The Miscellany News | October 6, 2011

The Miscellany News Since 1866 | miscellanynews.com

October 6, 2011

Vassar College Poughkeepsie, NY

Volume CXLV | Issue 5

VC seeks Freshman agreement elections with SEIU completed Joey Rearick

Dave Rosenkranz News Editor

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n Friday, Sept. 30, the freshman class learned who would serve as its Vassar Student Association (VSA) representatives for the 2011-2012 academic year.

Benedict Nguyen ’15 was elected freshman class president after an election season that involved several crowded races and a technological glitch that allowed some to access the results before their official release.

Nguyen beat out three other contenders to take the most prominent leadership position available to freshmen within the VSA’s organizational structure. He admitted he was far from certain he would win, saying just after his win, “Wow, I don’t even what to say. I’m honestly just surprised.”

He attributed his success to “a fun few weeks of campaigning” in which he tried to meet as many of See ELECTIONS on page 4

Courtesy of Danielle Falzon

assar has been in contract renegotiations with its employees, who are members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), since last May. As the negotiations approach their sixth month, both parties continue their debate over several important changes in wage, pension contributions, bureaucratic efficiency, summer employment and health care that will, once determined, remain in effect for several years.

Most Vassar employees who are a part of the SEIU are either grounds-keepers, custodians, food service providers or tradesmen and women. Many of them live locally and have worked at Vassar for at least two years. Even though the previous contract officially expired on June 30, they have all continued performing their functions because, according to See SEIU on page 4

Assistant News Editor

Above, thousands of demonstrators march across the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City as part of the Occupy Wall Street protests. 14 Vassar students have been involved in the burgeoning protests, which are now entering their third week.

Students join Occupy Wall St.

Renegotiation likely in Protests draw crowds, questions ARAMARK contract Mary Huber

Mary Huber

Features Editor

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n Oct. 1, a group of Vassar students marched across the Brooklyn Bridge as part of the burgeoning Occupy Wall Street protests; they emerged safely, but the NYPD arrested 700 of their fellow activists.

“I was one of the few people who made it across the Bridge,” said Re-

build the Dream student organizer Jonathan Bix ’14. “From what I understand, the police intentionally led people to be in an illegal situation.”

Bix is one of 14 Vassar students— most associated with Rebuild the Dream, Vassar Greens or Democracy Matters—who have participated in the Occupy Wall Street protests for several weeks, since before the bar-

rage of media attention. His assertion regarding the now-infamous Brooklyn Bridge arrests is a matter of controversy, as protesters and police debate whether the marchers had permission to walk on the Bridge. The participants from Vassar, however, have found significance in the event beyond the arrests.

See PROTEST on page 8

Juliana Halpert/The Miscellany News

he College has enlisted the Campus Dining Review Committee (CDRC) to gather feedback from students on its contract renegotiation with ARAMARK Food Services. Not all of that feedback has been positive, and some students have begun to ask questions about alternative dining solutions, though those options may be limited.

Though student satisfaction has increased by 1.9 percent since 2007, it still lags behind peer institutions.

According to the Vassar Senior Surveys, in 2010 45.4 percent of seniors were very or generally dissatisfied with Food Services, while 31.5 percent of seniors at peer institutions said the same. In 2007, dissatisfaction was at 47.3 percent, while only

18.1 percent at peer schools said the same.

One option to improve the dining experience on campus would be switching to an in-house dining service.

In 2011, the Princeton Review rated Middlebury College, which has an in-house food service, No. 6 in the United States for “Best Quality of Life” and No. 13 for “Best Campus Food.” Vassar wasn’t on either list.

Director of Dining Services at Middlebury Matthew Biette wrote in an emailed statement, “Our dining system is part of the College’s comprehensive fee. We don’t separate out the costs of a dining plan, board or other fees— all are lumped together with the tuition fee.” The comprehensive fee, $53,420, is comparable See CDRC on page 8

Features Editor

Studio art majors, above left, gather material for the roof of a sukkah, while Noah Lourie-Mosher ’12, above right, saws wood for the construction. The Vassar students are at work on an independent study entitled The Vassar Sukkot Project 5772.

Juliana Halpert/The Miscellany News

Patrons dine at the Retreat. Senior Survey data has revealed that senior dissatisfaction with Food Services exceeds levels found at peer institutions.

Inside this issue

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NEWS

Learn about the Miscellany digital archives

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Vassar Sukkot Project 5772 builds on community’s common ground Rachael Borné Arts Editor

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t may be built on a wagon. It may be built on a boat. During daytime, one must see more shadow than sunshine, but at night, stars must be visible. The roof must be made of material once grown from the ground, but that is no longer attached to the earth. It must be temporary and frag-

FEATURES

Local farm boasts quality, sustainability

ile. Such are the specifications for a traditional Jewish sukkah, a structure used for eating and sleeping during the Biblical holiday of Sukkot.

This year, in honor of the sesquicentennial, five studio art majors have worked on an independent study entitled The Vassar Sukkot Project 5772, a reference to the Hebrew New Year. The group was com-

13 HUMOR

missioned to construct and design two large-scale sukkot for students, faculty and members of the Poughkeepsie community to use. One will stand between the All Campus Dining Center and Lathrop on the open grassy lawn and the other near the College Center, right outside of the Aula. Since the end of last fall, the See SUKKOT on page 16

How to choose your perfect JYA destination

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The Miscellany News

October 6, 2011

Editor in Chief Molly Turpin Senior Editors

Katharine Austin Erik Lorenzsonn Aashim Usgaonkar

Contributing Editors Katie Cornish Carrie Hojnicki Jillian Scharr

News Dave Rosenkranz Features Danielle Bukowski Mary Huber Opinions Hannah Blume Humor & Satire Alanna Okun Arts Rachael Borné Adam Buchsbaum Sports Corey Cohn Andy Marmer Photography Juliana Halpert Madeline Zappala Online Nathan Tauger Social Media Matt Ortile Managing Qian Xu

In Ocotber 1980, The Miscellany News broke the story for an election fraud scandal involving 14 students that occured earlier in the spring. The Alumnae and Alumni of Vassar College also called a special meeting to determine whether several bylaws should be changed.

This Week in Vassar History 1873, Oct. 8 President Raymond’s daughter, Mary, a graduate in the Class of 1873, was married in the Chapel to William J. Richardson. When Dr. Raymond’s elder daughter, Harriet, had married Harlan P. Lloyd in 1869, the students were given only a half-holiday. Mary demanded and gained for them a whole holiday.

1915, Oct. 8 Student resistance to compulsory chapel continued to grow. Writing in the Miscellany, one student invoked Wordsworth’s lines from “The Prelude”: “…Was ever known The witless shepherd who persists to drive A flock that thirsts not to a pool disliked?”

1922, Oct. 16 The College announced that President Henry Noble MacCracken, currently visiting Europe, had been presented with the Cross of the Order of the Crown of Italy by the Italian government in recognition his knowledge and interpretation of the culture of Italy and of his support for the study of Italian at Vassar. The New York Times noted that the “award carries with it the right to wear the red and white ribbon of the order and to have the title “Cavaliere.”

1940, Oct. 13 The New York Times reported that Professor of Geology Thomas Hills and his students had nearly completed a very large-scale top-

By Dean Emeritus Colton Johnson

ographical map of the world on the inside wall and ceilings of the cylindrical staircase in the tower in Ely Hall. The three-color map extended over a wall space about 16 feet by 48 feet inside the tower, which is 19 feet in diameter.

“The map, “ The Times said, “is drawn on a modified Gall’s projection, minimizing distortion from the level of the second floor where observers stand. The Arctic regions, about Lat. 60 degrees N. are drawn on the ceiling in a modified polar projection. The Antarctic Continent, which could not well be painted on the stairway, appears on the ceiling of the first floor foyer, it its proper place when observed from the entrance level.”

1958, Oct. 11 Emma Hartman Noyes House, residence hall, was dedicated, Eero Saarinen, architect. The building was made possible through gifts to the Vassar Development Program of Katharine F. Jansen, ‘08, and Nicholas H. Noyes in memory of their mother, a member of the Class of 1880. Built at a cost of $1,400,000, the modern building, designed by FinnishAmerican architect Eero Saarinen, contained 54 single and 51 double rooms.

Mr. Saarinen, the husband of Aline Bernstein Saarinen ’35, spoke about the building at its dedication.

1960, Oct. 12 A chapter of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy was formed at Vassar.

1962, October 7-Nov. 11 The Vassar College Art Gallery opened after an extensive renovation and the installation of air conditioning. Paintings and drawings by 18th-century French landscape painter, decorator, garden designer and museum curator Hubert Robert were on display as the first major loan exhibition of the 1962-63 season.

1970, Oct. 13 In a referendum, 87.9 percent of those Vassar students voting were against the establishment of a proposed Graduate Center of Science, Technology and Human Affairs or, as it was known on the campus, the Vassar Institute of Technology (V.I.T.).

1971, Oct. 15 Nancy Graber, a 20 year-old former student, sued the college for $1,000,000 after leaving Vassar. She cited her roommate’s marijuana use and Vassar’s poor handling of that problem as the reasons for her lawsuit.

1973, Oct. 12 A sukkot, commemorating the Jewish Festival of Harvest, was set on fire in the early morning hours. At 1:48 a.m. a student in Lathrop reported a muffled explosion and fire. Within a few minutes the campus fire truck responded and extinguished the fire. A gasoline soaked rag was found at the scene, and students suggested that the incident reflected the conflict in the Middle East.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Assistant News Joey Rearick Assistant Features Ruth Bolster Jessica Tarantine Assistant Arts Charlacia Dent Shruti Manian Assistant Sports Kristine Olson Assistant Photo Carlos Hernandez Crossword Editor Jonathan Garfinkel Columnists Brittany Hunt Michael Mestitz Tom Renjilian Andy Sussman Reporters Emma Daniels Bethan Johnson Bobbie Lucas Jack Owen

LETTERS POLICY

The Miscellany News is Vassar College’s weekly open forum for discussion of campus, local and national issues, and welcomes letters and opinions submissions from all readers. Letters to the Editor should not exceed 450 words, and they usually respond to a particular item or debate from the previous week’s issue. Opinions articles are longer pieces, up to 800 words, and take the form of a longer column. No letter or opinions article may be printed anonymously. If you are interested in contributing, e-mail misc@vassar.edu.

ADVERTISING POLICY

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The Editorial Board holds weekly meetings every Sunday at 9 p.m. in the Rose Parlor. All members of the Vassar community interested in joining the newspaper’s staff or in a critique of the current issue are welcome. The Miscellany News is not responsible for the views presented in the Opinions pages. The weekly staff editorial is the only article which reflects the opinion of the Editorial Board. The Miscellany News is published weekly by the students of Vassar College. The Miscellany News office is located in College Center Room 303, Vassar College.

October 6, 2011

NEWS

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Davison responds to homophobic marks Departments Danielle Gensburg

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Guest Reporter

disturbing homophobic comment, written in black permanent marker, was discovered by two Davison house team members on one of the fourth floor bathroom stalls of Davison House on the morning of Saturday, Sept. 25. In response to the incident, the Davison house team held a mandatory general dormitory meeting last Monday, Oct. 3 in its Multi-Purpose Room (MPR), providing students the opportunity to express their reactions to the comments, brainstorm ideas on how to make amends for such behavior and discuss how to continue to uphold Vassar’s values as a community.

The graffiti, which read “dick sucking faggot puked here,” was found copied onto another bathroom stall in the first floor annex area the same day. “I was in awe,” said Davison House President Doug Greer ’14, expressing his immediate reaction after learning about the vandalism. “My heart stopped. I was completely shocked.”

In response to the remarks, an investigation has been launched by the Campus Life Response Team. The investigation is still ongoing, but unless somebody steps forward as responsible it is unlikely to produce any substantial results.

The dorm-wide meeting included around 120 Davison residents, the Davison House Fellows Kathy Anderson and Psychology Professor Randolph Cornelius, two members of the Campus Life Response Team, Davison House Advisor and Assistant Director of Campus Activities Mike Bodnarik, and Vassar Student Association (VSA) Vice President for Student Life Charlie Dobb ’12. “Please be respectful of what people are saying,” asked Davison Student Advisor Sidra Tareen ’13 as the meeting began. “We want this to be a comfortable space for people to share what they are feeling.” Students immediately began to speak out and reveal their outrage toward the hateful vandalism.

“I’m rather upset,” said Katie Shirilla ’13, adding, “I’ve lived here for two years, and I feel like the sense of this building as a home is hurt.”

Another student, voicing a similar opinion, added how much she admired Davison residents for attending the meeting and taking the issue so seriously. “I’m outraged by this close-mindedness and insult, but I’m so happy to be here. That we’re sitting here and having this open space, thank you guys for doing this. I really appreciate it,” she said.

Following individual reactions and opinions, the meeting addressed how the issue

should be handled and what can be done to prevent such incidents from occurring in the future. “You have the opportunity to make any change you wish to make,” said Bodnarik.

“It’s all about how you choose to move forward. It’s about who comes after us. Not just in your time here, but in the whole history of the College. We need to think about the space on campus, how we’re being inclusive or exclusive, and re-create a safe place.”

