Tuesday, March 11, 2014

THE

BROWN DAILY HERALD vol. cxlix, no. 33

since 1891

TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014

Thayer plan calls for changes in streetscape Divest Thayer Street to be repaved and parking spaces converted into public spaces

METRO

Green alleys on Cushing Street, Olive Street and Fones Alley will “provide permeable paving areas for stormwater retention and enhance the pedestrian experience.”

MEETING

BROOK

Approval of the finalized Thayer Street Planning Study in late January marked the conclusion of exploratory research on potential Thayer Street improvements, signalling a transition into the plan’s implementation phase.

Following months of revision, the approved outline calls for the long-term development and diversification of Thayer Street.

The plan includes just over five pages of action items for the next two years, some of which already have funding and will begin development this summer.

“I don’t think a lot has changed” during revision, said Paul Wackrow, the Providence Preservation Society’s director of preservation services, adding that he thinks the plan is “really comprehensive.”

The Thayer Street Planning Study has proposed streetscape modifications to “establish Thayer Street as an attractive and vibrant community destination that is accessible by foot, bike, car and public transit.”

PE HO

SENIOR STAFF WRITER

D LLOYstreetscape Proposed Thayer changes

THAYER

By ALEXANDER BLUM

The revision process incorporated input from a variety of stakeholder groups including the University, the Thayer Street District Management Authority, the College Hill Neighborhood Association, the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority and other groups with a vested interest in the Thayer Street district.

The addition of an implementation section is likely the most notable change made to the plan, said Nick Hornig, urban designer at NBBJ, the planning and design firm that authored the redevelopment plan. “There is no single magic bullet” that will revitalize Thayer, Hornig said. “It’s all about getting the balance right.”

Beginning this summer, students can expect to see developments, including infrastructural changes to the streetscape and integrated coordination of parking, transportation and loading, as well as the strengthening of regulatory enforcement, he said.

The creation of a parklet — parking spaces converted into a public space for people to sit — outside the Brown bookstore, which is expected to be completed by the beginning of the fall semester, will help “make (Thayer) a » See THAYER, page 6

SENIOR STAFF WRITER

N

WATERMA

A gateway plaza and transit hub will incorporate “decorative modular paving material” instead of asphalt to “reestablish the area as a priority pedestrian zone.”

The transit hub at the top of the bus tunnel — the eastern end of the proposed streetcar line — will feature “lighting, bicycle parking, covered seating, signage, an expanded pavement area and a real-time travel kiosk.”

Source: Thayer Street Planning Study ASHLEY SO / HERALD

Persecuted writers ‘bear witness’ with stories Dean of George Seremba and the College Gazmend Kapllani escaped homelands for freedom of expression search continues

By EMILY PASSARELLI STAFF WRITER

By MOLLY SCHULSON SENIOR STAFF WRITER

inside

The dean of the College search committee completed its first phase of interviews with nine applicants out of a pool of 53 and is currently reinterviewing a subset of the original interviewees, wrote Marisa Quinn, vice president of public affairs and University relations, in an email to The Herald.

The candidate chosen will take over the position from Margaret Klawunn, vice president for campus life and student services, who became interim dean after former Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron left in December to become president of Connecticut College.

Provost Mark Schlissel P’15, who previously chaired the committee, handed the reins to President Christina Paxson after announcing his » See DEAN, page 2

A story is a mechanism for sharing a memory, relating the outcome of an event, expressing an opinion — but not all political systems allow their citizens to tell stories without fear.

ARTS & CULTURE

playwriting and professor of theater arts and performance studies. Started

by Robert Coover in response to conflict over protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, IWP has sponsored writers from around the world living under a government that restricted freedom of speech. Both Kapllani and Seremba also experienced “civilly sanctioned acts of silence,” Ehn said. “They survived to speak.”

The literary presentations Monday night followed a panel discussion earlier in the day that featured Seremba, Kapllani, Vice President of » See WRITERS, page 7

The Undergraduate Council of Students is set to consider another resolution in support of Brown Divest Coal, said Todd Harris ’14.5, UCS president.

After Council leaders attended a Divest Coal meeting earlier this month, Divest Coal members are drafting a resolution to present to a UCS “working group,” Harris said.

Last spring, UCS voted to pass a resolution in support of divesting the University’s endowment from major coal and fossil fuel companies. But resolutions are not typically binding from year to year due to changing Council members.

“Having previous statements of support restated is super important, and UCS was one of our strongest supporters in the past,” said Ryan Greene ’16, a Divest Coal member.

The Council’s current consideration of support of divestment arrives after the Corporation’s October decision not to divest.

Council leaders hope to “continue the conversation about coal,” Harris said. “We’ve also just been trying to brainstorm new ways to support student initiatives and student groups on campus, Divest Coal being one of them and one of the hot topics throughout the year.” » See DIVESTMENT, page 2

Aga Khan stresses importance of pluralism Aga Khan emphasizes collective responsibility, cracks jokes in talk on tradition and technology

By CAROLINE KELLY SENIOR STAFF WRITER

Prince Karim Aga Khan IV ’96 hon.

P’95 said during a lecture Monday that the hardest part of speaking at Brown again since delivering the baccalaureate address in 1996 was “that you have to explain what you got wrong the first time.” It was hard to imagine that the

thorough, well-spoken 49th hereditary imam of Nizari Ismailism would be prone to carelessness.

But he insisted. “I think I actually underestimated what happened in the 18 years ahead,” he said, acknowledging that back then, “you would not have had any Facebook friends, and you would not be following anyone on Twitter, and perhaps more sadly, no one would be following you,” to much laughter from the audience.

Introduced by President Christina Paxson, the Aga Khan’s speech was a Stephen A. Ogden Jr. ’60 Memorial Lecture » See AGA KHAN, page 4

Metro

BRITTANY COMUNALE / HERALD

There was room for both social media jokes and a thoughtful discussion of modern communication in Prince Karim Aga Khan IV’s lecture yesterday.

Arts & Culture

Bill would create AfricanAmerican history curriculum in public schools

R.I. politicians work toward legislation to help unemployed and increase minimum wage

Art sleuth and National Geographic photographer speak at Creative Mind Mini-Lectures

Italian studies experts confer on political and personal memory at Chiasmi colloquium

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weather

Paxson gains more control of search committee, which will reach decision in April

Council considers resolution to support coal divestment, continue pressure on University

By CAROLINE KELLY

ANGELL

At the “Urgent Witness: A Freedom-to-Write” conference co-sponsored by the Department of Literary Arts and the International Writers Project Monday evening, George Seremba and Gazmend Kapllani — both at one point persecuted for expressing their ideas — shared their stories at the McCormack Family Theater. Seremba is a fellow and Kapllani a visiting scholar of the IWP, a literary arts initiative to support writers who face danger in their homelands because of their work.

Founded in 1989, IWP awards fellowships to writers at risk around the world, said Erik Ehn, head of

Coal looks to UCS for support

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2 university news

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014

» DIVESTMENT, from page 1 The Council has the important role of “going to student group meetings, student advocacy causes like Divest Coal and having conversations about what methods have you tried, what methods can we help you with, where can we partner to get data, information and decision-makers all in a place where we can have a more informed conversation about these issues,” said UCS Vice President Sam Gilman ’15.

When working with student advocacy groups, “UCS can support them, but we also don’t want to subsume or take over different causes from other groups,” Gilman added. “We want to be a partner, a supporter and an advocate, but to not take over advocacy efforts.”

Tammy Jiang ’16, a Divest Coal member, said she anticipates the Council will vote in favor of the resolution. “They have endorsed us (in the past), but obviously there’s a new UCS general body this year and we’re eager to have them pass another resolution,” she said.

The Council is “supposed to be representative of student voices,” Jiang added.

About 44 percent of undergraduates said they disagreed with the Corporation’s decision not to divest in a November Herald poll, compared to roughly 28 percent who agreed.

Divest Coal members are still in the process of clarifying the resolution’s wording, Greene said, adding that he hopes it includes language conducive to letting future Councils continue to pass resolutions supporting divestment.

When Divest Coal finishes writing the resolution, it will be passed on to a UCS working group dedicated to community engagement, “which includes amongst other things issues related to social justice and political student advocacy on campus,” said Cameron Johnson ’17, who is both a Divest Coal member and a UCS general body member. After that group

EMILY GILBERT / HERALD

Brown Divest Coal members are drafting a resolution for consideration by the Undergraduate Council of Students. If passed, the resolution would reaffirm UCS support for the University’s divestment from coal. deliberates, the resolution will come before the UCS general body for a vote.

