Phoenix Survivors Alliance rallies for Title IX Life without an address

TUESDAY • JUNE 2, 2015
CHICAGOMAROON.COM
THE INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO SINCE 1892
ISSUE 51 • VOLUME 126
UCPD responds to uptick in
robberies
Katherine Vega
News Staff
In response to a recent
spate of robberies that
affected University students and staff, the University of Chicago Police
Department (UCPD) is
increasing its patrols in
the recently targeted areas
near Metra stops on South
Students gather at Hull Gate as part of the “Stand with Survivors at UChicago”
rally last Friday, in order to protest University policies regarding sexual assault.
NATALIE FRIEDBERG | THE CHICAGO MAROON
Phoenix Survivors Alliance
rallies for Title IX
Natalie Friedberg
News Editor
Last Friday, May 29, a group
of approximately 35 students
gathered outside Hull Gate in
the rain to protest the University’s policies regarding sexual
assault at a rally called Stand
With Survivors at UChicago:
Rally for Title IX. The event,
organized by Phoenix Sur-
vivors Alliance (PSA), was
set to march from the gate to
Levi Hall, where the Office
of Campus and Student Life
is located, in order to deliver
a set of demands to Dean of
Students Michele Rasmussen,
Vice President for Campus
Life and Student Services Karen Warren Coleman and Associate Dean of Students and
Interim Title IX Coordinator
Belinda Cortez Vazquez.
The rain cleared up around
2:40 p.m. just as the group
began to march through the
main quad, holding signs
and chanting slogans such as,
“Rape culture is contagious,
come on Admin be courageous.”
Outside Levi Hall, a few
students spoke to the crowd
PSA continued on page 3
Faculty and adminstration relations
from Hutchins to Zimmer
Wendy Lee & Hannah Edgar
News Staff & AssociateArts Editor
The year after his retirement
in 1951, former University
President Robert Maynard
Hutchins stood before a select
committee from the United
States House of Representatives to declare that, “Education is a kind of continuing
dialogue, and a dialogue assumes, in the nature of the
case, different points of view.”
Though Hutchins was talking about the difference in
opinion that often rears its
head in the seminar room, his
words could just as accurately
summarize the continuing—
and at times heated—dialogue between a university’s
administration and its faculty.
At the University of Chicago,
it was Hutchins’s presidency
that would see greater faculty
representation through the
establishment of governing
bodies like the Council of
the University Senate and the
Committee of the Council.
But the story of faculty
representation has not been
that simple. Rather, since
these bodies’ inception during
Hutchins’ presidency, the debate over faculty’s exact powers and limitations has only
intensified.
To examine the powers of
faculty, it is first necessary to
understand the powers of the
two other major governing
powers at the University: the
Board of Trustees and the administration. Divinity School
IN VIEWPOINTS
Public shaming at UChicago
» Page 8
Analyzing the dynamics of
the campus sexual assault
community » Page 8
Professor Bruce Lincoln said
that the president’s role has always been to reconcile the interests of both the faculty and
the Board of Trustees. “The
Board of Trustees has responsibility for all financial matters at the University and the
faculty have all responsibility
for academic matters at the
University,” Lincoln said. “It’s
implicit that sometimes these
two bodies will see things differently, and it’s the Office of
the President that is supposed
to resolve those matters.”
For this reason, most American university presidents
have held a large amount of
power out of necessity. “You
need a strong president to set
an agenda,” said Dean of the
ADMIN continued on page 4
Harper Avenue, according
to a UCPD press release.
The uptick in crime is most
likely related to the warmer
weather, which often correlates with higher crime
rates, according to the announcement.
“Officers will focus on
these hotspot areas by increasing foot and bike
patrols, especially in the
blocks surrounding the
Metra stations. The prevention efforts will remain
in place for several weeks
and be adjusted as necessary to ensure that officers
are being deployed in the
right areas,” according to
the press release.
Between May 21 and
May 26, two students and
UCPD continued on page 2
Life without an address: Perspectives
from homeless in Hyde Park
Brandon Lee
News Staff
Homelessness poses a
significant burden on the
South Side of Chicago and
is a primarily socio-economic problem attributed to low
wages and a lack of affordable housing. The high cost
of living, coupled with high
unemployment rates and
low-wage jobs, forces indi-
viduals to choose amongst
food, housing and other
expenses. According to the
U.S. Department of Health
& Human Services’ 2015
guidelines, poverty line incomes are set at $11,770 for
one person, and $28,410 for
a family of five. Englewood,
a neighborhood directly
west of the University of
Chicago’s campus, has a percapita income of $11,993.
It then surprises no one
when they are told that the
South Side of Chicago is
home to a large proportion
of Chicago homeless. But
who are the homeless, and
what are their stories? *The
Maroon* asked both former
and currently homeless individuals about their experiences, and performed an
investigation into what students are currently doing to
combat homelessness.
HOMELESS continued on page 6
What “Fight for Fifteen” means for
Hyde Park business owners
Sonia Schlesinger
News Staff
On April 15, a group of
UChicago students from
groups such as Students Organizing United with Labor
(SOUL), South Side Solidarity
Network (SSN), and IIRON
Students Network (ISN)
joined fast food and retail
workers in downtown Chicago
at a “Fight for $15” rally. The
group marched to demand an
increase in Chicago’s minimum
wage to $15 per hour.
Fight for $15, as the national
movement is called, is not just
a hot-button issue on campus.
Similar rallies took place across
the country. This movement
comes in light of increases to
the minimum wage to $15 per
hour in Seattle last June and
more recently in Los Angeles.
While much of the talk surrounding the minimum wage
issue at these rallies and in the
media involves McDonald’s
and other large corporations,
small businesses are heavily affected by proposed wage
increases. While many small
business managers in Hyde
Park and Woodlawn support
the concept of minimum wage
increases, several are concerned
with the effects on their businesses and the changes that
they would have to make
should Chicago’s minimum
wage increase to $15 an hour.
These managers are already
WAGE ontinued on page 3
Employees Dylan Harris and Angel Elmore stand in
front of Hyde Park Records, a local store that would
potentially cut employee hours if the “Fight for
Fifteen” campaign raised Chicago’s minimum wage
to $15.
MARTA BAKULA | THE CHICAGO MAROON
IN ARTS
Senior looks back on years with
Voices in Your Head » Page 12
IN SPORTS
Men’s tennis bids adieu to an
extraordinary year » Backpage
Senior Spotlight: Scott Mainquist
cements his UChicago legacy » Page 15
THE CHICAGO MAROON | NEWS | June 2, 2015
2
The Grout Gatsby: UChicago’s notorious
bathroom graffiti
Isaac Stein
Senior News Writer
At the University of Chicago, some
institutions are timeless. The mythos
of the University seal in the Reynolds
Club. Scav. Milkshake Wednesdays at
C-Shop. And, of course, graffiti in oncampus bathrooms.
Be it tasteless depictions of genitalia or clever wordplay on the phrase
“grout” scrawled on the tiling of the
Bartlett men’s room, the content of
UChicago graffiti is far from uniform.
However, editorial quality does not
translate into permanence on the stall
wall. Students may notice that as successive academic quarters and calendar years pass, the graffiti that they remember as existing in particular places
may be painted over or whited out.
In order to better understand how
this largely hidden process works, The
Maroon interviewed Kevin Austin,
the director of Building Services, a division of the University Facilities Ser-
vices department. According to Austin, University janitors remove graffiti
from both the interior and exterior of
campus buildings five times per week,
at a labor and materials cost that adds
up to more than $15,000 per year, of
which $6,000 is attributable to graffiti
that is particularly hard to remove.
“Our janitorial company indicates
they spend an hour or two daily on
graffiti removal across campus, which
results in an approximate daily cost of
around $50, which includes the cost
of labor and required cleaning products. If our decorators (painters) get
involved, as they do for particularly
difficult-to-remove graffiti, they estimate the average removal costs about
$200 per occurrence. Decorators are
engaged about 10 times per quarter
for this task,” Austin wrote in an email.
The technical process of removal
varies based on the location of the
graffiti—janitors use a multipurpose
cleaner indoors, but may use a pressure
washer on building exteriors. But the
University follows a uniform protocol
for receiving reports of on-campus
graffiti, and removes all reported graffiti irrespective of its content.
“Instances of graffiti come to our
attention in two ways: Our custodial
staff discovers it during our daily interior building checks or it is reported
by students, faculty, staff or visitors.
Exterior graffiti reports follow that
same pattern: It is spotted by our landscaping crews or reported to us. All
graffiti is expected to be removed once
discovered,” Austin said.
He also suggested that the frequency of on-campus graffiti is declining,
and that it is not concentrated in or
around any building in particular.
“While difficult to quantify, based
on feedback from longtime staff members, there’s anecdotal suggestions that
the frequency of occurrences has declined in recent years…. There is not a
particular area that we would identify
as a [graffiti] ‘hot spot.’”
“Location, time of day and number
of suspects [involved in the incidents]
suggest a possible pattern”
UCPD continued from front
one staff member were robbed on
South Harper Avenue between
East 57th and East 58th Streets.
While none of the victims were
injured, all had property, including the staff member’s car, stolen
by the perpetrators. The crimes
all took place at night between
the hours of 9:20 p.m. and 10:15
p.m. In all three cases, the perpetrators implied possession of a
weapon, but the victims did not
see the weapon.
All of the incidents involved
two suspects, but no description
of these suspects is available. Although it is unknown whether
or not the same two people committed all three of the crimes, a
security alert released May 27
by Associate Vice President for
Safety and Security and Chief of
Police Marlon Lynch noted that
the “location, time of day, and
number of suspects [involved in
the incidents] suggest a possible
pattern.” The security alert noted
that the CPD was also bolstering
its patrols and increasing “crime
reduction activities” in the affected areas.
In the press release, security alert, and in an interview
with NBC 5 News, the UCPD
stressed that convenience should
always come second to safety,
noting that some practices that
may seem inconvenient may help
prevent or at least reduce the
severity of the crime. University affiliates should opt to wait
for a shuttle instead of walking
alone at night, should avoid using cell phones, and should leave
large amounts of cash and credit
cards at home if possible. In addition, the security alert asserted
that when walking alone at night,
there is safety in numbers.
THE MAROON would like to congratulate the
2015 Student Leader Awards Recipients!
COLLEGE OUTSTANDING NEW LEADER AWARD: Stephanie Diaz and Brian Steiner
RISE UP AWARD: Alison Fedoris, Tangela Feemster, and Jaime Sanchez
HUMANITARIAN AWARD: Amelia Dmowska, Keiko Rose, and Oluwafikummi Sobowale
BRIDGE BUILDER AWARD: Kyle Bullock, Rafia Khader, and Zelda Mayer
UNSUNG HERO AWARD: Peter Herman, Cornelius Hubbard, and Elizabeth Porretto
THE JANE MORTON AND HENRY C. MURPHY AWARD: Vincente Perez, Michael Schumer, and Sunil Yadav
HOWELL MURRAY ALUMNI ASSOCIATION AWARD: Christian Adames, Yusef Al-Jarani, Nadia Alhadi,
Tabbetha Bohac, Jeanne Chauffour, Jay Feldman, William Fernandez, Ashwin Ganti,
Alexandra Halladay, Arlin Hill, Mallory Morse, Lauren Riensche, Isabella Rowe, Shaan Sapra,
Aseal Tineh, and Steven Wendeborn
CAMPUS LIFE AND LEADERSHIP AWARD: Elizabeth Bynum, Anthony Martinez, Samuel Neal, Stephen
Richer, Christopher Rishel, Flora Roberts, Danielle Wilson, and Eve Zuckerman
THE MAROON KEY SOCIETY: (2nd years) Jonathan Acevedo, Elizabeth Adeitba, Nicholas Antos,
Anase Asom, Jake Mansoor, Kiran Misra, Evangeline Reid, William Rhee, Sammie Spector, Ala
Tineh, and Katherine Zellner; (3rd years) Aneri Amin, Karen Anderson, Stephanie Bi, Caroline
Bye, Jessica Covil, Benita Glamour, Michael Goodyear, Kevin Hasenfang, Russell Hathaway,
Gracelyn Jennings-Newhouse, Kristin Lin, Maren Loe, Benjamin Lusamba, Samuel Maidman,
Helen Petersen, Andrew Song, Julianna St. Onge, Tze Ern Teo, Justin Waney, and Paige
Womack
THE CHICAGO MAROON | NEWS | June 2, 2015
3
Business owners in Hyde Park expressed support for minimum wage increases but worry about their economic effects
WAGE continued from front
dealing with recent wage
increases in Chicago: Last
December the city council
voted to raise the Chicago’s
minimum wage to $13 per
hour. This will be put into effect incrementally, increasing
from the current $8.25 to $10
per hour by July, with the increase to $13 by 2019.
Local managers will respond
to current and potential future
wage increases by making significant changes in their stores,
either affecting their employees
or their customers.
Trushar Patel—manager of
Rajun Cajun, an Indian restaurant—currently pays his eight
employees within a $10–$12
per hour range. He explains
that he would raise costs of his
food, but would not change
management practices. “You
can’t change the hours because
Indian restaurants require a
lot of preparation,” he said.
“I wouldn’t look for different
employees because they already
need to be skilled, so we would
have to raise our food’s prices.”
Other managers worry that
the size of their stores will be
a hindrance if such changes
are to take effect. “As an independent business like mine we
are going to be walking a thin
line,” said Bader El-Shareif,
owner of Harper Foods. ElShareif currently employs only
one person, and pays him more
than $10 per hour, yet he’s concerned that if the minimum
wage is increased to $15 per
hour, “we already can’t compete with other stores, because
they’re so big. We’ll just have to
eat the extra cost.”
