Founded 1876 daily since 1892 online since 1998
Friday October 20, 2017 vol. CXLI no. 91
{ www.dailyprincetonian.com } ON CAMPUS
Simberloff talks invasive species efforts By Samvida Venkatesh senior writer
Managing invasive species is incredibly important to biodiversity conservation efforts, said Daniel Simberloff, professor of environmental science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in his lecture “Managing Biological Invasions: What’s Worked, What Hasn’t, and Some Controversial New Prospects.” Invasive species are living organisms that are not native to an ecosystem, and can thus cause harm to global biodiversity, explained Simberloff. He added that there are two methods by which invasive species have traditionally been managed: eradication, or the complete elimination of the population from a region, and maintenance management, which aims to maintain invasive populations at low levels. Simberloff explained that novel genetic techniques for managing exotic invasive species are quickly garnering interest in the field. One such genetic technique uses Trojan sex chromosomes, in which genetically male organisms exposed to female hormones appear physically female, and vice versa. Simberloff noted that this interrupts reproduction in the popula-
tion, eventually driving it to extinction. He explained that although this method is not very quick on its own, it can be the death knell for an invasive species when combined with more traditional chemical and biological methods of population management. Simberloff added that this was not just a hypothetical model, but has been tested with designer mosquitoes to battle dengue in Brazil. Even though invasive plants can often have more extensive impacts than invasive animal species, traditional management methods have targeted animals far more than they have plants and their pathogens because of the difficulty in controlling entire plant species, Simberloff explained. Some genetic techniques hope to address this problem. RNA interference, for example, binds to the singlestranded RNA molecules in cells and prevents them from making protein. Simberloff said that RNAi is being used against plant pathogens such as insects, and has been labeled “dsRNA [double-stranded RNA] insecticide” because of its effectiveness in removing insects. In addition to new genetic technologies, traditional See INVASION page 2
BEYOND THE BUBBLE
U . A F FA I R S
COURTESY OF CAMPUS DINING
Students select food in the servery of Wu/Wilcox dining hall. Recently, Campus Dining changed the labels in the disposal areas: Napkins are no longer composted with food waste.
Stop throwing napkins into the compost bins By Talitha Wisner contributor
This year, Campus Dining no longer wants napkins to be thrown in compost bins. Napkins interfere with its efforts to accurately measure food waste in the residential dining halls. Apart from separating the disposal of napkins from organic food matter, nothing else about waste disposal has changed, said Smitha Haneef, assistant vice president of Campus Dining. “The goal is to divert every ounce of organic food
waste from going into the landfill,” Haneef said. According to Haneef, all nine of Princeton’s dining halls still send their waste to AgriArk, an industrial food waste processing operation in Hopewell, N.J., only nine miles away, where the food scraps are converted into a highgrade, nutrient-dense fertilizer. Greening Dining, a student group that collaborates with Campus Dining to encourage sustainable eating practices, welcomes the accurate collection of food waste data, but wants the opportunity
U . A F FA I R S
to compost the napkins, the group’s co-president said. “They can’t compost napkins right now, which is fair, and data is really important, but to us it seemed like a shame and a loss that the napkins are not being composted even though they are compostable,” she said. Another of the co-president’s concerns is that the new disposal system needs to be more intuitively designed since students are already accustomed to throwing napkins in the landfill bin. See NAPKINS page 3
BEYOND THE BUBBLE
U. launches Title IX Trump investigation into offers birth German professor control head news editor
COURTESY OF MICHELE TUCK-PONDER
Tuck-Ponder has served as the mayor of Princeton and is one of five candidates for the Princeton Board of Education.
Tuck-Ponder reflects on lifetime of public service By Scott Newman contributor
Michele Tuck-Ponder’s passion for civil service has been a lifelong affair. Originally from the Bronx, Tuck-Ponder grew up in Teaneck, a small town in northern New Jersey. She received an education in one of the first school districts in the United States that bused students to different el-
In Opinion
ementary schools for the sake of racial integration. Through this initiative, Tuck-Ponder said, “I got to know a bunch of kids I would never get to know. That made a really big difference in my life.” It was during her high school years, however, that Tuck-Ponder began her lifelong career of civil service. As a teenager, she was a Girl Scout, a student See TUCK-PONDER page 2
Columnist Hayley Siegel advocates for greater transparency in Princeton’s portrayal of its academic rigour to prospective students, and columnist Daehee Lee implores ‘trolls’ to raise the intellectual quality of their responses to The Daily Princetonian. PAGE 4
After two female graduate students in the tiny German department left abruptly last year — leaving men to outnumber women two to one — student pressure forced administrators to organize a town hall. A third female graduate student was gone by the end of the year. In the lead-up to the May town hall meeting, all but two of the 21 active graduate students in the department signed a letter in which they expressed concern about inclusivity and the recent departures. Students also circulated an anonymous survey. Students read some of the responses and summarized the results at the town hall, which lasted around two hours, according to a recording provided to The Daily Princetonian. One response to an open-ended question about departmental climate was particularly stark.
“Female students are subjected to uncomfortable touching from certain faculty and emeritus faculty,” wrote one student in one of the responses read aloud at the town hall. “Female students’ appearances are often commented on to them and to other graduate students. Students from other departments approach students in the German department to voice these concerns.” The three female students who left the department told the ‘Prince’ that the department’s treatment of women had affected their work and research and was a key factor in their departure. The town hall and the student complaints raised the alarm in Nassau Hall, leading the University’s Title IX office — which investigates claims of sexual harassment — to open an investigation into a professor in the department this summer, according to documents seen by the ‘Prince.’ Assistant Vice PresiSee GERMAN page 3
Today on Campus 12 p.m.: A Conversation with Shaikh Nawaf S. Al-Sabah ’94 CEO, Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Company on recent Developments in the Geopolitics of Oil and the MiddleEast. Julis Romo Rabinowitz 1A17
insurance exemption By Mallory Williamson staff writer
In a controversial move, the Trump administration fulfilled yet another campaign promise by offering a religious exemption to the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive care mandate on Friday, Oct. 6. Effective immediately, the rollback allows all insurers, including employers, to exempt themselves from the Obama-era contraceptive care mandate — where insurers were required to carry at least one form of birth control without co-payments to clients — on grounds of “religious beliefs and moral convictions.” However, Princeton students on the University’s Student Health Plan will be unaffected by the newly relaxed mandate. According to a memo published by University Health Services about its SHP on March 15, the “University does not plan to make See SHP page 3
WEATHER
By Marcia Brown
HIGH
72˚
LOW
46˚
Sunny chance of rain:
10 percent