Friday, November 5th, 2021 - The Brown Daily Herald

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2021

VOLUME CLVI, ISSUE XXXV

BROWNDAILYHERALD.COM

UNIVERSITY NEWS

UNIVERSITY NEWS

Renowned women’s rugby coach Kathy Flores dies at 66 COVID-19 testing centers U.S. Rugby Hall of Fame Inductee closed, hours leaves lasting impact on rugby at Brown reduced

BY LOKI OLIN SENIOR STAFF WRITER Women’s rugby Head Coach and U.S. Rugby Hall of Fame Inductee Kathy Flores died at age 66 Oct. 21 after a year-long battle with cancer. During her 45-year career as a player and coach, Flores left an indelible mark on the sport of rugby and pioneered the growth of women’s rugby at Brown.

The rugby world responded to Flores’s passing with an outcry of support, remembering Flores for her numerous accomplishments and consistent advocacy for the expansion of women’s rugby. “Her vision was the spark for the founding of the U.S. Women’s Rugby Foundation,” read USA Rugby’s announcement published Oct. 21.

Flores coached the team at Brown from 2013 until her passing. On the field, Flores was a fierce competitor with a deep strategic understanding of the game and nearly unmatched technical expertise. To her players and those who met her even briefly, Flores was caring, passionate and

University scales back on-campus testing, pilots self-testing program

BY CANQI LI AND EMILY FAULHABER STAFF WRITER AND SENIOR STAFF WRITER

LOKI OLIN / HERALD

demonstrated an incredible capacity to offer support while expecting nothing in return.

Building from scratch: women’s rugby at Brown After beginning her prolific rugby career with four national championships at Florida State University, Flores went on to play for the USA women’s rugby team. When the team played its first international match

against Canada in 1987, Flores was named captain. Four years later, she started at No. 8 during the team’s first national championship win against England.

Between 1994 and 2010, Flores pivoted toward coaching and led the Berkeley All Blues to 11 national championships. She also became both the first woman and the first woman of color to serve as head coach of a national team, a position she held

for USA Women’s Rugby from 2002 to 2011.

In 2013, Flores signed on as head coach for Brown’s club-level women’s rugby program, which transitioned to varsity status the next year. According to Quinnipiac women’s rugby Head Coach Becky Carlson, Flores’ decision to join the nascent program at Brown, given her stature in the rugby world,

SEE FLORES PAGE 2

Brown has reduced the locations and hours of its on-campus asymptomatic COVID-19 testing program, according to an email from Executive Vice President for Planning and Policy Russell Carey ’91 MA’06 to the Brown community Thursday. Beginning Nov. 8, the testing site at Andrews House will be closed and the hours and days at both Alumnae Hall and One Davol Square will be reduced.

In addition, Carey noted that starting Monday, the University will be “piloting self-administered testing at One Davol Square,” with community members con-

SEE TESTING PAGE 8

UNIVERSITY NEWS

UNIVERSITY NEWS

Students celebrate Diwali across campus

Grad students navigate parenthood

South Asian festival of lights often celebrated with fireworks, food, gatherings

BY GAYA GUPTA UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITOR Neil Shah ’25, a first-year from Edison, New Jersey, usually celebrates the South Asian festival Diwali at home with “fireworks, food and a whole lot of fun.”

But this year, he joined students across campus in celebrating Diwali, also known as the festival of lights, on Thursday night.

Diwali is celebrated by millions of Hindus, Sikhs and Jains across the world.

The holiday’s date is based on the Hindu lunar calendar and tends to land between October and November. Diwali marks the start of new beginnings and the triumph of good over evil.

Anuvi Sabharwal ’24 considers the holiday one of the most important cul-

turally significant celebrations of the year, describing it as “Christmas and New Years rolled into one.”

“Diwali back home is always a very big affair,” she said.

This year, she invited friends to her apartment to share South Asian food and light diyas, an oil lamp usually made out of clay. She also led a short pooja, a Hindu worship ritual, followed by music, dance and sparklers.

Different religions celebrate the festival for different historical events. Hindus celebrate Lord Rama, a Hindu deity, and his defeat of Ravana, a demon king. When Rama and his consort Sita returned home after their victory, villagers lit lamps in celebration — one reason why Diwali is often celebrated with fireworks and lights.

For Jains, Diwali marks the moment when Tirthankara Mahavira Swami, an important Jain deity, reached a state called Moksha, also known as enlightenment, in 527 BCE. Some South Asian Buddhists, particularly Newar Buddhists in Nepal, celebrate

SEE DIWALI PAGE 1

Grad students balance parenthood, research, call for University support

BY ESTELLE ZHU AND CALEB LAZAR SENIOR STAFF WRITERS This is the first part of a two-part series about parenting as graduate students at brown Arielle Nitenson ScM’15 MAT’16 PhD ’17 timed her pregnancy for the last year of her doctorate in neuroscience to best coincide with her studies.

“We had heard that having a kid or being pregnant in the last year of grad school is a pretty good time, because there’s never a good time to have a kid, but at least at that time you’re done with coursework,” she said. “You’re usually doing more writing for your dissertation.”

But even with this planning, her pregnancy posed challenges for her academics, Nitenson said. “I had

U. News

Metro

Commentary

Title IX Office in search of new coordinator for the 2022 calendar year Page 2

Thayer Street businesses face labor shortages, forcing them to reduce hours Page 3

Bahl ’24: Pandemic shows technology’s limitations in replacing human connection Page 7

COURTESY OF ARIELLE NITENSON

Even with Nitenson’s planning, becoming a parent while pursuing her doctorate came with financial and logistical hurdles. really bad morning sickness and I really struggled to do a lot of my experiments with my nausea,” she said.

Yet through these challenges, Nitenson said that she felt supported by Brown’s financial support programs as she started her family.

Associate Dean of Student Development Vanessa Ryan, who chaired a rapid planning group that recommended policy changes to better support student parents, said that as a result of the group’s recommendations, Brown greatly expanded pa-

rental support in 2016. This included making all support programs gender neutral.

“All of our programming supports a graduate student, regardless of” their gender identity, Ryan said.

