the
Justice www.thejustice.org
The Independent Student Newspaper Volume LXXI, Number 10
of
B r a n d e is U n i v e r sit y S i n c e 1 9 4 9
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
STUDENT UNION
‘TRUE INTEGRATION’
Senators blast Union in mass emails, deepening rift over piano proposal
■ Senators Linfei Yang ’20 and Alex Chang ’22 criticized the Executive Board, with Yang calling it “hostile.” By NAKUL SRINIVAS JUSTICE STAFF WRITER
Class of 2022 Senator Alex Chang and Senator for International Students Linfei Yang ’20 sent out successive emails last Tuesday to the firstyear class criticizing Vice President Benedikt Reynolds ’19 and the Executive Board of the Student Union. In one email, Yang called the EBoard “brisk, opaque, inconsistent, and at times, downright hostile” for their “refusal” to accept his and Chang’s proposal to purchase two electric pianos for the first-year residence halls. In a different email, Chang claimed that only $80 of the Senate’s $20,000 discretionary budget remained for the rest of the academic year, which would not be enough to
cover the estimated cost of the pianos. At Sunday's Senate meeting that figure was established to be about $240. The emails sparked a week of conflict within the Senate over funding, E-Board transparency and last Tuesday’s emails. On Sunday, however, the Senate passed a $773.78 Senate Money Resolution to purchase the two pianos, drawing from money that had been designated for the two upcoming Midnight Buffets. In an interview with the Justice on Friday, Chang and Yang said that they proposed the piano resolution because “the freshman lounges are [falling] apart.” Chang and Yang both said they had overwhelming support from other senators and the student body, and that only one senator voted against the piano proposal. Class of 2019 Senator Kent Dinlenc clarified that the Senate’s vote on the proposal was a “hypothetical vote” that asked, “If [the Senate] resolved the current
See PIANOS, 6 ☛
CAMPUS SPEAKER
Survivor recounts her Holocaust experience ■ Rena Finder described her
childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland and being saved as part of Schindler's list. By GILDA GEIST JUSTICE STAFF WRITER
Holocaust survivor Rena Finder spoke about her experiences in Oskar Schindler’s factory and in Auschwitz at an event last Wednesday held by Facing History and Ourselves, an international nonprofit organization whose goal is to engage with and educate students about racism and anti-Semitism. The talk, sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies, was held to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a series of attacks against the Jews in Nazi Germany that is often seen as the beginning of the Holocaust. Finder was born in Krakow, Poland in 1929. In 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, a lot changed, she explained. “It was like overnight. From being a little girl, I became an enemy of the state.” That same year, Nazis started sending Jewish children under the age of 10 who resided in Krakow to farms where they would grow food for the German army. Finder was 10 years old at the time, so her parents changed her birthdate, mak-
ing her seem two years older to prevent her from being separated from her family. Finder said she remembered the moment she realized that even though the Polish people of Krakow were also occupied, most were allowed to go to school, keep their shops open and go about their lives without paying attention to what was happening to the country’s Jews. “All of a sudden, nobody saw or cared what was happening to their neighbors,” she said. The Germans began moving the Jews in Krakow to the ghetto. Finder recounted when her family left for the ghetto. There was a group of Polish people, many of them young, terrorizing them as they walked by, she said. “Polish people … were throwing stones at us, they were throwing mud at us, and they were screaming, ‘Good riddance Jews, don’t come back!’” According to Finder, soldiers would often search the ghetto, looking for people to send away. “Every day, every morning, every evening, during the day, in the middle of the night, there were always searches,” she said. She remembered one search in particular during which her mother made her hide in a pile of dirt and leaves. “We lay there, hardly breathing, and we could hear shoot-
See HOLOCAUST, 7 ☛
Waltham, Mass.
ANDREW BAXTER/the Justice
‘MEANINGFUL WORK’: Former Senator Tom Harkin spoke about his policy work on behalf of Americans with disabilities, including creating a law requiring closed-captioning technology for new TV sets and the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act.
