Tuesday, November 5, 2019

SINCE 1891

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2019

VOLUME CLIV, ISSUE 44

UNIVERSITY NEWS

BROWNDAILYHERALD.COM

SCIENCE & RESEARCH

U. spends second least in Ivy on coach salaries

Experts weigh in on happiness at Brown Almost 90 percent of students report they are somewhat or very happy in Herald poll

BY EMILIJA SAGAITYTE SENIOR STAFF WRITER

SARAH MARTINEZ / HERALD

Though fundraising lags behind, Brown spends high proportion of revenue on coaches

BY THOMAS PATTI CONTRIBUTING WRITER Brown head coaches and assistant coaches received the second-lowest total salaries in the Ivy League during the 2017-18 year, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity in Athletics Data Analysis.

According to the report, Brown paid $3,307,782 to 34 head coaches and $2,859,936 to 63 listed assistant coaches from July 2017 to June 2018, the most recent fiscal year that has been made public. In the Ivy League, only Dartmouth spent less on its coaching salaries. The Big Green paid $3,296,260 to 31 head coaches and $2,838,749 to 69 assistant coaches. On average, Brown paid each head coach $97,288, the lowest average in the Ivy League. Columbia’s average salary for its head coaches, the highest in the conference, was 38 percent higher,

at $134,026.

“We always want to be competitive when it comes to salaries,” wrote Athletic Director Jack Hayes in an email to The Herald. “We do not want to lose a candidate or a current coach because of the salary. That said, there may be times when there are limits to what we can offer.”

After coaching men’s lacrosse at Brown for 10 years, Lars Tiffany ’90 left the program in 2016 to accept the head coaching position at the University of Virginia, where he led the Cavaliers to a national championship

SEE SALARIES PAGE 3

UNIVERSITY NEWS

Revolutionary thinker Kimberlé Crenshaw describes life as activist Law professor behind intersectionality speaks at U. on racism in America

BY CAELYN PENDER STAFF WRITER Kimberlé Crenshaw was only nine years old when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968.

Her school was let out early that day, and the young students were directed by community activists to Jerusalem Baptist Church for a makeshift memorial service.

Despite the packed church, when the activists asked if anyone had anything to say about Dr. King, they were met with silence.

It was young Crenshaw who broke that silence. “It just seemed so wrong to me that this man could lose his

life fighting for us, fighting for the we,” Crenshaw recounted to a packed audience of students and community members in Salomon on Monday night. “We were allowing ourselves to be silent. Something blew up inside me, and before I thought the better of it, I was on my feet and the entire church was staring at a skinny bespectacled third grade girl … I heard words coming out of me that were not mine, exhorting everyone that we must not let his death be the end, that we had to pick up where he left off and continue to walk in his footsteps.”

That was the moment when Crenshaw first became aware that she had been “born into a history that bequeathed upon people like us …countless burdens.” King’s death, followed by the death of her father a year later, set Crenshaw on a trajectory toward

SEE CRENSHAW PAGE 6

Brown is widely known for its unusually happy community, but research has struggled to capture and understand what makes students happy.

In the Herald’s fall poll, 87.6 percent of University undergraduates reported that they were somewhat or very happy, taking all things into consideration.

These results may seem to corroborate the common trope that the University is the “happy Ivy,” but this statistic also raises questions about what actually constitutes happiness and which factors cause and explain this state of being.

Joachim Krueger, professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences, hesitated to call The Herald’s results definitive given the various ways people interpret happiness. Based on The Herald’s data, if all of the students who took the poll were placed on a scale of happiness ranging from one to five, most of them would land on the four-out-of-five, he said. So “(we) conclude that nothing seems to be obviously wrong but can’t conclude that everything is great,” especially because some students might feel pressured to

respond that they are happy or may be in denial about their own unhappiness.

But in general, the poll data suggest that a majority of students saw themselves as happy in the moment when they took The Herald’s poll.

The poll question’s wording was derived from the World Values Survey, a global research project which has been collecting data on people’s values since 1981. Along with The Herald’s data, the Princeton Review recently ranked Brown 13th out of all 385 schools on its “happiest students” 2020 ranking. These rankings are created from online student surveys comprised of both open-ended and five-point scale questions.

But defining happiness is not as easy as answering a question or ranking a school on a list. And while the meaning of happiness is widely debated in academia, happiness is a word and feeling colloquially used and unquestioningly accepted on a daily basis.

What is happiness?