“We’re also adoption- or birth-inclusive. Our policies support any family-building in any capacity.”

Parental relief Following the 2016 recommenda-

SEE PARENTS PAGE 6

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2021

UNIVERSITY NEWS

Search for new University Title IX coordinator underway Search committee hopes to select new Title IX Coordinator

by January 2022

BY STELLA OLKEN-HUNT SENIOR STAFF WRITER Ever since former Title IX Program Officer Rene Davis left in June to become assistant head of an independent K-12 school, Jeana Horton has been serving as both Interim Title IX Program Officer and Institutional Equity Investigator.

The search for Title IX Coordinator is currently underway and is “moving into the interview phase,” Sylvia Carey-Butler, vice president for institutional equity and diversity, wrote in an email to The Herald.

A search committee “composed of key stakeholders from our Brown community” will begin conducting interviews of qualified applicants in November and December, Carey-Butler wrote.

Interviews will be conducted both over Zoom and in-person on campus. “We have been fortunate to receive such qualified applicants and look forward to beginning interviews in the coming weeks,” Butler added.

While the timeline for filling the position is not finalized because it is

based on “personnel availability, applicant availability and, of course, our University holiday schedule,” Carey-Butler wrote, “we anticipate having someone in the position by January.”

Until the role is permanently filled, Norton will continue “to oversee compliance with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, to educate the campus community and to implement University policies and procedures,” Norton wrote in an email to The Herald.

The selected individual will take over this position and its responsibilities as the Title IX Coordinator — a change in title from what was formerly known as Title IX Program Officer. The University implemented this change “based on market evaluation and in keeping with other institutions of higher education,” Carey-Butler wrote.

In choosing a Title IX Officer, there are several factors and experiences that should be considered, according to Carey-Butler.

“There are certain traits that make a person in this position exceptional,” Carey-Butler wrote. “These include: patience, compassion, commitment to excellence, a thought partner and someone who is dedicated to this body of work.”

Student activists would like to see a candidate who has experience working with survivors of sexual assault.

“I would love to see a Title IX Office

that had people who have worked in survivor advocacy or worked in the mental health profession” beyond the context of a college administration, said Amelia Wyckoff ’22, an End Sexual Violence at Brown organizer. “It seems like a cool opportunity for people to have multiple areas of expertise when it comes to survivor advocacy.”

But according to Wyckoff, it doesn’t matter how experienced the new Title IX Coordinator is if the University doesn’t make fundamental structural changes.

“The biggest problem with the Title IX Office will continue regardless of who is the next person to take part in the office,” Wyckoff said. “The University is not treating this issue with the scale that it needs to be treated.”

Based on the amount of the student body that is harmed each year, “ the Title IX Office should be the biggest office on campus,” they added.

In the 2019-2020 school year, reports of sexual misconduct rose to 109 allegations from the preceding year’s 104, The Herald previously reported. But this collected data might only represent a portion of total instances of sexual assault at Brown, according to informal data collected through the Voices at Brown Instagram account, the account’s former moderators Amanda Cooper ’22 and Carter Woodruff ’21.5 previously told The Herald.

“Even (for) the people in the administration who clearly ... want to make a difference, it’s really hard for them to do so because of the structural issues,” Wyckoff added.

While ESV hasn’t met with the Title IX Office since Rene Davis’s departure because of other focuses, the coalition “outlined a number of things (it) wanted (the office) to latch onto,” Wyckoff said.

Personally, Wyckoff would like to see the office explore transformative justice and greater inclusion of student voices through campus wide focus groups, student coalitions and surveys, they added.

“I know other administrative offices include student workers in interviews” of job candidates, Wyckoff said. “I don’t know why they can’t do that for the Title IX Office.”

While students are not involved during the official interview process, there will be an opportunity for students to provide input near the end of the search, University Spokesperson Brian Clark wrote in an email to The Herald.

“Students and other members of the Brown community will have the opportunity

during the finalist stage of the search process to meet candidates, ask questions and share their perspectives,” Clark wrote. “Each candidate will come ... and participate in an open forum on campus, among other meetings and interviews.”

For Carey-Butler, “ensuring that the new Title IX Coordinator becomes acquainted with the Brown community will be one of our priorities,” she wrote.

As for changes to the office, “we will also enhance education/prevention on campus,” Carey-Butler wrote. “We will have more initiatives to share once (the new Title IX Coordinator) is in place.”

LOKI OLIN / HERALD

FLORES FROM PAGE 1 was crucial to the expansion of women’s rugby on the collegiate level.

“It was a really important time for women’s rugby,” Carlson said. “We needed coaches that were going to be able to transition programs” from club to varsity.

Flores’s decision to coach at Brown rather than a more established program was representative of her mentality as a coach, said wing Emmajane Rhodenhiser ’22.

“After such a standout rugby career, she came to a program that didn’t really exist,” Rhodenhiser said. “She chose to come where there was nothing and build something from scratch.”

Carlson lauded Flores for her ability to navigate the limited resources afforded to a program in its first varsity season. “You have to be pretty artful while trying to figure out how to place the pieces of the puzzle together and still be competitive,” Carlson said.

“You’re dealt the hand and you play with the cards that you have. Kathy did that really, really well.”

In 2014, Flores was named USA Rugby Female Coach of the Year after she led Brown to a 9-1 record overall and an undefeated 7-0 record during Ivy League conference play.

In a piece titled “What our game has truly lost,” Carlson wrote that Flores took a unique approach to the frenetic rugby recruitment process. While other coaches scrambled up and down the sidelines in pursuit of their next star, Flores sat quietly – confident in the knowledge that even if she spoke to them last, her conversation with each athlete would be the most impactful.

When scrum-half Gemma Ryu ’22 began her recruiting process, Flores set herself apart from other coaches from their first correspondence. Ryu sent an email out to a slew of college coaches and Flores was the first to respond, immediately offering her a

visit and asking about her academic interests. “Kathy responded within 20 minutes … For her to offer all that and to take me seriously — that meant the world to me.”