Davison residents eagerly proposed their ideas. Greer and other house team members also encouraged students to email them with any other project ideas, concerns or how to approach the VSA. Ultimately, three proposals were adopted: colorful post-it messages in the Davison MPR wall, a large artistic display to make a statement at Sunday’s Harvest Fest and a permanent structure (possibly made up of handprints and personal messages) in the College Center. Both members of the Campus Life Response Team reminded students about the various crisis reponse resources available to students on campus.

“I am so proud of every one of [my fellow residents] for coming here, for listening,” said Anderson after observing the students’ eagerness and commitment for finding a resolution. “I love living in Davison. I feel like [my fellow residents] are my family.”

Digital Miscellany archives go public Archive an example of digital initiative Molly Turpin

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Editor in Chief

n December 15, 1916 The Miscellany News reported on a women’s suffrage rally in Poughkeepsie; the reporter indicated a “new wave of suffrage enthusiasm.” In October of 1968, the big story was coeducation, a turning point in Vassar’s history. On April 12, 1985, President Virginia B. Smith suddenly announced her resignation, and the Miscellany covered the breaking news.

Research that has previously meant an afternoon in the Thompson Memorial Library’s Microtext Room or Special Collections is now available through minutes of online searching.

The Library announced this week that the Miscellany digital archive has gone live at the url newspaperarchives.vassar.edu, and the project is only one part of a greater push to digitize artifacts from the College’s history.

The process of digitization began several years ago, and moved forward after the College received funding for the project from an anonymous alumnae/i donor. Vassar then chose the company Digital Divide Data, which also produced the digital archives of the Yale Daily News, to complete the project.

Head of Special Collections Ron Patkus touts the functionality of the new archive. For the first time, he says, archival issues of the Miscellany can be searched by keyword in article texts or headlines, by images or by date. Pull up an issue, and not only are all of the pages available in their complete form, but every article, image and advertisement is catalogued individually and can be isolated from the whole.

“One thing I always believed in firmly is that we don’t want to do a quick and dirty presentation—if that were true we could have done it a long time ago,” said Patkus. “But I wanted to have certain kinds of functionalities, such as the searching by article.”

Digital Projects Librarian Joanna DiPasquale noted that this is possible because of optical character recognition (OCR), which recognizes the images of letters and words within pdf files and thus makes keyword searches possible.

The OCR documents are stored in an ALTO— Analyzed Layout and Text Object—xml schema, which DiPasquale explains keeps track of articles and their relation to the articles following and preceding them, a function that is particularly useful for the digitization of newspapers.

Though she noted that the accuracy of the software is not always perfect with more obscure words or names—the OCR is about 95 percent accurate—it is leaps and bounds ahead of scrolling through a reel of microfilm.

This isn’t to say that the microfilm is going anywhere. The Library will maintain the Mis-

Over the past several years, the Library has worked to digitally archive issues of The Miscellany News, such as the one above from April 1969. Digital Divide Data completed the project. cellany microfilm collection as yet another copy with which to preserve the paper’s history. Special Collections is also maintaining its complete repository of physical copies of the paper, and Patkus explained that a digital archive actually has a preservationist function by reducing the use, and therefore wear, of original documents.

Even with the digital collection, scholars and students stand to learn from material artifacts, said Patkus. “I think, for instance in teaching, there will be some uses for the hard copies for people to still get a sense of what that artifact was like physically,” he said. “But for the majority of uses I think the digital version will be used.”

The Miscellany digital archive represents one area of a larger effort to make the primary documents of Vassar’s history available online. The Library is working on digitizing other student publications, early student diaries and letters and musical programs. Once the projects are completed, themes within these resources are almost sure to intersect, providing a rich, wellrounded perspective on the history of Vassar.

DiPasquale added that other Seven Sisters colleges are pursuing similar initiatives, and soon a significant, more holistic view of the history of women’s education will be available through the aggregate resources of these institutions. “I

think it should mean a lot to the women’s education narrative in the United States,” she said.

DiPasquale’s position in itself is an indication of the Library’s recent dedication to these projects.

DiPasquale joined the College this past summer as Vassar’s first digital projects librarian. In addition to these projects, she is working on ways for the College to preserve it’s non-paper projects.

“It’s a new position that I think is recognizing the thrust in the digital library world for things like this, but also I think the College itself is recognizing that there is a lot of intellectual output that is no longer in paper,” she said. Along with keeping up with already-adhered-to standards, “this position is really focused on what we have at the College, not just in the archives already.”

According to Patkus, the new Miscellany archives and the other online Vassar sources that are on the way can be applied to the work of a large variety of disciplines. “There’s not just one topic in a diary,” said Patkus, “there’s potentially dozens of topics, it just depends what your interest is, so I hope our students will take advantage of that.”

“I’m going to be very interested to see how people use it,” he continued. “I’m sure it will get used but there are always going to be things that I can’t even envision.”

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

host talk on architecture Leighton Suen

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Guest Reporter

his past Monday, Vassar College’s Art Department, Urban Studies Program and the Margaret McCurry Fund sponsored a lecture

by Michael Van Valkenburgh entitled “Recent Works of Landscape Architecture.” Valkenburgh is a principal and the founder of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, the landscape architecture firm responsible for the continuing improvements to Vassar’s campus, including around certain dorms, Blodgett Hall and the Baldwin Hall for Health Services.

“I thought it was very important for Vassar students to hear about the person who is responsible for thinking about their landscape that they live in,” said Professor of Art History and Mary Conover Mellon Chair Nicholas Adams. “One of my ideas was to bring somebody who they are going to be intimately associated with.”

Adams introduced the speaker and described him as a major landscape architect who brought “rural living to the city.” Valkenburgh grew up in Lexington, N.Y. on a family-owned dairy farm.

He attended the College of Agriculture at Cornell University, where he received a Bachelor of Science Degree in 1973, and continued his education at the Boston Museum School and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Since 1982, he has taught at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, and he is currently the Charles Eliot Norton professor in practice of landscape architecture.

Valkenburgh dedicated a portion of the lecture for advice to Vassar students: basically, to follow what their hearts tell them to do. “Be sure to pay close attention to your intuitive sense in terms of career choices,” he declared resolutely.

“You have to feel very resonantly and deeply [about what you do].”

“I loved plants when I was a kid,” continued Valkenburgh with pride. “I grew vegetation and took care of landscapes. I loved the outdoors much more than indoors. I was like a magnet to vegetation.” Outside of his college education, he took plant study classes at a local arboretum simply because they caught his interest. Later in life, he was hired by Harvard largely because of his technical background in the field of vegetation.

The lecture was attended by over 50 students and faculty members and was accompanied by a slideshow of pictures from various sites of landscape architecture projects. Valkenburgh discussed his influences and decision-making processes concerning several of his projects, including the Pier Playgrounds in Brooklyn Bridge Park, Teardrop Park in New York and the Bailey Plaza at Cornell University. He also mentioned that he looks for inspiration in nature, and advocated for using one’s imagination instead of merely replicating what is seen. In addition to projects that are aesthetically pleasing, his firm is also dedicated to creating “environmentally sustainable and experientially rich places across a wide range of landscape scales.”

“I really liked the lecture because it involved many different perspectives and drew students from a variety of different disciplines, including ecology, geography, urban studies, art history, architecture,” said David Orkin ’13. “What he [Valkenburgh] is doing has an artistic component to it, but is also practical and pertinent to current issues.”

“I think that the landscape of Vassar is beautiful and inspiring and a national treasure,” stated Valkenburgh after the lecture. His goal in improving the Vassar campus is to reinvigorate the College’s historical continuity by evoking the “primacy of pedestrians and bicycling in the 19th century before vehicles became so dominant.” Several depictions of the 2010 Vassar College Landscape Master Plan, available on the website of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, support his intentions. Along with new sustainable developments, several vehicular roadways in central campus are scheduled to be removed.

“Landscape…is embedded in the fabric of a city,” Valkenburgh concluded. “The meshing of them together excites me.”

NEWS

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October 6, 2011

Health care provision GAAP, VPI panel addresses stalls union negotiations death penalty in justice system The largest concerns for Vassar are to stay within their budget for such employment, and to increase overall efficiency.

Spencer cited paper documentation as an example of inefficiency in the current system, saying, “there are a lot of complications with time sheets.” She hopes that a provision with regards to time clocks will be included in the language of the next contract. “We really want to use a time accounting device to improve accuracy and efficiency in the time accounting process.”

Spencer also hopes for this contract to last for five years, as opposed to the old one, which expired after three.

According to Bill Crane ’12, who is actively involved in an informal capacity on the part of the SEIU workers, summer employment is one of the biggest issues in the negotiation. Historically, Vassar has had several job opportunities available to campus employees during the summer.

These positions were never guaranteed in the previous contracts; they were only offered as they became available. Spencer explained, “if one accepts a position at Vassar that is an academic year job, then your employment is consistent with the College’s academic year calendar and work is available based on the residency of students when school is in session. It doesn’t make sense to [operate] at full capacity when we have such a reduced student body.”

Two years ago the College cut almost two dozen summer jobs in response to the global financial crisis. Crane contends that more and more of the remaining positions are being given to nonunion contractors, particularly in the Building and Grounds Department. “The concern is that while outsourcing continues, union workers’ jobs are in a precarious position. If work is outsourced the administration is free to replace however many workers it wants with contractors,” explained Crane in an emailed statement.

He added that the SEIU workers hope to include a no-outsourcing clause in the new contract.

Although it is still to early to predict how the negotiations will conclude, Spencer is optimistic about their future.

“We have tried to respect their priorities,” she wrote in an emailed statement, “and for the most part, I think we have had fairly amiable labor relations.”

Macrae Marran

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Guest Reporter

n Oct. 3, the Vassar Prison Initiative and the Grassroots Alliance for Alternative Politics (GAAP) invited several members of the Vassar community and Fernando Bermudez—a man who was wrongly convicted, incarcerated for 18 years, and then released after proving hemself innocent—to lead a discussion panel.

The discussion began with a reading of a letter that had been written by Troy Davis, the man who was executed on Sept. 21 for a crime that many maintain he did not commit. Although the panel’s topic was meant to be the criminal justice system, its focus was definitely Davis’ execution.

The panel consisted of Professor of Sociology Carlos AlamoPastrana, Professor of Political Science Adelaide Villmoare, Professor of Religion and Africana Studies Lawrence Mamiya, Assistant Dean of Campus Life in the Religious and Spritiual Life Samuel Speers, and Bermudez.

The initial conversation about Davis segued to a discussion about the death penalty in general. Some of the panel members’ main criticisms of the death penalty focused on issues of inequality. “The way I think about the execution of Troy Davis necessarily has to be from a perspective of privilege,” explained Villmoare. Bermudez went further and stated, “The death penalty is inherently racist.” Their statements were supported by the evidence put forward by Mamiya, who cited the fact that 42 percent of the inmates on death row in the United States are African Americans, who constitute only 12 percent of the country’s population. He also noted, “Blacks are three to four times more likely to receive the death penalty if the victim is white.”

The panel members also critiqued the efficacy of the death

Macrae Marran/The Miscellany News

SEIU continued from page 1 Associate Vice President of Human Resources Ruth Spencer, “We have a formal agreement to extend the current terms of the contract and we mutually agree to extend those terms until the final resolution of the next contract.”

Three years ago, when the now expired contract was first signed, negotiations spilled over into greater campus life.

Dozens of students, employees and faculty members held a massive demonstration focused on making changes to wages and pension. Specifically, they were dissatisfied with the post-retirement medical compensation. Although there were a few students and SEIU members who disrupted campus life, most demonstrators conducted themselves respectfully.

Ultimately, the union was successful and received a substantial pension increase.

According to Spencer, who is directly involved in the negotiations on Vassar’s behalf, the SEIU representatives in charge of the negotiations are still primarily concerned with wages, pension contributions and health care. Although wages and pension contributions vary from employee to employee, each employee was guaranteed “free health care” under the old contract; they didn’t have to pay any premiums or co-pays. According to Spencer, the SEIU has asked for increases in wages and pension contributions, and no changes to the health care provisions. Unfortunately, an on-campus SEIU representative could not be reached for comment.

As of this week, according to Spencer, the College is prepared to agree to those terms, but to a lesser degree than was asked for. Although it doesn’t plan to make any cuts, the College will have to minimize increases to wages and pension contributions to continue to pay for the fully compensated health care. “We have said we will honor their priority and allow the union members to continue their current health care plan even though there is a significant increase in a cost to the College. However, the balancing of that benefit has to result in a decrease in pension contribution and wages in order to conform to budget realities,” wrote Spencer in an emailed statement, adding, “there will be increases in the wages during the life of the contract, however probably not in the first year or so.”

Pictured above, students convene in Rockefeller Hall on Oct. 3 for a discussion on the criminal justice system and the execution of Troy Davis. penalty. They noted that states that exercise the death penalty do not have a lower rate of crime.

Mamiya pointed out that the death penalty is not a more financially sound alternative to life in prison without parole because a life in prison sentence costs the state between $500,000 and $1 million, while, due to the costs incurred by the large number of appeals associated with the death penalty, “the death penalty averages about $3 million.

