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NEWS: RESEARCH FINDS CBD HELPS FIGHT COVID-19

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UChicago Forward Update Announces Easing of Campus Masking Requirements

By NEIVE RODRIGUEZ | Senior News Reporter An email communication sent Friday, February 25, by UChicago Forward announced that beginning March 4, the University will make mask-wearing optional in most indoor spaces on campus. Mask requirements in classrooms will remain in place through the end of winter quarter on March 19.

The University’s decision follows the City of Chicago’s decision to lift its indoor masking requirement on February 28. Chicago’s mask mandate will still be in effect for public schools, public transit, and healthcare settings.

As of March 4, masks will no longer be required in most spaces in residence halls, dining halls, cafés, and campus stores, as well as in most non-medical offices. UChicago Medicine will maintain a separate set of masking requirements, while the UChicago Laboratory Schools and the UChicago

Charter School will communicate any policy updates separately. Per the email, the University will answer questions on the new masking policy next week.

The email also announced an end to mandatory COVID-19 surveillance testing on February 28 as cases decline citywide and on campus. For the remainder of winter quarter, testing will become voluntary for students and employees who are vaccinated.

Individuals can self-schedule tests online by visiting the UChicago Wellness portal. Unvaccinated individuals will still be required to participate in weekly surveillance tests.

The University reported 142 new COVID-19 cases and 410 close contacts between February 18 and 24, compared with 152 new cases and 405 close contacts last week. Surveillance testing between February 17 and 23 indicated 74 cases, for a 2.36 percent positivity rate. Chicago’s seven-day

positivity rate was 1.3 percent, a decrease of 0.5 percent from the 1.8 percent reported last week.

The email noted that February 28 will be the last day that the University will offer

free KN95 masks to students and employees.

The masks are currently available for pickup between 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the front desk of the Quadrangle Club.

Mask requirements in classrooms will remain in place through the end of winter quarter. emma-victoria banos

University Announces New Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity PAGE 2

The Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity will become part of the Division of the Social Sciences. emma-victoria banos

VIEWPOINTS: Indoor security officers deserve a raise.

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ARTS: Cautious Clay kicked off his 2022 world tour at the House of Blues in Chicago.

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VIEWPOINTS: UChicago’s Core and introductory classes need an overhaul.

ARTS: Griff showed a distinct era for youth in her universally relatable songwriting.

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Like our Facebook page at facebook.com/chicagomaroon and follow @chicagomaroon on Instagram and Twitter to get the latest updates on campus news.

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“Five generations of students of color have marched, chanted, wheat-pasted, rallied, banner dropped, and occupied in the name of a Department whose values are aligned with the Third-World Liberation Front”

By NOAH GLASGOW | News Reporter In an email to the University Wednesday morning, President Paul Alivisatos and Provost Ka Yee Lee announced the creation of the new Department of Race, Diaspora, Indigeneity. The announcement follows years of student and faculty pressure for a more expansive ethnic studies program at the University.

“Following a multi-year, faculty driven process, the Council of the Senate of the University of Chicago voted Tuesday to create a new Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity,” Alivisatos and Lee wrote in the letter. The department hopes to “produce new understanding and fresh insights into the world we live in by studying how conceptions of race have emerged in different eras and circumstances.”

The announcement was hailed as a victory by the campus organizations

that had long pushed the University to create a department focused on ethnic and racial studies.

In a statement to The Maroon, the University’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture (CSRPC) expressed excitement at the creation of the new department. “The innovative design of juxtaposing race, diaspora, and indigeneity—concepts and practices that have evolved in tandem with the modern world—has the potential to offer new paradigms for thinking across a constellation of conversant fields,” the center wrote in its statement.

UChicago United, a group made up of students at the University dedicated to racial justice, tweeted out an annotated version of the email sent out by the University. Their version attributed the creation of the new department to “students pressuring faculty to take action.”

UChicago United did not respond to The Maroon’s requests for comment.

While they praised the creation of the new program, organizers of #EthnicStudiesNow (ESN), a campaign led

by UC United, criticized President Alivisatos and Provost Lee’s failure to mention student and community activism in the creation of the new department.

“Five generations of students of color have marched, chanted, wheat-pasted, rallied, banner dropped, and occupied in the name of a Department whose values are aligned with the Third-World Liberation Front and other radical, multiracial student coalitions,” ESN organizers wrote in a public statement. “The email sent out by [Alivisatos] and [Lee]…erases and co-opts the work of generations of students of color organizing and the radical lineages we descend from.”

Organizers called on the administrators and faculty that will be involved in the creation of the new department to

ensure a radical program of study. Without that assurance, they raised concerns over the University “replicat[ing] ideological and material violences toward Black and Brown communities” that have characterized the University’s historical role in the South Side, according to their statement.

In a separate statement to The Maroon, the University of Chicago Graduate Student Union (GSU) called Tuesday’s vote a “much-deserved win after tireless advocacy particularly from students of color involved with #EthnicStudiesNow, UChicago United, and other allied groups.”

GSU recognized ESN’s longtime leadership on the issue and echoed calls for a department that would “work to dismantle and struggle against [the University’s] institutional complicity with racism and colonialism.”

College Launches Human Rights Major in Partnership With Pozen Center

By AUSTIN ZEGLIS | Senior News Reporter Beginning in the 2022–23 academic year, the College will offer a human rights major in partnership with the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights.

The major, which expands on the existing human rights minor, will lead students through the practice and theory of human rights via an interdisciplinary program that builds upon the minor by requiring four introductory foundational courses, six electives, and either a B.A. thesis or a capstone project.

According to Ben Laurence, associate instructional professor and director of undergraduate studies in human rights, the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights created the major to capitalize

on the high participation in the minor among College students. “It’s the largest minor in the Social Sciences Division. We think the interest from students is there and that the center is ready to take the next step forward in deepening its engagement with the College,’’ Laurence told The Maroon.

Students will be able to complete either a standard B.A. thesis track or a capstone project track, which offers students the chance to engage in fieldwork by participating in human rights research projects during their fourth year. The Pozen Center will also fund field or research experience in a variety of fields for all students majoring in human rights.