As the program grew, Flores became the largest draw for athletes considering Brown. “Every recruit that I talk to comes to Brown not because of our locker rooms, not because of our equipment, but because of Kathy,” Rhodenhiser said.

No. 8 Zyana Thomas ’22 decided to attend Brown after meeting Flores just once in March of her senior year — after having turned down a number of recruiting offers from other programs.

“Something in my gut told me to come here because she made me feel safe,” Thomas said.

According to fullback Lexi Nelson ’21.5, who walked onto the team, Flores also had a unique ability to identify and develop potential in players. “Even though I was pretty terrible, she always believed in me and always gave me extra guidance or feedback when I needed it,” Nelson said. “Now I’m a starter and rugby is a huge part of my life. I owe that all to her.”

When Flores watched No. 8 Kate Molloy ’23 play in high school, she recognized potential even though it was the first game of Molloy’s life. “I was a freshman and terrified, and Kathy was there at the game recruiting,” Molloy said. “I wasn’t good, but she looked at me and could tell based on my build and the way I was running that I was going to be a good rugby player. And she started recruiting me at that moment.”

As the program’s recruitment slots increased, Flores continued to welcome new players regardless of their status as a recruit or their experience in the sport. “One thing that she always said was that no matter how many recruiting slots she got, she would always have walk-ons,” Rhodenhiser said. “She had an amazing capacity to believe in

people.”

Flores’s coaching style: tough love and hard tackles During the first day of practice this fall, Flores showed up wearing a custom t-shirt with the message “Nobody cares. Work Harder.” Her emphasis on tough love and hard work, combined with decades of experience in the sport, contributed to Flores’s renowned abilities as a coach.

“Her motto was tough love,” Rhodenhiser said. “She was like, ‘Yeah, this is gonna be hard. It’s hard to learn how to tackle and be tough and resilient.’

But she also believed in us and said, ‘No, you can get to this place.’”

Flores’ playing years made her a force to be reckoned with on the pitch in practice. “Her skill was really obvious,” Rhodenhiser said. “When she jumped into drills, she would hit us hard, take us to the ground. When she jumped into a play, she was just so agile and had perfect passes. She would throw it behind her and it would go perfectly to where she wanted it to go.”

Flores continued to attend practices with the team even as her illness worsened, embodying the same grit that she instilled in her players. “In September, she was telling people not to go easy on her in drills,” Nelson said. “It was a testament to her fighting spirit. She would play with us up until the diagnosis.”

“She was battling cancer, but she was also prepared to be there as much as she could for our team,” Rhodenhiser added. “I’m so privileged to have had that kind of support and for our team to (have been) supported by her up until the very end.”

Impact off the field Flores’ support of her players extended off the field, where she would meet with them at Blue State Coffee to discuss relationships, academics and her dog, Manny. “She would invite us to

get tea and she asked us really personal questions because she cared,” Molloy said. “She was such a mom.”

“She would always ask us, ‘How’s your mental health?’ We thought it was funny because it was such a direct question, but I think it showed that she wanted to make sure that we were all okay,” Rhodenhiser added.

According to Ryu, Flores was also adept at recognizing when her players needed their spirits lifted. “When we were putting on our cleats at the beginning of the day or walking off the field at the end, she was very good at noticing when someone was having an off day,” Ryu said.

For Thomas, Flores quickly came to act as much more than just a coach. “It was no longer (a coach-player relationship) when I got here,” Thomas said.

“It became mother-daughter. I spent a lot of time with her because I lost a lot of people that were very dear to me. It was traumatic experience after traumatic experience, and Kathy was there every single time. She didn’t care how much she had to carry, even if she had to carry me on her back … I spent my holidays with her.”

A lasting legacy at Brown and in rugby To recognize Flores’s contributions to the school, Joan Sorensen ’72 and Paul Sorensen ’71 established the Kathy Flores women’s rugby head coaching chair as an endowed position Oct. 21.

“It helps cement rugby and its position here,” Ryu said. “We’re still one of the newer varsity teams, and to have that support going forward means a lot.

We want to keep building the program, and we want to keep rugby on campus and keep it growing.”

Still, Flores’s absence leaves a hole in the program. “There’s nothing athletics or anyone can possibly do that can represent who Kathy was. Kathy is women’s rugby, honestly. It was her

dream to bring it to NCAA sports, and she did. It was her dream to win a Rugby World Cup, and she did. It was her dream to coach a national team, and she did … I just want the greater Brown community to understand that,” Molloy said. “She was really incredible and she made this program what it is.”

Carlson — along with other coaches in the National Intercollegiate Rugby Association — recognized Flores’s significance and quickly took action to ensure that her impact on the game would not be forgotten by maintaining the spirit of community and collegiality that she brought to the group. Before Kathy’s passing, “we had never had a text stream between all of the NIRA coaches,” Carlson said. “When Kathy passed away, we were all saying, ‘We waited too long to do this —­everyone needs to know that she was a legend in the game.’”

Moving forward, Flores’s goals and values will remain at the forefront of players’ minds. “Kathy was always fighting for more recognition — to get us to varsity, and then to get us more recognition there. It was always about the next thing. The next thing for us after becoming varsity was winning a national championship — there’s always another goal to strive for,” Ryu said. “It’s up to us to help continue growing the program … and to pressure rugby in the larger world context to keep growing.”

Although Flores’s time at Brown was temporary, her impact remains in the many lives she touched as a coach, player, mentor, educator and friend.

“To be coached by a two-time Hall of Famer as a player and as a coach, by one of the most influential women in the game of women’s rugby, is such an honor,” Thomas said. “And to have her be my mother was such an honor. It was such a privilege.”

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2021

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS

3

METRO

Understaffed Thayer stores reduce hours of operation

BY OLIVER KNEEN SENIOR STAFF WRITER

that they are too busy for a part-time job, the employee said that the store currently lacks the extra staffing that would normally accommodate student workers.

Professor of Economics Kenneth Chay believes the pandemic prompted workers in the food service industry to re-assess the value of their work.

“Almost all these jobs have some

The nation has struggled with a labor shortage following the end of many pandemic restrictions, and businesses on Thayer Street are no exception — many saw shortened hours, delayed openings and management difficulties as a result of the shortage.

