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New Pritzker Dean Mark Anderson Wants Med School Without Tuition or Student Debt

By ANU VASHIST | Deputy News Editor

On October 1, Anderson began his tenure as executive vice president for medical affairs, dean of the Division of the Biological Sciences, and dean of the Pritzker School of Medicine. courtesy of the university of chicago

The Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago is the most diverse schools in the U.S. News and World Report’s top 20 medical schools and one of the most generous in its financial aid offerings, with 92 percent of students receiving tuition aid.

But for new Pritzker dean Mark Anderson, that’s not enough.

“I want to capture the value of the centennial of our school to try and move us to an even better place in terms of tuition support,” Anderson said, speaking of Pritzker’s upcoming 100-year anniversary in 2027.

“My goal would be to move the University into tuition- or debt-free scenarios so that

UChicago Men’s Soccer Wins First-Ever National Title

By FINN HARTNETT | Sports Editor The UChicago men’s soccer team made history on and off the field Saturday afternoon when the Maroons beat Williams College 2-0 in Salem, Virginia, to claim the first national championship in the program’s 75year history. Julianne Sitch, in her first year as head coach of the Maroons, became the first-ever female head coach to win a men’s collegiate soccer championship.

This victory represented a major accomplishment for a university that had only won its first NCAA team championship last year in men’s tennis. But the 2022 men’s soccer team was by no means a Cinderella story.

NEWS: At Vigil for China Fire Victims, Attendees Support Movement From Abroad PAGE 3

we can even further expand the diversity of our students.”

On October 1, Anderson began his tenure as executive vice president for Medical Affairs, dean of the Division of the Biological Sciences, and Dean of the Pritzker School of Medicine. He replaced Kenneth Polonsky, who is now a senior advisor to the president of the University.

Anderson joins UChicago after nearly a decade at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he most recently served as the director of the Department of Medicine and physician-in-chief of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Prior to his time at Hopkins, he served on the faculty at Vanderbilt University and the University of Iowa College of Medicine.

Anderson hopes to bring to UChicago CONTINUED ON PG. 2

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UChicago’s win against Williams came after a dominant regular season in which the Maroons won 16 games, drew one (a 0-0 match against NYU), and lost none. They added six more wins to that tally in the playoffs.

It was Williams who looked to play the role of spoiler in the championship match.

The Ephs had drawn more games than they had won in the regular season before embarking on a magical postseason run, which had seen them upset NYU, Ohio Northern, and Kenyon on their way to the finals. However, UChicago third-year Ryan Yetishefsky

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“I want [us] to be a more effective partner with the South Side” CONTINUED FROM PG. 1

the broadened diversity and equity practices he implemented in his previous roles, particularly those at Johns Hopkins. “At Hopkins, not to oversimplify, but there are many similarities [with UChicago] between the vulnerable populations that surround the medical school and the long and sometimes complicated relationship of those populations to the medical school,” Anderson said.

Anderson made sure to highlight how his former colleague at Hopkins, Sherita Golden, now the vice president and chief diversity officer at Johns Hopkins Medicine, shaped his perspective on equity and community practices.

“She pointed out that the [hospital] was more than the faculty, and it was even more than the nurses. Because of the structure, it involved lots of people who lived in our community—people who transported patients and were medical assistants [and] environmental services workers,” Anderson said.

“There were almost 6,000 employees, and we started to focus on this broader group to create engagement through a mission-values exercise that was broadly inclusive, and I think successful, through a series of discussions with various groups called Journeys in Medicine.”

The program created a forum for Johns Hopkins faculty and staff to share their experiences as underrepresented individuals while also connecting them with local leaders, such as members of religious community, “Some of this was really pretty hard to

hear, but I think it ended up engaging us more broadly, including as a faculty and as learners,” he said.

Speaking on how he wants to apply lessons from Johns Hopkins to UChicago, Anderson said, “I want [us] to be a more effective partner with the South Side of Chicago and make sure that we’re authentically engaged with the population...but I also want to make sure that people know the really remarkable things that are already happening.”

Anderson also feels expanding UChicago’s base of care is important—a task UChicago Medicine has already begun to undertake with the construction of a new $633 million clinical cancer center. “I think a real point of pride is building the first freestanding cancer center in the whole Midwest right here in Hyde Park.”

Before becoming a physician scientist, Anderson grew up with much exposure to health care. He grew up in Rochester, Minnesota, home to the world-renowned Mayo Clinic—a nonprofit academic medical center that integrates health care, research, and medical education. His father worked there as a consultant, publication editor, and professor, and his paternal grandparents were also both physicians. “It was hard not to be thinking about medicine,” Anderson said.

Despite his family history, Anderson did not originally want to pursue medicine. “My initial predilections were to go into law to do something that wasn’t so predetermined, and I loved history and political science.

Those were my first majors in undergrad-

uate,” Anderson said. “But I think I was drawn in by several factors, one of them for sure just being so interested in biology and the kind of discoveries that were starting to occur at that time.”

Clinically trained as a cardiologist, Anderson completed his internal medicine residency and fellowships in cardiology and clinical cardiac electrophysiology at Stanford University after earning an M.D.–Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1989.

For nearly 30 years since then, Anderson has led research funded by the National Institutes of Health focused on heart failure and arrhythmias. His research profile consists of more than 160 peer-reviewed publications.

As his career progressed, Anderson came to especially value academic medicine. “I could try and improve the human condition through reducing suffering, understand[ing] the unmet needs, [and] using science as a tool to gain a deeper mechanistic, molecular-level understanding of how things worked.”

A new challenge Anderson and his colleagues have had to tackle is the burnout facing medical workers on the front lines of care during the COVID-19 pandemic. “It just goes on forever,” Anderson said. “Especially at the beginning of the pandemic, when we didn’t have a good sense of how the virus was transmitted, that was even scarier.”

Burnout in health-care professionals remains an unresolved task. “There [are] not simple solutions. I think part of it is acknowledging the value of teams and what

people do and making sure that people have access to wellness resources and engagement so that they can talk to their supervisors in a candid, safe way.”

Beyond the stresses of being on the front lines, the pandemic brought social and political turmoil that resulted in less uptake of the unprecedented tools, like vaccines, that were developed to combat the virus, Anderson said. “I think the failure to really broadly uptake some of these great treatments is partially a failure of better communication.”

Other than recovery from the pandemic, Anderson also hopes to strengthen the Pritzker School’s collaboration with other UChicago divisions and other Chicago-area research universities. “Biology and medicine are generating tremendous and rich datasets that, until very recently, hadn’t been that interesting outside their communities. But now with the growth in data sciences and the power of computing, I think we’re seeing a lot of interest by adjacent or nontraditional allies,” he said.

Through this research, Anderson hopes to advance patient care—what he considers the backbone of the UChicago medical system.

“That is what creates the revenue streams to support education and research and engage more effectively with the broader university and all its assets,” Anderson said. “I want to make sure that the health system prospers because that’s how we actually touch people.”

“UChicago, who had made the NCAA Championship tournament four times in the last five years, had finally gone all the way.”

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told The Maroon that the team was nonplussed by William’s recent results. “Going into the finals, we were very confident that we were the better team. We’d seen plenty of film of our opponents and knew what to expect in the match. Our mentality was to respect the threats that Williams posed but ultimately to come in and impose our style of play onto them,” he said.

After a cagey first half of the championship match, third-year Robbie Pino gave the

Maroons the opening goal in the 66th minute. After controlling a pass from fourth-year Naz Kabbani 25 yards out, Pino unleashed a beautiful shot that sailed past Ephs goalie Ben Diffley and into the top corner. Yetishefsky, who led the Maroons in scoring in 2022, then capped the game off with a second goal with 13 seconds left to play. After Williams brought their entire team forward in search of an equalizer, the Chicago striker found himself with the ball in space following a Williams free kick. Yetishefsky

flew downfield and was able to pass the ball into an empty net from about 40 yards away, sending the UChicago fans who had made the trip south—as well as the entire Maroon bench—into delirium. “Honestly, I felt that before I scored the game was already over,” Yetishefsky admitted. “Our defense was exceptional today.… I was happy to score, but I was more excited for the team.”

The game ended not long after. As players on both the winning and losing sides dropped to their knees, one could feel the emotions re-

verberate in the damp Virginia air. Williams College had fallen short after a magical playoff run; UChicago, who had made the NCAA championship tournament four times in the last five years, had finally gone all the way.

It was an intense moment, to be sure. Head coach Sitch, however, remained relatively calm. As the cameras cut to her, she smiled slightly, applauding her team as she walked onto the field. It was only after a few players from the subs bench doused her with a Gatorade cooler that she broke into a grin.

THE CHICAGO MAROON — DECEMBER 8, 2022

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Bartlett Dining Commons to Close for Renovation During Spring, Summer Quarters

By ERIC FANG | Deputy News Editor Bartlett Dining Commons will be closed for the spring quarter and for most of the summer. Beginning spring quarter, Baker Dining Commons access will also be restricted to students and staff living in Campus North or Max Palevsky Residential Commons who have purchased a UChicago Dining meal plan. Full service is expected to return by fall 2023.

The closure and associated changes were announced in a December 1 email to residents of Max Palevsky Residential Commons and Snell-Hitchcock Hall by Executive Director of UChicago Dining Christopher Toote. He announced the future restrictions on Baker in a separate email on December 2 to all on-campus housing residents with a UChicago Din-

ing plan.

According to the emails, the closure is necessary for the next phase of external improvements on Bartlett, built from 1901 to 1904. Work began on the first phase of these improvements this summer. Exterior scaffolding and fencing remain around the building and at its entrances, although major work has paused for the autumn and winter quarters, per the emails.

During spring quarter, residents of both Max Palevsky and Snell-Hitchcock will receive five additional meal exchanges usable during lunch periods from Mondays through Fridays each week, an additional 100 Maroon Dollars, and 10 additional “to-go” meals from dining halls.

Additionally, all dining halls will serve lunch from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., extended from the standard window ending at 2:30 p.m.

For those eligible to dine at Baker in the spring and summer quarters, credit cards and Maroon Dollars will no longer be accepted as they normally are at campus dining halls. Further, Baker will no longer be available for outside groups nor for private dining events.

Operations at Cathey Dining Commons and Woodlawn Dining Commons, located next to Renée Granville-Grossman Residential Commons and Woodlawn Residential Commons respectively, will remain unchanged. Retail food vendors in Hutchinson Commons will also remain open.

For spring quarter, the eight tables

corresponding to Max Palevsky’s residential houses will be in Baker Dining Commons. House tables for Snell House and Hitchcock House will be in Cathey Dining Commons.

“Additional resources and programming will be provided to ensure that we continue to offer a dining program that promotes service, quality, safety, and community dining while the essential improvements are made in Bartlett Hall,” Toote wrote in both emails.

Toote encouraged students to direct questions at dining@uchicago.edu. In his email to Max Palevsky and Snell-Hitchcock residents, he also promised the communication of “additional operational changes to ease access to dining services” closer to the start of spring quarter.

At Vigil for China Fire Victims, Attendees Support Movement from Abroad

By YIWEN LU | Managing Editor Editor’s note: The Maroon granted anonymity to some sources in this story who raised concerns over retaliation and personal safety.

It started with a simple, black flyer: “Global Vigil: Remember the Urumqi Fire.” When Rik, a first-year undergraduate at Northwestern University, first came across the candlelight vigil on Instagram, he immediately decided to travel into the city. “I wanted to meet the fellow organizers,” he said. “I wanted to be part of the community.”

