News

Gender-neutral housing decision postponed

Fri, 09 May 2008 02:11:00 -0500

The administration has deferred a decision on whether to make a gender-neutral housing option available to students beginning next academic year. The decision comes after members of the Inter-House Council (IHC) expressed expectations that a recommendation they had drafted and presented to administrators would be approved in the coming weeks.

Housing Office staff and University administrators had been considering the option since the middle of last quarter, when an ad-hoc IHC committee finalized an “open-housing” proposal that, if implemented, would allow continuing undergraduates to share dorm rooms or apartments with members of the opposite sex.

In an e-mail sent to members of Student Government and the IHC last week, Vice President and Dean of Students Kimberly Goff-Crews said that she had postponed action after realizing that too narrow a sector of the campus community had been consulted during the decision-making process.

“As I reviewed the committee recommendation and learned about its process I recognized that some campus constituencies have not been included in the discussions of the past year,” Goff-Crews said in the e-mail. “This important step should not be overlooked and we need to address it. To that end, we will move this process forward by widening the discussion to include faculty, the larger student body, administrators who support student life, and other members of our community.”

Goff-Crews said that she expects a decision on IHC’s recommendation to be reached by the end of fall quarter. “If there are things we’ve missed, I need to understand,” she said in an interview, although she did not cite specific opposition to the recommendation by staff, students, or administrators.

Members of the IHC had hoped the recommendation would be approved in time for yesterday’s housing lottery, when students electing to remain in University housing bid for the following year’s assignments.

“I was really disappointed because I wanted the decision to be made by the housing lottery so next year’s students could have access to it,” said Aaron Goggans, an IHC member who served on the gender-neutral housing committee that drafted the recommendation. “I didn’t expect it, but I did see Kim Goff-Crews’s reasoning for it,” he said.

According to Goggans, most members of the IHC committee similarly received the decision. “We thought she was going to pass it.... [IHC members] were equally disappointed because they had been getting support and talking to students,” he said.

Following discussions within the University community, administrators will continue to hash out the logistics of implementing the option, Goff-Crews said. In the meantime, she will look to other universities that have already implemented similar policies for guidance, she said.

Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania are among the universities that offer some options for students who wish to live with members of the opposite sex.

Although in many instances the impetus for gender-neutral housing policies has been the increasing consideration given to transgendered and transsexual student needs, that will not be the main focus of the University of Chicago’s policy, said Katie Callow-Wright.

Instead, she said, the Housing Office will seek more generally to provide broader housing options to fulfill students’ wishes.

Currently, students who identify as members of the opposite sex, and who therefore may be uncomfortable in same-sex quarters, only have the option of living in single–person housing assignments, which can be ostracizing, Callow-Wright said.

According to Goff-Crews, the postponement is intended primarily as precautionary and procedural.

“It’s something that she doesn’t want to get wrong, and it makes sense,” Goggans said. “These kinds of things do take time, but as a student, I’m only here for two more years, and I want it implemented as soon as possible.... We just have different priorities.”

Scav Hunt festivities consume campus

Fri, 09 May 2008 02:09:00 -0500

Smiling, formally dressed students carrying umbrellas and parasols greeted passersby along the main quadrangles Thursday morning. Offering to escort fellow students, professors, friends, and strangers alike to their destinations, the students drew blank stares, giggles, and dawning looks of understanding.

It’s that time of the year again: The 2008 University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt kicked off Wednesday night with the release of this year’s list of items to be scouted out, created, or performed. Item 139 called for scavvies—as Scav Hunt participants are affectionately nicknamed—to “gallantly shelter complete strangers from Weathorr’s fury” and “[s]how the campus that Scav Hunt runs the best little escort service in Illinois.”

According to fourth-year Jennifer Crowell, Scav Hunt minister of propaganda, the judges held the list “hostage” from the teams until it was released Wednesday night. As ransom for the list, each team was given a list of demands to be fulfilled, including bringing the judges a black light, a toothpick, and a hula skirt. After each five-minute lapse, the judges burned a page of the list.

“It was fun to watch [the captains] squirm,” Crowell said, although she noted that the first few pages of the list contained rules and other important, but not key information.

The final ransom demand called for Scav captains to retrieve pencils from the A-level of the Regenstein Library. There, they were greeted by a former judge who directed them to another judge waiting in the parking structure at East 55th Street and South Greenwood Avenue. That judge handed over the Scav list.

Scav teams have until Sunday afternoon to satisfy the requirements on this year’s list, which contains 269 items. There are 11 additional items for “Scav Olympics,” which will be held on Saturday on the Eckhart quad. During the Olympics, scavvies will compete in untraditional sporting events such as a “Finnish-style wife-carrying competition”—during which competitors must prove they are indeed married—and an old-fashioned cream pie fight.

As a nod to the election season, politically flavored items constitute a recurring theme on the list. Item 17 calls for Scav participants to have a beer with a politician. Having a beer with a former candidate for civic office will gain 5 points, while having a beer with a current presidential candidate is worth 100 points. In addition, item 52 calls for “Obama’s haircut at Obama’s barbershop” (6 points) and item 152 states simply, “A Superdelegate. Must superdelegate” (56 points).

Each year, the Scav list includes a road trip to a location within a thousand miles of Chicago. This year, item 23 reads, “‘Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more.’ No, but you will be before the end of the day.” The road trip teams left Hutchinson Courtyard Thursday morning dressed as Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and “the Bat.” Judges required that transportation be decked out as a “flying house featuring a storm cellar door, chimneyed roof, picket fence, and the legs of the that wicked witch you just ran over.” However, there was an allowance for teams who own a yellow Buick Roadmaster.

Highlights of Scav Hunt so far include a De Lorean (the car featured in the movie “Back to the Future”) located and driven to campus by the graduate student team. Crowell noted that not only did the team receive 75 points, but that due to a bet between two Scav judges, one of the students won $75.

Crowell’s personal favorite item on the list: item 20, which called for each team to send a “Scav Warrior,” dressed in evening wear with a bathing suit underneath, to the Reynolds Club at 3:30 a.m. on Thursday. Upon arriving, the nine scavvies who had volunteered were blindfolded and driven to the airport and put on early morning flights to Las Vegas, where they are currently completing items for the hunt.

Scav Hunt is also notorious for its requisite party. This year’s party clue reads, “What if I told you your Scav Hunt Party’s nickname was ‘The Boat’?” Each team party will take place on a different boat including the Titanic, the H.M.S Pinafore, the Argo, and the Pequod, Crowell said.

The party will take place Friday on the main quads. However, students looking for a drink with presidential hopefuls should try their luck elsewhere.

“There was so much consternation with the party in the past, so we decided to cut out the alcohol and have it be a dry party,” she said.

Two years ago, the Scav party was moved indoors to Cobb due to rain and quickly shut down after students began vomiting and urinating in the inside stairwell. The Pub served alcohol to students at last year’s party on the Social Sciences quad, but the night was interrupted by an altercation that resulted in a student arrest by the Chicago Police Department.

Regardless, Crowell said that so far, the 2008 Scav Hunt is unfolding seamlessly.

“It’s going really well so far,” she said. “There’s always going to be something on the list for everyone. That’s what makes the list really, really great.”

Doctors Hospital in question as site for Hyde Park hotel

Fri, 09 May 2008 02:08:00 -0500

While rumors continue to circulate that developers are considering moving the planned construction of a hotel in Hyde Park from the Hyde Park Doctors Hospital to a site south of the Midway, White Lodging, the construction company, has yet to announce its plans.

“At this point, the University is waiting to hear from White Lodging services,” said Susan Campbell, the associate vice president for community affairs, who would not confirm reports that the company was investigating other sites. “There has been some activity in the back of the building installing additional security sensors and lighting to keep the site more secure. But the final decision is up to White Lodging.”

White Lodging’s original development plan called for demolishing the 93-year-old building at 5800 South Stony Island Avenue and building a new complex to house a Marriott Hotel and Fairfield Inn and Suites. Alderman Leslie Hairston rejected the plan, and in November, Hairston, University officials, and representatives from the Hyde Park Historical Society met with White Lodging to discuss the proposed construction. Members of the historical society, working with Landmark Illinois, an architectural preservation organization, presented an alternate design that would maintain White Lodging’s plan for 380 rooms while keeping the existing structure intact.

“The plan was quite good, although White Lodging was kind of huffy about it,” said Jack Spicer, chairman of the Hyde Park Historical Society’s preservation committee. “Finally, the alderman intervened and said she was very upset because she felt as though the University and White Lodging were not listening to her concerns for some time. She said the community was quite fond of the old building and didn’t want it torn down. It’s a residential street, and so she wanted most of the action from the hotel to be discreet and take place internally. She liked the reuse plan because it kept most of the action inside the hotel.

“She also said it was important to her and the community that the labor situation be taken seriously,” he said.

According to Spicer, “the understanding was that White Lodging would review the plan and get back to the preservation organizations who had paid for this plan, as soon as possible, by the middle of January.”

The preservation organizations are now encouraging Hairston and the Commission on Chicago Landmarks to designate the hospital a historic building, Spicer said. The alderman must recommend a building to the commission to initiate the landmarking process, which can take more than a year.

“It’s a fairly serious, very methodical process,” Spicer said. “We have an understanding that the commission would be receptive. But they won’t act without the alderman unless it is a real emergency.”

Carol Parks, a spokesperson for Hairston, said the alderman expressed concerns about landmark designation because “there are a lot of strings attached to it.”

“Once you have landmark status, it affects what people can do with the building,” Parks said. “There’s a potential that the building could go unused and sit there vacant for even longer than if the alderman works to maintain the building without making it a historic landmark.”

The alderman is not ruling out the possibility, but did have reservations about the process, Parks said.

In April, Hairston met with Bruce White, the CEO of White Lodgings and a U of C alumnus, to reiterate the concerns of the community.

According to Parks, Hairston said she considered it a “very good discussion.”

“I can’t say whether there will be development in the near future, but as long as there is open dialogue, we are better off than we were a couple of months ago,” Hairston said.

Hyde Park’s feral cats gain local and citywide sympathy

Fri, 09 May 2008 02:07:00 -0500

Like many areas of Hyde Park, the East 62nd Street alley is a space in transition. Filled with dumpsters and overgrown patches of weeds, it is sandwiched by newly minted apartments and older buildings fallen into disrepair. Notable, however, is the absence of rodents.

This alley is distinct from others in the neighborhood in that it is home to a small colony of feral cats.