Divest Coal plans to use UCS to try to “mobilize all the undergraduate students to further this conversation and show the administration that this is something we still find important, something we want to talk about,” Johnson said.

“I realized that if we want to take something as important and urgent as divestiture, … we need to use UCS as a mechanism,” he added. “Luckily UCS believes in the same thing, so we’re really working in tandem right now, and it’s been going swimmingly.”

At a March 2 Divest Coal meeting attended by UCS leaders, each side presented ideas for how the groups

could collaborate, Johnson said, adding that he was happy to see Harris and Gilman present.

“We talked about what type of things we’d like to see UCS do,” such as creating “language in the resolution that not only supports divestiture but pushes UCS to make statements and stands after the resolution has passed,” he said.

“They were tossing ideas back and forth about where they could fit in and where we could fit in, and right now it seems like a lot of it is going to be publicity,” said Divest Coal member Jahmour Givans ’16. “Todd and Sam seemed very receptive — they presented some of their ideas but they were mostly listening to what we had to say.”

» DEAN, from page 1

she added.

Foster said he is looking for someone with the ability to work well with students and faculty members as well as in the broader world.

“The student members have been terrific on helping us understand things from their perspective,” he said.

During deliberations, Dickson expressed her desire to find an applicant that “looks at both Brown and undergraduates holistically,” she wrote.

The new dean should see how the College fits into the University as a whole and recognize students’ interests and engagements in and out of the classroom, she added.

The dean of the College search now ties into the provost search, Paxson said.

“My hope is that we can move quickly on the provost search so that those decisions will be made roughly at the same time,” Paxson said, adding this will allow the finalists for each post to meet and begin to form a working relationship.

Both searches should come to a conclusion in April, she said.

departure in January. The original plan had been for the search committee to select three finalists, whom Paxson would then interview, The Herald previously reported.

Now that there is a provost search as well, Paxson has taken a more active role in the process, wrote Emma Dickson ’16, a committee member, in an email to The Herald.

Due to the change in leadership, the committee is “a little behind where we’re projected to be, but not decisively,” said Professor of Economics Andrew Foster, a committee member.

Paxson said the committee has not yet presented her with its final recommendations for the position.

“We have a great pool, and I mean that seriously, it’s a very strong pool,” said Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences Sheila Blumstein, a committee member who also served as dean of the College from 1987 to 1995.

“We’ve been working hard at narrowing it down,” she added.

The committee meets once a week on average, she said. “We’re working to do this as quickly as possible” without rushing or making mistakes,

-With additional reporting by Joseph Zappa

university news 3

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014

KATHLEEN SAMUELSON / HERALD

Students in Elissavet Amanatidou’s “Intermediate Modern Greek” class said they find video conferencing with a Cornell student also enrolled in the class a fairly neutral factor in their learning experience. The video conferencing has posed few technical problems and has also increased the accessibility of course materials.

Technology aids obscure language learning across campuses Cornell student joins seven Brown students in ‘Intermediate Modern Greek’ via video conference

By SHAVON BELL CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Eight students are currently enrolled in MGRK 0400: “Intermediate Modern Greek,” taught by Senior Lecturer in Modern Greek Studies Elissavet Amanatidou, but only seven of them live on College Hill. The eighth student is a graduate student at Cornell, Eilis Monahan, who joins the class by video conference as part of a pilot program launched last fall by the Center for Language Studies.

Monahan does archaeological work in Cyprus, making knowledge of modern Greek imperative to her practice, she said. But when Cornell — along with several other peer institutions — ended its modern Greek

program in 2011, Monahan was left searching for other options.

She began to communicate with Amanatidou, who also serves as director of the CLS. Amanatidou said she saw an opportunity for both Brown and Cornell to benefit from course-sharing. Video conferencing is a more engaging, realistic alternative to independent study, in which students often use software similar to Rosetta Stone and must review almost exclusively on their own, she said. “To develop sociolinguistic knowledge of a language,” students need to step away from computers, she said.

Course-sharing exposes Monahan to what Amanatidou described as a “community of learners.”

Monahan attends Greek class at

Brown over video conference using PolyCom HDX Telepresence System software. The rest of the students in the course see Monahan on a projector, and Monahan can use the software to control the camera, so she can zoom in on any particular part of the board, Monahan said.

Last semester, there were few technical difficulties and most were quickly resolved by a University staff member, said Michel Comitis ’16.

Despite occasional delays or sound outages, Alexandra Scott ’16 said the technology has never been distracting.

Last semester’s technical problems seem to have been resolved, and the software has seen no significant malfunctions this semester, Monahan said.

Amanatidou said she emails Monahan all course materials before class and returns completed work with her

comments. To take quizzes or exams, Amanatidou sends materials to the Cornell Language Resource Center, where they are kept secure, Monahan said. Monahan receives these exam materials at the same time her classmates on campus do, Amanatidou said.

Monahan said the video conferencing has led her to “exert extra effort to stay engaged in the class,” and overcoming the technological barrier has impelled additional focus during class time.

Given her distance from her classmates, Monahan has sought out Cornell students with whom to practice speaking modern Greek, she said.

But lacking “an immediate support network” has often forced her to study course materials individually.

Other students in the class said they find the video conferencing to be a fairly neutral factor in their learning

experience, though Comitis said it has made course materials such as videos, texts and audio files “more accessible” to all students because they all have to be available online.

Students in the class are mixed on whether they would video conference into a course at another university. Ashley Frith ’15 said she would consider it but questioned whether the format would be feasible in all courses, citing the lab component of science courses.

But classmate Scott said she would need to be in the classroom to feel “fully engaged.”

Cornell, Yale and Columbia have formed a formal consortium that course-share less commonly taught language courses among one another.

Amanatidou said she hopes Brown students will have the option of taking seldom-taught language courses at other institutions in the future.

4 university news

New position increases support for grad students

Associate dean of master’s education seeks to enhance experiences of student body’s fastest-growing segment

By EMILY DUPUIS STAFF WRITER

A new position in the Graduate School — the associate dean for master’s education, created last month­­— is seeking to improve master’s students’ experiences as this segment of the Brown student body becomes its fastest-growing.

Don Operario, associate professor of public health and director of a master’s program in the School of Public Health, is the inaugural associate dean, having assumed the role Feb. 1.

The position has three primary functions: serving as the first point of contact for master’s students with issues or concerns about enhancing their Brown experiences, helping connect offices across campus in supporting master’s students, and supporting

faculty members and departments in enhancing master’s programs, Operario said.

The new role “embodies the University’s commitment to these students,” Operario said, adding that he will “advocate, support and … nurture the students and the master’s community to the extent that I can.”

The new dean will help respond to the growing number of master’s students, said Provost Mark Schlissel P’15, adding that there are now more first-year master’s students than firstyear PhD students. “This is an important group of students for Brown to reach,” Schlissel said.

In the past decade, master’s programs have grown to make up 28 percent of the Grad School population, which in turn constitutes a quarter of the overall student body, wrote Peter

Weber, dean of the Grad School, in an email to The Herald.

“The number of master’s students has been growing significantly in recent years,” Schlissel said. “We want to be sure these programs get the same level of help from campus and are at the same level of quality as our PhD programs.”

The short time period master’s students spend at Brown also played a factor in creating the dean position.

Since master’s programs range from only two semesters to three years, “if a concern or problem arises, especially in a one-year program, it needs to be addressed quickly,” Weber wrote.

Operario will mentor and advise master’s students, as well as act as a go-between for the Grad School and master’s students and programs, Weber wrote.

The creation of the new dean position also signifies a growing emphasis on master’s education, Schlissel said, noting that in many areas, like

U. to evaluate AP and IB weight Following higher ed trends, Brown will reexamine standing from AP, IB courses

By GABRIELLE DEE SENIOR STAFF WRITER

With the number of high school students taking Advanced Placement courses more than doubling over the last 10 years, some of Brown’s peer institutions have stopped accepting AP and International Baccalaureate test scores for course credit. And while the University does not grant course credit for AP or IB scores, administrators said they will likely review Brown’s policies on both transfer credits and advanced standing from AP and IB scores this spring.

The College of William and Mary became the most recent elite university to announce it is no longer accepting AP and IB scores for course credit, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported last month. This academic year also marked the first time Dartmouth did not grant course credit for high AP and IB scores, the Chronicle reported.