It is cheaper to keep a person in jail than trying to execute them.”

Bermudez suggested, “We do, as a state and as a country, know better than, ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’” Bermudez spoke passionately about his time spent incarcerated. “What happened to me should not happen to anyone else,” he said. “I would not wish it on my worst enemy.” Speers, who has visited prisons in his capacity as a Presbyterian minister, described his experience from when he was temporarily lost in a jail. “I was struck . . . at the

complete sense of disorientation going into the jail,” he said, “even at the moment that I knew I was going to get out.”

The audience often participated in the discussion. Bermudez’s final statement was aimed towards Vassar students in the audience: “Today I encourage you to remain active, and use this panel discussion as a prompt, and lean for reform against the death penalty.” Bermudez’s words seemed to inspire the audience.

Bill Crane ’12 voiced an optimistic opinion, “I think it showed that, for even a place that is so academic as Vassar, everyone cares about the killing of Troy Davis. The significance of Troy Davis was that he was a cause that could rally people. Now that Troy Davis is gone, we can change it from a movement about one person to a movement about the death penalty and racism and against criminal injustice.”

“We can show how we can challenge the system that produces all these different issues,” he added.

Technology glitch tempers cheer of election results’ release ELECTIONS continued from page 1 his classmates as possible prior to the start of voting on Monday, Sept. 26. He was particularly diligent about door-to-door campaigning, which brought him into close contact with a large portion of his constituency. “On the first night candidates could campaign door-to-door, I went to eight of the nine dorms,” he said. “I think that went well for me—all the time I spent getting to know our class.”

He said he would ease himself into his new role as the lone freshman representative to the VSA Council before beginning any specific initiatives. “I want to wait and see what the Council dynamic is,” he said. “Then I can start thinking about stuff for our class.” Last Sunday, he attended his first Council meeting as president, where his fellow representatives welcomed him warmly.

Joining him in executive positions for the Class of 2015 are Alexandra Hamilton ’15 as vice president, Michelle Yuan ’15 as class secretary and Angela Della Croce ’15 as class treasurer.

The competition for freshman residential representative positions was thick. Several dorms had three or more candidates seeking votes from a limited pool of freshman residents, and many of these elections were decided by fewer than 10 votes. Still, the winners were optimistic that they could effectively promote the interests of all their respective constituencies.

John Sheehy ’15 bested two other candidates

to win the position of Jewett freshman representative. “My campaign was done on more of a subtle level than some,” he wrote. “I didn’t put up posters, and I didn’t spend too much time blatantly campaigning with platform views, but I did try to hang out with other freshmen to show rather than tell what kind of person I am.

Also, I enjoy spending time with people, and perhaps that came through.”

Indeed, there were several winners who attributed their success to personal interaction with voters rather than traditional campaigning techniques meant to reach wide swaths of the student body. Eunice Roh ’15, who was elected Noyes freshman representative by a wide margin, echoed Sheehy’s sentiment. “More than going door-to-door or having cool posters, people want to vote for someone who they are comfortable with, someone they are friends with, so that if there is ever an issue they want to bring up in the VSA, they could easily talk to their representative,” she said.

Catherine Chapman ’15, who will serve as Raymond’s freshman representative, plans to carry the outreach she did during her campaign into her role this year. “I think this personal connection, along with how eager I am to take said suggestions to action, accounts for a lot of the appeal of my candidacy,” she said. “My main responsibility as a freshman rep is to relay my classmates’ opinions to our house team.”

Despite the overwhelming optimism that

accompanied the release of the election results, Friday’s proceedings in the Retreat were marred slightly by a glitch in the election technology employed by the College that allowed some students to access the results of the voting prior to their official release.

According to Board of Elections co-Chair Seth Babson Warner ’14, the Board of Elections was informed of the problem on Tuesday night, Sept. 27, after the results had presumably been live since the beginning of voting the preceding Monday. In consultation with the VSA Webmaster and VSA Vice President for Operations Jenna Konstantine ’13, the Board of Elections reacted by temporarily shutting down the VSA’s website and taking down the live links.

They then called together a task force of Board of Elections members, Judicial Board members, and VSA Executive Board members to deliberate the legitimacy of the election after the glitch.

According to Warner, the group ultimately decided unanimously that the votes were fair because it did not seem that access to the results had influenced decisions, and up to 85 or 90 percent of votes cast were placed in the first six hours of the voting period.

Madeline Vogel ’15, the new Strong freshman representative, said she was tempted by the prospect of the glitch. “My reaction was surprise and curiosity,” she wrote in an email. “My friend had seen the results but wouldn’t tell me, so part of me wanted to know ahead of time, but part

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

of me wanted to wait until it was announced.”

Chapman added that she believes the College needs to revisit its election methodology to prevent further mistakes. “I also heard about a conflict last year where numbers from the freshman elections were released, and apparently it caused some major tension between the two Raymond rep candidates,” she said. “This kind of slip-up is unacceptable and causes unnecessary animosity. I think that the Vassar election process could use some revision with a focus on technology.”

Chapman also said some freshmen had communicated to her that they were confused by the run-off voting system, but Warner attributed the fairness of the election despite the glitch to this very system. “Simply because we have the ranked voting system, there’s no reason to believe one would have shifted or altered their actions in any way simply because they had access to limited voting data,” he said.

In the VSA’s traditional system, students were asked to rank the candidates rather than to select a single person from the field. If the candidate a student selected received too few first-choice votes to remain a viable part of the race, that student’s vote immediately shifted to his next highest preference among the remaining candidates. For future votes, Warner said that the Board of Elections will be conducting additional pre-election tests of the software to prevent similar issues.

FEATURES

October 6, 2011

Page 5

Back to the classroom for these alums Dorm updates continue on A basis of need Casey Zuckerman Guest Reporter

Kevin Benan

Guest Reporter

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Christie Chea/The Miscellany News

fter receiving their diplomas, most Vassar graduates walk through Main Gate again only for reunions or special occasions. But for Associate Professor of History and Director of Women’s Studies Lydia Murdoch ’92 and Professor of Art on the Sarah G. Blanding Chair Susan Kuretsky ’63, their Vassar education didn’t end with tossing their caps as undergraduates.

Returning to Vassar as a professor, Kuretsky said, “The most terrifying experience of my life, and I don’t expect this to change for the rest of it, was giving an Art 105 lecture for the first time, with some of [the people] who had taught me sitting in the back row.”

She found that key parts of Vassar had remained the same.

“Beauty of the campus, seriousness of the work, the kinds of friendships that you could build, are I think the same in essence.

[Vassar] is a wonderful place to make friends, to learn, to be for those four years.” She noted, however, that Vassar has become more diverse in its student body and more resourceful in its use of New York City. “That is a huge advantage of Vassar, that it exists in a beautiful country setting, but also has access to a major city, which for art historians is enormously important.” Art history courses now often require students to visit museums in New York.

With its independent programs and new majors, she believes that Vassar provides a unique education. “It’s not like Vassar was traditional before and isn’t now-- it has never been traditional-- but I just think that

it has developed and evolved and continues to do so,” she said.

In 2005 she was able to draw upon her multidisciplinary interests to show the manifestation and effect of time on art by curating and organizing a traveling loan exhibition called Time and Transformation in 17th-Century Dutch Art. “What had really begun as a modest proposal ended up [being] something that was quite large, and that’s one thing that has been a great thing about working at Vassar.

If you’re doing something interesting then people will support your research,” said Kuretsky.

For the project she worked closely with student assistants, something that was not prevalent when she was a student.

When she was here she worked as a departmental assistant, helping to install artwork.

However, she didn’t aid professors with research, as students do now.

Her more recent work is on Vassar history. She plans to cover the representation of animals, especially pets, in the 17th century during her sabbatical next semester.

Murdoch found that her personal experience with the small discussion-based classes as an undergraduate at Vassar aided her when she returned on the other side of the desk.

As a student she found that Vassar was a place where “students are encouraged to have a sense of social justice and alternative visions of the world.”

She was able to take a variety of courses while she fulfilled her requirements for her history major.

She came back to Vassar after completing her graduate work at Indiana University, which included going to London and Liv-

Professor of Art on the Sarah G. Blanding Chair Susan Kuretsky ’63, above, has observed changes at Vassar since her time as a student. erpool to research her dissertation. In the difficult job market, she considers herself fortunate that an opportunity arose at Vassar to teach British history.

Outside of class, she worked on her book Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare and Contested Citizenship in London.

While at Vassar she received a research grant to work on an added chapter and then complete the work.

She noted that Vassar’s students are “driven by issues of social justice and by a sense of what a privilege it is to be at Vassar.” Murdoch insisted that this was one part of Vassar that has not changed since she was here as a student. She believes that Vassar’s multidisciplinary approach to learning is one of

its biggest strengths.

Her perspective on Vassar’s future is bright. Said Murdoch, “My ideal future for Vassar is for it to remain true to its strengths and to its history. To continue to provide a leadership role for social justice issues in the country and in the world, and to continue to open up the College and make it accessible for everyone, ideally, and to stay an institution for women. One of the things that drew me to Vassar, first as a student, was that it could be coed and still have this vision of strong women’s history and have women in leadership positions.”

Though they graduated far apart, both Kuretsky and Murdoch found that Vassar still adhered to the ideals they cherished.

Graffiti culture on campus disputed Jessica Tarantine

Assistant Features Editor

“O

ur veins are intertwined like mic cables cords,” reads the last stall on the right in the women’s bathroom located in the basement of the Library. Scrawled on many stalls and walls of Vassar College is graffiti, which varies in its mixed responses from those on campus as well as its level of offensiveness and ability to be removed.

While some graffiti is simply song lyrics, poems or ideas written lightly in pencil, other instances are far more problematic and offensive, such as the swastika found on a bench by Blodgett in Spring 2011.

“This kind of graffiti is anti-Semitic in nature, offensive and intolerable within our community. The strength of our community demands that we respect the diverse beliefs and traditions our students, faculty and staff value. To step away from that respect in any way diminishes the community for everyone,” wrote President of the College Catharine Bond Hill in an email to the campus last April.

Although no more swastikas appeared last year, offensive homophobic graffiti was recently found in Davison House. “This is the first instance of graffiti I’ve seen in Davison specifically and I’ve rarely seen it in other dorms. It was never something that I thought was a huge problem at Vassar,” said Davison House President Doug Greer ’14.

House Advisor of Main Tom Park confirmed this. “In my experience since coming to Vassar a year ago, graffiti is not necessarily a regularity, but more prevalent than we would like,” he said. “It is the prominence of it that is really the issue when you talk about how noticeable it is.”

“Most bathrooms stalls have something written on them. It would be one thing if it was artistic, but it’s usually something gauche scribbled sloppily in black marker,” said Raymond House President Sam Brucker ’14.

The College responds to graffiti according to its severity. Non-offensive graffiti in pen or pencil is wiped off by the custodial staff.

For difficult-to-remove graffiti that is not offensive in nature, Park said, “Every effort is made to determine the culprits so that the remediation charges can be assessed directly, but if no responsibility can be assigned, the whole house is assessed the charge. If the graffiti, minor or prominent, is offensive in nature, Safety and Security is notified so that they can document it and a report is submitted. This is followed by an investigation and meetings with the house team and members of the community to discuss the impact of it and to solicit assistance in helping to identify the culprits,” said Park.

In general the Residential Life Office has a “Not in My Back Yard” stance in response to incidences of offensive graffiti. Park said, “The house collectively stands against things like that from being acceptable or even happening in the house.”

This was the case in response to the graffiti found in Davison. Greer said, “The house team felt it was best that we have an all dorm meeting this Monday because this issue really does affect each member of our house.

There, we are going to talk about how people are feeling about what happened and what action we can take to support everyone affected as well as preventing this kind of thing from happening in the future.”

While Brucker expressed displeasure over

the offensive graffiti, he holds the view that some graffiti has the ability to be positive.

“If we’re just talking about unsolicited art work in general, I think that kind of artistic passion can contribute to the creation of a comfortable home as apposed to detracting from it,” he said.

On the fourth floor of Noyes, blue painter’s tape marked an outline of a family of narwhals, the dorm’s mascot. “It’s not graffiti. It’s beautification and it makes the dorm feel homier,” said Noyes resident Rocky Schwartz ’15.

But not all members of the Vassar community felt that graffiti was positive. “Graffiti by nature causes damage to property,” said Assistant Director of Safety and Security Kim Squillace.

Jewett House President Clayton Masterman ’13 agreed: “There are plenty of forums for positive messages, but graffiti in the houses isn’t one of them. Regardless of its content, it inherently disrespects the common space that we all share.”

Strong House President Manning Wu ’14 disagreed: “Given Vassar’s artistic, quirky reputation, a positive message inscription would probably be responded to with nothing more than a chuckle and then left alone until Res Life came through with a new paint job.”

“A positive message to one group of students can be something that is offensive or makes another group uncomfortable. It’s a slippery slope and not a question easily answered by a simple yes or no,” said Park.

Students considering adding their favorite quote to a bathroom door must consider its impact on the custodial staff and other students before grabbing a pen.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

hile most Vassar students were away this summer, construction crews arrived on campus to upgrade a number of buildings. Among the projects completed during this time were improvements to Lathrop and Josselyn Houses.