Hyde Park resident Jill Adams unofficially adopted the colony last summer, after noticing the cats while walking her dog. She returned later with food, but after months of caring for and feeding the cats, she took a job downtown and made arrangements to move to Oak Park.

Faced with the prospect of moving north without a car to make the commute to the cats’ alley feasible, Adams turned to the University of Chicago Marketplace and posted an online advertisement.

“Looking for someone to feed wild cats. Will pay,” the ad read.

It was then that Mary Jean Kraybill, director of development at the Divinity School, and Terren Ilana Wein, the Divinity School’s director of communications and public relations, stepped in.

“I like Marketplace and browse it frequently,” Wein said, “and one day I found an ad asking for someone to feed cats, and they were going to pay.”

Intrigued by the prospect of someone willing to pay a stranger to feed strays, Wein told Kraybill about the ad, and Kraybill contacted Adams. Kraybill, who first came to the University as a graduate student in 1980, is a volunteer at Tree House Animal Foundation, a no-kill cat shelter that advocates the Trap-Neuter-Release (TNR) method for dealing with stray cats.

“Mary Jean and I both had the reaction of ‘Well, I’m not going to go to an alley and feed cats every day,’” Wein said. “But I guess Mary Jean and I thought we could come at this from the TNR angle…. At some point we could see the completion of the project, and that was very appealing.”

The pair’s TNR efforts began in March, and so far, Wein said that 12 cats from the alley have been neutered and released and that they hope to do the same for the estimated dozen remaining felines.

“Jill Adams didn’t have the resources for this,” Wein said. Adams, who has remained active with the colony since meeting Kraybill and Wein, moved north last Saturday. For Kraybill, it was partly Adams’s passion for the cats that drew her to the project.

“I’d just never met someone who would be willing to pay someone to feed wild cats,” Kraybill said. “I thought, ‘If someone cares that much, how can I as a cat lover not respond?’”

Once captured, the cats are driven in what Kraybill jokingly calls her “feral-catmobile” to Pets Are Worth Saving (PAWS) Chicago, which boasts a program specifically for strays snared by TNR activists. For $20, PAWS will spay or neuter any cat that is brought in and give it a volley of vaccinations and basic health treatments. A small notch called an ear tag is made in each treated cat’s ear to help distinguish it from those that have not yet been taken in.

“It isn’t an option to kill them all,” Kraybill said of the estimated 700,000 stray cats in Cook County. “This is a problem that humans have created, and to try to solve it by killing cats is really inhumane.”

Kraybill said that although she does not think feral cats pose a threat to Hyde Park residents, wild cats can become problematic without TNR intervention.

“The males tend to fight a lot, and you have the yowling in the alleys that people find so distasteful,” she said. “I think the big problem is having cats around that are not spayed and neutered.”

While some wild cats can be domesticated depending on their previous exposure to humans, the majority of the cats in the colony are not just strays but truly feral and are happier wandering the alleys of Hyde Park, they said.

To raise awareness about the felines, the pair started a blog, hydeparkcats.blogspot.com, that Wein maintains with updates about the progress of the work.

The pair’s TNR efforts attracted citywide attention after the Chicago Tribune featured the project in an April 27 article, which resulted in an outpouring of both emotional and financial support.

“It’s very heartwarming to me,” Kraybill said. “People are so willing to help and really care about the cats.”

But Wein stressed that while the pair appreciates monetary donations, the project also needs additional staffers willing to donate their time.

“Part of the problem is a manpower problem,” Wein said. “We’ve gotten a lot of donations thanks to the Tribune article, but we still need people to come out here and help actually catch the cats and drive them down to get taken care of.”

For the present, at least one more cat lover is joining Wein and Kraybill in their TNR efforts. Third-year Erin Wonder contacted Adams through Marketplace and has taken over feeding the cats four days a week.

“The hope was just to help out over there,” Wonder said. “We’re not just feeding them but kind of cutting down on the proliferation of cats in the neighborhood.”

As University students prepare to leave Hyde Park for the summer months, Kraybill and Wein worry about the future of other cats in the neighborhood.

“I’ve been at the University for five or six years now, and every year you see the animals that students have just dumped,” Wein said. “Getting a pet is a commitment, and not just for three years.”

Kraybill echoed Wein’s sentiments, pointing out that domesticated cats are unadapted to life in the wild.

“These cats were domesticated centuries ago, and they belong in houses with people and not on the street. And now there’s a huge problem with these cats.”

For the pair, the 62nd Street project is an effort to create a world hospitable for everyone, human and non-human alike.

“I think we say a lot about ourselves as a society by how we treat the weakest members, including animals,” Kraybill said.

“This work is trying to imagine the kind of world that I want to live in, where the weak and animals that don’t really have power are treated with respect and dignity,” she said. “I feel that we as responsible human beings have an obligation to help animals that are out there because of us.”

Higher Education Act expires without renewal

Fri, 09 May 2008 02:06:00 -0500

The Higher Education Act (HEA), the piece of federal legislation that dictates higher education policy, including government financial aid programs, has expired as of April 30. Congress is extending the Act until its renewal is completed and passed, with lawmakers expecting to pass the rewritten bill before the July 4 recess. The HEA, which became law in 1965, is reauthorized about once every seven years.

Congress is overhauling the Act as part of its efforts to introduce standard regulations that would affect college campuses nationwide to an unparalleled degree, said A. Scott Sudduth, the newly appointed director of the University’s Washington, D.C., Federal Relations office.

Music and video piracy, campus safety, credits for Advanced Placement exams, student loans, and financial aid are among the topics that fall within HEA’s broad scope. If passed, the cost of implementing these regulations could cause universities, including the University of Chicago, to raise their tuition costs in order to meet the updated standards of compliance, Sudduth said.

“Higher education is regulated in a variety of ways by Congress,” Sudduth said. “This reauthorization of the Higher Education Act has more than 120 new reporting requirements for higher education.

“The reauthorization covers everything from looking at institutional accreditation to how Advanced Placement exam scores should be looked at by schools like University of Chicago,” Sudduth said.

Additionally, the legislation includes clauses on campus safety, an issue that rose to prominence in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting last year. The updated Act would include provisions on campus crime and safety, missing students, campus emergencies, and student mental health, Sudduth said.

Another of HEA’s provisions would extend the length of federal Pell Grants for students from nine months to 12 months, which would allow students to use the grant money to pay for summer school. Due to increased enrollment, some universities, such as those in the University of California system, encourage students to enroll in summer classes. The grant extension would decrease the financial strain on students who attend school year-round, Sudduth said.

However, Sudduth said that the Act would not set regulations on admissions policies, adding that the new provisions would not infringe upon a school’s ability to determine enrollment.

“The legislation sets broad standards for higher education institutions but leaves universities to set their own admissions and enrollment policies,” he said.

The new version of the Act also forces universities to implement stricter rules on music and video piracy conducted over university Internet networks. The provision, which is being debated and has not yet been approved by the Senate, would require universities to purchase computer tools to detect illegal file sharing among students, faculty, and administration over university networks. The Act would also require schools to offer a discounted legal downloading program for students through a vendor such as iTunes, Sudduth said.

Sudduth added that many higher education institutions, including the University of Chicago, are willing to educate students on the dangers of violating copyright laws but do not feel that they should regulate it on their networks.

“A very small type of illegal file sharing happens across university networks. We do not like to look at the networks. Far more of this happens across private networks. The music industry should talk to the major providers as well,” he said.

Vice President and Chief Information Officer Greg Jackson said that the University would easily be able to offer students a deal with a legal music vendor but added that network regulation would prove problematic.

Not only does the technology not currently exist for that type of regulation, monitoring illegal file sharing has nothing to do with the University’s core purpose, Jackson said.

“If a student is illegally downloading episodes of an HBO show, that’s an issue between the student and HBO,” he said. “The university is not responsible for the student’s downloads. There are a lot of things students could do wrong that we are not responsible for.”

According to Jackson, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have dramatically stepped up their campaign against copyright violations on university networks. Over the past two months, the University has seen complaints from the industries increase by five to 10 times despite a lack of evidence that illegal file sharing has increased at all during that time.

If the clause is approved and the regulation technology becomes available, regulating the University’s network would be costly enough that it could result in a tuition increase, Jackson said.

Sudduth said the provisions currently in the reauthorization bill would increase universities’ costs at a time when universities are trying to manage their budgets.

“I think there are some very good provisions in this bill that will help students, but implementing this legislation will come at a cost for higher education institutions,” he said.

Columnist David Brooks visits alma mater for talk

Fri, 09 May 2008 02:03:00 -0500

New York Times columnist David Brooks (A.B. ’83) discussed Barack Obama, John McCain, the Middle East, and his time at the U of C in a talk yesterday sponsored by the Chicago Friends of Israel, the UCDems, and the College Republicans.

In his speech to more than 180 receptive students and faculty in a Kent lecture hall, the conservative columnist evaluated the current contenders for Oval Office, comparing and contrasting the experiences and abilities of Obama and McCain.

Brooks drew on his experience with politicians, many of whom he said he knew personally. Relaying his perceptions of the current presidential campaign, Brooks said that Obama is “now carried in by cherubs,” eliciting audience laughter.

“I could talk about Clinton, but I don’t think that it’s necessary,” Brooks said, referring to the widespread expectation that Obama will become the Democratic nominee.

“Obama has the heart of the world,” he said, praising Obama for both his ability to have perceptive, intellectual discussion and to see history as being driven by grassroots forces, rather than forces in a palace.

Brooks also took shots at the candidates, claiming that Obama “was a mediocre senator” and that McCain “does not have intellectual sensibilities.”

Obama sees global warming, hunger, and other “amorphous” problems as the big challenges facing the United States, Brooks said. McCain, on the other hand, sees China, Russia, and Iran as the main threats facing America.

Brooks said that he remains an “unabashed fan of McCain.” Keeping with McCain’s “straight-talk” campaign slogan, Brooks said that when McCain tells him something, he has no problem putting it in his column, because he trusts that McCain is not lying.

Brooks lightheartedly recommended that both candidates pick Dwight Eisenhower, who passed away in 1969, as their running mate, to laugher from the audience. Eisenhower is both older than Obama and younger than McCain, Brooks joked.

Brooks said that politicians “are all emotional freaks,” observing that while they often become adept at fostering strong relationships with those both more and less powerful than themselves as they ascend the political ladder, they often overlook relationships with their equals.

