April 18, 2017

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Founded 1876 daily since 1892 online since 1998

Tuesday April 18, 2017 vol. cxli no. 45

{ www.dailyprincetonian.com } BEYOND THE BUBBLE

Backer ’85 turns himself in after going missing for 1.5 years DJ Relley Rozay announced

AHMED AKHTAR:: THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN

Students celebrate concentration declaration with free pizza, cheesecake, and laptop stickers.

STUDENT LIFE

By Abhiram Karuppur associate news editor

Canadian investor and former Olympian Harold Backer ’85 turned himself in to the police last Thursday after disappearing in November of 2015. Backer, who lived in Victoria, British Columbia, is a former investment dealer and Olympic rower, having represented Canada in the 1984, 1988, and 1992 Olympic Games. According to the Victoria Police Department, on Nov. 3, 2015, Backer told his wife that he was going for a bike ride but never returned home. At the time of his disappearance, Backer was under investigation involving a probe by mutual funds company Investia Financial Services, Inc, for whom Backer was a representative and with whom he had 20 clients. According to the Huffington Post, Investia terminated Backer’s license after his disappearance because he had failed to follow policies requiring him to disclose all outside business activities.

In addition, financial crimes investigators from the Victoria Police Department started looking into Backer’s company, Financial Backer Corporation, after some of Backer’s investors received “concerning letters.” According to The Times Colonist, Backer sent his investors a letter expressing “deep remorse for decisions that cost them money” and noting that he was aware that he was “running a pyramid investment.” In the letter, Backer apologized and said he was “truly sorry for the effects of [his] poor decisions.” On April 13, roughly one and a half years after Backer’s disappearance, he turned himself in to the Victoria Police Department. He had a tele-bail hearing and was charged with two counts of fraud of over $5,000 each. Backer graduated with a degree in civil and environmental engineering from the University. His senior thesis was titled “The Efficient Markets Hypothesis — Fact or Fancy?”

U . A F FA I R S

as student LP headliner By Audrey Spensley staff writer

DJ Relley Rozay, also known as Durelle Napier ‘17, will be the undergraduate student headliner at the 2017 Spring Lawnparties, as announced by the Undergraduate Student Government Social Committee on Monday. “I’m definitely ecstatic, it definitely means a lot to me,” Napier said. “I’ve been wanting to be on the main stage of Lawnparties since I came in freshman year.” Napier has been DJing since his senior year of high school, and he has started a record label, G.O.A.T. Life*, with his friends. “I want to thank the Princeton community for supporting me these last four years of music and encouraging me to get better and pursue music after college,” Napier said. DJ Relley Rozay was selected to perform among six groups that participated in the “Artist of the Year” competition run by the USG. Online voting in this competition was open to all undergraduates from April 10 to

April 16, with video clips from each artist embedded into a Google Form. The form received 926 responses; 357 received DJ Relley Rozay votes, or 38.7 percent of the vote. He was followed by the group Daqa, with 262 votes or 28.4 percent. City in the Clouds received 105 votes, or 11.4 percent; DJ STORM received 98 votes, or 10.6 percent; Major Undecided received 51 votes, or 5.5 percent; and Sad Boys received 39 votes, or 5.5 percent. Over 400 responses were received when voting opened on Tuesday, and responses continued to be recorded through the entire five-day period, according to USG Social Chair Lavinia Liang ’18. “We’re really excited about how many votes came in,” Liang said, noting that turnout increased by almost tenfold since last year. The online voting represents a shift in the competition’s format. In previous years, groups competed at an event called

“Battle of the Bands.” “The problem was it deterred groups from competing,” Liang said. “And the event itself was a resources drain.” Moreover, since the event was termed “Battle of the Bands,” solo and duo groups were less likely to compete, Liang explained. “[The online form] was a new way to showcase work and to open up a broader platform for different kinds of groups,” she added. She also noted that students were able to provide feedback about the new format. When and where DJ Relley Rozay will perform is still being decided. In addition to Jeremih, J.I.D., and this student headliner, other groups will also be performing along Prospect Street on the day of Lawnparties. Although the overall Lawnparties lineup is not completely determined, the addition of the student headliner is an important gap that is now filled, Liang said.

