SINCE 1891
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2019
VOLUME CLIV, ISSUE 61
BROWNDAILYHERALD.COM
ARTS AND CULTURE
UNIVERSITY NEWS
A decade of smartphones on campus
Movement for fossil fuel divestment quiet on campus
Changes in communication, dating driven by appbased technology BY REBECCA CARCIERI, CHANIKARN KOVAVISARACH, CLAIRE LIU, NICK MICHAEL AND ELISE RYAN STAFF WRITERS AND ARTS AND CULTURE EDITOR
To get a ride downtown, you call the taxi dispatcher. To find a date, you sit at a bar. To share the details of your weekend, you call a friend. In 2007, this was life on a college campus. But halfway through that year, the release of the first iPhone heralded a seismic cultural shift that no one anticipated. In September, a Brown Daily Herald article titled “Despite devotees,
iPhone reception weak” announced the smartphone’s introduction to campus. “I get the impression (the iPhone) will be a big Christmas thing,” Benjamin Schnapp ’07 MD ’11, an Apple store employee at the time, told The Herald. “I’ll come back for second semester, and a couple more people will have them.” One year after The Herald’s story on the iPhone, Brown introduced Wifi for iPhone users. Now in its twelfth iteration, the iPhone and other smartphones rule life on campus — and wifi can be accessed everywhere, on every device. Over the last decade, students on campus saw the world shrink to the palm of their hand, as new technologies transformed life at Brown and far beyond. Congratulations! You have a new match! When Danielle Marshak ’13, a former Herald General Manager, was a senior, mysterious advertisements popped up
WINTER ISSUE
A LOOK AT THE LAST DECADE
Campus activists nationwide call for divestment, U. students pursue other measures BY OLIVIA BURDETTE SENIOR STAFF WRITER SUMMER ZHANG / HERALD
around campus. “These stickers started showing up on the elevators in the (Sciences Library). The elevator door would close and you would get a glimpse,” she said. “I remember being like, ‘what is Tinder?’” Since then, dating apps have infiltrated college campuses, and Brown is
SEE APPS PAGE 2
In stark contrast to the calls for fossil fuel divestment that are dominating college campuses nationwide, there is little unrest on Brown’s campus over the University’s holdings in fossil fuel companies. Brown has had a complicated history with fossil fuel divestment. Students spent three years advocating for divestment from coal then fossil fuels, but the administration dismissed these proposals in 2013. In a Dec. 2 interview with The Herald, President Christina Paxson P’19 reiterated her support for the University’s investments in fossil fuel companies. On the other hand, some students and faculty have begun to consider remounting a divestment campaign. The Herald explored the way climate justice has manifested on Brown’s campus over the last decade, beginning with a campus-wide movement to divest the University from coal in 2012.
SUMMER ZHANG / HERALD
The first calls for fossil fuel divestment When Brown Divest Coal Campaign began organizing at the University in 2012, the group gained traction quickly. They demanded that the University sever its financial ties with coal companies, who were at the time the “single largest source of global carbon dioxide emissions,” according to an op-ed penned by the group. Within the campaign’s first weeks, the group had garnered over 1,200 signatures of support on a petition and had over 60 volunteers. “I don’t remember a single opposing voice from the student body,” said Nathan Bishop ’13, one of Divest Coal’s core organizers. “I think everyone saw it as a pretty clear-cut issue.” “It was one of those cool moments at Brown where it was like, ‘Wow, these kids really want to get stuff done,’” said Dawn King, director of undergraduate studies for the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, who supported the student organizers during the first push for divestment. “There were hundreds of students behind it. They were at the (Urban Environmental Laboratory) making posters every night, having meetings every night and they took it incredibly seriously.” Divest Coal presented their argument to the Advisory Committee on Corporate
SEE DIVEST PAGE 5
UNIVERSITY NEWS
METRO
Brown Immigrant Rights Coalition: A decade in review
Food chains dominate Thayer St. evolution
BIRC builds legacy supporting undocumented, immigrant students BY CAELYN PENDER AND MAI NEWBURY STAFF WRITERS Founded in 2009, the Brown Immigrant Rights Coalition has spent the last decade leading student efforts to advocate for progress on issues such as the passage of the DREAM Act and the University’s accessibility for undocumented students. With the arrival of its tenth anniversary at the end of this year, alums and current BIRC members reflected on the organization’s evolution and its legacy in enacting change within the University, all while striving to honor the values of its founder Tam Tran GS, who passed away in a car accident in
2010. The founding Alongside VyVy Trinh ’11 MD’17, Tran founded BIRC to advocate for the rights of immigrant and undocumented students on campus and nationwide. BIRC was built upon the idea that “no human being is illegal,” and it demands “justice and equality for all humans irrespective of immigration status, gender, sexuality, economic status, race or other forms of oppression,” according to its official mission statement. Trinh, whose family came to the U.S. as refugees from Vietnam, wanted to lead BIRC because she had been interested in issues of social justice, racism and inequality from a young age. “In the U.S. this intersects with immigration in painfully obvious ways,” Trinh said, adding that growing up in an immigrant family also influenced her decision to lead the group. Prior to BIRC’s creation, students
SEE IMMIGRATION PAGE 15
U. real estate, global commercial trends contribute to transformation BY ISABEL INADOMI SENIOR STAFF WRITER Lois Hollingsworth owned Zuzu’s Petals, a dress boutique on Thayer Street, for 24 years. But in 2015, she chose to shutter her store because of what she described as a drastic change in Thayer’s character. “People came to Thayer Street because it was interesting, and it really had something for everybody,” she said. “It was such an eclectic street; it was really and truly a destination.” Now home to a Chase Bank and international chains such as Shake Shack and By CHLOE, Thayer Street has shifted away from the unique collection of independent retailers that it once was. A skate shop, record store, comic book shop and a small grocery store used to be staples on the street, recalled Ann Dusseault,
Arts & Culture
Metro
Commentary
Derbies’ cover of “Happier” earns spot on top 20 list of collegiate a capella songs Page 2
Gotham Greens opens new hydroponic greenhouse in downtown Providence Page 3
Ren ’23: Generational biases contribute to differences in views on modern music Page 7
COURTESY OF BLOGDAILYHERALD
Over the past decade, Thayer Street has evolved from an eclectic shopping district to a restaurant and chain-filled strip. owner of Pie In The Sky, a gift shop that has been open on Thayer for 26 years. Before Thayer’s original Baja’s Taqueria opened its doors in 2008, its space was home to Spike’s Junkyard Dogs, a cheap hot dog place which had walls covered with Polaroids of customers who had completed its six hot dog challenge. There was also College Hill Bookstore, a more affordable alternative to the Brown
Bookstore that closed in 2004, and Thayer Street Market, CVS’ predecessor at 291 Thayer. Just over last summer, Tealuxe, The Threading Place, Denali and GNC Live Well all closed. “It was more of a balance, years ago,” Dusseault said of the street. “Mostly it’s gone from retail to food.”
SEE THAYER PAGE 3
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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2019
ARTS AND CULTURE
Brown Derbies earn spot in 2020 Best of College A Cappella album Derbies become first U. group to be featured on list in 20 years with cover of ‘Happier’ BY EMILY TENG SENIOR STAFF WRITER For the first time in 20 years, a University a cappella group is featured on the 2020 Best of College A Cappella album, a juried selection of student-adapted songs chosen by industry professionals. The Brown Derbies’ rendition of “Happier” by Marshmello and Bastille emerged from hundreds of submissions to land on the Varsity Vocals’ list of top 20 collegiate a cappella tracks of the year. “Receiving this recognition is really rewarding, because we know how much time and effort was put into making
APPS FROM PAGE 1 no exception. All of the dating apps common to Brown’s campus were released within the last ten years: Grindr in 2009, Tinder, Hinge and Coffee Meets Bagel in 2012, Bumble in 2014 and The League in 2015. Each purports to help people find their “perfect match” from the comfort of their own phone. The majority of Tinder’s users are under the age of 25, according to the company’s end of 2019 press release. And these apps have become platforms for conversations that extend beyond dates and love. In 2019, the most popularly discussed topics on Tinder ranged from political figures like Elizabeth Warren and Greta Thunberg, to artists like Billie Eilish and pop-culture moments like the failed Fyre Festival. Tinder gained traction among Brown students soon after its release, serving as a test school on the East Coast for the app, according to a 2013 story in The Herald. A 2015 article in The Herald reported that students found Tinder more approachable than previous website-based platforms, like Match.com. Then, students found Tinder far less stigmatized than other dating platforms, and most had never used anything other than Tinder. Bumble, which requires women to message first in the app, has doubled the number of Brown users in the last year. In addition, the University’s users made 32 percent more first moves in 2019 compared to 2018. Bumble also provides platforms for friendship and business networking, called Bumble BFF and Bumble Bizz. “From 2018 to 2019 alone, there was a 90 percent growth in Bumble BFF users at Brown. This meaningful growth tells us that it’s been normalized for students to find friendships on campus through online tools like Bumble BFF,” a Bumble spokesperson wrote in an email to The Herald. In recent years, the app has even introduced brand ambassadors on the University’s campus, including Isabel Riches ’22, who promotes the app and organizes events.“The real life dating world has a different vibe from a dating app, but it’s just people’s preferences. (The) misconception (is that) it’s inorganic if facilitated by technology, which isn’t the case,” Riches said. But students and alums also attribute dating apps to a rise in “hookup” culture on campus. Erin Chang ’23 views dating apps as more fun than anything else. “I don’t see
this happen,” said Ben Michals ’22, the group’s music director. “I listened to BOCA albums in high school,” said Amit Chakrabarti ’21, the group’s business manager who arranged “Happier.” “BOCA is the recording Academy (Award) of a cappella.” The last time a University a cappella group was featured on a BOCA album was in 2000, when the Derbies’ rendition of “I Wanna Be Like You” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy landed in the top 20. In addition to its BOCA album, Varsity Vocals is known for hosting the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella, which Chakrabarti likened to the competition in acclaimed musical comedy “Pitch Perfect.” After releasing their EP “To Be Determined” in mid-September, the Derbies proceeded to submit all seven tracks of the album, including “Happier,” to various competitions such as Varsity Vocals.
“Our album has a theme this year — it starts with happy songs about young romance,” Chakrabarti said. The album then “evolves into … (the) complications of relationships and eventually separation and breakup. ‘Happier’ is an emotional song, but it also has really cool musical points.” Michals, who helped arrange “Happier,” said the song works well as an a cappella rendition because vocal percussion and beat-boxing can emphasize the many layers of the song. “Some songs innately work better for a cappella arranging,” Michals said. “There’s a lot of different factors that go into it. I think ‘Happier’ in particular works very well because of the build (up), which is such an essential part of creating excitement.” Through an audition process within the group, Michael Saracco ’21 was the elected soloist for the winning piece. The song “is really a collaborative effort
people getting into long term stuff from it. If it boosts your self esteem, go for it,” she said. Isaac Kianovsky ’23 agreed. “Sometimes it’s fun to look at pictures, but I don’t think there’s much to it,” he said. Beyond dating apps, social media has added a new layer of stress to students interviewed by The Herald. “A lot of people like to showcase picturesque aspects of their relationships” on social media, Alyssa Steinbaum ’23 said. “It makes it seem like they’re better than they are.” “It’s a different way to interact without seeing each other,” Tyler Jiang ’21 told The Herald. “It’s another thing to worry about.”
constricting to have to perform for an audience when you’re just going out for dinner with someone.” But Bochicchio also acknowledged that her feelings were not particularly common to other students during her time at Brown. Jeff Huang, assistant professor of computer science, suggested that these apps continued to grow popular despite their “surveillance,” as Bochicchio put it, because “in general, technology has always been pushing this dimension of convenience. Convenience almost always trumps things like privacy or other concerns.”