He said that part of the journalist’s job is to bridge gaps in communication among politicians.

“Journalists are like ambassadors telling politicians about each other,” Brooks said.

Brooks also expressed his pessimism about the ability of Middle Easterners and Americans to imagine a shared future both with members of their respective societies and within the global community, as Americans become more divided by educational achievement and Middle Easterners remain divided by religious ideology.

“The tragedy of the post–9-11 world is that a world that seemed to be coming together is not,” Brooks said.

Americans carried a “powerful sense of universalism,” during the 1990s after the Cold War, Brooks said. U.S. ideology seemed triumphant and the Soviet Union had apparently embraced democracy, with other European countries in tow.

September 11 and the vagaries of the Iraq war broke this notion, Brooks said, leading to a return among U.S. conservatives to what he called “epistemological modesty,” which he said involves a more serious understanding of cultural divides and how differing perceptions affect political outcomes.

This leads to a “great hesitancy to get enmeshed” in the affairs of other countries, Brooks said.

Some students disagreed with Brooks’s global perceptions.

“As far as the rifts, as a demographer that’s kind of his job,” fourth-year Nabeel Ebeid said. Ebeid said that while he agreed with Brooks on several accounts, he felt Brooks ignored the willingness of many people to reach across cultural barriers if given the chance.

Throughout the evening, Brooks interspersed his talk with humorous and self-deprecating memories of his U of C days as an undergraduate, recalling that he once received a D on a French exam in a nearby lecture room.

A former MAROON editorial columnist, Brooks said that he broke into the world of journalism after publishing in the paper a parody of William F. Buckley, the conservative journalist, political commentator, and founder of National Review, in anticipation of Buckley’s visit to campus.

“David Brooks, if you’re in the audience, I’d like to offer you a job,” Buckley announced during his U of C lecture.

Brooks said that he was not, in fact, in the audience at the time. However, upon graduating from the University with a degree in history, Brooks called Buckley and landed a reporting job at the Review. He worked as a reporter and columnist for several publications before joining the Times as a columnist in 2003.

“I can’t tell you how weird it is to be back here,” Brooks said.

Scientists to explore dark energy’s mysteries

Fri, 09 May 2008 01:56:00 -0500

The University’s Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes will use one of the world’s fastest supercomputers to model stellar explosions and collapses, natural phenomena that physicists claim hold the key to understanding dark energy.

The Center won 22 million computing hours from Argonne National Laboratory to use the Laboratory’s Blue Gene/P supercomputer. Blue Gene/P’s 160,000 cutting-edge processors can perform 445 trillion calculations per second, according to an Argonne press release. In three days, the supercomputer’s processors can perform a calculation that would take a normal desktop 1,000 years to complete.

Scientists will allocate the Center’s computing hours to simulate Type Ia supernovae, which are formed when white dwarf stars explode. The simulations will model small segments of the star as it begins to explode, building on research done at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, another supercomputing facility managed by the University of California.

Precise models of Type Ia supernovae are important because the explosions have a consistent luminosity. Scientists can measure the brightness of Type Ia supernovae to determine how far away they are, using Type Ia supernovae as distance markers for other celestial phenomena.

In 1998, researchers at the Berkeley Lab revealed that Type Ia supernovae were growing increasingly distant from each other, leading scientists to conclude that the universe was expanding at an accelerated rate. The researchers posited a repulsive force, dark energy, to explain this acceleration.

“Gravity always pulls things together,” said Robert Fisher, a research scientist at the Flash Center. “The only way to cause the universe to speed up is if there is some kind of repulsive gravity.”

Since there is no way to measure directly the luminosity that is crucial to determining distance, a supernova has to be understood from the inside out, starting from its creation.

“The question that arises when you understand the fundamental physics is how [stars that become supernovae] explode. Do they go off like combustion, which is called deflagration, or do they explode in a detonation?” Fisher said. “We want to go beyond the models to understand the physics of turbulent combustion.”

Crime Report: 5-9-08

Fri, 09 May 2008 01:53:00 -0500

May 4, 2:00 a.m. — A male victim reported that while walking on the 5100 block of South Engleside Avenue toward his parked car, he was approached from behind by a male offender who pressed a hard object into the victim’s back. “This is a stickup. Gimme all you have,” the offender said, according to the victim. The offender then reached into the victim’s pockets, took his wallet, and left the area on foot. The victim could not provide a description of the offender. 

May 6, 8:48 p.m. — A 29-year-old male was walking on the 5300 block of South Ellis Avenue when he cut through an alley. After hearing a yell from behind him, he turned around and saw three offenders approach him. The first offender demanded the victim’s money. “Show him we ain’t playing around,” the second offender said, according to the victim, and pointed to his waistband, implying he was armed. The victim surrendered his wallet and iPod, and the offenders fled through the alley. They are described as male, black, and in their 20s.

University to switch insurance providers

Tue, 06 May 2008 01:50:00 -0500

The University will be switching student health insurance providers next year, the Student Health Insurance Review Committee (SHIRC) announced last week. The move will lower overall costs for students, although the change will not be as broad as SHIRC had initially hoped.

Since 1999, students without preexisting healthcare coverage have bought a co-insurance plan from Chickering Aetna. Under that plan, students last year paid a set premium—or upfront cost—each quarter, the first $200 of each medical bill, and 20 percent of the remaining bill. After a student has paid a total of $1,700 in medical fees incurred from this 20 percent charge, Chickering covers all other costs for the rest of the year.

Under the University’s new provider, Student Resources, a member of the United Healthcare network, student premiums will increase four percent, but students will only pay 10 percent of remaining costs.

According to Associate Dean of Students in the University for Student Health and Administrative Affairs Celia Bergman, who sits on SHIRC, the committee was prompted to switch providers after Chickering presented them with a 30 percent increase in premium costs with no change in coverage.

“Chickering expects that 80 percent of premiums will go towards paying medical claims, and the other 20 percent is retained for themselves,” Bergman said. “We’ve only seen 65 to 70 percent used for claims. They’ve been making a lot of money off of our account.”

According to Bergman, last year SHIRC also considered dropping Chickering, but were offered an 11th hour bid for a one percent increase. This year, the best package Chickering offered was a 15 percent increase.

SHIRC is made up of eight administrators, three College students, three doctoral students, and a masters student.

Fourth-year and SHIRC member Dan Kimerling said that the committee began requesting bids soon after hearing from Chickering in February, and that Student Resources was the most competitive alternative.

“Given inflation, four percent is pretty reasonable,” he said. “And [Student Resources] already has a strong relationship with University hospitals, which leads to larger discounts.”

Bergman praised Student Resources capabilities to lower overall costs for students.

“United has already negotiated discounts at the Medical Center, so doctors’ bills won’t be as high from the start, so student costs won’t be as high. Chickering doesn’t have those discounts,” Bergman said.

While the move is expected to bring lower costs than the current system, members of SHIRC had hoped for a more drastic change. Members said that from the start, the committee was eager to switch not only providers, but to change the structure of the plan from co-insurance to co-pay.

In co-pay plans, students pay higher premiums at the beginning of each year, but instead of paying percentages of bills, they pay set fees—$25 for X-rays, for example.

“Student Resources offered us a co-insurance plan first, and we asked them to price out a co-pay structure,” Bergman said. She added that with the co-pay structure students would pay over nine percent more than under Student Resources’ co-insurance plan—almost $200.

Despite being more expensive than co-insurance plans, co-pay plans were favored by the committee because of their standardized fees.

“It helps students plan better and will hopefully incentivize them to plan and get the health care that they need,” Bergman said.

SHIRC member and graduate student Yelena Koldobskaya was a staunch supporter of moving to a co-pay system. She said that she knows several students that forgo some treatments because of the uncertainty of the cost, which prompted her to push for the change.

“It was long overdue,” she said. “You don’t know what you’ll end up paying [with co-insurance]. Everyone on SHIRC was for it.”

According to Bergman, SHIRC recommended a co-pay plan from Student Resources to Vice President and Dean of Students Kim Goff-Crews, who had the final say on the decision two weeks ago.

Goff-Crews rejected the co-play plan over SHIRC’s recommendation but approved the decision to switch to Student Resources.

“In general, I never have huge changes without broad conversations,” Goff-Crews said. “It makes sense to do it, though. Conceptually, it’s great.”

Goff-Crews added that one of the main reasons she decided to hold off on a decision on co-pay plans was that the increased premiums would affect College and masters students more than graduate students, since graduate student premiums will be paid by the University for their first five years, and that she wanted adequate feedback from those groups.

Koldobskaya, who is in her fifth year, took issue with Goff-Crews’s decision.

“I’m not saying that the plan was perfect, but I think it was better than what we had,” she said. “If [the administration] is so concerned about the extra $200, why aren’t they concerned about the extra $2,000 in tuition? They just need to rebuild the whole system.”

In response to an e-mail sent to her by Koldobskaya, Goff-Crews said, “While [some students] may not be concerned by paying an extra $200, many students will be.”

Goff-Crews said in an interview that she will be examining the issue in the fall and hopes to come to a decision in time for changes to take place for the 2009–2010 academic year.

“It’s not that it’s not going to happen; it’s just not going to happen in ’08–’09,” Bergman said.

Gloria Steinem gets progressive at Gala

Tue, 06 May 2008 01:48:00 -0500

Feminist icon Gloria Steinem encouraged progressive activism to a crowd of about 500 people gathered for the keynote address of the Progressive Gala: Women in Washington in Ratner gym on Saturday night.

“Progressives have taken over the University of Chicago. They said it would never happen,” Steinem said at the beginning of her talk.

The Progressive Gala, now in its third year, is an annual event organized by 20 U of C organizations that hosts a variety of speakers and performances to unite progressives from across campus.

Steinem, an icon of the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s, made her name in 1963 when she wrote an expose on the New York Playboy Bunny Club after going underground as a Playboy Bunny. In 1972, Steinem founded the feminist magazine Ms. and also founded the Coalition of Labor Union Women and the National Women’s Political Caucus.

Although she spoke to a largely female audience, Steinem hoped to address any person who has faced discrimination.

“You are not the only person to experience these things,” she said, explaining that activism begins on an individual level. “You name it, it becomes visible, you start to gather people who suffer from it.”

She invited the audience to have what she called “a moment of changed consciousness,” to become engaged and transform personal experience into a communal force. “For me, it was going to an abortion hearing in NYC that was in protest to another abortion hearing,” said Steinem, who herself had an illegal abortion before Roe v. Wade was passed.

