Portland State Vanguard Volume 77 Issue 19

THE FIGHT FOR TRANS RIGHTS IS FAR FROM OVER

NEWS

PSU President weighs in on declining enrollment P. 5

ARTS

5th Ave presents: The Traveler P. 7

OPINION

Portland needs to rethink our trash problem P. 8

MISSION STATEMENT

ABOUT Vanguard, established in 1946, is published weekly as an independent student newspaper governed by the PSU Student Media Board. Views and editorial content expressed herein are those of the staff, contributors and readers and do not necessarily represent the PSU student body, faculty, staff or administration. Find us in print Wednesdays and online 24/7 at psuvanguard.com. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @psuvanguard for multimedia content and breaking news.

After a month-long hiatus from publishing, the Portland State Vanguard is back—with an update! We will be reviving our “Letters to the Editor,” a recurring Opinion feature that publishes and spotlights voices from around PSU, as well as the larger community of Portland, Oregon.

This is a section devoted to spotlighting the opinions and feelings of our readsers, rather than the writers and contributors in our newsroom, and we welcome submissions from anyone. We’re particularly interested in perspectives related to current Portland events and community issues, as well as circumstances that impact the Pacific Northwest overall. We’d also love to hear your thoughts on stories we’ve covered—if you have a strong opinion about something we’ve reported, write us! We’ll happily read your submissions.

To share your letters for publishing consideration, email your thoughts to opinion@psuvanguard. com with the heading LETTER TO THE EDITOR, followed by your subject line.

We look forward to hearing from you soon. Sincerely,

PSU STUDENTS NAVIGATE ENROLLMENT

STUDENTS AND FACULTY TALK ABOUT DEGREE PLANNING CHALLENGES

ZOË BUHRMASTER

When Xen Lapshin went to register for classes as an incoming freshman, they were surprised to find a limited number of options for credits which qualified for Portland State’s most recent general university requirement, race and ethnic studies.

According to the new requirement, students entering PSU with less than 90 credits are required to take two classes which fall into this category. The issue is that right now there aren’t many options.

“I registered for one, for my major, which is online next term,” Lapshin said. “Though I didn’t want to take classes online. But that’s what I have to do with other classes.”

Crafting the ideal course schedule is no easy task. Mitham Lawati, a junior at PSU, said that despite the couple years of academic experience under his belt, he still struggles knowing all the course requirements for his degree.

“Sometimes I don’t know what classes I should be taking to finish my degree,” Lawati said. “But that’s why advisors are here.”

Last month, Lawati met with advisors on two separate occasions in order to help determine his academic plans. Now, he said, he feels comfortable knowing that he’s on the right track.

“Everything was clear and really simple,” Lawati said. “I feel really comfortable with it now.”

Zoe, the reuse coordinator at PSU’s Planning and Sustainability office, also keeps a busy schedule balancing working for the school and staying on

top of her classes. She said that with a busy schedule, keeping up to date with course requirements can be difficult.

“It’s hard to keep track of course requirements when you’re so busy,” Zoe said. “There’s so many different requirements that it’s so helpful to have someone. It’s crucial.”

Advisors can help with anything from class registration, academic planning, understanding graduation requirements to accessing other resources at PSU to help students along their academic journey.

Assistant Registrar Luke Norman oversees registrations and services at PSU. He said he’s seen waitlists become another big point of confusion. Once on a waitlist for a class, students may be dropped after a 24-hour period if they do not respond to notifications requiring them to accept the class in time.

Norman recommended meeting with an advisor at least once a year—though PSU only requires students to meet with an advisor during their first year—along with utilizing the school’s other resources when experiencing uncertainty in relation to academic planning.

“Registrars are unique to academic services,” Norman said. “They tend to be a hub that a lot of other departments have to work through, and can be a good resource for other resources as well.”

In response to concern about the lack of classes that can satisfy the new race and ethnicities requirement, Norman said to expect more classes to

appear on the schedule in the upcoming months.

“Because it is so new, not all departments have had a chance to evaluate their classes to the requirement goals,” Norman said. “Expect that there will be significantly more to come.”

Lapshin met with their advisor about the new requirements, who recommended that in the meantime they double up on some of their classes.