“The rationale, from our end, is that the major will bring something new to the University that is not there,” Laurence said. “What’s really distinctive about the major is the way it provides a rigorous academic study of human rights in such a way that it’s connected with the politics and practice of the work of human rights—not as two separate things, but as two things that inform one another.”

Laurence sees the interdisciplinary nature of this new major as a natural step in the expansion of the College’s offerings into more and more cross-curricular fields.

“We’ve learned from the success of other majors that are interdisciplinary that have broken the mold where every major was simply a department, from

global studies to Law, Letters, and Society, and so on. We see this explosion of majors that break that mold and we’re following in their footsteps.”

Since the 2022–23 academic year is the first year that the major will be available, any students who are graduating in spring quarter 2023 or earlier who wish to major in human rights will be able to have their field research requirement waived.

More information about the specific academic requirements for the human rights major can be found online. All students interested in the human rights major should contact Laurence at benlaurence@ uchicago.edu.

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Night Owls Highlights Agnes Callard, Ezra Klein in “How Does U.S. Politics Work?”

By KAYLA RUBENSTEIN | News Reporter In a conversation titled “How Does U.S. Politics Work?,” New York Times journalist Ezra Klein and philosophy professor Agnes Callard discussed the benefits and challenges of political polarization. The event, part of the Night Owls series of late-night chats hosted by the philosophy department, was broadcasted through Crowdcast on Wednesday, February 16.

Callard began by questioning why people seem to doubt the functionality of American politics. “When you say, ‘How does American politics work,’ what is lurking behind the word ‘work’ is a value judgement of what it means for it to work,” Klein responded. “My book, Why We’re Polarized, is a book about how American politics functions. At the same time, it’s a book about why it doesn’t work. Like many other people, I think the point of American politics is to solve problems in a representative and thoughtful and accountable way, and I think that it has been doing that less and less well in recent decades.”

Referencing Klein’s book, Callard

cited his views on polarization. “There’s a vicious cycle of polarization. To appeal to a more polarized public, political institutions and political actors behave more polarized. As they do that, they polarize the public,” Callard read. Klein expanded on his written argument by saying that “a disorder in American politics is that party polarization is natural, and we have a political structure that does not work well under conditions to party polarization.”

As the duo discussed, philosophy professor Tyler Zimmer, who moderated the interactive portion of the talk, posted a poll question: “Do you think polarization is a bad thing?” 56 viewers voted yes and 17 no.

Klein then pivoted to discussing the relationship between density and partisanship. Narrowing in on fellow New York Times contributor Will Wilkinson’s report “The Density Divide,” Klein explores the development from a nonexistent correlation between population density and political leaning to modern urban centers voting exclusively for the

Democratic Party.

Specifically, Klein spotlighted a 2003 political ad against Howard Dean to demonstrate the ways in which certain characteristics and political leanings have become associated. “The parties in completely weird ways are getting better and better and better at appealing across an entire spectrum of lifestyle preference even when what they’re appealing on is not a policy issue or what we’d even understand is a political question, and that is part of our polarization now,” Klein said.

Presenting a potential connection between war and polarization, Callard dissected the role of a common foreign enemy in promoting unity and reducing polarization. On the thread of conflict, the duo then considered the intersection of arguments over science and polarization.

“We don’t want the debate to be resolved. We want to make sure it isn’t resolved, we want to keep arguing about it because the debate exists in order to organize people into camps,” Callard said.

“So we can’t let it depend on something empirical or else it can be resolved.”

Klein held a differing view. “I think that we’re constantly trying to push debates into empirical grounds that they can’t really hold,” he said. “The lie of politics is that there’s some piece of empirical data that will decide the issue. In the counterfactual world that can prove it, how many minds would it actually change?”

Referencing immigration, Klein explained that the debate focuses not on labor concerns but rather on how “comfortable people are with foreigners moving into their country.” For such an emotion-driven consideration, facts cannot provide a clear resolution.

He continued to hypothesize what would happen if concrete data could present a solution. “It is safe ground to move it onto empirics, as if science can decide it, so people do it all the time,” Klein said. “Science can’t tell you what your values are. Science can’t resolve the question, but we wish it could because then we wouldn’t have to fight about it, or if it solved our side [of the argument], then everyone else would have to shut up about it.”

Jelani Cobb Analyzes Past, Present, and Future of Civil Rights at Harris School Event

By NEIVE RODRIGUEZ | Senior News Reporter Jelani Cobb, a columnist for The New Yorker and the Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, spoke at a virtual event hosted by the Harris School of Public Policy on Wednesday, February 9, as part of Harris’s “The Power of Social Movements” speaker series.

Cobb spoke on the creation of Black History Month and the historical continuity between the abolition and civil rights movements and current political dynamics in the United States.

Cobb began the talk by acknowledging Carter G. Woodson (A.B. and A.M.

1908), who was the second Black recipient of a doctoral degree in the United States. Woodson received his degree in 1912 from Harvard University and was the only Ph.D. recipient in the United States whose parents were enslaved.

Woodson created the precursor to Black History Month, known as the “Congress of Negro History Week,” in 1926. Woodson also founded two academic journals, The Journal of Negro History and The Negro History Bulletin, that aimed to legitimize the study of African American history and culture.

“Woodson was diligently trying to

make the point that Black people had a contributing role in the grand tide of history, undermining the view that Black people had been non-factors in the tide of human history,” Cobb said.

Cobb discussed current events that jeopardize civil rights and reflected on the current “troubling” circumstances of unjust voting laws that disadvantage Black voters. Cobb referred to a recent Supreme Court ruling which reestablished an Alabama congressional map that had been said to leave Black voters at a disadvantage through redistricting.

According to The Washington Post, those against the map argue that it “creates only one district favorable to a Black

candidate.”

“For almost 10 years now, we have seen a steady accretion of laws that have made it more difficult and onerous to access a ballot,” Cobb said.

Cobb then proceeded to explain the history of laws restricting Black votes, and the parallels between the Jim Crow era and current political dynamics. Cobb referred to the conservative reaction to Barack Obama’s presidency, which resulted in Donald Trump’s election and eventually the riot at the Capital Building in early 2021: “It seems almost predictable that in the context of the first Black president and in the conCONTINUED ON PG. 4

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“This optimism lies in our sense of survival and our ability to transcend the moment.”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 3

text of a multi-racial movement of voters who then reelected him four years later, that we would see precisely the type of reactionary movements that threaten American democracy again.”