Steinem spoke briefly of the coming political election.

“Choose, and have, and be a leader who would be happy with something else,” she said.

Steinem, who has praised both Clinton and Obama, endorses Clinton but did not speak on any specific candidates in her address.

“Never choose a leader who doesn’t have a sense of humor, and never be a leader who doesn’t have a sense of humor,” she said.

Toward the end of her talk, Steinem characterized progress as a process of channeling conflict into positive action. “I do fear conflict, but I try to remember that it is an energy source that will lead to a new form, and that form will lead to the butterfly that will change the world.”

“If we want at the end of our efforts to have joy and laughter and dancing and sex, we have to have joy and sex on the way,” she said.

The organizers of this year’s Gala, the third installment of the event, took into account the shortcomings of previous Galas in their decision to bring Steinem to campus.

At last year’s controversial Gala, political commentator James Carville demanded that the University apologize for the actions of alumnus and former Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The New Initiatives Fund, now known as the UnCommon Fund, provided $26,000 for the Gala to bring Carville to campus.

The Undergraduate House System’s Emily F. Talbot Lecture fund sponsored Gloria Steinem’s talk, which cost around $20,000. The fund was founded in 1910 in memory of Marion Talbot, an activist for women’s education, and previously brought female figures such as the poet Sylvia Plath to campus.

Fourth-year UC Dems President Hollie Russon Gilman, who organized Gala with third-year Gala chair Ariel Simon, chalked up last year’s mishap to the conflicting goals of various groups on campus.

“He didn’t like us; he was not our first choice. It was kind of like other people in the University wanted James Carville, and we wanted the Gala,” Gilman said.

Gilman said that this year’s organization was improved in part because involved groups began working together much earlier than before. She also attributed improvements to Simon, who has had the vision for a Women in Washington theme since last year’s Gala.

After Gloria Steinem’s speech, crowds gathered for food in the courtyard of the Smart Museum and then moved into the museum’s atrium, where events, including panels and performance artists, continued into the evening.

The first panel, The Politics of Women’s Health, included sex education activist Shelby Knox, President and CEO of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project Kirsten Moore, and Nikki Skies, a performing artist and program director for a non-profit organization working with youth in Watts County, California. Some attendees, who had trouble seeing the panelists, sat on the floor to listen to them speak. Steinem, who attended the entire Gala event, sat down as well, and the rest of the audience followed suit.

Vice President and Dean of Students Kim Geoff-Crews, moderated the second panel, Women of Color in Politics, along with panelists Robyn Spencer, an assistant professor of U.S. history at Lehman College who is completing a book on the Black Panther Party’s history in Oakland, California; Maria Teresa Petersen, the executive director of Voto Latino; and Pamela Bozeman-Evans, who is currently associate dean of students in the University and director of the University Community Service Center. Bozeman-Evans is leaving the University to work as director of Chicago operations for Barack Obama or as the executive director of Blue Gargoyle Community Services.

The Gala also included performance artists Amina Norman-Hawkins, a hip-hop activist, and Skies, an actress, performance poet, and author.

New bus route could improve downtown access

Tue, 06 May 2008 01:47:00 -0500

If approved, a new campus bus route could significantly reduce travel time between downtown and the U of C campus beginning in the fall.

The Transportation Office is awaiting word from the office of the Provost on whether to begin implementation of a new #173 bus route that would offer express service between the Reynolds Club and the downtown Gleacher Center near East Wacker Drive and North Michigan Avenue.

The bus would operate both northbound and southbound runs, and along the way would make limited stops at the Roosevelt and State/Lake Red Line stations, said Brian Shaw, director of the Transportation Office.

Unlike the #6 CTA route, which many Hyde Parkers use to travel downtown, the revised #173 will not make additional stops either in Hyde Park or in the Loop.

The current #173 route, which is operated by the CTA but paid for almost entirely by the University, offers service from campus through downtown and to the North Side, but only runs northbound during the afternoon rush hour and offers no southbound service. The #192 shuttle that runs between the University of Chicago Hospitals and downtown also runs on a limited rush hour schedule.

Current ridership on the #173 is about 200 people, said Jarrod Wolf, a member of College Council who worked with Shaw to draft the proposal.

“We decided that because the #173 is rarely used and only goes north…we would take that bus which is highly inefficient and change it into this express service,” Wolf said.

As proposed, the new route will make trips to and from downtown all day and run later on weekends, Shaw said.

“The concept is to have a #173 route operate throughout the morning and then have a midday run and then have service during the evening rush hour and into the more late night hours,” he said.

The inclusion of stops at one South Loop and one downtown El location would offer students an alternative to the 55th Street Red Line stop that is one of the only current options for students who live close to campus and are returning from downtown and the North Side during the late night hours. Many students have expressed safety concerns over having to wait for the #55 bus that operates between that station and Hyde Park. The CTA also operates a University-subsidized #174 route between that stop and the Reynolds Club.

If implemented, the revised #173 route will allow students to board the bus at either of the downtown Red Line stations where it will stop and ride it directly to the Reynolds Club.

The route will also eliminate the need for students living on or immediately near campus to walk to and from the #6 bus stops at the eastern end of Hyde Park.

According to Shaw and Wolf, because of the closure of the Shoreland at the end of the next academic year and the subsequent opening of the new dorm on East 60th Street and South Ellis Avenue, the route could eventually include a stop at that location.

The route could also benefit the increasing number of students electing to live outside of Hyde Park, especially in the South Loop, and Graduate School of Business students who regularly commute between Hyde Park and the downtown Gleacher Center.

But the proposal is contingent upon allocation of funds for the route in the 2008–2009 University budget. Because the route will be requested by the University, the CTA will require that it be almost entirely subsidized.

Similar to the #174 bus that operates between the Reynolds Club and the 55th Street Red Line station, students will have to pay regular CTA fares for the service because it will make connections to CTA transfer points. But the #173’s specialized ridership will be unlikely to entirely offset costs, at least initially, Shaw said.

According to Shaw, if allotted funding for the change, his office would work with the CTA over the summer in hopes of making the new route available by the start of the next school year.

“I think it’s just a matter of the university supporting us in the way that we would need them to support us, which would be financially,” Wolf said.

The Transportation Office should know later this month whether the new route has received University approval, Shaw said.

Admissions blog sweetens college application process

Tue, 06 May 2008 01:46:00 -0500

Libby Pearson tries to personalize a process high school students often find daunting: navigating a college application. As assistant director of admissions, Pearson writes a blog for prospective students that showcases a side of the University not always presented in recruiting brochures.

Pearson’s Uncommon Blog features photos of talking dinosaur skeletons and Q&As about the admissions process, and serves as a forum for student comments and questions.

Launched in 2005, the Uncommon Blog is partly modeled on a similar project started by the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, Pearson said. While the blog was initially maintained by Pearson and fellow admissions counselor Jerry Doyle, it has grown to feature contributions from other admissions staff.

Pearson said that the blog is the most cost-effective and accessible form of admissions recruitment. Postal mail publications and e-mails have high postage costs and take time to develop, and prospective students must grapple with the deluge of material from other colleges, she said. With the blog, prospective students can search on their own time.

“[Students] treat it as a bulletin board to talk to each other before they have even applied,” she said. “It serves as a way to communicate without e-mailing [prospective students] all the time and hassling them.”

Pearson said that she takes personal pride in maintaining the blog and added that she keeps content updated by posting frequently. She said that she enjoys “the reaction when [prospective students] see a post they like.”

Open interaction between admissions officers and students is the blog’s hallmark, Pearson said. She remembers having deleted only one profanity-laced comment since the blog’s launch three years ago.

“We’ve always been very liberal about comments,” she said, “even if they say something negative about the University.”

The blog often features photo montages of the campus. One includes a photo of Pearson ringing the doorbell of President Robert Zimmer’s house before fleeing, although Pearson admitted that she “just mimed doing it.”

Light-hearted blog entries were “a response to the postings by the prospective students,” Pearson said. She added that websites such as “icanhascheezburger.com,” which features pictures of cats with quotations in instant messaging jargon, influenced the blog’s content.

“It represents the personalities of the counselors,” Pearson said.

The blog’s original fans now have opportunities to contribute content in return.

Pearson said that two current undergraduates who contributed to the blog as prospective students now help maintain the blog’s content. She added that student bloggers contribute different perspectives on the admissions process, and she hopes to incorporate more student input in the future.

Pearson began working with the admissions office as a web developer during her time in the College and said that she experienced a smooth transition from her college life to her working life.

“I could still be in Chicago and with the University and still be in education,” Pearson said.

In addition to maintaining the blog, Pearson oversees University recruitment for the West coast.

Pearson will leave the admissions office in September to attend the University’s Harris School of Public Policy. She said that she envisions herself working for a think tank or in a government position.

Although Pearson plans on continuing her education, her brainchild, because of its success, will continue amusing and informing future generations of applicants to the College, she said.

Rep. Harris speaks on civil unions

Tue, 06 May 2008 01:45:00 -0500

State Representative Greg Harris (D-IL) spoke with University students this Monday at a small discussion group hosted by the undergraduate chapter of the ACLUofC and Queers & Associates (Q&A). Harris is the driving force behind House Bill 1826, also known as the Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act, which was introduced in February 2007. If passed, the bill would establish one of the strongest civil union laws in the United States, granting civil unions to both same- and opposite-sex adult couples in the state of Illinois.

The Act provides civil union couples emergency medical decision-making powers and state spousal benefits, such as worker’s compensation and retirement pension. The bill, which has garnered wide support from both legislators and high school and university students, would also benefit senior citizens who would lose their pensions or part of their Social Security if they remarried.

Rep. Harris represents the 13th district of Illinois and sits on the Committee of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparations and the Committee of Appropriations–Public Safety. He is the only openly gay member of the state legislature, as well as the only member who has publicly admitted to having AIDS. He has advocated on behalf of LGBTQ and HIV/AIDS issues in Illinois.

The ACLUofC is currently spearheading campus efforts in support of the bill, and members will table in the Reynolds Club next week as part of a letter writing campaign.

“We heard [Rep. Harris] speak at the ACLU membership conference last year and thought he was amazing. We especially wanted to invite him here because he brought this legislation to the Illinois House floor and is actively involved in seeking its support,” said Amanda Steele, co-executive director of the ACLUofC.