More than 100 community members gathered on the main quad of the University of Chicago on Sunday night, mourning the 10 victims of an apartment fire in Xinjiang, China. The fire, which broke out in a residential high-rise in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi, has become a focal point for those protesting China’s zero-COVID policy.

COVID-19 lockdowns forbidding residents from leaving their homes have been in place

for more than 100 days across the Xinjiang region, the home of many of China’s ethnic minorities, including the Uighur people.

While local officials continue to be circumspect, many in China believe that stringent lockdown measures, including a roadblock and the building’s closed fire exit delayed emergency responders from responding to the fire.

The tragedy has sparked mass demonstrations across major cities in China against the zero-COVID policy. Thousands of protestors have demanded that the government lift COVID-related restrictions, with some going as far as to challenge China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and the Chinese Communist Party. The movement has also spread throughout the Chinese diaspora abroad.

By 7 p.m., the scheduled start time, those on the quad stood in silence around candles and bouquets they had brought to the vigil. The organizers started to play background music—such as popular Chi-

nese songs from the 1980s and Western songs about revolution like “Do You Hear the People Sing?”—to which the growing crowd started to chant along. Some brought signs with slogans on them or held up blank sheets of paper, a symbol for censorship seen across protests in China.

A graduate student from Ohio State University who was visiting Chicago during Thanksgiving brought a printed road sign of a street named “Urumqi Road” in Shanghai. According to videos spreading online, the original sign was removed after a largescale demonstration on the street, after which hundreds were arrested.

“I grew up in Shanghai and frequented the street,” the student said. “When I saw the police taking those protestors away, I felt devastated. I hope to do something to pay respect to the protestors.”

As the night went on, organizers passed a microphone among the participants. “We gathered here not only to mourn the victims in the Urumqi fire,” one speaker said, listing social injustices in China that have made headlines during the past three years: farm-

ers in Korla, Xinjiang, who saw mass deaths of their livestock during the lockdown; migrant workers who caught COVID-19 but were not treated after being forced into centralized quarantine; 38 factory workers, many of them women, who were killed in a deadly fire in Anyang, Henan. These stories spread across Chinese social media and internationally on Instagram and Twitter, though they were eventually censored and scrubbed in China.

Later on, speakers chanted demands like “Free press! Free speech!,” “Democracy, law, and freedom!,” and “For tomorrow!”

Many shouted slogans in Mandarin, such as “We don’t want PCR tests; we want food! We don’t want a dictator; we want elections!”

Those assembled also called for the Chinese government to release an unnamed protestor who in October hung large banners from a bridge in Beijing with slogans calling for Xi Jinping to step down. The act of defiance drew widespread attention both within and outside of China because of its brazen nature and its proximity to China’s National CONTINUED ON PG. 4

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“Because we are fortunate to stay here without risks or police throwing tear gas at us, we are responsible for doing more.”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 3

Party Congress—an event that occurs every five years in China and is often preceded by heightened security and censorship efforts.

“The protesters in China faced much higher risks than us,” a graduate student who made the flyer advertising the vigil said. “Because we are fortunate to stay here without risks or police throwing tear gas at us, we are responsible for doing more.”

The student who helped organize the event said the number and diversity of

people who attended were beyond expectations. “We have friends from different programs, from the local church, and from Hong Kong,” they said. “People may stand differently on the political spectrum, but I was touched to have such a time and space that we can agree with each other and stand together.”

Rik said that fellow students who did not seem to be politically active in their everyday lives showed up on Sunday. That showed him a sense of belonging. The vig-

il attracted the attention of students who were passing by as well, many of whom stopped and participated out of solidarity with the protestors. “The exposure, I believe, is part of the goal,” Rik said.

One of the speakers at the vigil identified as a social worker from Hong Kong.

“Sometimes the work we do might not intersect all the time, but I believe that we all share the same universal values like democracy and freedom and, most importantly, just human dignity,” they said. “We really

want to show our support to you guys.”

The vigil was not the only event in Chicago at which people expressed solidarity with protestors in China. On Tuesday evening, almost 200 protested in front of the Chinese consulate at the corner of West Erie Street and North Clark Street. At universities across the country—such as Columbia, Harvard, and Duke—international students and members from surrounding communities have organized and participated in similar events.

UChicago’s Business Economics Track Facing Supply-and-Demand Crisis

By PETER MAHERAS | Senior News Reporter The business economics specialization of the economics major has grown rapidly since launching during the 2018– 19 academic year. As the track continues to grow, students have struggled to register for required classes as the economics department attempts to keep up with rising demand.

In an interview with The Maroon, economics department chair Robert Shimer said he expects growth to slow over the next few years but is unsure about what consistent percentage of students would choose the business economics track going forward. About half of all economics majors are currently pursuing the business economics track.

“Frankly, our thinking was that adoption was going to be a lot slower than it’s been,” Shimer said. “We just did not see how strong the demand was going to be for this [specialization].”

The business economics track’s required courses are split between the following categories: core, methods, empirical analysis, perspectives, and electives. Three of the elective courses must be taken at the Booth School of Business. Shimer said the department has struggled to keep up with the demand for business economics courses, especially in the methods and empirical analysis categories.

“The surprise for us has been—because the growth has been so strong—

that we have to shift resources into the methods and econometrics classes, and [the department is] still not fully satisfying the demand for those classes,” Shimer said.

Eight of the 10 courses offered during fall quarter that fill the methods requirement without requiring calculus are either full or overenrolled, according to the UChicago Class Search system. For example, both of the Intro to Econometrics sections (which fulfill the empirical analysis requirement) are overenrolled.

In order to meet demand, Shimer said the economics department had been increasing class sizes and the number of sections offered for required courses.

Individual instructors decide whether to allow overenrollment in their classes, but they are often limited by the physical size of classrooms.

“What we think we have right now is an unusually large number of students who need to take the methods classes,” Shimer said. “Because we’ve been behind for a few years on offering it, students weren’t able to get into the methods classes in their second year that they wanted to take. So we’ve got second-years, thirdyears, and fourth-years who are trying to take methods classes.”

Shimer said the registrar recently granted the economics department permission to change pre-registration rules to prioritize economics majors over other

students. He hopes this change will alleviate some of the bottlenecks in getting students into required courses.

The department plans to hire additional instructors to increase course offerings and shrink class sizes, but Shimer could not specify an intended number of new hires.

“The problem is we could get some warm bodies off the street to teach classes, but that’s not serving anybody well to do that,” Shimer said. “We want to hire great people, and that’s a time-consuming process.”

The business economics program was originally proposed in early 2018 as a standalone major jointly controlled by the Department of Economics and the Booth School of Business. The proposal generated pushback from some students and faculty. Opponents claimed that a business economics major would be akin to a pre-professional degree and would deviate from the University’s tradition of a liberal arts education.

In a petition dated April 3, 2018, more than 100 faculty members outlined their objections to the proposal. They worried that the major would have lower academic standards compared to other majors and would attract applicants who view education “primarily as a preparation for lucrative careers.”

“Creating a business major would do a disservice to future students who would be lured into a narrow technical track that is likely to be less academically rig-

orous and intellectually stimulating than existing programs in economics and the other social sciences,” the petition reads.

Shimer said the main difference between the business economics track and the standard economics major is the math requirement. Students in the standard economics track are required to complete a full calculus sequence, but students in the business economics track have no specific math requirement outside of the Core.

“For a lot of students, the math is going to be a barrier for entry,” Shimer said.

“We think there are really important, fundamental economic things which are independent of mathematics. If mathematics didn’t exist, the economics would still be there. It’s just a question about using different approaches to get at those economics things.”

Shortly after the petition was published, the proposal for a standalone major was withdrawn. Instead, business economics became a specialization within the existing economics major.

“I think we are teaching something which is useful, and I don’t think that’s a horrible thing,” Shimer said, “but we’re also not teaching courses which are, ‘You need to take this course in order to get a job at a Fortune 500 company or a tech company or something like that.’ That’s not how we envisioned it, and it’s not the way it’s constructed.”

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University Appoints New Housing and Residence Life Director

By NOAH GLASGOW | Senior News Reporter David Hibbler Jr. will become the new executive director of Housing and Residence Life (HRL) at the start of winter quarter, a University press release announced Tuesday, November 15.

As executive director of HRL, Hibbler will oversee the management of all sev-

en University dorms, which collectively house about 4,500 students. He will lead a department that employs almost 300 staff members.

Hibbler comes to Chicago from the University of South Florida (USF), where he spent nearly a decade working in stu-

dent affairs management. His most recent position at USF was director of residential education. He has also served as a Title IX investigator at USF, according to his LinkedIn page.

In 2020, Hibbler, who is Black, received his Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from USF for research in managing the “racialized role strain”

that Black administrators face at predominantly white institutions of higher education.

“I look forward to creating an environment for residents to live, eat, debate, play together, but most importantly, rest, to fully live out UChicago’s values and bring forth ideas that change the world,” Hibbler said in the University press release.

“Victory for Team Normal”: Representative Liz Cheney Expresses Post-Midterm Optimism during IOP Event

By ERIC FANG | Deputy News Editor Outgoing House of Representatives member Liz Cheney (R-WY) spoke about the importance of defending the nation’s democracy on November 11 during an Institute of Politics (IOP) speaker series event at Mandel Hall moderated by Dean of the Harris School of Public Policy Katherine Baicker.

Cheney has served as Wyoming’s atlarge Congressional Representative since 2017 but recently lost the Republican primary for her seat after she voted to impeach former president Donald Trump in 2021 following the events of January 6. Cheney was also ousted as the House Republican Caucus Chair, the third most powerful position in the Republican Congressional Caucus, as a result of her impeachment vote and subsequent cooperation with Democrats in investigating the events of January 6.

Born in Wisconsin in 1966, Cheney, the daughter of former vice president and Republican power broker Dick Cheney, received her J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 1996.

Cheney, who was introduced by President of the UChicago College Republicans and third-year mathematics major Chad Berkich, began the conversation with Baicker by reflecting upon last Tuesday’s midterm elections and the underwhelming performance of Republicans.

“I think, in terms of the election, the fact that we are here on Friday, and that we do not know which party will control the House or Senate tells you a lot about defying expectations and the extent to which it was a victory for team normal,” Cheney said. “I

think it was a really important and frankly hopeful outcome for democracy.”

Most pollsters predicted a “red wave” for the 2022 midterm elections which would see Republicans winning control of both the House and the Senate. However, the victory of Senator Cortez Masto (D-NV), called the day after Cheney’s event, secured Democratic control of the Senate. Across the eight most competitive Senate races, Democrats on average performed about three percentage points better than Real Clear Politics’ final polling averages.

Prior to the midterms, Cheney endorsed a select few Democratic candidates who were in critical races against Trump allies.

With one exception, all of the Democrats endorsed by Cheney won their races this year. Although Cheney saw these results as progress, she emphasized that there is still much more work to be done to end Trump’s political influence.

“I think we have a long way to go,” Cheney said. “We certainly have a threat that we have never faced before in this country in terms of a former president who tried to overturn an election, tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, who is still saying things that he knows caused violence on the sixth, and for whom there is still tremendous loyalty to in the Republican party.

I think we have a lot to do but the outcome this week is a step in the right direction.”

Cheney then spoke about the danger that threats to the peaceful transfer of power and constitutional democracy could become commonplace in the United States.

“I think elected officials need to un-

derstand that words matter,” Cheney said.

