Friday, February 10, 2023

UNIVERSITY NEWS

U. did not consult Narragansett Indian Tribe on human remains, Tribe says

Haffenreffer Museum promises to return remains, funerary artifacts to Tribe

BY NEIL MEHTA UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITOR

The University’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology failed to adequately consult the Narragansett Indian Tribe about the museum’s possession of 10 human remains and 24 funerary objects associated with the Narragansett, according to John Brown, historic preservation officer for the Narragansett Indian Tribe.

Under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, museums that hold the human remains and funerary objects of Native Americans must inventory and attempt to identify the cultural affiliation of the remains in consultation with the associated Native American tribes. Afterward, they must release a public notice about the inventory before repatriating the remains and objects to their associated tribes.

Appropriate consultations did not take place between the Narragansett

UNIVERSITY NEWS

and the Haffenreffer before the museum released a 2018 notice identifying the remains of 10 Narragansett individuals — which stated that they consulted the Tribe — John Brown said. And following that notice, the museum offered limited communication about the identification of the remains to the Narragansett, John Brown added.

The Haffenreffer previously believed that two meetings between the museum and the tribe — one in 1995 and the other in 1997 — served as consultations, wrote Robert Preucel, director of the Haffenreffer, in an email to The Herald. But the museum has learned that the Tribe “believes that the consultation was inadequate,” Preucel wrote.

Preucel declined to publicly comment regarding the Haffenreffer’s present understanding of the meetings.

Earlier this week, the Haffenreffer Museum apologized to John Brown and the Historic Preservation Office and requested a formal consultation with the Tribe regarding the remains and objects, John Brown said. Preucel confirmed this apology in an email to The Herald. The museum hopes to move forward with the repatriation process “as expeditiously as possible,”

Weekend cold spell causes campus facilities issues

Facilities, students discuss problems in residence halls, campus buildings

BY SAM LEVINE AND HALEY SANDLOW UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITORS

Over the weekend, Vivian Li ’25 moved into her neighbor’s room in Caswell Hall to quarantine after testing positive for COVID-19. But the heating in the room had broken during the week, Li said, making it extremely cold as temperatures dropped across the Northeast last Friday. Li and her neighbor called Facilities Management three times on Saturday to have the heating fixed. Each time, Facilities told Li and her neighbor that they could not find the work order they had previously placed and that they were “really busy” handling “a long queue” of work orders.

“Because the Caswell windows are kind of leaky… our room got

really cold and we both had to layer up really dramatically,” Li said.

According to Michael Guglielmo Jr., vice president for Facilities Management, “Facilities Management prioritizes response based on risk to buildings, structures, research and personal comfort.”

Throughout the weekend, Facilities received 64 service requests to check temperatures in student rooms and placed work orders into a queue for service — although he said that facilities did not receive any “repetitive calls.”

At around 2 a.m. Sunday morning, Facilities delivered two space heaters to Li’s room — but five minutes after plugging them in, a power surge caused the electricity in the room to go out, Li said. Li and her neighbor bundled up for the night, and by midday Sunday, Facilities returned to fix the electricity and the heating.

Caswell was not the only building impacted by the cold weather.

Residential, academic and athletic buildings at the University en -

Preucel wrote.

A flawed ‘standard process of review’

The NAGPRA states that Native American tribes can request that mu -

UNIVERSITY NEWS

seums and federal agencies holding “Native American human remains and associated funerary objects” return the remains and objects to the Tribe if the remains have an established tribal affiliation.

That affiliation is established by museums and federal agencies in a legally mandated inventory of the remains and objects they hold, along

Dual degree students discuss scheduling

BY INDIGO MUDBHARY SENIOR STAFF WRITER

Vicky Yang ’25, a third-year BrownRISD Dual Degree student majoring in psychology at the University and illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design, described her shopping period experience as similar to working as an airport air traffic controller.

“In airports, there’s that person that is giving direction to all the airplanes, so they can land in sequence and not bump into each other and not crash,” Yang said. “That’s what I feel like (planning) my classes because there are so many conflicts.”

Established in 2007, the dual degree program is a five-year academic experience that allows students to “develop and integrate diverse spheres of academic and artistic interests” simultaneously at Brown and RISD, according to the program’s website.

But fitting courses of interest at both schools into one schedule while also meeting degree requirements

comes with its own set of difficulties for students. The Herald spoke to three BRDD students about their experiences in course selection and scheduling.

Balancing courses, academic calendars at two schools Yang, who typically takes five classes per semester, prefers to have a balanced mix of courses from both institutions in her schedule, though dual degree students are “allowed to do one full RISD or one full Brown semester.”

Since her RISD major has “a lot of requirements,” taking less than five courses per semester would make it difficult to graduate on time, Yang added. But this is “not true for every

major,” she said.

Adam Meller ’25, a third-year dual degree student majoring in English and philosophy at the University and glass at RISD, said he tries to “balance between three (courses) at one (school) and two at the other,” though he plans to “do four Brown classes and one RISD class” for the spring semester.

Having access to both schools and being conscious about his course selection makes Meller feel “a sense of agency” in the registration process, he said. “It really feels like I am shaping my education constantly.”

Yang described her process of regis-

Students navigate two academic calendars, commend dual degree advising services

EMILY SUONG / HERALD

DANA RICHIE / HERALD

The Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology still holds the remains of at least 99 unidentified Native Americans, according to a ProPublica report released in December.

FDA authorizes abortion pills for distribution in retail pharmacies

Health Services continues to offer abortion options, support to students

BY OWEN DAHLKAMP SENIOR STAFF WRITER

On Jan. 3, the Food and Drug Administration announced that certified retail pharmacies can distribute mifepristone pills with a prescription. Combined with misoprostol, mifepristone can induce an abortion.