The 2021 Georgia Senate runoff, in which Raphael Warnock became the first Black senator from Georgia elected to US Congress, reminded Cobb of the “circumstances in which Black people first gained the right to vote in the South.” The Georgia Senate runoff also secured a democratic majority in the senate.

Cobb explained the historical con-

nections between the significance of Georgia’s status as a blue state in the 2020 election and its high Black voter turnout to the emancipation of Black voters after the Civil War. “In 1870, Black people were given the right to vote in order to offset the power of a white supremacist movement that threatened to destroy American democracy. In the most recent elections, we witnessed an echo of history,” he said.

Cobb offered advice on what can be learned from the civil rights movement by examining its greater historical context: “In emphasizing the Montgomery bus boycott, we overlook the dozens of

people who refused to give up their seats before Rosa Parks.”

Rather than focusing on significant historical events themselves, Cobb expressed the importance of understanding the forces behind them. “We are looking for those moments of confluence where a preexisting movement coincides with a large societal interest, which creates a moment that catalyzes change,” he said.

In addition, Cobb highlighted the importance of “broad-based allyship” and unity in social movements. “The movements that we have seen that have been successful have brought together

people for many reasons,” he said.

Cobb referred to the abolitionist movement, which opposed the institution of slavery both for its social injustices and the power it granted to the Confederacy, unifying groups with different motives in order to achieve a shared goal.

Cobb stressed that despite the adversity faced by Black Americans, the success of past rights movements give reason for optimism. “It is crucial that we maintain realistic optimism in moments of difficulty. This optimism lies in our sense of survival and our ability to transcend the moment.”

Law School Professor Aziz Huq Talks Qualified Immunity, Constitutional Rights at Seminary Co-Op Event

By ARJUN MAZUMDAR | News Reporter In a virtual event hosted by the Seminary Co-Op on Wednesday, February 9, Colleen Connell, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Illinois, met with Aziz Huq, the Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law at the UChicago Law School, to discuss Huq’s latest book, The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies.

In his book, published in December of last year, Huq argues that the United States’ federal courts are fundamentally biased against minorities and police violence victims and fail to protect the individual rights of America’s vulnerable.

According to Huq, courts have “not just a Republican problem but an institutional one,” which can only be solved by a shift in their institutional mindset.

Huq opened the event by discussing Baxter v. Bracey, a police brutality case presented to the Supreme Court in 2020.

Alexander Baxter, a Black man, was apprehended by police after burgling a house, and officers released a police dog on him even after he surrendered and lay flat on the ground. Baxter sued the two officers for use of excessive force,

citing the Fourth Amendment. The Supreme Court denied his petition, citing “qualified immunity,” an unofficial legal stipulation that protects government officials from civil suits as long as they do not clearly violate another’s constitutional rights.

“The Constitution says a lot about rights, but not much about remedies,” Huq said. When ruling in cases like Baxter’s, judges refer to doctrines like qualified immunity rather than codified law. “The subjectivity of these doctrines produces regressive, asymmetrical, and unequal rulings.”

Connell asked Huq why federal judges refuse to allow “individuals who are challenging discrete acts of state violence to get into the court.” Huq’s first response: the politicization of our courts.

He explained that American courts are “porous to presidential politics, specifically the politics of law and order,” arguing that the tough-on-crime mentality from Richard Nixon’s presidency endures. Huq asserted that the current Supreme Court “has preferences that are

even more anti-minority and more anti– police violence victims than has been the case maybe for a century,” which make it unlikely for plaintiffs to get a trial after

being injured by a police officer.

However, Huq cautioned critics from chalking up the court’s issues to its conCONTINUED ON PG. 5

Law Professor Aziz Huq. courtesy of the institute of politics

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“It is far too common for judges even on the liberal side of the spectrum to prioritize the interests of the court” CONTINUED FROM PG. 4

servative majority. There is a deeper, institutional problem with our federal courts, he said, that transcends party lines.

“I think that it is far too common for judges even on the liberal side of the spectrum to prioritize the interests of the court over the rights of marginalized constitutional rights holders,” he said.

Huq cited Rivas-Villegas v. Cortesluna, a recent case in which the Supreme Court unanimously decided to expand qualified immunity by offering new protections to officers being sued for excessive force.

Huq believes that many judges, whether liberal or conservative, hesitate

to hear individuals suing on the basis of their constitutional rights. Many judges fear that litigating each case fully will lead to a “flood of cases,” in which thousands of people will try to sue for personal damages. According to Huq, this is why the courts are more partial to hearing cases brought by corporate or government bodies than those brought by independent petitioners.

In proposing solutions to these tendencies, Huq acknowledged the work done by advocacy groups like the ACLU, which have enacted reform legislation to increase transparency between police departments and the public. He also emphasized the importance of state-level accountability, noting that local politi-

cians protect the police just as courts do. “The mayor of any big city rises and falls with the crime rate. Mayors are a hostage of the police force,” he said.

When asked how he would change the mindset of the judges themselves, Huq said that he would begin by quelling judges’ fears of case flooding. For example, when faced with 100 stop-and-frisk cases, the court should “reverse the policy as a whole” rather than litigate each petition independently. Solutions like these, according to Huq, would “fundamentally require courts to accept that their job is to protect the individual rights…of the Alexander Baxters of the world.”

In his conversation with Connell,

Huq also proposed a more radical answer to court reform, wherein congressionally appointed public defendants, rather than federal courts, decide cases for police damages. “Those damages should be drawn out of the flow of funds…that goes from the federal government to the relative policing unit,” leveraging police dependence on federal support to enact change. Though Huq acknowledged that creating an independent body to circumvent the courts would be politically impractical, he believes courts will remain biased against individual petitioners without institutional change. “I just don’t think our courts will do the job that we think they are supposed to do.”

Regenstein Library Features Nikkei South Side Exhibit

By NEIVE RODRIGUEZ | Senior News Reporter The story of Japanese Americans in the South Side was featured at the Regenstein Library as part of the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Research Collection Center from November 1 to January 28. Curated by Japanese Studies Librarian Ayako Yoshimura, Nikkei South Side explored the prewar and postwar dynamics between Japanese Americans and the Hyde Park neighborhood.

