The Miscellany News
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Vassar College Poughkeepsie, NY
Volume CLII | Issue 12
December 5, 2019
Invisible labor takes China’s censorship targets feminists toll on faculty of color XinRui Ong, Hindley Wang Columnist, Guest Reporter
Olivia Diallo
Guest Reporter
his past March, 13 senior faculty members at Yale withdrew from the University’s Ethnicity, Race and Migration (ER&M) program. The faculty cited a lack of university support for the program as the impetus for their withdrawal and expressed concerns that they were expected to “volunteer their labor” to continue the program. As a result of their departure, the program lacked tenured faculty and was forced to limit faculty support to current third- and fourthyear students (Yale Daily News, “Movement for ER&M support goes national,” 04.09.2019). The phenomenon described by Yale’s ER&M faculty might be referred to as “invisible labor,” a term originally employed in gender studies to describe the domestic labor of women. Because the labor performed is attributed to the inherent qualities of the laborer, it is undervalued and overlooked. For example, a woman’s role as child-rearer might be framed as the performance of a
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quick search of “feminism in China” into Baidu, a Chinese search engine, reveals personal blog posts and half-hearted jokes. These include forum threads on “acts of fake feminisms” and complaints about “princesses in the workplace.” The difficulty to access reportings on feminist activism reflects China’s prevailing internet censorship. This reality obstructs Lü Pin, a founding editor of Feminist Voices, China’s most influential feminist social media account with over 180,000 followers, which was unfortunately banned on International Women’s Day in 2018. Feminist See FEMINISM on page 3
Yvette Hu/ The Miscellany News
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biological predisposition, rather than actual labor. Yale is not the only institution where faculty of color point out an underappreciation of their work. On Dec. 2, Harvard students protested the tenure denial of Associate Professor Lorgia García Peña, who they claimed was the victim of “procedural errors, prejudice and discrimination.” A petition demanding greater administrative transparency at the institution has, as of Dec. 5, received more than 2,700 signatures (The Harvard Crimson, “Students Protest, Pen Open Letter In Response to Professor’s Tenure Denial,” 12.03.2019). Professor McGlennen serves as the Director of American Studies. She spoke at length about the ways in which she, as a Native American woman who teaches Native American Studies and created the discipline’s correlate, feels that she is held responsible for representing Indigenous people on campus: “It has been taxing being the only one, a lot of times, to be able to specifically address See LABOR on page 4
Lü Pin, a founding editor of Feminist Voices, came to Vassar to discuss the trajectory of feminist activism in China over the past few decades.
Band ‘panders’ to TH party-goers Dean Kopitsky Sports Editor
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he regular crowd does not shuffle into TH 148. They bulge and sway, jump and dance, making this crowd a little different than the usual TH sports party. The student band for this evening, Pander, warms up above
the buzzing mass, like vultures in reverse about to pump the crowd full of energy and life. Lead drummer Alex Koester ’23 hammers his drumsticks away at his Converse sneakers in bullet pace rhythm. He wears bleached-white overalls. They will eventually come off. Emmett Cashman ’23 is on bass.
He sways calmly with his Fender P, the hockey stick-shaped headstock inching dangerously close to my camera. Sawyer Bush ’22, mellow in contrast to the scene below, shows me his 2013 Gibson ES-335 reissue guitar. “It’s worth half my net worth,” See PANDER on page 8
Pleasant pups enrich campus life Opportunity knocks for new WBB coach Janet Song
Guest Reporter
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Inside this issue
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ARTS
‘JoJo Rabbit’ made columnist laugh—and also cry
Jonah Frere-Holmes Sports Editor
N Courtesy of Janet Song
uring my commutes around campus, I am always cheered up by the presence of dogs. You can see them being walked by their owners around the quad. And if you live in Joss, you always see Professor of German Studies and House Fellow Elliott Schreiber struggling to bring his mixed lab—Pepper—into the house. “Come on Pepper,” Elliott might say, while Pepper stares contemplatively at a tree. “Come on!” Despite his occasional aloofness, Pepper loves people. He’s quick to express it by jumping onto passersby when meeting them for the first time. When I visited the family for this article, Pepper pounced on me to the amusement of the professor and his wife, Julie O’Sullivan. They pulled Pepper back, apologizing as I entered the warmth of their home, ornately decorated with lamps and shelves of board games. “What happens is that he goes a bit bonkers when he first sees people,” said Julie. “But then, once he meets them, he can calm down.” Pepper came from some-
Above are the Schreiber-O’Sullivans, including Jonathan, Julie, Elliott and Pepper—who gets a tad rambunctious when meeting new friends. where in the South, but the Schreiber-O’Sullivan family found him at a shelter in the Hudson Valley. “He was in the shelter up here for three weeks,” said Julie, “and then we adopted him. We don’t really know what he’s had before, so we’re trying to help him with behaviors, because he might be reacting to things that we don’t know about.” Pepper’s backstory resembles those of other faculty dogs like big husky mix Alberta. “She was found in a shelter in Georgia
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state, and a group in Connecticut had an adoption fair at a local pet store and she didn’t get adopted,” Research Librarian and owner Gretchen Lieb recounted. “Someone local offered to take care of her so she wouldn’t have to ride back and forth in the van. So, [Adjunct Assistant Professor of Drama] Darrell James saw her being wheeled around in a grocery cart later that week in the Petco by the same person, with a sign that said ‘I’m available for adoption’ and he See DOGS on page 9
Elderly editors’ marriage advice devolves HUMOR into binary bickering
o one can figure out who said “When opportunity knocks, you’d better answer the door.” It’s unclear if anybody notable actually said those exact words, but most everyone gets the gist. For first-year Vassar women’s basketball head coach Lucia Robinson-Griggs, the knock was more of a clap of thunder, or an airplane taking off. Basically a really loud sound. When longtime Brewers’ head women’s basketball coach Candice Signor-Brown announced her sudden departure for Swarthmore College, she left behind a team that went 21-7, made the NCAA Tournament and returned its top seven scorers for this season. The knocking was deafening, and someone was going to open the door and welcome the chance to achieve immediate success. To find out more about that someone, I sat down with Coach Robinson-Griggs and talked about her career, her team and algebra. Robinson-Griggs knows what she’s working with. She put it as
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simply as possible, saying, “I’m not in a rebuilding situation.” Robinson-Griggs hails from Chelsea, MA, a town with an area of, depending on which map you use, 1.8 or 2.2 square miles. After a brief stint at Quinnipiac University, she played two years at Division II Bentley University, reaching the Sweet 16 in her senior year. Her first head coaching job was at Lesley University, where she spent two years in charge after a year as an assistant. She then coached at MIT for eight years, wearing a panoply of hats under the title of assistant coach. While coaching at MIT, Robinson-Griggs taught ninth grade algebra at Revere High School. After a full day of classes, she would hustle over to practices and games, often staying late with her players to work out and watch film. She also ran the MIT team’s social media page, and helped supercharge the program’s recruiting network. Though she stopped teaching, she hasn’t left math behind. Robinson-Griggs said that some of her players are math maSee COACH on page 15
Your Deece cocoa supports child slavery. OPINIONS Not so cozy anymore!