The decision provides patients increased access to medication abortions through their providers, according to Mindy Sobota, an associate professor of medicine and primary care physician.

What is mifepristone?

Mifepristone is the first in a two-drug regimen for a medication abortion, Sobota said. In contrast to a surgical abortion, which is exclusively performed in clinics and can be more invasive, medication abortions consist of prescription drugs taken to terminate a pregnancy, according to Sobota.

Mifepristone inhibits the production of hormones necessary for pregnancy while the second drug, misoprostol — a medication already

distributed at retail pharmacies with a prescription — initiates contractions to expel the uterine lining, according to Sobota.

Data from 2020 showed that over half of the abortions administered in the U.S. were medication abortions. Demand for the drugs has increased since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade.

The FDA first approved the drug for use in medication abortions in 2000, but restricted distribution to patients at in-person clinics. In 2021, the FDA approved the drug’s distribution through registered mail-order pharmacies, before it approved its distribution at retail pharmacies this year.

Patients should expect no symptoms from mifepristone, Sobota said. After taking misoprostol 24 to 48 hours later, patients will experience cramping and bleeding as the pregnancy is ended.

24 hours after taking misoprostol, Sobota added, “you should feel more or less like your normal self.”

What does mifepristone’s approval mean for abortion access?

Sobota said that the FDA’s decision is a “game-changer for primary care physicians.” Before the authorization, primary care providers often did not

prescribe mifepristone because it could not be filled by a retail pharmacy like CVS or Walgreens. Instead, the drug either needed to be stocked and dispensed from a clinic or, as of 2021, mail-ordered to a specialty pharmacy approved for remote distribution, Sobota said.

With the expanded number of physicians able to prescribe mifepristone, Sobota said she wants “healthcare workers to know that (medication abortions) really deserve to be in primary care.”

She added that medication abortions, which can take place at home, provide patients with “more privacy” than a procedure abortion.

Will mifepristone be available at Brown?

Retail pharmacies must apply for certification to distribute mifepristone, according to the FDA’s announcement. Two of the nation’s largest retail pharmacy chains, CVS and Walgreens, have expressed their intent to apply for certification to sell the pill.

CVS “plan(s) to seek certification to fill mifepristone prescriptions written by authorized providers,” spokesperson Amy Thibaut wrote in an email to The Herald.

In response to the FDA’s authorization, some states that limit abortion access have introduced or passed legislation to ban mifepristone use,

prompting lawsuits that could set a precedent for medication abortion regulations.

According to Thibaut, CVS will fill prescriptions “where legally permissible” and pledged to “follow all FDA safety protocols regarding the medication,” but did not specify which states mifepristone may be distributed in.

Brown’s on-campus pharmacy has not specified whether they will apply to obtain certification from the FDA to fill mifepristone prescriptions, wrote Tanya Sullivan, assistant clinical director of Brown Health Services, in an email to The Herald. However, Health Services already distributes misoprostol.

Sullivan added that students should refer to BWell’s abortion resources for more information.

Sullivan reaffirmed Brown Health Services’ commitment to providing reproductive health care to students. The department provides “inclusive and non-judgmental” options and referrals for abortions, including transportation, follow-up care and “comprehensive contraceptive care,” as well as counseling services, Sullivan said.

Sobota said she hopes that the FDA’s mifepristone authorization will encourage patients to discuss prospective abortion care with their primary care doctors at annual visits.

Sullivan added that the University will “continue to support a full range of reproductive health services which we believe is vital for the safety and well-being of all members of our community.”

Hope Street shops discuss business community, local residents’ support

most 30 years and previously operated another now-closed location on Thayer Street, according to Maddox.

have made goods more expensive across the United States, she added.

BY MIKAYLA KENNEDY CONTRIBUTING WRITER

About two miles from Brown’s campus sits a community of small and independent businesses on Hope Street This stretch of eight blocks is lined with craft shops, clothing stores, a ballet studio, restaurants and much more. The area aims to cultivate close connections between the street’s stores and the surrounding community, three local business operators told The Herald.

“We all feel like we won the lottery to end up on Hope Street,” said Jan Dane, who owns Stock Culinary Goods, a local kitchenware shop.

The area has long been home to a vibrant business community, said Pam Maddox, the owner of Blooming Blossoms Floral Boutique and a lifelong resident of the Hope Street area. Blooming Blossoms is a flower shop that has been on Hope Street for al-

She added that, though the exact composition of the street has changed, it has long fostered a sense of community. “In the ’60s, (Hope Street) had a market — the fruit stand, the butcher,” Maddox said. “It was set up a bit different, but it’s always been a community street for shopping local and small.”

Unlike Maddox’s shop, many of the businesses that currently reside on Hope Street opened between 2005 and 2010, according to Dane. For the most part, these businesses have stayed there.

The area surrounding Hope Street is residential, which Dane said allows the street to remain stable and family-oriented.

“I’ve watched kids grow from babies to age seven,” said Ashley Allen, the manager of the toy store Henry Bear’s Park. “I know a lot of the families, and it’s just great to have the support here.”

Local support has also helped businesses on the street weather inflation and supply chain issues that

Allen shared that community support, especially during the holiday season, has allowed Henry Bear’s quality of business and products to remain stable.

Now that almost all COVID-19 restrictions have been lifted in Rhode Island, Allen said that Henry Bear’s Park is bringing back storewide events such as weekly storytimes, music performances and game nights.

Dane added that Stock Culinary Goods has tried to keep prices steady for customers. “We want to be here for the long haul and so we have to ride out this inflation with the customers and the people and the community who (have) always been here for us,” she said.