The influx of Japanese Americans into the South Side was prompted by Japanese internment. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which allowed for the internment of all persons deemed to be a threat to national security. As a result, “exclusion zones” were created, causing the relocation of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps. Japanese internment was yet another instance of prejudice by the U.S. government: Thought Germany and Italy were, like Japan, also members of the Axis Powers. German Americans and Italian Americans were interned at substantially lower rates compared with Japanese Americans.

Because of the exclusion zones created in the West Coast, Japanese Americans who were released from internment were still

disallowed from returning to their homes but were able to resettle in the Midwest and East Coast, where hysteria prompted by the Pearl Harbor attacks was not as strong.

Thus, Chicago became a prime location for Japanese resettlement.

“Japanese Americans who came here after the camps owned corner stores, grocery stores, gift shops, restaurants, and apartment buildings,” Yoshimura said in an interview with The Maroon. A full list of Japanese-owned businesses and residences can be found on the Discover Nikkei website.

Prior to World War II, there was positive cultural exchange between Chicago and Imperial Japan. As part of the 1893 World’s Fair, a Japanese Garden was constructed in Jackson Park as a sign of diplomatic friendship between the nations.

By 1945, Chicago’s Japanese-American population grew from around 400 to 20,000.

South Side neighborhoods such as Oakland, Kenwood, and Hyde Park soon became home for thousands of Japanese Americans.

According to the University of Chicago Library, Japanese scholars were sent to the University of Chicago to receive a Western-style education during the Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishō (1912–26) periods.

One of these scholars was Eiji Asada, who was the recipient of UChicago’s first doctoral degree in 1893. Asada was a student of William Rainey Harper and received his degree for his dissertation “The Hebrew Text of Zechariah 1-8, Compared with the Different Ancient Versions.”

Prince and Princess Takamatsu of the Japanese imperial family visited UChicago in 1931 in an effort to strengthen relations between the two nations. After several decades of disastrous U.S.—Japan diplomacy, Prince and Princess Mikasa visited the University in 1965. According to the UChicago Library Reserves, in anticipation for Emperor Hirohito’s 1975 United States tour, members of the University’s Japanese studies department worked to “include Chicago in the travel itinerary.”

“I had no idea that the historical figures that I had read about in Japanese textbooks had been to Chicago or that the imperial family members came,” Yoshimura said.

Shortly after Japanese internment began, it was decided that UChicago should temporarily cease admitting Japanese students given the wartime instruction programs that took place at the University as well as the University’s relation with the Manhattan Project. Former dean of social sciences Robert Redfield called the deci-

sion “unwise and unjust,” and former vice president Emery T. Filby wrote that “the temporary exclusion of certain Americans of Japanese origin from student privileges is not an expression of University policy, but is something imposed upon it.”

In early 1945, the War Relocation Authority (WRA) authorized the return of Japanese Americans to the West Coast. As a result, the influx of Japanese-American immigrants to Chicago ceased in the 1950s.

Japanese Americans also faced racial discrimination, as many white Chicago residents struggled to place them within the established racial categories of “white” and “non-white.”

New neighborhood zoning laws after World War II changed the South Side’s racial demographic, and soon Japanese Americans became the second-largest non-white group rather than the largest. Many Japanese moved back to their West Coast homes after the war. The South Side’s Japanese-American population began to decline.

“This is something that only people who grew up in these neighborhoods remember,” Yoshimara said. “I am hoping to shine light on this piece of forgotten history.”

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University Researchers Find that CBD Helps Fight COVID-19 Infection in Human Cells

By NATALIE HOGE | News Reporter A group of UChicago researchers recently published a study that found that cannabidiol (CBD) may help block the COVID-19 virus in mice and human cells. Scientists believe that CBD interacts with the host’s endoplasmic reticulum and interferon signaling pathways in order to block SARS-CoV-2 replication.

Glenn Randall, one of the authors of the study, is a professor in the Department of Microbiology. When starting the research process, Randall recalled that the team first brainstormed chemicals that could have anti–SARS properties.

“CBD was suggested because it has anti-inflammatory properties that we thought might dampen a hyperaggressive immune response associated with later stages of COVID-19 disease pathology,” Randall said.

Randall explained that there were a number of surprising results during the study. “The first surprise was that CBD actually directly blocks the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to replicate in lung cells and animal models of COVID. It directly activated genes that our body uses to fight viral infections,” he said.

“The second surprise was that patients who were taking an FDA–approved formulation of CBD used to treat epilepsy had significantly less incidence of COVID than similar patients who were not taking CBD.” In an interview with The Maroon, Randall described his hopes for the researchers’ next steps. “It is impossible to know the value of CBD in treating or preventing COVID without a carefully designed clinical trial. [UChicago researchers] are trying to develop such a trial now.”

Randall also emphasized that the study results should not undermine

the current federal guidelines for COVID-19 prevention. “Neither CBD nor marijuana is an accepted preventative for COVID at this time. Vaccines and masking are proven approaches to prevent severe COVID, and CBD should not take their place,” said Randall.

The Maroon also spoke with Dr. Thomas Best of the Center for Health and the Social Sciences about his work for the study. Best echoed Randall’s surprise at their results.

“What was overall surprising to me is that [as] I kept adding more and more controls, or statistical checks and balances, to try to eliminate confounding [evidence]…the association between having a record of CBD and testing positive for COVID was still a significant negative association,” Best said.

Best learned from mistakes with early data, which helped him improve the study’s methods. Prior to working with the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), Best learned that it’s important “to be careful about assumptions you make with medical record data. It’s not always clear how different variables are defined, and one needs to be careful and forthright about any assumptions that they made that might be questionable.”

Best also spoke about the interdisciplinary nature of the study. “The number of authors on this is more than I’ve ever been part of, and the depth of work that was done by the collective is more than I’ve ever been part of,” he said. “The different perspectives, the number of different experiments that [were] done, both [with] patients and in cellular analysis, and in mice…it’s all in one paper.”

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VIEWPOINTS

Equal and Fair Pay for Security Officers Who Work Indoors Indoor security officers put themselves at risk every day and deserve a raise.