Though the University does not give course credit for any AP or IB scores, students can use satisfactory results from these tests to fulfill concentration requirements or place out of introductory classes at the discretion of individual academic departments, according to the dean of the College’s website. But AP and IB scores are not displayed on external transcripts, said Margaret Klawunn, vice president for campus life and student services and acting dean of the College.

Many higher education specialists

have expressed a growing concern over the quality of AP courses and their ability to prepare students for upper-level college courses, said Christopher Dennis, deputy dean of the College, adding that “now almost everybody is offering AP. It’s getting harder to sort out what are quality programs.”

The University will likely examine its approach to both transfer credits and advanced standing gained from high scores on these standardized tests, Dennis said. Administrators have been invited to speak with College Board representatives later this spring to analyze the AP testing system, he added.

AP and IB programs vary across different states as well as across high schools with different resources, Dennis said. AP and IB credits are mainly valuable to applicants seeking to bolster their admission chances to Brown, he added.

Denise Croote ’16 placed out of two semesters of calculus and an introductory biology course using AP scores.

Because the more advanced math and science courses are highly specialized, waiving her prerequisites for them did not affect her performance in the courses, she said. AP test scores are dependent on how well a student prepares for the exam, rather than the knowledge gained form the course, Croote added.

Nicole Lee ’15 said APs should not be used as a marker of how well a student will fare in an upper-level course.

Instead, the University should rely more on its own specially designed placement tests, she added.

Kota Mizutani ’17 said he did not use any of his AP scores to place into higher-level courses, because he did not feel adequately prepared by his high

school’s AP program.

AP tests are no longer construed as a measure of college preparedness, but rather as a way to boost a college application, Lee added.

Students with more than three qualifying scores may advance their semester standing, but must still take the standard 30 courses to graduate, according to the dean of the College’s website. Students may only petition for accelerated graduation after their fifth semester. But even after filing the paperwork to graduate early, many students decide that they would rather stay for a full eight semesters at Brown, Klawunn said, adding that few students end up advancing their semester standing.

The acknowledgment of AP and IB credit helps fulfill the mission of the New Curriculum, allowing students to take more challenging courses without having to repeat what they have already learned, Klawunn said. The case may be different for universities with core curriculum programs such as Columbia, where placing out of a course could mean waiving a requirement integral to that school’s general undergraduate curriculum, she added.

Croote said the ability to place out of introductory courses is especially valuable for students in concentrations with many requirements, such as biochemistry.

Nicolas Ledru ’16 said the University should continue to acknowledge AP and IB scores so motivated students can take better advantage of the “top-tier education available at Brown.”

Mizutani said Brown emphasizes each student’s freedom in shaping their education and should continue to acknowledge AP credit.

www.browndailyherald.com

computer science and engineering, undergraduate degrees are no longer sufficient for many jobs.

Enrollment in master’s programs has been growing “organically” without much concerted effort by the University, Operario said, adding that his position was a response to that growth and a “recognition of unmet need.”

But President Christina Paxson has said publicly that she plans to grow master’s programs at a faster rate than other components of the Brown population over the next decade, a goal administrators have acknowledged is in part financially motivated.

“More students realize this higher level of education is important for their future career development,” Schlissel said, adding that higher levels of enrollment are also common at other universities.

With more students in master’s programs, the associate dean for master’s education will be able to help departments, faculty members and

students determine where growth should occur, Operario said.

“I could be a resource to help them realize how to make that happen,” Operario said.

While the new position addresses an existing need, “it also reflects the University’s plan to enhance a commitment to graduate education with new master’s programs,” Weber wrote, noting that nine new master’s programs have been created since 2002.

The position was created as an early initiative of Paxson’s strategic plan, Weber wrote.

Following the publication of the plan, a committee of graduate program directors was convened to address how to enhance the experiences of master’s students and decided on the necessity of a position created to exclusively address master’s education, Operario said.

Input from master’s students was also reflected in the decision, Weber wrote.

» AGA KHAN, from page 1

own, when the bonds that connect us across our diversities begin to weaken.”

He cited the West’s perception of the Islamic world as an area where it is important to “replace fearful ignorance with empathetic knowledge,” describing how “knowledge gaps so often run the risk of becoming empathy gaps,” the topic of his first speech at Brown, which he still sees as pertinent. “The struggle to remain empathetic and open to the other in a diversifying world is a continuing struggle of central importance to all of us,” he said.

To solve these problems, the Aga Khan called for a “thoughtful, renewed commitment to the concept of pluralism” to foster the “essential unity of the human race.” He described the importance of “the capacity to integrate knowledge, to nurture critical thinking and ethical sensitivity” in preparing “wellinformed leaders who are sensitive to a wide array of disciplines and conflicts and cultures.”

After his speech, the Aga Khan participated in a question-and-answer session with Paxson, who drew from a list of questions contributed by members of the Brown community.

In response to a question about the Aga Khan’s work “to improve public health,” he said his organization has noted a significant change in disease spread in the developing world. “If you speak to most of the governments in the developing world, they are particularly unhappy about the cost of non-communicable diseases,” he said.

This dissatisfaction means focusing on “hospital beds, tertiary care” and an effort to “use technology to link rural, isolated areas to (their) own networks,” he said.

When Paxson asked what advice he had for students “looking forward to making a difference in the world,” he noted the importance of being able to access the world, saying, “If you speak seven languages, your horizons are widened.

“If you want to be a global citizen, then prepare yourself for that — it’s a different set of goals,” he added.

Lastly, the Aga Khan acknowledged the importance of persevering despite mistakes. “Everybody makes mistakes — never regret them, but correct them,” he said. “There’s no such thing as a perfect world or a perfect life.”

on International Affairs and focused on the importance of a relevant education.

The Aga Khan is the founder and chairman of the Aga Khan Development Network, whose agencies include the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, founded in 1967 to fight rural poverty and hunger in disenfranchised nations, and the Aga Khan Education Services. The latter include the Aga Khan Academies, residential private schools in Africa and Asia following the International Baccalaureate curriculum, and the Aga Khan Universities, which place an emphasis on pluralism and collective responsibility, according to the event brochure.

The Aga Khan described how his “own education has blended both Islamic and western traditions.” He said his position is “not a political role, as has been mentioned, but let me emphasize that Islamic belief sees the spiritual and material worlds as inextricably connected. Faith should deepen our concern for improving the quality of human life in all its dimensions.”

After his lighthearted foray into social media humor, the Aga Khan adopted a more serious tone. “We often think about technological innovation as a great source of hope for the world, (and) we hear about how the Internet can reach out across boundaries, helping us all to stay in touch,” he said.

But the success of our use of modern communication depends on “how human beings go about using or abusing their technological tools,” the Aga Khan said, fearing “centrifugal forces in our time, the forces of fragmentation” that can “threaten democratic institutions.” He described how technological access to constant information can lead to “more fleeting attention spans, more impulsive judgments and more dependence on superficial snapshots of events.”

In light of the temptation to “live more of our lives inside smaller information bubbles, in more intense and often more isolated groupings,” the Aga Khan stressed that “greater connectivity does not necessarily mean greater connection.” With more room for error, the enriching nature of diversity is lost, he said, noting that “the problem comes when diverse elements spin off on their

metro 5

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014

D O N ’ T R O C K T H E B O AT

BRIANNA NAMAN / HERALD

Remnants of a shipwreck near Kennedy Plaza appear to have run aground in this public art exhibition. No lives were lost at sea.

6 metro

Bill proposes African-American history curriculum Anthony Bogues, professor of Africana studies, explains the role of African-American history in public schools

By WHITING TENNIS CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Rep. Joseph Almeida, D-Providence, introduced legislation to the Rhode Island General Assembly Feb. 25 that would form the 1696 Historical Commission.

The commission, named for the year enslaved Africans were first documented to have arrived in Rhode Island, would create a comprehensive curriculum for teaching African-American history to public school students from kindergarten through 12th grade, according to a General Assembly press release.

In addition to the governor and the secretary of state, the commission would include the executive director of the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission, the Senate president and 12 members of the public appointed by the House speaker,

according to the release.

Once formed, the 15-member commission would be charged with drafting a curriculum to include “a history of people of African heritage, including the history of African peoples before the political conflicts that led to the development of slavery,” as well as enslavement and abolition in the state and across the country. The aim is to better define the “contributions of Africans to America and Rhode Island,” according to the release.