Opponents of increasing the
minimum wage to $15 argue
that while it may benefit those
able to obtain the higher pay,
it increases unemployment for
less skilled workers.
Allen Sanderson, a senior
lecturer in economics who has
publicly opposed minimum
wage increases, says that large
corporations are more likely to
automate in the face of minimum wage increases, replacing
workers with machines and
thus increasing unemployment. He says that the concern
is similar in small businesses:
“unskilled workers are going to
be replaced by people like University of Chicago anthropology students looking for parttime or entry-level work with a
higher skill level.”
Alexis Bouteville, manager
of Hyde Park Records, confirmed this assessment in the
case of his store, which employs three full-time employees
and pays more than the current
minimum wage but less than
$15. “If the minimum wage
were $15, I would certainly
consider higher standards for
hiring,” he said. “I wouldn’t
change the way the business
itself works,” he said of raising prices on the store’s items.
“But in terms of management,
I would cut employees’ hours
and try to get the best deal on
who I hired.”
Activists involved in the
Fight for $15 disagree with
predictions of negative economic effects. Second-year
Psalm Brown, head of SOUL,
argues that “while it’s always
economists’ concern that once
you raise the cost of labor fewer
people are employed, that’s not
Fellowship focusing on healthcare in
Chicago awarded to four graduate students
Tamar Honig
News Staff
Four graduate students at
the University of Chicago will
join the ranks of other exceptional health professions students awarded the prestigious
Schweitzer Fellowship for
projects to improve the health
and wellbeing of underserved
Chicago communities. Pritzker
School of Medicine students
Phillip Hsu, Amol Naik, and
Katherine Palmer and Social
Service Administration (SSA)
student Tessa Garcia McEwen
are among 30 fellows selected
from nearly 100 applicants
who will implement yearlong
projects aimed at overcoming
serious barriers to health care in
Chicago.
“The program draws students who aren’t satisfied with
the status quo and want to do
something about it,” said Ray
Wang, director of the Chicago
Area Schweitzer Fellows Program. “They’re excited by the
idea of getting out of the classroom for a while and helping
people by meeting them where
they are at, translating what
they’ve learned at a technical
level to something practical and
meaningful that community
members can understand and
apply in their everyday lives.”
The Chicago Area Schweitzer Fellows Program encourages students to “make
their lives their argument” by
providing direct service to Chicago residents. It is one of 11
Schweitzer Fellows Programs
nationwide, administered by
the Health & Medicine Policy
Research Group.
Hsu, a first-year medical student, plans to establish a free
health clinic and offer health
education classes in Bridgeport,
a community that is home to a
large and rapidly growing population of underserved Asian
immigrants.
“As a second-generation Taiwanese American, I am concerned about the challenges
faced by many Asian immigrants, especially the challenge
of attaining proper healthcare,
which is made difficult due to
limited English capacity or lack
of insurance,” Hsu said. “I have
become particularly invested in
using my position as a medical
student to work with underprivileged
Asian-American
populations with limited access
to health care, a challenge that
hinders both the possibility of
employment and overall quality of life.”
McEwen is a second-year Extended Evening Program SSA
student as well as a resident
head for 75 undergraduates
in Booth House in the College. She aims to implement a
comprehensive perinatal loss
support program for grieving parents on the South Side.
Furthermore, she will conduct
a train-the-trainer module for
medical providers and healthcare professionals in the fields
of compassionate care and cultural competency.
McEwen discussed the need
for increased support for those
who, like her, have suffered the
non-voluntary end of pregnancy.
“As a bereaved mother who
experienced perinatal loss without adequate emotional and
material support, I aim to walk
with fellow grieving parents
and help provide a space for
support and access to resources
that I never had,” McEwen said.
“I also aim to help medical pro-
fessionals and hospital staff acquire a deeper sense of compassion and educational awareness
for perinatal loss at all stages of
pregnancy.”
The remaining two Schweitzer Fellowship recipients
will tackle other health challenges faced by Chicagoans.
Naik’s proposal focuses on the
creation of a weekly health discussion group at the Interfaith
House, an interim housing facility for homeless adults.
“Through the discussion
group, I hope to help residents
learn about health issues of interest to them, such as diabetes, infectious disease, exercise,
nutrition,” said Naik, also a
first-year medical student. “By
providing me with insight into
the health-related challenges
faced by homeless adults, this
experience will allow me to be
a more empathetic and effective
physician for this population in
the future.”
Lastly, Palmer’s plan features
the development of a health
and wellness curriculum in the
UChicago Woodlawn Charter
School led by college and graduate student mentors.
Though their project goals
are diverse, the fellows share a
commitment to service and sustainable health improvements
in the communities that most
need them.
“In helping the underserved
community, we as helpers are
not swooping in as the ‘experts’
or the ones that will ‘fix’ and
‘save’ the community,” McEwen noted. “Our goal is to
walk alongside, learn from the
people as experts of their own
communities, and use our talents to provide support in ways
that can enrich their overall
well-being.”
the case. In places with significant wage increases there hasn’t
been a corresponding drop in
people employed.” Some past
studies support this, such as a
1990 UC Berkeley study on
fast food chains before and after minimum wage increases,
which found that effects on
unemployment are minimal.
Calculations based on the
current number of minimum
wage workers in Chicago and
the number of those marginally
below the poverty line indicate
that the most recent increase
will affect 410,000 minimum
wage workers and pull 70,000
out of poverty, according to
the Chicago Tribune. Yet
Brown and other organizers
argue that it’s not enough. Brianna Tong (A.B. ’15), head of
ISN, said, “I think it’s messed
up that people make what
they do working full time and
are still in poverty, not having
enough to feed themselves and
their kids.”
Local business managers and
employees support raising the
minimum wage in principle,
arguing as Tong does that cur-
rent wages are not high enough,
but out of concern for their
businesses, and because they
aren’t sure what the effects will
be, they support alternatives to
raising the minimum wage.
Dylan Harris, who graduated from UChicago last year
and now works full-time at
Hyde Park Records, earns $14
an hour. He said that although
“I can live pretty comfortably
on what I’m making right
now…if I have even a [single]
kid it wouldn’t be enough
at all. I think the minimum
wage is way too low.” Still, he
agreed with his manager that
“for small businesses like these,
it would be a tight squeeze….
Maybe we could have a lower
minimum wage for someone
younger without a lot of dependence…more of a needbased system.” El-Sharief from
Harper Foods agreed that “we
all know that you can’t live on
$9 or even $11 an hour if you
have a family, but you know,
that’s the system. It cannot go
unbalanced.”
Still, some local business
managers are not too con-
cerned about the wage increase.
In fact, in some cases, the
smaller sizes of these stores may
help. Chris Willard, a manager
at Blackstone Bicycle Works
in Woodlawn, explained that
most minimum wage increases,
even to $15 per hour, would
not be drastically harmful.
“We only have five employees,”
he says, “so while an increase
to $15 might change things, I
don’t think it would put us out
of business.”
The incremental increases
will make the transition to
$13 an hour easier as well, and
many hope a potential increase
to $15 would come about the
same way. “We’re going to have
to sit down and crunch some
numbers to offset cost if it happens but if it’s incremental it
will be much easier to absorb,”
explained Chris Salmon, a
manager at Powell’s independent bookstore, who pays most
of the store’s eight employees
the current minimum wage. “If
it’s going to go up slowly each
year there probably won’t be
a lot of major changes at the
store,” he said.
“The organizers of the event claimed that the
administration had not been receptive to alternative
attempts towards communication”
PSA continued from front
about sexual assault and the
University’s policy.
“Where’s the support for
students who don’t fit the
traditional narratives, not
that students who do fit those
don’t deserve support? ...
Where’s the support for male
survivors, trans survivors,
survivors of color, graduate
students? Nowhere.” Matt
Kellner, a fourth-year in the
College, said.
Shortly afterwards, all of the
protesters crowded into two
elevators and went up to the
second floor, where the Office
of Campus and Student Life
is located. Their intent was
to meet with and personally
deliver a list of demands to either Rasmussen, Coleman or
Cortez-Vazquez, but were not
able to secure a meeting with
any of them. The organizers of
the event claimed that the administration had not been receptive to alternative attempts
towards communication and
had not responded to calls or
emails.
Phoenix Survivors Alliance
had compiled a list of five demands: for the University to
provide more comprehensive
education on consent, Title
IX rights and other sexual assault issues during O-week
and for graduate students;
for information regarding the
rights sexual assault victims to
be put up online in an easily
accessible format, and for the
University to release aggregate
data semi-annually on disciplinary reporting. Additionally, the Phoenix Survivors
Alliance demanded that the
University create a coordinated community response
team to work towards ending
sexual violence and for the inclusion of student advocates
and victims of sexual assault
on University committees designed to address sexual and
gender-based violence. PSA
demanded that the University
agree to its demands by June
5 and that changes be made
by the beginning of the 2015
academic year.
The official list of demands
acknowledged recent steps
that the University has taken
in order to comply with Title
IX requirements but maintains that these actions have
not been sufficient. Some of
these recent changes include
last year’s consolidation and
clarification of University
Sexual Assault Policy and the
establishment of a disciplinary
committee to deal specifically
with allegations of sexual assault.
Once on the second floor of
the building, the group continued to chant outside the
doors of the Office of Student
Life. A staff member came out
of the office and asked the students to leave, claiming that
their presence in the building
constituted a fire hazard.
“Well, it’s a hazard for you
to have a shitty-ass [sexual assault] policy,” a person from
the crowd said in response.
A few of the organizers
asked the staff member to
bring out a person of authority to address the group’s concerns or to bring someone out
to publicly accept the list of
demands. However, the staff
member said that the intended recipients of the list were in
meetings and that she did not
have key card access to the of-
fice.
After a few minutes of tense
negotiations and loud chanting, Lynda Daher, one of the
sexual assault deans-on-call,
arrived on the scene and made
a call to Putnam, who refused
to meet the protesters. Daher agreed to deliver the list
of demands to its intended
recipients, although she did
not bring anyone from the
rally into the office to witness
her handing the paper over to
Putnam, as the protesters had
wanted.
The protesters left chanting
“We’ll be back” and left their
signs leaning against the walls
of Levi.
Daher stressed that she respected the students’ passion
and assured the crowd that the
list would be delivered into
Putnam’s hands and that she
would point out the response
deadline.
“We are committed to continuously finding ways to both
increase and improve what
we do around training for
students, during new student
orientation as well as over the
entire academic year. In addition, our planning for 2015–
16 has been greatly informed
by student input in meetings
over the past academic year
with individual students, advisory groups and RSOs, including the Phoenix Survivors
Alliance,” Rasmussen wrote in
a statement.
According to a statement
from University spokesperson Mary Abowd, the list of
demands will be reviewed by
staff members, who will most
likely set up a meeting with
the PSA to further discuss
these issues.
4
THE CHICAGO MAROON | NEWS | June 2, 2015
“Corporatization has continued to be a point of tension for faculty and the administration”
President Robert Maynard Hutchins, as pictured in a Board
of Trustees portrait taken 1929, the year of his inauguration.
The Board of Trustees meets with President Hutchins in 1945. That year, the Board of Trustees would work with faculty to establish the Council of the University Senate and the Committee of the Council. Hutchins is the leftmost figure at the end of the table.
COURTESY OF UCHICAGO
COURTESY OF UCHICAGO
Students and faculty meet in February 1969 to discuss then-assistant professor Marlene
Dixon’s dismissal by the sociology department, which had been announced the previous
month. Students and some faculty suspected that Dixon, an outspoken Marxist and feminist,
was being unfairly dismissed for her political views.
COURTESY OF UCHICAGO
ADMIN continued from front
College John W. Boyer, “to persuade
the public, to defend our interests, to
explain to people what a university is
and what it’s not.”
When he was appointed president in 1929, Hutchins seemed to
fit all of these criteria. Charismatic
and dynamic, he was more than just
a university president; he was an
ideologue who wanted the University of Chicago to be at the forefront
of educational innovation. But his
idealistic educational theories were
radical, and many of Hutchins’s most
dramatic reforms were made without
consulting the Board of Trustees and
faculty. Most undesirably, Hutchins
abolished majors at the University of
Chicago, instead pushing a four-year
general “Core” education curriculum
that was open to qualified students of
any age, including those still in high
school.
Hutchins’s far-reaching reforms
were unlike any previously seen in
undergraduate education, and faculty members—many of whose Ph.D.
programs were threatened—railed
against them. “What Hutchins was
doing was tampering with basic
pedagogical structures,” Boyer said.
“Telling a department you can’t have
a major, telling a department your
Ph.D. students aren’t going to write
doctoral dissertations—these are
very deep, probing interventions.”
They were also interventions that,
in the end, largely failed. Contrary
to his expectations, Hutchins’s radical changes didn’t catch on at other
elite universities, and his decision to
eliminate majors repelled students in
droves. “Our bachelor’s degree had
become degraded,” Boyer explained.
“Students graduating from the College couldn’t get jobs. When they’d
apply to medical school and law
school, [those schools] would make
them go for another couple of years
at another college to get more training.”
In the mid 1940s, when most of
these changes were being implemented despite popular outcry, the only
vehicle for faculty governance was the
University Senate, which had almost
no direct representative power and
was composed of only full-time professors. Hutchins’s rash flurry of autocratic decisions prompted the Board
of Trustees and faculty to change
this, and in 1945, they established
both the Council of the University
Senate and the Committee of the
Council. The Council of the Senate
would act as a further representative
body made up of elected members of
the Senate, and the Committee of the
Council, in turn, would be an even
smaller group elected by the Council that would work directly with the
President. Under the new organization of powers, enfranchisement in
the University Senate was extended
beyond those with full professorship
to include associate and assistant professors.