Starbucks — which already shortened their business hours due to the pandemic­— no longer opens on the weekends due to understaffing and a managerial vacancy that has persisted for the last month and a half, according to an employee who spoke under the condition of anonymity due to concerns about professional repercussions.

The employee said that some staff members have assumed traditional management responsibilities, such as opening and closing the store, but are unable to perform these tasks on Saturdays and Sundays due to lack of availability. The store decided to close on the weekend in order to accommodate these management limitations and ease stress on workers, they said.

While Starbucks’ current staff has shrunk to half its pre-pandemic size, the employee said that the store is unable to hire new workers without a formal manager, and added that the store struggled to maintain enough workers even when it had a manager. Though partly due to poor retention rates, given that the store often cycles through college student hires who later realize

contact with the public,” he said, adding that workers are less likely to accept wages that haven’t increased to accommodate the new health risks they face with the pandemic.

According to Ganko Ittetsu Ramen Manager Daniel Pond, line cooks were some of the workers most likely to be exposed to COVID-19, as “the majority of restaurants opened up two weeks after the shutdown” to offer take-out.

This risk led many line cooks to transfer to different industries or seek higher paying jobs, Pond said — Ganko Ittetsu lost some of its strongest line cooks after other restaurants offered them more competitive rates of $20 to $30 per hour.

According to a Nov. 1 posting on U.S. Job List, Ganko Ittetsu is offering between $13 and $20 per hour for line cooks and prep cooks. While Pond said that the restaurant raised the hourly rate for its kitchen workers by “a significant amount” since the start of the pandemic, the back of house remains understaffed since he began his search for line cooks in April.

After losing many full-time kitchen workers, Pond’s new kitchen staff includes multiple students from Johnson and Wales University, who are less available during the school year than they are in the summer. Due in part to the restaurant’s greater dependence on these students, Ganko Ittetsu began closing on Tuesdays and Wednesdays

Starbucks, Chipotle, Ganko Ittetsu hours constrained by labor shortages

CAELYN PENDER / HERALD

Starbucks on Thayer Street no longer opens on the weekends due to the absence of a manager. Across the street, Ganko Ittetsu Ramen saw many line cooks leave during the pandemic for higher wages elsewhere. over the course of the past two months.

He added that the change in operating hours has also affected the restaurant’s servers, who work 10 hours less per week than they did previously.

Ganko Ittetsu server Biané Braz said the change has been difficult for servers like herself. While she made roughly $500 per week when she started this summer, Braz said that the change in operations has reduced her weekly earnings by $100 despite the fact that the return of students and cold weather has led to busier hours at the restaurant.

Chipotle has also had to alter its operating hours. General Manager Nicholas Crosby — who hired mostly college students after experiencing a staffing shortage at the beginning of October — said his current crew’s inflexible schedules impede his ability to find those who can fulfill service

and kitchen manager positions. To deal with the insufficient availability of management throughout the week and to allocate more time for training new workers, he said that Chipotle has changed its operating hours from 10:45 a.m. to 10 p.m. to a reduced range of 12 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. increased its national average wage to $15 per hour this summer, but Crosby said wage ranges vary by location. For example, while his store pays crew members between $13.50 and $15.35 per hour, he said that crew members at a Chipotle in East Greenwich, a “higher revenue area,” can earn up to $16.50 per hour.

All stores are actively working to train more employees and return to a pre-pandemic schedule. Pond said that he began receiving more applications after unemployment benefits ended

on Sept. 5 and is now in the process of training newly recruited cooks. “We are hoping to get operating hours back to normal within the next month,” he said.

Crosby said that Chipotle is currently working on training managers and is also hoping that the store can restore its normal operating hours by the end of this month.

The Starbucks employee said that the store has found a new manager who is expected to arrive in a week. To provide time for recruiting more workers, they expect the store to maintain its current operating hours until more employees are hired.

ARTS AND CULTURE

RISD Faculty Exhibition review: diverse mediums and themes Works of 170 RISD faculty members include textiles, digital works, furniture CONTRIBUTING WRITER RYA VALLABHANENI Walking onto the second floor of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum’s Chace Center, the arrangement of artwork seems disjointed at first: a tall column of glass with earthy tones erect on one side of the gallery, a guitar pierced by honeycomb standing on the other. There are huge oil canvases, clean wooden pieces of furniture and bits of text framed upon the walls, even a deer miniature merged with a monarch butterfly.

The selection is a culmination of the works of about 170 RISD faculty members, all of whom have chosen to have pieces displayed at this year’s RISD Faculty Exhibition and Forum.

The show opened to the public Oct. 28 and will run until Nov. 21.

Pieces at the exhibition cover a diverse array of themes and mediums.

Works range from textiles and furniture to sculpture and photography. Paintings, illustrations, digital creations, jewelry and ceramic pieces are presented as well. Themes explored include

RYA VALLABHANENI / HERALD

RISD faculty member Leslie Hirst displays her piece “See Also” which blends lace and paper fragments and casts a unique shadow. nature, the environment and identity.

The faculty show was organized by RISD’s Director of Campus Exhibitions Mark Moscone, whose office worked with the RISD Museum to set up the exhibit. Acknowledging the diversity in the pieces submitted, Moscone wrote in an email to The Herald that “there isn’t one theme that is carried throughout all the works.” Still, he mentioned there were several pieces that revolve around

notions of nature and the home. “This makes sense given the past year and a half that we’ve all gone through,” wrote Moscone.

As to the planning process for the RISD Faculty Exhibition and Forum, Moscone wrote that “the challenge comes with the final layout of the show.” He explained that, due to the variety of art present, “it takes some time to place the works in the galleries

so there is an even flow from space to space and the individual pieces work together.”

RISD Professor of Experimental and Foundation Studies Leslie Hirst echoed this emphasis on curation. Referring to her piece “See Also” — an installation that blends lace and paper fragments — she said that the shadow her artwork casts when suspended is “the most important part.”

Hirst’s work is one example of the unique mediums and themes present at the show. She created the piece during her residency appointment at the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, exploring the relationship between text and textiles. “I’ve always been really interested in the collision between language and how we see — how language shapes our vision,” she explained.