According to the bill, the Rhode Island Department of Education would provide support staff and consultation to develop guidelines and facilitate the implementation of the new curriculum into public schools. By January, the commission would have its recommendation prepared, and the legislation hopes for funding and implementation for the start

of the 2016-2017 school year.

“Our youth must realize that AfricanAmericans are an integral part of the history of our state and have made many contributions to improve life in Rhode Island and the nation,” said Joyce Stevos, president of the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, in the release.

In anticipation of the commission’s report, The Herald spoke with Anthony Bogues, director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice and professor of Africana studies, about the exposure to African-American history currently offered in public schools, through media and at the University.

Herald: What do you know about the state of African-American history in secondary schools in the United States?

Bogues: We know that there is not much teaching occurring in AfricanAmerican history because when one teaches aspects of that history at Brown, we realize that there’s a lacuna. There are

R.I. officials look at unemployment Reed proposes bill to extend unemployment insurance, Chafee backs minimum wage hike

Unemployment and the minimum wage in the United States and R.I.

While unemployment has fluctuated over the past two decades both nationally and within Rhode Island, minimum wage has increased. The following graph of historical changes in the unemployment rate is annotated to show increases in the minimum wage at the state and federal level. $7.75

10 percent unemployment

8

$7.40

R.I. minimum wage: $4.45

By EMMA JERZYK SENIOR STAFF WRITER

As the national unemployment rate inches back toward pre-crisis figures, Rhode Island’s rate has followed the general trend. But the state’s stubbornly high unemployment distinguishes it from national progress. As lawmakers attempt to identify the cause of the Ocean State’s struggles, a range of proposed solutions from public officials have emerged in recent months, including a minimum wage hike and unemployment insurance bill sponsored by Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I. When the national unemployment rate hit its peak of 10 percent in October 2009, it was still nearly two percentage points below Rhode Island’s peak of 11.9 percent, which occurred in January 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics website.

While the national unemployment rate this January stood at only 6.6 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Rhode Island’s rate was 9.2 percent, according to the R.I. Department of Labor and Training.

Raising the federal minimum wage, one of President Obama’s recent initiatives, has garnered support from New England governors, including Lincoln Chafee ’75 P’14 P’17. The federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 per hour, and Rhode Island’s minimum wage is $8 per hour as of Jan. 1. Rhode Island was one of six states to increase its individual minimum wage since Obama first called for a federal increase in early 2013. And Chafee was one of several Northeastern governors to pledge Wednesday to raise their state’s wages to at least the $10.10 minimum proposed by Obama, in support of the campaign, the Associated Press reported.

The Minimum Wage Fairness Act, co-sponsored by Reed, would increase the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour over two years. Increasing the federal minimum would “put money back into the economy, increasing demand for goods and services and creating

$6.15

$5.15 6

4

$6.75

$4.75 Federal minimum wage: $3.80

R.I. U.S.

$7.25

$7.10

$5.65 $6.55

$4.75

$4.25

$5.85

2 $5.15 0 1990

1992

1994

1996

1998

2000

2002

2004

2006

2008

2010

2012

Source: United States Bureau of Labor Statistics; United States Department of Labor; Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training

JILLIAN LANNEY / HERALD

jobs,” Reed said in a statement sent to The Herald.

“Theoretically, we think that unemployment should go up when the minimum wage goes up,” said Nathaniel Baum-Snow, associate professor of economics and urban studies. But “the empirical evidence on this, I would say, is somewhat mixed. … It’s hard to determine whether there’s more unemployment when you raise the minimum wage,” he said.

Raising the minimum wage would also affect the labor market unevenly with a particularly negative effect on the lowest-wage earners, Baum-Snow said.“It makes it more costly for firms to hire workers, and (for) the people who would be willing to work for less than the minimum wage,” he said. “They don’t end up getting jobs.”

But Reed said a minimum wage hike is crucial to building a stronger middle class. “If Congress is serious about building ladders of opportunity and pathways to progress for the middle class, raising the minimum wage is one of the single most important investments we can make,” he said in the statement.

Though raising the minimum wage has commonly been proposed as a solution to income inequality issues, BaumSnow said this would not necessarily ameliorate the effects for those with a high school education or less — a segment of the labor market that has experienced steady wage decreases since the 1980s.

“There’s a bigger underlying fundamental that there’s just less demand by firms to hire people without much

education,” he said. “Because of that, they can offer less, and I think that sort of thing is only going to be exacerbated if we arbitrarily make them pay more to these people.”

Implementing the Minimum Wage Fairness Act would cut an estimated 500,000 jobs while increasing the earnings of about 16.5 million people, according to a Congressional Budget Office report.

“The proposal is more likely to serve as a rallying cry for Democrats in the approaching election than to be adopted by Congress in the foreseeable future,” the Providence Journal reported last week, adding that Democrats hope the bill “will appeal to economically squeezed voters in November’s midterm elections.”

Reed also filed the Emergency Unemployment Compensation Extension Act last Tuesday, which would retroactively extend unemployment insurance for “more than two million job-seeking Americans, including about 8,000 Rhode Islanders,” Reed said in the statement.

Emergency unemployment insurance expired Dec. 28. The legislation would also extend unemployment insurance by six months.

“The most recent Senate vote on a three-month unemployment insurance fix fell one Republican vote short of the necessary 60-vote threshold to overcome a filibuster,” Reed said in the statement.

“If Congress fails to act this year, …

21,700 Rhode Islanders will be cut off, and it will also mean 1,284 fewer jobs in Rhode Island,” he added.

gaps. I can’t speak for all states, but in some states there is not African-American history. There is American history.

African-American history tells the story of the African-American persons in the United States since slavery. I think the initiative is a very good one, and we should support it.

Given the media attention surrounding the Oscar-winning film “12 Years a Slave,” is the narrative of African-American history presented in film helpful to our societal understanding of the issues? Do motion pictures carry the risk of reducing or oversimplifying history?

No one movie can tell the entire story.

I don’t expect a movie to do the job of teaching the history of a long period.

What a big movie does is stimulate the interest of people in that history. “12 Years a Slave” does that. … It stimulates people to think about not just the history but the meaning of that history for life today — for the present.

» THAYER, from page 1 space for people to inhabit and feel comfortable in,” Hornig said.

Because NBBJ’s primary role was to “provide and coordinate the resources for this study,” the transition to the implementation phase marks the conclusion of the firm’s involvement. The Providence Department of Planning and Development will utilize the plan to develop Thayer in the coming years.

Hornig said he hopes the smaller initiatives outlined in the project’s action plan “will be germinators of bigger change.”

The goal is to “make it more of a destination for community members,” including students and local residents, said Allison Spooner, president of the College Hill Neighborhood Association.

“Thayer Street will be re-paved this summer. … That has been on the books for a while,” said Emily Kish, principal planner for the Department of Planning and Development. When the newly re-paved roads are painted, parking lanes will be created rather than individual parking spaces. There will also be biking “sharrows” — painted symbols on a road indicating shared space for motorists and bicyclists — and new signage will be installed to ensure all traffic on the road flows one way, she added.

The entire city is being re-zoned, Kish said, which means the Thayer Street district will likely operate under new commercial zoning laws in the future. According to the re-zoning initiative’s website, the implementation phase for new zoning laws is expected to begin in the fall.

Ed Bishop ’54 P’86 P’91, chair of the Thayer Street District Management Authority and board member of the College Hill Neighborhood Association, who also owns properties in the area, said the planning study formally recommended commercial zoning for the area, which would permit the construction of buildings three to four stories tall.

New commercial ordinances for the Thayer Street district could be more accommodating to Bishop’s own proposal to build a $35 million luxury hotel on Brook Street — an effort shot down in 2004 and 2008, but still under consideration, The Herald previously

What benefits do we gain as a society from improving our understanding of African-American history?

History is a subject in which people learn about themselves. It has a tremendous impact. It gives you self-confidence — a sense of identity — which is important for the world that you live in and your ability to navigate that world.

The absence of that can be devastating, particularly when a person does not take into account his or herself. In a racist society, the notions that people get of themselves are not very good ones. This is a history that talks about the experiences of people and how people have navigated those experiences.

It is also important for white Americans, because white Americans themselves don’t know much about the actual experience of African-Americans. We all live in the same society. So on both sides, it is a very important effort.

This interview has been condensed for length and clarity. reported. Bishop said he is still working on the hotel proposal, though there are challenges to attaining proper approval and raising the necessary funds.