In academia, researchers turn to the theories of Martin Seligman, the director of the Positive Psychology Center at Penn, to understand happiness. Seligman has suggested that happiness is born from three different feelings: positivity and satisfaction, a sense of engagement in the world and a perception of having achieved a

SEE HAPPINESS PAGE 2

UNIVERSITY NEWS

John Petrarca, U. technician, dies at 64 Family, coworkers remember Petrarca for his devotion, selflessness at work, home

BY SARAH WANG SENIOR STAFF WRITER John Petrarca Jr., who worked as a water treatment technician at the Department of Facilities Management for the past six years, passed away Sept.

24 at the age of 64.

After working at the Rhode Island Mall for over 40 years — first as a restaurant cook, then as a security guard before becoming a technician — Petrarca came to the University in 2014. Respected by his colleagues as a responsible, smart and perceptive technician, Petrarca was just as devoted to his work as he was to the

SEE PETRARCA PAGE 2

COURTESY OF CHRISTINE PETRARCA

Petrarca, known to his coworkers as “Father John,” was respected for his commitment, kind heart and willingness to help others.

Science & Research

Commentary

Commentary

University News

University lab explores thinking and language development in children Page 2

Editorial: U. should implement more nuanced proposals to address food insecurity Page 6

Brownsword ’18: U. community members should appreciate women’s soccer coach Page 7

Philosopher detailed connetions between images of brain, soul.

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TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2019

science, and both her research and personal experience at Brown have led her to an understanding of happiness as a feeling and as a cultural phenomenon. Researchers can describe what makes people happy, but studies are lacking when it comes to understanding the specific demographic of undergraduate students, Peltz said. This makes it difficult to explain exactly why The Herald’s poll data found almost 90 percent of students to be happy or explain why Brown is widely known as a happy place.

To promote and understand happiness among students, academic institutions like Brown should consider happiness when structuring school environments and designing policies, Peltz said.

SARAH MARTINEZ / HERALD

HAPPINESS FROM PAGE 1 meaningful life.

From a philosophical perspective, the idea of happiness can be equated with someone’s well-being, said Bernard Reginster, professor of philosophy.

Reginster has co-taught CLPS 0710: “The Psychology and Philosophy of Happiness.” But well-being can also be compromised in the pursuit of happiness and a morally “good life” because someone’s achievements or pursuits may benefit others but come at the expense of their own well-being.

Potential indicators of happiness can include students’ social lives and whether they have someone in their lives that they can confide in. Indicators of and contributors to unhappiness include the level of stress students experience and feelings of boredom or pain, Kreuger said. He has also taught CLPS 0710 with Reginster.

The modern world challenges gener-

PETRARCA FROM PAGE 1 people who worked alongside him. He was known as “Father John” by his coworkers.

“He was somebody who was solid, who you could always go to for advice,” said Thomas Demanche P’20, chief engineer at facilities management. “He would always speak his mind and tell you what he thinks, and he was pretty much always right.”

Jean-Pierre Fortin, who works as a water treatment technician at the University, said he “hit it off perfect” with Petrarca five years ago when they began working together.

“He had an infectious smile about him, an attitude that if you started talking to him, you just felt like he was your best friend instantly,” Fortin said, adding that the positive energy Petrarca brought into the workplace turned rough days into ones that ended with jokes and laughter. “He was probably the best coworker I’ve ever worked with in my life.”

Dependable and unselfish, Petrarca was the kind of person “who did it for you before you could do it for him,” Fortin said. Fortin recalled a time when he told Petrarca he had to go to a certain building to move a piece of equipment.

Petrarca, eager to help, told Fortin to call him when he arrived at the building so that he could lend a hand. But just as Fortin entered the building and reached for his phone, he realized that Petrarca had already quietly done the job for him.

al happiness in several ways. Research has suggested that social media may adversely affect happiness by limiting interpersonal contact, Krueger added.

And innate human characteristics limit people’s overall ability to be happy because human bodies are not evolutionarily developed to be content in today’s world, Reginster said.

“Psychologically, we are not well suited to live in the conditions in which we now live, and so that makes the prospect of our achieving happiness dimmer,” Reginster added. Humans still have the same desires that they had in ancient times — such as for fatty foods, now unhealthy in excess — but life today requires people to fight these tendencies in a way that reduces happiness.

In some ways, happiness can also be viewed as a cultural value, said psychologist and Director of Counseling and Psychological Services Will Meek.

But “from a psychologist and psycho-

therapist perspective … when people can live as much of their true identity and self in a validating and healthy environment, that fosters happiness,” Meek added. And promoting diversity and acceptance further allows people to live in accordance with their values, which consequently enables people to live happier.

“He was the person that knew so much about everything,” said Petrarca’s wife, Christine. “He could fix anything, he could troubleshoot anything. Anything that I needed, his friends needed, his family needed, he was that guy.”

Before their marriage 39 years ago, the two dated for five years. “Loud and fast” and into cars, Petrarca was the complete opposite of Christine Petrarca, but she loved him for being a “gentle giant with a big heart,” a side to him that she said became stronger with age.