Festival celebrates global food, style

Tue, 06 May 2008 01:44:00 -0500

Hundreds of students, staff, faculty, and community members crowded the International House’s Assembly Hall this past Sunday for the I-House’s annual Festival of Nations, an event featuring a global mix of food, performance, art, fashion, and music.

“The Festival of Nations has been occurring since the inception of I-House. Its purpose is to give both local and international students an opportunity to really celebrate the world’s cultures by coming together with other members of the University and of the Hyde Park community,” said Symon Ogeto, senior coordinator for marketing and events at the I-House.

This year’s Festival hosted local cuisine, dance, music, and clothing from over 20 nations, including Mexico, Colombia, Spain, Israel, Zimbabwe, Greece, India, Egypt, China, and Brazil.

“[Many of the] people who brought the artwork and food together at the booths are residents of I-House and the other half are students from the university. We used SPIN [Students Promoting Interracial Networks], a brand new RSO that volunteers to do recruiting, to find our performers,” said undergraduate Daniel Morales, secretary of the I-House residents’ council.

Sweet conchas, a variety of Mexican sweet breads, Greek yogurt (known by locals as tzatziki), olives, pita, Catalonian paella, Chinese puff pastries, Celtic barley and peas, and sweet bocadillo vele’o, a Colombian guava paste, were among the foods offered at the festival. Accompanying the food were decorated booths, artifacts, and costumes representing traditional art and garb of each country.

Attendees also participated in various recreational activities. John Kuo, an alumnus of the University, led dancers through traditional dance steps to music that included Afro-pop and Serbian gypsy music.

On-stage performances included salsa and Indian dance, medieval combat, an ethnic fashion show, and capoeira—a Brazillian blend of martial arts and dance.

Planning for the Festival began in January, and although Ogeto said that the event was smaller than previous years’, this year’s Festival of Nations nevertheless attracted more culture-hungry visitors than planners anticipated.

“We didn’t expect to have so many people come out. This year’s festival was small-scale due to minimized planning. Some people were impressed and others asked why it was so small and indoors this year, but overall, the festival managed to be an impressive fusion of music, food, dance, artwork, and fashion, capturing the essence of the world,” Ogeto said.

Crime Report 5-6-08

Tue, 06 May 2008 01:40:00 -0500

May 2, 5:39 p.m.—A male offender entered a cleaners’ on the 1700 block of East 55th Street and sprayed the person on duty behind the counter with mace. He then proceeded to open the cash register, take an undetermined amount of currency, and flee the building. A witness stated that another male in a vehicle parked outside may have been waiting for the offender. The offender is described as male, black, in his twenties, 200 pounds, wearing a black T-shirt and dark pants, and having numerous tattoos on his neck and forearms. The man waiting outside in the vehicle is described as black, in his twenties, and 180 pounds. The vehicle is described as a late model, two-door, black Chevrolet Monte Carlo. 

MAB books diverse Summer Breeze acts

Fri, 02 May 2008 00:26:00 -0500

The Major Activities Board’s (MAB) annual Summer Breeze music festival will feature four musical acts this year. Cake, Talib Kweli, Andrew Bird, and The Cool Kids will all perform in the May 17 concert in Hutch courtyard.

This is the first year that Summer Breeze has expanded beyond the traditional two- or three-act lineup. Fourth-year Justin Fleming, MAB chairman, said that an increase in funding and the success of previous MAB events enabled the Board to offer four acts this year. Sold-out fall and winter MAB shows provided extra revenue for more acts, he said.

MAB focused on diversifying the acts for this year’s Summer Breeze in order to appeal to a variety of tastes and attract students who have not attended a MAB show this year.

“We realized we did not have a hip-hop act for our fall or winter show, so we focused on adding a hip-hop act to the Summer Breeze lineup,” Fleming said.

There will be two hip-hop acts performing in this year’s show. Talib Kweli is a well known and critically acclaimed alternative hip-hop rapper. Hailing from Brooklyn, Kweli first gained recognition through his involvement in Black Star, a group he formed with Mos Def in 1998. Kweli has released five albums as a solo act since 2002. Eardrum, his most recent album, was released in 2007 and debuted at number two on the Billboard 200.

The Cool Kids were a recent addition to the Summer Breeze lineup.

“We saw an opportunity where we could add a group that is up-and-coming in the Chicago area,” Fleming said.

A MySpace phenomenon, The Cool Kids are a hip-hop duo from Chicago and Detroit that has already generated significant buzz in the music industry. The group was recognized by Rolling Stone magazine as one of ten artists to watch in 2008. Their debut album When Fish Ride Bicycles will be released in fall 2008.

A popular indie rock group, Cake was formed in 1991 in Sacramento, and quickly gained a national following. Cake also incorporates a variety of other genres ranging from funk to country. The group has released five studio albums, as well as a compilation album entitled B-Sides and Rarities, which was released October 2007 and features covers of bands like Black Sabbath, as well as Cake’s original songs. Their next album will be released later this year.

Andrew Bird, a Chicago-born songwriter and musician, has released nine albums since his first in 1996 but has seen his popularity grow in recent years. Bird is known for using multiple instruments such as violin, guitar, and whistling in his live performances.

Despite placing bids on big-name female acts such as Feist and Rilo Kiley, MAB was not successful in booking a female act this year, which has been a source of criticism in the past.

“We definitely made a strong effort to have a female act in the lineup, but unfortunately it didn’t work out,” Fleming said.

He said he hopes the Board will continue to work on this next year.

In order to accommodate the additional group, this year’s show will begin at 5:15 p.m. instead of 7 p.m., last year’s starting time. Fleming hopes that the additional acts will help create more of a festival atmosphere at Summer Breeze and will “provide a more enjoyable concert experience for everyone.”

In another attempt to enhance the Summer Breeze experience, the concert area will be expanded to include the space around Botany Pond, with an entrance at the 57th Street gate.

Sponsors such as Kraft and Red Bull will provide free food and beverages, which Fleming hopes will help justify ticket prices.

“We can’t change ticket prices, but these things make up for that and give students an incentive to come and stay in the venue area,” Fleming said. Weekend passes to summer music festivals such as Summer Camp and Lollapalooza will also be raffled off.

Tickets for Summer Breeze went on sale Wednesday, April 30 in the Reynolds Club, where they can be purchased on weekdays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. with a University ID. Tickets can be purchased in advance at $15 for students and $20 for faculty and staff, and prices will go up by $5 on the day of the show.

Campus flora help U of C usher in spring

Fri, 02 May 2008 00:24:00 -0500

Springtime in Chicago brings flowerbeds full of daffodils and tulips, the first leaves on campus trees, and lawns ripe for picnics and naps in the sunshine—all under the watchful eye of University Planner in Facilities Services Richard Bumstead and the facilities department.

The facilities department oversees annual spring restoration efforts on campus, revitalizing flora after the long and damaging winter months.

“This has been an especially hard winter on the landscape,” Bumstead said, referring to one of the coldest Chicago winters in the past quarter-century.

“It’s the typical spring cleanup, getting ready for the end-of-the-year events,” Bumstead said, who has served as university planner for nearly 25 years.

The end-of-year events include June’s four convocation ceremonies and Alumni Weekend, which is scheduled for June 5 through June 8. The celebrations typically draw thousands of visitors to campus, prompting the University to manicure the campus in ways that beg little recollection of the gray winter months.

“The University has really been funding over the past five or ten years to have these beautiful spaces,” said Abby Zanarini, assistant vice president for facilities services. “More than anything it’s a quality of life issue.”

Bumstead highlighted another major goal in landscaping: recruitment for prospective students.

“It’s this idea of, ‘Who wouldn’t want to come to school in a botanic garden?’ Higher education has become very competitive, and this was seen as another tool to get people to come here,” he said.

In 1997, the University was formally designated as a botanical garden by the American Association of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta. The U of C is the only school in the Chicago metropolitan area to have garnered this distinction.

As a botanical garden, the University allocates money in the facilities operating budget specifically for the care and maintenance of its gardens, which span the entire campus.

Bumstead pointed to the 1999 Campus Master Plan, which laid out architectural plans for Ratner, Bartlett, Max Palevsky, and other structures and put additional focus on the grounds.

“Part of that ’99 Master Plan was looking at how to make this a much more residential campus and the botanic garden was a small part of that, but a very visible part of it as well,” Bumstead said.

The University maintains a grounds service crew of 20 workers throughout the year. During the springtime, Bumstead said that the facilities department hires additional contract workers to assist with large-scale cleanup and maintenance.

“We use our grounds crew staff and then we also use our contracted vendors to supplement them,” he said.

This spring’s projects include the beautification of Botany Pond, where dozens of plants and flowers were installed this week, and Hull Court. Both projects are funded partially by the Julie and Parker Hall Landscape Endowment, Bumstead said.

However, not all springtime work actually takes place during the spring. Bumstead said that the planning for springtime planting efforts begin autumn quarter.

“In the fall we put most of the bulbs in the ground, and then in the spring for the pots we put in what are called forced bulbs—those are bulbs that have been grown in a greenhouse,” Bumstead said. “We put them in places where the bulbs would not have survived the winter.”

“We’ve definitely gotten strong backing from the central administration,” Zanarini said.

As for the end result, Bumstead said that the reaction is overwhelmingly positive—even from those who have already moved on from the community.

“The reactions I’ve been getting from alumni have been phenomenal,” Bumstead said. “Everyone is very happy to see what’s going on on campus and in the gardens.”

Zimmer continues open forum series

Fri, 02 May 2008 00:23:00 -0500

A small gathering of students participated in a casual discussion with President Zimmer on Thursday evening as part of a series of open forums sponsored by Student Government (SG). SG President-Elect Matthew Kennedy and SG President Scott Duncombe moderated the conversation, and Vice President and Dean of Students Kimberly Goff-Crews helped field questions from the audience.

The student presence was diverse, with attending representatives from the ACLUofC, the campus Hillel group, the Graduate School of Business (GSB), the student consulting group Blue Chips, and the U of C First Responder Corps.

Zimmer began the meeting with a brief statement on the organization of the University. “This is really quite a complex operation,” he said, stressing the roles of vice presidents, deans, and directors in handling issues relevant to their particular field.

Such a system, according to Zimmer, allows for many voices in the community to be heard, and creates an appropriate delegation of duties. When pointedly asked his opinion about gender-neutral housing, which administrators are widely expected to approve by the end of the year, Zimmer responded, “My opinion is that that issue should go through the process of decision, and I’ll support that decision.”