According to Maddox, a sense of mutual appreciation between customers and businesses has helped the area thrive. Blooming Blossoms has been able to flourish over the last three decades because “it’s something that makes you feel good,” she said. “It’s something that keeps you smiling.”

The Hope Street Merchants As -

sociation, a local organization representing many of the independent businesses on Hope Street, works to continue cultivating this persistent sense of community, ac cording to Dane, the association’s vice president.

Currently, the association is currently planning a “beautification effort” by planting “perennials and some annuals” in the many planters that line the street. This initiative was made possible by a placemaking grant from the state funding the improvement of public spaces, Dane

added.

The association will also host its annual spring block party that will feature “live music and performances,” “restaurants,” “food trucks,” “artists (and) more” on May 20, according to the association’s website.

“It’s really something to be celebrated when a community comes together in the way this community has,” Dane said. “It’s really critical to a city’s personality … we’re really grateful that we’ve been allowed to flourish this way.”

METRO Hope Street Merchants Association plans ‘beautification’ project, annual block party

RHEA RASQUINHA / HERALD

RHEA RASQUINHA / HERALD

countered a variety of maintenance and infrastructure issues as a result of the near- or sub-zero temperatures last weekend.

Sirens and fire alarms could be heard across campus as Facilities Management and the Providence Fire Department evacuated multiple buildings and repaired damages across campus.

Facilities had prepared for the extreme weather conditions, according to Guglielmo. Those preparations included scheduling additional staff, making rounds in unoccupied campus buildings, placing contractors on “standby” and making adjustments to campus mechanical systems.

Facilities issues included burst pipes, broken sprinkler heads and multiple problems in the Biomedical Center. According to Guglielmo, “remediation efforts are currently underway.”

The Herald spoke to four students impacted by the issues last weekend, including Li, who expressed a mix of frustration and understanding.

Students in Minden Hall also reported losing heat over the weekend, voicing their concerns over building temperatures in building-wide group chat messages reviewed by The Herald. And at New Pembroke 4, a sprinkler head failed in a custodial closet Sunday, Guglielmo wrote.

Facilities shut off the water in the building for four hours, wrote Angelica Mroczek ’25, a community coordinator for New Pembroke 4, in an email to The Herald. During that time, residents were

directed to use bathrooms in adjacent buildings.

“Residents were frustrated but understanding of the situation,” Mroczek wrote.

On Friday night, a section of railing was reported as hanging from the roof of Hegeman Hall, Guglielmo wrote, which Facilities inspected following the incident. The Department of Public Safety closed off a portion of George Street and surrounding walkways, and posted a patrol car on the corner of Thayer Street due to concerns about more fencing falling “during the high winds,” wrote Lori Sill, Hegeman’s area coordinator, in an email to residents.

Issues in academic, athletic buildings

Facilities received multiple reports of issues in the Biomed Center and the Sidney Frank Center for Life Sciences between last Friday and Sunday, including flooding in the Biomed Center’s elevators, offices, labs and the Herbarium, according to Guglielmo.

Issues across the two buildings included a frozen coil in one air handler unit that leaked water into the elevator pit and activated the fire alarm, the glycol loop heat exchanger leaking, a frozen pipe on the third floor, a frozen sprinkler head on the second floor and broken sprinkler heads on the third and sixth-floor stairwells, according to Guglielmo.

A restoration plan for physical damages to the buildings “has been developed” and will begin shortly, Guglielmo wrote, while “all systems are (now) fully operational.”

An exterior heating line froze on the second floor of the GeoChemistry Building Saturday morning, resulting in water in parts of the second floor and the spaces below, according to Guglielmo. There was “no impact to labs in this area,” and the issue is currently being addressed, he added.

A pipe also ruptured in the Olney-Margolies Athletic Center Sunday, which damaged multiple walls and carpets, Guglielmo wrote.

Facilities also responded to a sprinkler head failure in Sayles Hall on Sunday that leaked water into three rooms, according to Guglielmo.

Praises Amponsah ’24 was conducting interviews for the Brown Consulting Club in Sayles Room 205 — one of the impacted rooms — when she noticed the ceiling was dripping.

“It’s just unfortunate that a school like Brown, with as big of an endowment as it has, still can’t fix some of the infrastructure,” Amponsah said. “The Northeast is a very cold place … the fact that some of these buildings aren’t equipped to handle that is unfortunate.”

University Spokesperson Brian Clark wrote in an email to The Herald that no University or property owner “can guarantee with certainty that extreme weather events will never result in a burst pipe or heating system malfunction.”

“Brown invests many millions of dollars annually in renewing hundreds of buildings across campus — a number of which date back centuries — through both major renovations and more routine upgrades to infrastructure and fa-

cilities,” he added.

From freezing to 50s

While the buildings and heating systems in the Northeast are designed to operate in cold temperatures, they are not meant to sustain the less frequent severe temperatures such as those from last weekend, said Kurt Teichert, senior lecturer in Environment and Society.

“In extreme conditions like that, there’s going to be frozen pipes,” Teichert said, especially in the older buildings on campus which have been retrofitted over the years to include heating and cooling systems.

According to Kim Cobb, director of the Institute at Brown for Environment

and Society and a professor of Earth, Environmental and Planetary studies, the record-shattering cold temperatures resulted from a “pile up” of conditions.

This included two opposite “spinning” systems of large-scale atmospheric circulation that pulled colder, northern air masses to the Northeast, in addition to a southern meandering of the polar vortex, a region of constantly spinning cold air around the Earth’s poles.

Still, the University should also be preparing for the more common impact of climate change, Cobb said — record high temperatures that will create “increased cooling demands.”

Eddie Glaude P’18 calls for reimagining of American history in lecture

Glaude hopes to send a message that the United States “must accept the past that has made us who we are,” he said in an interview with The Herald.

continued, “protect our innocence.”