If approved, the hotel would surely be profitable given University events such as Fall Weekend, Commencement, sports reunions and conferences, he said, citing the prestigious reputation of The Study at Yale hotel in New Haven.

Bishop said he was encouraged by the study’s proposal for “long-term economic development,” which could potentially include his hotel and new offices. The plan also calls for improved parking, but does not specify a location. Bishop said he is in favor of building an underground parking lot beneath Pembroke Field.

Thayer’s various restaurants do not “make it much of a commercial street,” Bishop said, adding that many Thayer shops used to be hardware stores, eyeglass stores and other commercial entities, not eateries. “Historically, CVS was a Thayer market,” he added.

“People would buy something for $12 on Thayer that they could get for $10 somewhere else if they had the option,” Bishop said, noting that “people like to see the neighbors in a neighborhood environment,” which means more commercial development would be economically viable and profitable for businesses.

But space will prove a constraint, since there are not many large plots available on Thayer for business development. “A good boutique market wouldn’t try for 6,000 square feet,” Bishop said, adding that 12,000 square feet or more would be more realistic for a potential storefront.

As a stakeholder interested in monitoring Thayer Street development, the Providence Preservation Society is currently “exploring funding” to conduct a preservation survey of the Thayer Street district, Wackrow said.

This will help the society understand the area’s currently poorly documented history and will “help to guide future development,” he added.

“Our main responsibility is to get the survey underway,” Wackrow said.

“We really want a detailed history of all the properties in the area” to help define the neighborhood’s character and determine which buildings are historically significant, he added.

arts & culture 7

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014

» WRITERS, from page 1 PEN International Joanne LeedomAckerman and Larry Siems, director of Freedom-to-Write and international programs at PEN American Center.

This year, IWP is hosting Seremba as he works on a memoir adaptation of his play, “Come Good Rain.” Seremba, an Ugandan exile, explained that his first experience with storytelling came at a young age. “The homeland is the school, and the fireplace is the classroom,” he said. Primarily a playwright, he uses live performance to articulate his experience escaping the political turmoil of his homeland.

“A storyteller is someone that bears witness,” he said. “You can bring your own narratives to life.”

Seremba projected a clip of a performance of “Come Good Rain,” which he describes as a testimony to his experience of becoming an Ugandan exile. A student at the time of the overthrow of authoritarian ruler Idi Amin, Seremba and his peers at the university he was attending expected the country’s politics to improve. When, three months later, they did not, “we felt a responsibility to cry out against the evils of the day,” Seremba said. “My role as an activist ended up becoming quite lethal for me.”

On the eve of the new political elections of December 1980, Seremba was abducted, interrogated, beaten, tortured and left for dead. “It rained a lot that night, and I was told later on that that rain and the mud in the forest helped clot my blood, and so I was able to miraculously find myself alive the next day.”

After surgery and secretive hospital treatment, Seremba escaped Uganda.

CORRINE SZCZESNY / HERALD

Writer Gazmend Kapllani, Director of Freedom-to-Write and international programs at PEN American Center Larry Siems, writer George Seremba and Vice President of PEN International Joanne Leedom-Ackerman speak as part of the “Urgent Witness: A Freedom-to-Write” conference.

Nine years later, in Canada, he wrote “Come Good Rain” about his experience. He said he has never since seen as much suppression of thought as he did in Uganda. “The irony is … that (the censorship) is still in many ways as oppressive as it was when those events were unfolding,” he said.

The role of a writer is the role of a messenger, he said. “The world has become a smaller place. … You can’t help but condemn what is going on, and hopefully you do it as far as you can artistically manage. You have the aesthetics and the ethical.”

Kapllani, an Albanian writer, lived in a climate of political censorship that he described as similar to that of North

Korea today. The government banned many books, and finding reading material in Albanian was difficult, he said.

Learning French and Italian allowed him to listen to foreign radio stations, he said. “They were my only windows to reach the world beyond the borders.”

He also obtained fragments of banned books in these languages.

“Every book that we had in our hands was like a fortune — a piece of gold,” he said, adding that this illicit reading and eventually translating books triggered his love of writing. As a student, Kapllani was involved in the movement against the regime. His activism and involvement in a violent political rally eventually made him an enemy of the

government and prompted his flight from Albania to Greece.

Kapllani said sharing stories is the reason he became a writer. His book “Short Border Handbook” deals with those points — the borders — that all immigrants physically and psychologically come to in their lives. “The writing of it was like untying the knots inside of me,” he said.

But this persecution did not end when he left Albania. “I have forever in my life been a traitor,” he said.

As an author, he said, he sought and still seeks to share his opinion, and the opinions of others without the chance to be heard. “I try to bring together the activist and the writer,” he added. When

he was living in Greece, he wrote three novels and advocated for human rights and immigration rights in newspapers.

After some time this work against the government’s treatment of immigrants made him once more a target of the police and extremist political factions.

As an extremist political party took a larger share of the Greek parliament, Kapllani came to the United States as a Radcliffe Harvard Fellow, and is now the IWP’s visiting scholar for 2013. It is important to share others’ silenced stories so they do not just get blurred into the past, Kapllani said. “Brown’s help has been invaluable to help me continue to write without any pressure, any fear or any strife,” he said.

Minds meld research with artistic vision in lectures Art sleuth and expedition artist share career experiences in Creative Mind Mini-Lectures

By EMMAJEAN HOLLEY SENIOR STAFF WRITER

Daniel Byers ’08 experienced the worst day of his life on assignment as a photographer from National Geographic.

Forced to spend the night in an ice cave, his feet froze, and he drank water from melted snow. Even so, he said, looking out over the ancient landscapes the morning after breathed new life into him.

The Creative Mind Mini-Lectures Monday night, which also featured selfdescribed “art sleuth” Victoria Reed, were full of such anecdotes of adventure and revelation. The lectures took place in a packed Englander Studio in the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts.

The Creative Mind Lectures aim to showcase “creative thought across many disciplines, including art, science and technology,” according to the event’s Facebook page.

The first speaker was Reed, a curator of provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Provenance is “a vast and complex field that includes where artworks have been, who’s owned them and when, where, why and how they’ve changed hands,” said Nicha Ratana-Apiromyakij ’15, one of the coordinators of the lectures along with Vivian Carlson ’14.

Reed said she focuses her research

on the rise of the Nazi regime during World War II because “artwork was displaced at an unprecedented rate.” She illustrated this trend by outlining two case studies that ultimately traced the mysterious origins of artwork to theft and forced sale.

Because documentation for these origins is often dubious, Reed’s research requires her to go beyond traditional art historical research, casting a net into legal loopholes, business documents and post-war restitution files, she said.

In tracing these documents through their many homes, Reed said, the emergence of “the life stories of the individual owners” allows viewers to “understand the social lives of the objects that we share.”

Best known for his photography in National Geographic, Byers also produces films that speak to global issues he has encountered in his travels. Whether shadowing snow leopards through the mountains of Afghanistan or lowering a colleague into a flaming pit to collect rock samples, Byers said his creative process always relies on “synthesizing technical knowledge from other fields” including anthropology, ecology and earth science.

“This is something very rare for modern humans to experience — the ancient earth unmediated by any human force,” Byers said of his work in wild environments.

Byers said his artistic vision lies in bridging the gap between the untouched and the civilized realms of the world and in “bringing these images back and causing people to have a stake in some of

RYAN WALSH / HERALD

Daniel Byers ’08 speaks of his travels as a photographer for National Geographic at last night’s Creative Mind Mini-Lectures. In a previous lecture, Victoria Reed discussed challenges of tracing art back to WWII-era origins. these beautiful, fringed places.”

He often uses time lapse in his films to evoke an “almost anthropomorphic” perception of a landscape, so viewers can relate to the environment as “alive in the

same way that we are.”

Ratana-Apiromyakij said speakers like Reed and Byers mark a departure from previous lectures in the series that focused on “classic definitions of

creativity.”

“This year, we’re trying to bring in people who are very unexpectedly creative, who use that creative thinking in a different way,” she said.

8 arts & culture

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014

Italian studies scholars trace lifelines of cultural memory Personal and political histories unfold through interdisciplinary Italian studies conference

By SOPHIE YAN STAFF WRITER

Graduate students from the Italian studies programs at Brown and Harvard gathered this weekend for Chiasmi, an interdisciplinary graduate colloquium featuring 19 professors, graduate students and independent researchers, 12 of whom traveled from outside the United States to attend.