“When you see again and again people accepting things that are indefensible like January 6, that can very easily become the new normal. It can become legal. I think that is a big danger, and we need to make sure that we use our votes to encourage those who

“I think what we have done as a committee in terms of our hearings has been to put forward for people the evidence for the multi-part plan that Donald Trump oversaw and directed to stop the peaceful transition of power,” Cheney said. “I think it is really important for people to go back and

Liz Cheney speaks at an Institute of Politics event on November 11. eric fang will stand up for the Constitution.”

In July 2021, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed Cheney to the House Select Committee to investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol. In September 2021, she became vice chair of the committee.

watch the hearings if they haven’t. We need to make sure that we don’t become numb to what Donald Trump did.”

Cheney also addressed the role of social media in helping to foment the political radicalism that led to January 6. She stated that CONTINUED ON PG. 6

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“My advice is to go do it.”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 5

she is not in favor of removing the federal legal protections which exempt social media companies from civil liability stemming from third-party content on their platforms.

However, she does believe that if social media companies use algorithms that push users toward ideological extremes, then there should be more transparency and accountability. She also stressed the need for personal accountability in fact-checking information consumed online.

“I think our laws haven’t caught up with the role social media is playing in our lives, and when you hear that the leaders of the so-

cial media platforms aren’t letting their own children onto the app, that tells you everything that you need to know,” Cheney said.

Finally, Cheney offered advice to students who are hoping to drive positive change in the political sphere.

“My advice is to go do it,” Cheney said. “It can be easy to sit back and be intimidated by all the different pieces of running for office, but what I have learned since January 6 is that having good, committed, responsible people in office is necessary for the survival of the republic. So if you are at all interested in running, I don’t care if you are a Democrat or Republican, if you are smart, good,

and committed to fighting for the Constitution, please run for office.”

After finishing her conversation with Baicker, Cheney took questions from students in the audience. She notably addressed two questions concerning a conspiracy theory about an Arizona man named Ray Epps.

Specifically, prominent conservatives such as former president Donald Trump, Fox News Host Tucker Carlson, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), and Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) have all claimed that Epps represents one of many federal agents deployed to the Capitol on January 6 with the goal of instigating vio-

lence. In response to questions regarding Epps, Cheney emphasized that the committee has found no evidence pointing towards Epps being a federal agent. Cheney also answered questions regarding her foreign policy stance on China and the regulation of social media.

The event, originally scheduled for October 13, was moved twice, once to October 24 due to “an unforeseen and unavoidable scheduling conflict” and later to November 11 due to a flight cancellation.

Cheney will serve as Wyoming’s Congressional Representative until January 3.

Botany Pond Restoration Prioritizes Expansion and Improvement of Habitat

By GUSTAVO DELGADO | Senior News Reporter A picturesque staple of UChicago’s main quad, Botany Pond will remain closed to the public from October until summer 2023 due to a restoration project. During the construction process, the bridge through Botany Pond that connects to Hutchinson Courtyard will be closed, but the northsouth quad path through Cobb Gate will remain open.

The project aims to increase accessibility to Botany Pond. “The new design will eliminate the temporary fencing that has been installed at the pond annually, making the grassy banks fully accessible to human visitors,” Associate Director for Public Affairs Gerald McSwiggan told The Maroon.

This mesh fencing borders the area near the bridge to prevent visitors from getting too close to the pond edge and falling in.

The project also aims to improve the pond’s habitat and better incorporate the surrounding area. “A new water filtration

system will be among the improvements intended to promote the health of the pond’s flora and fauna,” McSwiggan said.

Each spring, turtles, birds, fish, and clutches of ducklings arrive at Botany Pond.

When the campus was closed during the pandemic, professor emeritus Jerry Coyne frequented the pond to feed and check on the wildlife that resides there. Two female ducks, Honey and Dorothy, have called Botany Pond home since at least 2017 and have raised over 20 ducklings. They nest atop window ledges at Erman Hall, which faces the pond.

The much-loved ducks have been relocated for their safety. Faculty experts in the Department of Ecology and Evolution were consulted for this work. “A certified wildlife habitat has agreed to care for the wildlife from Botany Pond,” McSwiggan wrote in an email to The Maroon. “All entities involved in the wildlife removal process are

Each spring, turtles, birds, fish, and clutches of ducklings arrive at Botany Pond. courtesy of angelina torre

licensed by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.”

Additionally, a 24/7 livestream that was set up for visitors to watch the ducks will not be active during the course of the construction.

Although Botany Pond has been drained and cordoned off, the University has not yet chosen a contractor or finalized a design

plan. “A contractor for construction has not been determined; the University will run a competitive bidding process to select a contractor and Facilities Services will oversee the project,” McSwiggan wrote.

Construction will occur between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. The fencing that surrounds Botany Pond will remain until the conclusion of the project.

Class of 2026 Acceptance Rate Reaches Record Low of 5.4 Percent

By AUSTIN ZEGLIS | Senior News Reporter The acceptance rate for the College Class of 2026 was 5.4 percent, the lowest in the University’s history, according to data re-

leased by the admissions office.

This year, 37,526 students applied to the College, compared with 37,977 last year. In

total, 2,041 students were accepted into the Class of 2026, 1,729 of whom chose to enroll.

This represents an 84.7 percent yield rate, the highest in the past 10 years.

With yield rate generally understood as

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“International students make up 16 percent of the incoming class.”

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Technology’s 85 percent.

The Class of 2026 is made up of students from across the country, with strong representation from the East and West Coasts and the Midwest. International students make up 16 percent of the incoming class.

Students’ SAT scores ranged from 1020 to 1600, with a middle 50 percent of 1510 to 1560. ACT scores ranged from 20 to 36, with a middle 50 percent of 34 to 35. UChicago has not required standardized testing scores

since 2018 in an effort to make the admissions process more accessible to first-generation, low-income students.

Yet erasing testing requirements did not make the application process easier for the Class of 2026. As high school seniors, the class grappled with the complicated landscape of applying to college during a global pandemic, facing barriers such as canceled standardized testing opportunities, virtual tours, and few opportunities for athletes to compete, The Maroon previously reported.

The newly admitted class is made up of a diverse group of students with wide-ranging interests. Twenty-two percent of the Class of 2026 are Hispanic or Latino, 22 percent are Asian, and 14 percent are Black or African American. Eighty-four percent of the Class of 2026 took part in community service activities in high school, and 67 percent were varsity athletes. Additionally, thirty-five percent of the class were a part of their high school’s student government, while 21 percent contributed to high school student

publications.

meghan hendrix

GSU Submits Letter Requesting Union Recognition by University

By NIKHIL JAISWAL | News Editor At 9 a.m. on Wednesday, November 16, members of UChicago Graduate Student’s United – United Electrical Workers (GSUUE) delivered a letter asking the University to voluntarily recognize them as a Union representing graduate student workers across all departments at the University of Chicago.

The letter, addressed to University President Paul Alivisatos, Provost Ka Yee C. Lee, and the University’s Board of Trustees, requested that the University respond to GSU-UE’s request for voluntary recognition by 5 p.m. on Tuesday, November 29, 2022.

Natalie Farrell, a graduate student in the music department and GSU-UE’s General Secretary, said that the Union has received signed Union cards from most

graduate workers at UChicago.

Union cards, which are signed by workers who wish to be represented by a union, are collected by unions and can be used to demonstrate to an employer that a majority or substantial number of employees wish to be in a union. This process of unionization is called voluntary recognition.

According to Valay Agarawal, a graduate student in the chemistry department and GSU-UE’s Communications Secretary, “[GSU-UE members] have put in thousands of hours already in organizing and talking to people. We hope that we don’t have to do it all over again for an election, but we’d be happy to do it.”

If at least 30 percent of employees have signed union cards and an employer refuses to voluntarily recognize a union, the

National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal body which adjudicates labor disputes, will conduct an election. If most employees vote to form a union, the NLRB will certify the Union and the employer will be required to recognize it.

GSU-UE’s renewed push for recognition comes at a moment of heightened campus labor activism across the country. Graduate students at Yale University and Northwestern University are gearing up for recognition elections on their own campuses while over 40,000 unionized graduate workers across the University of California system are striking for a new contract.

GSU, which recently affiliated with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, has a history of fighting for recognition from the University.

This current push would be the Union’s second; and critically, it would be its first

under a Democratically controlled NLRB. The Union withdrew its previous NLRB petition for recognition in 2018 due to fears that a Republican-controlled NLRB would use the case to reverse NLRB precedent in a way that could prevent graduate student unions across the country.

In a statement to The Maroon, the University said, “We appreciate our students’ efforts to enhance the graduate student experience at UChicago. The University will provide a response to GSU-UE by their requested deadline.”

“All the steps that led up to creating this voluntary letter have been extraordinarily unifying across departments on campus,” Farrell said. “One way or another, we’re ready to join the ranks of the dozens and dozens of peer institutions that are now, if not fully recognized unions, in the process of unionizing through the NLRB.”

Award-Winning Chef Thai Dang Brings Vietnamese Cuisine to UChicago

By SABRINA CHANG | Senior News Reporter If you venture outside of the dining halls for food this quarter, you will probably see the long lines formed in Hutchinson Commons and the William Eckhardt Research Center—the two locations of chef Thai Dang’s new restaurants, Dang Good Wings and Cà Phê Đá.

Dang is not new to the restaurant scene—his restaurant HaiSous Vietnam-

ese Kitchen has received many notable recognitions, including two nominations by the James Beard Foundation for Best New Restaurant in 2018 and Best Chef: Great Lakes in 2019, along with several consecutive Michelin Bib Gourmands.

He attended L’Academie de Cuisine in Maryland, where he learned French cuisine and culinary techniques. He then

moved to Chicago, where he worked for Michelin-starred restaurants such as L20, RIA, and Balsan at the Elysian Hotel Chicago before co-opening his first restaurant, Embeya, in Chicago’s West Loop in 2012. After a trip back to Vietnam to find new inspiration, Dang opened HaiSous in the Pilsen neighborhood in 2017.

Dang’s passion for the culinary field started early in life. He was born in Vietnam as the youngest of nine children, and

his family arrived in the U.S. as refugees in the late 1980s when he was only seven years old. His experiences as an immigrant in a family-oriented household are what encouraged him to pursue his interest in cooking.

“My mom wanted us to leave Vietnam for a better life. Having such a nurturing and supportive mother and that freedom to cook inspires me, because it allows me to think outside the box, but also be proud of who I CONTINUED ON PG. 8

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“His food has already become a big hit on campus.”

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am and where I come from,” Dang said. “And of course, being Vietnamese, that entrepreneur in our blood, our desire and sheer will to want to do something for ourselves or our family outweighs anything.”

When creating new dishes, Dang likes to combine ingredients and techniques from many different cultures. “Authenticity is so subjective because we are more alike than we are different,” Dang said. “There is so much borrowing from one culture to another, the word ‘authentic’ just doesn’t have a place in America because we are so diverse.”

Dang Good Wings, which opened in Hutchinson Commons in August, serves fried chicken on a bed of fries, but these aren’t just any wings—you get to choose between Vietnamese and Asian fusion– inspired sauces such as caramelized fish sauce, honey sriracha sauce, and Thai chili buffalo sauce. Each one provides a unique burst of flavor with a little hint of spice.

“We try to provide something that students can relate to, and it’s cool to see Asian students have a sense of pride in what we do,” Dang said. “But we also tailor to so many different palates, so we have to be adaptive

to really care about everyone here.”