The latest improvements differ from the past Davison and Jewett projects in which the houses were shut down for the year while the entire building was renovated. With Josselyn and Lathrop, the administration took a different approach, and a multi-step plan was developed. Over the summer Josselyn’s fourth and final improvements were completed with the addition of a new roof, while Lathrop’s plan began with the addition of new bathrooms on the north side. Other steps to the Lathrop project include finishing the bathrooms and installing a new elevator shaft.

Completing this work requires the coordinated effort of many different groups. Projects are managed by the Department of Buildings and Grounds.

Said Michael Quattrociocchi, a manager of the work done at Josseyln, “Engineers are consulted before work begins to examine buildings and provide recommendations. Once the job starts, depending on its size, there may be as little as three to four workers or as many as 50.” The workers for the two dorm projects this summer have been supplied by two contracting companies, Kirchhoff Consigli at Lathrop and Hayden at Josselyn. Kirchhoff Consigli and Storm King, contracting companies based in the Poughkeepsie area, have been involved in the other projects on campus.

Before any project can begin, a number of groups have to approve the plans, including the Campus Master Plan Committee, Senior Officers, the Priorities and Planning Committee, and finally the Board of Trustees. This process is necessary to ensure that as many people as possible can provide input in the process. According to Vice President for Finance and Administration Elizabeth “Betsy” Eismeier, “The committees and ‘red tape’ are not the problem.

The main problem is securing enough funding.”

As may be expected, dorm improvements can be very expensive. The work done at Lathrop, for example, is expected to cost approximately $5.2 million when it is finished. Finding this much funding is not an easy task, especially with a lagging economy.

Vassar officials have accepted the challenges they have to face. Eismeier said, “We are operating under some constraints, but we have to continue to address issues.” Pricing for contracting jobs has sharply decreased in the past few years, in an attempt to attract more jobs to the industry during a recession, so Vassar is able to get more improvements done for less money.

There are a variety of sources that can be used to pay for work that needs to be done, including donations, grants, fundraisers, a small amount already in the budget for maintenance and—the most prominent source in the Lathrop and Josselyn renovations—bonds. Every few years, Vassar issues a series of tax-exempt bonds, which raise large amounts of capital. The latest, in 2010, will continue to fund projects until at least 2013. While this system does cause the College to accumulate some debt, the amount is manageable since the bonds will be paid off over a long period of time.

There is no clear timetable yet for future improvements, yet officials do have a general idea of what they will pursue after finishing work on Lathrop.

Most likely, future improvement plans will include Strong and Raymond projects, as well as upgrades to Main and Cushing. A major reason for the lack of a clear schedule is that several different groups must approve each project. Campus officials are hard at work designing a plan for future improvements.

Currently, this plan is scheduled to be released in time for the second semester.

Student reactions to the improvements that have been completed are largely positive. According to President of Lathrop House Dallas Robinson ’14, “Everything worked out well. The renovations are a nice addition to the house.” If there is one major complaint about the Lathrop project, it is the time that it will take time to complete. As of now, the dorm still has no working elevator, raising issues of the building’s accessibility. However, Robinson noted, “We understand that these things take time and we all think that Lathrop is very livable.”

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Campus Libertarians a small, growing group Ruth Bolster

Assistant Features Editor

A

Study breaks encourage, foster unity among house residents

Mia Fermindoza/The Miscellany News

lthough Vassar generally has a reputation for being politically left-minded, there are known resources for students who identify as conservative or independent—the Moderate, Independent, and Conservative Association being one of them. Yet what about the students whose political views do not align with any of these groups? Led

by Julian Hassan ’14, the Vassar chapter of Students for Liberty is the recently formed Libertarian group that hopes to increase the available resources for these students while promoting a dialogue between other political groups on campus.

While opinions vary in intensity across the spectrum of political ideologies, Libertarianism generally promotes the idea that liberty should be the basic principle guiding modern society. Specifically, Libertarians believe in economic freedom, or free trade; social freedom, or the belief that one should not be told how to live his or her own life; and intellectual freedom, or the belief that one has the right to form and vocalize his or her own opinions. Each of these primary principles is characterized by strict non-governmental intervention in the lives of a country’s citizens.

“The concept of individual rights has really been dropped by both conservatives and liberals,” noted Hassan.

“It is no longer part of the debate, and that really is our stance in politics, the supremacy of individual rights.”

Although last year there was a small Libertarian group on campus led by Paul Weinger ’13, the group disbanded in part due to members’ conflicting commitments and because Weinger left to study abroad. However, the Libertarian group reformed under Hassan earlier in the school year and has become affiliated with Students for Liberty, a national organization that aims to promote Libertarian ideas across campuses nationwide by providing resources to its affiliated chapters. Students for Liberty began in July 2007 when students participating in the Institute for Humane Studies Koch Summer Fellowship began discussing ways to promote Libertarian ideas in schools across the country. From there, founding members Alexander McCobin and Sloane Frost executed these ideas by organizing the first Students for Liberty conference, which was hosted by Columbia University in February 2008.

Currently, Students for Liberty continues to provide resources such as webinars and conferences for pro-liberty organizations at both the college and high-school level.

What is unique about Students for Liberty is that they brought together both Objectivists and students of Austrian economics with more traditional members of the Libertarian movement. “It’s an interesting, but workable combination,” noted Hassan. “Plus, by associating ourselves with [Students for Liberty] this year, and with other groups, we can really provide a lot of alternative programming on campus.”

Created by novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, Objectivism, according to the Ayn Rand Institute’s website, holds, “The pursuit of one’s own rational selfinterest and of one’s own happiness is the highest moral purpose of one’s life.”

The Austrian School of Economics holds that statistics and mathematical models are unreliable means of testing and examining economic theories because it is impossible to predict one’s actions in a controlled setting. Generally, both Objectivists and members of the Austrian School of Economics are proponents of laissez-faire capitalism

and a small, limited government.

With the Ayn Rand Institute and The Undercurrent, a national objectivist publication aimed at college students, Students for Liberty most recently sponsored Capitalism Awareness Week, which, according to Hassan, aimed to highlight the underlying moral issues associated with capitalism. Students across the country were able to watch live, web-streamed debates and lectures beginning Sept. 27.

“Our first event was a debate between a supporter of capitalism and a supporter of socialism. Vassar students were able to ask questions to the debaters, and it went really well,” said Hassan.

In light of the success of these events, Hassan hopes to expand the group’s presence on campus. Although Libertarianism has had some coverage in the mainstream media, Vassar’s Students for Liberty chapter admits that not everyone at Vassar is fully informed about Libertarian ideas.

“I’d say that the campus is generally unconcerned with Libertarians, to be quite honest,” said Benjamin Morse ’14, a Students for Liberty member. “Most of them, if you asked them to provide a formal definition probably couldn’t give you one. Or even the stances.

They could probably throw out Ron Paul’s name, but that’s about it.”

However, the group hopes to change this by both increasing the level of political dialogue on campus and by encouraging students to examine their own political beliefs. In addition to hosting webinars and speakers, Hassan and the rest of Vassar’s Libertarians hope to execute Operation Politically Homeless, which consists of a quiz that allows students to assess their political beliefs in 10 questions. The 10 questions are broken up into two categories— social and economic. Students are assigned numeric points depending on how they answer the questions. When finished with the quiz, students tally up their points and, depending on their score for each respective category, will discover if their beliefs align with liberal, conservative, centrist, Statist (in favor of big government) or Libertarian views. Hassan hopes to table in the College Center on behalf of the Libertarians and hand these quizzes out to interested students in the near future.

The group also has tentative plans to reach out to Vassar’s other political organizations and present themselves as an alternative voice if a structured debate between the conservatives and the liberals ever manifests. Yet because it is both relatively new and small in size, it also hopes that a dialogue with a more established Vassar political organization will ultimately help this reformed Libertarian group thrive longer than its predecessor did.

“We are considering approaching other organizations and talking with them about maybe forming some sort of alliance, or going under the auspices of a group that is larger. Or we are debating if we want to stick this out on our own,” stated Morse.

Although he noted that students who identify as Libertarian were the most likely to join, Morse and the rest of Vassar Students for Liberty want to attract new members with fresh ideas and opinions.

“Mostly the people I attended meetings with are very same minded, which poses a problem, because if we all sit around and agree, it really doesn’t get us anywhere,” noted Morse.

Ultimately, an increase in membership will not only help Vassar Students for Liberty flourish as a group, but will also increase the variance in their own political opinions.

October 6, 2011

Study breaks offer a potpourri of attractions for house residents, from games and crafts to free food and beverages. A popular event is House Team Hot Seat, in which students ask house teams titillating questions.

Danielle Bukowski and Natasha Bertrand Features Editor, Guest Reporter

F

ree food, entertainment and the allure of procrastination alone is enough to draw most college students from their bookstrewn rooms; Vassar’s house teams know that study breaks are one of the houses’ most effective ways to build community spirit and break up a long week. While all house team members cited the breaks as an integral part of their dorm, each dorm has a different way of getting the whole house involved.

One consistency is House Team Hot Seat, held during the first few weeks of school, which is offered as a way for the freshmen to get to know their house team—sometimes a little too well. Main House Student Advisor Fardeen Chowdhury ’13 said Hot Seat is the most attended study break each year for Main, and they haven’t had problems with questions for the past few years. “If I find that a question might damage or jeopardize someone’s position, I shoot it down,” Chowdhury said. “Historically, I think our infamous Hot Seat is the most frequently attended,” wrote Cushing House President Daniel Shaw ’14 in an emailed statement. Noyes hosts Classy House Team Hot Seat instead, with classy clothes and fewer salacious questions.

There are two large components of study breaks: the opportunity to relax and socialize and the bringing together of house team members with the rest of the house. For the first few weeks of school, most programming is geared toward the freshman class. According to Lathrop House President Dallas Robinson ’14, “We choose these study breaks to help orient freshmen with the house team and each other and I think that has been accomplished.”

Lathrop plans on holding its study breaks once a month instead of weekly in order to attract more upperclassmen, as they would fit into busier schedules more easily, and the house team can plan bigger events.

Strong House also has trouble at-

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

tracting upperclassmen to their study breaks. Strong House Vice President Kattie Chen ’14 wrote in an emailed statement, “Study breaks this year are aimed to provide a way of getting the freshmen acquainted with each other, their housemates, the house team and other orgs/resources on campus…It has come to my attention that most upperclass Strong women have very few opportunities to meet and build relationships with their fellow freshmen housemates. Hopefully, in the near future, study breaks will become a way of facilitating such upperclassmen-freshmen relationships.”

Main alternates between an event and a low-key hangout every other week in order to keep the house interested. “This house team is almost all sophomores, and we noticed as freshmen that there was a chronic absenteeism in study breaks, especially as the year went on. One of our main goals going into this year is to have study breaks that more students attend,” said Main House Vice President Jack Mullan ’14.

Some weeks will just have food or academic information sessions, while others will have events like the recent Photo Shoot, which drew a large crowd.

To get more people to attend the events throughout the year, houses have integrated entertainment events along with the more laid-back study breaks with games and food. Last week Main had the Night Owls perform at their study break, and Raymond recently had the Vassar Devils sing during their break. “Many of the Devils are former or current Raymonites, so we want to show that this is what some people in Raymond do and encourage freshmen to try out for different groups,” Raymond House Vice President Casey BartowMcKenny ’14 said. “And basically anything with the Devils in it is well attended.” In preparation for Raymond’s annual Haunted House, the next few study breaks will incorporate related events and planning. “To maximize inclusion, it is our house team’s aim to put on diverse programming

to make sure that at least in the course of a given month, there is one study break that really gets every individual excited,” wrote Raymond House President Sam Brucker ’14 in an emailed statement. Strong House opens up their study breaks to the entire student body. “This year, we are aiming to coordinate more joint study breaks with the other dorm houses and organizations on campus,” wrote Chen.

Many houses have also found that the gathering is a good way to bring information to all the students in the house. Said Noyes House President Deborah Steinberg ’14, “We want to entertain people and get them mingling, but we also try to address issues that have come up or we fear will come up—we [had] a discussion with Abby Baird about sex [on Sept. 28], and Renee [Pabst came] in to talk about drugs. But generally we like to keep it light and fun to relieve some of the stress of the week.”

Food is a central theme in every house’s events. Said Jewett House President Clayton Masterman ’13, “Last year, study breaks were very food-oriented—we just had snacks and hung out. We’re trying to have a lot of the same benefit of offering food, but also an activity or something else going on, so that it’s not just people grabbing food and running.”

Advertising the study breaks is usually done through a weekly email and word-of-mouth, but Josselyn takes that idea further.

“We have a Facebook group to advertise through, I send out emails, the student fellows tell their freshmen and we put it on a whiteboard in the front of the building. We think that they have been pretty well received so far,” Josselyn House President Michael Kiel ’14 wrote in an emailed statement.

Although each house has a different identity and way of conducting their de-stressing sessions, all agreed that community spirit and a love of free food is a way to maximize students’ dorm pride. In the words of Davison House President Doug Greer ’14, “I love study breaks!”