This year marks the seventh annual iteration of the initiative, which alternates locations between Brown and Harvard every year, said Lianca Carlesi GS, one of the event’s organizers.

The conference this year was “Memories: Tradition and Revision, Amnesia and Retrieval.”

Massimo Riva, professor of Italian studies and a faculty adviser for the conference, identified two key goals of the conference: “One is to offer an opportunity to students to present their research,” he said. “The other one … is networking.”

“We thought we’d explore the issues of memory — memory and war and other related issues, such as colonialism,” said Matthew Collins, a Harvard graduate student involved in the organization of Chiasmi.

“We wanted to attract as many submissions as possible,” added Wuming Chang GS, the third event organizer, also from Brown’s Department of Italian Studies. Chang said the theme of memory was meant to appeal to a broad audience. “Everything in humanities and social sciences, more or less, has something to do with

COURTESY OF LIANCA CARLESI

Chiasmi, an Italian studies conference, alternates its location each year between Brown and Harvard. The seventh annual conference took place at Brown this weekend, focusing on the theme of “Memories: Tradition and Revision, Amnesia and Retrieval.” memory,” he said.

The organizers said they wanted in particular to incorporate more artistic elements into the conference to break up the academic panels and attract undergraduate attendees.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of Italian and history at New York University, was the keynote speaker at the

conference, delivering a speech titled “Memories of War, Wars of Memory: Italian Colonialism and its Aftermaths.”

Ben-Ghiat spoke about Italian propaganda film from the colonial period in order to understand “what (these films) can teach us about how memory works and why society decides to

selectively remember things.”

“After Italy lost World War II, nobody talked about these films,” she said. “My talk (at Chiasmi) was about what these films were like, and why it’s so difficult for Italians to remember them.”

“Cultures don’t want to remember certain things,” she added. “There was

COURTESY OF LIANCA CARLESI

The 19 professors, graduate students and independent researchers who attended Chiasmi incorporated various disciplines into their discussion of memory, including a lecture on Italian war propaganda film and a solo performance by Mariagrazia LaFauci ’12.

a lot of shame, and it was painful to think about (World War II) because there was so much hope placed in it, and it all came crashing down.”

Friday night, Mariagrazia LaFauci ’12 performed “Alexandria,” a solo show she wrote and produced during her last semester for TAPS 1210: “Solo Performance” with Professor of Theater Arts and Performance Studies Lowry Marshall. “It’s like a senior rite of passage,” LaFauci said, adding that the class was her most difficult at Brown.

“Alexandria” was the product of stories LaFauci collected from her family members. “We have a lot of ghost stories in my family,” she said. “They’ve been building up and building up, and I felt like I really needed some place to express them and give them life.”

LaFauci shifted from character to character, giving voices to long-dead relatives and figments of her imagination. Among the various characters brought to life in her performance were Indiana Jones, her own greatgrandmother and an unnamed, elderly professor. Throughout the performance, audience members were taken on a journey through “the attic in my brain,” as LaFauci put it.

Many of the stories and photographs she used had to be collected from various family members, she said.

“These are things that they wouldn’t talk about until I begged them.”

Memory “has real physical presence in the world,” she added. “It infects everything that happens onwards from that time. … Memories can be so hurtful until you turn them into something that you can create with.”

Chiasmi was sponsored by not only the Italian Studies Department, but also the departments of history, comparative literature, classics, anthropology, sociology, modern culture and media, German studies, French studies and East Asian studies.

today 9

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014

menu SHARPE REFECTORY

s m a r t s pa c e VERNEY-WOOLLEY

LUNCH Spring Vegetable and Beef Stir-Fry, Daiya Cheddar Cheese Quesadilla, Cheese Quesadilla

Spicy Chicken Wings, French Fried Potatoes, Enchilada Bar, Vegan Caribbean Beans, Snickerdoodle Cookies

DINNER Roast Turkey, Corn Bread Stuffing, Grilled Sweet Potatoes with Maple Sugar, Banana Cream Pie

Shepherd’s Pie, Pacific Vegetable Blend, Butternut Squash with Red Onion, Couscous

JOSIAH’S

THREE BURNERS

QUESADILLA OR GRILLED CHEESE

Banh Mi

Make-Your-Own Quesadilla

BLUE ROOM

SOUPS

DINNER ENTREES

Spinach and Feta, Sausage and Lentil, Three Bean Chili

Chicken Saag, Vegetable Mango Curry

sudoku

ARJUN NARAYEN / HERALD

Students make use of a free seminar room in Andrews Commons to watch a screening for the seminar MCM 0800J: “The Revolution is Being Photographed.”

comics Bacterial Culture | Dana Schwartz ’15

crossword

Cat Ears | Najatee’ McNeil ’17

calendar TODAY

MARCH 11

2:30 P.M. NOVELIST RIKKI DUCORNET READING

Rikki Ducornet, artist and author of eight novels, will read from her work. Her most recent novel, “Netsuke,” was described by the Boston Globe as “a short novel that seethes with dark energy and sinister eroticism.” McCormack Family Theater 9 P.M. SPRING WEEKEND LINEUP RELEASE PARTY

The Brown Concert Agency will host the first Spring Weekend lineup release party, with attendance free. The evening’s entertainment will lead up to a midnight release of the Spring Weekend lineup. Whiskey Republic

TOMORROW

MARCH 12

5 P.M. THE DISNEY VAULT: UNPACKING SOCIAL IDENTITIES IN DISNEY MEDIA

Have you ever wondered what Mickey Mouse and your other favorite Disney characters portray about race, gender and sexuality? Attend this MPC-style workshop to unpack the social identities displayed in Disney media. Third World Center 5 P.M. GUOBIN YANG - THREE TYPES OF ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA

Guobin Yang, associate professor of communication and sociology at Penn, will discuss his work, which explores digital media, political communication and social movements in China. Watson Institute, McKinney Conference Room

10 commentary

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014

EDITORIAL

Rethinking marijuana restrictions On Feb. 12, Sen. Joshua Miller, D-Cranston and Providence, and Rep. Edith Ajello, D-Providence, introduced a bill that would legalize the recreational use of marijuana for adults 21 years of age and older. If the bill is passed, Rhode Island will become the third state to legalize marijuana in the United States and will continue on its trajectory of increasingly progressive drug policy, following landmark legislation like marijuana decriminalization, medical marijuana legalization and the Good Samaritan Law, which eliminates legal disincentives to call emergency services in the event of a drug overdose.

We firmly believe it is time for Rhode Island to legalize marijuana. First and perhaps most important, Rhode Island constituents already support the measure. Fifty-three percent of Rhode Island residents support marijuana legalization, and Gov. Lincoln Chafee ’75 P’14 P’17 is especially open to the idea after noting the fiscal benefits of the tax-and-regulate model adopted in Colorado. This brings us to a further point — namely, that legalizing marijuana would bring a new revenue stream into Rhode Island, a state that could certainly use a fiscal boost, perhaps more than any other at the moment. Chafee is already calling for revenue to go toward infrastructure spending, or, as he aptly puts it, “pot for potholes.” We are heartened by Chafee’s goals, but would like to add that marijuana legalization can also create business opportunities for citizens like Rhode Island Girl Scouts, whose current popular location outside the Brown Bookstore would likely yield greater profits outside a marijuana dispensary, or for businesses that make or sell smoking apparatuses, which would likely enjoy a far wider market for their products.

We fundamentally support marijuana legalization not only for its potential fiscal benefits but for practical and moral reasons. It is startlingly clear that marijuana prohibition is a failed policy. Prohibition has failed to significantly curb drug use, but has certainly been a drain on public funding for a fat criminal justice system and has distracted police officers from addressing violent crime. Even decriminalization, which might be labeled “soft” prohibition, fails to address the fundamental dangers associated with a black market. Unlike legalization, decriminalization allows for the continuation of a black market and drug control by gangs. We also cannot ignore that while studies offer various findings on the negative health impacts of marijuana, taxed and regulated substances like tobacco and alcohol have resulted in staggering numbers of deaths, unlike marijuana, for which there are no reported overdose-related deaths.

Furthermore, legalization would quite likely do a better job of keeping marijuana out of the hands of minors, an oft-cited policy goal of concerned citizens, given that high school students report it is easier to obtain marijuana than to obtain beer or cigarettes. We cannot claim a definite causal relationship, but while a black market does not have checks in place to keep drugs out of the hands of minors, a regulatory market to a large extent does. Beyond these practical considerations, we believe the legalization of marijuana in Rhode Island would be an integral step to the larger project of rethinking the War on Drugs, which is a whopping policy failure that disproportionately targets minorities.