“It didn’t quite help resolve the issue, but my advisor pointed out that there were a few classes on the list that could double-count for my current major,” Lapshin said. “I did learn that students can find a way to double-count the classes for other requirements, but they have to be very strategic about it.”

For students looking for assistance registering for classes, visit pdx.edu/advising to get a hold of your advisor, or visit the Office of the Registrar in FMH from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday.

CAMDEN BENESH

PRESIDENT PERCY SPEAKS OUT ON DECLINING ENROLLMENT

PHILIPPA MASSEY

At a press conference held on Friday, Nov. 18, Portland State Vanguard was presented with the opportunity to speak with President Stephen Percy about the current status of enrollment at Portland State and what steps are being taken to address this challenge. According to him, the decline started years before the pandemic, and was only made worse during the COVID-19 years.

“Portland State for the last 10 years has had diminishing enrollment every year,” President Percy said. “Most years there’s around 1%, maybe 1.5%... prior to that period we grew a lot… and then we’ve been on a downward trajectory. We’ve been able to cover that trajectory in the past years with the state government giving us more money.”

Despite the predicted 1.5% enrollment decline, enrollment was down even further, at 5.3%, which may have been the result of the ongoing pandemic and the economy during that time.

Percy also talked about “persistence,” a term that describes a student’s ability to continue their education.

“One area where we declined was at student persistence… there were students who are here one period and then don’t come back the next year,” Percy said. “Last year during the academic year… we saw some decline right then in people not coming back. Again the pandemic’s turning around in all this period. This fall, the persistence which had been going up slightly dropped about 3%... that means we have 3% fewer people enrolled, 3% fewer people making their progress toward their degree, and 3% smaller in terms of generating tuition revenue.”

It seems as though the pandemic had quite a bigger effect on student enrollment than meets the eye, not only creating financial challenges but also affecting their academic performance due to the impromptu shift from in-person classes to entirely online.

“We have found evidence that that persistence problem has been more challenging for… first-year students moving into the second

year in that early period,” Percy said. “Those folks went through the pandemic and remote learning—they had challenges in their educational achievement just because of the disruption of the pandemic and there are state-level data reports that indicate that students—the Oregon students—came out of the pandemic with lower achievement levels than they had in the past. We’ll be doubling-down and trying to help and support that group of students, we wanna make sure there’s not a small financial issue… we’re trying to use remissions and other things to deal with that and otherwise reach out and support them.”

“The second problem we face with enrollment decline was that we recruited fewer new students than we had been planning to do then,” Percy said. Out of the students that PSU struggled to recruit, transfer students were a significant demographic.

“The larger decline… were transfer students,” Percy said.

Despite Portland Community College being the largest community college in the area that students transferred from to PSU, there has been a concerning decline in transfer student enrollment. Percy referred to such institutions as “feeder” schools, and the impact of the pandemic made it difficult for PSU to recruit from them. The community colleges that PSU recruits from were all remote even as PSU was open, making it difficult to do recruitment.

Portfolio analyst Matthew Hull, who was present at the press conference, pointed out how seriously concerning it is that the expected 1.5% enrollment decline turned into 5.3%. Percy replied by pointing to external factors. “Did some students not come back because the job market is better than it’s been in a long time and they feel it’s better to work for a while, or have people been disrupted by the pandemic and their family lives are just challenging to go to school right now?” he said. “It’s not because people weren’t working hard, it’s the world around us.”

Hull also pointed out how other universities are doing better with enrollment. “Our students are much more in the Pell-eligible category that apply and come to Portland State than those institutions,” Percy replied. “We’re proud of that—we’re proud of giving access to people… our students are not necessarily completely like those that are going to the University of Oregon… a lot of students that go to the University of Oregon may have more wealth or more privilege.”

“The flagships and the land grants are doing very well,” Percy said. “The more regional and urban universities which have a different student population, different kind of issues, are finding themselves more challenging in a period when the number of students going to college has been decreasing.”

Percy went on to discuss the state’s role in PSU’s funding and servicing.