A lifelong lover of cars, Petrarca was often found by his wife tinkering away at a car in the garage of their home that they built together. Years ago, he purchased a 1969 Chevrolet Camaro Z28, an exact duplicate to the one he owned in high school. Petrarca also took great pride in his 1964 Corvette Coupe, which he patiently restored over the course of 10 years. He also loved to help his friends with their own cars, whether that be by assisting them in finding spare parts or fixing a broken headlight.

Petrarca also held a passion for all genres of music. “Music was around him all the time,” Christine Petrarca said. Some of his favorite artists were The Beach Boys, Grand Funk Railroad, James Taylor and Steely Dan. He and his wife would often play their CDs while sharing a few drinks — a pastime they called “garage drinking,” which was well-known by friends, Christine Petrarca said.

Petrarca was also a loyal family man with a deep commitment to his friends,

wife and two children. “He had friends that he still was friends with since elementary school,” Christine Petrarca said. “His friends and his family were everything to him. That was his legacy.”

When his daughter and son were just children, he constantly played games with them and was sure to attend each one of their parent-teacher conferences until high school. Christine Petrarca said that nothing was more important to him than being involved with his kids’ lives and assuring them that he would always be a source of support and help.

Out of the countless memories she has of Petrarca’s considerate nature, Christine Petrarca said the compassion he showed when her brother passed away in 2015 will stay with her forever.

When everyone was told to leave the room as her brother was taken off life support, Petrarca stayed, stroking his face and reminiscing on their shared memories in the final moments. That selfless act made Christine Petrarca love her husband even more, “if that was even possible,” she said.

Friends and family of Petrarca hope to continue his legacy of kindness by hosting an annual car show fundraiser event, which will give local high school students scholarship money in Petrarca’s name. Petrarca will be remembered as a warm-hearted individual who prioritized the needs of others above his own.

“We used to call him Father John because he was like a dad,” Demanche said. “Now I call him Saint John.”

Understanding happiness at Brown The Princeton Review report illustrates how Brown’s campus nurtures unique identities in a way that helps create Brown’s reputation as the “happy Ivy.” In the report, Brown students said that their peers are “constantly questioning what could make the world and our school a better place” and have “their own interests and (pursue them) without any push from others.”

Kiera Peltz ’16 graduated with an independent concentration in happiness and a concentration in political

Limitations to polling on happiness Even small details of the environment in which a poll like The Herald’s is administered can greatly affect how students respond to questions about their happiness. For example, in studies assessing life satisfaction on a scale of one to ten, sunlight can elevate someone’s reported level of satisfaction by two levels, Reginster said.

While there are many ways to measure happiness — such as through reflection on past memories — some of these methods can actually have an adverse effect on subjects, making them unhappy. If you measure the same person’s happiness in different ways, the results could be different, Krueger said.

“We live in a country that prioritizes individual happiness … My research suggests that there’s a lot of components of happiness that are out of our control,” Peltz said. “Not being happy is not a personal failure, and I think, for both the Brown community and larger American society, if people realize that sometimes their unhappiness isn’t caused by themselves, they can actually be a lot happier and a lot more open in terms of that unhappiness.”

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS

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UNIVERSITY NEWS

Philosopher describes relationship between mind, brain, soul James Madden discusses conflict between theology, neuroscience

BY WILL KUBZANSKY STAFF WRITER Images of the brain are in essence images of the soul, argued Professor James Madden of Benedictine College in an interdisciplinary talk titled “Can You Take a Picture of The Soul?” Monday night.

Madden, who spoke in front of a small crowd of undergraduates, graduates and other community members in the Petteruti Lounge of the Stephen Robert ’62 campus center, described the relationship between neuroscience and religious philosophy and also touched on biology, artificial intelligence and other philosophical constructs during his lecture.

Madden began the discussion by referencing the commonly placed photos of brains in the front of neuroscience textbooks, often accompanied by captions labeling them as human minds. He used this example as a jumping off point to discuss the differences between the mind, the soul and the brain, entities that are often assumed to be synonomous.

Madden defined the mind as being a “collection of mental states,” while he referred to the brain as essentially “just impulses moving along membranes that have nothing to do with the content of mental states.”

He then expanded on the nuances between minds and souls. “There’s more than one true story to be told about the human being and her thinking. Having a human soul is not the very same thing as having a mind. One can have a human soul while failing to have a mind at all,” he said.