Many of the student questions referenced the comprehensive “Update on University Initiatives” e-mail sent to the University community in late March, and Zimmer and Goff-Crews repeatedly cited the letter in their responses. “That letter represents an enormous amount of work from people at many levels,” Zimmer said.

The tone of the meeting, which lasted about an hour and a half, was informal.

One student expressed his feeling that people of faith were disenfranchised on campus. In response, Zimmer said that the U of C strives to foster as open and accepting an atmosphere as possible.

“But inevitably it is something that requires attention—it’s not natural to be open. It requires constant work to maintain itself. But that doesn’t mean we should be complacent,” he said.

Housing, both on- and off-campus, was also a topic of interest among attending students.

“I don’t anticipate a move to a situation where all students live on campus all the time. But it is important to be able to house more students on campus more of the time—that students have that option,” Zimmer said.

Goff-Crews cited housing studies from the past two decades that sought to determine the right balance of on- and off-campus living. “We decided 70 percent was the right number,” Goff-Crews said in reference to administrators’ goal for the proportion of undergraduate students they would like to see in campus housing. “But we do realize that housing is changing. Students might be priced out of housing.”

Zimmer also discussed financial aid and the Odyssey Scholarship challenge at relative length.

“Statistically, there is a lot more concern about loans with lower-income families than with middle-income families,” he said about the specific focus of the Odyssey program, which assists students who would typically be unable to afford a U of C education. “Almost half, 47 percent of undergraduates, receive some form of financial aid. Many are in the Odyssey range, many aren’t.”

When queried about the U of C’s potential shift toward branding itself as an Ivy League rather than a purely intellectual institution, Zimmer steered the conversation toward the particular U of C culture.

“It’s not a matter of abstract prestige; it’s a matter of letting people know the value of what we do here,” said Zimmer.

Attracting professors to U of C is usually not a matter of personal issues or salaries, but because “this is simply an extraordinary place to be a scholar,” Zimmer said.

As the meeting came to a close, students appeared to more or less appreciative of the opportunity to converse with the University’s leader.

“It gives a direct opening to be the president for students—at least there is a channel,” said Ali Baqri, a student in the GSB and a member of the Graduate Business Council. “I’ve been at other schools where I only saw my director at a distance of 20 feet, let alone the president.”

Students find varied merits in U of C’s “dormcest” culture

Fri, 02 May 2008 00:21:00 -0500

“Dormcest” usually evokes relationships that either end awkwardly or form tight-knit bonds. But for third-year Priyanko Paul, dormcest is a way to make money.

Paul, a resident of Snell-Hitchcock, said that he and his roommate keep a chart detailing the relationship status of students living in the two houses.

“Some people are interested in history, some people are interested in politics and current events, and some people are interested in dormcest,” Paul said. “A chart like this is a very helpful instructional tool…and a betting tool—we place bets on how long [the relationships] will last.”

Paul has some experience with dormcest and housecest himself—terms many students use to describe the widespread phenomenon of dating fellow dormmates or housemates, often in joking or self-deprecating ways.

But not all students at the U of C have a carefree attitude toward such relationships.

First-year Emily Boggs takes issue with the negative connotation that the term dormcest carries at the University.

“I don’t think it always has to be a negative thing that people are so adamantly against, especially at a place like the University of Chicago where there’s an intellectually intense environment,” she said. “It’s the first time you come to a place where everyone’s like you—they care about studying and learning.”

Tom Gronkowski, a second-year currently dating a fellow resident in Max Palevsky, echoed Boggs’s sentiments.

“I don’t think [dormcest] is that much of a taboo. You know that if you put a big group of people who are around the same age and of the opposite sex together, obviously something is going to end up happening,” he said.

Gronkowski has dated students that live both in and out of his dorm, and thinks that both types of relationships have their conveniences and drawbacks.

“It can get to a point where, because you [and the person you’re dating] live so close by, it just becomes assumed that the other person is [always] there—even if you’re just doing homework or watching TV. It’s cool, but also it’s kind of unhealthy for a relationship,” he said.

Probably the most notorious form of campus dormcest is the “O-mance,” a romantic relationship formed between two students during their first-year Orientation Week that may or may not last beyond the nine days of Chicago Life Meetings and parties.

“O-mance is by far the most delightful flavor of dormcest,” Paul said. “Adorable little first-years show up with stars in their eyes, walking around so intellectually pleased and fulfilled—and then they fall into each other sideways and end up dealing with the consequences for either a week or a year.”

For many housemates, those consequences can include rifts between friendships, gossip spreading around the dorm, and awkward encounters once the relationship ends—all at a time when first-years are still getting to know their housemates and adjusting to the demands of the quarter system.

First-year Trent German is dating another student on his floor of the Shoreland and attributes their relationship to O-Week activities that encouraged house bonding.

“I have to say that we definitely got lucky,” German said. “When you’re dating on your floor it’s like a free booty call whenever you want.... It’s almost too convenient.”

But Evan Winston, a first-year whose girlfriend goes to college in Missouri, does not believe his relationship would improve if his girlfriend lived in his house.

“Her friends would most likely not be mine, and vice versa. And I think we’d be pretty much defined as ‘May and Evan,’ as opposed to individuals,” he said.

Pepperland parties no more

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:49:00 -0500

A longtime hub of the Hyde Park social scene, the Pepperland apartment complex will be closing indefinitely for renovations beginning September 30th. All current residents will be evicted. Located at 1509 East 57th Street, the Pepperland is notorious for its large parties, which span the building’s entire length, making use of the fire escape balconies on either side and the expansive courtyard that connects the two halves of the building.

Presently, the Pepperland is home to approximately three-fourths of the Ultimate Frisbee team, hence its moniker, “The “Frisbee Frat.” However, the Pepperland’s history is more expansive: It was home to a gay community in the 1990s, followed by a period in which the crew team called it home. Several residents suggested that the building’s intense community-style living drew a number of bohemian students during the 1970s. Today, current residents maintain the Pepperland’s long-standing tradition of leaving their doors open, which allows residents to walk through adjacent apartments to quickly navigate the building.

Pepperland parties are famously infamous. When Aileen McGroddy, a second-year in the college, was queried about her Pepperland party memories, she shook her head, smiled, and walked away.

The building’s namesake is a reference to the 1968 Beatles movie The Yellow Submarine, in which an underwater musical paradise named the Pepperland is attacked by the joyless Blue Meanies, with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band coming to the rescue in the end.

MAC Property Management issued formal eviction notices to Pepperland residents on April 13, which were included with a standard letter asking tenants whether they planned to remain in the building over the summer. The letters were signed by MAC Leasing Manager, Paul Shultz. MAC is allowing Pepperland residents to sign a three-and a-half-month lease starting in mid-June. Residents were also told that MAC employees were seeking out apartments available to Pepperland resident looking to relocate.

Several weeks ago, a note appeared on one of the front doors of the Pepperland that read, “FYI: Pepperland closing on Sept 30th for remodeling.” At the beginning of the year, MAC informed residents of its plans to remodel selected buildings, but many Pepperland residents learned only this month that the Pepperland itself was slated for renovations.

Pepperland residents first heard about the evictions through the grapevine, when a maintenance man mentioned it in passing to one of the residents. The presumed rumor spread quickly, fueled by MAC’s recent decision to return deposits to residents.

Cassandra Betts, a third-year in the College and a Pepperland resident, said that the rumor prompted her to call MAC’s Hyde Park office for follow-up information.

“Over spring break, I called the leasing office. After being redirected a dozen times, I was put in contact with the head of their leasing office,” she said in an e-mail interview.

“He told me that in fact the Pepperland would be closing indefinitely for renovations on September 30. I asked him if this was a firm, irrevocable decision, and he said that it was,” she said.

MAC did not respond to repeated requests for an interview for this article.

Margaret Siple, a resident of the Pepperland, said that her younger brother, Paul Siple, a first-year in the College, was to inherit her apartment. She also met with difficulties investigating rumors of the Pepperland’s potential closing.

“I went to go see the management office a couple of weeks ago because I had heard rumors that it was closing. And I talked to our building manager, and he said, and I quote, ‘This must be some kind of April Fools Joke that went too long.’ So he didn’t know anything about it, and he was like, ‘No, no, we’re not remodeling your place, you’re totally fine.’ And I said, ‘Can I have it in writing?’ and he said, ‘No, we can’t promise anything,’” she said.

“So here I am, totally terrorized because this is like a couple weeks ago—nearing upon time when we would have to find a new place, if we have to move out. They were going to tell us 60 days in advance before our leases expire. Which, you know, is enough time,” she said.

However, she said that the remodeling was still largely unexpected and required significant effort to confirm.

MAC acquired the Pepperland from K&G Management last spring. Residents signed new leases in January. The locks to the building were changed and MAC made several general renovations, including the repair of the ominous fire-escape balconies, which had been battered by party-goers over the years. By many accounts, K&G Management tended to take a laissez-faire attitude in maintaining the building and regulating its residents’ activities.

“Every six months or so, [K&G] would post a letter in the side of the door about noise laws or whatever,” Siple said.

In contrast, MAC has threatened residents with eviction notices after several of the louder public parties by slipping a note under their doors last spring and earlier this year. MAC sent a detailed letter to all residents late in winter quarter, threatening residents with eviction if parties were too rowdy.

“It was much more detailed and much more threatening than the K&G ones used to be,” Siple said.

MAC also posted public notices describing neighborhood noise complaints.

Siple said that today’s Pepperland parties are not as conscientious of the needs of neighbors as they have been in the past.

“Before, they had big parties, but they always cleaned up. The courtyard was always clean the next day. The frisbee players today, I don’t think maintain a very high standard of respecting the property. Things were getting pretty out of hand—they weren’t cleaning up after their parties. There was garbage everywhere and it was a fire hazard because it was all over people’s porches,” she said.

Mariya Akilova, a third-year in the College and a Pepperland resident echoed Siple’s sentiments.

“Last summer, [MAC] tried to reinforce the stairs, but they’re still rotting from the inside. [The courtyard] just smells like piss and vomit,” she said.

Siple also speculated that the Pepperland’s upcoming renovations are a part of MAC’s larger plans to gentrify many areas of Hyde Park.

“MAC is systematically remodeling places, and they told us at the beginning of the year that they were going to do this; this wasn’t like a secret. They said, ‘You know, we’re going to go through, and every year we’re going to remodel a few buildings.’”

She added that the Pepperland is a prime location for gentrification.