“I wish the state would reduce the gap in the amount of perstudent funding that the university receives,” Percy said. “We receive two to three thousand less in the state funding formula than the University of Oregon and Oregon State and our tuition is lower than both of those. We don’t wanna raise tuition so high because that hurts the ability of people to go to college… we’re trying to figure out how to make that case that Portland State is worthy of investment because of the unique mission we have and the power we have to transform students’ lives.”

Vanguard also asked about PSU’s long-term goals for increasing enrollment in the coming years.

“We wanna make sure that our marketing campaign demonstrates our unique value proposition… we’re trying to make sure that all of our programs are accessible for people coming in from different parts of the world,” Percy said. “We’re probably looking to see if we can increase the number of firsttime students out there in the market, because the transfer population… seems to be declining.”

WHITNEY McPHIE

PHOTO PROFILE: AKRASIA

NOV.

12, 2022

- PSU FARMERS MARKET

“I have always wanted to do vanlife, I had some friends doing it in Maui so I moved to Maui and then I got a homie in NOLA who does typewriter stuff—and so I went to lightning in a bottle and I was on acid, and they had this post office with a bunch of typewriters, and I was like tripping balls using a typewriter for the first time in my life and it changed my life, so I got a typewriter and it literally changed my life. I got back into poetry and realized that ‘oh wait, I can do the same thing my homie does in NOLA.’ So I’ve done this in different farmers markets. It’s great, the most I’ve made at a farmers market is like $170, which is fucking nuts just for like community support, you know? Lots of people are like here’s $20. A $20 poem? Sometimes I feel bad but it’s all community support and that’s the most beautiful part. I’m always like ‘get a typewriter.’ You’re never without money if you have something to offer.”

Where did you get your typewriter from?

“I got like four. Yeah, never paid more than 100 bucks on one. I feel like people nowadays are drawn to like nostalgic, I don’t know, like old video game consoles and typewriters and there’s some type of novelty to it, it’s cool.”

So you have people come up to you and say they want a poem?

“They’re usually like ‘what’s going on here?’ or they hear the clicking and they’re like ‘wassup?’”

ERIC SHELBY

AKRASIA SMILES AT HER BOOTH. ERIC SHELBY/PSU VANGUARD

AKRASIA SMILES AT HER BOOTH. ERIC SHELBY/PSU VANGUARD

"AT LEAST A DOLLAR POEMS" SIGN. ERIC SHELBY/PSU VANGUARD

AKRASIA'S TYPEWRITER WITH A POEM. ERIC SHELBY/PSU VANGUARD

FIND IT AT 5TH: THE TRAVELER UNIVERSAL EXPERIENCES THROUGH THE EYES OF AN IRANIAN BOY

MILO LOZA

This week at Portland State’s 5th Avenue Cinema—Portland’s only student-run theater—our film curators have chosen to project an Iranian film, The Traveler.

This 1974 film is Abbas Kiarostami’s first directed drama film, which now lives in The Criterion Collection. The Traveler gives us a glimpse into the lives of the Iranian people that lived in the early ‘70s. It follows an impoverished boy named Qassem Julayi (Hassan Darabi) that wants nothing more in the world than to attend a soccer game in the capital city of Iran, Tehran. Qassem appears to be devoted exclusively to sports. The child is not obedient to his mother at home, and he performs poorly at school because he is too busy reading sports magazines, which he can hardly afford. Qassem cannot afford to take the 150-mile bus ride to the game, so the resourceful boy attempts to raise funds by taking photos and selling items he does not own.

Owen Peterson of 5th Avenue selected The Traveler for screening this week. Despite the pandemic, he has worked at the cinema for the last two years while studying business at PSU.

During 2020, the cinema wasn’t allowed to encourage any public gathering by screening movies, so the staff briefly became podcasters on KPSU to discuss the films they could not show. For the 5th Ave Podcast, Peterson had also chosen a film created by Kiarostami. “When we were back in podcast time, during the pandemic, I picked one of his movies that I hadn’t seen from a trilogy he did in Iran, to talk about on the podcast,” Peterson said.

“He’s one of the most prominent Middle Eastern directors in the arthouse/cinema community and had only made one movie in English after being more successful in the west,” Peterson said. The first movie Peterson watched from the director was Certified Copy, the only one in English. “It has one of my favorite actors in it—Juliette Binoche—and I was just blown away by how good it was and how similar it was to the movies I liked, besides him being from a different region and his way of seeing things differently—but also similarly—to the other directors I like,” Peterson explained.