Dang’s favorite dish from Dang Good Wings is the caramelized fish sauce wings.

“I came up with [the caramelized fish sauce] years ago, and it just became a big hit. It won multiple awards years in a row, and I felt really proud,” Dang said. “When other Vietnamese people have it, they are so proud of it too, they just can’t believe it.”

Cà Phê Đá, in the William Eckhardt Research Center is a café that showcases classic Vietnamese dishes like phở, papaya salad, and bánh mì, as well as specialty coffee drinks like vanilla egg custard coffee and cà phê sữa đá, which is an intensely brewed coffee concentrate mixed with sweetened condensed milk.

Dang’s favorite menu item at Cà Phê Đá is the Vietnamese coffee, which is imported straight from Vietnam. “You can’t go wrong with Vietnamese coffee. The coffee is roasted by my sister-in-law’s family in Vietnam, and we get it shipped here on campus to serve hundreds of people.”

Another popular dish at the café is phở, a Vietnamese soup consisting of bone broth, rice noodles, and thinly sliced meat. While this dish usually takes a significant amount

do a Lunar New Year pop-up buffet in the Woodlawn dining hall. He also held a small cooking class for students. “I’m very fortunate and grateful to be here and be part of the university. It’s a great honor to operate my concepts here at one of the top universities in the country.”

His food has already become a big hit on campus. “As a whole, the students, staff, and faculty here have just been killing it. It’s amazing—the lines around lunchtimes are just nonstop,” Dang said. “We’re just getting our butts kicked, and it’s such a great feeling.”

Dang can be found in the kitchen at Cà Phê Đá almost every day, and places particular emphasis on hospitality. “My wife and I are here to greet people and to show our team that everyone that comes here is smiling, and that’s why we’re open. So we have to create this great environment that supports it,” Dang said.

Dang hopes that the UChicago community continues to try his food as an introduction to Vietnamese cuisine. “It’s just really awesome Vietnamese food executed properly,” Dang said. “You just got to come in and give it a shot.”

to address school spirit, safety, college advising, alumni career connections, and dining to improve the undergraduate experience this year.

“I’d like to hear more from dining specifically, just about the different accommodations that dining can provide. And I eat halal, so it would be interesting to know how we can improve the experience for both Jewish and Muslim students who are looking to have better dining experiences,” Mryan said.

While the Maroon Key Society hopes to discuss improvements to the on-campus experience this year, Mryan also talked with The Maroon about the community that the society provides for its members.

“I like that all of our members are incredibly respectful of one another. I mean, almost never do people interrupt each other,” Mryan said. “We snap often at meetings to encourage if someone else is saying something. We’ll ask follow-up questions if we agree with what a speaker

is saying, and if we don’t necessarily agree with what another student has said, then it’s a very respectful kind of disagreement that comes from a point of logic. It’s not inflammatory.”

This year, one of the group’s main goals is to reflect on the changes returning members tried to implement last year.

Mryan mentioned that while she believes the administration listens to the society, it can be difficult to know how much their conversations affect school policy.

“Honestly, it’s hard to tell after just one year. It is difficult to tell where the conversation ended up, which is why I think many of the returning members for MKS in the first meeting requested that the groups that we spoke to last year be brought back so we can ask them after our last conversation what happened,” Mryan said. “I can tell you it seems like they listen. I don’t know how tied their hands are in changing things. A conversation isn’t the end of it, I think, but it’s a good start.”

What Is the Maroon Key Society?

By KATI LANGILLE | News Reporter Maroon Key Society (MKS) member Amani Mryan, a fourth-year, told The Maroon about the University’s relationship with its most selective student advisory board.

The Maroon Key Society, described on UChicago’s Orientation website as “the College’s honorary society and its principle [sic] student advisory group,” met for the first time this year on October 25 to choose their topics of conversation for this year. The group solicits applications every year and only admits those with GPAs of 3.5 or higher. An essay is also required.

Those admitted have the opportunity to work directly with senior administrators on some of the biggest issues facing the University.

The Maroon interviewed Amani Mryan, a fourth-year in the College who has been a member of the Maroon Key Society since her third year. “At the beginning of

of time to make, Dang has perfected his recipe and execution to be able to keep up with the high demand and constant rush of college students. “What takes 10 to 15 minutes at a restaurant, I’m serving within a minute,” Dang said. “We produce phở faster than McDonald’s can give you a burger. Isn’t that crazy?”

Dang also places a lot of importance on his partnerships with other Asian companies. Dang formed a partnership with Happy Lemon, a Taiwanese tea company which is now available at Cà Phê Đá. “Happy Lemon is a husband-and-wife team that took a chance at a franchise, and I believe in their work, so I partnered up with them,” Dang said.

“And now you look around and every table is drinking Happy Lemon bubble tea.”

At Dang Good Wings and Cà Phê Đá, the sriracha is provided by first-generation Vietnamese Americans who created their own company, Fix Hot Sauce, for which Dang is a brand ambassador. “These long-term partnerships bring in a lot of value; it creates an ecosystem that supports one another, especially being Asian entrepreneurs,” Dang said.

Dang first came to UChicago last year to

the year, we all propose different people that we want to speak to, different administrators who deal with issues that either pertain to us or pertain to our communities, and so it’s a way for people to just kind of give their perspective,” Mryan said.

Mryan also discussed the issues that led her to join the Maroon Key Society, including the shift to nine-week quarters and her interest in examining the relationship between the University and the South Side.

“A lot of my questions with different departments are about accountability and what the University has intended to do, what they’ve actually been able to do, what the goals are,” Mryan said. “It’s kind of bringing that voice back into their mind essentially to just say we are watching, we’re interested in what you’re doing, we’re interested in hearing updates.”

Mryan also mentioned that she hoped

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VIEWPOINTS

The Problem of White Grievance: A Defense of Critical Inquiry Reactionary attacks on academics are not new. What’s new about the practice in the 21st century is the force multiplier of social media.

By REBECCA JOURNEY Content Warning: This op-ed discusses racism, white supremacy, antisemitism, and threats of violence and sexual assault. It also contains screenshots of emails that reference these themes.

On the morning of November 2, an automated email from

the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs appeared in my UChicago inbox, nudging me to complete a training module on harassment prevention. As it happened, this email arrived sandwiched between 23 others urging me among other things to come to Jesus, go into hiding, and “delete myself.” I could appreciate the irony, but as the day unfolded the invective got uglier.

A quick search revealed its origin: A UChicago undergraduate, whom I’ve never met, had apparently attacked my seminar on whiteness on Twitter the afternoon prior. In a lengthy thread, the student accused my course, which had just opened for registration in winter quarter, of exemplifying “anti-white hatred.”

One tweet dissected a screenshot of my course description, as if it

UPDATE POSTED ON NOVEMBER 5. COURTESY OF REBECCA JOURNEY

served as evidence of my bigotry, that he had “exposed.” Another offered over 30k followers a screenshot of my faculty page, including my university email and headshot. This is the face, the student implied, of institutionalized “anti-white” racism: On November 5, he tweeted an UPDATE. Contrary to the student’s proclaimed “victory,” my class

was not in fact cancelled. I made the call to move it to spring quarter precisely because of his cyber harassment campaign, which placed a target on me and therefore on my classroom.

In this discussion I want to pull focus on where it belongs: on the torrent of abuse this harassment campaign has incited. I won’t spend time here characterizing the 146 and counting taunts and threats to my body, safety, and psyche that have flooded my inbox since November 2.

Read some of them for yourself in select screenshots published here. I want to ask instead how an institution avowedly committed to free expression has come to condone its weaponization.

So let me begin with a thought experiment.

Had the student reached out to me with concerns about my course, The Problem of Whiteness, I would have happily scheduled office hours to discuss them.

During that meeting, I would have listened to his concerns and addressed them by elaborating far beyond the five sentences published in the course catalog.

I would have clarified that the class is not about “anti-white hatred” or my personal “problem with white people.” Both of those statements are value judgments; judgements which get in the way of critical inquiry. I would have explained that critical inquiry involves the rigorous study of social problems—problems which exert a shaping force on history and society. Grappling with such problems and the questions that CONTINUED ON PG. 10

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“I want to ask instead how an institution avowedly committed to free expression has come to condone its weaponization.”

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flow from them—even and especially sticky ones, like race—is essential to the pedagogical enterprise.

I would have then walked the student, as I would any student, through what decades of careful scholarship on race and racism in the U.S. have taught us: whiteness, like any racial identity, has no basis in biology. It is a scientific and cultural fiction; a “pigment of the imagination,” if you like. It is, however, as historian George Lipsitz writes, a social fact “created and continued with all-too-real consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige, and opportunity.” As an unmarked norm against which difference is constructed,

“whiteness is everywhere in U.S. culture,” Lipsitz observes, “but it is very hard to see.” The act of marking whiteness, then, is to locate it as a specific historical and ideological formation, and to ask what it does in the world. That’s the mission of the class.

During this notional discussion, I would have let the student know that there is a long scholarly literature on whiteness which he might find fascinating. As a primer, I would have steered him to the Peabody Award-nominated series Seeing White, a podcast produced by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, which I use as a teaching tool in my class. Then I would have introduced him to the wide-ranging literature, from

the foundational works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, and James Baldwin, to whom my course title pays tribute, as well as to the contemporary scholarship of Sara Ahmed, bell hooks, and Shannon Sullivan. I would have urged the student to approach these texts with a generous eye, to reflect on his own sense of grievance and victimization, and to consider other habits of mind, like intellectual curiosity and charity. I would have invited him to cultivate those habits in the seminar.

I would have encouraged him to bring his ideas to the table, and to be open to the seminar as a space of spirited deliberation. In short, I would have done my job.

But this conversation never happened, because this student

never reached out. He didn’t ask questions about my course description or request a copy of the syllabus. There was no thoughtful exchange of ideas during office hours. Clearly, this student is not interested in learning. As evidenced by his expertly packaged Twitter feed, he is interested in generating content for his MAGA media persona. In his bio, he positions himself as an amateur investigative reporter “exposing insanity” at the University of Chicago. White grievance— the notion that the true victims of institutionalized racism in the U.S. are white people—seems to be his main beat.

All of this leads me to conclude that this student has not been acting in good faith; that

is, as a pupil expressing sincere concerns about a course offering.

Rather, he has acted as a cynical opportunist chasing likes and shares. For this reason, I will refer to him as such in the remainder of this essay.

Because teaching fellows are junior scholars, we are institutionally precarious. To what extent this young opportunist understood this and saw me as an easy mark is for the reader to assess. What is knowable are the consequences of his actions (thus far).

When the opportunist found my course description in the winter term schedule, he seized a chance to go viral on social media by stoking racial resentment.

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“This is not trolling. It is not cancellation. This is abuse.”

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In the “EXCLUSIVE” Twitter thread in which he deputized an indignant mob to attack me via email, he crafted just enough plausible deniability to dodge a lawsuit. Yet his followers clearly understood what they were being invited to do (harass a professor). As their emails and comments below show, they also understood the subtext of racial grievance in play: “Thank you for sharing *****@uchicago.edu’s contact information. Peeps, you know what to do. Now get to it.”

“Just sent her an email…Suggest others do the same.”

“Keep going. Journey needs to be fired.”

“You should sign up and livestream it.”

“Yes. Put this across the internet.”

“Rebecca Journey is among the most dishonest, disgusting, degenerate, and deeply evil figures in public life.”

“People like Rebecca are rotten inside and that shows with

the ugly outside.”