Structurally, these governmental
bodies have essentially remained the
same since their inception. In the
end, it was Hutchins’s extreme reforms that lacked staying power: The
faculty all but unanimously agreed to
overturn his general education curriculum after he left the University in
1951.
For Boyer, the Hutchins crisis was,
in many ways, similar to a conflict
that he experienced firsthand as dean
of the College in the late 1990s. During this period, then-President Hugo
Sonnenschein called for a dramatic
expansion of the undergraduate
population, which had never entirely recovered from the shock of the
Hutchins era.
Not only was the College small, its
retention rates were also dishearteningly poor. “They used to tell the students at the opening ceremony, ‘Look
to the right, look to the left of you: By
the time you graduate, one or both of
the people next to you won’t be here
anymore,’” Boyer recalled. “[Trying]
to run a college on those terms was,
in my view, a moral disaster.”
Presidents before Sonnenschein
had increased the size of the College
incrementally, but Sonnenschein’s
call to accept as many as 1,000 more
undergraduates met with considerable backlash. Many faculty members
felt as though the selectivity, and thus
the intellectual integrity, of the College would be compromised. Professor Emeritus of Mathematics Mel
Rothenberg, who retired in 1999,
agrees that there were parallels between the Hutchins conflict and Sonnenschein’s expansion plan. Whereas
in the 1940s professors clashed with
Hutchins on his total upheaval of
traditional Ph.D. programs, under
Sonnenschein the underlying fear
was that faculty would be forced to
teach more undergraduate courses,
detracting from time otherwise spent
mentoring graduate students or conducting independent research. In
both cases, faculty felt as though the
University’s reputation as a premier
graduate and research-oriented institution was being compromised.
“When you start putting emphasis
on the undergraduate program, it
calls up memories of those days when
there was this intense battle between
researchers and the Hutchins–College crowd,” he explained. “There was
a strong institutional memory [of
that].”
As dean of the College at this time,
Boyer found himself caught between
two strongly divided camps: the
anti-expansion position, pushed by
a faculty contingent, and the pro-expansion position, advanced by Sonnenschein and a number of faculty
leaders. To reach a decision, Boyer
did what any historian would do:
plenty of research.
Boyer kept returning to Hutchins’s
story as a litmus test. “It actually
turns out to be the only way you
can operate a major university is to
have a large, thriving college. Nobody planned it this way; Hutchins
thought that his new general education college would be a big college,
but [the students] didn’t come…I
decided that Sonnenschein was right,
and so I decided that I would publicly support him.”
But Rothenberg believes that there
was a “grubbier objective” for the
College’s expansion, namely that it
was representative of the University’s
trend toward greater corporatization.
“People that go to graduate school to
become professors don’t become really rich. It’s the undergraduates who
go to business school and go out into
the world who get rich and bring a lot
of money to the University.”
Corporatization has continued
to be a point of tension for faculty
and the administration, particularly
when it comes to the establishment
of new academic institutions on campus. Recently, the establishment of
the Milton Friedman Institute for
Research in Economics—now the
Becker Friedman Institute—and the
Grossman Institute for Quantitative Biology and Human Behavior
polarized faculty and stirred intense
debates within the governing bodies.
“It struck me that in both instances, the administration was launching
major initiatives without adequate
consultation of the faculty at large
and its representative institutions,
the Council in specific,” Lincoln said.
The problem for Rothenberg,
Lincoln, and many faculty members
was that the institutes threatened
the well-being and integrity of the
University, either politically or intellectually. Rothenberg viewed the
Friedman Institute as an effort by
conservative alumni to pass down
the ideas of Milton Friedman to students at the University. “It was ‘one
of those institutes,’” said Rothenberg.
“They functioned as lobby groups for
certain economic and financial interests.”
The Grossman Institute faced
similar backlash. Economist and
University Trustee Sanford Grossman aspired to further the study of
“quantitative biometrics,” in which
researchers determine whether there
are hardwired biological factors that
correlate with certain kinds of personality structure and action decisions. While Grossman had originally envisioned building a neuroscience
research center, he was later influenced to instead focus on the study
of economic decision making.
Many faculty found these studies’
potential to be not only pseudoscientific, but morally offensive. “The neuroscientists [at the University] were
unhappy and thought the proposal
dubious. In Council, the discussion
was sharply critical of the proposal,”
said Lincoln.
Though years of negotiation led
to the gradual reconstruction of the
institute in 2011 to what the neuADMIN continued on Page 5
THE CHICAGO MAROON | NEWS | June 2, 2015
5
Lincoln believes relations have improved since the days of the Grossman, Friedman, and Confucius Institutes
President Sonnenschein and Dean of the College John W.
Boyer in 1997. Under Sonnenschein’s presidency, the College increased enrollment by about a thousand students.
Incoming President Hugo Sonnenschein walks arm-and-arm with President Hanna Gray
during his inauguration in 1993. Both administrators made calls to increase the size of the
College.
COURTESY OF UCHICAGO
COURTESY OF UCHICAGO
ADMIN continued from page 4
roscientists had wanted in the first
place, Lincoln states that the Council should have been able to intervene earlier without administrative
interference. “In the face of strong
opposition, the administration was
prepared to railroad a proposal that
they thought was financially advantageous.”
The faculty divide over the Friedman Institute further spurred debate
on the true powers and limitations
of the statutes. As debate intensified, there was a call among faculty
members to defer to the statutes and
bylaws that outlined the powers of
the governing bodies on campus. All
those involved knew that the statutes
very clearly indicated that faculty
approval is necessary for the establishment of new departments and
schools, but the question was if this
jurisdiction extended to the establishment of new research institutes.
Because no powers were explicitly
granted by the statutes, the Council
appointed a committee of faculty
to analyze and interpret these documents.
The committee ended up splitting
into two factions with completely different findings. “There was a majority [committee] that said the faculty
really had serious powers here, and
the other [committee] said, ‘No, the
faculty really only has power to give
advice and the decisions rest with the
administration,’” Lincoln said.
Before the committee’s findings
were announced, the president appointed his own committee to analyze the statutes, who interpreted
them as solely granting jurisdictional
power to the administration. Though
one of the faculty-appointed groups
had reached this conclusion independently, many members of the Council were baffled and disheartened by
the administration’s brusque overruling of their own findings. “By my
perception, [the faculty’s] argument
was superior to the one posed by the
administration, and structurally, they
were given much less voice in the decisions that got made, and ultimately,
less voice than the statutes mandated
they should have had,” Lincoln said.
The critical faculty response, combined with the financial crash of
2008, reined in the scale of the Friedman Institute. “Eventually, we made
a fuss about it, and there was enough
bad publicity and conflict on campus
that what they did was combine it
with the Becker Institute,” Rothenberg said. “It became a much smallerscale operation, which I regard as
kind of a victory.”
But for those vested in the issue,
the actions of the administration left
some lingering distrust, and it was in
the wake of this that the University’s
Confucius Institute was announced.
Like the Friedman Institute, some
faculty members were concerned
with the political implications of
the University’s affiliation with the
Confucius Institute, which is funded
by the Chinese government and has
been accused of academic censorship. “All of my instincts of the past
came into play,” Lincoln recalled. “I
thought, ‘Here we go again—this is
a terrible thing for the integrity of
the University.’ We were permitting
the classroom to become a vehicle for
state propaganda, and [the administration] was willing to turn a blind
eye to that.”
Though Rothenberg had been
retired for about a decade when the
Confucius Institute was announced,
he believed the principle of the issue should stand regardless of which
country is funding the institute.
“[The Confucius Institute] is not
uniquely evil by any means,” he explained, “[but] … its interests are political power and maintaining it.”
After a staff petition and a rash
of bad publicity, the University decided not to renew its five-year contract with the Confucius Institute
in September 2014. Many members
of the faculty acknowledged the dissociation as a victory, though other
factors more publicly contributed
to the decision: As reported by The
Maroon that month, University officials were particularly dismayed by
comments made by the Confucius
Institute Headquarters’s chief executive on its relationship with the University in a Chinese publication.
But in retrospect, Lincoln believes
that relations between faculty and
the administration have improved
since the days of the Grossman Institute, Friedman Institute, and Confucius Institute. “The battles were
fought, and they were unpleasant.
People pounded the table, people
got angry, and there were hurt feelings and there were accusations made
back and forth [that] were probably
overstated. But in the wake of it, I
think the administration is less determined to have its way,” Lincoln said.
“The Confucius Institute resolved
very nicely…. There was a serious
discussion, and objections got heard.
Ultimately, the institution made a
decision that wasn’t just based on finances. I think things are better than
they were at the time of the Friedman
Institute and the Grossman Institute,
in part because of those struggles.”
While Lincoln has certainly seen
an advance in the way in which the
administration now handles controversial matters, he still believes that
there is plenty of room for improvement with administration and faculty
relations. In particular, he envisions a
future in which the faculty and the
Board of Trustees are two spheres of
influence with mutual respect for one
another.
“In recent decades, Boards of
Trustees have been more activist than
they’ve used to be. They’ve wanted
to play a bigger role in shaping the
institution,” said Lincoln. “My opinion is that the Trustees should make
sure there is enough money for what
the faculty want to do. That’s how a
university ought to run. The Trustees
run their corporations, and if they’re
interested in academic matters, they
should trust academics to tell them
what’s important and what’s worth
doing. We’re not a production line.
We’re not a corporate entity. Knowledge doesn’t work the way products
do.”
That’s a point with which former
President Hutchins would almost
certainly agree. Though the battle
for greater faculty representation
began with his contentious, controlling presidency, there’s no question
that Hutchins had the best academic
interests of the University in mind
throughout. “I remember 20 years
ago when I just started [as dean of
the College], I was talking to older
faculty—who were young faculty in
the ’30s and ’40s—and what they remember is the vibrancy of the place,”
Boyer said of the Hutchins era.
“[They had] a president who gave
speeches on higher education, who
believed in ideas, who was constantly
talking about the ideas associated
with the University, and when he resigned, they missed him, even though
at the time some of them hated his
guts.”
So it has been with all presidents
since: In juggling the interests of both
the faculty and the Board of Trustees,
the Office of the President is certainly indebted to both bodies, but at
the end of the day, decisions must be
made for what is best for the University, and futures must be considered.
“Do I think presidents sometimes
force things through? Yeah, sometimes,” said Boyer. “They should have
a lot of prerogative, a lot of opportunities to influence the shaping of
the university. But the best ones understand that they have to cooperate
with at least a significant share of the
faculty.”
In May 1979, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara
was selected by a faculty committee as the recipient of the
first—and last—Albert Pick, Jr. Peace Award. Many faculty
and students who were not involved with the decision were
outraged, finding McNamara unfit for the award because of
his role in escalating the Vietnam War. The May 4th issue of
the Maroon broke the story.
THE CHICAGO MAROON ARCHIVES
President Robert J. Zimmer speaking at the UChicago
Center in Beijing in March. Under President Zimmer, faculty-administration conflict has primarily stemmed from the
association of high-budget institutes with the University.
COURTESY OF UCHICAGO
6
THE CHICAGO MAROON | NEWS | June 2, 2015
“Despite constant frostbite and
hypothermia warnings, the number of
homeless individuals remained high”
HOMELESS continued from front
Who are the homeless?
“The happiest moment in my life? When my father, mother and sister passed
away. I know that they’re in heaven now, and they’re comfortable. I’m not sad
because I know in my heart that I’ll see them again, and they won’t be in debt.
They won’t be hungry next time.”
–Jeff, 59 years old, 53rd and Dorchester
“No, my children don’t know that I’m homeless and I don’t want to worry them.
But, you know, all I have to do is walk through that church door…I know that
when I do, my life will change and I can get myself off the streets…things are
different today and I think I can walk through that door. No one has asked me
about myself in 5 months and I think that was all I needed: someone to care.”
–Georgia, 56 years old, 53rd and Blackstone
The City of Chicago, through the Department of Family and Support Services,
conducted its latest Homeless Count &
Survey on the night of January 22, 2014,
during one of the most severe winters in
the history of Chicago. Despite constant
frostbite and hypothermia warnings, and
subzero temperatures, the number of
homeless individuals remained high, falling from 1,219 in 2013 to 965 in 2014.
According to a January 23, 2014 WBEZ
article which covered the count, one explanation given was that some people consider their street space as their home and
would rather weather harsh conditions to
keep it.
Pierre Tatum, a 54-year-old black man
and Chicago native who has been homeless since 2003, also expressed such feelings of ownership for his part of the street.
“I’m a street vendor, and I have a spot on
53rd and Blackstone where I sell stuff
from down the alley or people that donate to the Second Faith Church.” Prior to
2003, he was an employee at a warehouse
before the company moved to California.
After his father passed away, the building in which he lived was vacated due to
structural damages which had not been addressed, and he has been without a home
since. He filed a suit against the federal
government, holding it liable for forcing
him into homelessness.
However, he claims that, given his circumstances, it is more financially beneficial to remain on the streets. “My father’s
attorney said ‘Me, personally? I would stay
outside because you’ll get more money...if
you’re working and over the poverty level,
you’ll lose dividends from the court.’ By me
not having a home, I could not get a steady
job because I don’t have a permanent address.” The suit is still ongoing.
Tatum’s path from employment to
chronic homelessness is a common one.