Certified Copy got Peterson excited about the director and encouraged him to watch more. “I bought a blu-ray of another film by this director—one of his most famous ones, which is called Close Up—and it had this movie [The Traveler] featured in the

disc’s bonus features,” he said. Through these bonus features, he found and eventually watched The Traveler. “The Traveler, in a lot of ways, inspired Close Up because Close Up is a reenactment of real events where a guy in Iran pretended to be another film director, and he got imprisoned for it because he took it way too far and got found out,” Peterson said. The man that Close Up was based on believed that he was Mohsen Makhmalbaf. “His favorite movie was the Traveler, and he saw himself in the role of the kid,” Peterson explained. “He projected a lot of his own issues in his life—like being ostracized and being misunderstood—he projected a lot of that onto that character, and that’s why they included it in the special features, because he basically based his life on the character.”

Additionally, Peterson chose this movie because he felt that he has a personal connection. “I’m a huge soccer fan—I played it since I was really young, and the world cup actually starts this week,” he said. “And my stint here is coming to an end in spring, so I felt like I needed to show a movie that depicted soccer in some way, and it just happened to be that I had seen this movie, and it was perfect.”

Iran’s people exist at the heart of this film. “It seems so, I think, embedded into their culture, and if you see this movie, you’ll see how much it’s really about depicting day-to-day life, but it’s done in a way that’s more amplified because there’s a progression that needs to be made in the story,” Peterson said.

“I think it’s really for Iranian people to feel represented, but also, widening that lens, what hits me about it is how I connect it to my boyhood experience,” he said. “It’s really similar to this French movie that’s much more popular, called The 400 Blows.” Peterson explained that the 1959 French film follows a young boy that finds himself getting into trouble more often than not.

“You get to see what the symptoms are in his life that makes him act that way, and it’s sort of the same in The Traveler,” he said. As a result, the viewer can examine their own life and see what events from their past contributed to their life today. “I think it’s a really interesting thing to think about—for a lot of men looking back at boyhood in that way—that’s what really stuck with me, but also the soccer connection,” Peterson said.

Peterson noted that many actors in The Traveler are not professional actors. “They’re just people that the director knew

or met that fit the role,” he said. “This director is probably the most prominent Iranian director in the west, and he is known for making a lot of films about children and using children that aren’t actors in the roles, plus this is his first film, so it’s sort of him practicing and experimenting with that.”

“It can easily be taken as a boring movie if you are not used to films being grounded in reality,” Peterson said. He explained how intentional and essential it is for this director to have a Middle Eastern film viewed by a western audience and to have their voice heard. “We’re in a specific microcosm like Portland, Oregon, in America—it’s always really important to acknowledge and see other points of view from the point of view of someone there, rather than someone here trying to explain something going on somewhere else,” Peterson said. “I think that when you have someone from the country and the city who’s in that life telling the story, it’s going to be more authentic than somebody from America reading about it or watching a video or even going there to explain it.”

Peterson warned audiences that a couple of scenes in the film may be challenging for some viewers. “There’s a scene where the boy gets beaten by his mom and his teacher, and that’s pretty tough to watch,” he said. “I think people that are sensitive to those things or might get triggered by that—they might not enjoy it— but I find its realistic depiction of life to be universally shared.”

“It’s about depicting life itself more than it is about making a movie—than making a spectacle,” Peterson said. The film isn’t looking to impress you with game-changing visuals or an experimental framing—it’s showing the audience what Iranian life was like for a young boy in the early 1970s. “It’s more about depiction rather than entertainment—but it also is entertaining because real life is pretty entertaining and spectacular, I think,” Peterson added. “I think when movies are about kids, there’s always this youthful ambiguity—whether it’s gender or class or whatever it is—people are just so innocent and pure when they’re young that anyone can really look at it and see a past version of themselves.”

Students can see The Traveler this weekend—for free—at the 5th Avenue Cinema. You can catch a showing this Friday or Saturday at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., or the Sunday screening at 3 p.m.

