Monday, Feb. 12, 2018 | Indiana Daily Student | idsnews.com
IDS Time for change
By Caroline Anders anders6@umail.iu.edu | @clineands
Biden calls on greek community to contribute to the solution for sexual violence at universities. By Lydia Gerike lgerike@umail.iu.edu | @LydiaGerike
INDIANAPOLIS — While greek life sometimes contributes to sexual violence on college campuses, fraternity and sorority members also have the power to change the culture, former Vice President Joe Biden said Friday afternoon at a fraternity conference. “Fraternities are a significant source of the solution and the problem,” Biden said. “I’m not going to color this because you guys are all here.” As part of the It’s On Us campaign, Biden spoke about sexual violence prevention to a crowd of thousands of fraternity and sorority members at the Association of Fraternal Leadership and Values central conference in Indianapolis. Since its creation under the Obama administration in 2014, Biden has become the face of It’s On Us, a national campaign to stop sexual violence. The movement has chapters at universities across the country, including IU. Biden said greek members need to take action as campus leaders and talk with
administrators to fix problems. “You guys have to raise hell on your campus if your campus does not have adequate protection,” Biden said. He mentioned victims’ units and proper training for the right people as ways to offer this protection. Jonathan Mathioudakis, IU’s Interfraternity Council vice president of risk management and standards, said the speech gave him a sense of what needs to be discussed. With the help of others in the IU greek community, Mathioudakis said he hopes to use what he learned from the speech to fix problems on campus. He also said he learned more about how this problem affects the country. “We’ve become content as a nation,” Mathioudakis said. Although women are responsible for taking action, Biden said, men need to become more involved in the conversation. He said he knew the students in the audience wouldn’t be afraid to
call out racism they hear or see at a bar, and they had the same responsibility when it comes to sexual violence. Not all men are abusers, Biden said, but the ones who don’t do anything are contributing to the problem.
“Fraternities are a significant source of the solution and the problem. I’m not going to color this because you guys are all here.” Joe Biden, former Vice President of the United States
“If you do not intervene,” he said, “you are a coward.” Progress will only come when men stop thinking they own women and when women stop thinking sexual assault is their fault, Biden said. The national conversation has changed greatly since 1994, which
PHOTO BY NOBLE GUYON | IDS
Former Vice President Joe Biden pauses while delivering a speech about sexual assault. The Association of Fraternal Leadership and Values conference was Friday at the JW Marriott in Indianapolis.
was the year Biden took a thencontroversial position and advocated for Congress to pass the Violence Against Women Act for domestic abuse protection, he said. Women’s groups advocated against the VAWA at the time because they thought the legislation would detract from other issues, such as abortion rights. With the #MeToo movement, more women are being taken seriously when they bring up issues of sexual violence. Biden said he doesn’t think there will ever be a total end to violence, but this is the first time he truly feels things might change. People have finally stopped ignoring women’s stories. “Society is listening instead of dismissing and giving the benefit of the doubt, and that’s a gigantic SEE BIDEN, PAGE 6
Mellencamp introduces campus film screening By Emily Abshire eabshire@indiana.edu | @emily_abs
John Mellencamp made a lastminute appearance at IU on Feb. 9 to introduce the coal-centered documentary “From the Ashes”. A crowd of about 400 in the Whittenberger Auditorium clapped loudly as he made his way to the stage with the help of a wooden cane. “You people are probably wondering, ‘Why does John have a cane with him?’” he said. “Well your conclusion, whatever it is, is wrong.” He asked the crowd if anyone knew why men used to always carry walking sticks. “Protection,” he said, whipping a long metal rod out of the bottom of the cane and thrusting it in the air. But man doesn’t need a cane for protection anymore, he said. The world pivoted from that with changes in technology. “Once upon a time, coal was the necessary situation people had to have,” he said, segueing to the topic at hand. “Today, not so much. We are pivoting. Pivoting means staying on one foot and remembering what you know but looking the other way and having focus on what is in front of you.” Mellencamp’s walking stick analogy was all in the name of conveying to the audience that coal was an outdated technology, the topic of the documentary Mellencamp was there to introduce. Mellencamp recorded a song for the 2017 documentary, a cover of Merle Travis’ 1946 song “Dark as a Dungeon,” which appears in the film’s end credits. The film’s director, Michael Bonfiglio, also directed a music video of the song, which the audience watched after Mellencamp left the auditorium. The video shows Mellencamp in black and white, accompanied by black and white footage of coal workers mixed with colored footage from the film of current-day
coal production. Mellencamp sings in a deep, rough tone, with just his acoustic guitar. He’s backed by a fiddle, harmonica and tambourine, with a woman’s voice floating harmonies on top of his singing. “Oh come all you young fellers so young and so fine / Seek not your fortune in a dark dreary mine / It’ll form as a habit and seep in your soul / Till the stream of your blood runs as black as the coal,” he sings. “I think what the song does, it so encapsulates the human side of coal mining,” Bonfiglio told the Indiana Daily Student. “It really brings it home in a personal way and that’s what we were trying to do with the film.” Bonfiglio said he was thrilled Mellencamp was getting behind the film and bringing its messages to IU students. Mellencamp said those involved in making the film had their heart in the right place. The documentary was supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, who had connections with Mellencamp and asked him to be involved, Bonfiglio said. The film screening and Mellencamp’s appearance was cosponsored by the School of Public and Environmental Affairs and the Integrated Program in the Environment. IPE Director Jeffrey White told the IDS he liked how Mellencamp took a song from 60 years ago and brought it into a modern context to show how coal miners still face the same issues today. Mellencamp is doing things with his recognition to help causes, White said. “I can’t do that,” White said. “I’m a scientist. I don’t have the street cred of John Mellencamp.” Mellencamp founded the benefit concert Farm Aid in the 1980s to fundraise for American farmers in debt. He was politically outspoken through his music during the former President George W. Bush administration. Mellencamp criticized
IMU polling stations changed
MALLORY SMITH | IDS
John Mellencamp pulls a long metal rod out of his cane Friday evening while introducing the film “From the Ashes”, a documentary about coal, in the Whittenberger Auditorium. Mellencamp recorded a cover of “Dark as a Dungeon”, a song by Merle Travis, for the documentary.