LECTURE

Panelists discuss their work in activist journalism, photography staff writer

COURTESY OF CAMPUS RECREATION

The site for the new proposed residential college is shown here, viewed from the east.

New residential college may be located near Poe Field By Allie Spensley staff writer

The University has selected a potential campus site for a seventh residential college, which will accommodate a planned increase of 125 students in each undergraduate class. The site is located south of Poe Field and east of Elm Drive. “One of the attractions of the proposed site for the new residential college is its proximity to Butler, Wilson and Whitman colleges,” Assistant

Vice President for Communications Daniel Day wrote in an email. “The purpose of the new college is to accommodate the 10 percent growth in the size of the undergraduate student body that the trustees approved last year. Before we can admit additional students, we need to build a new residential college, and a first step toward doing that is deciding where it will be located.” In a press release sent out See RES COLLEGE page 3

The election of President Donald Trump has many members of the University community wondering whether levels of activism will increase, or whether normalization of Trump’s and others’ ideologies will result in never-before-seen levels of apathy, a Monday lecture emphasized. However, Head of Wilson College Eduardo Cadava said the relevance of the activism series stretches back to far beyond the most recent presidential election. As part of its Signature Lecture Series, Wilson College sponsored “How to Sustain an Activist Life” on Monday, April 17. The talk was co-sponsored by 11 other departments, offices, and University programs, and featured speakers journalist Chris Hedges, photographer Fazal Sheikh, Columbia University professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Liana Theodoratou, and African American studies Professor Emeritus Cornel West. Politics major Naomi Fesseha ’19 said she attended the talk mainly to hear about Spivak’s work. Spivak is originally from Calcutta, and has focused her career

on criticism of postcolonial narratives. Spivak is best known for her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” which challenges the ways once-colonized populations have been represented by anthropologists. Hedges, an author, former University professor, and Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times, began by saying that “to resist radical evil is to endure a life that by the standards of wider society, is a failure.” He went on to give a passionate address about the ways in which activism, what some call “careerkilling contagion,” is fundamentally at odds with bodies of power that define twenty-first century life. “The state, the press, the church, the courts, academia, mouth the language of morality, but they serve the structures of power, no matter how venal, which provide them with money, status and authority,” Hedges said. Referencing his own experiences reporting on the fall of the Soviet Union, Hedges compared the revolutions of that era to others that are currently shaping the U.S. and the rest of the world.

In Opinion

Today on Campus

Leora Eisenberg asks us to reconsider our views on dating, Sarah Dinovelli shares what she learned from emulating her brother, and Lou Chen refutes Anderson’s claims against same-sex marriage but explains why we should welcome similar speakers. PAGE 4

4:30 p.m.: Rick Santorum discusses The Degredation of Traditional American Values in Whig Hall

“We, too, have undergone a coup d’état, carried out not by the stone-faced leaders of the monolithic Communist Party, but by the corporate state,” Hedges said. He argued that in our current state of despotism, simple human kindness “becomes a subversive act.” Photographer Fazal Sheikh also painted a complicated picture of activist life. Raised in Kenya by South Asian and American parents, Sheikh often grappled with representing the lives of refugees of other ethnicities living in Kenya. Although Sheikh’s work often identified him as Kenyan, he did not identify with all the same narratives as his Kenyan subjects. Sheikh doesn’t consider himself an “authority” on activism. Instead, he works to recognize the value of the forces motivating his subjects. “I feel much more as though the true activists within my work are the people in the images,” said Sheikh. “Their activism is the strong thing I recognize.” For audience members hoping to receive concrete advice on leading activist lives of their own, Gayatri See PANEL page 3

WEATHER

By Claire Thornton

HIGH

65˚

LOW

45˚

Mainlyl sunny. chance of rain:

0 percent


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