“Prior to becoming homeless, I had my
own business. I was making ten million
dollars a year in sales, selling clothes,
jewelry, cologne, you name it,” said Gerald Casey, the director of outreach and
volunteer coordinator for Pacific Garden
Mission, which is an emergency shelter
located in East Pilsen. While a student at
Olive-Harvey College, Casey was a business and accounting major. He opened a
successful sales business that took a turn
for the worst in July of 2005, when his life
spiraled out of control. “I lost everything
I had…my marriage went south on me, my
teenagers were acting up, and I had fallen
into a state of depression.”
Casey’s grandmother and first wife also
passed away during that time. He describes
the experience as lonely, as his family and
children kept their distance from him after
trying numerous times to help. Resorting
to drinking, marijuana and crack cocaine,
Casey said that substance use is a culturally ingrained form of coping. Furthermore,
Casey emphasized how experiences with
physical and sexual abuse, particularly
abuse of an incestuous nature, are shared
among many that come to the shelter.
“I was sexually molested as an infant by
my auntie, my female cousin and my uncle.
Furthermore, beer was placed in my baby
bottle to put me to sleep at times. So, you
know, by the time I was 10 years old…as
a kid growing up you see your adult peers
drinking…and you want to be grown and
like them.” He said that many utilize sub-
stances as a means to escape the hardships
of the past and present.
Casey was homeless for a year before
finding a home at Pacific Garden Mission.
The transition from business owner to
shelter-seeker was excruciating, and Casey
said that most homeless individuals are
almost never seen in public areas because
they are embarrassed by their situation. “I
didn’t want to be [at Pacific Garden Mission], because my view of Pacific Garden
Mission was that it was a place for bums.
My pride ran so strongly in me, telling
me ‘I’m not a bum’, but I was one…I just
couldn’t lower myself to coming there,”
Casey said. Though he was able to climb
out of his depression with the help of Pacific Garden Mission, many at the shelter
have more debilitating mental diseases
that confine them in perpetual homelessness.
“Out of about 850 homeless at our shelter, about 300 have severe mental illness…
bipolar, schizophrenic, manic depression,”
Casey said. “And that’s because our previous Governor, Pat Quinn, closed down all
the facilities. So where are they to go?”
Arlene Roberts, a current resident at Pacific Garden Mission, is a 52-year-old former nursing home assistant who has been
homeless for 3 years following a domestic
dispute with her husband. Originally from
Rockford, Illinois, Roberts says that even
though she does not have a history of substance abuse or mental illness, her lack of a
state identification resulted in her chronic
unemployment.
“In the summer, I used to stay at my
bench at Harold Washington Park, but
I’ve been staying at the Mission because
it’s safer for a woman, because there’s a
lot of rape and crime here,” Roberts said.
“I’ve been robbed and everything, but I
can’t let that stop me. I got to live on, and
I feel like something good’s about to happen.” She said that she recently acquired a
social worker who will be helping her find
a studio apartment as well as employment.
When asked about other homeless individuals that *the Maroon* interviewed,
such as Jeff and Georgia, her face lit up
as if beloved family members were mentioned. “Georgia! Yeah, and Jeff !” Roberts
said. “I know all of them.”
“The happiest moment in my life? When
my father, mother and sister passed away.
I know that they’re in heaven now, and
they’re comfortable. I’m not sad because I
know in my heart that I’ll see them again,
and they won’t be in debt. They won’t be
hungry next time.”
“No, my children don’t know that I’m
homeless and I don’t want to worry them.
But, you know, all I have to do is walk
through that church door…I know that
when I do, my life will change and I can get
myself off the streets…things are different
today and I think I can walk through that
door. No one has asked me about myself in
5 months and I think that was all I needed:
someone to care.”
What help have students
provided?
Of the homeless individuals interviewed, none could recall a student group
that provided consistent help to the homeless population. *The Maroon* spoke with
Elizabeth Weigel, who is the associate
director of Calvert House and adviser
for The Homeless Food Run, which appears to be the only student organization
HOMELESS continued on page 7
THE CHICAGO MAROON | NEWS | June 2, 2015
Sheltered & Unsheltered Population
HOMELESS continued from page 6
dedicated solely to helping the homeless.
Founded in 2002, The Homeless Food
Run delivers food to various locations via
a service truck on Tuesday evenings each
week. “On average [we have about] 10
students a week [volunteering ], and [each
week there are] different students. There
are maybe 2 students there, all the time,
running it…and sometimes they do extra
runs when fraternities and sororities contact us to do service projects,” Weigel said.
She said that The Homeless Food Run,
as well as other groups such as the oncampus Christian InterVarsity, which
does food runs, Hyde Park Food Pantry,
and The Living Room Café address not
only homelessness but also food insecurity in general: a problem relevant to both
those who are homeless and impoverished.
“There’s a lot of people who are food insecure, and there’s a lot of resources for
people like that,” Weigel said.
Despite some student involvement in
food runs, Weigel feels that there may not
be as big of a culture of service on campus. “We do get surges of people, but it’s
typically to fulfill hours either for their
fraternity or sorority…it isn’t something
that’s like ‘all my c lassmates are doing it,
and we feel compelled to do it,’” Weigel
said, though she recognizes that there are
many programs which students are actively
involved in, such as Summer Links, which
works with non-profits over the summer,
and Neighborhood Schools Program.
However, she feels there could be more
ALL PHOTOS BY BRANDON LEE
|
community-centered involvement from
students, especially since the campus is situated so closely to the poorest south side
neighborhoods.
“Students could help us with bus passes
or clothes during the winter, so we can
change our clothes. And toiletries,” Roberts said, suggesting that these could be
more useful than the occasional dollar,
and can be acquired from donations to
shelters.
“One of my dreams is to have a student
soup kitchen or whatever the need is in the
neighborhood…like a student run shelter.”
Weigel said. “Some of the SSA [Social Service Administration] students could help
with people who need housing or [solving ] questions that may be difficult to
answer. Some of the funding could come
from the University and donations come
from students. Think of all the dorms,
old apartments or stuff that people don’t
want!” She believes that there are churches
in Hyde Park that are looking for ways to
serve the community, and could be close
enough for students to open a shelter.
Casey agreed that there are plenty of
volunteer and service opportunities for
students at the University to initiate, and
emphasized the importance and gratification inherent to giving back to his community.
“For me, this is not a job it is a joy. It is
so pleasurable and rewarding,” Casey said.
“To be able to give back, to encourage others and let them know that there’s a way
out of your dilemma, your struggles.”
THE CHICAGO MAROON
7
Use of Mental Health Services
Substance Use
GRAPHS COURTESY OF
2014 HOMELESS
POINT-IN-TIME COUNT
&
SURVEY REPORT
VIEWPOINTS
Editorial & Op-Ed
JUNE 2, 2015
Shame on you
An in-depth look at UChicago’s recent history of public shaming
Will Dart
Maroon Contributor
“At low points,” said first-year
Derek Caquelin, “I think that everything is deserved.”
Caquelin wasn’t talking about
the three-quarter suspension
they received in the wake of fall
quarter’s much-publicized hacking hoax. That, they say, was well
warranted.
It’s the other level of punishment that Caquelin is not so
sure about: the barrage of threats
and verbal attacks on Facebook
and anonymous forums like Yik
Yak. The two letters sent to their
home—“I don’t know how they
found my address,” Caquelin said
mildly—each promising death for
them and their family. But the
nastiness started long before they
left campus; it was commonplace
even before the details of the hoax
came to light.
“Most of them would include,
like, ‘F*** you, n*****,’ ‘You’re like
a scourge to our campus,’ ‘You
don’t belong here,’” Caquelin recalled. “There were a couple ones
that were like, ‘If you don’t leave,
I’ll make you leave.’” Some of
these were delivered anonymously; many were shouted at them in
public. Caquelin goes back and
forth on whether this extra level
of abuse was warranted; they empathize with the anger and the
pain, although the verbal harassment—still going strong on Yik
Yak, even six months later—certainly hurts.
“It’s like, on some level, I can
understand where it’s coming
from, and I think it’s certainly
warranted,” Caquelin said. “But
let’s be honest: emotionally, it’s
been rough.”
Caquelin presents a fairly extreme case of public shaming at
the University of Chicago. Their
crime was relatively severe, and
their punishment has been harsh.
Others have been crucified for far
less.
Case in point: third-year Jenny Lee. Last year, she wrote a
less-than-stellar column in the
Viewpoints section of The Maroon—on the ladder of sins, this
is at least a couple rungs down
from a fake rape threat—and subsequently became the subject of
ridicule on the popular student
Facebook group Overheard at
UChicago. Lee readily admits that
the piece in question was not her
strongest work. Still, the public
nature of the shaming stung her.
“It didn’t put me in a great
place,” Lee said of the incident. “I
wore a hat for a week afterward
because I felt like everybody on
campus was staring at me.” The
author of the Overheard post
apologized a few months later,
long after his smear campaign had
done its work. That much-maligned article would be Lee’s last.
“I ultimately just kind of quit. I
didn’t want that to happen again.”
Kayleigh Voss, another Viewpoints columnist, got it even
worse on a similarly derisive Overheard post. Her only sin was the
misfortune of being published
while another contributor was
not. The attack had been directed
at the Viewpoints editors; Voss
was simply collateral damage. But
it hurt.
“I was waiting for class to start
when I saw it,” Voss recalled. “I
went home and cried.”
It was
a similar situation, minus the
tears, for Matt Jeong. You may remember Jeong ; he was one of the
students called out for dressing
up as a “cholo” last Halloween. A
picture of Jeong in costume was
widely circulated on Facebook;
he, like Voss, had been merely
a tool in a much bigger agenda
(this one was a campaign to end
microaggressions on campus). It’s
probable that the poster didn’t
take Jeong’s feelings into consideration, or the consequences it
would have for him. And there
were consequences.
“I was surprised at how fast it
escalated,” Jeong recalled. “It was
posted to Overheard, and then my
R.A. called me that night, and
then my R.H. called me. I talked
to Housing the next day. Eventually it got all the way to the dean
of students.”
Jeong had not violated the
University’s Diversity Policy and
couldn’t be punished by the administration. But now he had a
bigger problem: The issue had
been taken onto social media and
out of his hands. His image was on
thousands of screens; it was like
an evil spirit had been let loose.
He couldn’t control it anymore.
“The fact that it was posted so
publicly meant that I harmed a
lot more people,” he said. “If I’d
offended one or two people, I
could’ve handled it. Ultimately I
just didn’t know who to apologize
to.”
In the end, Jeong had to take his
apology onto Overheard, trying
futilely to chase down a sin that
had now taken on a life of its own.
“Is this the world that we want?
SARAH LARSON
Where you’re swallowed up by
the worst thing you ever did?”
asks Jon Ronson, author of the
very excellent So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. In the book, Ronson explores the myriad ways in
which people can make mistakes
and subsequently find themselves
the target of our collective ire.
He talks to people whose lives
|
THE CHICAGO MAROON
have been destroyed by runaway
shaming. By the end of his book
he’s discovered something kind
of terrifying : Public shaming has
turned into a habit for us, a new
kind of American pastime. We’ve
always on the lookout for transgressions and missteps, minor deviances from the status quo. We’re
SHAME continued on page 9
Walking on eggshells
The student newspaper of the
University of Chicago since 1892.
Eleanor Hyun, Editor-in-Chief
Sarah Manhardt, Deputy Editor-in-Chief
Stephen Moreland, Managing Editor
The Maroon Editorial Board consists of Alan Hassler, Eleanor Hyun, and Lear Jiang.
News
Natalie Friedberg, editor
Alec Goodwin, editor
Marta Bakula, deputy editor
Isaac Easton, associate editor
Raymond Fang, associate editor
Shelby Lohr, associate editor
Maggie Loughran, associate editor
Annie Nazzaro, associate editor
Isaac Stein, senior writer
Viewpoints
Sarah Zimmerman, editor
Nina Katemauswa, associate editor
Patricia Nyawga, associate editor
Kayleigh Voss, associate editor
Arts
Andrew McVea, editor
Evangeline Reid, editor
Ellen Rodnianski, editor
Hannah Edgar, associate editor
Grace Hauck, associate editor
James Mackenzie, senior editor
Sports
Helen Petersen, editor
Zachary Themer, editor
Ahmad Allaw, associate editor
Katie Anderson, associate editor
Tatiana Fields, senior editor
Sarah Langs, senior editor
Grey City
Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Editor-in-Chief
Kristin Lin, Editor-in-Chief
Design
Annie Cantara, head designer
Copy
Sophie Downes, head editor
Alan Hassler, head editor
Sherry He, head editor
Morganne Ramsey, head editor
Multimedia
Forrest Sill, editor
Kay Li, director of data analysis
Photo
Marta Bakula, editor
Yeo Bi Choi, associate editor
Liana Sonenclar, associate editor
Video
Amber Love, editor
Social Media
Emily Harwell, editor
Online
Ryan McDowell, web developer
Business
Nicolas Lukac, chief financial officer
Ananya Pillutla, vice chief financial officer
Andrew Ahn, co-director of marketing
Eitan Rude, co-director of marketing
Ben Veres, director of operations
Patrick Quinn, director of strategy
Lenise Lee, business manager
Harry Backlund, distributor
This issue:
Copy: Megan Daknis, Lauren Scott
Design: Kyra Martin, Michelle Zhao
Editor-in-Chief E-mail: [email protected]
Newsroom Phone: (773) 702-1403
Business Phone: (773) 702-9555
Fax: (773) 702-3032
For advertising inquiries, please contact
[email protected] or (773) 702-9555
Circulation: 6,800.