It also exemplifies the exhibition’s emphasis on more contemporary art, transcending conventional artistic approaches. “During my residency,” Hirst said, “I studied under traditional lacemakers. Not so much so that I could become a lacemaker, but really so that I could learn to rupture it.”

RISD freshman Phillip Walker was one visitor who noticed the variety of mediums present in the show. “I think my favorite aspect of it has been seeing the difference between illustration and painting professors, and this difference of representation within their art,” he said.

RISD student Julia Ambros was drawn to other types of art. She pointed out a set of ceramic mugs all decorated with drawings of various organs. As a prospective ceramics major, she said that “it’s nice to see some ceramic representation.”

After one and a half years of show cancellations, postponements and restricted access to the public, the Faculty Exhibition and Forum is a remarkable culmination of the work from years of professional experience and decades of emotive, innovative art. The show is incredibly varied; it is incohesive in the best way possible.

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | COMMENTARY

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2021

Bahl ’24: Tech efficiency won’t replace human connection

BY ANIKA BAHL STAFF COLUMNIST

When I moved to campus for the first time in January amid the bleakest months of the COVID-19 pandemic, I felt like a normal college student in many important ways: I was struggling with newly difficult classes, making friends with my crazily impressive peers and braving a New England winter for the first time.

Yet what I thought was normal wasn’t. This fall, I could finally understand what upperclassmen meant when they said that Brown felt like itself again — full of energy, vitality and life. This is clearly evidenced by the record turnouts at orientation events, the student activities fair and even Family Weekend. The same events were held last year in virtual form, but it’s obvious why the turnout was so much less then: It just wasn’t the same through a screen. Although the pandemic made technology indispensable, it also exposed the gaps that technology inherently can’t fill.

Tech companies have argued that software is only as good as its ability to make our lives more efficient. The issue is that efficiency may no longer be our top priority. Zoom was efficient, sure, but, as last year’s turnout rates show, efficiency wasn’t enough to draw people to the events. But if efficiency comes at the cost of happiness, we don’t have to ascribe it so much importance: Technology should enhance our lives, not just expedite them.

Someone might ask: Why shouldn’t we prioritize the efficiency that technology uniquely affords us? Technology has given us lifestyles that wouldn’t have been thought possible 20 years ago. Yet while efficiency is an important and worthwhile goal, we can’t think of it as our only one. Our happiness and satisfaction as people don’t come from some maximally pro-

ductive lifestyle. The pandemic has shown us that we want human-centered day-to-day interactions.

The quick adoption of Zoom as a video conference platform by governments, corporations and schools enabled us to study and work from home. While this approach to replacing in-per-

people just don’t have the impulse to go that extra mile. Even though technology made human connection possible through a screen during the pandemic, we lost the spontaneity and naturalness that make it so rewarding and meaningful to us in the first place.

There are countless more examples of in-

plemented perfectly and yet some things were still off. This could be a wake-up call for tech companies that primarily focus on how processes should be optimized. Now, they have the opportunity to question whether the optimization of a given process is actually what human beings want and would benefit from. We’ve

son events and activities prevented productivity from stalling as much as it could have early in the pandemic, it also sparked mental health

stances where technology allowed us to go through the motions to replicate aspects of our pre-pandemic lives, but took away the spark

reached a point where we can no longer afford a strictly pragmatic approach to integrating tech into our lives; if we push to create technologies just because they are possible to create, we will overwhelm ourselves with optimization and convenience over unquantifiable human connection. It’s not just about racing from point A to point B. Clicking “Leave Meeting” the moment the clock strikes 10:50 is no substitute for staying that extra 10 minutes after an in-person class to chat with a professor and make eye contact with that classmate.

Our preferences should determine the technology we create, rather than the technology we create determining our preferences. Although it would have been far more difficult to navigate the pandemic without modern technology, I’d be hard-pressed to say that I found “Zoom University” to be an equal substitute for the real thing. We’ve found temporary adaptations to unprecedented challenges, but the gaps that tech-based solutions haven’t been able to fill are self-evident: Just ask any student in my year. It’s clear that today’s tech companies are capable of unimaginable innovation. It is the end to which they engineer that innovation that will be key in determining how much we get out of tech going forward.

“Ultimately, as much as technology expanded our horizons during the pandemic, it was also limiting — not due to any fault in its implementation, but because it was implemented perfectly and yet some things were still off.”

issues for students who saw large parts of their casual daily human interactions cut off. While video conferencing platforms offer services that can give the appearance of real human connectivity, to me, they are far colder.

You can’t casually run into someone before a Zoom meeting, nor can you make eye contact with them during it or catch up with them once it is over. If you do want to engage with an individual in some capacity greater than everyone else in the meeting, you have to be awfully intentional about it — actively choosing to send a private message, pin them or email them. Especially without knowing someone well, many

that made them worthwhile. The readily available cameras in classrooms and even recreational spaces around Brown’s campus made the switch to asynchronous courses and tours relatively seamless — I never would have been able to take courses last fall without that resource. But as a then-first-year with no prior college experience, I can’t say that I felt like a real part of Brown or anything else bigger than my computer screen.

Ultimately, as much as technology expanded our horizons during the pandemic, it was also limiting — not due to any fault in its implementation, but actually perhaps because it was im-

CA L E N DA R

Anika Bahl ’24 can be reached at anika_ bahl@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald. com and other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.

COVID -19 AT BROWN LAST 7 DAYS*

NOVEMBER S

7

Completed Tests

People Tested

M

Tu

W

Th

F

S

2,707

2,450

1

2

3

4

5

6

Confirmed Positives

Positivity Rates

6

0.2 %

8

9

10

11

12

13 SINCE AUGUST 24, 2020*

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

Completed Tests

People Tested

569,546

18,046

Total Cases

Prevalence

820

4.5 %

*AS OF NOV 4.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2021

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS

post-

NOV 5 — VOL 28 — ISSUE 7

FEATURE

5

See Full Issue: ISSUU.COM/POSTMAGAZINEBDH

NARRATIVE

This is When You Call the Person You’re Thinking About love and loneliness in november

by Kaitlan Bui Okay, so maybe it’s that time of year.