Connecting the discussion back to its central question, Madden ultimately concluded that while all photos of a living being capture its soul, philosophers — Aristotle included — have held the belief that the soul is most

SALARIES FROM PAGE 1 in 2019. He said that while Brown’s salaries allow most head coaches to be relatively comfortable, lower budgets for assistant coaches can present challenges for various programs, including his own. He noted that multiple assistant coach candidates declined job offers at least partly for financial reasons during his time at Brown. When Tiffany left for Virginia, his assistant coaches Kip Turner and Sean Kirwan followed him for significant improvements in salary, he added. Turner and Kirwan did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

“I do remember some clamoring among coaches about how to entice really top-quality assistant coaches,” he said.

Tiffany, on the other hand, did not take the position at Virginia because of a difference in pay. He said his departure from his alma mater was “emotionally difficult,” but receiving an offer from the Atlantic Coast Conference powerhouse was “almost a non-decision.”

Coaching salaries depend heavily on

VICTORIA YIN / HERALD

Professor of Philosophy at Benedictine University James Madden spoke at a lecture titled “Can You Take a Picture of The Soul” Monday night. distinctly located in the brain.

“As neuroscientists become more adept at producing functional neuroimages, they are rendering images of the human soul and giving us insights into our nature,” he said at the close of his lecture.

The idea that non-living beings may have souls, such as artificial intelligence, also came up during the question and answer session following the lecture. Madden did not explicitly deny this possibility.

“If it were self-maintaining, if it had capacities that were divergent, I’m not betting on it, but I won’t rule it out a priori,” he said, adding that the bar for AI or “biological robots” having a soul was high but not im-

possible to reach.

The University’s chapter of the Thomistic Institute, which aims to promote Catholic thought through the lens of Saint Thomas Aquinas, organized Madden’s talk, which was one of a number of lectures the institute hosted this semester. Madden also lectured at the University’s chapter of the Thomistic Institute in 2017 on a similar subject. Benedictine, where Madden teaches, is a Catholic liberal arts college in Kansas.

Louis Gularte GS, who helped organize Madden’s lecture, said that the Thomistic Institute was looking for “life-relevant ideas” that connected with “scientifically interested undergrads.”

the Athletic Department’s fundraising and revenue, Hayes wrote. According to the EADA report, Ivy League schools do not profit from athletics, meaning that their athletic department’s total expenses, including coaching salaries, must match the department’s total revenue. Brown athletics rank last in the Ivy League in total revenue, generating 19 percent less income than the next-lowest school, Cornell, and 52 percent less than the highest-grossing school, Yale.

Of this revenue, Brown spent over 15 percent on its head coaching salaries — the second-highest proportion in the Ivy League, ranked only behind Princeton.

“Investing in coaches is critical,” Hayes wrote. “We want to attract coaches who are great teachers and motivators and then provide them with the resources to develop successful programs.”

“When it comes to coaching salaries, our primary goal at Brown is not to outrank other institutions simply for the sake of comparison,” wrote Assistant Vice President for News and

Editorial Development Brian Clark in a statement to The Herald. “Our goal is to invest in attracting, retaining and supporting the development of talented, high-achieving coaches who field winning teams, serve as teachers, mentors and community leaders, and ensure rewarding experiences for all of our student-athletes.”

Despite his concerns, Tiffany expressed optimism about the future of Brown athletics. Facilities have improved drastically in a short time frame, he said, suggesting that increases in coaching salaries might follow.

“Upon my departure, so much changed — it was almost as if Ruth Simmons had spent the first few years of her tenure raising money and creating a plan and then attacked,” he said.

“Maybe when we do get to a point where we feel like most of the Athletic Department facilities are top-notch and up to par, then maybe further fundraising efforts could move toward salary enhancement.”

“The soul sounds like this very mysterious thing, but on the Thomistic, Catholic view of the soul, it has the capacity to be more science-friendly than people expect,” Gularte said.

Maria Koenig, a first year student from the Rhode Island School of Design, said that the lecture’s intersectionality attracted her to the event. “It’s a novel concept,” she said. “Neuroscience is data-based and factual, while philosophy is very faith-based.”

Gularte also praised Madden’s lecturing style for its accessibility. “He likes answering questions, he doesn’t talk down to people. He’s ready to unroll his ideas,” he said.

Madden said that his work interacts with other disciplines, specifi-

cally neuroscience and psychology, on a daily basis. He hopes that the Catholic Church will begin to factor the world of science further into its vernacular.

“Catholicism is this idea that faith and reason are compatible,” he said.

“The science most relevant to claims that we make on behalf of the faith on human nature is neuroscience.”

To Catholic neuroscience concentrators concerned about the theology of their study, Madden had simple advice: be patient.

Madden told students: “You don’t have to sort all this out today. First and foremost, be a good neuroscientist. Then, start reading the tradition.”