“Hell I got sick of people who look like her talk about ‘gender’ in like 1997.”

“Is she white or an actual ghost? Why are these people always pasty, rail thin white women? How many cats does she have?”

“She ain’t white. She’s fucking translucent.”

“She’s a ginger, they don’t have souls.”

“She’s Jewish though, right?”

“I’m guessing the teacher is a J.” “Physiognomy never lies.”

This is not trolling. It is not cancellation. This is abuse. The opportunist did not simply “call [me] out.” He preyed on a private figure—a precariously employed postdoc—to further his own craven ambitions. He weaponized his free speech to stifle mine.

Reactionary attacks on academics are not new. What’s new about the practice in the 21st century is the force multiplier of social media. I am not even on Twitter, and yet I was targeted

and terrorized through it. In just 280 characters or fewer, a user can mobilize a collective, decentralized attack and walk away, feigning ignorance. Righteousness, even. I was just “calling out” “anti-white racism.” Let the dregs of the internet do the work.

Putting aside for a moment the logical incoherence of this tactic (free speech for me; censorship for you), I want to focus on how it undermines the educational mission of the University.

The University of Chicago has long taken an absolutist stance on the principle of free expression. In the Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression commissioned in 2014, the authors affirm the University’s “profound commitment” to supporting “the freedom of all members of the community ‘to discuss any problem that presents itself.’” However, they write: “The freedom to debate and discuss the merits of competing ideas does not, of course, mean that individuals may say whatever they wish, wherever they wish.

The University may restrict expression that violates the law, that falsely defames a specific individual, that constitutes a genuine threat or harassment, that unjustifiably invades substantial privacy or confidentiality interests, or that is otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the University.”

Does a torrent of hate speech on Twitter constitute a discussion? Is placing a target on an instructor’s body and classroom compatible with the function of the University? These are the

dystopian affordances of social media. The College is not a closed system.

Offering no public comment apart from a “note on course offerings” briefly posted on the Global Studies homepage, the University responded to the incident two weeks later in an internally circulated set of two emails.

The administration has taken the position that the opportunist’s targeted harassment campaign does not violate University policy on free expression. At the time of writing, he has faced no

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“The University’s belated, tepid response to this incident reduces its stakes to an abstract question of academic freedom.”

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disciplinary consequences for his conduct. This, despite being known to the administration for cyberbullying a fellow student earlier this year.

The University’s belated, tepid response to this incident reduces its stakes to an abstract question of academic freedom.

It sanitizes the white rage, misogyny, and antisemitism that hundreds of speakers routed through the opportunist’s provocation. There is more to say here about the interplay of each of these dynamics in the spectacular demolition of a female junior scholar. There is also more to say about the extent to which the far right has normalized violence in American life. But I want to stop here and ask: Why has the University shirked its “profound commitment” to protect the pedagogical project?

What this ugly incident reveals is just how hollow these commitments actually are, and just how little the administration has reckoned with the power of technology to thwart them. It exposes this language as naïve.

What would it mean to affirm those commitments today, to

borrow philosopher Wendy Brown’s phrase, in the “apocalyptically populist” present?

Is going viral by doxxing and harassing an instructor—particularly a structurally vulnerable one—a viable path to a media career? That is the message being telegraphed to others watching this play out. Bad faith actors will learn that they can hide behind the cover of free expression as they defame scholars and compromise classrooms.

The University has permitted the opportunist to terrorize an instructor, her students, and, I would also argue, our campus.

Let me spell out the nature of that terror if it is not already clear. A teacher is not free to do her job if she is fearful that an armed white nationalist, activated by a provocateur, will track her down and shoot up her classroom. This is not hyperbole. This is America in 2022.

Membership in the University community requires acceptance of its educational mission.

This opportunist has rejected that mission. Indeed, his conduct has placed it in harm’s way.

Graduate Student Unionization: The Path Forward for the University of Chicago For graduate workers, organizing their colleagues and fighting for union recognition are imperative steps in producing high-quality work.

By UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO GRADUATE STUDENTS UNITED—UNITED ELECTRICAL On November 16, members of UChicago Graduate Students

United—United Electrical Workers (GSU-UE) delivered a letter

to the offices of President Alivisatos, Provost Lee, and Secretary of the University Lori Berko.

This letter was a request for the University administration to

voluntarily recognize our labor union. After the University declined to voluntarily recognize us, we delivered a petition for a union election to the Nation-

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“Through countless conversations with our coworkers, it is clear that UChicago does not provide us with sufficient resources to efficiently produce the best research possible.”

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effort on November 29, we are continuing to engage in public dialogue about our campaign. At this juncture in our organizing, we want to pause and contextualize our efforts, to highlight our reasons for unionizing and our aspirations for the UChicago community.

Over the last few months, we have conducted surveys, convened mass meetings, and engaged in hundreds of one-on-one conversations in labs and offices across campus. We have become increasingly aware of a number of challenges faced by graduate student workers on this campus that prevent us from achieving the highest standards for academic research and instruction, including but not limited to: annual salaries below the living wage in Cook County, expensive dental and vision insurance, insufficient grievance and time off policies, and a lack of resources for graduate workers who are parenting, disabled, or international students.

To excel as a world-class institution, the University of Chicago must invest in making graduate programs accessible to graduate students from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, especially our colleagues of color, our international colleagues, our first-generation colleagues, our disabled colleagues, and our caregiving/parenting colleagues. This is why GSU-UE is fighting for commonsense improvements to our working conditions as researchers and instructors. We are fighting for: 1. A living wage that keeps up with cost of living.

2. Guaranteed dental, vision, and comprehensive benefits.

3. Equitable policies for our labs, classrooms, and community.

4. Fairness and support for international students.

5. Transparency and decision-making power.

In our capacity as researchers and instructors, we work alongside faculty and adjuncts year-round, teaching students, grading assignments, running experiments, collecting and analyzing data, assembling manuscripts, and otherwise ensuring that UChicago is a world-class institution for research and learning. Through countless conversations with our coworkers, it is clear that UChicago does not provide us with sufficient resources to efficiently produce the best research possible. As employees of the University of Chicago—and as experts in what we need to produce high-quality work—we are seeking a seat at the table when it comes to our working conditions, pay, and protections.

As a labor organization that formed in 2007, we’ve been around for long enough to know that the University prefers to see us as students, not workers. Despite the University’s assertions about our student status, we are acutely aware that if we do not fulfill labor obligations related to teaching and research, we are unable to retain our pay, our benefits, or our statuses as students. As individuals tasked with running data analysis, teaching undergraduate and master’s level courses, and working to support the research of our faculty supervisors, we are indeed workers, and we are motivated to organize in solidarity with each other.

Furthermore, unions for graduate students are a fundamentally normal feature in U.S. universities. Graduate employees at many public universities have benefited from strong unions since the 1960s (for example, at the University of Illinois Chicago, University of Michigan, and University of Wisconsin–Madison). We look forward to joining our unionized peers in private universities at New York University (NYU), Columbia, Harvard, The New School, Brown, and Georgetown, all of whom have bargained contracts with their administrations, along with the many others who are building campaigns right now, such as our fellow UE-affiliated graduate unions at MIT, Indiana University, Northwestern, Dartmouth, and Johns Hopkins.

GSU-UE currently represents a majority of graduate students who perform work across the University. Over 2,000 graduate workers in every division of the University have signed union cards, indicating their desire for representation in bargaining a labor contract with the University. (For context, the University census indicates there are 3,135 Ph.D. students enrolled. We also estimate several hundred masters students perform work as TAs or RAs.) As a fundamentally democratic body, we aim to set bargaining goals for a contract that will meet the needs of every department and every graduate student. A union provides the substantive, democratic decision-making power that graduate students currently lack in our workplaces.

We know that unions deliver tangible, meaningful wins

for graduate students. Student Workers of Columbia recently won a 40% increase of the minimum hourly wage, guaranteed 3% annual raises for the duration of the contract, 75% coverage for dental premiums, $5,000 child care stipends, an out-of-pocket medical expenses fund of $350,000 that increases over time, two weeks guaranteed sick leave, and access to neutral arbitration for cases of harassment and discrimination. University of Michigan graduate students have negotiated better conditions for international students, including reimbursement of Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVIS) fees, covering the cost of an English Language Proficiency workshop, overwork protections to prevent violating the terms of the student visa, and the creation of a legal hotline for international students to call with visa and immigration issues. The Harvard Graduate Student Union recently won dedicated funds for childcare, dental, and out-of-pocket medical expenses, 12 weeks of unpaid family and medical leave where access to healthcare and benefits is retained, guaranteed desk space and private advising space, prepayment for work-related travel, and discounted transit passes. In 2021, student workers at NYU ratified a contract that prevented U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection from entering campus and the university from giving either agency information about NYU community members’ immigration statuses as well as designating the presence of the New York City Police Department on campus as a health and safety

concern that the union can bargain over. While these represent just a few, incomplete examples of the many real improvements that unions bring about for graduate students, they reveal the importance of using workers’ power to improve broader campus conditions.

As an organization with a long history of collective organizing at UChicago, our unified demands of the University administration have played substantive roles in a number of material improvements for graduate workers in recent years. After our 2018 walkout, the University overhauled its funding structure to ensure that Ph.D. students are funded for the duration of our programs, rather than abruptly cutting funds before completion. After our student services fee refusal campaign in 2021, the University agreed to cover the fee for Ph.D. students in all divisions. Graduate workers no longer have to take $1,200–$1,600 out of their stipends each year to pay the university for unnamed services. We proudly claim these organizing victories as examples of what we can accomplish as a union, and we feel confident that with legal recognition, our voice will only get stronger.

Graduate workers at the University of Chicago spend countless hours working for the benefit of everyone at the university.

We teach, research, and support our faculty and undergraduates because we believe in the importance of a strong intellectual community. As individuals invested in the robust intellectual legacy of our university, we see graduate unionization as the logical extension of that powCONTINUED ON PG. 14

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“We know that unions deliver tangible, meaningful wins for graduate students.”

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erful tradition–in supporting

graduate workers’ free speech and protecting our labor, we

will only grow in our capacity to produce world-class research

and instruction here. We look forward to winning the election

and sitting down at the bargaining table with the University.

Pence and Cheney Come to Campus: What Our Guest Speakers Reveal About Campus Conservatism Representative Liz Cheney and Vice President Mike Pence sat on the same stage but received wildly different applause.

By HENRY CANTOR Members of the UChicago community gathered in Mandel Hall on November 11 for “In Conversation with Rep. Liz Cheney” and reentered the same theater on November 29 for “On the Record with Vice President Mike Pence.”

I think it’s a fair estimation to say the theater was filled with older, left-leaning adults. Representative Liz Cheney received two standing ovations and eager applause from this crowd, and every time she said “democracy” there was a concert of head nods.

It sounded like my parents when a plane lands, and I couldn’t help but laugh. A crowd who almost certainly voted for Clinton, Obama, and Biden was enamored with her, while the campus conservatives from the Chicago Thinker were trying to turn the event into the “Roast of Liz Cheney.”

Anticipating a crowd similar to the one that gathered for Cheney, I was curious to see how Pence would be received. Let me first remark that Pence and Cheney are not made in the same image. Cheney’s attention to January 6 is unmatched by any other Republican, and her political ostracization is unenviable. But the event was a nice reminder that the bar is low. Cheney was the first to admit that she voted with Trump 93 percent of the time.