Former Senator Tom Harkin talks state of disability policy ■ The retired five-term Iowa
senator focused on the more personal parts of his career fighting for disability rights. By SAM STOCKBRIDGE JUSTICE EDITOR
The architect of the Americans with Disabilities Act, former Democratic Iowa senator Tom Harkin, discussed the importance of disability legislation on Wednesday as the featured speaker of the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy’s Annual Distinguished Lecture. Harkin’s lecture, titled “True Integration: Meaningful Work for People with Disabilities,” celebrated the expansion of rights for Americans with disabilities since the 1990 passage of the ADA, but criticized the lack of progress made in government policies to encourage economic self-sufficiency for citizens with disabilities. Early in Harkin’s political career, he was recruited by fellow Senator Ted Kennedy, a Democrat who represented Massachusetts from 1962 until his death in 2009, to draft legislation for the rights of the disabled. A leaflet distributed before the lecture containing a brief biography of Harkin explained, “What emerged from this legislation would later become his signature legislative achievement — The Americans with Disabilities Act.” Rather than discuss his role in the drafting and passage of the ADA
— “That’s fine, [but] a lot of people [were] involved in that,” he said — Harkin spent the lecture discussing his career and the experiences he had while campaigning for citizens with disabilities. Harkin grew up with a deaf brother, which contributed to his interest in the difficulty of getting access to closed-captioning in TV programming. To watch TV with captions at that time, consumers had to buy a $279 set-top box — more than $500 in today’s dollars — that could decode the caption signals being broadcast. “I had someone come to me and say, ‘You know, new technology, they can have a chip just as big as your thumbnail and put [it] in your TV set that will do all that that big box can do,’” Harkin said. As thenchair of the Senate Subcommittee on Disability Policy, Harkin held hearings to assess the viability of requiring TV manufacturers to put those chips in their TV sets. TV set manufacturers protested the proposal, arguing that it would increase the cost of TVs by at least $100. “So I got ahold of my friend in the chip business [at] Intel and asked, ‘Is that true?’” Harkin recounted. “He said, ‘Well, yeah, if you make a hundred of them, or a thousand. But if you make millions of them, it’ll hardly cost anything!’” With this information, Harkin was able to convince his fellow representatives of the viability of his initiative. Called the Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990, the legislation was signed into law
by President George H.W. Bush in October of 1990, the same year the ADA was passed. The law stipulated that TV manufacturers needed to put caption chips in all TVs that were 13 inches or bigger within five years. Harkin said the TDCA demonstrated the far-reaching impact of disability legislation. “When you do something in disability policy to meet the needs of a segment or a group, more often than not it benefits everybody.” Harkin said that the TDCA improved the lives of almost every American, not just those with disabilities. Several times during his lecture, Harkin mentioned “universal design,” the attitude that design that accommodates people with disabilities often benefits people without disabilities. This is also known as the “curb-cut effect,” a term coined in the 1970s when researchers discovered that wheelchairaccessible slopes in the curbs at intersections in Berkeley, California helped all pedestrians. Similarly, the caption decoders made mandatory by the TDCA led to the use of closed captioning in other places, such as sports bars, Harkin said. Harkin also explained that prior to the passage of the ADA, few companies realized the value employees with disabilities could bring to their company. When his deaf brother Frank graduated from the Iowa School for the Deaf he was told that he could be “three things: a baker, a shoe cobbler or a printer’s assistant,” Harkin explained.
See LURIE, 7 ☛
The FBI and Bernstein
Sankofa
Brandeis alumnus charged with hate crimes
An FBI file on the composer almost ruined his career.
BASO hosts annual "Night for Africa" in Levin Ballroom.
By CHAIEL SCHAFFEL
By VICTOR FELDMAN
By YVETTE SEI
NEWS 3
Vote by mail could improve democracy By VIOLET FEARON
FORUM 12
Women’s soccer ends season on a loss ANDREW BAXTER/the Justice
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ARTS 19
By JEN GELLER
COPYRIGHT 2018 FREE AT BRANDEIS.
SPORTS 16