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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2019
VOLUME CLIV, ISSUE 21
BROWNDAILYHERALD.COM
UNIVERSITY NEWS
Fed. court upholds Harvard’s race-conscious admissions Students for Fair Admissions intend to appeal decision to Supreme Court
BY OLIVIA GEORGE SENIOR STAFF WRITER
COURTESY OF MUNS
The University supported Harvard’s admission policy following the 2018 amicus brief. Now, the University plans to review the written ruling by judge Allison D. Burroughs. ported Harvard’s admission policy, The Herald previously reported. “We at Brown will do everything in our power to advocate against changes to laws or policies that would undermine our ability to build a diverse community of outstanding students,”
UNIVERSITY NEWS
BY CELIA HACK UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITOR Following weeks of heated discussion over the search for a new director of the Brown Center for Students of Color, Assistant Vice President for Campus Life Nicole Truesdell paused the hiring process Tuesday. That same day, Truesdell named Charrise Barron, a presidential diversity postdoctoral fellow, as interim director to serve for the academic year — a move that upset many students and led to a sit-in in Truesdell’s office Tuesday afternoon. Students opposed the decision over concerns that the appointment unfolded without adequate student involvement. “The search was halted — it was halted so we could figure out solutions together,” said May Niiya ’20, who sat on the first search
wrote President Christina Paxson P’19 in an Aug. 2018 news release following the amicus brief. SFFA intends to appeal the district court’s decision, said the group’s president Edward Blum in a statement. “Students for Fair Admissions is dis-
Low voting rates among young people have been a hallmark of American elections for decades, with particularly disappointing results in midterm years — but the tides may be turning. Voting participation among Brown students increased threefold between the 2014 and 2018 midterm elections, according to new data provided by the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement published last month. Student voter turnout jumped from 13.4 to 45.1 percent, respectively.
appointed that the court has upheld Harvard’s discriminatory admissions policies,” Blum said. Allison D. Burroughs, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court in
Student voting data The report places the University’s 2018 student voting rate 6 percentage points above the average rate for the
SEE HARVARD PAGE 2
SEE VOTERS PAGE 4
METRO
U. pauses contentious search for BCSC Director Students stage sit-in over appointment of new interim director Tuesday afternoon
Student voter turnout triples Recent report spurs Swearer Center to build on high student voter turnout
BY LI GOLDSTEIN SENIOR STAFF WRITER A federal judge ruled in favor of Harvard’s race-conscious admission policy yesterday, temporarily ending a court challenge to the practice. Harvard was accused of discriminating against Asian-American applicants in a lawsuit brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative group that aims to end affirmative action. The University will “conduct a thorough legal review of the 130-page opinion to determine whether there are any implications for our admissions practices,” wrote Brian Clark, director of news and editorial development in an email to The Herald. “For now, we understand that the decision upholds the right to continue to consider race as one factor among many in our efforts to bring the very best students to Brown.” In signing an amicus brief along with 15 other highly selective schools June 2018, the University publicly sup-
UNIVERSITY NEWS
committee. “We don’t even know if an interim director is the best way to move forward.” Conflicting accounts followed over whether or not the interim director would remain in place, but the University confirmed late Tuesday night that Barron would keep her title. “While conversations around the best approach to solidifying the BCSC’s long-term leadership plan will continue well beyond those that took place this afternoon, Charrise Barron will indeed take on the role of interim director until the end of the academic year,” wrote Brian Clark, director of news and editorial development, in an email to The Herald. But three students at the sit-in said Truesdell told them that she intended to remove Barron from the position and not have an interim director this year. Neither Truesdell nor Barron responded to request for comment about the search process for the in
SEE BCSC PAGE 3
E-scooters return to Providence E-scooter company Spin to launch 300 scooters in Providence this month BY HENRY DAWSON SENIOR STAFF WRITER E-scooters returned to Providence yesterday as Spin deployed the devices throughout the city. The company will launch 100 scooters in Providence this week and then scale up to 300 over the next month, a Spin spokesperson said in an email to the Herald. During Spin’s first week in Providence, its scooters will be free to unlock and cost $0.15 per minute. After the first week, regular rates will increase to $1.00 to unlock and $0.15 per minute. Since the departures of Jump, Bird and, most recently, Lime, as of Sept. 20, Providence has not provided any electronically accessible micro-trans-
SEE SCOOTERS PAGE 4
TIFFANY DING / HERALD
After Lime’s recent departure from Providence, Spin will be bringing 100 scooters to the area this week.
