Daily
Herald
the Brown
vol. cxlviii, no. 11
INSIDE
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Ramen remedy New site seeks out free food for starving students
A-Trak, Kendrick Lamar to headline Spring Weekend What Cheer? Brigade, Big Freedia, Dirty Projectors and Deerhunter will also perform
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Flood gates Moraff ’15 asks why money rules education policy Page 8
Public intellect Prof. receives science communications fellowship
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since 1891
wednesday, february 6, 2013
By andrew smyth senior staff writer
DJ A-Trak and rapper Kendrick Lamar will headline Friday and Saturday night, respectively, for this year’s Spring Weekend. The concert, scheduled for the weekend of April 19 to 21, will also feature Providence’s What Cheer? Brigade, New Orleans bounce artist Big Freedia, experimental rock band Dirty Projectors and indie standard Deerhunter. The lineup was announced Wednesday at midnight by the Brown Concert Agency. The acts, which were booked unusually early this year, were announced several weeks ahead of schedule due to concerns about leaking, said BCA Booking Chair Emma Ramadan ’13.
“We were thinking about announcing way earlier than usual anyway, and then there were a few rumors, so why not just do it?” she said. Confusion mounted after a false lineup — which included The Postal Service, Grouper, Toro Y Moi, The Sounds of Capitalism and two “more acts to be announced in March” — was sent in a fraudulent email to BlogDailyHerald. The lineup, which appeared to be sent from the student email account of BCA Publicity Chair Raillan Brooks ’13, was published on Blog and later retracted. It is unclear who sent the email, Brooks said, and whether “The Sounds of Capitalism” is or ever was a real band. BCA members said they were confident in the choices for this year’s lineup. The festival will coincide with Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival for the third year in a row, The Herald previously reported. “I think people will be really happy with the two headliners and the other acts. It / / Lamar page 2
COURTESY OF A-TRAK
Canadian electronic musician DJ A-Trak is just one of a host of performers scheduled to perform at Spring Weekend this year.
Student health plan to cover sex reassignment Faculty votes The change is part of a broader attempt to make U. policies more inclusive of transgender students By JENNIFER KAPLAN SENIOR STAFF WRITER
The Brown Student Health Insurance Plan will cover 14 different sexual reassignment surgery procedures starting in August, Director of Insurance and Purchasing Services Jeanne Hebert confirmed in an email to The Herald. The move makes Brown one of a handful of schools and healthcare providers nationwide to cover the surgeries. “We identified this as an important benefit for students to have access to,” Hebert wrote, adding that the change was in line with “Brown’s efforts to support all students.” The coverage will be funded through renewal rates paid for next year’s
student healthcare coverage, she wrote. In general, the total package of sexual reassignment surgeries, hormone therapy and other services can cost up to $50,000. Kelly Garrett, LGBTQ Center coordinator, said she has strongly advocated this change for the past several years. A milestone in the movement to add coverage for these surgeries was the inclusion of hormone treatment in the current school year’s coverage plan, Garrett added. The sexual reassignment procedures that will be covered are “very standard and very comprehensive,” she said. In the past, transgender students did not have access to sex reassignment surgeries at Brown and often were barred from treatment due to high costs, Garrett said. “I know people where it’s taken them 10 years because they needed to save money,” she said. The LGBTQ Center has no statistics on how many transgender students are at Brown, and it is difficult / /Surgery page 2 to get accurate
unanimously for improved benefits The University has lagged behind peers in providing retirement and tuition assistance for faculty By Maxine Joselow Senior Staff Writer
rachel kaplan / herald
Brown is set to join a group of universities, including Cornell, Harvard, Stanford and Penn, that cover at least some sex reassignment surgeries.
False Spring Weekend lineup Demonstrators give voice sent to campus press outlets to victims of sexual assault A third-party website allows spoofers to create realistic fake email accounts By Sam heft-luthy senior staff writer
Brown email addresses can be impersonated by any user inside or outside of the Brown network through email spoofing websites, evidenced by an email supposedly sent from Brown Concert Agency Publicity Chair Raillan Brooks ’13 to multiple press outlets Tuesday with a false Spring Weekend lineup. “(Email spoofing) is an inherent insecurity in the Internet,” said Chief Information Security Officer David
Sherry, one that is “inherent in all email servers” and not just Brown’s. The email’s source code revealed the message was a hoax sent from a third-party service that allows any user to modify an email’s “from:” field and impersonate another address. If done cleverly enough, the email will appear at first glance to have actually been sent by that user. Sherry said trying to crack down further on these sorts of spoofing attempts “would be a losing battle” and would “cause issues for all emails.” “I did know that it was possible to impersonate other email addresses, but I had never seen it happen,” said Kareem Osman ’14. “This was obviously a lighthearted example,” he added. “But you can obviously think / / Spring page 4
The 157 Project aims to call attention to the prevalence of sexual assault at Brown By Eli Okun University News Editor
Clad in purple and wearing strips of gray duct tape across their mouths, several dozen students streamed into the Sharpe Refectory at lunchtime Tuesday to stage a demonstration against sexual assault at Brown. The event, organized and led by a group of Minority Peer Counselors, was intended to raise awareness about the prevalence of sexual assault on campus and urge students to take an active role in preventing it, organizers told The
Herald following the event. After roughly 75 students arranged themselves in a loose arc near the salad bar, they tore off the tape and read aloud a series of protest statements in unison. The demonstrators declared they were “representing the silenced voices.” The demonstrators cited several statistics — that one in six women is sexually assaulted in her lifetime and that national studies generally indicate an average of 5 percent of college women are assaulted each year. For Brown, that statistic becomes 157 students assaulted annually, organizers said, the number that provided the name of the MPCs’ effort, the 157 Project. The event arose out of the workshops that MPCs usually hold each semester — a / / Assault page 3
Brown faculty members may see increased tuition assistance and retirement benefits, as the faculty endorsed a report from the Ad Hoc Committee on Employee Benefits at its meeting Tuesday night. Faculty members all voted in favor of the report, with no abstentions. One of the report’s major recommendations was an increase in the Tuition Aid Program benefit, which provides tuition assistance to faculty and staff members’ children who attend the University as undergraduates, said Harold Roth, professor of religious studies, who presented the report to the faculty. “Brown’s tuition benefit for employees’ children attending Brown is not competitive with those of our peers,” including those that have comparable endowments, Roth said. The report recommends raising Brown’s tuition benefit “to a level minimally competitive with our peers,” from 24 percent of tuition to 36 percent, Roth said. The increase would cost the University a little over $2 million annually, he said. One faculty member expressed concern that 36 percent was not an ambitious enough goal, since the mean percentage among the University’s peer institutions is 37 percent. “If we’re trying to stay competitive, wouldn’t we / / Benefits page 2