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2019

SCIENCE & RESEARCH

In U. language lab, researchers explore children’s thinking, speech

COURTESY OF ROMAN FEIMAN

Eight undergraduate students and one graduate student are currently working in the Brown Language and Thought Lab under director Roman Feiman. The lab is interested in examining how children’s development of thought processes relates to linguistic development.

Researchers examine linguistic development, focus on different age groups

BY PREETI GANESH STAFF WRITER In an attempt to decipher how children acquire language, the recently founded Brown Language and Thought Lab is exploring how people form thoughts and linguistic expression from infancy to adulthood.

“We’re interested in how we learn to be able to put different concepts together into longer, more structured thoughts and how we learn to put different words together into longer, more structured sentences and what those two abilities have to do with each other,” said Roman Feiman, the director of the lab and assistant professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences.

When asked why he chose to come to the University, Feiman said that “we have psychology, cognitive science and linguistics living together in one department,” which sets it apart from other institutions. With this structure, Feiman said his work sits “right at the intersection at a lot of different interests in this department.”

The lab currently has eight undergraduate students and one graduate

student, all of whom are working on different projects. Among its many investigations, the lab is asking: “What is a structured thought like for an infant?” “What can infants do before they learn any language?” And, “What happens with kids when they learn a new language?”

The lab is currently recruiting children for their studies, said Jennifer Hernandez-Pina ’21, one of the undergraduates working in the lab who takes an interest in both developmental and abnormal psychology.

“In development, we’re interested in whether learning your first language actually gives you some sort of new ability to put thoughts together in a way that you couldn’t before, or whether it’s merely a way to express the kinds of thoughts you already were able to think,” Feiman said.

“Just because they start to say a word at one point doesn’t mean they understand it at that (same) point,” Feiman said. One of the projects the lab is currently working on is looking at how children acquire abstract words like “no” and “not,” he added.“The reason these words are interesting is because they mean things that you can’t point to.”

In the experiment to examine that question, researchers showed children a ball and two containers, a bucket and a truck, and put a screen in front of the containers so the child could not see them anymore. They then lowered

the ball behind the screen and placed it in one of the containers. They told the children which container the ball was in, saying either that the ball “is” within a specific container or it “is not” within a specific container. With this phrase, they were testing to see whether children could process the word “not.”

“What we’re testing for here is something called disjunctive syllogism, specifically if infants can reason about this concept of ‘no’ or ‘not’ without language,” said Heather Tarr, the lab manager, who came to the University one month after Feiman and is interested in developmental psychology, intuitive physics and ideas of effort. The lab mainly experiments with “monolingual” and “neurotypical developing kids,” Tarr said. “If you know the baseline, you can account for anyone that’s behind.”

The lab allows for open discussion, collaboration and ample room to propose independent projects, said Kelsie Lopez ’20, one of the thesis students of the lab. “We have lab meetings, and if you need feedback on a study, everyone’s always willing to help out.”

Beyond the culture of the lab, the methodology for research studies varies on a case-by-case basis, although the lab does conduct preliminary research to develop the questions they ask the children. “There’s a lot of things that could affect the answer you get to the question that you’re asking,” Tarr said,

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such as the “order of words that you say” or the “type of (word) stem” used.

One of the difficulties of working with children is that they need to be able to follow instructions before and throughout an experiment. In the case of the bucket/truck study, the children would have to “get up, walk over to this bucket, look inside it, leave their parent with whom they’re feeling secure and walk toward this experimenter who is a stranger,” Feiman said. All of these variables indicate that “kids would actually be able to reason by exclusion even earlier if (the task) didn’t require all these other demands.”

To deal with the potential issues that may arise from problems unique to young children, the lab programmed a similar version of the study as an iPad game for children to play to eliminate most of the interactions with an unfamiliar researcher.

Along the same technological lines, the lab is currently partnering with the computer science department to develop videos for their experiments. In addition, the two departments are collaborating on a “machine version” of the experiment that tests the same questions with a language learning computer algorithm, Feiman said.

The lab’s research has potential applications in a variety of educational settings. It is important to “understand which words are harder for kids to learn” in order to inform educators

about how to identify typical developmental trends and help them explain difficult concepts to children.

The lab also includes adult participants to compare their language acquisition to children’s. Some of the research conducted with adults involves “trying to understand what other words you need to know in order to learn the words that you learn later,” Feiman said.

“Language acquisition and word learning, in particular, is sort of contingent on what words you’ve already learned,” Feiman added. The lab examines the extent to which adults can use context to decipher the meaning of a word being used. “If they can’t guess that, you might imagine it would be really hard for kids to do the same,” Feiman said.

Additionally, there is a large body of work surrounding implicit meanings, which is “something that adults really understand but kids don’t,”and the lab is currently trying to “uncover a little bit more of the mechanisms there,” Lopez said.