By JD I am related to a security officer who works in the interior of the University. On a heartbreaking phone call recently, they informed me that raises have allegedly been given out to officers who work outside with little to no experience, while the officers who work indoors have had little recognition or pay raises for their efforts. This is a serious issue— one individual I know of has gone through periods where they can barely keep the lights on. A pay raise was due a long time ago, and the University must work with its contracted security firm to ensure that officers working indoors receive the compensation they deserve.

Allied Universal, with whom the University has a security contract, had $18 billion in revenue in 2021. This information, coupled with Allied Universal’s acquisition of several other security firms since 2021, indicates that there is enough for a pay increase.

Some might argue that out-

door work warrants a higher compensation rate than working indoors because it includes physical hazards that indoor work does not, but such a claim would be fundamentally flawed. It is founded on an outmoded system that prioritizes physical health over mental health and does not reflect the forward-thinking values this University theoretically stands for. For the University to place the outside officers’ physical life over the indoor officers’ mental and physical health in the workplace is simply dangerous.

Yes, outdoor officers deserve to be paid fairly because of the dangerous elements outside, but officers indoors do too. During this time of COVID-19, indoor officers face the possibility of physical harm, just as outdoor officers do, as well as a whirlwind of threats to their mental health.

The officers who work indoor during COVID-19 are risking their physical health by default.

They are in a contained environment with students, faculty, and visitors, etc. who may have the vi-

rus, and catching that virus could be disastrous for their health, even if they’re vaccinated. Every day, the indoor officers risk being exposed. They have to constantly ask students to put on their masks. They see many of them finish eating, leave the masks off, and talk, increasing the risk of spreading the virus. The officers indoors simply don’t feel safe or valued. The officers have proven their reliability and dependability to the University by maintaining and ensuring a safe environment for students and staff, while also having to constantly worry about their own physical and mental well-being.

It’s simply not sustainable to try to work under these conditions.

What I’m sharing is that this is not only physical wear and tear but mental wear and tear that is building up within the indoor officer’s minds. I have been told that a lot of people were exposed to the virus, and it attacked their bodies to the point that some of the individuals wished that they were dead. These are people

who have been vaccinated. The vaccine saves you from dying, but it doesn’t protect you from the suffering part. At any time, a student who is entitled can say that an officer is rude to them just because they don’t like being told no or what they can’t do.

This has been especially stressful because COVID procedures have been revised and security offers have to enforce these new procedures more strictly. Officers are dealing with the rude attitudes of students on top of false reports of misconduct.

A few indoor officers have had mental breakdowns because of COVID and dealing with the rude attitudes from some students is just too much to bear. Those students have no regard for the feelings of the officers. The officers feel unable to bring this up with higher-level people because they assume that the University will have the students’ interests in mind rather than the officers’ since the students’ money is invested in the University. The of-

ficers could end up unemployed or get a transfer just because a student doesn’t want to follow COVID procedures. All this warrants commensurate compensation and more priority placed on the well-being of the interior officers.

In my opinion, the indoor officers have more interaction with the public than outside officers because they talk to everyone that passes their desks. The officers simply feel undervalued for the work that they do. The mental and physical health of the indoor officers is just as valuable as the officers who work outside, and if the University of Chicago can find money to give raises to certain faculty members, then they can do the same for the indoors officers. Allied Universal and the University must come to some kind of solution that supports the indoor officers and ensures these officers’ lives are valued and protected as they should be.

JD is a resident of Hyde Park.

Introduction to Gatekeeping UChicago’s Core and introductory classes should welcome, not deter.

By TEJAS NARAYAN Note: This article was written before the Department of Computer Science replaced the threecourse introductory sequence with a new, four-course sequence.

If you told me you’d heard only good things about UChi-

cago’s Core and introductory classes, I’d have a very hard time believing you. As well-taught and interesting as I find the computer science (CS) electives I take now, the introductory sequence doesn’t share that polish. The Honors Physics sequence felt like an anchor chained to both

my GPA and my mental health, quickly driving me to switch majors. Horror stories about the Econ 200s, Gen Chem, and Core Bio echo across campus, and I once heard that most of the Calc 150s sections are taught by “grad students who could not care less” about the class. For a school like

UChicago that prides itself on offering a comprehensive liberal arts education, this pattern seems a little strange—intro sequences that spark interest in a subject are one of the clearest ways to encourage interdisciplinary study. Yet in spite of this, it feels like these courses are instead

designed to filter out casual and inexperienced students, ensuring that only those with a background in the relevant field, an existing commitment to it, or a natural affinity for it choose to pursue it further. If we want to be free to properly experience the treasure CONTINUED ON PG. 8

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“Chances are that you’ve suffered through your share of shoddy intro sequences too.”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 7

trove of incredible advanced electives our school has to offer, intro sequences can’t be treated as disposable; on the contrary, they’re the most crucial part of any student’s educational journey, and UChicago must give their design a level of care and investment reflecting that.

Given that more than a third of our course load is dedicated to satisfying Core requirements, it’s difficult to imagine that UChicago wants to lock students into their majors. The entire concept of liberal arts revolves around the idea that learning different subjects teaches us to think in different ways, providing us with the tools to approach problems from a vari-

ety of angles. To that end, it makes sense to equip every student with a foundational understanding of subjects that they might never touch again. What doesn’t make sense is the perceived reluctance to build interest in a department beyond what the Core demands of it. It’s almost as though the average student’s mindset about general education has filtered into the way the Core itself is structured: as a necessary hurdle to get out of the way before we can get into what we’re really supposed to be learning.

The Introduction to Computer Science courses demonstrate this pattern incredibly well. I was lucky enough to take them with a background in coding, and I can

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say without reservation that my prior experience single-handedly carried me to a passing grade.

For reasons that I will never understand, CS 151 teaches “functional programming,” a way of structuring code that doesn’t translate well to most real-world applications. While functional programming is an extremely helpful asset for specific uses like machine learning, it’s a much less intuitive introduction to computer science than the alternative, termed “imperative programming.” Most of the programming languages you’ve probably heard of—C, Java, or Python, to name a few—are built around imperative programming. CS 152, on the other hand, does nothing to build on the concepts established in its predecessor—it’s taught in a completely different language, and the basic way in which programs are organized is fundamentally distinct. None of the ideas introduced in the first course contribute to one’s understanding of the second, and to make matters worse, CS 152 assumes an unreasonable degree of familiarity with the material. Students are expected to complete their work in the powerful yet arcane text editor Vim but are never taught to use it effectively enough to justify its use over more convenient alternatives such as VS Code. I even spoke to someone who hadn’t learned how to output their program’s results to the screen in class, which should intuitively be recognizable as one of the most basic and universal skills in computer science. Without a solid foundation from CS 151, students in CS 152 are rushed through the class’s first principles, making it dramatically more challenging for an inexperienced programmer to grasp its core material properly.