The aforementioned arguments in favor of marijuana legalization are all important to keep in mind, but our final point hits closest to home. We can and must do better. Legalizing marijuana is a small step in the right direction to reforming our bloated prison system that penalizes particularly vulnerable members of society. This isn’t a panacea, but it is certainly a step in the right direction.

A N G E L IA WA N G

CORRECTION An article in Thursday’s Herald (“Teach-in explores roots of Ukrainian political upheaval,” March 6) incorrectly stated that Professor of Computer Science Anna Lysyanskaya is a Ukrainian citizen. In fact, she became a U.S. citizen in 2000.

The Herald regrets the error.

Q U O T E O F T H E D AY

“History is a subject in which people learn about themselves.”

— Anthony Bogues, professor of Africana studies

See curriculum on page 5.

Editorials are written by The Herald’s editorial page board: its editors, Matt Brundage ’15 and Rachel Occhiogrosso ’14, and its members, Hannah Loewentheil ’14 and Thomas Nath ’16. Send comments to editorials@browndailyherald.com.

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commentary 11

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014

Roads, roads and more roads KUNAL SINDHU opinions columnist

On a recent trip down the obstacle course known as Point and Wickenden streets, I couldn’t help but wonder why the Taveras administration has not prioritized the maintenance of the city’s roads. Without question, Providence possesses some of the worst roads that I have ever seen. Every drive is an unpredictable adventure, fraught with the danger of encountering a devastating pothole that should have been filled by the mayor’s team long ago. By neglecting to tend to these problems, the administration has allowed the city’s roads to become a serious threat to the physical safety of drivers and to the structural integrity of their cars.

While Providence may be a particularly heinous example of what happens when governments underinvest in infrastructure, it is by no means the only offender. The state of Rhode Island, too, has been putting off vital investments that could dramatically improve the quality of its infrastructure.

As a result, the American Society of Civil Engineers found that 70 percent of the state’s major roads were “poor” or “mediocre” in 2013 and cost drivers $350 million annually in vehicle repair and other operating costs.

Additionally, over half of Rhode Island’s bridges were deemed “structurally deficient” or “functionally obsolete,” posing a direct threat to the safety of the state’s drivers — one cannot help but worry about a local repeat of the 2007 collapse of the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis.

The ASCE did not stop there. It also awarded the United States a D+ for the quality of its national infrastructure.

Thirty-two percent of roads in the world’s richest nation are in “poor” or “mediocre” condition and cost drivers

well. A 2012 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that every dollar of infrastructure spending boosts GDP by at least $2. With economic growth of just 2.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013, higher infrastructure spending could help the United States finally achieve rapid, sustainable growth for the first time since the onset of the Great Recession.

Upgrading our infrastructure would also be a boon for business.

World-class infrastructure would reduce transit times, boost transport ca-

help boost employment, both directly and indirectly. Aside from creating jobs to complete shovel-ready projects, by boosting economic growth, higher infrastructure spending would act as a stimulus for the economy as a whole and generate further downstream employment. With unemployment still high at 6.7 percent and the labor participation rate near its record low, any source of brisker job growth would be welcome.

Of course, investing in infrastructure is expensive. The ASCE has esti-

With large swaths of the nation’s decrepit infrastructure posing a direct threat to its citizens, there is a clear, compelling case to be made for boosting investment in the system. $67 billion in annual operating costs.

Nearly 65,000 bridges are “structurally deficient,” and approximately 20,000 of these are at risk of collapsing if only one of their parts fails. In terms of developing and maintaining world-class infrastructure, it is clear that the United States is woefully underperforming relative to its potential.

With large swaths of the nation’s decrepit infrastructure posing a direct threat to its citizens, there is a clear, compelling case to be made for boosting investment in the system. There is a strong economic case to be made, as

pacity and increase efficiency, thereby boosting the long-term potential of the U.S. economy. It’s no wonder that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, by its own admission, is “(leading) the charge to improve the quality of America’s infrastructure.” To minimize the risk of investing in wasteful projects that only benefit special interests, governments could first focus on improving the quality of existing infrastructure, which — as the ASCE has pointed out — represents a clear and dire need.

Lastly, these investments would

mated that the country, as a whole, will need to increase spending by an additional $1.6 trillion over projected levels by 2020 in order to raise its infrastructure grade to a B. While budgets at the federal, state and municipal levels are finally showing fewer signs of the strain caused by years of weak tax revenues, the upcoming retirement of the baby boomer generation represents an existential threat to the fiscal solvency of all levels of government. With significantly higher health care and pension costs looming, how can governments finally prioritize infrastructure

spending?

There are a number of suitable options that have already been developed. Congress could finally raise the federal fuel tax, which supports road construction and mass transit, for the first time since 1993. Additionally, as President Obama has suggested numerous times, it could finally create a National Infrastructure Bank to leverage investor cash through public-private partnerships. Lastly, governments at all levels could finally stand up to established special interests, reform the very entitlement programs that threaten their solvency, and use some of the resulting savings to fund upfront infrastructure upgrades.

The next governor of Rhode Island and mayor of Providence will need to address pressing fiscal issues upon ascending to office. But with the infrastructure of the state and the city in such dire shape, and with the benefits of targeted investments so clear, it is vital that both new leaders immediately commit themselves to seriously addressing the deep gaps in the system.

Allowing the status quo to prevail, while the streets remain pockmarked with potholes deep enough to get lost in, is simply unacceptable.

Kunal Sindhu MD’17 can be contacted at kunal_sindhu@brown.edu.

Who should the next provost be?

MAGGIE TENNIS opinions columnist

At the end of January, I wrote in a column that the departure of Provost Mark Schlissel P’15 is an opportunity to hire a new provost who genuinely understands the aspects of Brown that make it strong and unique (“A new provost, a new opportunity,” Jan. 30). Significant among these is the centrality of the liberal arts, the New Curriculum and, of course, the university-college system. As I wrote then, Schlissel’s tenure at Brown revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of these features and their importance.

After attending an Undergraduate Council of Students open forum seeking undergraduate feedback regarding the qualities and qualifications of the next provost, I expressed my concern about the lack of student representation and concrete student input into the provost search process (“Provost search lacks student representation,” March 3). At this forum, I listened to a number of peers voice their thoughts on the provost search and potential candidates. Some advocated candidates on the basis of characteristics like the possession of a “big personality” or “enthusiasm” for the job. That’s great, but I consider these to be baseline qualities that, while valuable, are merely a starting point for evaluation.

In a dream world, the next provost would encompass the following: He or she — and perhaps it is time for a she — would be a Brown faculty member. Indeed, hiring an internal candidate is crucial. Just as important is that she identify as a minority, thereby increasing her ability to relate to minority students. Finally, she would recognize and appreciate the university-college system as vital, and the liberal arts and New Curriculum as es-

sential, to Brown’s mission and success.

The next provost must be chosen from within Brown. We must not fall victim to endless recruitment of celebrity administrators from other universities, who fail to understand the qualities that make Brown distinct. Or even worse, administrators who scorn phrases like “university-college,” while planning initiatives focused solely on STEM fields at the expense of the liberal arts. The STEM fields bring in more money, it’s true. But is monetary value the only value we seek to extract from our academic disciplines? What about the value that the humanities and social sciences provide to undergraduates by teaching them to think, and to graduate students by training them to teach? In

aspects of both the liberal arts and the research university. That experience is conducive to melding graduate learning with that of undergraduates in a way that ultimately benefits both, as exemplified by the late Brown President Henry Wriston’s 1946 essay “The University College.”

Before Schlissel was provost, Professor of Anthropology and Italian Studies David Kertzer held the position. The strongest attribute of a provost who is a faculty member, who will continue to serve as a faculty member, and who will one day return to full-time faculty status, is his or her ability to relate to fellow faculty members and to be accountable to them. Furthermore, a faculty provost might very well increase faculty interest in admin-

Our last three provosts have been white men. Two of them were external candidates. Now that we have the chance, let’s shake things up. my view, they’re priceless.

One student at the UCS forum expressed a desire for an external applicant from a liberal arts college. But this desire is misguided, as it ignores the “university” aspect of the university-college.

The new provost must understand and value graduate students and their research, especially for their enablement of undergraduate learning.