BY NEIL MEHTA

UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITOR

Scholar and public intellectual Eddie

Glaude P’18 spoke to a crowd of Brown students and community members Thursday, calling for a reimagining of American history at his “Race and Democracy: America is Always Changing, But America Never Changes” lecture.

The lecture kicked off the Democracy Project’s first public-facing program, “Being Again: Democracy in Crisis,” hosted by the University’s Center for Philosophy, Politics and Economics. The Democracy Project “promotes the study … of democratic values, norms, cultures, institutions and practices around the world, with a specific focus on North American, European and Latin American experiences with democracy,” according to the project website.

During the lecture, Glaude said that the country is currently experiencing “a moment of profound crisis,” pointing to the dissonance between the country’s origin myths, which promote “American exceptionalism,” and the truth of its history.

As a result, the U.S. today faces pressing issues such as “the great replacement theory, terror around demographic shifts (and) assaults on voting rights.”

“We have been lying to ourselves since the beginning about who we are,” Glaude told the audience. “What do we make of the fact that a lie repeatedly told becomes a uniquely American form of madness that haunts the nation?”

According to Glaude, Americans must “examine ourselves for who we really are,” and must do so without “our myths and legends about American exceptionalism.” These myths, he

Glaude said that the country must undergo a process of self-examination to move beyond a view of history “that desperately needs Black folks to be the sick men and women of our democracy.”

Glaude told The Herald his academic interests involve “the distribution of benefits” in the U.S., such as access to schooling opportunities and bank loans, and how this distribution can be uneven on the basis of race.

Lily Gardner ’26 said that she attended Glaude’s lecture “because I care about democracy and I think that the conversations we have about democracy are one-sided and esoteric and rely too much on constitutionality.”

Associate Professor of Political Science and Co-director of the Democracy Project Melvin Rogers praised Glaude as an impactful scholar with a timely message.

Glaude’s impact “in American intellectual and cultural life extends far beyond the walls of academia (and) into your living room or wherever

you find yourself watching MSNBC,” Rogers said. He added that Glaude “has modeled for me thoughtfulness, intellectual rigor

ASHLEY CHOI / HERALD

and a need to be a critical steward of the complicated religious and political traditions of the United States.”

NEIL MEHTA / HERALD Glaude said that the United States currently stands in a “moment of profound crisis” stemming from the denial of its true history.

tering for courses as “very complicated.”

In particular, RISD’s five-hour studio classes conflict with her interests at the University, she said. If a studio “takes up, for example, Monday afternoon, (you) can’t take any Monday, Wednesday (and) Friday afternoon classes at Brown.”

“The RISD studios are so hefty and lengthy. They felt like they were kind of preventing me from even considering (some) Brown classes,” said Sarkis Antonyan ’27, a first-year dual degree student interested in pursuing interior architecture at RISD and urban studies and literary arts at Brown.

This semester, Yang is able to work around her Friday RISD studio class because she can watch recordings of her Friday class at the University. “If there’s a conflict, I email both professors and work with them individually

to see what can be done about it,” Yang said. “Whether they will accommodate you (or not) depends on the professor.”

Yang described RISD’s Wintersession — which allows RISD students to take a single class and ran from Jan. 5 to Feb. 8 in 2023 — as another conflict between RISD’s calendar and the spring semester at Brown. “The first half (of Wintersession) overlaps with Brown’s winter holiday (and) the latter half (overlaps) with Brown’s spring semester.”

Meller said he tends to “shop extra classes at Brown” since he “won’t know what (his) RISD schedule looks like until shopping period is over at Brown.” The University’s spring semester started Jan. 26 this year, according to Brown’s office of the registrar, which falls in the middle of RISD’s Wintersession.

Even though BRDD students can opt out of Wintersession starting their third

year, Meller said he has participated in Wintersession every year possible.

Advising and the ‘five-year plan’

BRDD students are given a consistently updated document referred to as the five-year plan in their first year at the University which helps them identify their course plans.

“This helps them to map out which courses they’ll need to take at various points and to identify and navigate potential conflicts ahead of time,” Patricia Ybarra, interim director of the dual degree program, wrote in an email to The Herald.

Designing the five-year plan means

“I need to be more familiar with … the course offerings (at both schools) and try to predict the way I can take (courses) without certain conflict,” Yang said. “If I don’t pay more attention to course offerings, it will be very difficult in my fourth or fifth year to make things

happen.”

Yang said there’s not “really much of a system designed for (BRDD students) to navigate through two schools and resolve (scheduling) conflicts,” and that making the process easier would also allow Brown students to take RISD classes more frequently and vice versa.

Antonyan said that he has felt “supported” throughout the registration process due to the work of RISD advisors and administrators. He added that BRDD students themselves are a source of support for one another, although he wishes he met with advisors more often after registration.

Ybarra encouraged BRDD students who are struggling to manage course scheduling to get in touch with their advisors as early as possible. “They (also) have their RISD major advisor and Brown concentration advisor for guidance on selecting courses at each institution,” she added.

“We are reviewing … how to make these policies more user-friendly for students,” Ybarra wrote. “It’s very tricky to come up with one-size-fits-all solutions for difficulties in course conflicts” with all of the different degree combinations across the two schools.

She added that “regular advising is key” since classes at both schools change constantly. “A perfectly planned schedule in the second year may not work out as planned in the fourth year.”

“What is great about this program is that the students keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible,” Ybarra wrote.

“I feel like this program is so unique. Some days I get to read about climate change and then on my desk I have two paintings drying, and I look at both sitting next to each other,” Antonyan said. “It just feels very special. I feel like multiple sides of my character are being tapped into.”

Valentine’s Day Arts and Crafts 7:00 p.m.