So to recap: CS 151 doesn’t

prepare students for the rest of its sequence, can’t be applied to general-purpose programming, and is unnecessarily difficult for most newcomers. What, then, is its purpose? If anything, it seems to be specifically intended as a deterrent to those who aren’t fully committed to a degree in computer science. Whatever damage this may deal to CS 152’s quality of instruction is just the cost of achieving that goal. But while the other two computer science classes I’ve taken so far—CS 154 and Introduction to Computer Security—have been similarly demanding, they have yet to prove unfair. The content is riveting, and as much as I may struggle with it, the course design has been refreshingly thoughtful. It’s just a shame that it took until my second year to encounter it.

It’s harder to criticize the Physics 140s in the same amount of detail since I was too overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of the information being thrown at me to have a clear sense of whether it was being presented in a productive way. But that is problematic in and of itself— even if these courses were perfectly structured, the stark gap in difficulty between the honors and standard sequences would still force many physics lovers to choose between a semester of high school review and a flood of material well beyond their ability.

And the truth is that their structure is far from ideal. Despite the fact that Honors Physics—especially Electricity and Magnetism—relies heavily on advanced applied math, the concurrent Math 180s courses are almost comically timely in how they cover a technique or theorem that would probably have been useful on the physics P-set due a week earlier. That’s as far as my own experience goes, but don’t worry:

There’s no shortage of students who have either been pushed away from a subject by their first taste of it or been left scarred by the first two or three courses they had to endure for their majors.

Chances are that you’ve suffered through your share of shoddy intro sequences too.

You might be picking up on another key point—most of the departments I’ve mentioned are STEM fields, with the exception of economics. One theory to explain this is simply that UChicago anticipates a large number of students seeking out these majors as “right” choices for their careers and wants to ensure that no one has to discover that their field of study isn’t a good fit after they’ve already sunk years into that commitment. Or maybe it isn’t by design at all, and the only thing to blame is a lack of investment in early classes in favor of later ones. But the idea that we should devote our lives to what we’re good at regardless of what we enjoy is ultimately antithetical to what college claims to offer: an opportunity to discover and pursue our passions. For every pre-med student who realizes too late that they’re in over their head, there are three more political science students who never got the chance to find their calling as doctors. When exploring new subjects comes at the cost of enjoyable, well-designed intro sequences and a consistent GPA, our ability to make full use of our time in college will inevitably be hindered. So if UChicago hopes to rebuild the education it offers into the wealth of inquiry and opportunity that it’s touted as offering, the beginning seems like a good place to start.

Tejas Narayan is a second-year in the College.

THE CHICAGO MAROON — MARCH 2, 2022

9

Sunshine on My Shoulders Terrifies Me By neglecting to establish a dedicated environmental studies core requirement, the University fails its students and fails itself. derstand the env ironmental crisis that threatens to destabilize it

KIRA DAVIS

By RAWAN ABBAS I’d just logged into my Zoom session for my Sosc class a few weeks ago when I glanced out the window and noticed that several inches of snow were missing. A few hours of sunlight and relative warmth had melted it. The weather app told me it was mostly sunny, but it was more than just sunny—it was six degrees Celsius in January in Chicago. If you skim the overview of the physical sciences Core requirement on UChicago’s website, you might notice a quote from the late UChicago professor and Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar: “Science is a

perception of the world around us.

Science is a place where what you find in nature pleases you.” When we observe the world around us, we usually tend to categorize it into two categories—odd things and normal things. Sunny Chicago didn’t seem

pleasing; it seemed odd. But wh at is not pleasing about sunny Chicago?

This article won’t provide an answer to that question, but it’s my hope that it’ll tell you how you can answer it for yourself. You can, of course, Google it and click on the first article that mentions climate change or global warming; however, that’s not the type of answer—or in Chandrasekhar’s words, “perception of the world”— that I am looking for. Knowing the answer is not simply reading about it somewhere—it is about learning, acquiring knowledge, and using it to change what you perceive as unpleasant or harmful. One of the

University’s most distinctive characteristics—both culturally and institutionally—is its commitment to holistic education for its own sake: education that prioritizes breadth but also rewards depth.

The Core Curriculum affords students in the College the unique opportunity to observe phenomena with a critical eye, and how to position themselves to address, analyze, and adapt to these phenomena. The spirit of the Core is one designed to prepare students at UChicago to learn “the skills of critical inquiry, argumentation, and analytical thinking in both quantitative and qualitative settings,” and learning about the environmental crisis should be at the top of this list. The University prides itself on its commitments to rigorous inquiry and the growth of knowledge; by neglecting to establish a dedicated environmental studies Core requirement, the University fails its students and fails itself. You can’t understand the world around you until you un-

altogether.

One thing that consistently impresses me about classes at UChicago is how well they continuously engage with the world that the University exists in. One of the classes that has been offered this quarter is titled Sociology of Urban Planning: Cities, Territories, Environments. It’s cross-listed between environmental and urban studies and several other programs. The course takes a systematic—and not individualistic—approach to the environmental crisis in the context of capitalism and urban planning.

Another course offered this quarter is called Environmental Effects on Human Health—this course focuses on how the ongoing environmental crisis affects the well-being and health of humans.

There are other courses listed, and you can find them on the program website.

If you decide to take any environmental and urban studies courses next quarter, make sure to ask your professor why sunny Chicago is unpleasant and whether the University of Chicago commits any actions that are harming the environment—not as an arbitrary entity but rather an active entity that mirrors the system in which it resides. After all, one part of learning is self-assessment—and the other part is about changing from within.

Rawan Abbas is a student-atlarge in the College.

THE CHICAGO MAROON — MARCH 2, 2022

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ARTS Good Karma and Good Friends Cautious Clay kicked off his 2022 Karma and Friends World Tour at the House of Blues in Chicago in celebration of his debut full-length album Deadpan Love.