Science & Research
News
News
Commentary
Diet may affect reaction between gut microbiome and antibiotics, study finds Page 2
Buttigieg, Sanders, Warren, Yang garner support on campus for 2020 election Page 3
Faculty approve new combined Baccalaureate, MAT program Page 2
Lehrer-Small ’20: Annenberg Institute should invest more in research with local impact Page 6
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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2019
SCIENCE & RESEARCH
Recent U. study finds link between diet, gut microbiome, antibiotics
APRIL JIANG (YIHAN) / HERALD
Dietary fiber, glucose found to impact reaction of gut bacteria to antibiotics BY PREETI GANESH CONTRIBUTING WRITER When a person takes an antibiotic, which is intended to kill bacteria in the human body, the medicine can also wreak havoc on healthy bacteria inside the stomach. A recent study by Peter Belenky, an assistant professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the University, found a link between diet and the way the body reacts to antibiotics in mice. The bacteria that live inside the stomach are called the gut microbiome, and the food people eat may shape how the microbiome interacts with antibiotics, either lessening or increasing the often-damaging side effects.
According to Belenky, one of the key findings from the research was that antibiotics not only change the composition of the microbiome but also the manner through which the genes interact, which is part of the “transcriptional profile.” When antibiotics were administered to the mice, some of the genes in some of the bacteria inside the gut microbiome were altered in a way that changed the metabolic ability in the microbiome. Specifically, the altered genes changed the way the mice metabolized carbon sources, shutting down central energy metabolism pathways. Damien Cabral, the lead author of the study, stated that bacterial metabolism is an important factor in the body’s response to antibiotics and its sensitivity to future treatment. It was found during the study that the most efficient way to alter the metabolic environment of the gut was to change diet. The researchers examined Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron, a specific bacterium
present in guts, and were surprised to find the bacterium flourished during antibiotic treatment — its presence in the microbiome grew from 30 percent to 90 percent. The team grew the bacterium in the lab, feeding it either glucose or dietary fiber. They found that the bacterium was ten times less affected by amoxicillin — one of the antibiotics used in the experiment — when fed dietary fiber as opposed to glucose. These findings “tells us a lot about how the microbiome responds to antibiotics and that provides clues for how we can eventually extend this into therapy for people,” Belenky said. The researchers used three commonly prescribed antibiotics — amoxicillin, ciprofloxacin and doxycycline. The research was conducted on mice because it is easier to find multiple mice with the same genetic background than multiple humans, said Swathi Penumutchu, one of the contributing re-
UNIVERSITY NEWS
Faculty approve combined Baccalaureate, MAT program Faculty abolish three advisory boards, reaffirm commitment to DACA beneficiaries BY OLIVIA BURDETTE SENIOR STAFF WRITER Faculty approved a new five-year Concurrent Baccalaureate/Masters in the Art of Teaching program in a vote at yesterday’s faculty meeting. Professor Tracy Steffes, chair of the University’s Department of Education, presented the program as a motion to amend the Faculty Rules that will be put into effect immediately. The faculty also approved
three other motions to amend the rules at Tuesday’s meeting, abolishing the College Advisory Board, the Campus Planning Advisory Board and the Information Technology Advisory Board. Provost Richard Locke P’19 also gave an update on changes to the University’s budgeting process, to be implemented in fiscal year 2021, according to a summary of Locke’s remarks provided by his chief of staff, Marisa Quinn. He announced a new base-budgeting approach, in which individual academic and administrative units will develop their budgets from scratch, rather than requesting incremental resources based on their existing budgets. The University Resources Committee will implement the
changes in budget meetings that will occur in the coming months. In order to allow sufficient time for the base-budgeting process, the Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, will not take action on the formal budget during the February Corporation meeting. Instead, the URC will submit a proposed budget to President Christina Paxson P ’19 before the May Corporation meeting. The Provost also reaffirmed the University’s commitment to securing long-term protections for beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program and continuing to negotiate with graduate students in good faith after their vote to unionize last November.