Maybe it’s that time of year when I begin feeling sorry for myself, just a little. I begin to wonder why I’m studying, or writing, or living here at all—not necessarily in a depressed way, but also, if I’m being honest, maybe in a depressed way. Maybe it’s the midterms, but I find myself evaluating my “progress” not just academically, but also emotionally, spiritually, physically. And most of the time, that progress doesn’t

On Loon Time

or thinking through climate disaster

by Isaac Eng illustrated by John Gendron “From where the loon calls, an outlet. A phantom river lost in fog and bulrushes. Finally, a break in the rushes, an almost imperceptible current swirls past a great boulder, a black finger of water points into the mist.” (Paddle Whispers, Douglas Wood) I watch as the sun tucks itself into a small pocket of pines and steam off to the west, until it looks like a little lightbulb held in a thin hand. I sit for thirty minutes or so until it has completely disappeared.

It’s a new moon tonight and there’s cloud cover coming in. Soon, the night is so black I can’t see further than my feet—no city lights leak into the sky to cut the soupy darkness. The silence is even more total. There are no crickets, not this far north.

It’s windless. No distant hum of planes or drum of wheels on the highway can be heard. I lie down on the coarse granite outcropping that serves as the loading pier for our two old vinyl canoes. In the pure dark,

I get the feeling that I’m being swathed in a freshly laundered quilt, smelling of pine and the sweet musk of lake water.

Then, from out of the empty space in front of me, a loon’s warbling moan builds from a throaty chuckle into mournful song. It resonates into the stillness where the gradient world dissolves. Waveless, windless, starless night. The loon shatters that darknothing, adding more breath until its yodel falls into vast looping echoes, painting textures and distances on the black canvas before me. Echolocating with the song, the world that had disappeared the hour before reconstitutes itself. *** I’m from Minnesota. For my entire life, I’ve gone north at least twice a year with my family and friends to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA), a 1.1-million-acre expanse of lake land...

“I’m demystifying the penis one inch at a time.”

“Death is just an ironic nap.”

match the hopes I unknowingly harbored. In the same way I blame the East Coast weather for my moodiness, maybe I can blame it for the way I look...

ARTS & CULTURE

Live Forever!

ray bradbury, mindfulness, and creativity by joseph suddleson The day after Ray Bradbury’s death at age 91, writer Neil Gaiman remembered him in an article for The Guardian: “A young man from Waukegan, Illinois, who went to Los Angeles, educated himself in libraries, and wrote until he got good, then transcended genre and became a genre of one; often emulated, absolutely inimitable.” Yes, many will remember Ray Bradbury as the writer who brought man to Mars in The Martian Chronicles, or as the confector of the not-so-virtualreality nursery in his short story The Veldt. But the best writers—writers like Ray Bradbury—leave us with something beyond clever plots; they alter our experience of the world.

I remember realizing something was wrong when I couldn’t remember having a dream in months. A couple of years back—when I was spiritually and creatively bankrupt—I decided to start carrying around a pocket-sized notebook...

LIFESTYLE

Run, Run, Run

by Caitlin McCartney

DayQuil Chasers 1. OGP, if they’d ever refill it 2. None if ur strong enough 3. THICC MILK aka the time the V-Dub milk dispenser was full of cream instead of milk 4. Emergen-C on the rocks 5. Room temp orange juice. This is college, after all. post–

Want to be involved?

Email: olivia_howe@brown.edu!

6. Coffee milk, a Rhode Island classic!

7. TeQuil(a) 8. Rain water 9. V8 (deconstructed Bloody Mary) 10. NyQuil

I fell in love with running over the past year around Providence. It became a source of stressrelief, accomplishment, and arguably most important, endorphins. I’m not saying this happened overnight.

There were many long runs at the beginning that were painful, as I acclimated to the hilly geography of the city. However, with consistent practice and a hopeful mentality, running slowly transformed into a magical escape from the struggles of the day. I am still an amateur and my pace is on the scale of snail-mail, but I think that this great variation in runners and runs makes running perfect for almost anyone. You can improve at your own pace and on your own terms...

November 5, 2021 5

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS

6

PARENTS FROM PAGE 1 tions, Brown created a parental relief program that offers graduate student parents a full semester of parental leave. Through the program, the University continues to pay all stipended MFA and PhD students and pauses all academic requirements while they are on leave, Ryan said. A year and a half ago, the University further expanded the program to cover both parents if they are both Brown students.

Ivana Petrovic ScM’13 PhD’18 had her child in 2017, just after the parental relief program was established. She said she found life as a new parent to be “all of a sudden a whole different world” but felt that the relief program really helped her through the variety of unexpected challenges she faced.

“Something had changed and for me, it was really hard to focus on work,” Petrovic said. “Of course, part of it had to do with waking up at night to feed my child, but the other part was something that I wasn’t expecting, which was that my brain naturally was thinking about my child. It just felt really hard, and that was something I wasn’t really prepared for.”

Nitenson, who defended her PhD while eight and a half months pregnant, said that taking parental relief between her defense and graduation gave her flexibility and time to care for her newborn daughter.

“Other than doing a little bit of teaching, I didn’t actually start my job until my daughter was six months old,” she said. “I had a substantial amount of time for maternity leave and that was just really, really valuable.”

Elsie Gibson GS, a third-year PhD candidate in computational biology who had her son in April, feels that conditions would have been much more difficult had she been in an industry job, given the “absolutely abysmal legal standards in (this) country.”

“I feel really grateful to be at a university and get a full semester of leave,” she said. “I really needed the full three or four months.”

Avery Morrow GS, who is currently on six months of parental relief following the birth of his daughter, said that

the time off is helpful, as he would otherwise struggle to balance conducting research and caring for his daughter.

“I thought I would have time to work on research, and that’s really not the case when you have a three-month-old baby,” he said. “You get little one-hour breaks here and there during the day, and that’s kind of it.”

While parental relief has paused Morrow’s academic responsibilities, he said that he is unsure of what will happen when he returns to school next semester and can’t stay home with his daughter.