By NATALIE MANLEY | Arts Editor and SAMUEL CODY | Arts Reporter It’s not every day that you get to see an R&B artist whip out a flute, tenor, and soprano saxophone mid-concert. Oh yeah— and spontaneously whip off the bottom half of his pants somewhere in there too.

Who else could pull off such a spectacle but Cautious Clay? Hailing from Cleveland, Ohio, the 29-year-old classically trained woodwind player-turned R&B artist kicked off his Karma and Friends World Tour last week with a sold-out show at the House of Blues in Chicago. The tour celebrates the release of his first full-length album, Deadpan Love, which comes more than two years since he last went on tour for his EP Blood Type.

When we spoke with Cautious Clay a few days before the concert, he revealed that the Karma and Friends World Tour would feature an all-new lighting setup, his signature improvisational flute and saxophone playing, and a new member

in his now-four-piece band. That new member turned out to be up-and-coming 22-year-old jazz pianist and percussionist Julius Rodriguez, who grew up in White Plains, NY and studied under Wynton Marsalis at Julliard. In 2021, Rodriguez’s song “Actual Proof,” which he co-created with Cisco Swank, was named the second-best jazz song of the year by Spotify. Rodriguez, who is also known by his stage name Orange Julius, not only played keys and percussion for Cautious Clay but was also his opening act.

It was a little strange to have a non-vocalist jazz musician open for an R&B concert, but after warming up the crowd with a few mellow, modern blues tracks that honestly could have made their way onto a “lo-fi beats to study to” playlist, Rodriguez and his three-piece band launched into some more high-energy pieces, including their take on a Herbie Hancock

Cautious Clay live in Montreal. courtesy of monika cefis

standard complete with a truly funk-tastic Rhodes (piano) solo and another piece featuring bassist (and Rodriguez’s good friend) Philip Norris on an upright. The crowd, though clearly unfamiliar with Rodriguez’s music and jazz as a genre in general seemed to appreciate the group’s talent and musicality, cheering each time a member took a solo.

Rodriguez’s setup was rather barebones, but the lighting equipment Cautious Clay spoke of in our interview was on full display during the intro leading up to his entrance. When Cautious and his band walked onstage following Rodriguez’s set, beams of white light projected from both sides of the stage, bouncing off of rotating mirrors placed in a triangle formation while rod-like LEDs shone from within the mirrors themselves. The setup truly utilized a minimal amount of tech for maximal effect, and it was easy to see why Cautious was so stoked about his new lighting.

After a fun little intro piece, Cautious Clay launched into his song “Agreeable” off Deadpan Love and followed with the rather popular “Joshua Tree” and “Dying in The Subtlety.” Somewhere in this mix of songs, however, Cautious remarked how his pants kept falling down. Rather than carry on into his next song, he signaled to the sound booth to pause the show, then proceeded to remove the bottom half of his pants (they were the turn-into-shorts kind; fret not, there was no brute pants ripping). Of course, the crowd went wild, and Cautious carried this energy with him as he started his next song. The moment was a nice showcase of Cautious Clay’s easygoing, go-with-the-flow personality. It’s easy to forget at times that artists are people too, and part of the beauty of live performances is being able to see a more human side of a musician.

The middle of Cautious Clay’s set

showcased a healthy mix of his more popular songs such as “Wild Fire,” “Woah,” and “Shook,” with some lesser-known songs like “French Riviera” and “Spinner” thrown in. Cautious Clay also played an unreleased new song called “Camp Anonymous,” which was a nice touch, though somewhat unmemorable.

Cautious Clay took full advantage of the live performance setting in order to showcase his improvisational flute and saxophone playing; he often picked up his tenor saxophone or flute mid-song to weave in a soaring solo before each final chorus. Though they weren’t the most technically advanced solos (Cautious Clay admitted in our interview that he in no way considers himself to be a jazz musician or anything of the sort), the live instrumentals added some delightful color to Cautious’ performance and showcased his technical talent and unique sound. It was very clear from his playing that Cautious Clay had a strong musical background, and his incorporation of flute and saxophone into his songs clearly sets him apart from other similar artists.

The most memorable solos of the night came, however, from Cautious Clay’s guitar player, Chris Kyle, who took center stage on a few occasions and was by far the most prominent member of Cautious Clay’s four-piece band. Overall, the band complemented Cautious Clay well, but we would have loved to see more moments featuring individual members. Julius Rodriguez in particular played brilliantly in his opening act but never really got the chance to shine during Cautious Clay’s set, which was a bit of a shame. Francesco Alessi on drums made some cool stylistic choices throughout and definitely played with some of the grooves on Cautious’ songs, but he was really more complementary than anything. Similarly, Dan PappalarCONTINUED ON PG. 11

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“I’m an introvert, but I came out here to celebrate music with y’all tonight.”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 10

do on bass certainly filled out Cautious’ sound, but we think there was a missed opportunity for him to add some funky bass fills and colors to the set. In general, we’re sure there was more technical stuff happening in the background that

we didn’t catch, but for the most part, it wasn’t really highlighted—Cautious Clay was very much the star of the show.

Like Cautious Clay said in our interview, the Karma and Friends World Tour was meant to embody exactly that: good karma and good friends. We would

argue that it did. Cautious Clay certainly brought his down-to-earth and genuine energy to the House of Blues and provided fans with an overall positive concert experience. The concert wasn’t a high-energy rave, but it wasn’t meant to be. The crowd was made up of more

mellow fans who could relate to Cautious Clay’s signature emotive lyrics and moving sound. As Cautious said before his last song, “I’m an introvert, but I came out here to celebrate music with y’all tonight.” And celebrate music we did.

Griff Shines in Sold-Out American Tour

By JERRY SHI and SOFIA HRYCYSZYN | Arts Reporters As the stage lights dimmed, the soothing monologue of a woman with a British accent came over the speakers.

“It started with me just making beats in my bedroom,” she said, and what sounded like interview excerpts turned into a personal address. “I didn’t expect so many people to relate to my songs, like yourself.”