Stephen

Robert ’62 Campus Center

Brown University Men’s Basketball vs Cornell 2:00 p.m. Pizzitola Sports Center

University professors consider AI’s impact on academic integrity

New artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT creates waves in academic world

BY MAYA DAVIS AND ANISHA KUMAR STAFF WRITER AND SENIOR STAFF WRITER

ChatGPT, a chatbot created by artificial intelligence company OpenAI Nov. 30, has prompted professors at colleges across the country to change the way they teach and assign work.

Advertised as a program that users can interact with in a “conversational way,” ChatGPT has earned attention for its ability to write concise and convincing essays and fix code. When prompted, the bot can write anything from a textbook intro to a love poem. Some school districts in the United States have banned ChatGPT completely.

According to five professors interviewed by The Herald, whether or not the bot’s expansive abilities offer a supplementary educational tool or provide unacceptable outside help is up for debate.

At the University, the academic code remains unchanged, according to Steven Reiss, chair of the University’s Standing Committee on the Academic Code and a professor of computer science.

Reiss emphasized the “Basic Policy” passage in the code, which states that a student’s name on academic work assures that the work is “the result of the student’s own thoughts and study,” unless the work acknowledges external assistance.

“We do not discourage or encourage the use of (ChatGPT),” Reiss said. He added that professors’ individual policies always override the academic code, which means that professors can choose to allow the use of ChatGPT.

The University’s Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching has also released a guide for professors that offers direction on dealing with new developments in AI.

With the final decision left to individual professors, some professors told The Herald that they plan to alter their syllabi to include language on ChatGPT.

Jason Harry, professor of the

practice of technology and entrepreneurship, teaches ENGN 2125: “Engineering Management and Decision Making.” This year, the course has an updated syllab us that adapts to ChatGPT: “Submitting work that has been substantially created using AI technology” is considered “unacceptable behavior.”

Students “will turn to ChatGPT to rough draft an answer, and then they’ll mask the fact that it was done substantially by AI,” Harry added. “So, we’ve disallowed it.”

Benjamin Parker, an assistant professor of English, said he experimented with feeding ChatGPT essay prompts he has previously used in his classes and found the responses underwhelming. In his trials, Parker concluded that ChatGPT was not capable of close reading,

creatively analyzing quotations or paying attention to “patterns of significance.”

“I would convey to my students who are tempted to have computers think for them that they are only cheating themselves,” Parker said. Even if students do submit ChatGPT’s work as their own, there are limitations to the bot’s abilities, according to Assistant Professor of Computer Science Stephen Bach. While ChatGPT can gather information, it lacks many of the complex reasoning skills that humans possess, Bach said. Asking the AI to reason through hypothetical scenarios often causes it to “hallucinate” — a term used in natural language processing to describe AI-generated content that is incorrect, though confidently stated, he added.

“ChatGPT can be eager to please,” Bach explained. “In some cases, if you say ‘prove this statement,’ and it’s not a true statement, it’ll still act as if it’s true and give you something that sounds plausible, but is wrong.”

According to Bach, no widespread and reliable method exists to detect ChatGPT-generated content, though OpenAI recently released an AI Text Classifier that “predicts how likely it is that a piece of text was generated by AI” — which comes with the caveat that the tool “isn’t always accurate .”

“We don’t want ChatGPT to be used for misleading purposes in schools or anywhere else, so we’re already developing mitigations to help anyone identify text generated by that system,” an OpenAI spokes -

person wrote in an email to The Herald. “We look forward to working with educators on useful solutions and (finding) other ways to help teachers and students benefit from artificial intelligence.”

Rather than focusing on detecting or banning AI use, Professor of American Studies and History Steven Lubar — who specializes in the history of technology — said he plans to experiment with allowing students to use ChatGPT for brainstorming and first drafts.

“When to pay attention to it, ignore it or push back on it … those are the kinds of things you need to learn with any tool,” Lubar said. “My hope is to learn to teach students to use (tools like ChatGPT) wisely.”

Lubar said he modified his syllabus to tell students they are welcome to use ChatGPT, as long as they clearly explain how they used it and provide a detailed discussion of how it helped them.

“My guess is it may be more work to use ChatGPT wisely than to not use it at all,” Lubar said.

During computer science teaching assistant training camp over winter break, ChatGPT became “the elephant in the room” due to its ability to write code, according to Samantha Gundotra ’24, a CS concentrator and head teaching assistant for CSCI 0320: “Introduction to Software Engineering.”

ChatGPT “is a great tool to get an outline down or get a block of code,” Gundotra said. “It’s really nice to overcome that barrier of starting something, which can give students anxiety. I hope that professors will take that into account.”

Harry likened the tool to technologies such as calculators or Wikipedia, citing how ChatGPT can break down confusing topics and help students who are not native English speakers. In many cases, Harry said, new technology such as ChatGPT could be “liberating to the human condition.”

“In some circumstances, it may be ultimately unshackling. In other ways, it may just be the opposite,” Harry added. “It may shackle people to be the human front-end to an AI engine.”

This article was originally published online Wednesday, February 8, 2023.

MICHELLE DING / HERALD

Students with COVID-19 struggle to navigate shopping period virtually

Professors balance prioritizing in-person classes, accommodating sick students

BY HALEY SANDLOW SCIENCE & RESEARCH AND UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITOR

Ella Spungen ’23.5 is what you might call a “big shopper.” At the start of the spring semester, she planned to attend the first meetings of at least 10 classes. But when she tested positive for COVID-19 the week before classes started, the semester’s first three days became “nonexistent.”

“It left me sort of unsure of what I (was) doing,” Spungen said, adding that some professors allowed her to attend class via Zoom, while others did not provide that option. “I haven’t really been able to shop at all.”