THE TRAVELER. COURTESY OF 5TH AVENUE CINEMA

PORTLAND NEEDS A COMMUNITY APPROACH TO TRASH MANAGEMENT

TOGETHER WE CAN END THE SCOURGE OF GARBAGE ON OUR STREETS

IAN MCMEEKAN

For years it has been a common sight in Portland to see trash piling up in the streets. This is a serious health risk to the citizens of our city, and we cannot afford to ignore this problem.

Austin Downs and Richard Acevedo of earthday.org warn that with exposure to trash “one can develop diseases such as asthma, birth defects, cancer, cardiovascular disease, childhood cancer, COPD, infectious diseases, low birth weight, and preterm delivery. Bacteria, vermin, and insects can also be added to the problem that trash causes.” This makes one wonder what is being done about this growing problem in Portland and the threats it poses.

The City of Portland reports our city-funded public trash service is “expanding cleaning of public streets, and ensuring damaged businesses are boarded up and protected quickly from vandalism, the City will ensure these COVID-19 impacts are addressed. The livability and economic health of our communities and businesses depend on it. The City of Portland is engaging multiple bureaus to boost resources. This is in addition to existing city services that help keep Portland clean.”

Another city program called RID Patrol is also helping to get our city clean and litter-free by cleaning illegally dumped trash sites. They also investigate evidence found in dumped garbage and pursue eyewitness accounts of dumping incidents according to Oregon Metro They boasted to Joelle Jones of KOIN how “in the last 6 months, more than 418 tons of waste have been picked up by the RID Patrol—as much as two Boeing 747s. That included 1,800 tires, 845 shopping carts, 380 mattresses, and 300 couches. In November, our crews cleaned 300 sites.”

While these programs are a big step in the right direction, there is still way too much trash on our streets. I think we need a program that holds community events that help clean up our city. There are programs in Portland doing this sort of work, but they do so with no reward whatsoever. This would be an even bigger step in the right direction, and it would lead to far more people doing this necessary work.

Currently, the program SOLVE hosts cleaning events year round, with 545 volunteers removing more than 4,715 pounds of trash throughout Portland.

Through such events, Portland could give its citizens the opportunity to give back to the city. I think an incentive or some sort of reward—perhaps even a cash reward—for picking up litter would boost our morale and involvement. The city could also offer discounts on city services, such as TriMet, for doing this service with proof of the doer’s good deed.

Alas, there are no programs like this so only a seldom few are contributing, and because of this we continue to have an abundance of trash on our streets. I hope that one day soon our city will be clean, and the health risks of garbage piling up will be gone. All we have to do is care enough to try to make that a reality

ZAHIRA ZUVUYA

WE NEED TO PROTECT LGBTQ+ KIDS

David Klepper of Associated Press wrote in August that “references to pedophiles and ‘grooming’ rose by more than 400 percent in the month after Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ measure was approved.”

The law unquestionably promotes a hateful message toward LGBTQ+ people. This idea of LGBTQ+ people being “groomers” is a repackaging of the same Nazi ideology that fueled those attacks in the 1930s–40s.

Perhaps you’ve heard this trope: there is a secret cabal that rules the world. They kidnap children to slaughter and eat. They gain power from their blood which they use to control positions of power within government, the banking industry, international finance, the news media and even churches. They are the ones who have promoted defunding and abolishing the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia and they seek to destroy the white race.

of transgender individuals.

This has had fatal consequences. The Human Rights Campaign reports that “2022 has already seen at least 32 transgender people fatally shot or killed by other violent means. We say ‘at least’ because too often these stories go unreported—or misreported. In previous years, the majority of these people were Black and Latinx transgender women.”

According to the Trevor Project in their 2022 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health, “1 in 5 transgender and nonbinary youth attempted suicide and LGBTQ youth of color reported higher rates than their white peers” and “LGBTQ youth who live in a community that is accepting of LGBTQ people reported significantly lower rates of attempting suicide than those who do not.”

KELSEY ZUBERBUEHLER

REACTIONARY BIGOTS CANNOT SUCCEED IN DEMONIZING GAY AND TRANS PEOPLE

JUSTIN CORY

The old adage “history repeats itself” all too often seems true. A case in point—in Berlin during the early part of the 20th century there was a vibrant explosion of progressive gay and trans visibility and art movements galore. This beautiful flowering of expression and identity was brutally repressed in 1933 with the rise of the Nazi Party.