“It’s right next to the Metra; it’s close to campus. If they could get new residents, they could probably charge an extra hundred bucks or something like that,” she said.

This same sentiment was echoed by several other Pepperland residents, who declined to be named, as they are currently seeking out a new landlord. They speculated that the Pepperland’s current “social scene” prevents further development. One resident speculated that once a series of apartments are inherited by a group such as the frisbee team, new residents are unlikely to accept residential changes since they come to the building with strong preconceived notions of what the residential life will be like.

In an attempt to reclaim the community culture that defined life at the Pepperland, several residents signed leases for a constellation of apartments around East 55th Street and South Cornell Avenue.

“The idea of a reconstituted Pepperland is kind of ridiculous. The building and its history are such an important part of what the Pepperland is that it can likely never be recreated,” said third-year John Lago. “Most of us—me included—are moving to a new building on 55th and Cornell, but it is only 4 [or] 5 apartments which are scattered across a few buildings… It won’t be anything like the old Pepperland, but hopefully we’ll be able to create something new there.”

Chicago colleges lobby for Metra line discounts

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:48:00 -0500

The Coalition of Chicago Colleges (CCC) is working to secure discounted fares on the Metra rail system for Chicago-area college students. Student representatives from CCC schools, which include the U of C, are traveling to Springfield on May 7 to lobby state legislators in support of the Metra Initiative Amendment, HB2144. If the State Senate and House pass the bill, the amendment would require the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA), which runs the Metra system, to give all Chicago-area university students a 50-percent discount on monthly passes.

Second-year College Council (CC) member and CCC founder Jarrod Wolf, as well as student government leaders from other universities, has been meeting and working with state legislators to curry favor for the discount. The bill’s sponsors are House Speaker Mike Madigan, House Majority Leader and Hyde Park Representative Barbara Flynn Currie, and Representative John Fritchey of Lincoln Park. The CCC discussed the issue at its first meeting on February 21 and students from 18 schools throughout the city are working to get the bill passed.

According to DePaul Student Government Association President Kurt Gonska, students originally met with a Metra representative but when negotiations did not pan out, the CCC decided to take the issue to the state government. DePaul’s and Columbia’s student governments had individually been thinking about pushing for a Metra discount before the CCC was formed but coordinating communication between local universities proved difficult. The CCC has made it easier to organize efforts and work toward common goals for all universities, Gonsaka said.

“We hope to get discounts in a way that will help all students,” he said.

A discount on monthly Metra passes could save people who commute to U of C’s Hyde Park campus a couple hundred dollars each year, Wolf said. The legislation might expand to include discounts on other Metra passes such as the 10-ride pass.

“It would be really helpful for graduate students at our school who ride the Metra daily and also for commuter students at schools such as DePaul and Columbia,” he said. “Currently the created amendment is written to give a discount on monthly passes. However, we think that will change shortly.”

U of C’s Student Government (SG) assembly approved the initiative and SG President Scott Duncombe, along with other area student-body presidents, will sign a letter of support.

According to Wolf, the discount would be beneficial for all U of C students because it will make the Metra a cheaper option for leaving Hyde Park than the Chicago Transit Authority’s bus routes. A ride on the Metra, with the 10-ride pass, would be about a dollar cheaper than a CTA ride if the discount is enacted, he said.

“The Metra is cleaner, safer, and quicker. This is just one step towards improving transportation on our campus,” he said.

The RTA currently offers a state-funded Metra discount for elementary- and high-school students but there is no such program for college students. Adding college students to the program would not exhaust Metra’s state funds for student discounts, Wolf said.

Columbia College Student Government Association President Brian Matos said CCC’s biggest concern is that the RTA will do everything it can to fight the legislation, even though he believes that the discount would be a good move for Metra.

“The more rides they have the better it is for them financially,” he said.

According to Gonska, the Metra discount is the first big issue the CCC has worked on, and it has been a great way for area universities to start working together.

“It’s been a great starting point for us. We hit the ground running right off the bat,” he said.

Matos said the effort has been a great experience for all the students involved, and it will show state leaders that college students are politically active and concerned.

“It’s always good to have students in Springfield and show the legislators that we care,” he said.

Chicago Tribune reporter to lead U of C news office

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:47:00 -0500

The University of Chicago has appointed Chicago Tribune journalist Steven Kloehn as News Office director, effective May 27. Kloehn is currently a deputy metro editor at the Tribune following a two-decade-long career in the field.

The News Office is the primary media relations office of the University and is responsible for interacting with media outlets, training faculty on dealing with the media, and publishing the Chicago Chronicle, the University’s official news publication.

According to Julie Peterson, vice president of communications, the position has been vacant since 1999.

“The last director left and the position was never filled,” Peterson said, adding that other staff members under different titles took over some or all of the responsibilities over the past nine years.

When Peterson took her current position last July, one of her stipulations was that she be allowed to fill nine such vacant positions, ranging from support staff to an associate vice president of communications. Kloehn’s hiring is a part of her office’s move to repopulate these positions.

Kloehn said that he wasn’t in the market for a new job, but after suggestions from former colleagues, he began to seriously consider the University’s offer.

“As a reporter, I used to get down to campus from time to time, and I found it exhilarating,” Kloehn said. “The intellectual power is very appealing. Everywhere you go, people are making you think. That same feeling came back when I came back here to look at the job.”

According to Peterson, one of the reasons Kloehn is well-suited for the job is his experience with multimedia journalism. Kloehn was in charge of creating “Be not Afraid: The Epic Papacy of John Paul II,” an award-winning CD featuring video, audio, and interactive documents that accompanied a book by the same name.

“We’re trying to engage in more multimedia avenues so he will be very valuable,” Peterson said. She added that the University is launching a presence on iTunes University, a section of iTunes where colleges can share course content, and increasing multimedia content on the News Office’s website.

“As anybody who’s in the media and consumes media knows, things are changing fast, from the way we hear from our friends to the way we hear about the world,” Kloehn said. “I don’t think anybody’s yet fully figured out how to take advantage of all the opportunities.”

Kloehn emphasized the opportunities that the University would give him to continue exploring the emerging field of journalism. “It’s an unbeatable combination,” Kloehn said.

In addition to his experience in new forms of journalism, Kloehn’s years of writing and editing more conventional forms is crucial as well. But, Kloehn said, he still looks forward to a significant on-the-job training process.

“I have a lot to learn, and that’s fun,” Kloehn said. “In return, I can give [the News Office] some of the experience I’ve built up living and breathing newsroom air for all these years, and how that end makes decisions.”

In spite of the fact that Kloehn will have different responsibilities at the University than at the Tribune, he sees substantial similarities between the two jobs.

“My hope is that with this job, I’ll still be meeting people who are doing fascinating things, learning all I can, and then trying to explain that to other people,” Kloehn said.

Men find academic home in gender studies

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:45:00 -0500

Sexuality, masculinity, and interracial pornography have held particular allure for David Klein since high school, but only after coming to the U of C did Klein find a theoretical framework for talking about his interests.

“Theories of gender and sexuality have a part in everything. I think queer theory has a lot to offer in terms of frameworks for looking at the world,” said Klein, who is a second-year in the College.

Klein is one of only three undergraduate men currently declared as gender studies majors at the University.

Since the creation of the major in 1996, men have comprised around 20 percent of undergraduate gender studies majors, said Stuart Michaels, assistant director for curriculum development at the University’s Center for Gender Studies, which was established in 1996 in conjunction with the gender studies major. However, with an average of only four undergraduate gender studies majors per year, the small department often graduates classes without any men at all.

Last year’s graduating class boasted two male gender studies majors, out of a total of six total graduates in the department, Michaels said. But this year’s cohort of third- and fourth-year gender studies majors are all women, and all three current male gender studies majors are in the class of 2010.

Klein came to the University wanting to study English literature. Now an English and gender studies double major, Klein said that he made the decision to pick up the gender studies major only after entering the University.

“I happened upon it my first year. I took Problems in the Study of Gender in the spring of my first year, and everything just made a lot of sense to me,” he said.

Justin Reinheimer graduated from the College in 2004 with degrees in both gender studies and political science and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in jurisprudence and social policy at the University of California–Berkeley. One of the two male gender studies majors in the class of 2004, Reinheimer said that he stumbled across gender and sexuality studies unexpectedly in his Sosc sequence Power, Identity, and Resistance.

“The gender studies concentration offered a way to organize and unify my interests in sex inequality and social change that spanned traditional disciplinary boundaries,” Reinheimer wrote in an e-mail interview.

Although women outnumber men in gender studies departments nationwide, Klein said that he doesn’t feel out of his element either in class or on campus.

“I think when it comes to issues of gender and sexuality, these issues affect everyone, so that being a male [gender studies major] shouldn’t affect me. I don’t feel outnumbered,” Klein said.

Recalling his own classroom experience at the U of C, Reinheimer said that he felt that the issues discussed in his gender and sexuality studies classes were relevant and accessible to men as well as women.

“While I don’t know if my presence changed the experiences of the female students, I don’t think my being male affected the classroom dynamics very much. The courses I took covered a wide range of topics and issues, and I never felt especially qualified or disqualified, as a man, to contribute to discussion,” he said.

Since the gender studies major is largely interdisciplinary, many of the department’s classes are cross-listed under other departments. Gender studies courses span biology, psychology, human development, literary criticism, and even economics.

“Most of the people in those classes aren’t gender studies majors anyway. I never really thought about it. I feel comfortable in those situations,” Klein said.

Gender and sexuality studies: then and now

The University of Chicago established its gender studies department nearly two decades after larger state schools had introduced similar departments on their campuses nationwide in the 1970s, Michaels said.

As a bastion of rightist political thought in the 1970s and the 1980s, the University was home to notable neoconservative thinkers that included political theorist Leo Strauss and his students, Paul Wolfowitz, who served as deputy secretary of defense under President George Bush until 2005, and the philosopher Allan Bloom.

“At the time, the University of Chicago resisted [incorporating a gender and sexuality studies department]. We were not amenable to new areas of study,” Michaels said.

“We’re a University that’s greatly open to interdisciplinary programs, so I don’t think that was the issue. I think the reason for this [resistance] was the newness of the discipline. There’s always resistance to change. There are always border disputes. And I think there are also always doubts about how research and knowledge should be organized,” he added.

The gender and sexuality studies departments that cropped up from this initial move went toward the establishment of the discipline in the 1970s were listed under women’s studies. The University established its own gender studies department during a time when the discipline was expanding outward to include areas of study beyond gender and feminism.

