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DC: Keynote speaker talks about activist experiences CONTINUED FROM 1 Adams asked the attendees to raise their hands if they had ever felt left out, to which the majority affirmed that they had. Next, he asked them to raise their hands
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TUESDAY, february 14, 2017
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if they had enjoyed being left out, receiving no responses. “Now that we know how it feels to be left out, how dare we leave anyone out,” he said. “I believe that we need to be committed to ‘we.’”
OPEN MIC NIGHT NATALIA WIATER/the Justice
Students enjoyed Thursday's snow day outside with snowball fights on Chapel’s Hill.
SU: Seats filled in first round CONTINUED FROM 1
and chartered clubs. Those clubs are, in turn, to be recognized by the Senate. As quoted in a Jan. 30 Justice article, Feldman aims to address the funding of secured clubs, pointing out that there is “a lot of money that goes away with not much scrutiny.” The Senator-at-Large seat went to Matt Smetana ’17, who received 382 out of the 488 total votes cast. As reported in a Jan. 30 Justice article, he has emphasized the need for greener energy on campus. “Brandeis has been consistently more energy-intensive (and wasteful) than all comparable universities with similar infrastructure, size and climate,” Smetana wrote in an email to the Justice. “There is a lot that Brandeis has
started doing to reduce its carbon footprint, but there is a lot that still needs to be done.” Meanwhile, Dana Brown ’20 won the position of Midyear Senator with 27 votes out of 54, and Brandon Stanaway ’19 won that of Ziv Quad Senator with 38 out of the 51 votes cast. In an interview with the Justice, Stanaway also pointed to the need for a more sustainable campus. Additionally, he said that as the representative of Ziv, he wants to “[make] sure people know about what resources are available through the [Community Advisors], through Student Union.” Among these resources, he said, students can borrow sleeping bags and vacuum cleaners. “Being part of Student Union will help me promote the things that are already there and help create change based upon what people want,” Stan-
away said. “I want people to come and say hello, come and tell me what they want, tell me their problems, tell me things they like, so I can enact as much change as I can in this semester when I’m representing them.” Abstaining voters came out in great numbers for the seats of Ridgewood Quad Senator, Charles River/567 Apartments Senator and Mods Quad Senator. In the vote for Ridgewood Quad Senator, 11 out of 22 abstained, as well as 9 out of 23 for Charles River/567 Apartments Senator and 6 out of 20 for Mods Quad Senator. In line with the Undergraduate Student Union constitution, those three seats will remain vacant until the next election because more people abstained than voted for any of the given candidates.
HEATHER SCHILLER/the Justice
Izzy Yeoh ’20 performed at the Stein’s open mic on Friday.
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PHYSICS: Six finalists interview at University for assistant professor CONTINUED FROM 1 ally outstanding,” said Wardle. Over the past month, the six candidates have visited the University and conducted public colloquiums on their research tailored for undergraduates with a background in physics, afterward engaging in a more technical “chalk talk” with the search committee about their research proposals and interests. Candidates also intermittently met with other departmental faculty and graduate students. It was as much an interview for the candidate as it was an interview for the faculty and students to see if the candidate would like to work at the University, said Wardle. The search committee has put a large amount of effort into an outreach for minorities, women and people of color to apply for the position, said Wardle. The position was not only publicly posted, but potential candidates of interest, both of high academic accomplishment and diversity, were personally reached out to and invited to apply. “These are extremely prestigious, first-rate people,” said Wardle, who first asked colleagues at other universities for recommendations and
then went through the lists of the National Science Foundation, Hubble and Einstein postdoctoral fellowship programs looking for women and minorities were in the particular areas they were advertising. “The importance is simply that the more diverse the faculty is, the more included the students feel … in terms of encouraging [women and people of color] to go ahead and major in the hard sciences and for recruitment of students coming here. … When they see faculty here that looks like they do — you can’t underestimate that.” The six finalists include four women and two men, of whom two are Hispanic and one is Black. “I’m kind of proud of that — in a field like astrophysics, that’s good,” said Wardle. While astronomy has a tradition of having more women than other hard sciences, there are very few people of color, said Wardle. “There are various efforts in the division of science to try and improve that, but when you’re actually looking for a faculty member … the pool of minority candidates is very small, and you really have to go and seek them out,” he said. The situation for recruiting women faculty is a bit better. However,
“We’re not bad in physics, actually; we have a higher number of women than most physics departments do in the country,” said Wardle, noting the department of physics’ three women faculty. The Brandeis Physics department has 40 to 45 graduate students, with approximately 20 undergraduates graduating with a degree in physics every year. Wardle hopes that a minority candidate will not only help encourage more individuals to go into the hard sciences but also increase diversity among students enrolled in physics. Wardle said it is also important that they find someone who can work in the University’s small research environment, with the potential to collaborate with established research groups on campus. Additionally the committee looked at a candidate’s investment in undergraduate research and education, “That’s one of our signatures,” said Wardle, “encouraging undergraduate research — everybody does that here.” The search committee has ranked the list of six candidates in order of preference, and the department expects an offer accepted soon with an appointment of the position to begin in Fall 2017.