October 6, 2011

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Page 7

Walbridge Farm Market a local, sustainable food source Sarah Begley

Guest Columnist

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Sarah Begley/The Miscellany News

albridge Farm Market occupies a small wooden building on the corner of a 700acre farm in Millbrook, N.Y. The building once functioned as a grain bin, and you can still see the original grain shoot, beams and windows.

Inside, the store is filled with quaintly packaged jam, vinegar, honey and other products from local farmers.

But the main event is a low freezer on the side of the room, with sliding glass doors on top that allow you to see its contents: dozens of packages of frozen Angus beef, all from steer that were raised on Walbridge Farm.

Husband and wife owners Doug and Cheryl Giles keep the freezer stocked with various cuts of beef, from London broil to short ribs. There are also a few plump chickens, a new addition to the line-up. On a recent Sunday, a customer and neighbor walked into the store and greeted the Giles. “I saw a roast in here last week and I’ve been dreaming about it ever since,” she said, already rooting through the freezer.

Cheryl Giles tells the customer, a woman named Sara, “If you don’t see one that’s pretty enough, Doug will go in the freezer and get you whichever one you want.”

The store, which opened in May, relies on business from regulars like Sara—some local, others New Yorkers with weekend homes in the Hudson Valley. The ties with the community are strong: Sara drives the bus that Doug and Cheryl Giles’ sons—Gunner, 12, and Tucker, 10—take to school. She also makes the jam sold in the store.

The Giles met 13 years ago, when Cheryl Giles worked at a local Agway and Doug Giles, a seventh-generation farmer, came in to buy supplies. They came to Walbridge Farm in 2005, when it was under different ownership.

They purchased the farming operation in 2007 and have greatly expanded the business over the coarse of their four-year tenure. In 2005, the farm consisted of 17 head of cattle. Now, there are nearly 200 head.

Before May of this year, Walbridge Farm only sold whole, half and quarter steers in the private market. They decided to open the storefront two years ago, but it took until May to complete renovations of the old grain shoot. “I’m a pill,” Cheryl Giles said, “and every little detail of this building was me driving a contractor crazy.” Her attention to detail was worth the trouble: The market is the image of pastoral charm.

Walbridge Farm Market, above, is owned and operated by Doug and Cheryl Giles in Milbrook, N.Y. The farm’s animals, including cattle and chickens, are raised on a healthy diet and without hormones.

Cheryl Giles employs an even higher set of standards in researching the Hudson Valley products she buys to sell in the store, all of which must be “fresh and natural.” The same goes double for the meat in the freezer, which, in many ways, is the politically conscious omnivore’s ideal.

The herds of Angus cattle graze freely on 150 acres of permanent pasture. None of the animals on Walbridge Farm are treated with hormones—“I wouldn’t even know where to buy hormones,” Cheryl Giles said. However,

the beef is not technically organic, a label that Cheryl Giles thinks is “ridiculous” because its regulations prohibit the use of antibiotics. As Doug Giles explained, “Certain things happen on a farm like pink eye. That’s easily treatable, but if you’re organic, you can’t treat it.” Cheryl Giles added, “You should be able to have a trusting relationship with a farmer. If my cow is sick, I’m gonna treat it with antibiotics; however, you do not eat that animal.”

Maintaining a healthful diet and environment for the animals is not cheap. “It does cost

more to feed the animals healthy food,” Doug Giles said, “and it takes 10 times more space.”

Additionally, production costs have gone up: Doug Giles estimates that fuel costs will be 60 percent higher this year. Yet they have only raised the cost of steaks by one dollar since May, and each month a different cut of beef is on sale.

Sometimes, customers come in looking for a certain cut that has sold out. This is partly due to the fact that the Giles send only four steers to slaughter each month. The USDA’s regulations, which favor large companies, make it difficult for most small-scale farms to slaughter their own livestock, so the cattle from Walbridge Farm meet their maker in Athol, Mass., on the Adams Family Farm. The turnaround between sending the cattle and receiving the packaged meat is three to four weeks, during which the beef ages in a cooler for 16 to 18 days.

After adding chicken to the menu, the Giles are now in the early stages of diversifying even more. “We already have four lambs,” Cheryl Giles said. “They’re still alive and they’ve already been sold.” She adds that pork is next on the horizon. “Everybody’s been asking for it,” she said. Doug Giles chimed in, “Everybody always wants what you don’t have.”

Whatever meat doesn’t sell in the market usually winds up on the Giles’ dinner table, and they don’t often look further than their own backyard for food supply. “We have a giant garden,” Cheryl Giles said, “and we use local farmers to supplement what we don’t have. They bring in fresh produce and we say, ‘Thanks, do you want cash or do you want meat?’ So we have a kind of barter system with them that we use sometimes.”

Business has grown steadily since May, but the market is only a small part of the farm’s operation—the majority of their revenue comes from selling cattle to other farmers. As Doug Giles explained, income from the store “is enough to keep the highs and lows out of the rest of the business.”

Though Doug and Cheryl Giles plan to expand, freshness and quality remain the most important factors at Walbridge Farm Market.

“Whether we’re talking about the seed stock or the meat,” Doug Giles said, “all we have is our reputation. This is the same meat I feed to my children.”

Walbridge Farm Market is located at 538 Route 343 in Millbrook. It is open Fridays from 12 to 5 p.m., Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The Brad behind Brad’s Granola offers baking classes Divya Pathak

Guest Reporter

A

s far as personal favorites in the All Campus Dining Center go, many students know that without a doubt, it’s Brad’s Granola.

What students may not know is the man to whom the recipe of this unique concoction belongs.

Chef Brad Goulden has 25 years of experience in cooking and baking in the Hudson Valley, 12 of which have been spent at Vassar.

But granola won’t be the only thing Vassar can expect from Goulden this year. He is introducing a series of classes called Baking with Brad in which he will teach a free baking class for 10 students each month, making desserts together. Goulden became interested in teaching a class after taking one himself. “I sat in on a food science class here and got really involved in it,” he explained.

From there, he and the administration worked times around his busy schedule during which he could do some teaching. He decided on Wednesdays since most of the other days of the week, he works at another restaurant.

In the first class, on Wednesday, Sept. 28, students had the chance to work with fresh, local apples picked by Goulden’s neighbors. On the menu were three items: baked apples with cranberry stuffing on crème Anglaise, dulce de leche, whipped cream and sea salt, and cayenne pumpkin seeds; apple turnovers with royal icing; and warm apple bread pudding with sautéed apples, served with vanilla bean ice cream, drizzled with apple cider simple syrup and cabernet balsamic glaze. The ingredients were already beautifully prepared when stu-

dents arrived to the class. Students then had the opportunity to work these ingredients into a puff pastry and assemble the desserts correctly. Lily Ngaruiya ’15 exclaimed, “I really like the bread pudding but I really can’t choose my favorite dessert from today, it was all so good!”

Ngaruiya also expressed how she enjoyed the unique combination of flavors Goulden used in his recipes. Josh Multer ‘14 said, “I think I will definitely come to more classes.”

The class is the ideal outlet for Goulden to showcase his personal baking style and distinctive combination of flavors Ngaruiya tasted in the desserts. Goulden described his interests in baking: “When it comes to desserts I enjoy introducing complex flavors. I use herbs and spices that are generally thought to be used for cooking but have recently crossed over into baking. Other flavors I also enjoy using are vinegar, basil, thyme and sea salt.” This style can also be seen as a reflection of Goulden’s cooking and baking background and experiences since his graduation from the Culinary Institute of America in 1979.

Goulden first became known to the general student body four years ago, when the administration approached him to serve a new granola recipe that did not contain nuts. To Goulden, it seemed easy enough, but the recipe went through a lot of trial and error. Students did not respond well to some of the ingredients that were a part of the recipe at different times, such as corn syrup, honey and white sugar, all of which did not cater to those who were vegan or allergic to gluten.

Goulden’s recipe has now reached a high level of popularity among students, so much

so that Goulden said, “When it’s out, it’s the biggest complaint management gets.” Some key ingredients include rolled oats, toasted wheat germ oats, dried apples, dried cranberries, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, and GrapeNuts cereal. Goulden said, “It’s all organic and it’s vegan.”

Some would also be surprised to learn how precise the granola-making process can become when it comes to having lumps in the granola. “I can’t use honey to help it lump up so I have to make sure it’s not too warm and not too cold so it can form lumps naturally since the students like the lumps,” Goulden said. “Students put it in the yogurt and the frozen yogurt. Some even put them in little baggies and take them to go!”

At times, Goulden has a hard time keeping up with the demand for his granola: “The amount I go through is so incredible; I made 150 pounds this Monday and today [Wednesday], I think I’m down to about 70 pounds.”

The overall process is very expensive and time consuming, especially when there are conflicts with ordering the ingredients. However, Goulden wants to assure its perfection and refuses to settle for less than the best recipe. “I’m truly sorry when it’s out,” he said, “it’s just that if I don’t have all the ingredients, I just won’t put it out.”

Goulden has done more than teach baking and make granola over the course of his career.

He said, “I’ve traveled extensively across the United States working in various hotels and restaurants. In Knoxville, Tenn., I opened up the Hilton exclusively for the World’s Fair, of which I catered for the Australian Pavilion.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Traveling allowed me to gain experience and I owned a restaurant for three years.”

He became interested in baking as a logical progression from cooking. “Baking is a much more precise form of cooking and even more precise are chocolates and confections, which is the direction I’m headed in now. I enjoy making my own chocolates and candies,” Goulden said.

He also talked about a possible plan for the future: “I have a bake shop in the basement of my house and someday I hope to bake pastries for restaurants in the local area.”

Goulden plans on keeping the class going strong and has a theme for each month: “In October, I want to bake with éclairs, November will be a baking with pumpkin class, in December I’m going to do cookies from around the world, in February I want to do a chocolate and confection class, and, finally, in March I’d like to have an open forum where I can hear from students as for what desserts they would like to try.”

Students can sign up for the class in the College Center to experience Goulden’s teaching.

He said, “I enjoy teaching because it helps me keep my skills sharp and questions push me to think in a direction I might not normally think.” He also encouraged students to stop by at the bakery station and say hello or ask any questions they may have as he would be happy to answer.

Students can definitely benefit from the class and enjoy tasty treats they may not usually try. Ngaruiya’s final thoughts: “I like that he’s really open and talkative about his food.

You can see the passion he has for his food.”

Page 8

FEATURES

October 6, 2011

Wall St. protesters march across Brooklyn Bridge, face arrest

Courtesy of Danielle Falzon

PROTEST continued from page 1 “Seeing the thousands of people marching across the Brooklyn Bridge was breathtaking,” said Gabriel Dunsmith ’15, a member of Rebuild the Dream and Vassar Greens. “I didn’t expect so many people there! Cars were honking as they passed by, and the entire group of protesters were united in our chants.”

Reports of mass arrests and videos of New York police officers using mace on a handful of penned protesters during the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City have received considerable attention from the press lately. Similar protests, albeit on a smaller scale, have emerged in major cities all over the country, and unions and other social activism groups have pledged solidarity with the protesters.

Bix learned about the protests online and through friends: “It started with...Adbusters, which called for this kind of open, non-hierarchical protest on Wall Street. Then other progressive groups took up the idea, and it spread like that through the Internet.”

Adbusters—a self-described “global network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power and the way meaning is produced in our society”—initiated the idea for the protests, but social media has been integral to spreading news of the movement.

“Money and greed and corruption have taken over our political system,” said Bix, a stance which seems to be the protesters’ central complaint.

“Our main aim is to change the value structure of this country. Its overriding goal is to move the ultimate priority of the value and political structures of this country away from money and toward human dignity,” said Bix. The protests are still, as originally intended, without centralized command. Bix wrote in an emailed statement, “I don’t think there are particular groups with authority, maybe besides the NYC community organizers, but I know certain goals are decided upon at a general assembly meeting, which happens every day.”

A non-hierarchal movement without a recognized leader needs a way to coordinate the disparate participants. Enter occupywallst.org, a forum for news of marches and events and links to the Occupy Wall Street Twitter and Facebook

Protestors emerge on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge on Oct. 1 as part of Occupy Wall Street.

700 demonstrators were arrested for blocking the thoroughfare by the New York Police Department. accounts. The forum also spreads the protesters’ political message.

That political message is, they admitted, rather nebulous. “As of now, there’s no central purpose.

There are no demands, there’s no manifesto. But it is a statement. It may be vague, but it shows that people are fed up,” said Spencer Resnick ’15, a member of Rebuild the Dream who has participated in the protests.

The lack of concrete political goals or formal leadership has gained the protests some detractors. Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times called the protests “a noble but fractured and airy movement of rightly frustrated young people.” (“Gunning for Wall Street, with Faulty Aim,” 23.9.2011, New York Times) Bellafante continued, “The group’s lack of cohesion and its apparent wish to pantomime progressivism rather than practice it knowledgably is unsettling in the face of the challenges so many of its generation face.”