© 2015 The Chicago Maroon
Ida Noyes Hall, 1212 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637
Analyzing the dynamics of the campus sexual assault community
Michaela Cross
Maroon Contributor
It was the closing ceremony of
the Clothesline Project and I was
trying not to laugh. I have this
awful dark sense of humor—at
the worst times it shows its face.
I was sitting there and listening
to stories of tragedy. But behind
the speaker was a line of frat boys,
with dolled-up ladies by their
sides.
They were on their way to a formal, unable to hear our stories of
sexual assault at frats. Their numbers were far greater; they stared
at us curiously. And it struck me
as ridiculous because it was not
us but they who should have been
the audience. We had literally
turned our backs to exactly the
people who really needed to hear.
We were there to speak to our
allies and not to our enemies. We
were rallying the troops of our
imaginary war.
That was 2014, and I was there
because I’d written an article. An
article about India and the sexual
assault I’d faced. The year before
had been hard for me: I’d been
suicidal, traumatized, depressed.
That was when I met the allies,
the only ones who seemed to care.
Who are the “allies?” you might
ask: You’ve seen it all before. They
say words like “cis-gender” and
“POC,” “survivor” and “intersectionality.” They’re queer and angry and fighting for good, with an
arsenal of sympathy.
I felt in need of sympathy—I
learned which boxes to check.
I was braless and queerish and
liked to fuck my friends. I was unhappy and angry and hated hiding
truths. So I checked “feminist,”
“pansexual,” and “polyamorist.” I
checked “triggers,” “Bipolar II,”
“catatonia,” and “PTSD.”
No longer had I just been fondled as a child by a boy in a basement. Now I was called a “survivor.” Now I was called “brave.”
All these words were made to
help me but I only crippled myself. I entered a world of opposites,
where powerlessness was power
and strength sent you plummeting
down.
We allies offered a morbid
sympathy, and so with relish we
counted our cuts. I picked mine
until I was scarred, until I was
lost in personal pain. I longed to
write about this new world, and
yet it was a world too littered with
eggshells. It was a world made up
of whispers, where no one would
even speak.
On every campus there lays this
faction, this underground, whispering world. One that disagrees
with the world, but won’t stand
up and tell it—one that hides in
the cobwebby corners of the Left.
There, my bad stories of India languished, fermenting in stagnant
waters with other tales. And there
I languished too, lying on a bed of
eggshells, covered in the cuts I’d
made myself.
It was silence and self-pity that
was killing me, far more than the
assaults I’d faced. We were lost in
our darkness, agreeing ourselves to
death.
Those days, people agreed so
ALLIES continued on page 9
THE CHICAGO MAROON | VIEWPOINTS | June 2, 2015
9
“We’re relieved when someone else’s head is on the chopping block, and we gleefully swing the axe”
SHAME continued from page 8
tearing each other apart for sport.
One way to read cases like
Caquelin, Jeong, Lee, and Voss’s
is that they were not just arbitrary
victims of our bloodlust, but instead had it coming—Caquelin
and Jeong for serious offenses
against the student body, Lee
and Voss for apparently failing to
be excellent at what they do. But
even a cursory examination of social media on campus proves that
this just isn’t true. You see people
taken down for risqué jokes, for
being mildly annoying, for failing
to follow the ever-more-complex
scripture of political correctness
on campus, and for voicing an
unpopular opinion at the wrong
time. People are always tiptoeing
on Facebook; they run in terror
from the crucible of Yik Yak.
Watching the way students behave in situations like these, talking to those who have been at the
mercy of public scrutiny in ways
big and small, a portrait slowly
begins to emerge of a college
population living in fear of their
flaws being exposed to the world.
I’m not smart enough, we think.
I’m not good enough. I shouldn’t be
here. We’re relieved when someone else’s head is on the chopping
block, and we gleefully swing the
axe. We’re safe for another day.
During the most recent in an
endless string of sexual assault allegations started on Yik Yak, several commentators compared the
current atmosphere on campus
to that of Salem, Massachusetts
circa 1692, an analogy that at
first seems completely stupid, and
then sensational, and then, after
some consideration, spot-on.
Think about it: We’re living
in a small, isolated community,
cordoned off by tuition fees and
a selective admissions office. The
winters are brutal, the stress is intense. General malaise runs rampant (according to Salem State
University historian Tad Baker,
“the higher the misery quotient,
the more likely you are to be seeing witches”). Presiding over the
whole thing is an administration
so deaf to students’ needs that
it might as well be ruling from
across the Atlantic, checking in
every six months with letters on
a spice cog. Add the virtual whipping post of Yik Yak (which often
provides its own kind of spectral
evidence against the accused),
plus our newfound Puritan aversion to unpopular ideas and frivolity, and you’ve got all the makings of a good witch-hunt.
I heard that the South Side
Weekly is brewing occult potions
in the steam tunnels below the
quads. Grab your torch and pitchfork!
Writing this article, I couldn’t
help but ruminate on my own
boatloads of private shame (an act
which mostly entails listening to
sappy Avett Brothers songs and
crying in the shower). My sins
are certainly equal to those who
have garnered public shaming
here. The only difference is that
those acts were committed in the
broad daylight of a Facebook wall,
while mine are still secreted away
in the pages of my journal. It’s
bad enough to know the cruelties
you’ve committed; I can’t imagine the pain of having that guilt
shouted back at you by the world.
Derek Caquelin will be back
in October to begin their second
year. They’ve learned from the
experience—about the power of
words and how they affect people. “Seeing the way people responded, it really made me aware
of how my actions really had an
effect on other people. Our actions and our words, they have
serious repercussions for others,”
Caquelin said. “Sometimes you
can brush it off. And sometimes
it sticks to you.”
Still, they’re attempting to put
the incident behind them. They
hope that the people they’ve
hurt can do the same. They hope
that the rest won’t feed off of the
controversy any longer than necessary. But they understand the
situation.
“I definitely think there’s gonna
be a lot of negativity when I come
back, but I’m kind of accepting of
it,” they said. “I mean—what I did
was really, really bad. But I’m going to try to be positive, and really
be a better part of the community
than before. I don’t want to fight
anyone.”
I won’t be around next year to
see whatever ugliness might ensue. But I have some parting advice: Look to your Good Book, ye
Puritans. Let he who is without
sin post the first snarky comment.
Will Dart is a fourth-year
in the College majoring in
English.
“We were there to speak to our allies and not to our enemies. We were rallying the troops of our
imaginary war”
ALLIES continued from page 8
much with me, but those relationships didn’t last. The ones that did
were contentious—they were the
people who challenged me and
cared about me far more. It was
one of the challengers who told
me to write an article, and that article opened up the world of those
who disagreed. That air was fresh
and full of energy, electric and full
of change.
The college liberal movement is
stultifying, and it’s easy enough to
see. We’re afraid to face the ones
we call rapists, afraid of the disabilities we’ve imagined into our
minds. We teach ourselves trig-
gers, trade our flesh for porcelain,
and learn to shatter at the slightest touch. We confuse alliances
with friendships, and peace for an
imaginary war.
Am I victim-blaming? No—I
simply believe we’re greater than
we think. I could only heal by
leaving the world of allies and
my own poisonous self-pity. And
behind me I left my sense of false
bravery—this is the first thing I’ve
been scared to write.
Because I’ve passed the T-shirts
on the quad; I’ve read the stories
of those 50 rapes. I’ve seen the
deadened eyes of friends and the
numb eyes of my mother. I’ve read
the comments on the internet,
heard the jokes at parties dropped.
I’ve seen hundreds of kids come
into this school, and knew some of
them would soon be rapists, some
of them would soon be raped.
But the problem is that when
you launch a war, you turn civilians into enemies. The problem
is that when we launch a war, we
close our eyes and stuff our ears.
We fuel our just causes with hatred and see ourselves as warriors.
And warriors see no one as human, not even themselves.
We will not learn our lessons
from those who won’t disagree.
We will learn from the questioners
and the listeners, and we all have
a lot to learn. We must learn to
stand up and listen. We must learn
to crush eggshells and speak.
So call me racist, call me a liar,
call me anything but a “survivor.”
It’s your goddamn right to do so,
and it’s my right to love it when
you do. It keeps me on my toes
and makes me stronger than being
called “brave.”
When people call you brave you
stop needing to prove to yourself
that you are.
It’s the duty of college liberals
to prepare for a war outside these
walls. It’s a war whose survivors
are on respirators and whose trig-
gers aren’t made of words. It’s a
war we have the power to face, if
only we give it to ourselves.
And if we don’t heal our personal problems, we’ll not be able
to fight for something greater. It
is not enough to fight only for
people who are just like you.
The war is real and it’s out there,
waiting for strong people to join
it. And I intend to do everything
to make myself to be of some use.
So lower your weapons and
open your eyes—go out and face
the real war.
Michaela Cross is a student in the College.
Letter: The Maroon needs to revise online comment policy
Dear Editor,
This quarter, online comments
on Maroon Viewpoints pieces
about sexual assault have called
women such degrading names as
“bitch” and “fool.” The Maroon’s
Viewpoints editor’s email response
to my request to remove the comments was: “We can only remove
when a comment threatens to physically harm a user.”
In my opinion, rude comments
shouldn’t need to escalate to threatening physical violence in order to
be removed. I have written four
op-eds for The Maroon from my
perspective as an alumna sexual assault survivor, but unless the policy
changes, I won’t be writing any
more.
If The Maroon is going to live
up to the preamble of the student
handbook—that members of the
University strive for personal integrity and treat others with dignity
and respect—it needs to be willing
to sanction people who do not act
with basic human decency.
Sexual assault isn’t an anomaly
arising out of an otherwise respectful society. It fits its context. A society that accepts microaggressions
such as name-calling signals to rapists and bullies that they have unfettered reign.
I urge The Maroon to revise
and publish its policy for online
comments to make it clear that ad
hominem attacks will not be tolerated. At a minimum, such comments should be removed. In addition, only allowing people with
uchicago.edu email addresses to
participate might enable the University community to have its own
constructive conversations without
the interference of Internet trolls.
But then again, it might not.
Those policies are currently in
place in the university-sponsored
UChicago Alumni LinkedIn group
where I naively posted about sexual
assault. At first, I enjoyed the opportunity to dialogue with alumni
with whom I vehemently disagreed
in what I assumed would be a civil
forum.
Unfortunately, it was not. As
we’ve learned with rape, threats
do not always come from strangers outside our ivory tower. Members of our university community
commit verbal and sexual assaults.
An alumnus made several inappropriate comments to me, one of
which the University administrator
removed. The man continued commenting as if nothing happened.
Justice had been done, but I still
felt uncomfortable: he had not acknowledged wrongdoing.
The University process paralleled
the criminal justice system: The
university and the state punish, and
victims are simply witnesses. Fortunately, there’s another model, one
that restores power to victims. In
keeping with the preamble guidelines, which state that University
members need to take responsibility for their behavior, I suggest that
the authors of ad hominem attacks
be required to apologize before being allowed to comment again.
Apologies require perpetrators to take personal responsibility for their actions. They provide
an opportunity for the powerful
to experience vulnerability, and in
so doing, empower the offended.
As psychologist Aaron Lazare explains, in apologies, violators and
their victims exchange power and
shame.
Like the many rape survivors
who drop out of school and watch
perpetrators graduate, I no longer
participate in the LinkedIn group
and will no longer write op-eds for
The Maroon When freedom of
expression extends to personal attacks, it silences voices within our
community.
I urge the University of Chicago
Committee on Freedom of Expression to reconvene to provide
guidance for maintaining civility
in highly contentious discussions,
a crucial issue its recent report
did not address. I look forward to
rejoining University discussion forums when I can be assured of civility.
—Michele Beaulieux A.B. ’82
10
THE CHICAGO MAROON | VIEWPOINTS | June 2, 2015
The weight of cultural differences
Misdiagnoses of eating disorders can be the result of physicians using a single standard of healthy for all body types
Angela Qian
Maroon Contributor
I’m five-foot-one and weigh
somewhere in the low nineties. I’m
not bony, but I would agree with
anyone who said I was thin. I’ve
been underweight ever since I was
born—but for many Asians, that’s
not unusual.
The other day I went into Student Health Services for a physical,
in order to get a certificate of health
signed so I could start a year-long
teaching program in Japan—a job I
had really wanted and was extremely excited about. The nurse weighed
me, took my height and blood pressure, and then did a quick vision
test. When the attending physician,
a tall Caucasian woman, came in,
she looked at my chart and said,
“You’re wildly underweight.”
She reweighed me. Then she
made me change out of my street
clothes into a hospital gown, and
weighed me on a different scale.
This time the number was a pound
lower.
“It says on your chart you have a
history of mental illness?”
I had a bad feeling about this.
“Second year, I was really stressed
out about some things and paid
some visits to Student Counseling,”
I said. “But that was two years ago.”
“Did you leave with their approval?”
I frowned. “I guess. They
never gave me a formal diagnosis.”
At the end of the exam the physician said, “I’m really concerned
about you. You have a history of
mental illness and you’re really underweight. Do you have an eating
disorder?”
I’d sort of seen this coming. “No,”
I said, trying to be patient. “I eat
plenty. My mom is like this too. It’s
more normal for Asian people—”
“No, no it isn’t,” she said.
“I know so many friends who
have similar body types to me,”
I said. “It’s genetic. My mom is
the same—” and my brother, and
grandma, and two of my aunts, and
an uncle.
“Well, maybe your mom has an
eating disorder too.”