searchers. “If I studied a group of mice that I bought from the same place and then grew up together, their microbiomes are going to be very similar, so my baseline here is going to be very clean,” Belenkey said. To potentially make the study more applicable to humans, researchers could take a human’s gut bacteria and place it in mice, Cabral said. The team collaborated with experts from the Mayo Clinic, a nonprofit academic medical center, to analyze their results. In the future, the researchers intend to further investigate the influence of dietary fiber on metabolic activity of the gut. Penumutchu, who is continuing the research after Cabral departs the lab, will look “at different diet-derived fibers from oats and psyllium husks and different fruits and vegetables” and examine how pure fiber supplements impact bacteria. The team is also in-
terested in how people with metabolic disorders, like diabetes, would respond differently to antibiotics. Their ultimate goal is to be able to offer universally applicable dietary recommendations to people taking these antibiotics in a way that mitigates their disastrous side effects on the gut microbiome. Belenky approached this research as he approaches all of his work — with a bird’s-eye philosophy inspired by Jim Collins, a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. “(Collins) says a cell is like an electrical system, so let’s say you walk into a house and you don’t know how the wiring is made up, what you do is you walk room to room and you just flip the switches. And eventually you’ll figure out which switches connect to which light bulbs, and that’s kind of his perspective to the biology, except his idea is you want to flip all the switches at once so then you can figure out how the whole system works.”
HARVARD FROM PAGE 1
nority applicants and also emphasized that Harvard’s Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program has included Asian-Americans in its outreach efforts since the 1970s. “The Court will not dismantle a very fine admissions program that passes constitutional muster, solely because it could do better,” Burroughs wrote in the conclusion of the ruling. Since the Supreme Court last considered affirmative action in 2016, conservative justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch have joined the court. Neither has a long record on affirmative action, the Associated Press reported. “At Brown, diversity among our student body remains fundamentally critical to our educational mission,” Clark wrote. “The court’s opinion Tuesday is a reaffirmation that a diverse student body brings educational benefits to the entire student body. We are very pleased by the ruling, though we recognize that this may be the first in the legal process.”
Massachusetts, outlined the conclusions of the case in a written ruling. “The evidence at trial was clear that a heterogeneous student body promotes a more robust academic environment with greater depth and breadth of learning, encourages learning outside the classroom and creates a richer sense of community,” Burroughs wrote in the decision. In their case, SFFA advocated for “race-neutral” alternatives to affirmative action, such as practices to further promote socioeconomic diversity, according to Burroughs’ ruling. However, Burroughs also noted that SFFA simulations suggest that this move would lead Harvard to enroll about 33 percent fewer African-American students, unless the school also eliminated many other admission practices, such as preferences for legacy students and recruited athletes. Burroughs commended Harvard’s work to recruit low-income and mi-
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2019
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS
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UNIVERSITY NEWS
Students begin rallying behind presidential candidates Groups for Buttigieg, Sanders, Warren, Yang plan engagement strategies to increase support BY KARINA FONSTAD STAFF WRITER As the 2020 elections loom large on campus, students have begun to form groups around presidential candidates to increase student support. Currently, groups have formed in support of Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (I — VT), Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren (D — MA) and entrepreneur Andrew Yang ’96. Students for Sanders Student support for Sanders manifested on campus during the summer, “start(ing) in earnest in late August,” said Samy Amkieh ’21, one of the contributors to the newly-formed campus group. The group has yet to be formally recognized by the Student Activities Office. A Brown Students for Bernie group existed on campus during the 2016 election cycle, but the members have mostly graduated since then, meaning the current iteration of the group had to begin recruiting from scratch and rebuild their relationship with the Sanders Campaign. A number of the students who helped form Students for Bernie this summer took a course called the Students for Bernie Summer School, which provided participants with tips for event organizing, canvassing and recruiting through a series of webinars, Amkieh said. “We’re still so new. … There hasn’t been a chance for people to get really involved, but that’s going to change,” Amkieh added. In order to garner student support, Students for Bernie plans to focus on Sanders’ policies that are relevant to students rather than his personal characteristics. “We think