Graduate students do not exist just to conduct research — they are here to learn how to teach, and the next provost must support their development as “teacher-scholars.” She can do so most knowledgeably with experience in a university setting.

There’s another side to this. Her experience should not be limited to a large research university, because then she might undervalue the significance of the “teacher” piece of the “teacherscholar” equation. A Brown professor is an ideal candidate particularly because of her exposure to

istrative matters — and enthusiasm to participate in them.

It’s no secret Brown has fallen victim to administrative bloat. Increased faculty leadership is one step in solving this problem. But why should faculty members willingly take on more responsibility if they do not think their participation is valued? Perhaps with a faculty member at the helm of academic governance, they will. More important still is the probability that an internal candidate from the Brown faculty will be intimately acquainted with faculty concerns, thus making her better poised to serve faculty interests. This feature is significant in bridging the administration and the faculty — and expanding trust on both sides.

Our next provost should identify as a minority — but not just because a diverse administration makes Brown look good. Brown must increase the number of administrators of color for

two key reasons unrelated to the University’s reputation. First is the issue of student security and confidence. As a student of color emphasized to me, when students of color see fellow minorities in positions of power, they feel their voices are being represented. In a similar vein, Psychological Services is currently grappling with the problem of students of color feeling uncomfortable there, “due to cultural minorities and LGBT providers not being well represented” among the staff, Active Minds co-president Julia Lynford ’14 told The Herald recently (“Students seek additional Psych Services support,” March 6). These students “are afraid that providers won’t know where they are coming from.”

Second, it is imperative that the Brown community correspond to the national population in terms of minority representation. And not just at the student and faculty level, but also at the administrative level, for reasons expressed in my first point. Brown is not “diverse” just because a fraction of the student body identifies as students of color. Diversity exists when it is all-encompassing, and when it is active. Minorities must possess genuine leadership, responsibility and influence. The provost possesses all of these. Therefore, a provost of color is an important symbol both to the general community that Brown is achieving active diversity in a significant fashion and, more particularly, to students of color that they have a leader whom they can relate to and trust with their interests.

And there you have it. It’s an ambitious list of qualifications and features. But it’s a necessary list.

Our last three provosts have been white men. Two of them were external candidates. Now that we have the chance, let’s shake things up.

Maggie Tennis ’14 is concentrating in provost studies.

TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014

THE

BROWN DAILY HERALD arts & culture

ASHWINI NATARAJAN / HERALD

Harrison Chad ’14.5 plays Javert in a dress rehearsal of “Les Miserables,” made possible by the effort of six students who created a Group Independent Study Project dedicated to concert production and study of the novel.

From novel to stage, GISP enlivens study of ‘Les Miserables’ Students bring ‘Les Mis’ to College Hill through creative means, academic study of the novel

By DREW WILLIAMS SENIOR STAFF WRITER

Last year Marissa Bergman ’14, Emily Kassie ’14 and Jesse Weil ’16 found themselves discussing a mutual interest: “Les Miserables.” As the conversation wandered from the recent starstudded movie — they thought it was overdone — to the possibilities of ever seeing it on Brown’s main stage — slim to none — the trio asked a question: “Why don’t we do it?”

More than one year and just under $5,000 later, a Group Independent Study Project entitled “Les Miserables: In Text and Production” is bringing the plan into fruition in the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts as “Les Miserables: In Concert” takes the stage for four nights this week.

“We thought about what way we could do it that was actually plausible,” Weil said. “We realized that because of the elaborate nature of the set and the costumes and how grandiose it is as a production, … it was never going to be done as a traditional” show at Brown.

After three eager friends seconded their interest in forming a GISP, the six students set out contemplating both content and, crucially, plausibility.

“We wanted to get back to the roots of ‘Les Mis’ the production, which is really in the music,” Kassie said.

“Beyond that we wanted to see how the Victor Hugo text translated into

production — what was left out, what was kept in.”

The group landed on a dual concert production and study of the novel.

“We decided it would be not only an interesting theatrical endeavor but also an academic one to explore the way in which it was adapted and put on our own version,” Kassie added.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater Arts and Performance Studies Marcus Gardley agreed to serve as faculty advisor for the GISP, which was approved last November as a spring course. “He gave us some good advice to really keep the GISP and production as separate as possible, to really focus on the GISP being an academic pursuit,” said Michael Gale ’14, a member of the GISP. The course included two-and-ahalf hours of class time plus an hourlong meeting with Gardley each week.

Work included reading the book, studying movie and musical adaptations and “watching just about every version of ‘Les Mis’ on YouTube,” so that the group could further “accomplish what we thought the essence of the book was” in its own adaptation, Weil said.

But the performance aspect took up the most time. Five GISP members would act, Bergman would direct and all six would produce, they decided.

Work on the show started in the fall, with auditions planned for November even before the GISP application

passed. “We said no matter what, we’re going to do a production,” Kassie said.

As both the show and the course developed, the study of Hugo’s text and more recent textual adaptations — such as movies and performances — shaped the direction of the performance more and more.

The production focuses on the music, using “stylized blocking” instead of extensive dramatic acting, Kassie said.

The stage lies barren of set, instead featuring five clusters of microphones at staggered increments, with the cast sitting in a semi-circle of chairs directly behind. When an actor comes to a microphone — or many actors in an ensemble piece — the simplicity is intended to bring out the dramatic nature of the text and the lyrics themselves, Kassie said.

Creative art and quotes from Hugo’s novel project on the back wall throughout the performance. Famous lines such as “to love another person is to see the face of God,” “it is nothing to die; it is frightful not to live” and “not being heard is no reason for silence” serve as a backdrop highlighting Hugo’s broader ideas, while the music “sets the mood of each character” and conveys the story, Kassie said.

This allows the audience “to connect with it as is,” Weil said. “A lot of the quotes are very emotional, so we don’t have to do anything.”

Some actors felt that the emphasis on singing over blocking, or ensemble acting, required a separate approach than normally taken for a production of “Les Miserables.”

“The way you engage with the other

people on stage is very different,” said Weil, who plays Marius in the show.

Kassie, who plays Eponine, felt a further ability “to focus on the character and what they’re singing or saying” than she would have if the large-set pieces and action scenes had been incorporated, she said.

Characters interact on the stage, but typically in a brief and understated way, with facial expressions conveying the majority of the emotions.

“I think it has had enormous benefits in regard to the music, … which I think is the most crucial thing when you’re talking about ‘Les Mis,’” wrote Joe Van Wye ’15, who plays Jean Valjean, in an email to The Herald.

Besides the source for the projected quotes, Hugo’s text also served as a large source of some actors’ character development.

“As much as I love the Broadway, West End production of ‘Les Mis,’ … I would say the text more than anything influenced my choices as Eponine,” Kassie said. “There’s a selflessness and a loyalty to Eponine that is really brought out in the text,” a contrast to the usual production in which Eponine’s feelings for Marius are blatantly obvious, she said. A line from the novel unused in the musical — “You know, Monsieur Marius, I think I might have loved you a little bit,” whispered as Eponine dies in Marius’s arms — “crystallized her experience for me and brought a lot more depth to the character,” Kassie said.

Gale, cast as Javert, expressed similar experiences. “I think one of my biggest issues with the musical is that

most of the characters are portrayed pretty flat. They’re not very dynamic.”

For him, it was a line in the musical — “You know nothing of Javert. I was born inside a jail. I was born with scum like you. I am from the gutter too.” — that lacked context until he read Hugo’s book. “With the information I learned studying the book, … I was able to see that Javert’s entire persona is just a construct, this inferiority complex.

It gave me a lot to work with that I would’ve missed,” Gale said.

Van Wye is not part of the GISP and has never made it through the “beautiful slog” that is Hugo’s work, but working with Bergman allowed him to discover deeper character motivation in bringing out a Valjean who isn’t perfect, he wrote.

“I think for the people in the GISP it’s been very different, but for the rest of the cast it has just felt like a normal show,” he wrote.

Music director Alex Sogo ’15 agreed that the production being contained within a GISP did not change much, with the exception of the six producers having more control over the show, he said.

Sogo even considered doing an independent production of Les Miserables with a friend last year, before realizing it would be too massive an undertaking for two people, he said.

Ultimately the GISP — an unconventional method — proved the ideal venue for the undertaking, members said. “Student shows at Brown are really difficult to get past theater boards and really difficult to put on,” Kassie said.