“The part of the mind that we’re interested in understanding is the part that is I think one of the coolest features of being a human,” Feiman said.

“You can think new things very easily, very productively that no one has ever thought before. …We’re not trying to find a cure for anything or an intervention. We’re really trying to understand how the mind works.”

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2019

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The Swedish Program Information Session 4:00 P.M. Page-Robinson Hall

Paper Worlds of Native Voices exhibition opening 4:00 P.M. John Carter Brown Library

“Ghost in the Race Machine” Lecture by Prof. Terence 5:00 P.M. Pembroke Hall

Women’s Basketball vs Bryant University 7:00 P.M. Pizzitola Sports Center

TOMORROW East Asia Colloquium 12:00 P.M. List Arts Center

Lunch Talk with MissBeHelpful (Yanely Espinal ’11) 12:00 P.M. U-Fli Center

Education Resource Strategies Information Session 4:00 P.M. CareerLAB

Audition for MF’s Concert Musical: Gone Missing 7:00 P.M. Friedman Hall

Q U OTE OF TH E DAY

“We used to call him Father John because he was like a dad. Now I call him Saint John.”

— Thomas Demanche P’20 SEE PETRARCA PAGE 1

R I NG I NG IN T H E F I RST SN OW

CR O S SWO R D

REBECCA HO / HERALD

Bells chime on College Hill, ringing in the mid-semester season. Flecks of fall color fill the scenery, but this week’s forecast of snow reminds Providence residents of the winter wonderland to come.

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | COMMENTARY

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2019

VICTORIA YIN / HERALD

Kimberlé Crenshaw, who is known for coining the term intersectionality and for developing Critical Race Theory, spoke about her history of advocacy in a lecture Monday night.

CRENSHAW FROM PAGE 1 civil rights advocacy and activism.

Crenshaw is a law professor at the University of California Los Angeles and Columbia Law School and an acclaimed lawyer best known for developing Critical Race Theory and the term intersectionality. In her lecture, she spoke on a variety of topics such as affirmative action and racism in higher education, in addition to her role in beginning the #SayHerName movement.

Crenshaw said that the systems of higher education were not built to allow students to voice critical opinions about either the status quo or the role of race in disciplinary systems.

She emphasized how the integration of higher education systems was not necessarily intended to benefit students of color. “Diversity was good for the university, and for the students whose worldview would be broadened by exposure to others,” Crenshaw said.

She also spoke about how activism against police brutality has organized more frequently around the deaths of the black men while ignoring the black women also killed by the police.

She started the hashtag #SayHerName in February 2015 to raise awareness about the women who have been murdered by police.“The fact remains that black women and girls have been killed by police at disproportionate rates,” Crenshaw said. “Only one in 10 American women are black but

three in 10 American women killed by police are black.”

Crenshaw’s speech was organized and hosted by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, the Department of Africana Studies/Rites and Reason Theatre and the Petey Greene Program as the keynote lecture of the “50 Years Since 1968” initiative.

The year of commemorative programming “reflect(ed) on the meaning and significance of that remarkable year and examines the state of the world a half-century later,” according to the Department of Africana Studies website. The initiative was meant to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the walkout by black University students and their allies to protest “the small number of black faculty and the ab-

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sence of a black studies curriculum,” according to the Department of Africana Studies website. Previous events included a film screening, a digital gallery and the AFRI 1968: “A Year in Review” course. Crenshaw’s speech was delayed until this month because it took more time to organize.

Celeste Kelly ’22 decided to attend Crenshaw’s keynote lecture after hearing her speak previously at a diversity conference. “Those challenges and struggles have really been shaping my experience (at Brown),” Kelly said.

“I came to this (talk) to seek an outlet from that and hear from somebody who I guess sees life through a similar lens.”

Providence community member Anders Lindgren attended the lecture

after hearing about it from a member of an anti-racism and pedagogy group to which he belongs.

“It was very motivational,” Lindgren said. He was especially struck by her account of a civil rights lawyer who, while sharing some of Crenshaw’s political beliefs, opposed Crenshaw’s attempt to organize a constitutional law and minority issues course at Harvard in the 1980s.

“I really enjoy her reflections on the different ways in which people who used to be standard-bearers can become obstacles, and I think that was very powerful, hearing about her own activism and Harvard Law School and fighting some of the people who used to be her idols.”

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TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2019

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | COMMENTARY

7

U. community must not take Kia McNeil for granted

BY MATT BROWNSWORD ’18 OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

For those remaining Brown University sports fans — and I know how few of us there have been over the years — please don’t take women’s head soccer coach Kia McNeil for granted.