Bernie’s policies are what make him stand out more and we want to bring attention to that,” Amkieh said. Students for Bernie plans to partner with the Alpert Medical School’s Democratic Socialist Association and the Students for a National Health Program to host an off-campus event to gain support for Sanders, though the PNHP cannot officially endorse him. The student group hopes to organize a similar event for undergraduates in the Spring. Students for Warren The Students for Warren coordinating group was formed in August of 2019. The group currently consists of seven campus liaisons, according to coordinator Nathaniel Pettit ’20. The students hope that the organization grows organically and that those who join “have an opportunity to get engaged and take leadership (positions) and take the team in whatever direction they think is the best,” Pettit said. The organization launched their social media outreach last month. The Students for Warren Facebook page has grown quickly, with almost 200 likes. “It’s exciting to see that there was a quick reaction and demand for a group like this,” Pettit said. Students for Warren has been “bombarded by a bunch of community members and partners who are also working to get Elizabeth elected,” Pettit said. Students from Providence College attended the group’s kickoff event along with members of the broader Providence community. Students for Warren is planning a number of ways to contribute to the broader national campaign. Warren supporters on campus plan to drive up to New Hampshire on the weekends “to make sure [the group] can be a part of Elizabeth winning New Hampshire,” Pettit said. On campus, the group hopes to work with existing University student organizations to harness their expertise. “That’s how you build a winning
TIFFANY DING / HERALD
Students show their support for various presidential candidates on campus with chalk statements. Groups have formed around Buttigieg, Sanders, Warren and Yang for the upcoming 2020 Democratic primary election. coalition,” Pettit said. Students for Warren plans to work with Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere, a group that Petit also leads, among other student organizations that focus on topics highlighted by Warren’s platform. Students for Buttigieg The Buttigieg Campaign is represented on campus by liaison Phillip Yang ’21 , who is originally from South Bend, Indiana. Yang began supporting Buttigieg this summer when he signed up to become a campus lead. As of now there is no official campus group, but he has worked to share his enthusiasm for Buttigieg with other students. Yang is still waiting to hear back from the campaign to form an official campus group and plans to hold a kickoff meeting later this semester. Students for Yang Students for Yang is also in its
HERALD FILE PHOTO
The search to find a new director for the Brown Center for Students of Color was paused after students and faculty stressed their concerns about the current version of the process.
BCSC FROM PAGE 1 terim director. The search for a new director began over the summer. At a BCSC town hall
held on Sept. 19, the search committee announced that they had selected three finalist candidates to bring to campus during the first weeks in October. Those candidates will no longer be visiting
campus this month, Truesdell told The Herald. The turmoil on Tuesday followed the emotional town hall, when students and faculty called for more information
infancy. While the group is not yet officially recognized by the SAO, Tej Stead ’23 has been collecting signatures to gain official recognition. Stead got involved through the Yang campaign’s student outreach program over the summer, which hopes to recruit high school and university students to organize within their schools and communities. To garner on-campus support, the group has posted drawings, stickers and posters all over campus. Resources given to Students for Yang by the campaign have “encourage(d) people, especially other students, to get involved with volunteer texting and to host in-person events.” Stead believes that Yang’s status as a Brown alum should not be a factor in people’s support. “Supporting someone because they went to our school is kind of short-sighted, and so even though that may initially draw some to him, I
don’t think that should be a primary reason to support a candidate.” “The Yang campaign is in a different spot compared to the front-runners,” Stead said. While someone like Buttigieg is polling lower than the other front-runners, his campaign has significantly more donors. “It’s not feasible for us to carry out the same kind of things (they can), and so the campaign relies pretty heavily on volunteers,” Stead said. The Brown College Democrats can not officially endorse any of the candidates or student groups, but they can offer support and pass on organizing information to Brown Dems’ members. The Brown Dems are currently spending their time phone banking for senate races and hosting debate watch parties. Engagement with the group has increased significantly since 2014, said Brown Dems President Zoë Mermelstein ’21.