Then Griff appeared on stage, in an oversized sweater atop a shimmering maxi dress that she presumably sewed herself. Her trademark ponytail—a series of oversized bulbs—flittered behind her. Her soft-spoken demeanor, complete with a hot cup of throat coat tea, belied her effortless ease on stage. She bantered with the audience like an experienced stand-up, at one point introducing the backstory for a song with the self-awareness that there might be a number of boyfriends dragged to her show. At another point, she gave directions to the sound booth to change her in-ear settings so she would feel less “lonely up here.”

Griff’s effortless presence and bedroom pop backstory hide the amount of work she has put into her music. According to interviews, she learned music production from YouTube in middle school. Her opening act, Amy Allen, recounted meeting Griff three and a half years prior at a studio writing session (which Griff attended after school).

At one point in her set, Griff used a looping machine, a skill she had picked up in just a few days for her electrifying BRITs (British Record Industry Trust) Rising Star Award performance. The bedroom pop self-made beats, the looping machine, the guitar and piano, the homemade outfits, and even the backdrop (a series of flat sheets sewn together haphazardly) all gave a distinct DIY aesthetic. It was as if Griff was telling her audience, “You could do this too.”

Crafted during lockdown, the seven-song mixtape One Foot in Front of the Other mines the highs and lows of adolescent existence like Taylor Swift (who cosigned “Shade of Yellow”), Lorde (whose “Royals” she blended into a live rendition of “Heart of Gold”), and countless other talented young female pop artists. Despite these influences, Griff herself might be loath to agree with any such comparisons.

In introducing “Head on Fire,” her freshly released collab with Norwegian songstress Sigrid, she said the song came about after becoming frustrated with the music industry’s unrelenting comparisons of female artists. Unlike the early discography of Lorde and Taylor Swift, Griff’s music is about a distinctly different era for youth: A never-ending global pandemic, increasing inequality, a climate crisis, the constant threat of mass casualty events, and an attention span hijacked by multinational tech corporations have impacted today’s youth in ways that could not have been predicted in the time since her pop predecessors rose to prominence.

Despite her young age, the universal relatability of Griff’s songwriting means that the majority of her audience at her all-ages show is in their twenties and thirties, if not older. It’s an effect that Griff sometimes intentionally cultivates. In the introduction to “Good Stuff,” which appears on its surface to be a generic breakup anthem, Griff says she wrote the song about the loss she felt when the children her family fostered would move on to their forever homes. She admits she wrote the song from the perspective of a breakup to make it more relatable to a wider audience.

Griff also says her debut single, “Mirror Talk,” is a self-addressed letter reminding

yourself you can’t stare in the mirror forever, hyping yourself up with affirmations and pep talks. At some point, you have to turn to reality and move on with your life.

Her setlist traces a similar outline, beginning with the difficulty of healing in “One Foot in Front of the Other” and imploring self-forgiveness in “Forgive Myself” before exploring the euphoria of love in songs like “1,000,000 X Better” and ending with her biggest hit to date, “Black Hole.” Griff

started with an acoustic rendition to get the audience singing along before her backing band joined in. Sadly, the heavy kick of the bass drum that gave more texture and layers to the melodramatic production of the song was missing. Despite the cheers from the crowd for an encore, when the song finished, Griff was gone, and stagehands quickly appeared to tear down her set.

Griff’s effortless presence and bedroom pop backstory hide the amount of work she has put into her music. courtesy of jerry shi

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The Arc Gallery’s “Body Politics” Exhibit Challenges Stigmatization

By KATIE FRASER | Arts Reporter With the advent of increasingly strict policies forced on women’s bodies throughout the United States and along with the continued stigmatization of the naked body, exhibits like the Body Politics exhibit at the Arc Gallery in Chicago are necessary.

The artwork not only advocates for advancing women’s access to health care but also shows the role of the body in different mechanisms, as well as individual existence. In its essence, the exhibit’s collective approach defies regular stigmatization of the naked form, while still drawing from personal and vulnerable experiences which relate to the body, all in a frame.

Artist Christine Wuenschel’s visual art piece “L and M Eating” is the clear choice for visitors to see as they first step through the gallery’s doors. The artwork sets the tone for the rest of the exhibit, challenging fear and anxiety of the body through stenciled

outlines of the human form. The outlines pose the female figure in a confrontational manner to emphasize tensions between awkwardness and comfort, pleasure, and discomfort. Not only does this open up internal dialogue about the body through reflections on the naked frame and its relation to other people, but it encourages further exploration of repressed experiences on an individual and collective level.

The artwork is not limited to painting and stenciling. In “Toys r US,” created by Suzanna Scott, two baby blankets are hung side by side. Everything about them is contradictory; one is pink, the other is black; one is decorated with hangers, the other with guns. The toys on the blankets represent the political interplay of rights and existence, with health care access and gun legislation being topics of question in the artwork.

Another piece, “I Come Rising” made

by Bea, was one of my personal favorites in the exhibit. The artwork illustrates a beautifully vulnerable personal story, using the symbolism of flowers, fires, skies, and reflections to impart further meaning to each color and brush stroke. The hollyhock flower, a delicate pale pink against the flaming reds and oranges of the fires in the back, stands tall to represent survival in spite of medical practices which harm women. The contrast of the striking fire, the beautiful growing flower, and the colored reflecting water create both a self-reflective and narratively complex piece.

A multi-media form, “The Law As Written,” made by Alex Younger, prints laws onto a metallic and rusty platform. It includes South Carolina’s 16-3-658 statute, in which “a person cannot be guilty of criminal sexual conduct under Sections 16-3-651 through 16-3-659.1 if the victim is the legal spouse unless the couple is living apart and the offending spouse’s conduct constitutes

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criminal sexual conduct in the first degree or second degree as defined by Sections 163-652 and 16-3-653.” The multi-media component of this piece explores how words can be transformed when taken off of a neutral paper and inserted within a piece of art. This process strips the language of its impartiality, revealing the fragility within these laws through the hiding, erasing, and fracturing of text.

The Arc Gallery represents a community of artists asserting greater meaning and purpose from each individual piece through the conglomeration of similarly themed artwork. While the Arc Gallery has moved past the Body Politics exhibit to showcase other pieces of art, viewing exhibits like Body Politics always gives me hope that artists will continue to find platforms to showcase their work in a meaningful fashion. Personally, I can’t wait to view more exhibits from the Arc Gallery in the future, and I highly encourage others to do the same.