Pokeworks on Thayer says to pick up your order in 10 minutes. Over the decade, convenience apps like Venmo and Snackpass have exploded in popularity. Approximately 4,500 University students have used Snackpass alone to order food in the last three months, wrote Kara Peruss ’18, a Snackpass representative, in an email to The Herald. Snackpass’s University user base has increased by more than 500 percent; when the app first launched, it attracted around 800 users in the first week and a half. Vivian Van ’21 says that she uses the food ordering app two or three times a week. She appreciates the social aspect of the Snackpass app, especially the rewards feature that allows her to send sticker gifts after an order to friends “who I haven’t talked to in awhile or who are off meal plan who might want it.” Meal-sharing and finances between friends have been made more convenient by Venmo, an app that allows users to transfer money. Alexis Rodriguez ’15 remembers the app growing popular during her senior year, even though it first launched in 2009. “I remember being stressed because I used to never have cash on me. Then, the ATM would only give $20s and you had to hope you’d get your change back,” she said. Among the apps of the last decade, “the biggest ones that changed our lives were definitely Venmo, Tinder for some people, and then Uber,” Rodriguez said. To some students, the social feature of convenience apps can be “creepy,” said Sarah Bochicchio ’16. Especially with Venmo, she disliked that the transactions could be public. “I got it for a practical reason … but then it has this weird social media aspect to it. … It kind of gave me this window into the fact that all these apps are about surveillance, and it’s so
The Class of 2020 has 1 new post share. Facebook friend requests can be a prelude to lifelong college friendships, or they can function as a performative and meaningless social ritual. “We all used Facebook to get to know each other before starting,” reflected Marshak. “Actually, one of the people who is my best friend today, she and I first had connected in the (Brown Class of 2013 Facebook) Group, … and we have been really close friends ever since.” The social media platform had only existed for five years at the time. Orientation Facebook friendships have remained a tradition throughout the decade, as Rodriguez recalled a similar experience. “The first week (of school), you’d add 50 or 60 people. I remember when you would meet someone during orientation and you would exchange Facebooks,” she explained. Facebook Groups are still created for each matriculating class. Sometimes, the digitally founded connections served as beginnings to interpersonal friendships, though the friending frenzy was often fruitless. Though Instagram was released to iOS in 2010 and Android in 2012, Marshak did not make an account until after graduating. “I think Instagram now is a much more social experience, but when it first started … people were using Instagram so that they could put cool filters on photos that they wanted to share on Facebook,” she said. “I use social media mostly for scrolling, in between tasks throughout the day,” said Lauren Lee ’22. Scrolling has become a daily ritual, quietly filling every empty moment. “I also check it right after waking up and before going to sleep. Apple says I use about 40 min of it per day,” she added. Lee, who signed up for Facebook on her thirteenth birthday, sees it as a way “to talk to friends, establish a solid image of my identity, and see what other people
KEELIN LYONS / HERALD
The Derbies submitted all seven songs from their EP album, “to be determined,” to several competitions, such as Varsity Vocals. and communication between the music director, myself and the other people who are singing in the background of the piece,” Saracco said. “You are sort of all working in tandem to produce this one piece.” As the soloist, Saracco added that he tried to “really convey the emotion of the piece.”
Saracco, Chakrabarti and Michals all agreed that the close-knit community of the Derbies was a factor in the group’s success. “The friendships that we have outside of rehearsal is actually what lends itself really well to the musical cohesion we have,” Michals added.
SUMMER ZHANG / HERALD
are up to.” But others, including Sophie Nagle ’23, have found that the platforms increase the pressure of crafting a public image. “As the platforms have grown, I have felt a lot more pressure to actually post on my accounts.” “Instagram was suddenly this thing where you could cultivate a version of yourself that other people couldn’t necessarily argue with and Snapchat was this voyeuristic window into what that meant,” Bochicchio said. Social media’s rise to ubiquity has characterized the decade. As of June 2018, “75 percent of US 18-24 year olds are Instagram users,” according to the Business of Apps. But social media’s meteoric rise has finally begun to plateau and possibly evolve. In the last year or so, users have begun taking more agency over their consumption of Facebook and Instagram posts. Apple introduced Screen Time in the fall of 2018 to appease increased consumer desire for mindful technology usage. Now, Marshak uses Facebook and Instagram less than ever, setting a ten-minute timer to regulate her daily social media consumption. “When that limit comes up, sometimes I extend it, but I try to be mindful that I don’t know necessarily that it’s a super good use of my time.” Your ride will be outside in 1 minute. Running late? For students today, the answer may simply be calling an Uber or Lyft. Uber was founded in 2009 and Lyft in 2012, but the early half of the decade was dominated on campus by the “taxi dispatch.” “When I was at Brown, I didn’t have a car and I had truly traumatic taxi experiences, where the only way to get to
the airport, if you didn’t want to take the train, was to call the taxi dispatch and reserve,” said Ashley Lordon ’10, who is currently a software engineer at Lyft. In her interview with The Herald, Lordon did not represent the views of her company. In addition to Lordon, many other students and alums have gone on to pursue careers at these companies, most notably the current CEO of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi ’91. Lordon recalled the taxi dispatch as “a nightmare. … It (was) like a negotiation that’s happening live, when you need to go. I definitely missed at least one flight, because I couldn’t get a ride.” Rodriguez described a similar distressing experience calling taxis during her first year at Brown. Without ride-hailing apps, exploring the city was more difficult, Marshak said. “We knew there was this other side of Providence that had really good restaurants, but it was just a big hassle to get there.” After coming to Brown from a small town in Connecticut, Brynn McGlinchey ’23 observed a greater need for transportation apps while living on campus. “It’s different in a big city; a big part of getting around is through these apps.” In October 2018, The Herald reported that the number of total riders on RIPTA was the lowest it had been since the bus system saw an initial decline in users in 2013. At the time, Elizabeth Gentry, assistant vice president for business and financial services, said that this could potentially be attributed to the rise of ride-share apps. Download complete. “I think more than anything, the apps have brought out what has already existed in us,” Bochicchio said.
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2019
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS
METRO
THAYER FROM PAGE 1
New tech-driven greenhouse opens in downtown Providence
HENRY DAWSON / HERALD
Providence recently welcomed a new greenhouse run by hydroponic farming company Gotham Greens.
Gotham Greens expands hydroponic farming operation to New England BY HENRY DAWSON SENIOR STAFF WRITER Heads of lettuce cuddle together under a glass sky, warm in an artificial summer despite the snow and wind outside. The picturesque scene marked the opening ceremony for a new greenhouse in Providence run by a hydroponic farming company called Gotham Greens. Hydroponic farms grow plants in a mineral-rich water solution instead of soil, which can decrease water usage and increase growth of the greens. “The latest pushing-the-limit technology for greenhouses is just getting yields and quality that have never been seen before,” said Jenn Frymark, chief greenhouse officer for Gotham Greens. Providence is the first city in New England to have one of Gotham’s farms, which are already open in seven other locations nationwide. The company started with a rooftop greenhouse in Brooklyn in 2011. “We continue to feel inspired by the city, state and region’s legacy of manufacturing and local food culture,” wrote Viraj Puri, chief executive officer and co-founder of Gotham Greens. The company collaborated with Farm Fresh Rhode Island, the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management’s Division of Agriculture, the Rhode Island Food Policy Council and other groups to bring the project to life, according to Puri. The greenhouse is part of Rhode Island’s focus on increasing local food production. Less than five percent of the food consumed in Rhode Island is produced within the state, The Herald previously reported. “We are, especially in the Northeast, very dependent on food which largely comes from the West Coast and South America to here,” said Ken Ayers, chief of agriculture at RIDEM. “We are
literally at the end of a very long pipeline. And so, what we view as a sustainable future for us is to keep moving toward far more local production.” Ayers said Gotham Greens epitomizes many of the values Rhode Island’s food community is looking for, as it exists in a space between environmental sustainability, local agriculture and local food. He views this combination as the future of a healthy food system. The greenhouse uses glass designed to let in 98 percent of light from above to maximize plant growth. Different areas of the farm are sectioned off, so that the Gotham team can set specific “climate recipes” for the plants regardless of the Ocean State’s fickle weather. Located on 555 Harris Ave., just west of Federal Hill and on the site of an old light-bulb manufacturing plant, the greenhouse filled an empty lot. “We are literally right in the middle of the city, and that is so special about this project,” Frymark said. The site was developed with a pricetag of $12.2 million, according to Frymark. Of that number, $2.2 million came from tax credits from the Rhode Island Commerce Corporation, according to the Providence Journal. “I think that Gotham Greens can be a leader in green business and sustainability and leading others into sustainable agriculture in a new way that we haven’t necessarily thought of before,” said Leigh Vincola, farmers market program coordinator for Farm Fresh R.I., who attended the event. “It’s a great model for the rest of the region as well as for other smaller farmers who might be inspired.” Thursday’s ceremony attracted a collection of food and agriculture leaders in Rhode Island. Guests mingled in a room adjoined to the greenhouse, eating food catered by Plant City, a new vegan establishment thriving in downtown Providence. Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza, a chef in his whites from Johnson and Wales University and others looked over the farm on a tour while other event attendees nibbled on chia seed pudding cups.
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There are several factors that have contributed to Thayer’s shift over the last decade. The University has significant say in the direction of Thayer, as it owns a number of properties on the street such as the former location of Denali — now awaiting a new tenent — and the buildings inhabited by Insomnia Cookies, Berk’s Shoes & Clothing, Blue State Coffee, Salon Persia and the Brown Bookstore. The properties owned by the University that are used primarily for non-educational purposes are listed under a Brown-owned real estate subsidiary company called Farview, Inc. While some University-owned buildings, like the one that houses the Bookstore, have been occupied by the same tenant for over a decade, other business, like
possible, something that supports the community.” English Cellar Alehouse was one of the popular bars students and other community members frequented during that time. Although a challenge, Luipold stressed that attracting and retaining tenants that are good fits for Thayer is a priority for the University. “It would be easy to just make a deal with anybody,” he said. “But we really want to try and attract tenants that fit into the community in some way, that either the students would like or would attract people from the broader community.” Luipold added that food establishments tend to be more willing and able to pay a high price for real estate on Thayer. “Retailers, primarily food retailers, really like Thayer Street,” he said. “That
storefront, citing customer complaints about parking costs. Former Thayer Street store owners Chris and Jennifer Daltry expressed similar views. When the Daltrys moved their business, What Cheer Records and Vintage, to Thayer in June of 2012, “there was a lot of optimism; there were still enough little independent places on the street,” Jennifer Daltry said. But the Daltrys soon began to notice more shops closing and more restaurants appearing. Like Hollingsworth, the Daltrys added that people were starting to complain about the parking. “We started to notice that these changes, these negative changes, were having an impact on our business,” Jennifer Daltry said. “We were facing, even if we could stay, a significant rent increase, and we couldn’t make those
Insomnia, have joined the street more recently. According to John Luipold, the vice president of real estate and strategic initiatives at the University, the University purchases property on Thayer for both academic and commercial purposes. “We could redevelop (a building) into something that supports the University’s strategic mission,” Luipold said, citing the Brown Bookstore as an example. The University also wants “to be able to help influence the kind of retail that’s on Thayer Street,” he added. Luipold said that in 2012 and 2013, for example, “there were some challenges with some bar activity on Thayer Street.” He said that the University wanted to limit the number of establishments on the street that were primarily focused on serving alcohol. Thayer “is a gateway for visitors to Brown, prospective students to Brown, parents of students and our students,” he said. “We want to make sure that it is, as best
can drive up the value of properties because many tenants are willing to pay a lot of money to be a tenant in a building.” In addition to shifting priorities for the University, global changes in consumption have contributed to a more chain-based Thayer Street. “If we want to support small business, instead of doing the click-click on the computer, throw on some clothes, run down to the store, and support family operations,” said Ken Dulgarian, owner of the Avon Cinema which has survived on Thayer since 1938. Not everyone is satisfied with Thayer’s new direction. “It’s sad, because we thought we would always, always be on Thayer Street,” Hollingsworth said. “It might seem like a fun student street, but it’s nothing like it was.” She added that the installation of new parking meters on Thayer was the “final straw” before she decided to close her Thayer Street
numbers work.” What Cheer closed in May 2017. For those who remain on the street, maintaining their businesses has been a challenge. Jesse Berman, owner of the Army Navy Surplus Store, has maintained a storefront on Thayer since 1981 and owned the property since 2000. While his ownership of the building has allowed him to continue operating without concern over prices of rent, he said that high landlord turnover in the area has affected many of his neighbors. Dusseault added that the landlord turnover can be attributed to the original owners selling or passing away, and new landlords taking over who are not local to Providence. “It’s not a personal thing. It’s just all business, so they buy the building and immediately double the rent so that any indies couldn’t possibly stay,” she said. Chris Daltry agreed. “This used to be a shopping district, and now it’s an eating district,” he said.