I was stunned. Now she was questioning my mother, too? I looked
at the form and reminded myself I
had to get her to sign it. I tried to be
reasonable.
“How much weight do you think
I should gain?”
The physician did some calculations. “Fifteen pounds. If you gain
fifteen pounds, you’ll be normal.”
I had never weighed that much in
my entire life.
I tried again. “I don’t think I can
gain fifteen pounds by the time it’s
time to go to Japan—”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“But… I need you to sign the
form.”
“I can’t if I have these concerns.”
“But that means I can’t go!”
“Well, I’m not sure that you
should!”
I froze. The air seemed to thicken
with tension. Was she kidding me?
“I’m normal,” I protested. “I have
so many friends who are a similar
height, a similar weight—”
“You’re in denial,” the physician
said, shaking her head. “You’re being very resistant to the idea.” Her
tone implied my attitude wasn’t
SEAN WHANG
helping things. Well, I didn’t like
her attitude, either.
She made me sign me up for
weight management visits. I walked
out of the hospital and called my
dad. Halfway through explaining
what had happened (“She said I
was too underweight. She won’t
let me go to Japan.”) I started crying—she’d accused me of so much,
hadn’t listened at all, and had even
made me doubt myself. Maybe I
was abnormal. Maybe I did have a
problem.
My dad was furious.
“That’s ridiculous!” he said. “Fly
home. Right now. I’ll find you a
doctor. Fly home this weekend.”
When he calmed down a little, he
said, “Find an Asian doctor. You
have to go to an Asian doctor.”
After I found a Chinese doctor at
Northwestern who would give me a
physical, I started looking at WHO
statistics for Asian BMIs. For Asian
populations, one study found, some
BMIs under 25 (considered obese)
still put Asians at higher risk for
diseases related to obesity, such as
hypertension, high blood pressure,
or cardiovascular issues. In other
words, this study suggested that
some Asian people should naturally
weigh a little less than the American
norm to be healthy.
I talked to a few Asian friends
who were about my height. They
too, fell in my weight range. My old
roommate, a spunky and athletic
dancer who was a major foodie, also
weighed in the nineties and was
five feet tall. I had a friend in high
school, an ex-gymnast, 5’4” and
ninety pounds—lots of people were
jealous of her fit body, but she ate
like a truck driver. We worked in an
ice cream shop together and always
took home huge milkshakes and
sundaes.
“That’s ridiculous,” these friends
all said. “What, does she think half
the people in Japan or Korea have
eating disorders?”
Though the physician I saw accused me of being resistant to the
idea that I was underweight, she
was resistant to the idea that I really might just have been born this
way. Aside from my weight, I was
in perfect health, and had no symptoms of having a disordered relationship with food. I eat when I’m
hungry, and I stop when I’m full. I
don’t binge, purge, control, restrict,
or count calories. But when I’d told
her—angrily—“I’ve been like this
for 21 years. I know my own body!,”
she immediately assumed I was ignorant or lying, and invalidated my
personal experience by replying,
“I don’t think you do!” She demonstrated a complete lack of cultural awareness, bringing her rigid
notions of what “normal” bodies
should be like to bear on not only
me, but also my mother, whom she
hadn’t even seen.
She didn’t listen to anything I
said.
And she isn’t the first. A few
months earlier, I’d gone to Student
Health to get treatment for a kitchen burn. The attending physician
spent more time asking me about
my weight, asking if I had an eating disorder, and trying to get me
to come in for weight consultations
than she did treating my red, throbbing, and blistered finger.
For the careless way in which
“mental health” was entered into
my chart without further elaboration and tests, for the way both
physicians at SHS took that note
and twisted it to apply their own
unbending stereotypes and expectations on to me, and for the complete
and utter failure of cultural competency they demonstrated in making
accusations about my body and as-
sumptions about my relationship
with food,I am appalled. My visit
with SHS shook my self-confidence
so much that I forced myself to eat
four meals that day, not stopping
even when I was full, even when my
stomach started to protest. I made
twice my usual portion of rice,
poured twice the normal amount
of oil into the frying pan. Even after
I finished my last meal I thought:
“Should I keep going?”
They should not have made me
doubt myself so much.
When I started talking to my other small-framed Asian friends, their
stories started coming out too—
of times non-Asian doctors had
looked at them with very concerned
faces and asked, “Do you have an
eating disorder?” Those doctors
didn’t believe my friends when they
said no, either.
I, and thousands of other girls out
|
THE CHICAGO MAROON
there, shouldn’t have to find a special Asian doctor just to get a physical. Medical professionals should
understand that different people
have different body types. Diagnosing solely based on looks is harmful and even negligent on the part
of the doctor, especially since our
idea of healthy weight is based on
norms for Caucasians. To properly
address, and even prevent, eating
disorders, physicians should gain a
more fundamental understanding
of all the symptoms an eating disorder entails—not just weight. Otherwise, some people who really need
help will fall through the cracks and
some who aren’t sick will be incorrectly diagnosed.
Angela Qian is a fourthyear in the College double
majoring in English and political science.
Letter: Update on re-installing
stained glass in Bartlett
I want to thank The Maroon
and especially journalist Maggie
Loughran for the outstanding
recent article on the plight of
the Edward Sperry stained glass
that once adorned Bartlett Commons (“Bartlett Stained Glass
Still in Storage After 15 Years,”
5/15/15). It is my hope that the
article, together with a major effort by alumni, current students,
and others, will spur the University administration to finally take
the glass out of storage, where it
has been sitting since 2001, and
re-install it in its rightful place.
To this end, I have created a
closed Facebook group called
“Friends of Edward Sperry”
which will serve as a resource for
discussion and planning a strateg y.
Ideally, we can meet periodically in the coming months in
order to build dialogue with the
University regarding this neglected architectural treasure.
—Karl Rahder A.M. ’89
THE CHICAGO MAROON | VIEWPOINTS | June 2, 2015
11
An ego trip down memory lane
The consequences of harboring egotism within acts of service
Sophia Chen
PhiloSophia
“No, stop! We’re running this
scene one more time.”
My shrill voice, laced with derision and frustration, bounced
around the echoing exercise room
of South Campus. It was Saturday
night—ninth week of winter quarter, when the darkened halls were
silenced with the impending doom
of finals—and there were 10 of us
in that fluorescently lit chamber of
dinky colored mats, surrounded by
shabby props.
We, the first-year girls of a Christian fellowship on campus called
AAIV, were practicing our play for
Brothers’ Appreciation Day. It was
a day that was supposed to be dedicated to honoring the guys of our
fellowship. But the good intentions
of the event took background to a
chorus of other motivations in my
head. Brandishing the overly long
script, I stomped around the exercise room, emitting death glares
and interrupting people.
The satirical screenplay for the
performance was my precious offspring that I had nurtured over the
past quarter. In addition to being
the writer, I was also the de facto
director (surprise!). To properly
describe what I was like during this
period of time, words like tyrant,
perfectionist, and megalomaniac
come to mind. I was being absolutely ridiculous—this was just a
10-person, 30-minute skit for a
tiny audience. I thought I was Martin Scorsese as a director but I was
actually just M. Night Shyamalan,
ruiner of children’s dreams.
At this school, no extracurricular activity ever goes as planned,
not with our constant stream of
midterms, not with our lightning
fast 10-week courses. But for me,
the fact that work caused people
to miss rehearsals, show up late or
leave early, or ask to switch roles
was unacceptable. I hounded and
stalked the cast like Ms. Darbus of
High School Musical (my spirit animal), to the point that I don’t think
anyone was having fun anymore.
Eventually, a member of the cast
pulled me aside to confront me and
say that the guys in our fellowship
would still feel loved even if the
skit wasn’t perfect. I realized then
that my need for this performance
to be flawless wasn’t merely so that
the brothers felt loved.
In fact, most of the pretty and
inspirational words I had said in regard to this skit were empty. When
I complained to others about having to do most of the work for
this project, I painted myself as
someone who was sacrificing her
academics and her time in order
to make others feel appreciated. I
hope that some of these pure motivations were true, but I also know
that I would not have “sacrificed”
myself to this degree if it weren’t
for my own pursuit of recognition.
A big part of why I put aside academics for Brothers’ Appreciation
Day, why I spent hours fiddling
with lines and props, was because
I wanted to validate myself as a
writer. In the new environment of
college, I wanted people to know
that my reasons for pursuing English as one of my majors, a less
pre-professional decision, weren’t
unfounded and delusional. I wanted the audience that watched this
performance to be impressed with
me, and to understand that maybe
my strings of sentences had something to them. And to achieve this,
I was making the cast of this performance, my fellow AAIV sisters, my
friends, miserable.
It’s natural for all our decisions
to be colored with some self-interest, but that becomes a problem
when we act like they’re not and
that they’re fully in service of others. For me, I hope to acknowledge
this selfishness more so in the future, while also seeking to reach the
pure motivations that I claimed to
have during Brothers’ Appreciation
Day preparation.
Though I try my best to mean
well, I can name countless instances in the past where I comforted
someone else partly to make myself
feel wise and important, where a
gift for a friend also served as invisible currency to purchase affection.
Even in the practice of my faith, I
recently realized that I used to sing
worship songs without total sincerity. These songs have lyrics like,
“For the honor of the Father,” but
what mattered to me more was the
way the music swelled, the comfort
that it brought to me instead of,
WEI YI OW
well, honoring the Father. Beauty
and comfort are, in their own right,
important, but I mostly thought
about those things instead of honoring and appreciating another—
the purpose of worship.
It wasn’t until I recently started
going to Holy Trinity Church in
Hyde Park, which sang songs I
was completely unfamiliar with,
that I was rattled out of just going through the motions. I started
thinking about the words again,
what it meant to honor another in-
| THE CHICAGO
MAROON
stead of the self. And how that sentiment pertains to the rest of my
life, especially that winter night
rehearsal in a basement.
This year has been an adventure
in confronting my own ego. It’s still
a big, ugly thing, but maybe next
year, it’ll learn to hurt others a little
less.
Sophia Chen is a firstyear in the College double
majoring in biology and
English
Panty politics
The increasing popularity of “granny panties” indexes a shift in what we consider sexy
Eliora Katz
Katzenjammer
After Bridget Jones, the protagonist of Bridget Jones’s Diary, has
dinner with her perilously charming boss Daniel Cleaver, she accepts a not-so-innocent offer for
drinks at his place. In no time we
see the two rolling around on the
couch, making their way to the
floor. We see Daniel’s hands caressing Bridget as smoothly as a
pianist’s against the keys. We hear
him begin to undress her. “Now,
these are very silly little boots,
Jones. And this is a very silly little
dress. And, um, these are, uh—”
We wait. “Fuck me, absolutely
enormous panties.” But Daniel
playfully reassures Bridget that
the large knickers are no turn off.
“Don’t apologize,” he insists. “I
like them. Hello, Mummy.”
This is not your average movie
sex scene; it’s quietly revolutionary. In this quirky sequence,
Bridget elegantly subverts the
classic formula of a steamy atmosphere of seductive chatter followed by a scene where the heroine’s “sexy” underwear is revealed,
and exchanges it for something
much more real. In doing so, our
heroine redefines what makes a
woman attractive in the bedroom.
Jones is able to wield her “wanton
goddess” charm irrespective of her
larger-than-life knickers, dispelling the notion that more coverage
means less action.
I, too, am a granny panties kind
of gal, and I can’t deny that seeing
Bridget Jones’s Diary with my mom
at a very young age had something
to do with it. In fact, it was my favorite movie growing up.
I like my briefs like I like my
lattes: tall and full. I enjoy the
broad comfort of cotton instead
of a string rubbing against me, and
I enjoy those moments where the
top of my panties and my belly
button meet. And if that ever is to
deter a man, then that clearly that
says more about him than it does
about me. Even when I tried buying sexy undies, the best I could
manage was a high-waisted mesh
boyshort—basically lace granny
panties. After all, isn’t it what’s on
the inside that counts?
We’re constantly told by the media and girlfriends alike that “your
ginormous underwear choice also
likely means you aren’t getting laid
often.” But luckily for those of us
with the wide panty predilection,
things are starting to change—
the masses are catching on. The
New York Times reported this past
Wednesday that young women are
to an increasing extent espousing
“granny panties” and jettisoning
thongs, demonstrating that women are finally dressing and shopping for women.
What is sexy, after all, if not
an incredible myriad of properties relative to a time and place?
A big question that would make
for a scintillating fundamentals
B.A. Sexiness is an incredibly subjective and whimsical property
which women are now taking by
the horns and I hope it’s just one
of many more revolutions women
have in store.
According to The Times, the sale
of thongs has seen a 7 percent drop
in the past year, in contrast to a 17
SUBMISSIONS
The Chicago Maroon welcomes opinions and responses from its readers.
The Chicago Maroon
Attn: Viewpoints
1212 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
E-mail: [email protected]
percent rise in the sales of full-coverage underwear. “In the end, it is
about options,” the author says.
More options, and the resulting
greater variety of panties women
can choose from, signals the beginning of the lingerie industry’s
recognition that there is more
than one way to be sexy. Women
should wear whatever underwear
they like—be it G-string, thong,
or nothing at all—as long as they
feel comfortable in it.
Behind this point is an even
more exciting notion: The shift in
the undies we wear signals a shift
in our very perception of what
concepts like “sexy” and “beautiful” actually mean today.
Eliora Katz is a secondyear in the College majoring in philosophy.
ARTS
What is art?