After former women’s head soccer coach Phil Pincince, an Ivy League legend, announced his retirement ahead of the 2015 season, Brown went through an exhaustive head coaching search, interviewing 115 candidates. They eventually settled on a rising star in McNeil, who had national success at both her alma mater Boston College — as a player and a coach — and Northeastern, two forces in New England collegiate athletics.

Over the four years since her first season at Brown, McNeil has kept Brown competitive in the Ivy League every season and her teams have never dipped below .500 overall. Going 4-1-2 in conference play, McNeil took a team she didn’t recruit and finished second in the league. What was evident and impressive even then was the mindset from the players in the transition to their new head coach. At a school where 30 percent of recruited athletes quit their respective sports, only one underclassman from Pincince’s last team did not make it to McNeil’s inaugural season.

In 2016, McNeil spoke of aspirations to recruit players across the world with the simple pitch of an athletic experience combined with an Ivy League degree. And while she has not reached other continents quite yet, this year’s team features recruits from 13 states and Puer-

favorite sport is, chances are Brown just has not been good at it recently. Whether it be from lack of investment or community apathy toward Brown sports, what used to be a competitive Ivy League athletic program has fallen behind.

The men’s lacrosse teams in 2015 and 2016

“For those remaining Brown University sports fans — and I know how few of us there have been over the years — please don’t take women’s head soccer coach Kia McNeil for granted.”

to Rico.

And even when half of the stadium seating is unusable, the crowd and energy at Brown’s 1-0 win over Penn was palpable from over the TV screen. That type of buzz for Brown sports is rare, but it is usually correlated with success.

In my four years at the University, from 2014 to 2018, I saw exactly one team I followed — men’s lacrosse — win an Ivy League conference championship. But, no matter what your

were transcendent: With recruits that went on to play professionally, Brown won the Ivy League in back-to-back years, made its first ever NCAA semifinal and played incredibly in front of a national audience. The school invested in our lacrosse and soccer fields, which Lars Tiffany ’90, men’s lacrosse head coach at the time, lauded as a critical piece of the program’s ability to “compete at the highest level.” But when the University of Virginia came for Tiffany,

Brown University just was not able to keep the coach that had brought us our first conference title since 1995.

And as the 2016 men’s lacrosse team was gearing toward a chase for back-to-back conference championships, McNeil was interviewed in The Herald and had the same mindset: an Ivy League championship.

“They’ve won 12 Ivy League championships; I’d love to get us to lucky number 13,” McNeil said at the time.

After 6 games undefeated in 2019, McNeil, Brown, and the first-years-now-seniors she coached in 2016 have their first taste of Ivy League glory. In fact, it’s the women’s soccer team’s first conference championship in 25 years. They will now be playing for a national championship. There’s truly nothing in Brown athletics quite like the atmosphere of a playoff game. When I was at Brown, we did not get many.

So whichever Brown University sports fan you are — player, coach, student, alumni, administrator — just please don’t take it for granted.

Matt Brownsword ’18 can be reached at matthew_brownsword@alumni.brown.edu.

Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

The lifelong joy of the Open Curriculum To the Editor: As a former Brown transfer student and current staff member, I may be one of the few people on campus who spent half my undergraduate years at another university with a strict core curriculum, and half my years at Brown. As such, I feel compelled to respond to Galen Hall’s question, “Is the Open Curriculum a failed experiment?”

While it’s true that a shared core curriculum can serve as a conversation-starter, in my experience, that conversation was often mutual commiseration. In my core classes, students tended to drag themselves through the process of completing requirements, waiting until they could finally study what they really wanted.

In contrast, when I arrived at Brown as a transfer student, I was stunned by the enthusiasm and energy with which Brown students described their classes. Students loved their classes; they were bubbling over with excitement to discuss their studies, even in the dorms at night. Allowing students to follow their own passions resulted in intellectual agency, joy and a love of learning that I had not observed at my first university. It was that shared feeling of intellectual engagement — and not specific subject matter — that created the communal experience at Brown.

Twenty-five years later, I see how cultivating the courage to explore still benefits my Brown classmates. My housemate, who invented his own concentration in “altered states of consciousness,” is now a physician/scientist and director of substance use research at the San Francisco Department of Public Health. My roommate, who worked in publishing after Brown but wanted out of the punishing hours after having a baby, started one of the first literary agencies in the country that allowed staff to work flexible hours while also caring for their families. Another friend became a teacher, but always cared more about how her students felt than whether they knew the content: she earned her PhD in her 40s and recently became the therapist she always wanted to be.

And somehow, 25 years after walking out of the Van Wickle Gates, I find myself celebrating my 5-year anniversary on Brown’s staff. I have a hunch it’s the joy, collaboration and love of learning that I experienced as a Brown student and now feel on campus every day — and not my years of deconstructing the Western canon — that make me love my job.