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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2019
SCIENCE AND RESEARCH
The last 10 years in Alzheimer’s research: No cure, but care improves Decade of research culminates in potential drug, largest federal grant in U. history BY RAHMA IBRAHIM STAFF WRITER Within the next 30 years, the number of Americans living with Alzheimer’s Disease will likely grow by an estimated 240 percent. By the end of that 30-year mark, the disease and other dementias will cost the United States nearly $1.1 trillion. In seniors, it kills more patients than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined. Every 65 seconds, a person in the U.S. develops Alzheimer’s, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. But how has research into this disease changed over the years, how has the University shaped this research and where is it leading to now? Over the past ten years, there have been significant advances made in the understanding of and approach to a disease that currently has no cure. This past September, the University received the largest federal grant in its history to research care for Alzheimer’s disease as part of this effort. Alzheimer’s disease, or what may be more accurately referred to as a syndrome because its cause is unknown, is a form of dementia — a mental condition characterized by issues in cognitive functioning and difficulties with daily activities. Early treatments for Alzheimer’s Disease There are at least two distinctions of AD: clinical and pathological. Clinical syndrome AD specifically refers to individuals with symptoms of dementia. In contrast, pathological Alzheimer’s refers to the phenomena of amyloid plaques and tau neurofibrillary tangles in the brain, both characterized by buildups of their respective proteins. Traditionally, pathological AD is identified post-mortem, or after death; but over the past ten years, two newer techniques that can identify pathological AD in living people have been created: PET scans and lumbar punctures. In recent years, researchers have begun exploring a third and more accessible test — a blood screen. More recently, people have also associated mutations in three specific genes as predictors of AD. But in an article published this year in Nature, Assistant Professor of Opthalmology Joseph Arboleda-Velasquez at Harvard Medical School and his group showed that there may be a mutation that can delay the progression of AD. Over the years, the way people have thought about the underlying pathology of AD has evolved. In the 1990s, people believed that it was caused by a deficiency in neurotransmission — how nerves communicate in the brain. Then, researchers began thinking that it was amyloid plaques that caused the disease, and that these plaques would build up for years before an individual was finally diagnosed. In a clinical trial known as the A4 study, coordinated at the University of Southern California, researchers tested an anti-amyloid therapy, but it failed clinically. Scientists have theorized that perhaps this failure was caused because the patients were treated too late to counteract the disease. The last decade in research at Brown
and the greater University community Brian Ott, professor of neurology at the University and director of the Alzheimer’s Disease and Memory Disorders Center, managed a clinical site used for the testing of Tacran, the first drug to clinically succeed for Alzheimer’s treatment. Tacran targeted the deficiencies in neurotransmission, one of the early hypothesized causes of AD. “All of a sudden, people saw Alzheimer’s as something that was treatable,” Ott said. Unfortunately, Tacran has since been found to be toxic to the liver. Ott also conducted clinical trials for Memantine, which is the last Alzheimer’s drug to have been approved by the FDA in the last 16 years. Memantine blocks NMDA, a receptor found in nerve cells. While Memantine appears to be safe for human use, it only targets explicit symptoms of dementia and does not actually prevent the disease’s progression. Memantine is one of only two types of currently approved treatments. Earlier this year, Ott and his team collaborated with the lab run by William Heindel, professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at the University, in a large, controlled clinical trial. Their research showed that “transcranial magnetic stimulation,” which uses magnetic fields to stimulate neurons and is often used to treat depression, could potentially also treat dementia. “Currently, TMS is approved for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease in various countries in Europe and Asia … but not the U.S.,” Ott said. In 2013, University researchers began clinical trials for the drug Aducanumab at the Rhode Island and Butler Hospitals in coordination with biotechnology company Biogen. Named the “EMERGE” clinical trials, these tests administered high doses of anti-amyloid treatment, similar to the A4 trials. Aducanumab is being submitted to the FDA in 2020 for approval for what may be the first disease-modifying Alzheimer’s treatment since 2003. But scientists remain wary, given that only one of their two clinical trials showed success. Recent advances in improving Alzheimer’s care Stephen Salloway, professor of neurology and psychiatry and human behavior at Alpert Medical School and director and establisher of the Memory and Aging program at Butler Hospital, has conducted more than 100 clinical trials on AD and related disorders. “The cost of care for Alzheimer’s is already greater than that of cancer and heart diseases, taking to account formal and informal costs,” Salloway said. About four years ago, Salloway’s program became the first to perform an infusion using an antibody that targeted beta amyloid to try to prevent AD. Unfortunately, the clinical trial was not successful, but it does have implications for future research. At the community level, Salloway and his program are organizing prevention “swab parties” all around the state. These “swab parties” allow people to swab their cheeks; the research team can then use genetic tests to identify Alzheimer’s risk genes. If someone tests positive for any of the risk genes, they become eligible to participate in research studies. In 2011, Ott received a grant from
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the National Institutes of Health to start the Rhode Island Alzheimer’s Prevention Registry. Families can sign up for these registries, and they are sent monthly newsletters and announcements for recruitment to prevention-related studies. Butler Hospital also has a prevention registry run by Salloway that allows people to sign up for studies and receive updates on current research. “These registries are important venues to reach out to the public,” Salloway said. More recently, the Carney Institute of Brain Science has made it a greater priority for the University to study diseases like Alzheimer’s. With increased funding, the Institute has been able to recruit more faculty, including YuWen Alvin Huang, assistant professor of molecular biology, cell biology and biochemistry. Huang came from a Stanford Nobel Laureate lab and is developing a chip brain model to study AD signaling pathways. This year, the University also opened the Institute for Translational
Neuroscience, which aims for scientists who work in clinical and lab settings to work together on brain disease-oriented research. Largest federal grant in University history This past September, the University was awarded a $53 million grant for Alzheimer’s research, which will be co-led by Vincent Mor, professor of health services, policy and practice. Mor conducts his public health research in nursing homes where 70 percent of his research population has dementia. Over the past ten years, he has seen dementia research generally move from observational work to more intervention-based studies. In an early project, Mor examined whether there was a relationship between the amount of money spent to fund nursing homes and the self-reported experiences of their residents. The study showed that more money correlated to a decrease in self-reported
negative experiences. In an ongoing project, Mor has been studying music and memory in an effort to create personalized music for people with advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. He hopes these programs can be implemented in nursing home settings to reduce treating patients with antipsychotic drugs. As a public health professional, Mor explains that “just as public health focuses on the population, we focus on the population of people with dementia. When we have that information, we can identify things that work for the (entire) population,” not just a handful of subjects. The $53 million grant will fund projects across the country like the one completed by Mor and his team in nursing homes. “The notion that you can take existing, large administrative data collected by providers and turn it into a data system to test outcomes in a large population base is being used more in the field,” Mor said.
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2019
DIVEST FROM PAGE 1 Responsibility in Investment Policies in 2013, which went on to recommend divestiture. The committee wrote that the companies cited in Divest Coal’s proposal committed social harm “so grave that it would be deeply unethical” for the University to continue to profit from them. Ultimately, the Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, and Paxson dismissed the proposal in 2013. Paxson wrote in an open letter at the time that divestiture would convey “only a nebulous statement — that coal is harmful — without speaking to the technological and policy actions needed to reduce the harm from coal.” In the subsequent years, Divest Coal rebranded themselves as Fossil Free Brown to expand their goal for divestment from the top 200 fossil fuel companies in the world, The Herald previously reported. In 2016, ACCRIP recommended the University move toward sustainable investment using several tactics including a gradual divestment. The Committee focused more particularly, however, on the creation of a climate change task force and increased marketing of the Brown University Sustainable Investment Fund, as The Herald previously reported. But the University has yet to publicly divest from any fossil fuel companies. “(Divest Coal) made a really strong argument that coal was dying a natural death,” Bishop said. But the University “didn’t want to be bothered” with divesting and only wanted to focus on “what they thought was going to be the most lucrative investment,” he added. Bishop characterized the end of the divestment campaign as “depressing.” “It’s absolutely a national phenomenon with these massive prestigious schools divesting, and the fact that the institution has crushed a student movement when it’s been so strong, is going to be a real stain on the institution’s reputation,” he added. Status of Divest at Brown While activists at other Ivy League universities prioritize divestment as a key part of their climate justice movements, environmental student groups at Brown have focused heavily on pressuring state and local legislators to support policies, such as the Green New Deal. Currently, no fossil fuel divestment campaign is underway on campus. Sunrise Movement Brown and Rhode Island School of Design, one of the University’s most prominent environmental justice groups, has instead focused their efforts on pushing for a state-wide Green New Deal and organizing climate strikes in Providence. “For the foreseeable future, we don’t see ourselves doing divestment I think because there are already other campaigns fighting for divestment,” said Yesenia Puebla ’21, a co-hub organizer of the group, in a Nov. 24 interview with The Herald. She cited the reluctance of Sunrise members to take attention away from the current push for the University to divest from companies facilitating human rights abuses in Palestine. She also said that members of Sunrise aren’t
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS
5
Brown’s Fossil Fuel Divestment Timeline Oct. 2012 Brown Divest Coal calls for the University to divest their endowment from 15 coal companies.
Mar. 2013
Dec. 2016
Pres. Christina Paxson confirms investment in some of these 15 coal companies.
ACCRIP recommends that the President’s Office establish a new Climate Investment Task Force (CITF) and increase donations to the Brown University Sustainable Investment Fund (BUSIF).
Oct. 2013
The Corporation decided not to divest the University’s endowment from coal companies.
The Brown Divest Coal Campaign changes its name to Fossil Free Brown and alters its mission to divesting from the top 200 fossil fuel companies in the world.
ACCRIP voted 6-2 recommending that “the University publicly divest from the fifteen coal companies” that were most socially and environmentally harmful.
Jan. 2013
Paxson asks an ad hoc committee of the Corporation to consider the request of Brown Divest Coal and ACCRIP’s recommendation.
Oct. 2014
Apr. 2017
Paxson makes a "Task Force on Climate Change and Business and Investment Practices.”
Brown releases sustainability initiatives to cut its campus greenhouse gas emissions by 75 percent by 2025 and to achieve net-zero no later than 2040.
Feb. 2019
Apr. 2013 USHA BHALLA / HERALD
particularly excited about pushing for divestment. “If we’ve already failed, I wonder how much of our efforts are worth it,” she said. “We see that mobilizing … will be more effective for a statewide Green New Deal which is eventually what we want, so we really don’t see ourselves doing divestment.” With Sunrise more focused on statewide issues, a new group, Climate Action Now, formed in October with an intention to achieve climate justice at the University level. Galen Hall ’20, a columnist for The Herald, and Andrew Javens ’21, two leaders of the group, hope to “form a vision for how Brown could be transformed in light of the climate crisis.” Among the multiple ideas they are considering, they hope to advocate for an interdisciplinary curriculum at the University that addresses the urgency of climate change. Javens and Hall said they did not believe that divestment was the only answer in helping the University improve its environmental policies, but it could be “one option among many,” Javens said. Fossil fuel divestment contributes to “stigmatizing and politicizing the issue of fossil fuels, pushing people to take sides on the issue,” he added. “We don’t want to take divestment off the table, we just want to think more broadly as well, and figure out when it would be more opportune to push for something like that,” Hall said. Professor of Environmental Studies J. Timmons Roberts reiterated this point. “On divestment, it’s often argued that other investors will just buy up shares if we sell them in these companies,” he wrote in an email to The Herald. “This is about something else: taking away the social license of these firms that are undermining our science, and our futures.” But in an interview with The Herald, Paxson said that if a divestment campaign were to begin again, she would stand by her decision from 2013. “Right or wrong, (divestment) is just not effective,” she said. “I don’t see how it does any good. In some ways, if people
think that that’s all they need to do, and that it lets them off the hook … that’s a really easy way out of doing the hard work of actually making real change.” Referencing the University of California system’s decision to divest its endowment and pension fund from fossil fuel companies, Paxson said, “They didn’t really divest. I think they said they wouldn’t be buying any more for now because they didn’t think it was a good investment.” “Four years ago, when people wanted Brown to divest from coal … we had less than a million dollars in coal because it wasn’t a very good investment. Natural gas had really come and pushed coal out of the market. We currently make decisions about any type of investment in terms of what its potential future return is.” Paxson added that the University’s current investments in coal are quite insignificant, but she declined to share the University’s current level of investments in fossil fuels. Actions the University is taking Rather than divesting from fossil fuel companies, the University has focused on reducing campus greenhouse gas emissions. In February 2019, the University announced its goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2040. To achieve its goal, the University created the Longer-Term Sustainability Study Committee, co-chaired by Assistant Provost for Sustainability and Professor of Environment and Society and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Stephen Porder. The committee crafted a plan that includes two clean energy projects, converting the University’s central heating plant to run on bio-oil and renovating buildings to increase thermal efficiency. Porder said that the University’s plan for net-zero emissions is “financially, logistically and technologically feasible” and would place Brown in the top tier of universities in terms of climate action. He added that the net-zero initiative is more effective than divestment for improving the University’s sustainability.
Divesting from fossil fuel companies, he said, “won’t keep a single molecule of carbon out of the atmosphere.” “Skepticism about divestment has nothing to do with a desire for inaction on climate change,” he said. “I am laser-focused on the rapidity with which the earth system is changing and the incredibly pressing need to reduce emissions as fast as possible, and divestment to me is a very ineffective tool to do that.” Javens and Hall said that while the net-zero plan is a good start, they feel the University should do more to take a political stand on climate change. The two hope that the University expands its climate plan to include political advocacy for climate legislation on a state and national level. “Taking the moral lead as an institution means both reducing our own footprint which we have a good plan to do, and then leading in our political-social business engagements in Rhode Island and nationally,” Hall said. “Are we addressing climate injustices? Are we pushing for climate action?” Divestment on other campuses This November, over 200 students and alums from Harvard and Yale interrupted a football game with a demonstration calling for both universities to divest their holdings in fossil fuel companies. The action made headlines across the country, placing the fossil fuel divestment movement in the national spotlight. Harvard and Yale are far from the only two Ivy League universities with increasingly active fossil fuel divestment campaigns. At Penn, Fossil Free Penn members stage a weekly four-hour sitin inside the university’s College Hall, where President Amy Gutmann’s office is located. At Dartmouth, Divest Dartmouth unfurled a large banner reading “Divest” in front of the school’s main library to call for divestment from certain oil and gas companies last spring. And over the summer, the University of California system announced that its “endowment and pension-fund were going ‘fossil free.’”