Cheney’s relationship with

Trump before January 6 was barely touched on during the event. The moderator let her off too easily, and the same can be said for student questions—at least for the few that managed to slip past the Chicago Thinker’s blockade at the microphone. In our fanaticism, we failed to ask why she went along with Trump for four years, especially since the events on January 6 were prognosticated before Trump spoke at the Ellipse that afternoon.

To my surprise, the crowd, similar to the one that gathered for Cheney, greeted Pence with mild applause and tender silence.

The only standing ovation came from members of the Chicago Thinker at the conclusion of the conversation.

I have to admit: I wrongly predicted the response from the audience. I assumed the crowd would applaud Pence for his actions on January 6, and I assumed the Chicago Thinker would try to smash his political wings as they did with Cheney.

I’m trying my best not to be critical, but I’m confused. While the Chicago Thinker’s articles only reflect the opinions of the authors, it’s telling that Cheney was featured in an article entitled, “How Liz Cheney Lied to Me at an IOP Event,” whereas Pence was featured in an article entitled, “Vice President Mike Pence, Christian Warrior, to Visit UChicago.” Why

does campus conservatism champion Mike Pence but criticize Cheney? Certainly the Thinker does not represent the views of every conservative on campus, but it is the dominant (and most vocal) conservative group.

Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I assumed campus conservatives would be more favorable to the intellectual conservatism of Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater and the never-Trump movement, instead of the conspiratorial and culture war rhetoric of Donald Trump and Fox News.

Though Pence is more socially conservative, Pence and Cheney share similar conservative philosophies (as already stated, Cheney supported most of the Trump administration’s policy agenda). So if it’s not a difference of philosophy, why do they elicit such opposing reactions from campus conservatives? The only explanation I can find is our speakers’ fundamental disagreement as to Trump’s role on January 6.

Apparently, campus conservatism isn’t as different from the mainstream Republican Party as I anticipated. The speaking events revealed the most obvious and sometimes forgotten fault line in the party: Donald Trump.

Pence was noncommittal about holding the former president accountable; instead, Trump remained almost unnamable by Pence throughout the event. Any

targeted questions by Axelrod were diverted and unanswered.

On the other hand, Cheney unequivocally condemned the former president. There was no obfuscation with Cheney. I left the event knowing exactly how she felt.

The same cannot be said for Pence. He was unwilling to draw contrast between himself and his predecessor, and he refused to offer attribution when it came to Trump. For a man of faith, Pence made no moral estimates about the former president’s actions.

Everything was contextualized under the vocabulary of the Constitution. Pence said he had no Constitutional power to overturn the election but never said it would be wrong to do so even if he had had. He said he respects the American people’s “right” to vote for Trump’s confrontational style but never said whether he disagrees with or supports this rhetoric. Pence deflected every question by reaffirming the rights in the Constitution, and when the question called for a more editorialized response, he hid under the unarguable call to God. Originalism and faith gave Pence a convincing hall pass from making his own judgments.

The two events revealed the fine line Republican politicians must walk with Trump and election denialism to avoid party excommunication. Apparently,

there is an important difference between the seditious mob and Trump. Condemning the former is acceptable, but condemning the latter is too far. Pence has narrowed his commentary on election denial to the events of January 6, which is more forgivable to the Republican base than censuring Trump.

It’s worth mentioning that until January 6, Pence was complicit in the sordid scheme to overturn the election. He helped steer the ship into the storm, then jumped off when he heard thunder. But his “heroism” on January 6 perfectly manages the desire to appear loyal to the Constitution without completely splitting ties with the former President and his supporters, which became clear in Mandel Hall.

Neither speaker is a purist, but I have more admiration for someone who can be forthright in front of an audience rather than losing any form of clarity in order to please everybody. Campus conservatism, it seems, disagreed.

At a time when it feels like nothing is disqualifying anymore, I assumed a place like UChicago would feature a conservatism that still believes that character matters.

Henry Cantor is a second-year in the College.

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College and Other Liminal Spaces Living off-campus can create the separation needed to shape an experience of your own and to build a new appreciation for UChicago.

By RACHEL ONG A friend of mine recently asked me why I prefer living off-campus instead of living in the dorms.

What was meant to be a quick text in response ended up being a five-paragraph essay: I found myself recalling Sunday grocery shopping trips and making eye contact with the mouse that would (more often than not) make its weekly appearance scuttling across our kitchen floor. Certain routines unique to taking care of your own space—putting away dishes in the quiet of the morning, checking in on my roommates at strange hours of the night—had become concrete.

These small moments breathed life into my experience at UChicago in a way that living in the dorms hadn’t. Most of my college experience had been insulated within campus, and my dorm’s close proximity to the rest of the school had

forced a closeness between myself and the school that I desperately needed in my first two years here.

But now, by having space from the College, I’ve become closer to it than I’ve ever been. We need to be able to build our own lives outside of the College to occasionally perceive it as a liminal space rather than the point of destination.

Last month, I worried that living in an apartment would mean a clean split from UChicago and its culture—I wasn’t exactly ready to let go of that yet, nor was I ready to start officially adulting so soon. To be so distant from the University almost felt like a command, a notso-gentle reminder that we weren’t kids floundering about amongst the real adults anymore. You are too old to be here! There are new, younger first-years that we need to take care of! It hadn’t sunk in yet that I was nearly 21 and had my own keys to an apartment. It just

felt like I had blindly taken on the expected “next step” of upperclassmen instead of properly thinking through all options.

College was the focal point of my past two years, a medium through which all of my experiences had been filtered. When I reflect on my college experiences— the slog of exam seasons, the panic of the pandemic, the occasional instant ramen dinner—I think about how much of it was spent within the four walls of my dorm room, anxious and alone. Without access to most resources on campus and the persistent struggle of maintaining a work-life balance, college felt like a never-ending online course where the stakes seemed extraordinarily high.

Now, college inhabits a different role in my life. The weight of assignments feels less pressing when I’m busy planning meals with my roommates or dealing with mold

on our bathroom ceiling. I feel much more protective over these quiet moments that I call my own.

Perhaps college belongs in the negative space. In an apartment removed from the campus web of libraries and lecture halls, I can still enjoy what this University has to offer without letting it swallow my life whole. When I walk to class now, I spend a little more time taking in the familiar scenes of autumn on campus: professors chatting over coffee on a bench, the frisbee players sneaking in another game before class, someone in a hammock soaking in the warmth of October. There’s a lightness that didn’t exist before—or maybe it just needed some time to settle.

While there is certainly encouragement to create your own sense of self in the first two years of living on campus, it’s often drowned out by the noise of campus culture and social expecta-

tions. After two years of optimistic autumns, long stretches of winter, and burgeoning springs, I hadn’t realized how many moments were fraught with a fear of absence—the absence of knowing what college was actually supposed to feel like, the absence of making college a home. Echoing my previous columns, it can be easy to feel like you’re never really doing college right—everyone else feels the same way.

Even if living off-campus hasn’t completely erased that feeling, it’s offered a new thesis on how to go about these next two years left at UChicago. Joy doesn’t have to be sequestered, nor does it have to be earned. It belongs at the forefront— it always did—despite the need to make it an if, not a when.

Rachel Ong is a third-year in the College.

Can I Customize That Order?

A case for more variety, flexibility, and affordability in campus meal plans.

By CHERIE FERNANDES Let’s talk options. The University of Chicago offers a total of four meal plans: Unlimited ($2,376/quarter), Phoenix ($2,376/quarter), Apartment ($1,684/quarter), and Off-Campus ($153/10-meal pack). As the names suggest, the Apartment and Off-Campus plans are exclusive to students who live in on-campus apartments and off-campus housing, respectively. This leaves two options for students who live on campus.

Between the equally-priced Unlimited and Phoenix plans, which both offer five guest swipes, 10 to-go swipes, and Saturday night meal swipes, the notable difference is a trade-off in flexibility: Unlimited offers unlimited (shocking, I know) dining hall swipes but 100 Maroon Dollars and three meal exchanges, while Phoenix caps you at 150 swipes (approximately two per day) but provides 50 extra Maroon Dollars and 12 additional meal exchanges. First-years are required to be enrolled in Unlimited—probably

something about not being trusted to feed themselves.

Now of course there’s the obvious complaint; first-years and the majority of second-years fork over $7,000 for dining per year, while the average college and university charges about $4,500. One might say cost reflects quality, but even a seasoned lawyer couldn’t defend Baker’s decidedly unseasoned chicken. But even if there’s not much that can be done for the price of a given plan, the University ought to consider offering more variety and flexibility—which are

currently quite limited—in the meal plans available to on-campus students.

First, to the first-years’ mandatory Unlimited meal plan: First-years generally burn through their 100 Maroon Dollars at coffee shops and such— reasonable given that more and more eateries around campus, like the Smart Museum Café and Harris Café, have begun accepting Maroon Dollars since 2015—but don’t have that same occasion to take advantage of unlimited meals. Between take-out

when one can’t brave the winter, trusty cup ramen for the nocturnal, and food trucks for when the Bartlett taco bar just won’t cut it—not to mention all the house/ RSO feeds and social dining off campus—it’s uncommon to consistently use three meal swipes a day, every day of the week, much less more. This is particularly true of students with dietary restrictions or a consistent preference for cuisine associated with a particular culture (look, I enjoy most of the dining hall fare, but CONTINUED ON PG. 16

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its tendency to mistake salt for a spice has me pining after my mother’s cooking); while dining halls adequately address their needs, the unavoidable dearth of options might make eating out or preparing one’s own meals more attractive. Then, in effect, most first-years pay an extra $1000–$3000 for a service they won’t use.

Even beyond first year, second-years and upperclassmen who live on campus (excepting the lucky bastards who managed to snag apartments) don’t have it much better, choosing between the somehow equivalently priced Unlimited Plan and the Phoenix Plan; the 50 extra Maroon Dollars aren’t much of a draw when you remember that the conversion is 1 MD = 1 USD. Non–firstyears are also often more deeply entrenched in Greek Life and other social/scholastic groups, and so the dining halls won’t exactly be their usual haunts; there is less of a community-building incentive to encourage their presence.

Rather, they’re at the stage where being able to prepare simple dorm-friendly meals and make

decisions about which places to patronize are crucial skills, and students should be able to opt into plans that make room for them.

Columbia University, for instance, offers three meal plans for first-years to select from based on their needs, with varying numbers of meal swipes traded off for varying amounts of their Maroon Dollars equivalent; all are equally expensive at around $3,000 a year. Since UChicago’s plan costs more than double this, modulating the price to prevent a financial barrier would be of interest. Even under the new UChicago Empower initiative, families earning less than $125,000 per year (i.e. eligible for full free tuition) but more than $60,000 still do not have standard room and meals covered by financial aid. These costs put additional financial stress on students.

It might then be appropriate to follow other schools in offering limited meal plans at corresponding prices: e.g., the annual cost of two meal swipes per day is about $1000 less than three swipes per day, so a person on the former plan might simply opt to stock up on cereal and fruit to

eat breakfast in their dorm. Yes, there is a concern with freshmen grappling with their newfound independence—specifically, that access to unlimited meals is a necessary safety net for when they overestimate their ability to plan ahead. But the per-quarter setup of the University’s meal plan makes this easy to adjust for: perhaps an Unlimited meal plan should be mandatory only for a student’s first quarter, after which they have a good enough sense of their habits to adjust the plan as necessary.