“Up until now has been the easy part for me. I feel supported, both by the union as well as by the administration, which has given me the entire semester off, paid, which is fairly rare among universities in general,” he said.

“But I don’t know what’s coming next.”

Child care costs When Morrow returns to school in January, his daughter will be six months old, young enough that she will still need constant care, he said. For Morrow, finding affordable child care has been difficult.

Brown offers graduate student parents an annual subsidy of $4,000 per child, for up to three children, to help cover expenses including child care, Ryan said. All graduate student parents with an annual household income of less than $100,000 are eligible for the subsidy.

Brown also has a partnership with the Brown/Fox Point Early Childhood Education Center, Ryan said. The maximum tuition at Brown/Fox Point is $1,458.34 per month, although the center offers financial assistance as allowed by its budget, according to the center’s website.

Nitenson said that while finding daycare was difficult, the child care subsidy helped her family afford the associated costs.

“Luckily between the $4,000 child care subsidy plus working at a job that was making slightly more money, we were able to afford child care just fine,” she said. “But for two grad students on a grad student salary, I don’t know.”

Morrow, who lives in Boston and

commutes to Providence, said that the subsidy would cover just over a month of child care expenses.

“The only thing that’s available to us is $3,000 a month,” he said. “If we can’t find something else, we’re going to have to start pulling strings with family members, seeing who’s willing to quit their job. We can hire a nanny for some days. It’s going to be very complicated.”

But working an extra job to cover child care costs is not an option for all graduate students. Mirjam Paninski MA’20 GS, who has two children aged four and six, said that covering child care expenses has been especially difficult for her family since both she and her husband are international graduate students at Brown.

“International grad student parents are not allowed to make any additional money from what Brown is giving them,” she said. “I don’t think that even residents or green card holders or American grad student parents should work beyond what they’re given, because grad school itself is already so challenging.”

Having chosen Brown partly for its culture of supporting graduate students with families, Paninski was not prepared for the challenge she has faced in covering child care costs in the United States, and said she believes that more support from the University is necessary.

“The average preschool and nursery program would not cost less than $11,000 a year in Providence. That child care subsidy doesn’t even cover half the child care costs,” Paninski said. “We are not even speaking of insurance, we are not even speaking of food and clothing, all the additional costs that you have with kids.”

Throughout the admissions process, “Brown and the grad school were quite prominently featuring graduate student parents and the child care subsidy, so we did think there would be a little more support,” she added.

Morrow said that he expects to encounter difficult decisions between prioritizing child care and his own education. As a Boston resident, the process of actually getting to Providence takes additional time away from both

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Morrow’s studies and his time with his child.

“Every added day that I go into Providence is adding several hundred dollars per month to the price” of child care, he said. “I’m anticipating some difficult juggling next semester.”

Health insurance The University covers 75% of healthcare costs for children and spouses of graduate students on Brown’s health insurance, Ryan said.

“That’s a really transformative difference because if you have a spouse and a child, health insurance is going to be a significant cost,” she added. “If we can cover 75% of it, that’s a big lift to creating a healthy family.”

Nitenson said that while expensive, adding her daughter to Brown’s health insurance paid off.

“When we had our daughter, I think we owed the hospital like a hundred bucks,” she said. “That was it.”

Morrow said that while he was unable to add his daughter to his Brown health insurance plan this year, he hopes to do so in the future because it provides more benefits than his wife’s plan.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2021 students to apply, Associate Dean for Administration and Operations Ethan Bernstein said.

“When PhD students are considering an institution, we want them to think of Brown as a family-friendly place,” Bernstein said. “Sometimes the distinguishing characteristics between institutions may be few. We believe that this is an area that Brown stands out in and is actually leading in terms of graduate student parental support.”

Nitenson said that Brown’s encouragement of graduate student parents was one of the reasons she and her husband chose Brown.

“Even when I was interviewing for grad school, one of the reasons why I wanted to go to Brown was that there were people that were married, that were in serious relationships, that had children, that had a life outside of just school,” Nitenson said. “They seemed just as connected as everyone else.”

Brown’s culture of support Brown’s support programs for graduate student parents are meant to show students that they don’t have to choose between academics and life milestones, Ryan said.

“When a PhD student is here for six years, we need to make sure that their life and their studies can be supportive of each other,” Ryan said. “You don’t need to pause your life while you’re a graduate student.”

Nitenson said that she was initially concerned about being able to have children while in grad school.

“One of the fears that I had even going into grad school was spending a good portion of your childbearing years in school,” she said. “I remember being worried at some point about having that first kid. You don’t want to start to get too old for that.”

Programs to support graduate student parents differentiate Brown from other universities and encourage

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FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2021

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | COMMENTARY

7

Simon ’25: Higher ed media focuses too much on male enrollment

BY ALISSA SIMON STAFF COLUMNIST

Education is a field ruled by discourse. Every month there seems to be a new debate about parents, teachers and scholars: whether masks in schools impede childhood development, whether Montessori schools are a revolution or a scam. But there’s one phenomenon that has steadily garnered more and more attention over the past few years: Boys aren’t going to school at the same rates as they once were. Women now make up nearly 60% of college students nationwide. At Brown, the number of women in the undergraduate population first surpassed the number of men in 1994, and the college’s current enrollment is 53% female and 47% male. However, there are recent arguments that too much progress has been made at the expense of male applicants. A simple Google search of the phrase “gender in college” spawns a list of articles about the drop in male applicants, each headline punchier and more sensational than the last. They raise questions about the necessity of gender-based affirmative action, new frameworks for early childhood education and expanded support networks for adolescent boys — but notably absent from the results of this search is any mention of some of the most pressing gendered issues in academic environments. This discourse around the so-called feminization of the education system unintentionally obscures the problems that female students face and hinders opportunities for more complete conversations about gender in higher education.