This semester, the University’s approach to academic instruction regarding COVID-19 will remain the same from the fall semester, according to a Jan. 30 communication from Interim Provost Larry Larson.

The approach, described in an Aug. 9 communication from former Provost Richard Locke P ’18, includes guidance related to student absences. “While instructors are not expected to teach additional hybrid or online sections to accommodate individual student absences, we ask that instructors develop plans for student absences and communicate those plans to students at the beginning of the semester,” Locke wrote.

The Aug. 9 announcement pointed to a faculty guide for remote-accessible teaching that lists resources such as Media Services and the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning for support in “remote-accessible course scenarios.” Those scenarios include courses where class sessions are recorded and posted on Canvas, fully online courses and students joining in-person classes

SINCE 1891

via Zoom.

The Herald spoke to four students who, due to positive tests for COVID-19, were unable to attend class in person during the first week of shopping period. Students’ experiences included a combination of attending class via Zoom, watching recorded lectures, listening to audio recordings or reading syllabi and going over slides.

Although Spungen was able to attend certain classes via Zoom, others were more difficult to access.

“I’ve had a lot of professors be like, ‘Oh I’m so sorry, no I cannot figure out Zoom. … Look at the syllabus,’ or they forget to send me a link, or said they were going to try and then couldn’t figure it out,” Spungen said.

Sebastian Park ’25 had a similar experience to Spungen. While some professors provided a Zoom option and others utilized lecture capture, two classes Park was interested in did not offer recordings, he said.

“It was not the most convenient thing to try to get the feel of what (the classes) were like when I had to stay at home,” Sebastian said.

“The first classes are … where you kind of get the overall feeling of the class,” said Isabella Clarke ’26, who missed the first three days of shopping period after testing positive for COVID. “Obviously I could look at the syllabus myself in my room, but not being (in class) was a little difficult.”

“I kind of get it on their end,” Spungen said. “But we’re three years into (the pandemic) and I don’t think it’s that hard.”

The Aug. 9 announcement included guidelines for managing classroom density and providing virtual options during shopping period. Instructors “should explain their attendance policy in their syllabus, post their syllabus on Courses@Brown … and publish Canvas websites in advance of the first class so students know how instructors will manage attendance before the first day of class.”

Instructors may also manage the density of classrooms by “recording their first lecture(s) if feasible and posting on Canvas,” Locke wrote. While professors have discretion over how COVID-related absences are managed, the Provost’s Office notes that instructors “should be flexible and support students with excused absences.”

Michael Satlow, professor of Judaic studies and religious studies, said that professors have a number of options when it comes to accommodating students who cannot attend class, but that the decision is “pretty much entirely up to us.”

“It’s a lot of effort, in general, for a professor to provide lecture capture or some filming of his or her lecture, especially on the first days,” said Satlow, who teaches RELS 0010: “Happiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life,” in which over 400 students are enrolled. He has not yet had a student reach out to him regarding health concerns, he added.

RELS 0010 is taught in Salomon Center DECI, a room that has lecture capture. “I do nothing,” Satlow said, regarding the automated system which starts, stops and uploads recordings to his Canvas page automatically.

“If I was in another room that didn’t

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have that, and I had to set up the Panopto on my own computer and get that running in addition to thinking about the content of the class, that’s a much tougher lift,” he said.

Quinn Cowing ’25 said that a seminar they missed after testing positive for COVID-19 last week offered no virtual option or recording because the course is discussion-based. Another class provided lecture capture, and one professor shared just the audio of the class to accompany the posted slides.

“I’m lucky in that it’s still at the beginning of shopping period where classes haven’t picked up very much,” Cowing said. “But I don’t think this is going to be a super sustainable practice to keep class accessible to kids.”

“We have been encouraging instructors to offer as much flexibility as they can in the specific context of their class and classroom,” Sydney Skybetter, deputy dean of the College for curriculum and co-curriculum, wrote in an email to The Herald. “This flexibility is intended as a means of offering support to one another — students, staff and faculty — and to acknowledge that individual pedagogic circumstances are simultaneously intensely personal and variable.”

Zoom and recordings are “technology that we should all be very familiar with at this point,” Spungen said. With absences due to COVID-19, “you have to do a ton of self-advocating, and I was luckily healthy enough to do it, but it’s exhausting.”

Despite challenges, all four students told The Herald that professors have been understanding about holding their spots on waitlists.

Koren Bakkegard, associate vice president for campus life and dean of students, told The Herald that students can reach out to Student Support deans for assistance with the impacts of their health on academics, including navigating conversations with faculty or receiving dean’s notes.

Satlow said that virtual or even hybrid class sessions lessen the learning experiences of both the people in the room and those attending virtually.

“Do you try to accommodate those people who can’t make it?” Satlow said, noting that students who get sick typically miss one or two classes. “But degrading the quality of the instruction for everybody who’s there — (that’s a) tough choice, as much sympathy as one has for the people who’re sick.”

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EDITORIAL

UCS must drop political theater, needs to be a serious voice for students

If you didn’t catch the latest season of the soap opera that Brown’s student government has become, you’re not alone: Only 27% of undergraduates participated in this week’s failed vote to recall Undergraduate Council of Students President Ricky Zhong ’23. The effort was prompted in large part by UCS leadership’s elimination of its general body, a move that limited direct UCS participation to elected members and which critics called anti-democratic. But after all the bluster, the recall vote won the support of only 28 more students than the 301 who signed the petition kicking it off. This is just another in a long line of unnecessary UCS melodramas in recent years. Is UCS a serious organization furthering student representation, or is it a sideshow only notable for its tendency to collapse into chaos? The time has come to choose — and both UCS and the student body must play their part.