“Personally, we kind of missed the boat in not naming the department gender and sexuality studies—because that’s sort of what it is,” Michaels said.

But as academia transitions into the 21st century, Klein, Michaels, and Reinheimer each said that University administrators and the student body are welcoming to gender and sexuality studies on campus.

“I think the only thing I’ve encountered is snootiness,” Klein said. “‘That’s not a real major.’ But I definitely think it is. There’s a lot to be done in this field of research. There’s a lot to think about.”

Michaels added that while pockets of resistance to unorthodoxy will always remain; he said that the University is largely supportive of new initiatives within the gender studies department today.

“There were angry battles within departments, nationally, internationally. And what’s striking to me is that these questions aren’t really asked anymore,” he said.

Reinheimer echoed Michaels’s sentiments and said that the U of C’s political environment and long-standing reputation for conservatism do not negatively influence the general reception of gender studies on campus.

“While I certainly had conversations with friends and peers that evinced a dismissive attitude toward gender and women’s studies, I doubt this response is unique to Chicago nor am I sure it’s any stronger or more common at Chicago due to its conservative reputation,” he said.

Intersection of theory and practice

For Klein, who identifies himself as gay, the decision to study issues of gender and sexuality is intensely political.

“It also sort of marks me as a queer person. I’m pursuing a ‘gay major.’ A man getting a gender studies major is most likely to be gay. But I’m cool with that. I’m into LGBTQ activism on campus,” he said.

Klein is active as the outreach chair for Queers and Associates (Q&A), the University’s largest LGBTQ campus organization. Earlier this month, Q&A sponsored Pride 2008, a two week–long celebration of sexual diversity that included educational events, study breaks, and a keynote address by classicist and queer theorist David Halperin.

Both in his coursework and as a gay man, Klein said he is particularly interested in thinking about what it means to live in a “post-gay” world.

“I think the next generation of scholarship will have to look into how much [the gay identity] really matters. There’s a whole new trend of gay men who are ‘post-gay.’” For many, homosexuality is not necessarily the defining characteristic of a gay man, he said.

“I think people have the right to identify however they want. I think you can fight back against categories. But at the same time, there are things that affect gay men. So it’s also frustrating when some people don’t feel these issues affect them,” he added.

In the future, Klein hopes to work with department faculty to organize a class on theories of pornography, and is considering writing his B.A. thesis about trends in gay pornography. Klein said he eventually plans to pursue a doctorate degree in gender and sexuality studies.

But for now Klein said he wants to acquire new frameworks for systematizing the growing body of queer scholarship, history, and activism. He said that Halperin’s work on gay subculture and political theorist Judith Butler’s concept of “performativity”—the notion that language and discourse influences gender development—have been particularly useful in thinking about what it means to be a queer-identified person.

Last quarter, Klein enrolled in Michaels’s course on problems in the study of sexuality. He recalled how a particularly vivid classroom discussion solidified his belief that academic theory forms the foundation for political activism.

“Stuart [Michaels] said this thing I thought was amazing. ‘I’m a Hutu, you’re a Tutsi. I’m going to kill you for it. I’m going to marginalize, dehumanize, kill you for being in a category I’ve placed you into.’ He was comparing this political situation to incidents of hate crimes you hear about because someone is gay. ‘I’m straight, you’re gay. I’m going to kill you for it,’” Klein recalled.

“How did these categories come into being? What is it like to live in those categories? It’s so troublesome. It’s the whole aspect of how people aren’t treated like human beings,” he said.

Stage legend Fiona Shaw parses Euripides, Beckett

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:43:00 -0500

Actress Fiona Shaw is probably most widely known to general audiences for playing the nasty Aunt Petunia character in the Harry Potter film franchise. This week, however, the critically acclaimed and classically trained Irish actress will coach a select group of U of C students as she hosts acting workshops on campus as part of the Artspeaks Fellows Program, which brings headline artists to campus annually.

Shaw conducted a master class with University Theater (UT) students on Sunday. On Monday night, at an invite-only event called “Medea & Friends or Electra & Enemies,” Shaw performed and discussed excerpts from a wide span of theater history. On Tuesday, Shaw will take part in a seminar workshop of Euripides’s Medea and related works.

“If anywhere there’s an answer to ‘What’s so interesting about Medea?’ surely it was manifest in this woman’s performance [of it] on stage,” said Thomas Bartscherer, a doctoral candidate in the Committee on Social Thought and a visiting assistant professor from Bard College, in his introduction of Shaw on Monday night’s performance.

Shaw said that her understanding of theater performance was grounded most significantly in Greek tragedy, the works of Shakespeare, and the plays of Samuel Beckett. Accordingly, Monday’s presentation featured selections from Electra, Medea, As You Like It, and Happy Days, among others.

“Shakespeare: A bit like the internet, he was just something wonderful that came along,” said Shaw, who offered lectures, personal anecdotes, and pithy remarks about working with these pieces throughout the night. On Beckett: “The revenge of the Irish was to use English better than the English themselves.” On Jason and Medea: “For a while, they were Tom Cruise and that Katie woman.”

Greek tragedy cannot be approached through ritual method, said Shaw. In an elaborate metaphor, she likened the process of confronting Greek tragedy to an anecdote about how David Mamot once went hunting kangaroos with Australian Aboriginals by running them down in a Jeep.

The performance in the third floor theater of the Reynolds Club was fully attended and was followed by a reception and a question-and-answer session.

“There is no way to describe what it’s like to see 14 students engaged in conversation with somebody like Ms. Shaw,” said Heidi Coleman, director of University Theater, reflecting on the master class. “It’s deeply moving as an educator to see, and it’s an amazing experience for any student.”

A graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Shaw was nominated for a Tony Award for playing the lead role of Medea in Euripides’s tragedy and was awarded the Laurence Olivier Theater Award in 1990 and 1994. She has performed roles in numerous Shakespeare works and in the film versions of Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, and Persuasion.

David Levin, an associate professor in Germanic studies and chair on the committee on theater and performance studies, will be moderating today’s workshop.

The Artspeaks Fellows Program attempts to synthesize theory and practice in the arts and introduce students to professionals from the field. Past Artspeaks Fellows have included theater director Anne Bogart; pianist and composer Uri Caine; film-maker Atom Egoyan; author Neil Gaiman, who wrote the recent Beowulf movie and the English script of Princess Mononoke; and actor James Schamus, who appeared in Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

One Campus wins SG election in landslide

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 02:10:00 -0500

One Campus was declared the winner of Student Government (SG) executive slate elections last night, handily beating Connect Four, their closest competitors.

The executive slate is comprised of SG president, vice president for administration, and vice president for student affairs. The race for undergraduate liaison to the Board of Trustees was highly competitive, with four candidates. Third-year Aliza Levine won with 854 votes.

College Council (CC) representatives and the graduate liaison to the Board of Trustees were also decided in this week’s election. “We had a high turnout relative to previous years,” Archie Chandrasekhar, chairwoman of the Election and Rules Committee, said.

A record 2,755 students voted, up slightly from last year. The turnout is consistent with a recent trend of increased voter participation following 1,407 voters in 2005. Chandrasekhar attributed the rise in voter turnout, especially among graduate students, to the inclusion of graduate students on slates. Graduate students cast 839 ballots this year.

“Two of the slates had graduate students running,” she said. “People are more inclined to vote for people like themselves.”

One Campus won the slate election with 1,266 votes, just over double Connect Four’s 629 votes. Third year and president-elect Matt Kennedy was surprised by the results. “Connect Four put on a great debate. The students had two competitive candidates,” Kennedy said. “[But our win] was an overwhelming endorsement by the student body.”

Graduate student Anthony Green, Connect Four’s presidential candidate, was disappointed with some aspects of the campaign but declined to comment further because of his current position as president of the Graduate Council. Nonetheless, Green said he holds no grudges.

“Matt Kennedy has a lot of good experience. If we didn’t win, I’m glad that they did win,” Green said.

Current SG president Scott Duncombe was excited for One Campus’s victory, and in particular for Kennedy, who is currently SG vice president for student affairs. “Now relationships we’ve built can pass on directly. I’m happy Matt is getting recognized for his accomplishments,” Duncombe said.

Undergraduate liaison to the Board of Trustees–elect Levine attributed her win to her exposure in the University community. “I’ve been visible for longer, so I think I won on sheer experience alone,” she said.

Second-year Jospeh Dozier, the second-place finisher for undergraduate liaison with 672 votes, said that his loss was due to a misreading of his opponents. “I knew Aliza and I were going to be close, but I didn’t expect Nick Zhao to garner so many votes,” Dozier said of Zhao’s 261 votes, “He was the Ralph Nader of the election.”

Levine, co-chair of Students Taking Action Now: Darfur, drew support from students who identify with the causes she represents, Duncombe said. “Aliza’s election shows the strength of that community,” Duncombe said. “The election is a referendum on those issues. People want those issues brought to the board.”

Second-year Louis Potok, who placed third in the liaison contest with 342 votes, had reservations about that characterization of the position’s role within SG. “I question whether Aliza will be able to divorce herself from her personal feelings when representing the Board to the student body,” Potok said, referring to Levine’s history of political activism on campus. Levine has maintained that that history will not interfere with her responsibility to accurately represent the student voice to the board.

Nick Rodman, Kati Proctor, Christina Melander, and Gabriel Gaster all won seats on CC representing the class of 2009; Rodman led with 196 votes. Jarrod Wolf had the most votes of any CC candidate with 241. Prerna Nadathur, Aaron Goggans, and Jay Kim will join him as class of 2010 representatives. The class of 2011 elections were led by Mark Redmond, who garnered 236 votes. Victor Leung, Archibald England, and Arthur Baptist also won seats.

Notable among the results were the five council seats garnered by members of SGProgress, a coalition of 10 candidates drawn from various activism-oriented student groups on campus who ran on a common platform of SG reform.

Second-year and CC chair Ben Esparza said that the high turnout for CC elections was due to the competitiveness of the races and the character of the candidates.

“There was a high turnout in part because a lot of people were running, but also the winners reflect members who have worked hard on their own,” Esparza said, citing Wolf’s role in founding the Coalition of Chicago Colleges, a consortium of colleges that aims to politically unite the city’s schools.

Graduate student Brian Cody, who ran unopposed for graduate liaison to the Board of Trustees, was elected with 1,728 votes.

Adrian Florido contributed to the reporting of this article.