about the departure of the Center’s former director from the University this summer. The former director, Joshua Segui, stopped working at the University on June 20 after seven years at the Center. Truesdell said she could not comment on the terms surrounding the former director’s departure due to University policy that limits public statements about personnel issues. Many students said they felt confused and upset by Segui’s sudden departure, noting his apparent love for his job and that he had received an award for excellence in leadership at the 2017 Brown Employee Appreciation and Recognition Day. “One glue to our center, gone, and no clear explanation,” said Rafael Gonzalez-Cruz PhD’18, a postdoctoral researcher at the town hall. Segui did not respond to multiple requests for comment. “There’s a lot of opposition right now, a lot of distrust,” said Naoko Shibusawa P’14, P’21, associate professor of American studies and ethnic studies, at the town hall. “If you want to succeed, you have to build trust. One way to do that, tangibly, is to put a stop to the search.” Truesdell’s decision to pause the search committee’s work and restructure
the process was in direct response to the town hall. “We will rebuild the search committee to ensure student, staff and faculty voices are represented,” she wrote in an email to the BCSC community Tuesday. “I was able to hear student concerns and frustrations around the director search, along with the hurt felt by the departure of the former director.” The search committee originally consisted of two administrators, including Truesdell, one staff member, one faculty member, one graduate student and two undergraduate students, according to a Monday op-ed in The Herald written by Niiya, Shivani Guturu ’20 and Jessica Jiang ’20.5. “We call on Truesdell, as the senior director of the Institute for Transformative Practice at Brown, to halt the search process until a new search can be run that takes undergraduate input fully into account,” the students wrote. Students and faculty responded enthusiastically when Truesdell announced the new search committeee Tuesday. “I hope that this is the first of many steps taken to rebuild trust and to model for the Brown community how transformative justice can look like in actual practice,” Shibusawa wrote in an email to The Herald.
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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2019
SARAH MARTINEZ / HERALD
VOTERS FROM PAGE 1 1,100 colleges and universities working with NSLVE. The report also unearthed a series of distinctive features about University students’ 2018 voting patterns. Female students had higher turnout than males: 40.6 percent versus 33.2 percent. Undergraduates turned out at a higher rate than graduate students: 40.3 percent versus 29.7 percent. Asian-identifying students had a lower turnout rate than their peers: 30.8 percent versus 34.4 percent for black students, 40.2 percent for Hispanic students and 50.5 percent for white students. Voting rates calculated by NSLVE reflect the percentage of an institution’s students who actually voted out of all who were eligible. But when voting rates were calculated within individual age groups, genders, race/ethnicity, fields of study, enrollment status, education level and class year, voting rates were not adjusted by removing non-resident aliens, resident aliens or undocumented students. The NSLVE simply divided the number of students who voted by the total number of students in that category, which could slightly skew the percentages for specific demographic breakdowns.
“We were so excited by the recent data that came out from the NSLVE report,” said Betsy Shimberg, assistant dean of the college and the director of student development at the Swearer Center for Public Service. “There was a huge increase in youth voting across the country — it pretty much doubled,” she added. “At Brown, it tripled!” NSLVE was founded by Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy & Higher Education in 2013 following a “call to action” issued by the U.S. Department of Education, urging American institutions of higher education to facilitate greater student civic engagement and learning. “I think it’s a very positive development that young people have been voting in great numbers,” said Richard Arenberg, senior fellow in International and Public Affairs at the Watson Institute. “It re-energizes the electorate.” The University has a long tradition of politically active students, but turnout has remained low; Brown’s 2014 student voting rate of 13.4 percent stood 6.3 points behind the average of all NSLVE institutions. Citing troubling declines in civic engagement over recent decades, administrators, faculty and students alike voiced a sense of encouragement from the new NSLVE data. “It’s something to
build on,” Arenberg said. Zoë Mermelstein ’21, president of the Brown College Democrats, pointed to the current political climate, coupled with University supported initiatives like TurboVote, as driving forces behind increased student turnout. “It is a crazy time politically,” Mermelstein said. “And the efforts on campus have been really effective in making sure people are not only registered, but also engaging in the process of voting.” Young people tend to lean leftward on the political spectrum. According to a 2016 Pew Research Center poll, 58 percent of 18-to-25-year-olds either identify as Democrat or lean toward the Democratic Party, versus 36 percent who identify as Republican or lean toward the Republican Party. On Brown’s campus, the difference is more pronounced. A 2016 campus poll conducted by The Herald found that, when asked what political party they were most likely to identify with, 62.8 percent of respondents considered themselves Democrat, while only 5 percent considered themselves Republican. On-campus efforts to increase turnout Because the Swearer Center knows that approximately 85 percent of stu-