Dunsmith stressed that he has seen the move-

ment mature over the past few weeks. “The first day people couldn’t even agree upon anything to protest—for that matter, they couldn’t even agree that people who wanted to smoke should go to the sidewalk and do it [there] instead of doing it in the park. It was pitiful,” he wrote in an emailed statement.

Dunsmith continued, “Going back [Oct. 1] and marching across the Brooklyn Bridge, on the other hand, was one of the most powerful group experiences I’ve felt. In their chants, people seemed to agree on the issue at hand—that Wall Street should pay for the pain they have put upon the American people.” Other groups have already pledged solidarity with the demonstrators, and there may be even more unity, and formal leadership, in the future.

“Next week, the site will welcome members of New York’s organized labor coalitions including the United Federation of Teachers, 32BJ SEIU [Service Employees International Union], 1199 SEIU, Workers United and Transport Workers

Union Local 100, which voted unanimously last night [Sept. 28] to support the occupation. Other groups standing in solidarity include the Working Families party, the Coalition for the Homeless and MoveOn.org,” wrote Joe Coscarelli, (“Labor Unions and Leftist Groups Prepare to Join Occupy Wall Street As Protesters Settle In,” 29.9.2011, New York Magazine) Bix and Resnick supported the involvement of unions. Said Bix, “The fact that there are political and social celebrities and progressive groups, one brings some legitimacy, but it also brings together individuals on the left and institutions together in a way that hasn’t been the case in a long time.”

Rearick concurred: “Unions have historically been very progressive, great organizations, and they’re helping channel the vague, broad protest into meaningful actions. They have organizational power and history.”

Dunsmith was more wary. “It’s great to have people from unions and other organizations involved,” he stated. “Celebrities and union-members should participate in the protests just like everyone else, becoming part of the larger body, not something separate from it.”

Resnick remained hopeful that the various groups involved could work together on common objectives. “Our goals are taking shape, and people are coming together and creating a community there. They feed each other and build their own democratic processes, and build places to live and work together,” he said.

He offered one instance that, he believed, summed up their experiences at Occupy Wall Street. “Once, we were marching past this very exclusive club, and there were all these people on the balcony drinking champagne and basically looking like fat cats, and they were pointing and mocking us,” said Resnick. “It really encapsulated everything that this protest is. It was almost poetic.”

Those Vassar students that take part in the protests hope to share the spirit of the movement with others in the community. “We don’t think there’s going to be immediate, massive change, but this is how movements start,” said Resnick.

“From there, people go out to their lives and change their surroundings.”

Bix concurred: “The significance of this event will outlast the actual happening.”

CDRC weighs options, student opinion on campus dining however, they are always looking for more too. I meet annually with our SGA [Student Government Association] board, as well as have a student senate dining committee,” wrote Director of Dining Services at Smith Kathleen Zieja in an emailed statement.

However, Smith’s dining comes at a significantly higher price than Vassar’s. Room and board costs $13,390 per person there, compared to $10,430 at Vassar.

It seems unlikely that Vassar would choose to take a similar route. According to Director of Dining Services at Vassar Maureen King, “The College doesn’t want to be in the business of doing dining services—we know that.” At the most recent Town Hall meeting on Oct. 3 in the second floor of the Students’ Building, administrators concurred, doubting whether an in-house food service would be a viable option for the College.

King emphasized Vassar’s Dining Services’ cooperation with student groups when it comes to composting and alternative food choices. “There are some times when either student groups or our commitment to local products comes up; in general we make those decisions with college input,” she said.

Any other outside vendor would probably come with similar advantages and disadvantages. King said, in relation to other institutional dining options, “I don’t see how it could be a huge change.”

An entirely new contract would take a great deal of time, and effort, to create. “A formal Request for Proposal process soliciting bids and presentations from multiple dining providers is a year-long process, one which requires significant time on the part of the committee the College would need to create to oversee and evaluate the bids,” explained Assistant Vice President of Budget and Planning David English.

English went on to explain that the College used this process when it originally chose ARA-

Juliana Halpert/The Miscellany News

CDRC continued from page 1 to Vassar tuition, room and board: $54,480.

However, without information on how much tuition is paid after financial aid, and how much money goes toward food services, it is difficult to determine how much the food program actually costs.

Biette touted independence as one way to maintain high dining standards. “Middlebury… is answering the needs of the College board of trustees/administration/students,” he stated.

“The contractor has those too, but more importantly, they have their own board of directors and shareholders to make happy. So, not all of your money is staying on campus with a contractor.”

Conflicts between responsibility to shareholders and customer service have resulted in lawsuits against the University of Alabama, Auburn University, and University of Alabama at Birmingham, and their outside food vendors, including ARAMARK. “Students at each school claimed the public universities were violating antitrust laws, illegally supporting private business, charging too much for the services, and wrongly converting their money into accounts that can be used like debit cards. They sued the schools and the contractors, which include ARAMARK Educational Services Inc. at Alabama, Compass Group USA Inc. at Auburn, and Sodexo Inc. at UAB [University of Alabama at Birmingham].” (“Ala. Court backs schools on ‘dining dollar’ suits,” 30.9.2011, Houston Chronicle) Alabama’s Supreme Court dismissed the case, though ARAMARK has been the defendant in a number of lawsuits over the past few years, many related to allegedly spending student dollars in a fictitiously high way.

Smith College also has a highly esteemed inhouse dining program, with 11 dining locations and a variety of menus. Student satisfaction is a high priority. “Are our students satisfied—yes—

A Vassar employee unpacks food stores provided by Sysco in the All Campus Dining Center. The College is likely to renew its contract with ARAMARK, but hopes to improve student satisfaction.

MARK to provide food services. He explained, “The committee, which included students and administrators from several areas of the College, recommended ARAMARK as the best overall bidder, evaluating all bidders on cost, food quality (including on-site visits of several of the top bidders), sustainability and interviews with then-current bidder clients.”

Since changing dining systems is virtually impossible, Vassar’s administration and the CDRC have focused on improving the agreement between ARAMARK and Vassar. “We want to get very specific information on whatever issues students have,” said Assistant Dean for Campus Activities and CDRC co-chair Teresa Quinn.

“We’re working toward being able to say, when we renegotiate the contract, ‘This is what students want.”’

“We’ll be submitting our report with recom-

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

mendations in the spring, which will be used for renegotiating the contract with ARAMARK,” she explained. “The focus group discussions, town hall meeting, surveys and informal discussions will help us to determine the terms of the contract renewal.”

English, who will facilitate the contract negotiations, appreciated the CDRC’s work, saying, “Whoever provides dining services knows that the relationship is built on a series of shorter term contracts and student satisfaction with the quality of food and service provided is very important to every vendor I’ve interviewed.”

Quinn concluded, “I think often students have such strong opinions, and not just about dining, but they feel like they don’t have a voice in the decision-making process.”

“But here we’re giving people an opportunity to be part of the process and make their voices

OPINIONS

October 6, 2011

Miscellany News Staff Editorial

Other dining options should remain open ARAMARK may not constitute best choice C

ampus dissatisfaction with Vassar’s dining services was most recently quantified with the Consortium on Financing Higher Education’s (COFHE) senior survey, in which 467 members of the Class of 2010 rated their overall campus dining experience. What resulted were levels of dissatisfaction at Vassar much higher than those of our peer institutions—the satisfaction rate at these institutions was, on average, 13.9 percent higher than that reported at Vassar.

The Miscellany News encourages the College and the Campus Dining Review Committee (CDRC) to consider this notable dissatisfaction in its upcoming survey of campus dining. Although we understand the restraints dictated by the current financial climate, the Editorial Board urges the CDRC to approach the upcoming review as an opportunity for change, not as a routine contract renewal. We are heartened by the approach that the CDRC is already taking to incorporate student voices in the process, and we hope that those voices have a significant influence in the final decisions.

This negotiation presents the College with a chance to improve the quality of life for Vassar students and to consider whether Vassar’s dining practices truly align with our values as an institution, and the needs of our student body. This is particularly important given the mandatory nature of the campus-dining plan for students living in the dorm houses, for which students pay between $2290 and $2940 per semester.

Forefront in student concern surrounding the current dining system is its inflexibility.

Perhaps the most common complaint of the system is the rigid lopsidedness of the plan, leaving many students with wasted meal swipes and/or out-of-pocket expenses at the Retreat. This tells us that the current model is inefficient and would benefit strongly from organizational shifts allowing students to more fluidly transfer excess meals or points between the All Campus Dining Center (ACDC) and The Retreat. Campus Dining decisions must be made with finances in mind, but the inefficiencies of this system make the meal plan seem unduly expensive and wasteful for students’ families, which are working with similar financial restraints.

On another level, campus dialogue indicates student concern with the quality of food options offered through campus dining. ARAMARK, the college’s current catering service, receives most of its food products from distributors such as Sysco, who provide the dining system with low-cost and non-perishable goods. While these are options are fiscally sound, students find room for improvement in the quality and variety of fresh food options. After all, it is difficult to get a wide range of vitamins with only two or three varieties of fruit available all year.

We recognize that there are also very positive examples of alternative food sourcing to be found in Campus Dining. The handmade granola, occasional local produce, feta cheese at the salad bar, Rockland Bakery bread, fair trade coffee in the Retreat and nightly specials are all evidence of the care that goes into feeding students. The successful reception of these changes should be taken into consideration as the CDRC moves forward. We applaud these small achievements, and hope that such goals will be pursued much more vigorously in the future, perhaps even written in to whatever contract results from the process.

Vassar and ARAMARK have been working together on Campus Dining for 22 years, but we also remember that ARAMARK is a for-profit organization, whose chief concerns are not necessarily the health and wellness of Vassar students. Although it is a fast-growing corporation in an unfavorable economic environment, and it brings with it both the benefits and disadvantages of a large company. Aramark’s corporate history should not be overlooked. A 2004 audit revealed that Aramark robbed the Detroit Public Schools of $1.1 million when they ignored federal regulations to pocket rebate money from its suppliers. Last month, the Associated Press reported an instance in which Aramark bribed the University of Central Arkansas with a $700,000 home renovation in exchange for a seven-year contract renewal. We trust the administration and CDRC to keep our needs as students in mind as they engage in future discussions with the organization. If Aramark wants our business, they should remain cognizant of competitive dining options.

While our current financial state may prevent a full overhaul of the current dining system, this should not stop us from seeking inspiration in alternative services. We shed light on the self-run service of Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont.

Middlebury has successfully implemented a self-run system that does not exist to make a profit, but to feed students. Its mission statement is as follows: “A professional, flexible and dependable team dedicated to enhancing the health and enjoyment of the Middlebury College experience.”

Middlebury feeds its students, about 2,450 undergraduates, entirely on its own. They have primary and secondary food distributors, which bid against each other every few years, keeping quality high and prices low.

They spend just over 20% on their budget on local products, which include meat from a small company with less than 50 employees called, tomatoes grown with chemicalfree methods and dairy and eggs from a family farm. While a transition to such a self-run system is perhaps too ambitious for the College’s current financial abilities, we encourage the administration and CDRC to consider Middlebury’s model and remember that feeding students does not have to be about efficiency and profit.

Even if an in-house dining system is effectively off the table, there is no reason that we could not work to incorporate some of the benefits of such a system into our own Campus Dining structure.

The upcoming dining review endows the College with a powerful opportunity to respond to student needs and desires. As the senior survey indicated, Aramark’s current model is not successful in providing students the dining experience expected of an institution of our size and caliber. If students are required to partake in campus dining, then Vassar as an institution must not ignore the student voice when considering its dining future. We stand behind the College in taking bold action when improving the quality of student life.

—The Staff Editorial represents the opinion of at least two thirds of the 21-member Miscellany News Editorial Board.

Page 9

Drone killings do not help war on terrorism Noor Mir

Guest Columnist

J

an. 4, 2011. It was a typical winter afternoon in my hometown, the city of Islamabad—nestled amongst the low, lush foothills of the Himalayas, a neatly planned criss-cross of avenues named after retired generals and Persian poets, divided by painstakingly manicured medians. That day, I had decided it was time to stray away from my routinely banal vacation schedule of eating and sleeping and embark on something noticeably different—a field trip. As a schoolgirl, I had boarded numerous buses, almost annually, to Taxila, a vestige of the Gandharan civilization that was proudly within Pakistani borders. This year, 40 minutes later, I was back to my childhood haunt after a seven-year hiatus.

We started up on the cobbled stairs that seemed more and more difficult to climb with each visit, noting that somebody had taken the time to repaint the sign where somebody had scratched the entry fees out. No lines awaited us at the very top.

To the right, I could see Dharmarajika, built by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE. To the left, the ruins of the Jaulian monastery, burnt and destroyed by the White Huns in the fifth century CE. The museum was the same as I remembered, dimly lit but impeccably organized. Handwritten captions on yellowed index cards told me that the square coins were IndoGreek, inscribed with fuzzy outlines of emperors and that the necklaces were Indo-Scythian from the first century BCE. An aging tour guide with a magnificent henna-stained mustache walked behind us, having committed all of this to memory.

The lights went off as per schedule at home. “You don’t have a generator?” I asked. “No, madam. It’s too expensive.” It was then, in the shadows of that musty museum, next to a silver Buddhist reliquary, that I got the phone call from my father. “There’s been a shooting. The governor is dead and your mother was at the same café. She can’t get out.