“(Divestment) is a necessary step to take to reduce carbon emissions,” said Maeve Masterson, an organizer for Fossil Free Penn. After a previous divestment movement failed in 2015, Fossil Free Penn renewed their efforts in 2018 when they presented an argument to their Board of Trustees to divest. The group moved to more action-oriented tactics after the Board denied their proposal. “The point of our non-violent direct action strategy is really to place a lot of pressure and reputational damage on the Board of Trustees, knowing that they are the ones that are capable of making this decision,” Masterson said. “We call it a campaign of continuous embarrassment — we’re trying to make it as disruptive as possible, and make it so that their business as usual is no longer able to happen comfortably.” Masterson said that raising awareness of this “silent crisis on campus” to the student body can help place “pressure on our administration to take action.” Divest Dartmouth has maintained a campaign for seven years, which has seen its goals evolve over time. Students are currently advocating for the college to disclose its “limited investments” in fossil fuel companies. In addition, the group changed their tactics after the administration refused their proposal for divestment from the 200 most-polluting fossil fuel companies, said Edel Galgon, a member of the group. Now they are asking for divestment based off the “companies with the worst corporate practices and the most misinformation about climate science,” Galgon added. To compromise with Dartmouth’s administration, the group judges companies based off the Union of Concerned Scientists’ climate accountability scorecard. Roberts praised the protest at the Harvard-Yale game, saying that “University students have been the leaders of many protest movements, through history and around the world.” He added that “the moment is back, and it will keep coming back until we divest.”
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FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2019
SCIENCE AND RESEARCH
Ten years in, first tenured woman in APMA dept. reshapes mentorship Hired in 2010, Kavita Ramanan strives to tackle gender inequity on campus, beyond BY CATE RYAN SCIENCE AND RESEARCH EDITOR When Professor of Applied Mathematics Kavita Ramanan PhD’98 was hired by her department in 2010, she became the department’s first and only tenured female faculty member. Today, almost 10 years later, there are two. Ramanan has witnessed and driven change within mathematics over the past 10 years. She has bolstered support for women in a field where they have struggled to achieve the same status and success as their male colleagues. Beyond her push to diversify the field of math, her research on probability and stochastic, random processes has provided clarity and advanced work in fields ranging from engineering to biology. “There are very many things in the world that are uncertain,” said Mira Gordin ’20, an APMA concentrator. “Probability is a really elegant language for expressing that and studying it.” In 2013, Ramanan helped tackle the gender divide when she co-founded the University’s chapter of the Association for Women in Mathematics. “It started quite modestly … but now it is a really active group.” The group, open to anyone regardless of gender identity, fosters a unique sense of community for undergraduates in the field, Ramanan said. “It creates a space for people underrepresented in the field to come together.” Ramanan also founded an outreach group in 2014 called Math CoOp that shares mathematical concepts with middle and high school students who may
otherwise lack easy access to the material. “One must contribute to one’s society more broadly in whatever capacity possible,” she said. Since coming to the University, addressing the “paucity of women” in math has been one of Ramanan’s central contributions. “There definitely is a gender divide, and it becomes more extreme (with) every … progressive step,” said Gordin, who is the undergraduate president of Brown’s AWM. Though a gender gap is evident in undergraduate classes, it worsens as one looks up the ladder of academia toward faculty positions. At those stages, “there are a smaller percentage of women and non-binary people,” Gordin said. “There is a lot of leakage as you go to the postdoctoral level, and higher… especially in the higher echelons of schools,” she said. According to data from the Office of Institutional Research, the University has awarded more degrees to male students than female students in the physical sciences, the broad category in which APMA falls, for the last 11 years. While 43 percent of physical science baccalaureate degree recipients last year were female, only 34 percent of masters degree recipients were female and a mere 18 percent of doctoral degree recipients identified as such. According to Ramanan, the APMA graduate program has reached enrollment levels of about 50 percent female to male at times, but even so, a gender gap persists. “This is due to a lot of factors, including societal factors which are beyond academia. I think a lot of efforts are being made by some institutions and also the general math community to make the (field) more inclusive. But I think a lot more have to be made,” Ramanan said. The difference in gender representation is similar for faculty. In 2010, the physical sciences had 26 female
faculty members and 162 male faculty members. The latest available data from 2018 shows that there were 27 female faculty members and 165 male faculty members — marking little change over the past decade and reflecting the broader divide that exists in these fields on the University’s campus and beyond. “It’s sad to me, because I think there are so many incredible people who can do math, who are not able to progress because they don’t have the support from the community. And that’s one of the things that we try to mitigate through identity based organizations like (AWM),” Gordin said. To Gordin, role models like Ramanan matter because they set a basic example — women successful in math. Ramaman has specifically mentored Gordin in her work, helping her explore her interest in probability while also inspiring new initiatives for AWM. “At the end of the day, I just want to do math,” Gordin said. Ramanan studied engineering as an undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Technology. But like many students, she eventually came to realize that her career plans should lie outside of her undergraduate concentration. Unlike many students, the realization came to her at a random moment in the backseat of a cab. One of her otherwise-supportive undergraduate mentors cautioned her against making the switch to APMA, warning that Ramanan wanted to enter the field too late. In India at the time, APMA “was not a common concentration offered by graduate programs.” But it did imbue other disciplines so centrally that Ramanan already had a background through her engineering studies. “I really found myself constantly attracted to the more rigorous formulations of things rather than mere applications of them. I wanted to actually develop the (theories),” she said. After switching to applied math,
Ramanan moved from Mumbai to Providence to pursue her PhD at Brown. She found that at Brown, “people strive for excellence without being ultra-competitive with somebody else, you’re just competing with yourself. There’s a more collaborative atmosphere.” She completed her doctorate in 1998 and then left Brown for other endeavors, including a post doc in Haifa, Israel. Twelve years later, she returned to Brown as a tenured professor in 2010. “That ethos continues today,” she said. Ramanan has always been drawn to the creative side of mathematics. “I felt an academic profession would allow me to always keep learning and sharing my knowledge for life,” she said. She described her job as a “24/7 occupation.” After 5 p.m., she is still thinking about the theories that drive her to work every morning. She is motivated by “beautiful eureka moments” that mark the discovery of a new theory or completion of a certain problem. After that moment of discovery, the finding seems obvious — “If you put it in the right framework ... it sometimes seems so evident that you wonder why you did not see it earlier.” With the creativity required to tackle the difficult work in APMA, comes the need to collaborate on the international scale. “You get to know people really well through this creative process, or discussing a problem, but then you also get to know them as human beings. And they’re people from all over the world.” While Ramanan has shaped math over the last decade through her advocacy and research, the University has also facilitated a shift in the field through the founding of the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics, which opened on South Main Street in 2011. The institute bridges the gap between pure and applied mathematics to create
COURTESY OF BROWN UNIVERSITY
Since joining the Department of Applied Mathematics, Ramanan has pushed to increase support for historically underrepresented groups in the field.
timely applications for computation. “It also does typically bring together very diverse sets of people.” Starting this January, Ramanan will serve as the Institute’s deputy director. This month, the American Association for the Advancement of Science named Ramanan as one of their fellows “for her research in applied probability and efforts to increase the number of women in the sciences,” according to AAAS. The AAAS is a nonprofit organization that works to defend scientific freedom, advance science policy and promote collaboration and cooperation between scientists, according to their website. Fellows are nominated by their peers. “I really like belonging to this broader scientific community, and not just my mathematical community — one that is engaged actively in policy as well as spreading rational thinking and issues like that,” Ramanan said. “Upholding the value of scientific inquiry and related aspects are very dear to my heart, so I’m particularly honored and excited to contribute my little bit,” she said.
C O R R E CT I O N The Dec. 5 article titled “UCS expresses support for ACCRIP reps” stated that a student representative on ACCRIP did not respond to a request for comment by press time. In fact, the student representative did respond to the request for comment. The Herald regrets the error. The April 11 article titled “UCS amends bylaws, supports Disability Justice at Brown” referred to Silver Mckie ‘22 as Silver Pape. The Herald regrets the error.
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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | COMMENTARY
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The kids are alright BY JOHNNY REN ’23 STAFF COLUMNIST Growing up, I would often hear complaints, usually from adults much older than myself, about the sorry state of modern songwriting. As a young, impressionable kid, I sometimes felt like they had a point. New songs were trite and uninspired. Surely, they could never match the poetic beauty of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” or the twisting intricacies of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” If you listened to the critics, you too would see the clear failures of Taylor Swift’s simplistic teenage fantasies or the consumerist chauvinism of Lil’ Pump, who once said the phrase “Gucci Gang” fifty times and made that a song. The music of the past was a temple, and the music of the present was a heresy. I am older now, nineteen to be exact. I never really considered the music of my childhood as anything noteworthy. Though it may have been easy to romanticize the far-flung past, it felt difficult to reminisce about what still felt new. My songs were simply the ones that blared from the backseat of our minivan on the way to soccer practice. But this skepticism about the merits of modern music has started to fade away. One day, I went online, and I found playlists I had never seen before — hits of the 2000s, top songs of the 2010s — populating the likes of YouTube and Spotify. It suddenly appeared as if the songs of my childhood were becoming immortalized, spoken of in the same language as all other momentous musical eras — the language of decades. What would my lifetime of music be remembered for? I still do not know entirely. But the act of simply acknowledging the unique musical identity of the past twenty years lends our generation a new sense of legitimacy. Now, I can say for sure that music never got worse so much as it got misunderstood.
With great regularity, generations come to criticize their successors. The old attack the young, who seem to become lazier and less cultured each year. I speak, of course, in generalizations, conceding that this cynicism is not felt by all people from earlier generations. But our generation feels it still, the insinuation that our ways are inferior. If we don’t feel the critique at a systemic scale, we feel it subtly, hearing the gen-
sical progressivism and perversion? More than anything, I believe it is the influence of time. In the not so distant future, the vulgarity of a present-day SoundCloud rapper may become an object of antiquity, something that only grandpa and grandma listened to. While people are in the present, however, they have great trouble seeing the parallels, how their musical Luddism is a direct consequence of a broader historical pattern.
“I fell in love with the music of my childhood not for its beauty, but for the simple fact that it grew up alongside me.”
tle carping from our relatives and our teachers. We feel it in their judgment of our music, which is evidently more alienating than ever before. Its themes are too superficial. People just don’t sing as well as they used to. All of it is just a silly phase. What those many detractors fail to see is that their objections are often artifacts of their own generational bias more than anything else. A famous, or perhaps infamous, example of cultural resistance occurred way back in the day with the music of Elvis Presley. Parents and priests alike mourned the ruin of the social fabric, a surefire consequence of the gyrating hips and scandalous songs of Presley’s performances. In hindsight, these reactions seem absurd. Today, not only are many people unaware of Presley’s former notoriety, many young children may have never even heard an Elvis Presley song. Few would consider his lyrics outrageous other than in their oldness. What is the distinction then between mu-
At the same time, with the impending arrival of adulthood, I think I can also understand why someone might yearn for past music, why they might reject modern preferences. I didn’t notice the feeling at first. Week by week, new songs sound much like their predecessors, sparkling with the same technopop optimism, autotuned melodies and clichés of romance. The change, if any, is so incremental that it is unnoticeable. But then the years passed, and I realized slowly— with a sense of horror at my newfound agedness — that the banal beats of my childhood came out very long ago. They came out when Justin Bieber was still a squeaky-voiced teen, when I was still in elementary school letting lyrical innuendos fly over my head. Those songs, the kind I once considered contemporary, have fermented over time, developing the patina of nostalgia. Their beauty is augmented, so when I hear the familiar rhythm of a
Katy Perry song in the heat and haze of a dorm party, a hidden part of my soul stirs. It isn’t the depth of the songs that makes them special — comparing one’s love to a firework is far from nuanced. It is something else. I fell in love with the music of my childhood not for its beauty, but for the simple fact that it grew up alongside me. At the age of nineteen, I am still young. But I am also moving onward from childhood to adulthood. Try as I might to familiarize myself with the new, I will no longer view the world as I once did. I will no longer appreciate new music as effortlessly because I will have lost the ability to grow up, to be innocent and unknowledgeable. At some point, I will start to hear music from the perspective of an outsider. One day, I may turn on the radio and gasp at the blasphemy I hear, and I will seek comfort in my own throwbacks. In 1966, The Who, an English rock band, released the song “The Kids Are Alright,” part of the power pop genre all the rage at the time. Throughout the song’s progression, the upbeat melody returns time and time again to the titular refrain “the kids are alright,” repeated as if hearing it the first time is not enough, as if we all need to be convinced of its truth. Nearly five decades later, in 2015, rapper Kendrick Lamar released a similarly titled song, “Alright,” a track coming from a genre that did not exist back in 1966. It is a song of hopeful conviction. Laced within the lyrics, Lamar proclaims “we gon’ be alright.” These two songs, spanning multiple decades and generations, are no doubt different. And yet, they also show us how little we change at all. The world will alter. Children will grow up and grow old. Music will evolve. But somehow, some way, the kids are alright — we will be alright. Johnny Ren ’23 can be reached at jiawei_ren@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald. com and op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
Reality distortion: the unnerving legacy of the 2010s BY REID SECONDO ’16 GS STAFF COLUMNIST
Well, we made it — another 10-year demarcation that allows us to reflect on society and ourselves. Whether or not the 2010’s will be crowned by Time as the latest “decade from hell,” these 10 years demand a more serious retrospective than an inflammatory moniker. The decade that brought us athleisure, renewed demagoguery and Candy Crush also ushered in an age of mass disruption. Status quos in politics, entertainment and indeed, human relations writ large were routinely strained into modified or completely new arrangements. Remember when there was no other option but to use a DVD player to watch a movie at home or call a cab over the phone or print out a ticket for scanning? It feels like a vestige from a distant past. The culprit for such memory-warping change? As in every period of universal change, technology propelled this decade’s turbine of transformation. Driven by the entrepreneurial industrial-complex of Silicon Valley, innovations in computing, media and telecommunications launched a revolution in how humans connect, communicate and conceive of ourselves in society. Seemingly universal adoption of the iPhone has ushered in the app-ification of everything imaginable. Food, banking, dating, transportation and entertainment have become just a few swipes and scrolls away. Social-media platforms emerged as the foremost mediums of human interaction and information exchange. Electronic interfaces evolved into extensions of our physical being, solidifying the virtual environment as another dimension of our reality. Visually captured memories are stored in metaphysical clouds, while Uber ratings and number of Insta-
gram followers are now components, no matter how small, of a modern person’s identity. This era of moving fast and breaking things yielded positive changes to daily life based on values of access, convenience and gratification. But fulfilling the law of unintended consequences, technologically-driven disruption has brought more than convenience and efficiency to societies. Indeed, it has spawned the most unnerving and concerning upheaval to the modern human experience: the reality distortion revolution.
before; it does not require strenuous training of the mind, but rather consistent perusals of an Instagram feed. As one spends more time in these online spaces, the line between these curated realities and physical life start to blur. Decade-defining AR/VR products like Pokémon Go and Snapchat reflected the more lighthearted side of this distortion revolution. Certainly, these toy-like products are not the pernicious subjects of this column. I instead want to discern how reality distortion has
“(Technologically-driven disruption) has spawned the most unnerving and concerning upheaval to the modern human experience: the reality distortion revolution.”