In the past few years, UCS has not been known for its efficacy, stability or usefulness to students. Yet this semester has seen some of its most impactful work in years, with UCS playing a role in installing a queue-tracking monitor in the mailroom and conducting student polling that helped inform the Office of Residential Life’s decision to extend the free laundry program. But fruitful projects still feel much more like the exception than the rule. UCS has mostly failed to justify its existence to students: Less than one in four Brown students think they have benefited from a UCS program, according to The Herald’s fall 2022 poll. Perhaps undergraduates just aren’t aware of all the good work UCS does, but who could blame them for forgetting after the past year’s string of distractions: Last spring, UCS named one president, then UCS decided that it ran the election under the wrong constitution, then UCS ran another election, then UCS named a different president, then this fall a student called for a presidential recall, then the recall petition was nearly dropped for having too many unverifiable signatures and then finally the recall itself was held. This dysfunctional drama, not recent flashes of effectiveness, has come to define UCS.

As the most prominent branch of Brown’s undergraduate student government, UCS has a responsibility to be an effective intermediary between the University’s administration and the student body. While it may have started down that path in recent months, the drama endemic to UCS refuses to get out of the way. UCS will need to take a hard look at its real problems and implement effective solutions.

One crucial solution to the failings of UCS is to lay out a conclusive and comprehensive election code for all three branches of Brown’s Student Government Association — UCS, the Undergraduate Finance Board and the Class Coordinating Board. After all, the initial incorrect announcement of the UCS president last spring was prompted by a disparity between the UCS and SGA rules. The mess of constitutions, bylaws and precedents governing elections — “disjoint and convoluted,” in the words of UCS Elections Co-Director Eli Sporn ’24 — leaves room for the manipulation and confusion we’ve seen in the last year. To their credit, UCS is currently working on producing a uniform elections code, one that hopefully is clear and thorough enough to avoid these problems.

But at the end of the day, UCS’s central issue is the same one it has suffered from for ages: a lack of serious, substantive student engagement. UCS must actively foster this engagement by proving to the student body that it is worthy of their attention. This means meaningful projects with other branches of SGA as well as with the Brown administration — efforts beyond laundry polling and mailroom screens, although these are not bad first steps. Still, this is a reciprocal relationship: Students must recognize the goals that UCS does accomplish and take the organization seriously when deserved.

UCS had started to prove its worth, but this recall was a distraction. If UCS and those hoping to serve as student government leaders are going to earn our respect, this must be the last time forgotten rules and petty squabbling get in the way of real work.

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Chou ’23, Yasmeen Gaber ’23, Tom Li ’26, Jackson McGough ’23, Alissa Simon ’25, Kate Waisel ’24 and Yael Wellisch ’26.

with their “geographical and cultural identity.” While creating the inventory, museums and federal agencies must work “in consultation with tribal government,” according to the law — and then notify the tribes with identified remains.

John Brown said that repatriation involves a “standard process of review,” including opportunities for tribal representatives to ask about the details of burials, see photographic evidence, view the holdings in person and “see the general lay of the land.”

While John Brown said he participated in the 1995 and 1997 meetings with University NAGPRA Coordinator Thierry Gentis, he did not consider them a consultation, even though the Haffenreffer’s 2018 notice stated that it assessed the holdings “in consultation with representatives of the Narragansett Indian Tribe.”

Gentis did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the meetings with John Brown and the Narragansett.

The Haffenreffer still holds the re-

mains of at least 99 unidentified Native Americans, according to a Dec. 9 report by ProPublica based on public data from the National Park Service.

A museum … in the state of Rhode Island did not know how to reach us’

John Brown and Chief Sachem Anthony Stanton said they only received two emails from the Haffenreffer attempting to make them aware of the 2018 notice: one in 2018 to Stanton and another in 2021 to John Brown. Neither of the emails were reviewed by their intended recipients, Stanton and John Brown said.

After posting the notice, Preucel wrote that the Haffenreffer contacted Narragansett Chief Sachem Anthony Stanton. In an email to Chief Sachem’s office sent Sept. 12, 2018, and reviewed by The Herald, Gentis forwarded Stanton a link to the notice and received a response attributed to the chief thanking him.

Stanton told The Herald that he did not personally receive the email and that the reply could have been sent by anyone in the chief’s office. Additionally, he noted that he did

not have the internal authority to acknowledge the notice of the remains.

John Brown confirmed that he — not Stanton — holds the authority to acknowledge the notice as the Tribe’s historic preservation officer.

Preucel wrote that the museum later learned the Tribe “did not see (the museum’s) communications.”

Gentis did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the email sent to Stanton.

In a following email from Preucel to John Brown sent Oct. 22, 2021 that was reviewed by The Herald, Preucel followed up regarding the Haffenreffer’s possession of the remains and asked how to proceed. Brown told The Herald that he missed the museum’s email.

Brown, who said he has worked with over 100 institutions regarding repatriation, said that most other institutions have not struggled to contact him.

He added that given the Tribe’s proximity to the Haffenreffer and his publicly available contact information, he is easily accessible.

“The museums in Washington,

D.C. know how to reach me,” he said. “The federal agencies know how to reach me. I find it interesting that a museum located in the state of Rhode Island did not know how to reach us. What are we, a 30- (or) 40-minute drive?”

‘Too little and too late’

Ma’iingan Wolf Garvin ’25, a member of the Hoocąk Nation and Bad River Ojibwe and co-coordinator for Natives at Brown, told The Herald that any museum holding Native American remains is “disgusting (and) shocking to me in so many ways.”

Wolf Garvin noted that the details of the University’s holdings, published in the ProPublica report, are “especially hard-hitting because of how specific the numbers are.”