dents arrive on College Hill already registered to vote, the Center is specifically focused on increasing student voter turnout, Shimberg said. As part of this ongoing effort, the Center is funding a partnership with TurboVote, an online service that allows easy registration and absentee ballot requests and provides election reminders through text alerts. Voting can be a confusing process, and students who are voting out-of-state can have difficulties getting their ballot counted. Shimberg hopes that the Swearer Center’s efforts will demystify absentee voting, streamlining an often convoluted process which has served to “disenfranchise young people from voting” in the past. The Swearer Center, in partnership with numerous student groups, has staffed registration stations at campus-wide fairs and events, including a push during orientation this year which saw about 220 new students register to vote, Shimberg said. Efforts to bolster student turnout come as the nation braces for a high-stakes 2020 presidential election. University staff working to increase turnout stressed that their efforts are focused on improving civic engagement and are not tied to any one political party
SCOOTERS FROM PAGE 1
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portation services until Spin’s arrival yesterday. “Besides the fact that they’re really fun, I like the convenience they provide,” said Jamie Flynn ’20.5, a Herald opinions editor. “I’m the type of person who’s late to class a lot. This makes me less late.” Flynn used scooter services almost daily last year to commute from off-campus housing to class. Some of the scooters will deploy near College Hill, and half the fleet will be placed in downtown areas, according to the spokesperson. The company expects to work with the City to adjust distribution in the future. “The City will welcome two new scooter companies to improve the quality of life for residents citywide and encourage those who visit the Creative Capital to explore all we have to offer,” wrote Ben Smith, deputy director of
or election. “Young people are realizing that they have power, and they’re using their power and they’re using their voice,” Shimberg said. “At the Swearer Center, we’re trying to facilitate that.” A significant percentage of Brown students are either international students or undocumented students and so are ineligible to vote in the United States. “I do not want to be excluding them from the conversation,” Shimberg said. “We have to go beyond the ballot, to get to a place where people are engaging with each other, people are having thought provoking conversations around issues, candidates and policies that affect us all.” Mermelstein stressed that civic engagement should go beyond the confines of College Hill and emphasized the importance of the University using its institutional power to support grassroots voter education projects in the broader Providence area. She outlined the formation of a Voter Education Team, a group of student volunteers within the Brown Dems who are trained in voter eduction. “Our model is mostly focusing on providing volunteers to existing initiatives in the community that really need the bodies,” Mermelstein said. “We want to train students for after college,” she said, adding, “We want to make sure we are providing training so that students can go out and make an impact in voter education in their communities.” Debate on campus Julian Haag ’20, president of the Brown College Republicans, similarly praised the boosted turnout, championing civic engagement irrespective of political affiliation. Haag stressed that he hopes increased student voter turnout will be mirrored by an increasing fervor for political debate on campus. “Political polarization is making it so difficult for conservative students to want to speak out,” Haag said of the campus atmosphere. “They don’t want to be ostracized, they don’t want to be isolated.” “I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me quietly and said ‘I’m a Republican, but I don’t want anyone to know it,’ or ‘I’m a conservative, but I don’t want anybody to know it,’” he added. Mermelstein similarly voiced a commitment to respectful, pluralistic debates and affirmed that she looks forward to planning another annual Brown Democrats versus Brown Republicans panel.
communications for Providence. VeoRide will also provide scooters to Providence, The Herald previously reported. Scooter companies must maintain stable relationships with the city to survive — Bird was pulled off the streets earlier after a rogue launch, while Spin repeatedly stressed their willingness to cooperate with the City. Spin is also working to increase access to scooters for people without smartphones, mobile location services or credit cards, and the company hopes to provide discounted fares to participants of its accessibility program — $0.50 to unlock and $0.07 per minute. Marie Baker ’20 is excited to see scooters back on College Hill. Baker loves going fast on the scooters. “I live up on North College Hill, near Hope High. There are a lot of fun hills to go up and down.”