President Trump’s desire to bring back coal during his introduction of the film.
“You people are probably wondering, ‘Why does John have a cane?’ Well your conclusion, whatever it is, is wrong.” John Mellencamp, musician and Bloomington resident
“John has never shied away from standing up what he believes in,” Media School Professor Emeritus Ron Osgood said in his introduction of Mellencamp.
In print Monday and Thursday. 24/7 online.
Osgood made the documentary, “Trouble No More: the Making of a John Mellencamp Album,” in 2004 and has also made documentaries on climate change. Mellencamp’s introduction of “From the Ashes” consisted of personal stories as analogies for coal as an outdated technology. “You hear a lot about, particularly from this administration, we’re going to bring coal back,” he said. “Why? Are we going to bring the walking stick back?” The crowd laughed as he brought the message full circle. “The coal industry needs to realize they’re done, and the rest of the world is pivoting,” he said. “The future is not coal. The future is not coal.”
idsnews.com & @idsnews
Making the trek to the outer limits of campus to vote may have been difficult for some IU students in the past elections. For the 2018 midterm elections, many IU students and other Bloomington residents will cast their votes at a new polling station in the Indiana Memorial Union. The Monroe County Election Board voted Feb. 1 to approve a station in the IMU after about a year of urging from IU’s Political and Civic Engagement program, PACE. Bloomington residents whose precincts previously voted at Union Street Center or Memorial Stadium will vote in the University Club at the IMU in the fall. Monroe County Election Board chair William Ellis said postcards will be sent out soon to inform citizens of the change. However, not all students will be able to vote at the IMU. Registered voters can check where they can vote at the State of Indiana’s website. Citizens can also register to vote through the website. The consolidation of the two polling stations will save the county around $3000, Ellis said. Sandra Shapshay, the director of PACE, said the effort began with IU’s involvement in the 2016 All In Democracy Challenge, a non-partisan challenge encouraging campuses to commit to increasing student voter rates. When campuses commit to the challenge, they have to provide their enrollment rosters to the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement, Shapshay said. NSLVE uses this information to determine what percentage of eligible students are voting. The NSLVE study found that 51.8 percent of undergraduate IUPUI students voted in the 2016 election. PACE looked at the IUB data, which is not publicly available, and decided to try and improve the campus’s rate of participation. Senior Maggie Eickhoff worked with Shapshay and Bernard Fraga, an assistant professor in IU’s political science department, to discuss tactics to increase student voting. According to her research, one of the best ways to improve voting is to have a polling place central on campus, something Purdue University does. Purdue’s voting rates were higher than IU’s in 2016. Voter turnout for midterm elections is consistently lower than turnout during presidential years. However, Shapshay, Ellis and Fraga all said their expectation is for turnout to increase based on the new polling place. Fraga said the central campus location is especially important, because Indiana’s polling places are open from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., times when many students are usually on campus. Eickhoff ’s proposal to have a central campus polling location was endorsed by the College Republicans, College Democrats, Provost’s Office, IUSA and PACE before being submitted to the election board. At first, the board had concerns about the handicap accessibility of the IMU after there were similar issues at Union Street Center during the 2016 election, Ellis said. Ellis said the commitment from the PACE program and IMU management to emphasize accessibility assuaged those fears. The election board chose the University Club at the IMU because of its size, how close it is to handicapped-accessible parking spaces and its easy access to a ramp entrance. Shapshay said she has never had such a positive experience with local government before working on this project with the election board. “It felt like a very good experience with government, a government that was very public-facing and very transparent,” she said. Ellis said the election board tries to respect public comment and treat it as a conversation. “I believe, as chairman of the board, it shouldn’t be public comment,” he said. “It should be public discussion.”