JUNE 2, 2015
Senior looks back on years with Voices in Your Head
The group took second in the world among collegiate a cappella teams this spring
Evangeline Reid
Arts Editor
If Pitch Perfect was nonfiction,
it totally could have been filmed
on UChicago’s campus. Voices in
Your Head placed second at the
International Championship of
Collegiate A Cappella (ICCAs)
this spring, and first-year member Shubha Vedual took home the
Outstanding Soloist Award.
The finals were held at Beacon Theatre in New York after
months of prep work and a long
series of qualifying competitions.
(The Midwest Quarterfinal was
hosted by the A Cappella Council in Mandel Hall in January,
which also brought film crews
to campus for Sing It On, a new
reality TV show that follows collegiate a cappella groups.) Their
winning set—a mix of “Show Me
How You Burlesque,” “Heroes Listen,” and “Band My Head”— was
arranged by group members and
featured tight choreography, microphone tricks, and stellar solos.
Since then, the group has reached
new audiences in an NPR special
about collegiate a cappella and
had a brief moment of glory on
the Today show.
Voices in Your Head was just
one of many collegiate vocal
groups—there are eight on this
campus alone—until 2012 when
the group suddenly drew national attention by placing fourth at
the ICCAs. Four years later, they
proved it was not a fluke by being
only six points short of first place
at the Finals.
Kevin Qian, a graduating
fourth-year and the group’s business manager for the past three
years, has been along for the
whole journey. He’s one of only
two fourth-years—the other, Mason Heller, is the group’s president—who remain in the group,
despite coming in with nine other
students in the fall of 2011. Kevin
is an award winning vocal percussionist—a cappella jargon for
beatboxer—and tenor who also
produces recordings for the group
and on his own. In high school
in Massachusetts he was a “music
geek.” He arrived on campus at
an opportune time, just after the
group’s beatboxer graduated. “I
had learned to beatbox from my
high school a cappella group so
it was just a skill I kept refining,
and [I] made sure I had that ready
to give me an edge in auditions.”
That helped buy him a ticket into
the group at the beginning of their
breakthrough season. This year’s
success seems to bring it full circle.
Chicago Maroon: Did you see
your success this year coming?
Kevin Qian: It’s kinda hard to
see it coming because you never
know. There are a lot of great a
cappella groups across the U.S.
and throughout the world, in the
collegiate world….We never really
achieved that high of a level in ICCAs before 2012…. People were
like, “ Wow, this is Voices in Your
Head.” A lot of groups really come
out of nowhere…. But this year
we had a really great talent pool.
We have one member [Shubha
Vedual] who was a former contestant on American Idol. We have
a championship beatboxer, who’s
also a first-year. We have a really
great bass, and we have a great
whistler, a great baritone, a great
alto who [also] arranges a lot for
us. That combination worked really well for us, but ultimately it’s
what you do with the raw talent
that helps you achieve success.
CM: Tell me about rehearsals.
KQ: Our normal rehearsal
schedule is three days a week for
two hours each—so six hours of
rehearsal a week—typically Sunday and two other days in the
week, although do tend to ramp
up before concerts or competitions…. [At rehearsals] we warmup first. We rehearse any songs either we need to do for a gig that’s
coming up or learn new material.
Sometimes we rehearse with our
sound system, which is awesome.
We have a really good sound system for the entire a cappella community: It’s 14 wireless mics and
subwoofers and speakers and everything.
CM: How have you seen the
group grow and change in your
four years?
KQ: Well, one thing that hasn’t
changed…is that I think the group
has always been really passion-
ate…. The biggest thing that’s
changed is obviously membership.
We cycle through new members
every year with new auditions, and
I think with every coming year the
group just becomes more of a family. We still are really close…even
with alumni and people who are
no longer in the group.
[And]
just like UChica-go—every year
[it] gets progres-sively better on
paper with SAT scores or whatever—I feel like with Voices, the
talent, every year it gets better and
better… which is also great to
have an upward trend in that.
CM:
Have you been able to
pursue your pa-sion for music
more seriously in college?
KQ:
[The] U n i v e r s i t y
of
Chicago… it’s not like
Northwestern or Berkeley where
people come to study music and
yet there’s such an awesome and
growing talent pool here. I love
c o l l a b o r a t i n g with musicians
here, either with people in my a
cappella group or just random
friends that I make. I have a
home bedroom studio and…I do
have a Sound-cloud, and I like
to record and produce my own
covers in my spare time. I’ve also
gotten in songwriting. Everything
for right now is just a hobby, but
I’m hoping to pursue that a bit
more seriously after graduation.
CM: Do you feel like Pitch
Perfect is representative of what
it’s really like?
KQ: Obviously there’s a lot of
exaggeration. There aren’t announcers in the ICCA and none
that make terrible comments during the performances. Also I don’t
think accabattles are a thing that
happens…. There may be rivalry at
other schools but I think at least
among the UChicago a capella
community we’re all really great
friends…. I’m going to all the other a cappella group’s concerts this
coming week and next week. It’s
fun to see Pitch Perfect and Pitch
Perfect 2 and see what appeals to
other people about a cappella and
[seeing how it makes] it super
mainstream. [But] I didn’t treat it
like, “Oh this is a docu-series on
my life.”
Kevin Qian has been with Voices since the time of their first
break through into the big leagues of collegiate a capella.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MIKE NEENAN
CM: Glee and the reality TV
show the Sing Off first started
grabbing attention for a cappella in 2009 and since then the
hype has taken off with Pentatonix and the Pitch Perfect movies. What’s it like being around
at this prime time for a cappella?
KQ: Getting the mainstream
attention that it deserves has been
great for our group. We’ve definitely gotten a lot of great exposure for it and also a lot of gigs—
people getting married, getting
engaged will hire us—or we even
got the chance to sing with one of
the members of Pentatonix who
was on The Sing Off, Avi Kaplan,
back in 2013. I watch Pitch Perfect
2, and I’m like, “Oh I know that
guy.”
CM: And as for seeing the
group come so far?
KQ: When I got in as a firstyear I knew they were great…but
I had no idea that you know that
four years later I’d be performing
in the Beacon Theatre in New
York. It’s incredible. I can’t say I
expected that. I just auditioned
for an a cappella group because
I love music and so did everyone
else in our group. So it’s just great
to see what we’ve accomplished.
And I’m really proud, a really
proud senior.
Kevin hinted the spring concert
might include a cool light show accompanying a new song, along with
a live performance of the ICCA set,
his senior solo, and a loud crowd of
alumni cheering the whole way.
Voices in Your Head's spring concert will be held Friday, June 5, at
8 p.m. in Logan Performance Hall.
$7 with UCID
Voices in Your Head, an RSO on campus, has been featured in an NPR special this year after their big win. The group missed first place by only six points.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MIKE NEENAN
THE CHICAGO MAROON | ARTS | June 2, 2015
13
Plants for poems: arts collective brings project to campus
For two days last week, a Pilsen-based arts collective called Cream Co. brought a unique exhibit to the Logan Center’s patio: It allowed members of the community to trade a poem for a tomato plant. “We feel
like the value of one plant equals the value of someone taking the time to write a poem,” said Patrick Thornton, a member of the group. The project, General Economy Exquisite Exchange, offered several unique
tomato varieties for the event. (For example, the Jaune Flamme promised to be round, apricot-colored, and both sweet and tart.) Thornton called the initiative a social practice art project. “It’s not an object, it’s not
a performance, but it always seems to be about engaging with the community.” The group brought an almost identical project to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art last year. One of the members of Cream
Co. lives on the South Side, and the group has brought projects to the Hyde Park Art Center, as well as other communities around Chicago. A previous project documented the color of tomato plants through
their life cycle and then painted the colors in squares on a large canvas. “As part of our practice we collect data and then we figure out how to use it,” he explained. “So I don’t know what we’re going to do with the
poems we get today.” They found another short-term purpose at the conclusion of the project on Wednesday evening, when poetry students read from the collected poems outside Logan.
PHOTOS BY EVANGELINE REID
|
THE CHICAGO MAROON
Jamie xx's In Colour toes the line between celebration and melancholy
Andrew Yang
Arts Contributor
Jamie Smith has a tendency to look
back. Raised on his parents’ soul records in the early ’90s before delving
into the sounds of his native British
dance music, his music captures the
feeling of discovering and inhabiting
an era after it has already passed.
Smith, better known as Jamie xx,
is one third of the English trio The xx
and also has producing credits with
Alicia Keys and Drake, including the
smash hit “Take Care,” featuring Rihanna. In Colour, which hit stores
yesterday, is his first solo project. It
was made available for streaming from
iTunes as a “visual album” last week.
The accompanying video features 42
minutes of colored, dancing rectangles and triangles that are surprisingly
cinematic and mesmerizing to watch
alongside the music.
Known for his reserved demeanor
and unconventional live DJ sets—in
which Otis Redding tracks are equally
at home with contemporary electronic
dance music—Smith’s sensibilities are
delightfully nerdy. He is the solitary
dude that goes to live shows and stands
at the front of the venue, quietly nodding his head to the music while the
crowd around him raves. On In Colour, his influences come primarily
from ’90s British dance music, especially on the opening track “Gosh,”
with its aggressive breakbeat and a
pitch-lowered vocal sample from a pirate-radio show. These influences give
the album a distinctly nostalgic feel,
looking back on a once-vibrant culture that is now fading from London,
club by shuttered club. Indeed, much
of Smith’s exposure to British dance
music came after the era had already
passed, from videos he watched while
feeling homesick on a world tour with
The xx.
Despite the dance beats and synths,
much of the music has the same subdued, melancholic quality of The
xx’s first two albums. Oliver Sim and
Romy Madley Croft, the other two
members of The xx, both make appearances, and there are a few moments in “Loud Places” and “Stranger
in a Room” that would feel right at
home on a full-band album.
But Smith has no trouble carving
out his own identity for his solo project. Steel drums, which are fast becoming a Jamie xx staple, lend tracks like
“Obvs” and “I Know There’s Gonna
Be Good Times” a splash of bright,
beachy sunlight. Indeed, “Good
Times” is an early candidate for song
of the summer, featuring a chorus from
Jamaican dancehall artist Popcaan and
plenty of quotable verses from a particularly chirpy Young Thug. As the title
suggests, this album is a jolt of color
to The xx’s black and white. The tension between joy and sadness is what
makes the music so compelling, giving its happier moments a bittersweet
edge and its more reflective moments
a sweeping, grandiose sense of tragedy.
These moments are best exemplified by the album’s closing tracks. “The
Rest Is Noise” is the album’s highlight,
a gorgeous, sprawling effort that builds
uncertainty with moody piano notes
and disembodied sirens, then pushes
deeper into the night with a solemn,
pulsing beat. “Girl” recalls past heartache, layering muted guitar and synths
with an insistent snare and a distant,
ominous brass swell. Both of these
tracks create a sense of sadness and
solitude, and then proceed to embrace
it. They turn inward to find peace and
beat on, and amidst the ’90’s samples
and breakbeats, it is this that turns out
to be timeless.
Lake Street Dive's talent underappreciated at Thalia Hall gig
Lily Gordon
Arts Contributor
In Lake Street Dive’s most viewed
video on YouTube, the four-person
jazzy pop band performs a slow, bassheavy version of The Jackson 5’s “I
Want You Back” on a sunny Boston
street corner. At one point, a couple
passes by in the background, glancing
at the performers with curiosity, but—
to my surprise—not stopping to listen.
If I were to happen upon lead singer
Rachael Price’s voice performing the
remarkably fresh cover of “I Want You
Back,” I wouldn’t be able to keep walking; it’s powerfully low and patient,
holding notes until her sound has
made its full impact.
Despite not being widely recognized, Lake Street Dive is one of the
most exciting and talented bands playing today. Trumpet player and guitarist
Mike “McDuck” Olson, bassist Bridget Kearney, drummer Mike Calabrese,
and Price all met while students at
Boston’s New England Conservatory.
Since its formation in 2004, the band
has since relocated to Brooklyn.
When Lake Street Dive performed
its second of two sold-out shows at
Thalia Hall in Pilsen on Sunday night,
Price said early in the evening, “The
Sunday night crowd is rowdier than
Saturday’s! This is gonna be really fun.
Thank you for coming out.”
But it didn’t feel like a sold-out
show; it wasn’t rowdy. The crowd, for
the most part, was politely curious
about the band—like the passersby in
the YouTube clip—swaying and moving, bobbing their heads, but never
dancing. Couples limply held each
other by the hips. Audience members
seated on the second floor balcony
didn’t even stand to dance during fast
songs like “You Go Down Smooth”
from Bad Self Portraits, the band’s
most recent album from February
2014.
Perhaps the audience was disappointed that they didn’t perform any
of their most-loved covers, including,
of course, the aforementioned “I Want
You Back,” “Rich Girl” by Daryl Hall
and John Oates, and “Faith” by George
Michael, all featured on 2012’s Fun
Machine. I know I was, but that didn’t
stop me from dancing. Perhaps the
audience didn’t know how to dance
to the songs, with their shifting and
unpredictable rhythms. Perhaps they
were stunned by Price’s shaking hips
and resinous vibrato, or intimidated by
the drummer who sat barefoot, wearing a striped t-shirt, rolled-up khakis,
and a bandana on his head.
Whatever the reason, it was bizarre.
And yet Price called us an exceptional
crowd! What does this say about contemporary audiences of this genre?
On Sunday night, they performed
songs from their self-titled 2010 album, including “Hello? Goodbye!,”
“Elijah,” and “Got Me Fooled,” inviting audience members to participate
in a call-and-response for the latter:
“drinks in the bar room” and “tapes
and some thai food,” they asked us to
yell. (The four musicians write the lyrics together.)