Katie Silberman ’94 Associate Director of Community Relations, Brown Office of Government & Community Relations

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8

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2019

EDITORIAL

University must improve strategies for fighting food insecurity In June, the University announced a revision to the undergraduate student meal plan in an ongoing effort to lessen food insecurity on campus. The update ushered in a handful of adjustments, most notably a requirement that all sophomore students must enroll in either of the two most expensive meal plan options offered to undergraduates. The new policy sparked controversy among students who felt forced to pay unfairly high prices for a meal plan. Disapproval of the University’s meal plan system remains strong today, as The Herald Fall 2019 poll found that 62.9 percent of students feel either somewhat or very dissatisfied with meal plan options.

As noted by the University in its original announcement on the meal plan change, 28 percent of surveyed undergraduates reported experiencing food insecurity in a three-month span. The trend is not limited to Brown. Recent studies show that 41 percent of four-year college students experience food insecurity.

While the University’s effort to mitigate food insecurity is important and relevant, large changes that affect an entire class of students are generally impersonal.

They present additional financial strain to low-income students and fail to address the root causes of the issue. In light of this national trend and recent attention toward the problem at Brown, the University should do a better job to improve its strategies to combat food insecurity.

With a matter as complex as food insecurity, a policy that impacts the entire sophomore class does not recognize the vast diversity of socioeconomic backgrounds at Brown. Making sure every student has consistent and stable access to food is not as simple as requiring students to purchase a meal plan. The University should know this already; a working group dedicated to studying food insecurity on campus found that many students cited finances, limited time to shop for groceries and a lack of access to adequate cooking facilities as factors contributing to their insecurity. While meals will now be provided at no additional cost to students on meal plan over Spring Break,

the changes to the meal plan system largely fail to address any of the working group’s concerns directly.

Ultimately, the University should consider circulating another survey among undergraduate students to understand the factors that contribute to their food insecurity. The results of such a survey could inform the University’s ability to expand upon the nutrition-related policies it has introduced recently.

For example, barriers such as time or transportation might make it difficult for students to grocery shop adequately. To mitigate this, Brown has expanded OnCall shuttle service to East Side Marketplace, Stop & Shop and Walmart. We welcome this change, but other efforts from the University do not sufficiently recognize the complex barriers that facilitate food insecurity among students. For instance, earlier this year students learned that they could receive discounts on the grocery delivery service Peapod. But the service requires students to spend a minimum of $60 on their groceries to qualify for delivery, making it financially inaccessible for many. In that vein, the University could do more to develop new policies and initiatives that truly understand the circumstances that many of its students regularly face.

In addition to working on improving policy internally, the University should look to other institutions to see the strategies they have implemented to strengthen food security. It is common to see students advertising free food on Facebook pages affiliated with Brown, and student groups place end-of-the-semester donation boxes outside of campus eateries where individuals can drop off non-perishable items. However, both students and the University could make a stronger impact by adding structure to these philanthropic efforts. For example, Swipe Out Hunger is a nonprofit organization that partners with colleges across the United States in an effort to address food insecurity.

Its primary initiative is a “swipe drive,” in which students with extra meal swipes can donate their swipes to students with demonstrated need. Since its founding in 2010, the organization has partnered with over

80 colleges, including Cornell and Penn. The University should look into a potential partnership with an organization such as Swipe Out Hunger. Such a program could be a viable avenue for providing extra resources to students who need them and allowing their peers to make valuable use of unused swipes.

Brown could also consider establishing a campus pantry, where students have access to necessary food items at no additional cost. The pantry’s food would be supplied in part through donations and in part through University funds. The concept is widespread across colleges, which include but are not limited to the University of Arizona and the University of Maryland. By focusing on efforts that provide students with additional food resources, Brown could have an immediate impact on campus-wide food security without placing additional financial strain on students.

The administration at Brown has recognized that food insecurity exists on its campus and has made efforts to improve the situation for students. But these efforts seem misguided by inadvertently causing many students to feel stress rather than relief. To strengthen food security at Brown in a way that is sustainable and nonrestrictive, the University should delve deeper into the issue to fully recognize the complicated factors that can lead a student to experience food insecurity.

In doing so, the University will be better positioned to implement effectual solutions that can aid a wider pool of students on campus. Most crucially, however, students who face this problem will feel heard and will be primed to thrive in their academic experience at Brown.

Editorials are written by The Herald’s editorial page board: its editors, Grace Layer ’20 and Krista Stapleford ’21, and its members, Dylan Tian ’21, Jonathan Douglas ’20, and Riley Pestorius ’21.

Send comments to editorials@browndailyherald. com. Send comments to editorials@browndailyherald.com.