“Over and over I hear with the issue of repatriation, ‘We don’t know where it’s going to go, and we don’t know who to talk to,’ ” she said. “Well, have you even tried reaching out to a single Native person? A relationship with Native people is imperative.”

Preucel told The Herald that the

Haffenreffer is “doing everything we can to repatriate all of the human remains” in the museum’s holdings. He said that the Haffenreffer is currently working with Bernstein and Associates, a NAGPRA consulting firm, in its repatriation process.

He also said that museums that hold Native American remains, including the Haffenreffer, “really have to do better,” noting that the Haffenreffer’s repatriation process is limited by the number of staff members it employs and their capacity.

“We’re dealing with the painful legacy of our field of anthropology,” Preucel said, referring to the repatriation process. “And it’s something we are all taking very seriously today.”

John Brown said that it “will remain to be seen” whether the Haffenreffer follows through with the repatriation process following this week’s apology, highlighting the long period without correspondence between the two organizations.

“It takes 30 years to do the right thing?” Brown said. “This is too little and too late.”

ARTS & CULTURE

Brown-RISD Dual Degree students hold ‘fantastical’ annual art exhibit

in an email to The Herald. Program students were also involved with the exhibition’s branding and installation committees.

BY SAMANTHA CHAMBERS CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Since Jan. 23, visitors to the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts have been greeted by artwork displaying the obscure, other-worldly and mythical. “The Witching Hour” is the annual presentation of various artworks created by students in the Brown-RISD Dual Degree program. These works comprised BRDD’s annual student exhibition and will be available for public viewing until Feb. 26.

At the exhibition, viewers can see works that convey themes of “magic, mystery, mysticism, myth, rites and rituals, the grotesque, the fantastical, the uncanny, curiosities and wonder,” according to the exhibit’s description on Events@Brown.

“It’s like a very weird, magical experience,” said Cassandra Carrasco ’26, a member of the Executive Committee who submitted both a painting and a series of prints for the showcase.

The Executive Committee of the exhibition was responsible for content decisions within the exhibit, “including the theme and title of the exhibition, and selecting which submissions would be included,” wrote Hanna Exel, curricular and co-curricular program coordinator, wrote

Carrasco’s painting, “L’écorché,” plays on what she described as a common artistic exercise of encapsulating “the sensation of feeling one’s own body.” She added that the painting serves to imagine what a figure might look like if their skin was removed.

The exhibition features 51 pieces of various mediums from 34 different artists enrolled in the dual degree program, according to Naya Lee Chang ’24, a BRDD student and Executive Committee member.

“The exhibition is definitely supposed to showcase all the different things that dual degree students are doing, which range from your traditional fine art to some really experimental video and audio,” Chang said.

“I think it really shows that there’s not one way of being a dual degree artist … and a lot of that is on display at (the) Granoff.”

Matteo Papadopoulos ’26, said that he saw this variety on display when he attended the exhibit. “I saw combinations of concentrations and mediums that were vastly different from one another, but came together to produce truly compelling artistic pieces,” he said.

Hoping to produce a unique piece of art, Adam Colman ’26 — another member of the Executive Committee — used a series of rocks that he had picked up on hiking trips in his piece titled “Stone Stacking Journey.”

“These rocks were kind of an index of my engagement with the world and how I find my place and inspiration,” he said. Colman also noted that the piece had a direct relationship to his personal sense of ritual and wonder.

Similarly focused on the theme of ritual, Yukti Agarwal ’24.5 used textiles as her mode of art for the exhibition. Her piece, titled “Neelambari Nightwear,” was inspired by ancient Indian ragas, a musical feature of classical Indian music. Displayed in the Cohen Gallery, her piece features a machine-knit nightgown that “tries to map sound using a striping sequence” that delves into “the idea of psychosomaticism,” she said.

Agarwal added that her work was shaped both by her Indian heritage as well as RISD’s longstanding history with the textile industry.

“I’m trying to critique the idea of the place that I come from as a place that’s not always associated with these ideas of mysticism,” she said. “Spaces (like this) allow you to acknowledge that you’re here within these very colonial organizations and institutions, trying to figure out where you fit in and how you change the structure in your own small way.”

“Overall, it’s nice because as an artist you get to see your pieces up in a gallery,” Chang said. “And for the committees, you get to see what goes on behind the scenes of putting on the exhibition.”

“I love the idea of making a show specifically for dual degree students and then having such an integral part

in making it happen,” Rachel Moss ’23, an Executive Committee member, said. Moss added that often, RISD students are not “really involved with the organization of” exhibitions.

“Having this kind of hands-on experience really just adds” to the exhibit, she said. This year, students took on new responsibilities for the exhibition’s execution after BRDD’s Associate Director left her position in October.

Students organizing the show “were really dubious about whether we would be able to have a show without her,” Agarwal explained. “She was pretty much the grounding force of the dual degree program.”

Moss, who worked on the executive committee, noted that this year was “a little bit more hectic.”

Despite the changes, Moss noted that “things have run smoothly” with help from dual degree students and staff from the Brown Arts Institute

and the Granoff Center.

The event also marked another change from recent years, with the dual-degree program’s first publicly open reception since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, several members of the program noted how organizing the exhibition helped bring them together.

“We all have this very common but unique, weird experience and we’re all very united because of it,” Carrasco said.“But we’re coming from extremely different places. Everyone’s studying completely different things.”

“It’s just really nice to see how we can come together for this exhibition and submit work that’s completely unique and strange,” Carrasco added. “It all fits really well.”

‘The Witching Hour’ showcases magic and mysticism in Granoff Center for the Arts

ELSA CHOI-HAUSMAN / HERALD “It’s like a very weird, magical experience,” said Cassandra Carrasco ’26, who submitted a painting and a series of prints for the showcase.