The growing proportion of women in higher ed powerfully demonstrates the progress made throughout the 20th century. No longer is a woman seeking higher education deemed an abnormality or limited to attending a single-sex school; women now constitute the majority of the student body at the most selective co-ed institutions in the country. However, most uni-

versities still seek to achieve a 50/50 gender balance in their student populations, leading to higher acceptance rates for men in recent years. In 2014, the Washington Post reported that 64 universities, including Brown, have made it markedly more difficult for girls to get in compared to their male peers. Advocates for gender-based affirmative action argue that boys

seen immense progress for the representation of women in STEM classrooms and careers, there are still significant imbalances in the gender breakdowns of both high school and college courses — and these barriers to entry are even steeper for women of color. These fields remain so male-dominated that even when women make their way into a computer science

“The reality is that acting as if only one gender experiences academic challenges is a fruitless and even harmful endeavor.”

experience greater social and pedagogical challenges in schools, warranting such policies. The implication of those arguments is that schools and colleges are spaces where girls, on average, more easily succeed. According to sociologists, classroom environments are better aligned with “feminine” tendencies toward greater self-discipline and rule-following. These dynamics, studies indicate, make boys more likely to struggle with behavioral and academic problems as children and less likely to maintain high GPAs and apply to college as adolescents.

However, this conversation fails to acknowledge that educational institutions at every level are largely unwelcoming to and uniquely challenging for their female students. And the obstacles they face are much graver, and arguably more tangible, than the social handicaps that boys are said to have when they come to college. When coverage in the media implicitly ascribes greater significance to the latter, advocacy and policy around issues facing women suffer in turn. While the past few decades have

class, they are unlikely to have female mentors.

A culture of masculinity in the classroom also leads women to suffer from what’s referred to in social research as the “confidence gap.” Representation in these classes may be growing, but that doesn’t mean that women are able to truly thrive there. The fact remains that, whether or not men have lower GPAs or struggle with developing behavioral skills in early childhood, they still will go on to make higher salaries in nearly every field.

It’s also difficult to swallow the idea of the college campus being a space better suited to women when Brown students and alums are in the midst of filing a federal class action lawsuit against the University for gross mismanagement of sexual assault claims. Assault and harassment remain an undeniable part of college culture. The Red Zone, Title IX — these terms are an essential part of the female student’s vernacular. University policies and programs around sexual health and safety, in addition to student-run groups like End Sexual Violence

at Brown, are meant to help address the problem, but it’s rare to see similar initiatives in high schools. University resources can only do so much to combat issues that have been allowed to fester for the previous twelve years of schooling. It may be more difficult for boys to sit still and develop reading skills at a young age, but this same period is also when behaviors of misogyny are first learned at the expense of their female classmates. The fact remains that these communities are tied to a society biased against women — policy solutions and activism focused solely on higher ed will never reach the root of the problem, and a discourse obsessed with a slightly declining male enrollment certainly doesn’t help.

This isn’t to say that the educational challenges faced by boys or the declining number of men pursuing higher education aren’t deserving of attention. But these issues are all too often framed as “either-or” scenarios — boys are disadvantaged in schools therefore girls must be experiencing advantages — when the reality is that acting as if only one gender experiences academic challenges is a fruitless and even harmful endeavor. Girls are able to succeed in their school environments, but only as long as they are able to break into male-dominated fields while doing the additional work of navigating a misogynistic culture. Policy makers, administrators and scholars will continue to brainstorm ways to expand education and better meet the needs of students in their transition to college and beyond. It’s crucial that, in doing so, they don’t only focus on the gender disparities recently dominating the headlines, but also the ones that have long defined the American classroom.

Alissa Simon ’25 can be reached at alissa_ simon@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald. com and other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2021

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS

8

DIWALI FROM PAGE 1 the holiday as the day Emperor Ashoka, an Indian ruler reigning between 268 – 232 BCE, converted to Buddhism.

Finally, Sikhs celebrate Bandi Chhor Divas to commemorate the day Hargobind Singh, the sixth of the ten Gurus of the Sikh religion, was released from prison in 1619. After his liberation from Mughal imprisonment, he returned to the city of Amritsar, considered a holy place in Sikh religion. Years earlier in 1577, the foundation stone of the Golden Temple at Amritsar was laid on Diwali.

The University’s South Asian Student Association also celebrated the holiday on Thursday in the Petteruti Lounge.

Diwali “is a time when the family comes together,” said Suyash Kothari ’23, South Asian Coalition Chair on SASA’s executive board. “That’s what we’re trying to recreate here at Brown for those who want to.”

Students dressed in traditional South Asian attire enjoyed samosas, mango lassi and more South Asian

NAT HARDY / HERALD

The University’s announcement follows its Oct. 25 decision to make testing optional for community members on campus.

GAYA GUPTA / HERALD

SASA celebrated Diwali with snacks catered by Taste of India. Diwali “is a time when the family comes together,” said Suyash Kothari ’23. delicacies supplied by Taste of India, a restaurant in Fox Point.

Celebrating Diwali on campus is a way to create a sense of home for South Asian students, Kothari said.

“All of us are away from home and our holidays at Brown don’t necessarily align with South Asian festivals,’’ he said. “It’s very important because we’re all here to create communities for all.”

Diwali was also a chance for Sabhar-

wal to introduce her culture to nonSouth Asian friends.

“It’s a way to give other Desi kids a feeling of home,” she said, “and I love to introduce non-Indian people to my culture.”

Shah attended both Sabharwal and SASA’s Diwali celebrations this year.

“Diwali is one of my family’s favorite holidays, so this feels like a little slice of home,” he said.

TESTING FROM PAGE 1 ducting their own PCR tests at the site under the supervision of a medical technician who will “assist with any questions you might have,” Carey wrote.

The announcement follows the University’s Oct. 25 decision to make COVID-19 testing on campus optional for fully vaccinated students, faculty and staff members. Upon returning from Thanksgiving break, “undergraduate students will be required to test on day 1 and 5 following their return to campus,” Carey wrote to the Brown

community in an Oct. 25 email. Unvaccinated community members are still required to receive twice-weekly testing at campus facilities.

According to the Healthy at Brown website Alumnae Hall will be open from 6:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Mondays, and 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. It will be open from 12:00 p.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and will be closed Sundays. One Davol Square will be open from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday through Friday, and will be closed on the weekend.