Famously ascribed as a key aspect of Steve Jobs’ magnetism, reality distortion describes the phenomenon of convincing oneself or others to see anything as real. This process is theoretically achieved using a myriad of social-psychological tools and personal gravitas (along with a heaping helping of egomania). It warps actuality into alternative virtuality that is in the control of the beholder: more favorable, more outrageous, more persuasive. People dissociate from physical reality, preferring customized virtual spaces to face to face interaction. Certainly, bending reality is hardly a novel concept. With modern technologies, however, it is now easier than ever
been able to impact society at such rapid scale, spurred on by products implemented without such creative intent. Mass adoption of technology platforms has democratized media and self-promotion. It has eroded established channels of information consumption and personal presentation. Platforms like YouTube and Facebook empower individual control over the production, dissemination and curation of “content.” This redistribution of power results in fragmented information-spaces, mirroring the siloed landscape of traditional media that divides our real-life communities. Exacerbated by the exclusionary comfort of our devices, our
withdrawal into these hyper-personalized spaces tugs at the social fabric and norms that bind people together. Fragmentation of virtual spaces has come with a hypercuration of these spaces, which makes them uniquely suited to distorting individuals’ perceptions of reality. Take Instagram. A far cry from its nascent days as a picture-sharing platform of landscapes with artsy filters, the platform has evolved into a realm of self-commoditization and signaling of social capital. In this simulacrum of the public square, reality is curated to reflect the ideal image users desire to project to the world. This decade has nurtured a coterie of grifters. Tech darlings and faux socialites alike reveled in alternate realities to suit their needs. Disgraced tech startups like Theranos and WeWork were houses of lies and false prospects. Anna Delvey, aka Anna Sorokin, conned New York high society until her scam was eventually uncovered. And then there’s the president. Co-opting Fox News, Facebook and Twitter to take his preferred narratives directly from the arenas to private digital spaces, he built the perfect cross-dimensional reality distortion firewall against the forces of fact and integrity. Beyond hypercuration, fakery and scamming, what else has this legacy of reality distortion left its wake? Dilution of authenticity. Distrust of establishment. Disregard of truth. Dismissal of fact. Disinformation. Disillusionment. We may be stumbling in a funhouse for now, but spend enough time there and it may morph into an Orwellian reality. Happy 2020s. Reid Secondo ’16 GS can be reached at reid_secondo@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and op-eds to opinions@ browndailyherald.com.
8
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2019
METRO
Faculty, staff describe experiences as PPSD parents amid state takeover U. community members urge colleagues to consider Providence public schools BY CLARA GUTMAN ARGEMÍ STAFF WRITER Six months after the Johns Hopkins report documented the systematic underperformance of the Providence Public School District, University faculty, staff and an administrator reflected on their experiences as parents of PPSD students. The Herald interviewed four faculty members, one administrator and one staff member who have or had children enrolled in the school system. Many interviewees described feeling strongly about sending their children to public schools. Some discussed the importance of school quality in deciding whether to live in Providence or elsewhere. President Christina Paxson P’19 told The Herald that while there are faculty and staff members who send their kids to Providence public schools and have positive experiences in the system, new recruits are often living farther away from campus due to concerns about PPSD. “We often find that when we’re trying to recruit people, they say, ‘Oh, I hear I have to live in Barrington,’ or ‘I have to live in Greenwich or Cranston,’” Paxson said in an Oct. 2 interview with The Herald. “It would be great if people could have the confidence to say, ‘Oh yeah, you can get a good education right here in Providence.’” Senior Associate Dean of the Faculty Anne Windham highlighted the University’s efforts to encourage faculty to live near campus, such as the Brown to Brown Home Ownership Program, which sells residential properties owned by the University to eligible members of faculty and staff, according to the program’s website. The Johns Hopkins report, released last May, highlighted the systemic underperformance of the Providence Public School District. The report’s descriptions of hazardous building facilities, ineffective bureaucratic structures, broken school culture and low expectations for student performance set in motion an unprecedented takeover of the district by Rhode Island’s Department of Education, which began Nov. 1. After the Johns Hopkins report land-
CLARA GUTMAN ARGEMÍ / HERALD
University faculty, staff and an administrator who have experience with children in the Providence Public School District told The Herald about their perspectives on PPSD in the wake of the searing John Hopkins school report. ed and the state took over the school system, the University announced that it will coordinate with RIDE and PPSD to launch a partnership with select schools, among other efforts, The Herald previously reported. The University drew criticism over reports that it had raised less than 20 percent of its promised $10 million endowment for PPSD after 12 years. In a separate fund, the University has invested over $800,000 annually in the district through several centers and departments, The Herald previously reported. PPSD Director of Communications Laura Hart declined to comment by press time about the experiences of PPSD parents associated with the University. Dilania Inoa ’99, senior program manager for student development, discussed her experiences as both a student and a parent at PPSD. Inoa enrolled at Classical High School after her parents emigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic. “They came to this country for a better education,” she said. “In the Dominican Republic, we could not afford private education. Going (to public schools) there, we would not be
educated in good schools.” After her own experience in Providence public schools, Inoa enrolled her two children in public elementary schools. Her oldest is now a student at Classical. “I wanted my children to be in neighborhood schools,” she said. “I wanted my children to go to school with their friends, with our neighbors, and walk to school if that was possible and to be in activity with our friends that lived near them.” Other members of the University community described more mixed experiences in Providence public schools. Professor of English Philip Gould sent his son, who grew up with autism, to Providence public schools several years ago. He attributed his son’s positive experiences to individual teachers who worked hard despite a failing school system. “We have had teachers over the years, from lower school on, that have been literally life savers to us,” Gould said. “We as a family feel blessed, but it shouldn’t be the luck of the draw.” Gould discussed his disappointment with the process for assigning and reassigning his son’s aides, saying that it was “eye-opening” and illustrative of
a system unable to meet its students’ needs. Frustrated that populations with special needs were “being sacrificed,” Gould decided to join the board of PPSD. Although he resigned from the board in 2011, Gould is considering rejoining in light of the takeover process. “If you’ve got young kids and private school’s not an option, then sure, you’re concerned as a parent,” Gould said. Some interviewed by The Herald urged their colleagues to consider sending their children to Providence public schools, regardless of the issues highlighted in the searing report. Professor of History Tara Nummedal’s daughter is a student at a Providence public school. While the school has exemplified problems identified in the school report such as poor facilities, Nummedal believes in the value of a public education. She acknowledged the significant failures of the school system — her daughter’s school had an electrical fire the day before the 2018-19 school year — but said her experience in PPSD made her more of a part of the city and state community. “The number of times I’ve heard the phrase, ‘No one sends their kids to public schools.’ … People have said this
to me,” she said, adding that “I felt like a Rhode Islander for the first time when (my daughter) started going to public schools, and that’s after living in Providence for almost 10 years.” Robert Lee, associate professor of American Studies, echoed Nummendal. “The common wisdom that Providence schools are problematic is pervasive,” he said, adding that “so many of my younger colleagues say you need to move to Barrington.” Assistant Professor of History Daniel Rodriguez, who has a daughter in PPSD, also voiced that “a lot of new faculty with kids often … feel like they need to send their kids to private schools.” For Rodriguez, Brown faculty have a responsibility to send their children to PPSD and the University itself should use its resources to improve the city’s schools. He added that when more welloff families choose public schooling, it “brings a lot of resources to these schools.” “Brown has a responsibility to make these schools better, and faculty have a responsibility to send their kids to these schools,” he said. — With additional reporting by Livia Gimenes
In This Issue
post- farewells
POST- ITS 3
Nice to Meme You
ANNA HARVEY 2 ANNELIESE MAIR 4
A Decade Undone
Truthfully, Objectively KATE OK 5
Teens and Tens in the 10’s ROB CAPRON 5
postCover by Brenda Rodríguez
DEC 6
—
VOL 24 —
ISSUE 12
FEATURE
Nice to Meme You
When Internet Language Is IRL BY ANNA HARVEY ILLUSTRATED BY STEPHANIE WU
I
would not consider myself to be Extremely Online. I am Online enough to know that one should capitalize the phrase Extremely Online, as well as its milder correlative, Very Online. I am Online enough to have installed time-limiting apps for Twitter and Instagram on both my phone and computer, but not so Online that I feel particularly comfortable regularly posting to either platform. I am Online enough in the sense that I have grown up in a culture where to be offline is, effectively, to not exist. The beginnings of the internet date back to the early 1960s, when J.C.R. Licklider, a psychologist and computer scientist at M.I.T., proposed a plan for an “Intergalactic Computer Network.” The first prototype was built in 1969, and on October 29 of that year, the first “node-to-node” message was sent from one computer to another. From the early 1980s, scientists began to expand these nodes to create the network we understand today as the internet. This early internet reached its modern iteration in 1990 with the creation of the World Wide Web. No matter how bitter the vitriol spewed against it—especially over the past decade, with the rise of the smartphone (and
the alleged assault on English grammar that texting has waged) and, more recently, the exposure of politically motivated data-harvesting scandals—the internet was always going to be a place where people came to communicate. It was made by humans, for humans, and connected them with each other on a scale never before known. I am not interested in discussing whether the internet is good or bad—for democracy, for language, for culture. It just is. I have never lived in a world without it, so I don’t know how to conceptualize an alternative. I have grown up in a world whose linguistic register hews so closely to the lexicon of Online Discourse that what I think and say owes a debt to the internet. As I’ve gotten older and spent more time online, I’ve started to notice the ways in which internet lingo has slipped into the spoken word. My friends and I will frequently say abbreviations out loud, peppering our speech with “lol,” “wtf,” and even “lmao” (pronounced la-mow). Conversations often begin with “You know that meme?” as we link something we viewed alone, on a screen, to an in-person interaction. Mild confusion
becomes Math Lady/Confused Lady. Stressful week? This Is Fine. We assume a certain level of knowledge to make these references work, but no more than we would if we were quoting The Office or Parks and Rec (GIFS from both are, for the record, often used as reaction shots in comment sections). The level of pop culture background once gained by watching a hit TV show is now achieved by scrolling through Twitter. But how important is it, really, that memes originate online, often pulled together from one person’s frenetic, goldfish-like thoughts, rather than from the careful honing of a writer’s room? Don’t they provoke the same effect? Some memes do, after all, come from TV shows, both scripted and reality. But I’d propose it’s the capacity for change that makes online humor different. Within seconds, a post can be picked up, circulated, and shaped to fit the whims of anyone with a wifi connection. In 2013, a William Carlos Williams poem was molded to address subjects as diverse as M&Ms, browser tabs, and think pieces, all while retaining its poetic structure. In 2017, the same poem was rediscovered and adapted to the rhythm of “Mambo No. 5” and “Call Me Maybe” while somehow retaining its subject matter: The plums that were in the icebox, so sweet, and so cold. Somehow, people on the internet decided that modernist poetry was cool and ran with it. Something that may have been confined to obscurity was recirculated, altered for the digital age, and it made people laugh. I can’t say that I fully understand why some cultural tidbits become memes and others don’t, but the ones that do offer a form of collective communication, however ephemeral, that rivals only the written word. University of Michigan linguist Anne Curzan calls language that originates online a form of “electronically mediated communication,” or EMC. EMC is informal, rife with abbreviations and variations in capitalization, punctuation, and spelling—the sentence “I’ll cc mary on that 2morrow” is an exaggerated example. Despite the yearly op-eds about the deplorable state of young people’s grammar, Curzan’s studies show that college students generally have a finely tuned instinct for when
Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, As a senior, in my old age, let me tell you what I remember (about post-). I remember not knowing anyone in the room. I remember my heart rate quickening as I presented my suggestions to the other editors who certainly knew more than I did. I remember the rush of nerves and pride the first time I saw my name in print on a post- piece. I remember the weekly Feature section editing meetings in the Blue Room or the Underground, wherever there were seats—wherever we could go to read together, debate syntax and structure, and draft effusive notes to our latest talented writers. I remember meeting with those writers in Starbucks or at The Herald office to serve as a sounding board for their budding ideas, helping flesh out promising outlines of piecesto-be. I remember Spotify playlists, the Copy Couch, forgotten chargers and water bottles, heart-warming props, homemade baked goods, an unforgettable talent show, and the countless moments that have made me beyond thankful for this incredible community. I remember late-night coffee runs and conversations, impassioned debates about em dashes, and more than a couple laugh attacks that left me gasping for air.