The band also performed “You Go
Down Smooth” and “Rabid Animal”
from February 2014’s Bad Self Por-
traits, and Annie Lennox’s “Walking
on Broken Glass,” breaking the night’s
no-cover trend.
They were quirky. They sang about
life in Brooklyn and the philosophizing provoked by hearing neighbors
having sex in “Neighbor Song”:
“’Cause we’re all stacked in rows and
columns / And if one of them should
fall on me / My neighbors making
love upstairs would crush me / I’m
down on the ground floor.” They also
performed a new song called “Poster”
from a forthcoming album.
“She’s perfect. I love her,” I overheard a woman near me say to her
friend. While this comment, along
with the fact that the show was sold
out, suggests that Price and Lake Street
Dive have a huge following, perhaps
Chicago isn’t ready for the band yet.
14
THE CHICAGO MAROON | ADVERTISEMENTS | June 2, 2015
Beautiful & spacious 2 bedroom
apartments at 54th & Woodlawn
These rarely available units will be ready for
moving in on June 15th 2015.
Rents start at $1,450. Heat & Water included.
Please call Annie from Blackstone Management
at 773-667-1568 to schedule a visit.
THE CHICAGO MAROON | SPORTS | June 2, 2015
15
SENIOR SPOTLIGHT
SCOTT MAINQUIST
FOOTBALL: MAINQUIST SHINES ON
AND OFF THE FIELD
Katie Anderson
Associate Sports Editor
Fourth-year Scott Mainquist evolving into his final form against Concordia in a fall game.
Fourth-year defensive lineman
and California-native Scott Mainquist finished his career as a Maroon in dominating fashion. In his
senior season, he earned First Team
All-American honors from USA
College Football, UAA Defensive
Player of the Year, and First Team
All-UAA.
In the nine games of his final
campaign, he made an impressive
43 tackles with three sacks and one
fumble recovery, and led the team
with eight quarterback hurries.
Looking back at his career,
Mainquist said, “The best part
about being an athlete at UChicago was that I could play football
and use it as an outlet to not think
about school and stress. But at the
same time it never felt like a job or
that I was overworked because of
being an athlete.”
Clearly, having such an outlet
benefited Mainquist greatly: many
of his most impressive accomplishments came off of the field. As a
public policy studies major with
a specialization in environmental
policy, he received UAA All-Academic honors in his first, second,
and third years. Additionally, he
was a National Football Foundation Hampshire Honor Society
member his fourth year.
Outside of football, he is a member of an organization called Chi-
cago Youth Philanthropy Group.
With this group, he works once a
week with high school juniors and
seniors at King College Prep High
School, teaching them about philanthropy. The program allows the
students to donate $1,000 to an
area in their community that they
would like to see improved.
Mainquist emphasized his appreciation of UChicago’s balance
between academics and athletics,
saying, “Coach Wilkerson and the
other football coaches always supported us as players and made sure
we could get our schoolwork done
and encouraged us to not let football get in the way of taking classes
we wanted to take.”
After graduation, Mainquist will
be moving back to San Diego to
work at a law firm before applying
to law school. Athletics, though,
will remain an important part of
his life. He will continue his involvement by coaching high school
football.
As he prepares to leave Hyde
Park in just a couple short weeks,
the former co-captain leaves his
peers with one last piece of advice.
“I guess the best piece of advice I
can give to student athletes is to
make sure you are playing your
sport for the right reasons. Basically play your sport because you love
to play your sport and not for any
other reason. Division III athletics
isn’t glamorous but if you have the
right attitude it can be a truly rewarding experience.”
COURTESY OF UCHICAGO ATHLETICS
G R ADUATE STU DE NTAT-L ARG E
INFORMATION SESSIONS
Join us to learn how you
UPCOMING DATES
can take one or more
undergraduate or grad-
MONDAY, MAY 11, 2015
12–1 PM; HM 151
uate courses across campus as a GSAL student
CLASSIFIEDS
ASSISTANCE NEEDED
Would Serve as Companion to an 85yo Gentleman
Graduate of Harvard Law & Univ. of Michigan
Knowledge of History & Classical Music Pref.
Love of Baseball Required
Must be Willing to Drive
Schedule and Salary Negotiable
bgeorgegold@gmail or text/call 312-218-1067
Beautiful & spacious 2 bedroom apartments at 54th & Woodlawn.
These rarely available units will be ready for moving in on June 15th 2015.
Rents start at $1,450. Heat & Water included.
Please call Annie from Blackstone Management at 773-667-1568 to
schedule a visit.
to bridge your undergraduate experience to a
graduate or professional
degree program.
TUESDAY, MAY 12, 2015
4–5 PM; CL 111
MONDAY, MAY 18, 2015
12–1 PM; HM 151
TUESDAY, MAY 19, 2015
4–5 PM; CL 111
TUESDAY, MAY 26, 2015
4–5 PM; CL 111
RSVP to
[email protected]
Please indicate which session
you would like to attend. Pizza
and soft drinks will be served.
SPORTS
IN QUOTES
“In A-Town with a fitted cap. I’m so hot, I think I need a thermostat. I gotta go to work.”
– Sports analyst Jay Bilas dishes a sneak-peek to his latest mixtape which will surely be fire
Chicago bids adieu to an extraordinary year
Men’s Tennis
Ahmad Allaw
Associate Sports Editor
It’s February 14, just two weeks
after season’s start. Chicago is about
to begin the first game of its doubleheader, also its sixth match of the
year. Each Maroon player, whether
on the singles or doubles court,
takes his position.
The pregame nerves soon give
way to a familiar, comforting sensation. They’ve been through it so
many times before, seen an incredible number of balls and returned
an even greater count with shots of
their own. And soon enough, after
the starting signal, the past repeats
itself. Chicago dominates.
On one court, first-year Nick
Chua loops a forehand winner just
inside the outer edge. On another,
second-year Sven Kranz paints the
midline with an ace. And so it is
for each Chicago player: a crushing
overhead volley, an unreturnable
drop shot, an exquisite backhand
stroke, and on and on and on. The
Maroon players aren’t just playing
tennis, they’re playing tennis the
way only great teams can. That day,
Chicago would go on to win both
of its matches 9–0.
But the final product hadn’t always been so pleasing. In fact, just
a year ago, the South Siders finished
11–9 and failed to earn a spot in
the DIII NCAA tournament. It
wasn’t a bad season, of course. But it
wasn’t much better than average either. The team lacked what so many
other great ones had: instead of
poise and assurance, there had been
uncertainty and doubt. Instead of a
lion’s will, there had been an insipid, uninspired malaise. Things look
destined to remain unchanged. But
among the dying embers, there were
brilliant sparks.
Along with some of the great returning players, including fourthyear leaders Deepak Sabada and
Ankur Bhargava, many talented
first-years were added to the squad.
Immediately, things changed.
That offseason, ambition mixed
with experience, confidence with
a renewed edge. Day after day, the
players pushed themselves and each
other. Week after week, the players put in extra time honing their
skills and perfecting their strokes.
As weeks turned into months, the
team looked entirely different than
it had looked before.
As Head Coach Jay Tee explained, “The…thing that really
stands out is the team’s work ethic
and their drive to be a great team.
They completely changed the culture of the team from one where we
made excuses and looked for an easy
way out to one where guys are continuously striving to improve to be
the best.”
And the incessant practice immediately translated into results. By
the end of the regular season, Chicago held a 14–4 record. Three of
their losses, moreover, were narrow
5–4 defeats and all came against
ranked opponents. Soon enough,
Chicago had found unmatched
confidence. As Leung explained,
“with the close matches we lost to
top ranked teams, we realized that
we in fact could compete and beat
every single team in the country.
There is no team in the country that
can utterly destroy us with peace of
mind. If someone does beat us, we
will give them a couple shots to the
gut while going down.”
Entering UAA competition,
however, Chicago’s DIII Tournament hopes weren’t yet sealed. Each
game was being played with the
highest of stakes on the line:
“I knew from the first day that we
had a team that could make a run in
the NCAA Tournament, the real
challenge was getting there. We play
in an extremely competitive conference and this year the NCAA only
took five at-large selections, which
meant there was a possibility that
a top-10 team would get left out of
the tournament. We knew going
into the UAA Tournament that we
had to finish third to give ourselves
a chance,” Tee said.
And sure enough, Chicago did
just that. They knocked off No. 12
Case Western and then—after losing 5–4 against No. 2 Emory in
the semifinals match—beat No. 10
The men’s tennis team gets in a call before an earlier season match.
COURTESY OF UCHICAGO ATHLETICS
Carnegie Mellon to take third place
in the UAA Championship. Chicago had punched its ticket to a DIII
NCAA Tournament.
The Maroons, though, weren’t
satisfied yet. Making the tournament was great, no doubt. But they
had their sights set on something
far greater. “We were honestly expecting to win the whole NCAA
tournament, with very little competition,” said Leung.
In the first two rounds, Chicago
was well on its way to accomplishing its goal. They easily defeated No.
36 Coe and No. 18 Gustavus Adolphus (5–1 and 5–2, respectively).
In the quarterfinals, though, Chicago faced a daunting opponent:
current No. 2 Amherst College.
In an up-and-down affair, with
shifting momentum and expectation, the Maroons pulled out possibly its gutsiest win of the year. They
had knocked off the defending na-
tional champions 5-4 to advance to
the semifinals match against Middlebury. Unfortunately, though,
Chicago’s run of success ran out.
They lost their next two matches to
finish fourth in the DIII Tournament.
Despite the Maroons’ disappointment, their season can’t be
viewed as anything but a success.
Never before had Chicago tennis
reached the DIII Semifinals. Never
before had they shown such quality
and skill. Chicago had proven itself
a worthy opponent and a deserving
threat for the NCAA title.
With the season over, though,
Coach Tee is already focused on
the year to come. He has seen how
much the team has grown, both
mentally and physically, and he is
confidently optimistic that next
season will be the same. He said,
“It’s going to be tough to replace
what Ankur and Deepak provided
us in terms of leadership and ability but I’m confident that we have
some very good leaders already on
the team. They saw what it means to
lead and they’re ready to step into
that role. This team has always had
the talent to compete at the highest
level but now everyone realizes that
it takes more than that to be a good
team. I think right now everyone
is motivated to work had over the
summer and come back next year
ready to make another run.”
For the returning players, it isn’t
much different. The sting of defeat
still burns, of course. But that is
what motivates their play. Leung
concluded, “I look back and realized that we accomplished a big
goal this year but it is nowhere near
what we can do in the future. Our
goals are to win the tournament,
simple as that. I look forward to being part of the first team to win the
NCAA title for UChicago.”
BLACKHAWKS:
Four wins. That’s all that stands
between the Blackhawks and Lord
Stanley’s Cup. After winning Game
7 on the road in Anaheim on Saturday, the Hawks are preparing
to face the Tampa Bay Lightning
in the Stanley Cup Finals beginning Wednesday. Chicago beat the
Ducks 5–3 in the decisive game,
paced by two first period goals
by captain Jonathan Toews. The
Hawks will play in the Stanley Cup
Finals for the third time in six years.
The Western Conference representative in the finals for each of the
past four years has been either the
Hawks or the L.A. Kings, alternat-
ing each year. Puck drops for Game
1 at 7 p.m. CST on Wednesday.
This Week in Sports: Chicago Special
with Sarah Langs
CUBS:
The Cubs had an even weekend, going 1–1 with a rainout in-between. In
a home series against interleague foes
in the Royals, the Cubs dropped the
Friday game 8–4, but won on Sunday
2–1. Jorge Soler hit his fourth homer
of the season in the sixth inning, and
Addison Russell hit his fourth of the
year as well, in the seventh. Saturday’s
game was called after some unseasonably cold, in other words, seasonably
Chicago, weather. On Sunday, in
throwback Chicago Whales jerseys,
the Cubs pulled out a 2–1 victory
in eleven innings. Starter Tsyuoshi
Wada gave up a run over 5.2 innings,
and seven relievers combined to shut
out the Royals for the rest of the
game. Chicago won it on David Ross’
11th-inning single. The Cubs remain
in second place in the N.L. Central,
six games behind the Cardinals, entering Monday. This week, the Cubs
will take on the Marlins and then the
Nationals on the road.
WHITE SOX:
The White Sox took two out of
three from the A.L.–West–leading
Astros this weekend in Houston. On
Friday, the Sox won 6–3 in 11 innings.
After Carlos Rodon gave up three
runs, one earned, over 6.1 innings,
the bullpen kept the Astros scoreless.
Gordon Beckham hit an eighth in-
ning home run to tie the game at three
apiece, and then the floodgates opened
for the ’Stros pitching in the top of the
eleventh. On Saturday, Dallas Keuchel
pitched a four-hit shutout, notching
11 strikeouts en route to a 3–0 Astros
victory. But the Sox were able to reign
supreme in the rubber game, winning
6–0 behind John Danks’s 10-hit shutout. Perhaps not as dominating in the
box score as Keuchel’s, but the shutout
still got the job done. The Sox remain
in last place in the A.L. Central, seven
games out of the division-leading
Twins, entering Monday. This week,
they’ll take on the Texas Rangers on
the road before returning home to face
the Detroit Tigers.
BULLS:
The Bulls fired head coach Tom
Thibodeau on Thursday, reliving
him of his coaching duties after
five seasons at the helm. The Bulls
made the playoffs each year under Thibodeau. There’s been no
official announcement entering
Monday morning, but the team is
expected to announce Iowa State
head coach Fred Hoiberg their new
head coach. Hoiberg played for the
Bulls form 1999–2003 and has
been coaching at Iowa State since
2010.