Their first salvo after Adolph Hitler’s election as chancellor of Germany was to attack and burn down the Institute of Sexology. Lucy Diavolo wrote in Teen Vogue that it was “one of the first medical facilities in the world that could provide gender affirmation surgeries for trans people who wanted them” and was the world’s foremost research space for studies of human sexuality. Over 20,000 books were burned and subsequently, countless LGBTQ+ people were sent to their deaths in concentration camps alongside Jewish people, disabled people and many others.

This excerpt from Clayton J. Whisnant’s Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 1880-1945 explains the vitriol: “Berlin’s gay scene was attracting such notoriety that it frequently was mentioned in tourist literature, lifting up the city’s gay scene as proof of the evils of urban life and the dangers of modernity; in them, Berlin became the country’s Sodom and Gomorrah put together, a sure sign of the land’s degeneracy.”

Perhaps this sounds familiar?

This past March, the Florida Legislature and Republican Governor Ron DeSantis passed the now famous Florida Parental Rights in Education Act—also known as “Don’t Say Gay”—which prohibits school teachers from discussing gender identity or sexual orientation with students from kindergarten through third grade. Its supporters defend it by positing that talking about sexual orientation should be up to parents, not school teachers.

This is the platform that animates the cult Q Anon, and as I wrote a while ago in a piece about the rise of antisemitism in the United States, this is a rebranding of that same old fabricated document, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. It purports to be the meeting minutes of a Jewish cabal attempting to seize control of the entire world. From this sprang accusations of blood libel—that Jews sacrificed Christian children. It was foundational to the lies that Hitler spread to commit the horrific Shoah—what we call the Holocaust—the genocidal slaughter of over six million Jewish people along with countless LGBTQ+ people, Romani and disabled people, among others who were deemed “inferior.”

Sadly, antisemitism has only increased in severity and visibility since I wrote that article. Part and parcel of that has been the linking of LGBTQ+ identities—and particularly trans people—to the degradation and woes of our current society.

Reactionary hate-fueled politics are all that the Republican Party seems to have left to animate their base after the failure of their midterm “red wave.” Nikki Ramirez of Rolling Stone reports that “multiple bills have been submitted to the Texas state Senate that would make providing or consenting to genderaffirming care for a minor a form of child abuse under Texas’s Family Code.”

Right-wing pundits are claiming that the transgender community are predators intent on sexualizing, corrupting and harming children to increase their numbers and control. Freedom for All Americans, a bipartisan campaign to secure full nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people nationwide, tracked more than 155 anti-LGBTQ+ bills submitted in 2022 and over 30 states that have submitted legislation that restricts the rights and medical freedoms

There is literal blood on the hands of bigots like Greg Abbot, Ron DeSantis and their supporters. We are living in a climate of violence and hostility towards transgender people and their supporters that has been engineered by these politicians and their backers.

We have the data on our side. Countless studies show that gender-affirming care significantly improves outcomes and the quality of life for transgender youth. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, a non-profit physician and academicled organization devoted to transgender health, “hold that supportive care with work alongside a mental health professional is recommended for young children exploring their gender identity.”

The reactionary playbook has not even changed, it’s just hatred with a rebrand. They fear the decline of their stranglehold upon society. White supremacy is being challenged and their reaction is to attack “wokeness” and brand an accurate recounting of our colonizer history as Critical Race Theory. The old tropes about pedophilic blood libel have been reanimated and deployed against the same targets as before— Jewish people, LGBTQ+ communities, progressives, socialists, etc.

We are fighting the same battles over 100 years later. Pointing this out is not enough. It is absolutely crucial that all of us—regardless of our own personal sexual and gender identities—stand up as accomplices and allies in these culture wars. Transgender and nonbinary people remind us of the limitlessness of expression and the beautiful possibilities that await us in expanding our consciousness. We stand at the liminal precipice of a world that is nurturing and accepting of all people. We must not allow the reactionary transgressions of fearful bigots to drag us back into the horrific atrocities of our past. This history must not repeat and we must be the ones to break the cycle.