ESTABLISHED 1826 — OLDEST COLLEGE NEWSPAPER WEST OF THE ALLEGHENIES
Volume 149 No. 6
Miami university — Oxford, Ohio
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2020
VOTE! “A Message to the Miami Community”:
How Miami University talks to students about COVID-19 SEAN SCOTT
THE MIAMI STUDENT
Veteran and
SOMNIA KEESEY THE MIAMI STUDENT With Election Day quickly apvoters alike are acknowledging that ent than its predecessors. COVID-19 has shifted how the presidential election and the voting process is conducted. And now, in an age where our country’s politics and media are more interconnected than ever before, there are many ing and plenty of new obstacles for a CONTINUED ON PAGE 2
When Miami University President Greg Crawford announced the return of residential students and face-to-face classes in a Sept. 9 ing messages about the state of the COVID-19 pandemic on Miami’s Oxford campus. “This decision … is an expression nity,” Crawford wrote. point more than 1,000 students had already tested positive for COVID-19. “[The university’s testing policy,]” Crawford wrote, “gives us the ability to quickly quarantine and isolate those who tested positive or those in close contact with individuals who tested positive.” Now, it can sometimes take up to dents after testing positive. University administrators from President Crawford to theCrisis Management Team (CMT), which is without clear leadership, seemingly follow two general rules when updating students about COVID-19 at Miami: First, they avoid providing students with numbers or data through email. Instead, they direct readers to
a hard-to-navigate dashboard that omits information more than two weeks old. Second, they don’t contextualize the pandemic in terms of the Mi-
communications leadership heading into the pandemic. “We’ve been trying to navigate this entire catastrophe without [a chief marketing and communications
they opt for phrases like “The number of COVID-19 cases across our nation continues to rise,” as used in an Oct. 9 CMT email, or “Here in Butler County, the rate of positive cases continues to increase,” as Crawford wrote on Oct. 20. Since the start of October, the CMT has sent four university-wide emails to students. While this group may feel anonymous to students —
had one person waking up every day thinking about, ‘How do we strategiThe university announced in July located from North Carolina in late August, and though she now works remote.
names for its members — Provost Jason Osborne explained that this
versity communications rarely come from a single administrator. “Communications about COVID-19 … are developed in a collaborative process to ensure we have information and insights from multiple perspectives,” Hunt wrote in an email to The Miami Student. Hunt also wrote that the decision to exclude numbers from emails regarding COVID-19 is intentional. Instead, the university relies on multiple streams to share information with students, including the COVID-19 dashboard, university social media accounts and signs across campus. CONTINUED ON PAGE 2
COVID-19. “[The CMT] is a lot of the university leadership,” Osborne said. “But then, it’s also everyone we need to pull in as well … It’s kind of one of these entities where everyone has representation and we can be experts depending on what the crisis is.” Last February, Michelle Gaither Sparks, Miami’s chief marketing and
"We've been trying to navigate this entire catastrophe without [a chief marketing and - Jason Osborne
leaving the university without clear
From masquerades to parades:
The history of Halloween in Oxford
WHILE THE WAY OXFORD CELEBRATES HALLOWEEN HAS EVOLVED OVER TIME, THE SPOOKY SPIRIT HAS ENDURED. ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR MADELINE PHABY
MADELINE PHABY ASST. NEWS EDITOR This year, due to COVID-19, Oxford residents will be forced to forego some of their Halloween traditions. These traditions mainly include costume parties for adults and trick-ortreating for kids — which will still happen, just in a socially-distanced fashion. But Oxford has celebrated Halloween years — some spookier than others.
In the early 1900s, most Halloween celebrations were sponsored by Miami or individual organizations on campus. The November 1902 issue of The Miami Student tells the tale of a “Hallo’een Masquerade” hosted by a group of female students. At this masquerade, students wore masks to conceal their identities for most of the night, then eventually unmasked to reveal themselves to their peers. “On the eve of the 31st of October witches and wizards of all shapes, sizes and forms silently rode their broom-
the article in The Student reads, “and enjoyed a splendid evening of dancing with good music till the wee hours of the still night.” As one might imagine, popular costumes during this era looked very different from the ones you might see at today’s parties. An image in the Oct. 25, 1918 issue of the Oxford Herald shows a young woman sporting a “fashionable” jack-o-lantern hat made of crepe paper, with a fan to match. These large, public celebrations continued into the 1920s and 1930s.
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CULTURE
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High School in Oxford held both a Halloween party and a dance for students. Students attended the party in costumes “ranging in type from the beautiful to the ridiculous,” danced to organ music and played games. The dance featured a fortune teller, and the high school gym was decorated with “Hallowe’en colors, pumpkins and fodder,” according to a 1932 feature in The Oxford Press. People also started buying their costumes rather than making them in the 1930s, as evidenced by an advertisement for Snyder’s Art and Gift Shop in another 1932 Oxford Press issue. According to the ad, the shop sold “Halloween costumes, faces, party decorations, tallies, place cards, favors and novelties.” Beginning in the 1940s, private house parties replaced public gatherings as the most common form of Halloween celebration. The Press regularly published notices about upcoming parties, as well as listing who attended past ones. As the years progressed, these parties became increasingly popular among younger people, and by the 1950s, costume parties dominated the Halloween scene for college students. Unlike today’s college parties, though, these were chaperoned by the hosts’ parents. Another longstanding tradition that began in the late 1940s was the annual Halloween parade, which continues today. The parade was the Oxford Lions foundation in 1947. These parades have always featured costume contests, though the categories have varied over the years. In the
1951 parade, cash prizes were awarded to the best cowboy, best “Indian,” most unusual costume, best comic strip character costume, best farm costume, best animal character and best dressed participant. Nowadays, prizes are simply given to the best costumes in each age group. The parade remained the predominant Halloween tradition in Oxford until the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the city began introducing a wider variety of activities like haunted houses and festivals. A 1980 advertisement in the Press invites residents to tour the “inhabitants” of a haunted house at the TRI Community Center, sponsored by the Oxford Recreation Department (ORD). The ORD also held a “happy house” for younger children, featuring a carnival and pumpkin painting contest rather than the usual frights of a haunted house. Mac’s, a former drive-in restaurant in Oxford, also hosted an annual fall festival in the 1970s. This “festival” was essentially a small market for popular fall treats, such as pumpkins, caramel apples and cider. loween tradition that gained popularity in the 1970s and 80s was trick-ortreating. It became the predominant Halloween activity for kids in Oxford during the latter half of the 20th century, and it remains so today. Halloween festivities have evolved quite a bit over the past hundred-plus years, but one thing has remained constant: Oxford loves to celebrate this spooktacular holiday. phabymr@miamioh.edu
OPINION
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