And for those of us that are all grown up, additional options can only be a benefit. Several schools with similar sizes and endowments to UChicago’s own can provide a template for this: Duke has dining plans A through F, with various price points tailored to different needs—somewhat uninspired naming, yes, but we’re looking for substance over frills. Similarly, Cornell offers the standard Unlimited in addition to “Bear Traditional,” “Bear Choice,” and “Bear Basic,” (what was their mascot again?) which are, respectively, the standard two swipes a day, a 10 per week

STELLA BEVACQUA variation that favors on-campus eateries, and a seven per week variation that favors cooking for oneself. Admin, changes in this direction would shape a student body that is able to avoid financial struggle, cultivate healthy eating habits, and make and plan for cru-

cial decisions about their health— and more importantly, maybe if dining here gets more love, we’ll crack number 5 on USNews.

Cherie Fernandes is a second-year in the College.

ARTS The Drink of December: A Ranking of UChicago’s Best Cups of Hot Cocoa Arts reporter Lainey Gregory rates hot chocolates on UChicago’s campus.

By LAINEY GREGORY | Arts Reporter As the holidays approach, there’s no better way to avoid work than to relax in a café with a hot chocolate in hand. With so

many cafés on campus, it can be hard to know where to start your search. I scoured the quad to find the perfect cup of hot choc-

olate, which, just like the UChicago Core Curriculum, has a few requirements that must be met.

Richness: Richness describes the intensity and quality of the drink’s chocolate flavor

on a scale from 1 to 10.

Sweetness: Sweetness refers to how well the beverage’s sugar content complements the overall drink on a scale from 1 to 10.

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Creaminess: Creaminess characterizes the overall consistency of the hot chocolate on a scale from 1 to 10.

Whipped Cream: I gave a bonus point if the drink came with whipped cream just because I like whipped cream!

8) Starbucks at Saieh Hall Richness: 4 Sweetness: 3 Creaminess: 4 Whipped Cream: +1 Overall: 12/30 Starbucks is a beverage hotspot that dutifully serves the economics students of Saieh Hall. Unfortunately, its hot chocolate is terrible, representing the worst that hot chocolate has to offer. It has the consistency of water and excessive sweetness, and the chocolate flavor is overly strong. And on top of all that, the drink was scalding hot. Priced at $3.75 for the smallest size, Starbucks’s hot chocolate was the most expensive on this list.

While I don’t think this beverage is worth your money, at least it has whipped cream!

7) Peach’s Richness: 6 Sweetness: 3 Creaminess: 5 Overall: 14/30 Peach’s hot cocoa recipe features both powdered hot chocolate mix and Hershey’s syrup. This combination regrettably resulted in a hot chocolate that was overly sugary.

Additionally, the processed chocolate mix gave the drink a strange aftertaste. My cup was also lukewarm and had a thin consistency, which I attributed to improper aeration of the beverage. With a little more time in the

frother, Peach’s hot chocolate has the potential to be a warm winter treat.

6) Hallowed Grounds Richness: 6 Sweetness: 4 Creaminess: 8 Overall: 18/30 Hallowed’s hot chocolate came in my favorite purple “My Grandma Rocks” mug.

I was joined by my friend Tom, who noted that he appreciates the “depth of flavor” in Hallowed Grounds’s hot chocolate. I regret to say that I did not get a cup like that. The drink was very creamy, but it lacked any chocolate flavor. I felt like I was drinking a mildly sweet, steamed milk. Then, when I reached the bottom of the cup, I was hit with a wave of dense chocolate. The syrup had not been mixed with the milk and had settled at the bottom of the mug. Next time I stop at Hallowed, I will be sure to stir my cocoa well.

5) Harper Café Richness: 7 Sweetness: 8 Creaminess: 4 Whipped Cream: +1 Overall: 20/30 Nestled in the east tower of Harper Memorial Library, Harper Café boasts cheap coffee and a dark academia environment.

Its hot chocolate was perfectly sweet, which makes for a very pleasant cup. The chocolate flavor was bold but unfortunately had an artificial taste. Harper was the only café that made hot chocolate with water, which came at the cost of the creaminess of the beverage.

Overall, I thought that the drink was pretty standard, but I really enjoyed it.

4) Grounds of Being Richness: 6 Sweetness: 5 Creaminess: 10 Overall: 21/30 With cash in hand, I descended into the basement of the Divinity School to sample my next cocoa. The best part of this hot chocolate was undoubtedly the texture. However, there was very little flavor, most likely because of poor mixing of the chocolate sauce.

I recommend asking for extra chocolate sauce to create a perfect cup. Regardless, I am now a huge fan of Grounds of Being’s hot chocolate and will be back very soon! If you would like to try a cup for yourself, don’t forget to bring your wallet; Grounds of Being only accepts cash!

3) Cobb Café Richness: 6.5 Sweetness: 9 Creaminess: 8 Overall: 23.5/30 My love for Cobb Café runs deep, so I had very high expectations for its hot chocolate.

My order was met with confusion, and the barista admitted to me that he did not know if Cobb sold hot chocolate. After consulting an off-the-clock friend, he managed to locate some and charged me $2, his best guess at the price (which was later discovered to be $3.75). The drink itself had a very subtle sweetness and a silky-smooth consistency.

My cup would have benefited from a little bit more chocolate, as the intensity of the flavor was slightly lacking. Despite that, Cobb’s hot cocoa was quite good and is certainly worth a return visit.

2) Ex Libris

Richness: 7.5 Sweetness: 9 Creaminess: 8 Whipped Cream: +1 Overall: 25.5/30 Located in the Reg, Ex Libris provides respite to those in the throes of deadlines and late-night study sessions. My cup was filled to the brim and had just the right amount of chocolate flavor. After burning my tongue on other hot chocolates on this list, I was extremely grateful for the mild warmth of this cup of cocoa. The chocolate syrup had a delicately sweet aftertaste, which earned this cup of hot cocoa the number two spot.

While you’re there, snag one of Ex Lib’s fresh pastries because its hot chocolate is best paired with a chocolate old-fashioned donut!

1) Plein Air Richness: 9 Sweetness: 9 Creaminess: 9 Overall: 27/30 Plein Air was one of the last stops on my hot chocolate adventure. A few friends and I arrived just before closing, but the baristas were very kind and made us a drink despite my tardiness. What made this cup wonderful was Plein Air’s house-made chocolate syrup, which added a light sweetness that left me wanting more. I usually prefer a slightly bolder flavor in my hot chocolate, but this drink’s silky consistency was more than satisfying. After so many cups, my appetite for hot cocoa was starting to ebb. However, I was surprised to find myself bickering with my friends over who got to finish off the mug.

We will be back very soon to purchase our own cups because Plein Air’s hot chocolate is too good to share!

Invictus Theatre’s Julius Caesar Is an Interesting, If Muddled, Production

By FRANCESCO P. RAHE | Arts Reporter

“Brutus is an honorable man.”

Even if you’ve never seen Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, you’re likely to

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quote’s speaker, a simmering Mark Antony (played by a mostly skillful Mikha’el Amin in Invictus Theatre’s most recent production) is being sarcastic. He has no intention whatsoever of persuading his audience that Brutus is honorable.

He’s condemning Brutus as a butcher, a murderer of Antony’s beloved sovereign Caesar. In other words, he’s describing Brutus as honorable according to one definition (having a good reputation) and dishonorable according to another (being a good person). The tension between those two definitions, and the question of which applies most aptly to the protagonist Brutus, is at the core of Julius Caesar—and, when it’s most effective, at the core of Invictus Theatre’s production. Unfortunately, the most powerful moments of this production come part and parcel with poorly fitting political metaphors and occasional weak acting.

Said weakness is rooted in a small, yet pernicious problem: A few of the actors tend to confuse shouting with impassioned acting. The play is staged in a very small room, which largely makes the experience more intimate and upclose. Sadly, it also leads to the roaring of Daniel Houle (who plays Cassius) and Chuck Munro (who plays Caesar) becoming absolutely deafening. I struggled not to cover my ears at points. Worse, much of the subtlety of Shakespeare’s dialogue is lost in indiscriminate noise.

Shouting aside, most of the acting comes across as genuinely strong.

Charles Askenaizer plays Brutus and mostly plays him well—a good thing, since Brutus is the center of this play.

Brutus comes across as slightly delicate, a scholar even, in military fatigues. His vanity is apparent from the outset, as is his naïveté and genuine conviction.

Askenaizer shines in particular during his interactions with Cassius (whom Houle portrays with an intriguing mixture of brash aggression and sly shrewdness whenever he isn’t yelling). Their relationship evolves convincingly from pure trickery on Cassius’s part in the first scene into a friendship that’s equal parts authentic and touching by the end.

That Askenaizer and Houle make this improbable journey not just believable but powerful is a remarkable accomplishment. It’s also a genuine pleasure to watch.

Amin as Mark Antony also deserves praise. His oration over Caesar’s body in the immediate aftermath of Caesar’s bloody death does the play justice. In Amin’s capable hands, all the artifice of Mark Antony’s oration only serves to better reveal his unending grief and fury. His king is dead, and he wants the world to burn.

I’ve emphasized thus far truth and earnestness. Julius Caesar is indeed a play about rhetoric and reputation, themes the directors highlight in the program. But far more than that, it’s a

play about who people are, deep down in their cores. It’s about that central question of who Brutus is, and in what way, if at all, he can be called an honorable man.

The problem is, this rendition, despite posing that question, can’t seem to come to a consensus about Brutus. That’s in no small part a result of the fact that the directors chose to turn the play into a January 6 metaphor.

To clarify, I don’t have anything against January 6 metaphors in Shakespeare. A Richard III production I once saw used contemporary politics to great effect; however, in that case, the play fit the metaphor. Richard III is a villain— one with a sympathetic backstory, no doubt—but a conniving, calculating villain nonetheless. As an allegory for Trump, Richard III works. The problem with Invictus Theatre’s use of contemporary politics, aside from bludgeoning its message into viewers’ heads with all the subtlety of a cannonball (lines from Donald Trump’s January 6 speech are played over a loudspeaker at the end of the production, with a spotlight shining on Brutus’s bloody corpse), is that it just doesn’t fit. Invictus Theatre associates rebellion against Caesar with the January 6 rioters (early criticizers of Caesar wear red baseball caps, and Brutus’s army in the second half thrusts high a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag), but Brutus and his buddies are quite arguably the good guys in the play.

By over and over again associating

the January 6 rioters with Caesar’s assassins, Invictus Theatre muddles its own message. Are Cassius and company meant to be villains in the production, duping the over-earnest Brutus into treachery? The tent scene, along with Caesar’s egotistical lines, would suggest otherwise. Are they meant to be heroes?

Clearly not, unless Invictus Theatre is significantly more right-wing than one would expect. Is Invictus Theatre trying to portray Brutus as a truly honorable man in the end? Trump’s words played over Brutus’s corpse would suggest otherwise. The likeliest interpretation I can come up with is the first—that Invictus’s Brutus is a cautionary tale, a poor fool duped by a mixture of vanity and good will into evil…but again, the intense complexity of Shakespeare’s text, which this production uses in its entirety, shoots that interpretation full of holes. The result is a rendition more confusing than powerful.

For a production faithful in text and emotionally potent, go see Invictus Theatre’s Julius Caesar. However, if you’re expecting coherent themes or perfection (or sympathize with January 6 rioters), I’d advise looking elsewhere.

Invictus Theatre’s production of Julius Caesar ran at the Reginald Vaughn Theater through November 20.

Steep Theatre’s Our Dear Dead Drug Lord Is Terrifying and Thrilling, in Spite of an Imperfect Script

By ZACHARY LEITER | Associate Arts Editor Content Warning: This article mentions drug use and contains graphic depictions of violence and abortion.