2! POST–
Many parts of post- take my breath away. Our staff ’s unwavering dedication, generosity, and talent across the board of writing, editing, designing, illustrating, and social media curation. Our readers’ continued support and feedback, both kind and critical—always welcome and much appreciated. The immense pleasure and honor it has been to serve as Editor-in-Chief this past year, seeing each part of this delicately balanced and carefully coordinated production come together to orchestrate a new issue every week; each built from emotion, artistry, research, passion, growth, and a little bit of chaotic good (or straight-up chaos, as in the case of our Spring Weekend issue, for which we worked until literal dawn). Please enjoy this final issue of the decade, and of my tenure. I have not one ounce of doubt that EIC-to-be Amanda Ngo and the rest of the incoming team will lead our little publication to new heights. And I’m excited to enjoy the view.
For the last time, thank you, and happy reading!
Anita Sheih Editor-in-Chief
Things to Do Before the Decade Ends 1. Make that joke about not having 20/20 vision when someone asks where you see yourself in x years 2. See how much you can get for your iPod Nano on Craigslist 3. Yell “Billy Mays!!!!!!!!” 4. Date your papers “2019” 5. Switch from La Croix to Bubly 6. Wonder why the world didn’t end in 2012 7. Reminisce about Hannah Montana, The Suite Life, and the good ol’ days 8. Throw a massive New Year’s party to signal the return of The Roaring ’20s 9. Tell yourself you’ll (once again) get it together in January 10. Spend time with the people/things you love (including the final issue of post- this decade)
to use EMC and when not to. According to Curzan’s students, using EMC in inappropriate contexts— emails to professors, for example—is considered “very uncool.” Though the speech we use IRL (“in real life”) may not always align with EMC, some situations are similar enough for it to work. It doesn’t matter whether friends are communicating via text or at the kitchen table; the social and emotional registers of both types of interaction are casual enough to merit the same language. For those of us who have grown up enmeshed in the internet, our language, whether or not mediated by a computer screen, is often Very Online. The language used on the internet, like any language, is prone to change. Take LOL, for example, which is more frequently written in lowercase and tacked on to the end of sentences. The earliest citation of “LOL” comes from a May 1989 post on the computer network FidoNet, though a man named Wayne Pearson claims to have invented it in the mid-80s on a Canadian bulletin board system (a precursor to the internet chatroom). LOL originally meant “laughing out loud,” though as even the most intermittent Tweeter could tell you, no one uses it that way anymore. According to a 2013 op-ed by John McWhorter, the LOLs dropped into online conversation aren’t meant to indicate humor anymore; they’re meant to “signal basic empathy between texters...easing tension and creating a sense of equality.” McWhorter offers LOL as a way of conveying nuance in a medium that lacks verbal inflection and body language. But what if we have both at our disposal, as we do in person, and we still say “LOL”? What does this say about the way communication has changed over the past decade? When did online language migrate beyond the written and into the verbal, and why? I decided to ask Lucy Duda ’20, a longtime admin of the Brown Dank Stash of Memes for S/NC Teens Facebook page. She cited words like “yeet,” first adopted ironically before they “accidentally become a reflex,” as prime examples of the near-seamlessness with which internet diction infiltrates speech. “I think these things tend to come out more in speech when people are feeling nervous or awkward,” Duda said. “They provide a structured response in a widely shared vernacular and also allow us to deflect from the vulnerability of saying what specifically is on our mind.” We may be living in a new age of anxiety, but it becomes more manageable when we can trust that everyone else is in on the joke. Speaking in memes is itself a slightly absurd act. But its absurdity finds an equal sparring partner in the daily news cycle. If asked how I feel about it all, I can reference the things that keep me up at night: climate disaster, the housing crisis, antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Or, to express how overwhelmed I feel, I can reference Kim Kardashian Laying in Bed. Which would you prefer? If kids these days are using internet language IRL, the boundary between being on and offline feels like an artificial one. In fact, it seems like we’ve been edging in this direction for the past decade. About five billion people worldwide own mobile devices, and about half of these are smartphones, with adults 18-34 leading the way in smartphone use across the globe. If online is always in your pocket, are you then Always Online? Real Life, an online magazine about “living with technology,” with the emphasis “more on living,” poses one answer. In the introduction to its January 2018 issue, “Extremely Online,” the editors write, “What if instead of an escape from being ‘in real life,’ we think of
the internet as a genre or style?” At the risk of sounding like the heretical English concentrator I am, I think the internet is literary. It is a constantly evolving book of life, where events are created, erased, and memorialized at lightning speed—it is a record and an art form and also a place and a medium in which to work out what it means to be a person right here and right now. According to Real Life, “‘Online’ can be seen as structuring an entire a [sic] way of being in the world,” and “‘online’ can be thought of as a way of doing things, not the place they are done.” To be online is “to speak in memes, to see in photos, to intuit the metrics and know what counts.” In other words, it “might be understood as an openness to being continually humbled and troubled by the ever shifting [sic] contexts of conversations.” To be online is to be attuned to the breakneck pace of modern life and to be trying to keep up. To be online is to recall Distracted Boyfriend when making decisions, to reminisce over Nyan Cat, or to use “retweet” as a verbal affirmation. TL;DR (“too long; didn’t read”): In this culture we’re all Pretty Online, clicking and scrolling, chatting and laughing, and being messy, fallible, silly, and human.
post- farewells going but not gone
BY POST- ITS SYDNEY LO, JULIAN TOWERS, AND AMANDA NGO ILLUSTRATED BY NAYA LEE CHANG
Sydney post- was a late night that just got later. I began writing for it my first year at Brown, finishing articles the day they were due. I sat in my dorm room, alone, at 8:00 p.m., working through rambling Narrative pieces about baristas and oil painting. While I am not all that proud of those early pieces, they led me to a Feature section editing position two years later. I had a decent idea of what editing entailed when I began: weekly content development, grammar checks, and close reads of articles. While all of these
responsibilities have certainly been a part of my postexperience, there were also the coffee-fueled Feature meetings on Monday mornings, during which we caught up on weekend adventures while perusing the piece of the week. There were the Thursday production nights, with free pizza, snacks, and exposure to new and exciting writers. There was friendship. There was being a part of something, of a family of creative, dynamic editors with inimitable tastes in music. When I finished my edits on those Thursday nights, around 9:30 p.m., I often didn’t want to leave. So, eventually, I didn’t. I took on a managing editor position for the Feature section. I got to lead the Monday morning Feature meetings. Production nights went as late as 1:30 a.m. for me, spent poring over drafts and waiting for the printer at The Brown Daily Herald offices to work. And though I’ve never loved staying up so late, my work allowed me to grow even closer to the post- team. So much so that I can barely imagine what next semester will be like without it. But I know I will always have a part of post-, and it will always have a part of me. Julian post- is the only venue on this planet that has never rescinded my aux privileges. That’s remarkable. After an adolescence spent inflicting my Spotify selects on parents, high school friends, and boarding school van drivers, lifetime bans are what I’ve come to expect; yet, somehow, each Thursday night during production, my colleagues will actually ask me to play my music! Given that my self-esteem is almost entirely tied up in how others react to my preference for 1970s German funk-rock and modern-day Detroit scam rap, I cannot overstate what this validation means to me. I like to think that this attitude—everyone’s embrace of the intimate—carries over into the work that our editorial class has done; under the kind, curatorial eyes of Celina and Sydney, the Narrative and Feature sections have been bastions for the kind of personal writing that few campus newspapers have ever cradled. For my part, I received the Arts & Culture
“He kind of looks like my pet cockroach back home… It’s endearing.” “My accent? Oh, I’m not from London. But I’m British by invasion!”
DECEMBER 6 , 2019!3
NARRATIVE section in 2018 with a mission to shun topicality, forego criticism, and instead encourage students to tell their life stories through their relationship to artists and their work. At the end of the day, I’m grateful to my writers above all. When it came time to pitch each week, they accepted my bizarre mission with force and ferocity; I have no doubt these talented folks probably would have written really great reviews, had I not refused to publish them. Ten years from now, if I’m still working with people who wholeheartedly embrace the weirdness coming out of my speakers, then I’ll have postmagazine to thank for plugging me. Amanda Summer after my senior year of high school: It’s a sweltering night, and I am making no attempt to sleep. My phone dings. Morning Mail. I am an eager prefrosh, excited to be looped into University goings-on even before I step foot on campus. Some publication called post- is looking for editors, copy editors, and staff writers. Gee—they must really need a copy editor if they don’t know to capitalize the title of their own publication. *** Winter during my junior year of college: I am cozy on the Copy Couch, named as such for no reason other than my insistence on occupying it every prod night. Music is playing, snacks are haphazardly shared over the table, old issues of post- lay around the room. Someone asks me whether a person stands “in line” or “on line.” With an executive decision to instate the former as an official entry in our style guide, I invalidate this linguistic oddity of New Yorkers. Argument ensues, and everyone is shouting or laughing, or both. It’s been an absolute pleasure to be post-’s copy chief. Contention over commas and em dashes aside, I’ve grown to love post- and the family that we’ve formed around this incredible publication. I’ve grown to love the intimacy with which our writers approach each article, the vibrancy that emanates from our illustrators’ works, our dedication every Thursday as we work—through drooping eyelids and against assignment deadlines—late into the night to get the next issue out. But this is not a farewell. I’m excited to try and fill the shoes of our graduating staff next semester, even if that means I have to leave the comfort of the Copy Couch for a ripped leather chair at the head of the table. Thank you all for everything you’ve done for this magazine. Until next semester, post-.
A Decade Undone Naming Now, Knowing Later BY ANNELIESE MAIR ILLUSTRATED BY JOANNE HAN
I am to start with a Statement on the 2010s—a whole decade coming to a close!—the years of X, Y, and Z, the shifts from A to Q, the return to B, the emerging popularity of E, the obvious appeal of G and H in these times of X, Y, Z, A to Q, B and E, which are all reflective of the times of W, and are all the same thing, if we really think about it. Or we can narrow the scope to my experience of the 2010s. Still, the thought of reflecting on an entire decade is overwhelming. Especially the thought of putting a piece into the world that suggests I have any real knowledge or authority to pick out of the pile and describe (even with the caveat of it all being from my limited point of view) what has happened at the intersection of the decade’s history and my little life. No matter how “personal” my thoughts on the 2010s may be, I’ve still experienced them in contexts of communal, national, and international events to varying degrees. And between the personal and the (inter)national, there stands the responsibility of choice: As soon as I select any one event, I endow it with importance. I could privilege high school graduation, the 2017 Women’s March in New York, my first time voting in a presidential election, entering Brown as a frosh with near-certainty that my admission was a mistake, and so much more than can be neatly packaged into a list. This is an area of thought heavily explored by theorists (usually in terms that fly above my head): how language itself selects and views an object, a person, or a place, and how readers locate and connect bits of text to create meaning. As soon as a subject is present in the text, readers assign it significance: Actors and objects become variables in an unfolding narrative, taking action, undergoing change, even if only to establish a sense of place or reality. And with the presence of anything in a text, there looms the shadow of absence: a powerful tool when used purposefully and responsibly but a potentially and historically harmful one, an inevitable element of any piece of writing whose length fails to reach infinity. So I’m sitting here a bit dumbstruck. It feels like anything I choose pulls itself out of my personal sphere and into shared experiences of time—“shared” not nearly the same as “equivalent.” Moreover, in selecting
events, trends, returns, injustices, emergences, and all else that occurs in the span of 10 years, I have to map out time! How the hell do I do that? I don’t want to spiral into those never-ending, brain-numbing questions of what time truly is or means—I usually shut myself down when my thoughts start trotting along that trail, afraid I’ll find myself up against the edge of confusion and despair. Instead, I find the challenge of mapping out time a fascinating one: It’s a question of how we mark locations along the paths of our lives, how we establish and refer to those reference points. After graduating high school, I started one of those sentence-a-day journals with the hope of recording as much of my College Experience as I could (with the least effort possible). I found myself up against a challenge of choice: What about my day mattered enough to record? Even more importantly, it seemed, what would I want to remember in the future? The latter question dominated early entries: My first weeks at school were a routine of meeting new people, shopping exciting classes, and going to social events. I’m not going to be terrified, lonely, and doubtful later on, I’d think. So I won’t want to remember that. Around a month into college, I looked back on the earlier sentences and realized that, though they weren’t untrue, they were BS. My mental map of my recent history didn’t align with the breadcrumbs I’d laid out in writing; there was a discrepancy between what had literally happened and what felt true to me. I was desperately searching for, and thus trying to create, turning points of my immediate past: accompanying new friends to the pumpkin patch for hayrides and hot cider, meeting someone at Unit Wars, staying out late and going to Jo’s for the first time. But the truly significant moments of that time only emerged later: meeting my new doctor in Providence; my roommate and I discovering uncanny similarities between our lives; typing “Brown” into the “Company” section for my contact on someone’s phone, assuming I wouldn’t keep in touch with the person who would eventually become one of my best friends and senioryear housemate. In order for me to remember, or keep track of, this time in my life—and thus be able to develop relationships, to reflect on myself and to grow—I gravitate towards these points that anchor the befores and afters of my narrative. The points themselves shift with time; my memory values different moments, or varying elements of the same moments, as I proceed through college and my 20s. I think there is some element of choice as to what events matter most to me, or what has provoked the most change—but this choice is limited to the extent that I can direct my own mind and thoughts. It’s a collaboration, sometimes a contention, between self and brain: Together, my brain and my self are learning to condition, decondition, and develop me, drawing a linear timeline into the present, dotting it with knots of memory. Because people kind of have to. Our histories fall into narratives because, as historian Hayden White says, narratives are the only forms of writing—of stories—that we recognize. Maybe a linear organization is the easiest to put together and follow; even in cases of purposeful ambiguity, as my writing professor would urge me, it may be necessary to “signpost” the text to give the reader a sense of solid ground. So when we select events, we don’t just assign them importance: We set them up as static, untouchable moments as well as points of turning and returning in our mental timeframes. As for the decade, I find myself afraid to say anything at all. I think that any reflection upon this time will inevitably unfold as a stubbornly linear narrative, defining itself through the recognition and repetition of salient events. Of course I have thoughts, fears, and even
4!POST–
ARTS & CULTURE hopes for the present based on the past 10 years. But I’m wary of making choices of importance and of absence. I’m insecure about defining turning points relative to time, about pinning these moments down in such close proximity to now. And I’m aware of the desire to mark some events over others in an attempt to address, or even to please, onlookers in the future. I’ll let myself be by leaning into patience, setting myself in the humbling contexts of the vast, shifting landscapes of my community and world, and engaging in some healthy procrastination; I’ll let meaning emerge with me.