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2019
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | TODAY
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National Coffee with a Cop Day 8:30 A.M. 222 Richmond Street
Ling Lang Lunch 1:00 P.M. Metcalf Research Building
TripAdvisor Tech Talk 4:00 P.M. CareerLab 1st Floor
Sanford Biggers | Artist Talk 5:00 P.M. List Art Building
TOMORROW ‘Oktoberfest’ Community Buffet Luncheon 11:30 A.M. Faculty Club
Perception & Action Seminar Series 12:00 P.M. Metcalf Research Building
Student of Color Luncheon 12:30 P.M. 121 South Main St
Engineering Seminar 4:00 P.M. Barus & Holley
Q U OTE OF TH E DAY
S U D O KU
“At Brown, diversity among our student body remains fundamentally critical to our educational mission.” —Brian Clark, Director of News and Editorial Development SEE HARVARD PAGE 1
PAI NTI N G P EMBROK E
RELEASE DATE– Monday, November 10, 2014
Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle CRNorris O S and SWO R D Lewis Edited by Rich Joyce Nichols ACROSS 1 Digital periodical, briefly 5 Part of CBS: Abbr. 9 Comics title character who married Irving 14 Kitchen floor covering, in Kent 15 __ Ness monster 16 Earth pigment 17 Sooner State city 18 Architectural Scurve 19 Rays of light 20 Taking the top spot 23 Roman fountain 24 Volcano in Sicily 25 “What’s happenin’?” 28 In the least favorable case 31 Brit’s “Bye-bye” 32 Cleopatra’s undoing 35 Slim and muscular 36 Annie with a gun 38 With 40-Across, remaining focused 40 See 38-Across 41 Gold purity measures 42 Brother of Cain 43 Item in a P.O. box 44 This, in Seville 45 Fed up with 48 For what reason 49 Capricorn’s animal 50 Creates 54 Betting it all 58 “Hot corner” base 60 Cowboys quarterback Tony 61 R&B singer India.__ 62 Exposed 63 Explorer __ the Red 64 Reject as false 65 Brass or bronze 66 CPR pros 67 It’s a long story DOWN 1 Put into office 2 Insignificant
3 Japanese 39 Former NBA 53 Parting words, cartoon style center __ Ming perhaps after the 4 Premium 40 U.K. award visit suggested chocolate brand 42 Painting or by the starts of 5 Walk laboriously, sculpture 20-, 38-/40- and as through mud 54-Across 46 “No argument 6 Quotable Berra from me” 55 Twistable 7 The stuff of many 47 Electrical cookie postcard photos capacitance units 56 Fail to mention 8 Burglaries 49 Dizzy with delight 57 Mythical birds 9 Hooded snake 51 Divided country 58 TV schedule 10 King beaters 52 Barely managing, abbr. 11 “It’s not true!” with “out” 59 Actor Holbrook 12 Pants bottom 13 Decade tenths: ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE: Abbr. 21 Knucklehead 22 Chanted 26 Sch. with a Chattanooga campus 27 Subscriptionbased home entertainment 29 Churchill of the United Kingdom 30 Charity’s URL ending 31 Fight stopper, for short 32 Cockeyed 33 Hidden supply 34 Free-spirited socializer 37 Poise 11/10/14 xwordeditor@aol.com
By Teresa Colby (c)2014 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
11/10/14
ELEANOR YE / HERALD
The scenic view of Metcalf Hall from its mirror, Miller, provides the perfect canvas for a bright painting of Providence’s waning warm days. Capture these bucolic moments before they fade into winter months.