In a make-believe tree house in a real-life-used-to-be-church on the North Side of Chicago, Steep Theatre’s produc-

tion of Alexis Scheer’s Our Dear Dead Drug Lord is not for the faint of heart.

The play, which premiered in 2021 to much acclaim, depicts four teenage girls in Miami in their quest—indeed, quite a saga—to summon the ghost of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. Whether

or not this feat is accomplished by the play’s end is up for debate, in part because the girls are on cocaine for much of the duration. Friends Pipe, Squeeze, Zoom, and Kit struggle much more with each other and their adolescence than with the otherworldly, even as they try to convince themselves otherwise. Make no mistake, however: This play is not a

conventional coming-of-age narrative.

Our Dear Dead Drug Lord is, in two words, a spectacle. Anarchic drawings adorn the walls of the small black box Steep Theatre, whose motto is appropriately “Incredible Stories, Incredibly Close.” But to call this a black box would be to suggest an absence of frills, where CONTINUED ON PG. 19

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in reality, the room is decked out floorto-ceiling and wall-to-wall in reminiscences of an early-aughts adolescence.

It’s more like theater in-the-round, but with a rather small circumference. Drug Lord makes strong use of its space: Characters dash around, banging into things and assaulting the audience with their performed physicality.

Lights rise and fall and flash. The young girls scream at one another, and their shrieks echo. This is a loud and frantic play, and it’s a play in which everything seems to happen all at once (but that, this reviewer supposes, is how he felt in high school). Drug Lord’s biggest fault is that these characters depict normal adolescence only to a certain degree; they have way more than their fair, or reasonable, share of struggles. The characters have so many dead relatives and depressive bouts that their traumas begin to lose their shock value—and their true value to the audience. And that’s a shame, because the four girls’ actors, despite being adults, present very

believable angsty teenagers.

Lauren Smith, as Zoom, is particularly fantastic. Smith’s eager energy pervades the play, providing a robust counterpart to Isabella Maria Valdes’s strong-willed and certain-minded Pipe, who leads the four girls. Zoom is a whirling dervish of sorts, spinning around the stage somewhat unawares. She fidgets with her clothing constantly, climbs everything, and spies on her friends’ conversations. Zoom is living in a world entirely of her own imagination, where she believes her friend Kit to be Pablo Escobar’s long-lost daughter.

And Zoom still believes in the power of magic. It is therefore particularly heartbreaking to watch her sudden disillusionment upon witnessing the cruel reality of Pipe’s ambitions. All four of these girls just want to feel self-assured and stable, and Smith demonstrates that adolescent desire with incredible genuineness.

However, the play’s end is differently heartbreaking: Just as quickly as Zoom realizes her naïveté, the play pivots,

becoming a hasty, strange sort of quasi-feminist, pseudo-anarchist tirade.

And in that ending, the characters’ traumas and faults are stripped away. The result is a less interesting product.

Where Drug Lord succeeds is in its graphic depiction of the blurred line between dangerous insanity and childhood. Growing up is tough, and Pipe, Squeeze, Zoom, and Kit are just trying to assert control over the world around them. Where Drug Lord fails is where it attempts, especially at play’s end, to be a manifesto.

These are, however, faults of the script, and Steep Theatre’s production is otherwise near flawless. It is especially thrilling, and chilling, in its startlingly frank exploration of adolescents’ experiences with issues of race, sexuality, and religion. Drug Lord is nothing if not startling. There’s a particularly difficult-to-watch scene at the play’s end—the scene in which Zoom is disillusioned—in which her friends perform a forced coat hanger abortion on a pinned-down Zoom in a sacrifice to

summon Escobar.

This play is, again, not for the faint of heart, nor for those desiring coolly manicured, digestible theater.

But re-creating adolescence is a hard task, as is summoning a drug lord. And if it’s unclear whether the four friends are successful in summoning said drug lord, there’s much less doubt that Steep Theatre has been successful in conjuring up a fabulous and frightening spectacle.

Steep Theatre’s production of Alexis Scheer’s Our Dear Dead Drug Lord is in Edgewater through December 10.

Content warnings for the show include drug use, animal cruelty, and graphic violence.

A Tireless, Thesis-less Tirade on the Tiresome Trials and Troubling Tribulations of Too Many Terrible Christmas Movies If you haven’t seen It’s a Wonderful Life, you should have, and if you have seen Elf, you shouldn’t have.

By ZACHARY LEITER | Associate Arts Editor When I first took the pitch for this article—to write about my takeaways from a classic holiday movie—I was determined to write a passionate defense of Frank Capra’s 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life. Then two things happened.

First, I talked to almost everyone I know at this school, and an alarmingly small number of those people had any interest in watching—or, god forbid, reading about—a movie from the post-war era.

Second, I realized I was writing this article during finals week.

I present below, then, not a passionate polemic but a tireless tirade. To follow are some of the most famous holiday movies, according to myself, my friends, and the interweb. I will try to present takeaways from each one. I have seen some of these movies.

It’s a Wonderful Life

Featuring Jimmy Stewart, absurdly long camera shots, and a scene involving a swimming pool hidden beneath a dance floor! Black and white! Naked girls talking from behind bushes! “Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings,” and every time I watch this movie, I reminisce about an era I never experienced and am probably glad I never did. Seriously, you should watch this movie if you haven’t watched it yet and if you don’t mind a little bit of New Deal propaganda.

Home Alone Kevin, a future axe-murderer, attacks two kindly older gentlemen who happen by his house one day. Kevin’s mother cares about what happens to Kevin exactly as much as your academic advisor cares about what happens to you. She’ll come back when Christmas is over, don’t worry. This movie takes place in Chicago, apparently. Maybe Kevin became the Woodlawn arsonist.

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THE CHICAGO MAROON — DECEMBER 8, 2022

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“Elf is never at its best, despite the postulations of the Extreme Value Theorem.”

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The Muppet Christmas Carol A legitimately lovely movie. Funny, wholesome, and there are talking rats.

Michael Caine has a remarkable performance, especially when you consider he’s starring alongside a pig-adjacent frog. Definitely the best Christmas Carol adaptation; this is not up for debate.

Takes place in London, which is not Chicago.

Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus This is a 1991 TV movie about an 1897 New York Sun editorial. Very relevant today, given that the people in the movie are now dead and so is the New York Sun. Haha, journalism joke. Also, true story: When I was eight, I confronted my mom about Santa Claus being fake, and then she actually admitted he was fake, and then I got very sad because I’d been trying to call her bluff and I wanted to still believe in Santa, even as a Jew. That’s the kind of eight-year-old I was.

No, Zach, There Is Not a Santa Claus.

Trading Places This movie has Eddie Murphy and is apparently about Christmas. Moral: Don’t be greedy, and do be Eddie Murphy. New York City is also not Chicago.

Also, plot-holey fuck this movie is bizarre.

Let it Snow Netflix. Up to you. :/ The Year Without a Santa Claus This movie is from an era when everyone turned on their TV for the evening news after finishing their microwave mac and cheese and Jell-O salad, and all the TVs across the country were playing the same thing—in this case, the answer to Christmas movies not being Christmas-y enough: The Year Without a Santa Claus. It probably ran between ads to become a flight attendant for Pan Am. This movie is sweet, but honestly, just look up Snow Miser and Heat Miser on YouTube and then skip the rest of the movie.

The Santa Clause The main character, Scott Calvin, is reproached for eating five desserts. But, like, the blue ice cream at fourth meal is so good. Moral: If you murder Christmas, you become Christmas.

A Christmas Story I really should’ve chosen more movies I’ve seen, but apparently, this movie has no plot, so how far off can I be?

Here’s what happens: nothing. And also, Christmas. Starring: probably Bill Murray.

Elf At its best, this movie is endearing.

At its worst, it’s infuriating. Elf is never at its best, despite the postulations of the Extreme Value Theorem. In case you haven’t seen this movie, a warning: This movie is what happens when you take Christmas and you beat it over the head with a dead reindeer. This movie is what happens when you put a candy cane, a snowman, Santa, and Will Ferrell into a blender. Featuring: the creepy shower scene where Zooey Deschanel sings “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” If you like this movie, you should join the elves at the North Pole whence Ferrell came at movie’s opening and whither he returns at movie’s end. Or, alternatively, you could move to Chicago. Baby, it’s cold outside.

The Polar Express Tom Hanks is almost all of the characters. This movie is about a kid who’s kind of depressed and boards a train that has an old man in the ceiling. This movie includes a song, which, to my memory, goes something like, Boy: “Santa never gives us poor kids gifts” gifts.”

Girl: “Christmas “Christmas is fun when you do get gifts.”

Miracle on 34th Street It’s like The Bee Movie, but about Christmas.

Edward Scissorhands No matter how you remember this movie, it’s both weirder and sadder than you remember. Roughly half of this

movie is ice sculpting montages. I guess that makes it a Christmas movie? If you like Tim Burton, I suppose you should watch this movie. Otherwise, if you’re just looking for a chilly tale of lost love between a secretly sad popular girl and an artistic loner boy, try Titanic. Titanic is about as much of a Christmas movie as Edward Scissorhands is, and only one of these movies stars Leonardo DiCaprio.

Krampus No. Die Hard “It is a fucking Christmas movie,” says my friend, before describing a movie that is as much a Christmas movie as political science is a science. Starring Alan Rickman and Bruce Willis. Did you know that Bruce Willis is on Spotify, singing “Under the Boardwalk” The Nightmare Before Christmas The title of this movie literally admits that the movie does not occur on Christmas. I watched this movie on Halloween, as a palate cleanser between The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2. I will not be watching it again. Currently wishing I could conjure up the energy to study for my finals.

Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman This is, apparently, a movie. If you have seen it, please let me know, because I have so many questions.

Gremlins I have not seen this movie, but I’m told it has “everything and lots of death.”

All of the holiday movie staples: gremlins, “the classic glowy pool scene,” and people getting run over by snowplows.

The three rules of gremlin care are, apparently: First, do not expose them to sunlight. See: Cullen, Edward. Second, do not let them get wet. See: men, UChicago. Third, don’t feed them after midnight. Or, if you’re Arley D. Cathey, after 8:25 p.m.

Love Actually

This movie is not actually about love.

Don’t cheat on your wife. Don’t try to seduce a married woman with creepy poster board signs while you stand outside her door pretending to be a Christmas caroler. Hugh Grant! Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Liam Neeson, Keira Knightly, Colin Firth, and also Rowan Atkinson! This movie is the kind of movie that you really enjoy, really regret that you really enjoyed, really regret that you regret enjoying because some of the movie really is romantic in a kind of cutesy way, and then feel very proud of yourself for not enjoying because look at you, you’re a college student, and you know what healthy relationships look like.

Catch Me if You Can This is the perfect amount of Christmas in a movie (at least to me, as a Jew).

The movie is festive, cheery, and only mentions what time of year it is a couple of times. Note to directors: The holidays are overrated. There, I said it.

Snow is very cold. Candy canes taste like *REDACTED*. I don’t want a tree in my house. And if I hear a single other person play fucking “The Little Drummer Boy” any time before December 23, I swear I’m going to try to hibernate. I’d rather listen to Bruce Willis than Christmas music before Christmas. Alternatively, I could listen to “Dominick the Donkey,” the only Christmas song that’s acceptable year-round. And unfortunately, despite Adam Sandler’s various efforts, Hanukkah music remains a nonentity.