Come home now.”

My aim isn’t to evoke pity. My mother is fine, and the governor of Punjab is dead. My purpose lies elsewhere. Pakistan is in trouble and a room of suited men in Langley, Va. isn’t going to fix our problems, or yours, by pressing a button that fires a missile and eliminates one, single high-value target, polluting headlines with victorious exclamations of “We Killed Al-Qaeda Number Two” and three and four. Job done, they’ll return to their suburban homes and repeat the routine the See PAKISTAN on page 12

Protesters on Wall St. declare ‘enough is enough’ Spencer Resnick, Jon Bix and Nick Olsen

W

Guest Columnists

hen we first arrived at Zuccotti park in downtown Manhattan on Sept. 17 for a spontaneous protest called Occupy Wall Street, we found a barely organized gathering of people frustrated with Wall Street’s financial elite.

They came from a wide range of backgrounds, political persuasions and locations. It was a loose coalition united around ambiguous goals.

The marching, chanting and organizing was energetic and inspiring, but looked like it would soon peter out. By the third day, after we had all left, roughly 40 activists remained in the pouring rain. Occupy Wall Street was criticized for having no purpose, agenda or list of demands.

It looked like the fledgling movement would not get off its feet. However, more people began trickling in, and videos of police brutality opened the floodgates.

When we returned two weeks later, we joined a march of thousands down the Brooklyn Bridge. At one point, 17,000 people were watching the march via live stream. 700 were arrested after police intentionally led marchers into an illegal pathway across the Bridge.

At this point, the AFL-CIO, two SEIU locals, the United Transport Workers union, MoveOn. org and others had lent their support. Cornel West, Michael Moore, Immortal Technique and Susan Sarandon had participated in the occupation. Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Lupe

Fiasco, Van Jones, Senator Bernie Sanders, Radiohead, Big Boi and others had expressed their solidarity. When we explored Zuccotti park, we discovered a growing community. Protesters participated in a twice daily general assembly, a system of participatory democracy. Forbidden by the police from using amplification systems, messages were communicated by the People’s Mic, a group-wide call and response system.

Every aspect of the protest was coordinated by democratic committees called working groups.

For example, the comfort committee had collected extra clothes and sleeping materials to those in need, a food committee cooked and distributed food, a health committee was learning basic care from nurse union members, and a committee was even printing Occupy Wall Street’s newspaper, The Occupied Wall St. Journal. The level of organization and participation was remarkable. Unlike the system of decision making that prevails on Wall Street, the protesters had created a working system of direct democracy in which everyone had a voice.

The protest on Wall Street represents but a small fraction of the worldwide resistance. As the New York Times reported in a recent article, 2011 has been a year of protests in the Arab world, Israel, Chile, India and Spain. Driven by economic hardships and unresponsive political elites, people everywhere have been taking action. “[This] rising disillusionment comes 20 years after what was celebrated as democratic

capitalism’s final victory over communism and dictatorship,” the Times said. That triumph and the false consensus that came with it proved to be unsustainable. Institutional greed, corporate co-option of democracy, growing inequality and perpetual crisis have demonstrated the hollowness of that supposedly perfected model. Young people, working people, disillusioned citizens and activists have taken to the street seeking an alternative. This revolutionary fervor has come to Wall Street. The days of deference to the existing structure are over, and the weeks and years of reconstruction are just beginning. As Cornel West declared to the protesters, “Don’t be afraid to say revolution.”

Fundamental change is never handed down from above. Equality, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, is exacted from below. People feel like they no longer have a voice, like they’ve been muzzled by corporate elites. People feel like they cannot change their fates through the ballot alone, and so they are practicing politics in the streets. We now register our votes with our feet, our tents and our raised voices. The onus is on all of us now, whether we study at Vassar or are looking for a job in Tunisia. The democratic revolutionary spirit, long dormant, has risen again in cities throughout the country and throughout the world.

The movement is growing. Occupations are underway in Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles and dozens of other cities. The United Steelwork-

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

ers Union, Rebuild the Dream and the Working Families Party have voiced their support. The media, after originally turning a blind eye, have been forced to re-examine this phenomenon.

Occupy Wall Street is now being covered by every major American media outlet, from Fox News to the Nation. It is now also being covered by major international outlets such as AlJazeera and the Guardian. Still, many criticize Occupy Wall Stret because there are not yet clear demands. This is one of the drawbacks of direct democracy in action; it is difficult to reach consensus. However, Occupy Wall Street recently released its first official statement, a list of grievances, and indicated that demands would follow. Unlike the elites in Wall Street and Washington, protesters want everyone to have a voice. While there have not yet been clear demands, there has been a clear message.

The message is simple: enough is enough. We want control over our lives. We want a democracy where votes speak louder than dollars. We want a say. Our values as Americans cannot be realized while the profits of the few are regarded as more important than the dignity of the many.

Right now, people are reclaiming that dignity.

Join us, because the struggle of a generation is growing on the streets of New York City.

—Spencer Resnick ’15, Jonathan Bix ’14 and Nick Olsen ’15 are members of Rebuild the Dream and GAAP.

OPINIONS

Page 10

SlutWalk combats U.S. rape culture Emma Russell

Guest Columnist

T

he SlutWalk protest march was held again this past weekend in NYC, a continuation of a movement that began last April in response to the excuses made for rape based on a person’s appearance. These excuses and explanations for rape, appropriately termed “victim blaming,” place the burden on the victim of rape or sexual assault by asking them questions such as “What were you wearing?” Furious with our rape culture—a culture that seems to provide an environment conducive to rape—protestors took to the streets of Manhattan to tell the media, the police and everyone else who victim-blames that this behavior is unacceptable. In addition, they wished to communicate that a person can wear any clothing and express their sexuality in any way they want, but clothing is not consent, and a person never deserves or asks to be raped.

For many who don’t understand the passion behind this protest, they mistake it for an excuse to wear nothing but fishnets and a bra out in public. While that may be a plus for protesters, SlutWalk goes way beyond a day of lingerie and black leather boots. The protesters are making the point that they should be able to dress that way in public, at any time, without fear of being sexually assaulted or consequently blamed for that assault.

This makes the march a powerful show of self-expression and female sexual expression, trying to fight the blame and shame that society impresses upon them.

While I did not attend the walk, many who did professed that SlutWalk was an overwhelmingly positive experience: hundreds of protesters, of all genders and ages, converging in support of each other and of their right to feel safe with their bodies. Participants celebrated with body paint, creative clothing, imaginative signs, music and artistic performances. It was an uplifting, powerful and incredibly moving day for all present.

Despite this, the gravity of the message they wish to have heard cannot be overlooked. As one protester’s slogan read, “This sign isn’t funny, neither is rape.” Unfortunately, rape jokes are commonplace in our society: on TV shows, in movies and advertisements, in our classrooms—all undermining the seriousness of sexual assault. These same mediums normalize images of violence, especially against females, so that we as a culture have come to view rape as unfortunate but predicted. A fact of life. We even go so far as to say that people ask for rape (impossible by definition), and that if you don’t want to get assaulted you shouldn’t dress, talk, act or dance a certain way.

Victim-blaming attitudes are painfully harmful to women and people of all genders, and it is SlutWalk’s goal to illuminate that. Some of the signs they carried exclaimed “sluts are beautiful,” “don’t get raped,” “don’t tell me how to dress” and “punish rapists not victims.” Still other signs emphasized the importance of consent before sex, with one sign reading “just because she’s drunk doesn’t mean she’s DTF.” This last sign, carried by a male protester, is an important reminder of the male influence in this seemingly female-dominated protest. Many male voices were heard, in most instances reinforcing the need to shift blame back to the assaulters. Also, it is important to remember that male-identified people can be targeted for dressing too sexually, or too “feminine.”

If no other message was taken away from the protest, protesters hoped people walked away with knowledge that no type of dress or action is an invitation for assault, and that people are assaulted regardless of what they are wearing.

As a college community we need to be aware of the rape culture we live in and actively seek to combat it. Being passive means siding with the oppressors, and this structure of slut-shaming and victim-blaming isn’t healthy for anyone. And revolution does not have to come from wearing fishnets down the streets of NYC—it can be as simple as not laughing at rape jokes, not judging people based on their clothing, not taking advantage of people when they are unable to consent.

Let’s bring the ideas behind SlutWalk back to the Vassar campus.

—Emma Russel ’13 is an English major.

October 6, 2011

Student support in labor talks essential Bill Crane

T

Guest Columnist

here’s a war going on at Vassar College.

Most of the student body may not be aware of it, but that doesn’t make it any less real. And what’s more, it’s the same war that’s going on everywhere else in the country.

Currently Vassar workers represented by the Service Employees’ International Union are in negotiations with the administration. In the past several years, Vassar has conducted layoffs and placed workers on shifts starting at 5 a.m.

All this has no doubt led to increasingly poor conditions in the dorms, and bad service at the All Campus Dining Center. For these things the administration bears the responsibility, not the workers.

The largest issue between the workers and administration is the outsourcing of summer work. While it has told the union that there is not enough summer employment for all college workers, it has continued to outsource many jobs to non-union contractors, who are cheaper as they do not have any benefits. Therefore many workers in the union are laid off during the summer, making things very difficult for them.

This kind of thing was foreseen a century and a half ago by a man Vassar students are probably familiar with. If you have ever taken an introductory sociology or political science class, for instance, you may remember something like this from your reading: “The maximum of profit corresponds to the physical minimum of wages … The fixation of its actual degree is only settled by the continuous struggle between capital and labor, the capitalist constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum, and to extend the working day to its physical maximum, while the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction.”

That, of course, was from none other than Karl Marx. His writings do not only contain the reasons for the current economic crisis, as many mainstream economists are being forced to admit, but he also wrote perceptively and forcefully on the nature of class war. In this way he is directly relevant to what is going on

here at Vassar, and should be brought out of the classrooms.

What do the events at Vassar tell us about class struggle? In the first place, they confirm Marx’s prediction that capitalists will try to maximize profits as much as they possibly can. As a College, Vassar may not seem like a large corporation, but as its workers know, it certainly operates like one.

The administration’s policies are directed toward maximizing the endowment and reducing what it needs to pay its employees to the minimum it can get away with. Workers’ livelihoods and students’ quality of life are a direct casualty of this.

The reason for a union is to enable workers to defend themselves at the most basic level.

Forming a union is helpful in enabling workers to come together and resist, through negotiations with employers, or at the more militant end, by going on strike. I think that some of the significance of a strike has been lost on this country, since it’s been quite a while since we saw any large ones. In Marx’s terms, a strike is what happens when workers collectively deny their labor power to the capitalist. This puts a stop to production, and with it a stop to profits.

It has always been the most effective form of working-class struggle, and workers in unions have shared the legacy of such struggle, which is higher wages, shorter hours and better benefits than the non-organized workforce.

In this respect then, the consequences of Vassar’s policy are pretty clear. If the administration can continue outsourcing and letting workers go in the summer, it is a short step to laying them off, period. Doing this would weaken the union’s ability to defend its workers in the short term, and eventually Vassar could be in a position to get it decertified.

This is to be expected, as the existence of unions has never been conceded by the capitalist class. They have always tried to weaken workers’ organizations. In the 1980s, for example, U.S. corporations spent half a billion dollars annually to hire union-busting consultants. The media portrays organized workers as too well paid and lazy.

The anti-union offensive shared by government and corporations was on full display in

Wisconsin last spring, when the Republican state government passed a law that prevented the unions of state employees from collecting dues at work and required annual re-certification votes. Effectively this was a measure to break the power of the public sector unions, to which was given the flimsy pretext of balancing the state’s budget.

The fight against unions did not stop there.

Currently, longshoremen in the State of Washington are on strike against plans by EGT Development to open a non-union warehouse. If EGT succeeds, it would help curb the power of the International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union, one of the strongest and most militant unions in the country. Also, the Chicago Teachers’ Union is currently fighting against a law from Mayor Rahm Emmanuel that, in addition to requiring longer days and weakening teacher tenure, would require a 75-percent vote to authorize a strike, and a mandatory sixmonth “cooling off” period were such a vote successful. Also important was the strike at Verizon, which brought out workers on the landline service for two weeks protesting the givebacks Verizon, a company that made $11 billion dollars this year, was demanding from them.

In all of these struggles broadly the same dynamic is observable that Marx described and that we see now at Vassar, though on a larger scale. Corporations and governments seek to raise capitalist profits by attacking workers’ wages, laying off large numbers, cutting benefits and seeking to destroy the unions that have the power to resist these measures.

So what do we as students do? It is obviously up to the workers whether they decide to continue with negotiations or escalate to more militant methods. But how they are treated affects us directly, and it is our duty to stand in solidarity with them.

Now is the time at Vassar, New York and the United States to stand for workers’ resistance.

—Bill Crane ’12 is a member of the International Socialist Organization. He is an Asian studies major.

Declaring TCE a carcinogen only first step Gabe Dunsmith

T

Guest Columnist

he Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) made the right move.

On Sept. 28, the EPA released its public health assessment of the industrial chemical trichloroethylene (TCE). The report brands TCE as a cancer-causing substance and details its detrimental effects on the immune, nervous and reproductive systems.