Teens and Tens in the 10’s
The Decade’s Most Important Films (To Me) BY ROB CAPRON ILLUSTRATED BY CECILIA CAO
As we approach the end of 2019, major publications—readying their year-end arts & culture retrospectives as per usual—are charged with an additional, even more brazen task: determining the highlights of the 2010s at large. How could we ever transition into 2020 without definitive, “official” recognition of the decade’s best and worst content? Yet if these lists fail for me as a method of remembering our collective past, it’s because the people who curate them have the audacity to contradict my personal rankings. Jerks. Joking aside, I know these lists are essentially harmless: fumbling attempts to canonize what’s most important from ten years of cultural detritus. However, they rarely will take me on a tour of collective history, instead recalling my personal memory. That, to me, is the key component these “best-of” lists tend to neglect: There are personal reasons why we remember certain works of art, why we might cherish something regardless of its quality or content. Allow me to provide some examples from the deep recesses of my own teenage cinephilia that will hopefully inspire your own think pieces. And if a particularly egregious choice lands me on your kill list, remember: I’m not saying these are the best films—just the ones that spoke the most to me. 2010: The Social Network I’d never been on social media. It didn’t matter. At 11 years old, I was distinctly aware that David Fincher’s The Social Network was a fantastic movie. What made it good? Perhaps it was Aaron Sorkin’s brilliant, rapidfire dialogue, or Jesse Eisenberg’s effectively neurotic delivery of really big words that went (and still) go over my head. Perhaps it was the film’s crushing loss to The King’s Speech for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, and the series of battles I waged with my history-obsessed father over which movie was better. And since a 12-year-old couldn’t quite comprehend the merits of shot composition then (and a 49-year-old Dad in 2010 barely understood Facebook in the first place), it goes without saying that I lost every time. Ah well. He got his history movie. I got film history—and my first sense of what masterful directors like Fincher were capable of. 2011: Midnight in Paris What can I say? I’ve been addled by melancholic pangs of nostalgia since before my teenage years. I also spent two woefully short days in Paris a few months prior to watching this in theaters, so to say I came in with a little bias would be an understatement. But even if my knowledge of the region was limited to the Eiffel Tower, cool catacombs, and the weird, horrendoustasting “grape juice” that Dad let me try, the movie made me feel tangible longing for a place I could never
be a part of. And the score! The score! Trumpets are the best, man. 2012: The Avengers Do I even need to talk about this one? Words fail. You have to understand—back then, these superheroes appearing together as a unit in a film that wasn’t their own solo title was revolutionary. If you can recall the famous 360-degree shot around the team in the film’s final battle—and in today’s oversaturated superherodriven society with Disney operating as feudal lord, you probably aren’t allowed to forget it—please add this mental image of me watching it: a chubby 13-yearold, scarfing down popcorn, smiling ear-to-ear. These movies might not quite be cinema, but they’re certainly movie magic. 2013: The Green Inferno Don’t watch this movie. Please. I snuck in and shouldn’t have. It’s a cannibal horror film. It’s just gross. Skip, skip, skip. I wouldn’t, however, tell you to skip the experience of sneaking into an R-rated film with your friends (might be a little late if you haven’t already had the chance, alas); I’ll never forget the horrified gasps and giggles as bodies exploded, faced decapitation, or worse; and our nervous assurances to one another afterwards that it was “fun, right?” Our collective horror when we remember the experience makes the whole ordeal worth it. If theaters ever do go, I’ll miss the sojourns they allow into random cinematic territory. 2014: Whiplash As an aspiring screenwriter, one of my long-term goals is to utilize music in new and exciting ways. That goal wholly comes from this film. There’s plenty of room to debate the movie’s message and morality (no spoilers here—that ruins the “fun”), but all I will say is this: The last 12 minutes engaged me like nothing I’d ever seen. A perfect union of sound and image, and the creation of raw energy. The sense of being alive. 2015: Spectre This one was my first real cinematic disappointment. I even liked 2008’s Quantum of Solace (and James Bond fans loathe that one). After the brilliance of 2012’s Skyfall, I expected another masterpiece, another extension of Bond lore that wasn’t a rehash—and got an overambitious, tonally confused mess. Here’s to the next one. It had one unintentional side effect, though— it made me begin to wonder if somehow, someway, I could do better. 2016: La La Land Moonlight is a better film. That is clear. But I said it myself: I’m a nostalgia boy. And despite the silly spectacle of Ryan Gosling saving jazz, the movie couldn’t help but win over this viewer—an angsty former child star questioning his place in showbiz. And that ending. Sigh. This movie’s been charged with being a tad sentimental, its nostalgia the primary fuel for its emotional verve. I may even agree with that reading upon a rewatch. Which is why I never will rewatch it. Some experiences should be left untouched.
2017: The Florida Project This one’s tough, because for me it totally hinges on what I believe is an utterly ingenious ending. Just watch it. And think of this—I’ve never seen a movie make a more effective point about both the beauty and frailty of dreams in so short a time frame. If La La Land shows the beauty and tragedy of our dreams, this film captures the poignant, brutal truth that they cannot always come true, and maybe never had a chance to in the first place. 2018: Eighth Grade Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse was my favorite. This one was more important. You may be beginning to notice a trend in my selections—themes of nostalgia, childhood, dreams. Unsurprising, given my biggest role from my child-star days. Would it be weird if I said this movie felt like an authentic, digital-childhood version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid? Would Greg Heffley even keep a diary in today’s world—or, like Eighth Grade’s protagonist, start a vlog? The longing, the hope, the anticipation of the future—all here, captured wonderfully. Got high hopes for you as a director, Bo Burnham. 2019: TBD What? I haven’t seen Parasite yet.
Truthfully, Objectively
Top 10 Albums of the 2010s BY KATE OK ILLUSTRATED BY OLIVIA LUNGER
2010: Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest Listening to this album in early high school, I imagined that I would one day walk down a collegiate sidewalk listening to “Memory Boy.” Or listen to “Revival” while perusing my wardrobe for low-rise jeans that are two inches (not one) below my bellybutton, or while attempting to cook a frittata and achieving more of a confusing stir-fry. Indeed, I do these things now. Deerhunter’s 2010 release is just sonically joyful, and this album makes me want to believe in doing things (or having done things) in an idyllic manner, as “halcyon” suggests. HIGHLIGHT: “Revival” 2011: Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring for My Halo Vile’s album is almost hyper-normal—the work of a music fan more than a musician, which is why I am drawn to it. A little R.E.M.-y with its depressive pop sensibility on “Jesus Fever,” a little Dylan-y with its Shakespearean vocal twists on “Puppet To The Man,” and all-around tale-teller Lou Reed-y, this album is derivative in the most genuine way. The album’s sincerity in stylistic imitation is endearing. Consider that Vile released it to mark his departure from the (soon-to-be-Grammywinning) band he played guitar for, The War On Drugs, and we find yet another layer of humility in the work. HIGHLIGHT: “Jesus Fever” DECEMBER 6 , 2019!5
ARTS&CULTURE 2012: Jonny Greenwood - The Master This is the second soundtrack Radiohead bassist Jonny Greenwood composed for director Paul Thomas Anderson—one that is as cinematic as Anderson’s epic film. He captures a sense of pre-war America in sprawling orchestral arrangements, while also portraying the disturbing, post-war atmosphere in sparse tracks like “Able-Bodied Seaman.” One of the reasons why The Master is among my favorite films is that it distorts an Austenian sort of restraint and puts it forward with a haunting, masculine stillness, presenting its narrative as close-to-natural as much as it is unnatural. In my opinion, Greenwood perfectly encapsulates the film’s contradictory analogues of emotional chaos and stillness. HIGHLIGHT: “Get Thee Behind Me Satan feat. Ella Fitzgerald” 2013: Kanye - Yeezus Here, we have Kanye West when he began to be very “New Kanye”—Yeezus amalgamates over-the-top ego and character with a jarring shift to electro and noisy pitches. With collaborators like Arca, Hudson Mohawke, and Daft Punk, Kanye departs, warps, drills, and digitizes hip hop in an unprecedented manner for the producer-rapper. The album is messy and minimal; it captures conflict in its egotistical sonic highs and chaotic conceits. HIGHLIGHT: “I Am a God” 2014: Amen Dunes - Love Damon McMahon, under project name Amen Dunes, whines a lot on this album, but these whines soar in a Tim Buckleyan manner—folk at its most elemental. The album resembles a collection of childhood tunes in its repetition, but it has an overwhelming sense of expansion and climax with its meditative chord progressions in songs like “White Child” and “Lonely Richard.” Love feels devotional, as the title may suggest. Though McMahon doesn’t make the object of devotion exactly clear, it’s that ambiguous gospel of experience that makes this album stand out. HIGHLIGHT: “Lonely Richard” 2015: Travis Scott - Rodeo Rodeo was Travis Scott’s debut studio album— establishing the dark, hedonistic production that Scott is now heralded for. Though he relies on standard hip hop braggadocio and decadent narratives of the Hollywood Hills, on tracks like “90210” and “Nightcrawler,” Scott shows what trap is capable of: an almost tangible, hyper-synthetic architecture of sound. Scott’s curation of over-the-top autotune, bizarre feature selection, and plasticky production formulate the audible translation of his fame and success. HIGHLIGHT: “90210 feat. Kacy Hill” 2016: Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool Yes, 2016 is the year that Beyoncé’s Lemonade was released, and I don’t have an exact explanation as to
why I favor Radiohead’s release. But I can guess that Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool remains my favorite because of how divisive the album is. None of the songs on the album are specifically meme-able or tweet-able— they are all too atmospheric and ambient and dodgy in genre. But A Moon Shaped Pool’s amalgamation of genre and shape is what attracts me to it. From the quick prog-ness of “Burn The Witch” to the ambient, spacey “Glass Eyes,” Radiohead brings forth a patient sort of artfulness. HIGHLIGHT: “True Love Waits” 2017: LCD Soundsystem - American Dream I have a shirt that proclaims “LCD SOUNDSYSTEM, BACK FROM THE DEAD.” And this sort of mantra is what fascinates me about their comeback fourth studio album. Following 2010’s This is Happening, LCD Soundsystem had announced that they were officially disbanding—complete with the whole farewell tour shebang—only to reunite five years later and release a number-one-charting album. But with American Dream, bandleader James Murphy perfectly captures a musical sort of renaissance, of “coming back from the dead,” of nostalgic cult and obsession. Murphy understood the combination of anxiety and cynicism that fans had about the new album, and he managed to combat it. It’s not exactly disingenuous, either—it doesn’t seem like Murphy booby-trapped music geeks and nerds to feed into a cultural trap. Instead, he allows them a glimpse of cultural interiority. HIGHLIGHT: “American Dream”
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Anita Sheih FEATURE Managing Editor Sydney Lo
“But like in a terrible Tim Burton movie, aggressive anti-social behavior turned out to be a hidden pathway to making friends.” - Julian Towers, “why all lists are garbage” 12.6.18
Staff Writer Anna Harvey
“I miss the insignificant significance given to harvests and end-of-the-year celebrations, the comfort of days void of the sense of something to be done.” - Sydney Lo, “pumpkin spice & other existential autumnal comforts” 12.6.17
6!POST–
Section Editors Sara Shapiro Erin Walden
NARRATIVE Managing Editor Celina Sun Section Editors Liza Edwards-Levin Michelle Liu Jasmine Ngai
2018: Bob Dylan - More Blood, More Tracks The 14th volume of Bob Dylan’s archival “bootleg” series, More Blood, More Tracks comes in two versions: a one-disc collection with 11 tracks, and a six-disc collection with 87 tracks. This compilation of previously unreleased recordings is from sessions for the original 1975 album Blood on the Tracks. With alternate takes of familiar classics like “Tangled Up in Blue,” Dylan’s new installment in his bootleg series gives me a glimpse into his private life, which isn’t necessarily comprised of private details. More Blood, More Tracks is eye-opening; the album’s obsessive repetitiveness makes Dylan even more visible as a person and less of a perfect mythic figure. I couldn’t imagine Mick Jagger being friends with Dylan until hearing their take of “Meet Me in the Morning” and listening to them argue about who plays slide guitar. HIGHLIGHT: “Tangled Up in Blue (Take 3, Remake 3)” 2019: Wilco - Ode to Joy Tweedy’s 2019 release marks Wilco’s return to whispery, subtle charm. After the lukewarm albums Schmilco and Star Wars, Ode to Joy feels like a revelation—but it doesn’t exactly sound like one. In this album, I feel as though Wilco is doing what Wilco does best, which is crafting a gangly collection of beautiful melodies. Wilco returns to their Yankee Hotel Foxtrot comfort zone of introspective indie rock, but they find a way to keep their sound spiritually rich with loose touches of emotional weight. HIGHLIGHT: “White Wooden Cross”
Staff Writers Kaitlan Bui Siena Capone Danielle Emerson Naomi Kim Anneliese Mair Grace Park ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Julian Towers Section Editors Nicole Fegan Griffin Plaag Staff Writers Rob Capron David Kleinman
LIFESTYLE Managing Editor Kahini Mehta
SOCIAL MEDIA Head Editor Camila Pavon
Section Editor Caitlin McCartney
Editor Paola Solano
Staff Writers Eashan Das Lauren Toneatto
HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Rémy Poisson
COPY Copy Chief Amanda Ngo
LAYOUT Co-Chiefs Amy Choi Nina Yuchi
Copy Editors Maddy McGrath Jennifer Osborne Mohima Sattar
Designers Joanne Han Steve Ju Iris Xie
Want to be involved? Email: anita_sheih@brown.edu!