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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | COMMENTARY
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2019
A local partnership model for the Annenberg Institute ASHER LEHRER-SMALL STAFF COLUMNIST Last year in a shiny glass room one floor above the Brown Bookstore, the Annenberg Institute for School Reform hosted an event: “Advancing Equity through Research-Practice Partnerships.” The Institute brought in Ruth Lopez Turley, founder of the Houston Education Research Consortium, to present on the power of research grounded in community partnerships — a worthy and pertinent topic. However, one central irony stood out as the elephant in the room: The Annenberg Institute had just undergone a push in the opposite direction. The Annenberg Institute should heed Turley’s call and focus their research on the Providence community. The story of Brown’s Annenberg Institute begins in 1993. Former Chair of the Education Department Ted Sizer — a name famous in education philosophy for his vision of student empowerment — created the Institute and executed an agenda of progressive school reform. After Sizer left, Warren Simmons stepped in as executive director with a focus on putting “racial equality and social justice in the forefront of the mission.” Under his leadership, the Institute expanded its reach into the community with a New England-Based Community Organizing and Engagement program. However, in the last three years, the Institute has undergone a swift transition away from engagement work — and away from its Providence community entirely. Last year, Brown transferred all Annenberg programs to other universities. Since then, the Annenberg Institute has become an education research juggernaut, producing 44 publications in 2018 and 2019 alone. Yet while these works touch on important issues such as social-emotional learning and racial disparities in school discipline, not one of them deals directly with education in Providence. Brown initiated the transition away from engagement to better integrate the Institute into the rest of the University’s academic focus. After the decision, Provost Richard Locke P’18 explained to The Herald that, at a university like Brown, “it is not one of (our) core compe-
tencies to do capacity building for communities. What we do is research and teaching, and it’s through our research and teaching that we have an impact (on) the world.” I’m not writing to argue with Locke’s claim that Brown shouldn’t work in community capacity building, though I think one could make a case that it should. I’m writing to make a case that the Annenberg Institute’s renewed focus on research is compatible with helping the Providence community. It creates an opportunity to provide necessary and time-sensitive analysis on issues facing the city’s school district. Remember Ruth Lopez Turley? The one who the Institute invited to speak on research-practice partnerships in their shiny new glass
building? Her work provides a model that the Institute can follow. Rather than developing research questions and searching for the optimal settings to test them as most researchers do, Turley works with partners in her area such as the Houston school district to develop questions relevant to education in her city and then shares the results with local decision-makers. The Annenberg Institute should seek to imitate Turley’s research-practice partnership model. As Locke said, research is what Brown University does best. So why not leverage that asset to make an impact in its immediate community? To be fair, the Institute has made strides toward a research-practice partnership model. Their program, titled “Annenberg Institute at Brown Research Partnerships,” includes “strategic partnerships” with the San Francisco Unified School District, the Providence Public School District, the Rhode Island Department of Education and the Miami-Dade County Pub-
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University on how it could counteract some of the negative effects of its past. The committee made recommendations such as allowing Rhode Island public school teachers to enroll in one Brown course per semester free of charge and including tuition waivers to Masters of Art in Teaching students who commit themselves to working for at least three years in local public schools. Many of these recommendations have not come to fruition. In fact, last year the Univerity canceled the elementary education track of its MAT program. And over a decade later, Brown has managed to raise only $1.9 million of the $10 million sum. While University leadership has told The Herald that its current investments in the PPSD exceed the potential returns the
“I’m writing to make a case that the Annenberg Institute’s renewed focus on research is compatible with helping the Providence community.”
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lic Schools. But while there is ample information listed on the Institute’s website for the San Francisco and Miami parternships — including current studies and working papers — there is no research listed in partnership with the Providence Public School District or the Rhode Island Department of Education. The Institute’s first course of action when looking to uplift communities should be its own. By forming meaningful partnerships with local practitioners and publicizing that information, Annenberg could use its research focus to address necessary questions in Providence. Such a move could not come at a better time. The Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy released a report on the Providence Public School District in June that revealed startling
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problems in Providence schools — from heavy teacher absenteeism to structurally unsound buildings. The report prompted a state takeover of the school district. As the state now starts on its path to address structural problems through reform, it would benefit from a research institution that can evaluate the district’s programs and run analyses to guide its new directions. Brown University has an obligation, as well as an incentive, to do what it can to support Providence schools. As an institution enjoying nonprofit status, Brown receives tax relief in return for the presumed benefit that the University brings to the community. But Brown needs to hold up its end of the bargain. In 2007, the University pledged to establish a $10 million endowment for Providence schools. The $10 million promise came as a response to recommendations from Brown’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. On the committee, students and faculty explored Brown’s complicity in the slave trade and advised the
endowment would have generated, many of these investments in the district predated the creation of the fund and the University nonetheless failed to live up to its stated promises. Each institution and program at Brown must do what it can to support Providence. In the case of the Annenberg Institute, this means transitioning its research focus toward the research-practice partnership model at a local level. They should join Ruth Lopez Turley’s National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships. Such a transition will take legwork. The Annenberg Institute must be ready to commit fully. As Turley emphasized in her talk, partnership is a long-term collaboration. Of her institute’s relationship with its partners, she said, “we’re not just dating, we’re married.” Asher Lehrer-Small ’20 can be reached at asher_lehrer-small@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@ browndailyherald.com and op-eds to opin-
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