WEB MASTER Jeff Demanche
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2019
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS
15
UNIVERSITY NEWS
UFB forum on student group funding stirs discussion on its policies Students criticize principles of funding policies, appreciate increased transparency
BY SARAH WANG SENIOR STAFF WRITER
icy, which requires funds to “directly benefit Brown students.” The principle means that groups cannot donate UFB funds or use them to pay for services for non-Brown students. Multiple participants at the forum, many of whom represented service groups such as Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere, Brown Elemen-
competition and travel-based groups, they argued that it is not equitable to apply it to service groups who could always use more funds to expand and deepen their outreach. Met with loud snaps in agreement, one student at the forum also said that funding the minimum for small groups that require high amounts of funding
Following the Undergraduate Finance Board’s publication of the funding totals for nearly 200 students groups last week, students expressed concerns about some of the principles that guide the Board’s funding decisions at a forum UFB hosted Wednesday evening. “UFB’s goal is to help all of the student body. We’re always looking for ways to improve what we do,” said UFB Chair Julian De Georgia ’20 at the forum, which was attended by about 50 students. “I’m here to listen to what you have to say, start a conversation and answer any questions that you have.” UFB Vice Chair Fatoumata Kabba ’22 and UCS Chair of Student Activities Alex Song ’20 were also in attendance. While students appreciated how the Board handled the forum and its transparency efforts, much of the dialogue at the forum focused on the fourth principle of UFB’s funding pol-
tary Afterschool Mentoring and Project LETS, questioned how the Board could quantify the amount that a group directly benefits students. They emphasized how community engagement work is a two-way street that inherently benefits both those in need and student volunteers. Rocket Drew ’22, a member of HOPE, suggested eliminating the principle altogether. As a replacement, Drew proposed that the Board should instead consider “the actual impact that money has on real people’s lives in the community” during their deliberations on funding. Students at the forum also criticized UFB’s practice of funding only “to the minimum that each group needs,” meaning that the Board only provides the funds necessary to support the cheapest options for supplies, transportation and lodging, among other necessities. While multiple students agreed that a set minimum amount is reasonable for
and have high barriers to entry fundamentally benefits students who are already privileged. During the forum, De Georgia also acknowledged that UFB has not been a “good advocate for students” in the past and that the current Board has “inherited a lot of precedence.” Gabrielle Santas ’20, a member of the Student Advisory Committee in the Swearer Center for Public Service, said that she “would like to see (UFB) move itself in a different light” that upholds the “certain institutional culpability and accountability that Brown has to the greater Providence community” by funding groups that better the community. The SAC has adopted a resolution urging UFB to revise their policies, The Herald previously reported. Drew told The Herald that the Board’s reliance on precedent was “hamstringing their ability” to allocate funding in a way that students would
“Our goals became more focused and clarified over time,” Trinh said. “We thought of ourselves as plugging in for advocacy for the DREAM Act. We wanted the (University) to make a public statement explicitly saying it would not discriminate against undocumented immigrants.” Then-President Ruth Simmons later offered public support for the DREAM Act. “She was one of the first Ivy League presidents” to do so, Stark said, describing her decision to speak out as a proud moment for BIRC. While Tran’s death in a 2010 car accident devastated BIRC, the organization strove to continue its work, later establishing a scholarship in Tran’s name to support undocumented students who planned to attend college. BIRC also tried to honor Tran’s legacy by focusing on prominent immigration issues that affected both the University specifically as well as immigrants nationwide. “It was always a collective struggle,” Stark said. “We put at the forefront a critique of capitalism and showed how it relates to the migrant justice movement.”
History of Brown Immigrant Rights Coalition
BIRC FROM PAGE 1 on campus still discussed immigrant rights and migrant justice issues “but in smaller circles,” Trinh said. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, anti-immigrant sentiments rose, which made students feel “criminalized,” she added. Tran began the effort to form and establish BIRC because, as an undocumented student herself, she “always knew that at every institution, there are students living in the shadows the way she had to,” Trinh said. Tran’s family sought safe haven in the United States because they feared political persecution at home in Vietnam. Though they were denied political asylum into the country, they remained in the United States as undocumented immigrants. Tran was only six years old when she arrived in the United States for the first time. Prior to her arrival at the University, Tran studied as an undergraduate at the University of California at Los Angeles, where she advocated for immigrant rights. “She saw herself as privileged because she made it to Brown, and she used that relative safety to advocate for people who didn’t have that,” Trinh said. Tran later received the attention of Congress after she testified before a House of Representatives subcommittee in favor of the DREAM Act, as The Herald previously reported. The bipartisan DREAM Act, or the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, is a legislative proposal to provide the children of undocumented immigrants with a path to citizenship if they earned a high school degree and then completed two years of college or military service or were employed for three years. “She was constantly advocating for the DREAM Act, even as she approached the age where she might not qualify,” Trinh added. In its earliest days, passing the DREAM Act was one of BIRC’s main goals, said Alejo Stark ’13, a member of BIRC from 2010 to 2013. A similar bill passed in the House this past June, though it has not yet been voted on in the Senate.
BIRC re-emerges in a new political era After many of its original members graduated, BIRC fell into a state of relative inactivity during the 2014-15 school year. “It kind of faded out for a bit,” said Jasmine Ruiz ’20.5, a current member of BIRC and a former photo editor for The Herald, referring to the two lives of the institution as “BIRC 1.0 and BIRC 2.0.” The group, Ruiz elaborated, “has always been non-hierarchical, which makes it hard to hold people accountable.” Re-established in 2015, members of BIRC resumed their work with the 2016 presidential election underway. After President Donald Trump’s election, which promised heavy changes and more punitive immigration measures, the group came closer together, Ruiz said. “There was definitely a sense of fear for the safety of a lot of our loved ones, and we found community with each other because we felt that the issue was very personal and close to home,” she added. As the organization once again became reconnected with the University community, their goals included spread-
2009
BIRC is founded by Tam Tran GS and VyVy Trinh ’11 MD’17
SARAH MARTINEZ / HERALD
support. “Their highest priority should be to reflect what students want right now, not the ways in which past boards have spent this money.” De Georgia wrote in an email to The Herald that he was impressed with the “thoughtful and productive” conversation at the forum. To ensure that these conversations lead to meaningful action, UFB is planning to take several steps to encourage further discussion and increase transparency. For instance, they plan to create small working groups composed of students who are interested in addressing
2013
2010
Tam Tran Scholarship established to aid undocumented students
Then-University President Ruth Simmons rallies alongside BIRC for passage of the DREAM Act
2015
2016
BIRC reconvenes as Donald Trump begins his candidacy for president
University adds information regarding financial aid availability for undocumented students to their website
specific aspects of UFB’s funding policies, De Georgia added. The Board is also considering adding information about funding precedents to the UFB website, establishing office hours and creating a presentation that outlines the many pathways student groups can take to receive funding at the University. “My hope is that UFB can change from primarily making budget decisions to acting as a champion of the student body and thinking proactively about what we can do to ensure that student activities at Brown are as successful as possible,” De Georgia wrote.
2017
Undocumented Student Program is created as an initiative of the First-Generation College and Low-Income Student Center
Due to BIRC’s activism, the University begins considering undocumented applicants who qualify for DACA as domestic applicants
2019
The First-Generation College and Low-Income Student Center changes its name to the Undocumented, First-Generation and Low-Income Student Center
University launches Undocumented Student initiative
USHA BHALLA / HERALD
ing awareness about immigration issues, raising money for various nonprofits and advocating for undocumented students on campus. In May 2016, BIRC held a meeting with Provost Richard Locke P’18 and Dean of the College Maud Mandel, in which they presented research they had conducted on “the experience of (undocumented) students on campus, the problems with the way students were being admitted (as part of the international rather than domestic pool) and the need for attention to these areas,” wrote Marisa Quinn, chief of staff to the Provost, in an email to The Herald. In response to this, the University revised their approach “to admitting and supporting undocumented and DACA students,” Quinn wrote. Due to the efforts of BIRC, the University altered its financial aid policy and began considering undocumented students as domestic applicants so that they could receive financial aid. “This was a very constructive partnership that led to a deeper understanding of the distinct issues faced by undocumented and DACA students and helped the University develop a far more robust and targeted way to address those needs,” Quinn wrote.
The demands BIRC presented to the University in May 2016 originated in a class about immigrant social movements taught by Kevin Escudero, an assistant professor of American Studies and ethnic studies, who played an integral role in creating the Undocumented Student Initiative, as The Herald previously reported. “BIRC has been at the forefront of ensuring that the University is aware of the needs of the undocumented student community at Brown,” Escudero said. Escudero said that BIRC spreads “awareness and visibility to the ways in which immigration status impacts their lives and also the lives of the people in their community.” Some of BIRC’s campaigns have included creating photo booths, as well as conducting teach-ins to spread awareness about immigration issues. BIRC uses such programming to challenge “some crazy depictions of the way that migrants to the United States are (presented),” said John Lopez-Aldas ’19, a BIRC member from 2015 to 2019. BIRC also worked closely with the Undocumented, First-Generation College and Low-Income Student Center center to move “toward long term structural solutions as opposed to bandaids” to
serve undocumented students at the University and in the larger Providence area, Ruiz added. BIRC’s advocacy led to the creation of the Undocumented Student Program as an initiative of the U-FLi Center in fall 2016. The program provides advising and leadership development for undocumented students and programming for the campus community on migration issues. Recently, BIRC has focused on building relationships with local grassroots organizations doing “the same kind of work,” such as the Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance. AMOR provides “community support … for victims of hate crimes and state-sponsored violence,” with a particular focus on aiding immigrant populations, according to their website. “We threw a Fuck Borders party and donated the proceeds,” Ruiz said. When reflecting on BIRC’s decade of work, Ruiz sees the group’s future as pushing for equality for immigrants on a larger scale. “Generally (we want to) work toward a future where we don’t have to worry about borders or criminalizing folks,” Ruiz said. “Especially when a lot of people fleeing violence in their country are fleeing because of U.S. interventions.”
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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2019
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WINTER SEASON ICE SKATING + ICE BUMPER CARS
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The First Baptist Meeting House in America 75 North Main Street, Providence, RI 02903 Featuring seasonal readings by President Christina H. Paxson and members of the Department of Classics Musical prelude and accompaniment by University Organist Mark Steinbach, plus the Chattertocks’ rendition of The Twelve Days of Christmas and a special arrangement by the Brown Madrigal Singers
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