The TCE report was last updated 24 years ago, in 1987.

After years of delays, releasing the TCE report is a step in the right direction. Up until a week ago, TCE had only been a “suspected” carcinogen. The effort to confirm the chemical as a carcinogen has been long and arduous, assaulted by both government and industry. In 2001, the EPA drafted a report which classified TCE as “highly likely” to cause cancer, kick-starting a 10-year maelstrom of criticism from the chemical industry, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. According to the National Resources Defense Counsel, those three entities are responsible for about 750 TCE-contaminated sites across the nation. The Bush administration waitlisted the EPA’s draft report, and in 2007 filed an exemption so that the military and certain industries were not capped on airborne TCE emissions. The White House is currently reconsidering the exemptions.

TCE is a chemical not encountered anywhere in nature. It was mass-manufactured after World War II to degrease metal parts, and up until 1977 was used as a surgical anesthetic. Until the 1980s, it was used in other pharmaceuticals and food. Inside the home, it is found in paint remover, glues, electronic equipment cleaners, rust removers, adhesives, gun-cleaning fluid, typewriter correction fluid and other types of fluids. 10 million pounds of TCE are used each year in the manufacture of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC. The chemical industry fiercely opposed the release of the report. For years, chemical companies have attacked the EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System, the program dedicated to releasing

chemical reports. Earlier this year, a chemical lobbying group demanded that the EPA re-evaluate all the reports that it is currently drafting.

Confirming TCE as a cancer-causing chemical marks the Obama administration’s most significant step in protecting people from chemical exposure. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson made it one of her core tenets to focus on chemical regulation, saying the issue is “closest to my heart.” Now it seems like Jackson is actually beginning to accomplish her goals.

“This is among the most important assessments that we’ll be releasing this year,” said Paul Anastas with the EPA. “Trichloroethylene is one of the very large-volume chemicals out there. It’s in all different kinds of industries.”

In the end, Jackson, the Obama administration and EPA scientists deserve credit for finalizing the TCE rule. But to take 24 years to confirm one chemical as a carcinogen is quite some time. The EPA and the Obama administration should not forget that there is still much work to be done.

Hundreds of TCE-laden sites around the nation are seeing little or no cleanup. At least 1,500 hazardous waste sites in the United States, including 761 sites on the federal Superfund inventory (a catalogue of the most heavily-polluted places in the nation) are contaminated with TCE. For many here in Dutchess County, the TCE rule hits close to home. The Hopewell Precision Superfund Site, polluted with TCE, sits fewer than eight miles from Vassar.

Hopewell Precision, Inc. manufactures sheet metal at its facilities just outside of Poughkeepsie. In decades previous, workers dumped effluent, which included TCE, on the ground, contaminating wells in the area. According to Lenny Siegel with the Center for Public Environmental Oversight, officials knew of the contamination for years and yet did not bother to inform residents.

The EPA first took note of contamination at the site in 1979; people in the surrounding neighborhood were exposed to TCE for up to 29 years before the EPA notified residents.

Around 120 houses in the area surrounding the Hopewell Precision site have been contam-

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

inated with TCE, either through well water or indoor air. The EPA helped install 51 water filters and 46 air filters to combat TCE, but many other contaminated homes saw no filters at all.

Why? Because the levels of toxins in their air or water didn’t meet cleanup standards.

Denying residents clean water because their wells aren’t contaminated enough is inexcusable. The EPA’s new rule deeming TCE a carcinogen should establish that there is no safe standard for consuming the chemical, whether through breathing or drinking.

Release of the TCE report should also not be used as an excuse to block or delay other chemical rules. The EPA has an enormous backlog of chemical reports that it should work to release as soon as possible.

The EPA should act promptly to ban the manufacture of trichloroethylene. The risks simply aren’t worth taking. The new TCE rule was not made just so that chemical and manufacturing companies can continue dumping spent solvents out the backdoor; instead, tethered to the TCE rule is an implicit notion that the use of such a chemical is immoral. Continued use of carcinogens in the United States— and the world—cannot be tolerated.

Those industries that would rather go on consciously polluting the bodies of innocent people should be incriminated.

To play its part, the EPA should bear in mind that its number-one priority is to safeguard human health. Though the new TCE rule may go a long way to getting more filters installed in the Hopewell Precision neighborhood, as well as seeing reinvigorated cleanups at TCE-stricken sites across the country, the EPA should focus first and foremost on prevention. If dangerous toxins were not employed to begin with, there would be no reason to clean them up.

For now, praise be to the EPA for getting this report out the door. Let’s hope the agency keeps doing its job.

—Gabe Dunsmith ’15 is a member of the Vassar Greens.

October 6, 2011

OPINIONS

Page 11

Crisis confirms EU’s lack of federal unity Lane Kisonak

D

Guest Columnist

o I think of myself primarily as an American, or as a Vermonter?

As a native of Vermont, I’ve always held a certain pride in the fact that my home state was, before its admission to the union in 1791, one of the handful to have been an independent republic. It was the first place in North America to abolish slavery, the first to enshrine the principle of public education in its constitution and is the only state whose capital lacks a McDonald’s. The state continues to demonstrate its independent spirit, being the first to enact civil unions in 2000 and the first to introduce same-sex marriage by a voluntary act of legislation. This past year Vermont created the United States’ first state-wide, single-payer health care system.

As a liberal, I am proud of my state probably in much the same way a conservative Texan is proud of his own. However, that Texan has surely entertained a fleeting desire for my hippie socialist haven, that upsidedown New Hampshire with all the cows, to secede—perhaps it could glue itself onto Quebec. That’s okay; I understand. I have from time to time thought Texas should try returning to the single life, as Gov. Rick Perry himself has suggested. A lot of people in Puerto Rico want a shot at full-fledged statehood; why not let them take Texas’s spot?

But both this hypothetical Texan and I understand that these thoughts are simply products of frustration at the policies that other states choose to pursue, or disappointment that our country’s politics as a whole do not reflect the values we each espouse, and in which we were immersed during our upbringings. Somehow, despite the myriad cultural, economic and political differences between the states, this country has kept its Constitution alive for 224 years. Even as the country navigates a political environment more angry and divided than ever, that has to count for something. The United States is, at its core, a federation whose contract transcends individual states, parties or persons.

Primarily, both the Texan and I think of ourselves as Americans.

Over on the other side of the Atlantic, we see a group of nation-states beginning to con-

front the same problems that beset the United States under the Articles of Confederation prior to 1787—weak revenue-raising capabilities, onerous requirements for unanimity and crippling debts among them. The European Union (EU)—comprising 27 sovereign states under several overlapping trade and movement agreements, a common currency and a set of supranational political institutions— has been flirting with federalism for the last half century. The degree to which the EU states have already integrated is remarkable when one considers the tremendous gaps in language, culture, history and economy that have been, on the whole, well bridged. But, despite the many acts of statecraft performed since the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1957, the EU is still far from becoming anything like a federal republic.

For the past couple of years the EU has been busily fighting the same global economic crisis from which the United States is failing to extract itself. At the same time it is dealing with another crisis—one the United States conquered in 1787 by ratifying the Constitution. The sovereign debt crisis, sparked by the 2008 banking meltdown and profligate spending on the periphery of the EU, most notably in countries such as Greece and Portugal, has imperiled the single European market made possible by the Schengen Agreement and the eurozone.

In recent months, as the contagion of debt has spread across Europe, the EU’s financially stable anchors, especially Germany, have been called on to bail out their fellow member states as they attempt to restore their balance sheets to sustainable levels. German voters and politicians, quite understandably, are less than overjoyed at the prospect of putting themselves on the hook for debts run up by their non-contiguous neighbors. Despite polls showing over a third of Germans wanting countries such as Greece kicked out of the eurozone, many fear the effects of letting the euro collapse more than they rue the idea of pooling yet more money into the euro rescue fund.

Just this past week German Chancellor Angela Merkel managed to coax her fractious coalition in the Bundestag to approve a huge

increase in funding for the European Financial Stability Facility—a fund created in 2010 to provide assistance to troubled economies and, more recently, to purchase toxic government bonds—boosting it from $440 billion to $780 billion. Most of the expansion, if ultimately implemented, will come directly from the German federal government. To put it another way, German taxpayers are being called upon by their elected officials to pay directly for crises whose roots lie outside their borders, in Greece, Portugal and Ireland.

And yet this is not done in a spirit of generosity; it is done begrudgingly and for the sake of pragmatism. In terms of the EU there is little of the spirit of broad nationalist fraternity that, much of the time, will smooth over the differences between a Californian and a Mississippian. The overall lack of grassroots support for full-blown European integration (the EU came closest to ratifying a constitution in 2005 through national referenda, ultimately settling for a synthesis of previous agreements with the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009) means the pressure to move forward with bold plans such as mutually guaranteed Eurobonds and tightly organized fiscal policy must continue to come from the top downward. And, because the EU’s total budget represents just over one percent of the GDPs of its constituent nations, Eurocrats must continue to negotiate crisis responses in an increasingly strained intergovernmental framework if they want to put enough money behind them. If James Madison and Alexander Hamilton were around today, they would doubtless be experiencing some measure of déjà vu.

In the short run, the EU’s response to the crisis has been faltering, causing markets to doubt policy-makers’ overall capabilities, triggering volatility in bond spreads and stock markets, and chipping away at economic growth. The top-down approach is not proving equal to the task at hand, which is why the European Commission and Parliament are stuck pursuing dubious stop-gap measures (such as an EU-wide tax on financial transactions) and soliciting voluntary contributions from the private sector. In the meantime, people in Germany are looking on See EU on page 12

Obama equally detrimental to Israel talk Katie Howard

T

Guest Columnist

hat the “GOP abuses Israel-Palestine debate” is undeniable, a simple fact, but Emma Lowe’s opinion column in last week’s Miscellany News ignores another plain fact: that the Democratic Party, and certainly President Obama have been equally, if not more, detrimental to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Obama’s stand on Palestine’s recent UN bid contained no “political and social nuance,” only a well-written, pro-Israel defense of the status quo. In his speech to the United Nations (UN) a week ago, on the occasion of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s formal appeal to that international body, President Obama remarked, “We seek a future where Palestinians live in a sovereign state of their own ... it’s precisely because we believe so strongly in the aspirations of the Palestinian people that America has invested so much time and so much effort in the building of a Palestinian state.” The thinly veiled reality of the current administration is that Obama may be interested in investing “time” and “effort,” but not money. Military aid alone to Israel is slated to increase in 2012 by roughly $75 million (for a total of $3.075 billion per year) and will increase by another $25 million in 2013.

By comparison, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza will receive $400.4 million, with only $200 million going to Lebanon and $660 million to Jordan where, after all, the majority of Palestinian refugees have ended up (and as I write this, Congress has decided to freeze $200 million in aid to the Palestinians in response to the UN bid for statehood). In many ways, President Obama has been a greater friend to Israel than former Republican President George W. Bush ever was.

What disturbs me infinitely more than Gov. Rick Perry’s extremely unstudied approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is President

Obama’s seemingly very well studied acquiescence to Israeli demands under the guise of the unbiased peace-broker. While the State of Israel now insists that peace hinges on the inability of the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a “Jewish State”—to do so would be to effectively deny the very identities of Palestinian-Israeli Muslims and Christians living in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel who also consider the land to be holy—as Mahmoud Abbas argued in his speech to the UN, the real issue, which Israel and its supporters refuse to face, is the continued dispossession of the Palestinians for the purpose of extending Israel’s illegal settlements. Therefore, while President Obama remarked that Israelis have lived, since the creation of their state, among the constant threats of their neighbors that they would be wiped off the map, Palestinians live precisely that threat as reality every day, and while Obama is sure to emphasize the undeniably fraught experience of Israeli children who must “live with the fear that other children are taught to hate them,” he neglects to mention the fact that Palestinian children on the other side of the wall live with the same terrible fear.

This habit that our President has of emphasizing the Israeli struggle and neglecting the Palestinians is not merely coincidence and should not be accepted.

The final decision on the part of the Obama administration to veto the formal Palestinian bid for statehood in front of the UN and the world is an emphatic, if well-worded, statement of its fealty to Israel at the expense of the Palestinian people and the principles of human dignity and equality that he made repeated appeals to in his speech. His argument, that peace negotiations can only be lasting if decided upon exclusively between the two parties, ignores the very important and well-known fact that while Israel is

a sovereign state, Palestine is not, and requires the support of international institutions and bodies precisely for this reason. An underlying motive for stalling Palestinian statehood, as it has always been, is to stretch indefinitely the years of Palestinian statelessness, thus expanding indefinitely too Israeli human rights violations, illegal Israeli settlements and ultimately shrink the land that a Palestinian state could ever hope to inhabit.

Islamophobia is at once a deep, very real and extremely superficial explanation for what is a much more complicated geopolitical-historical issue, and merely referencing ignorant American politicians does a disservice to the entirety of what’s really at stake.

Hannah Arendt, a philosopher and a German Jew, herself the victim of ethnic cleansing and statelessness, had the presence of mind to note in 1944 that the premise upon which the Israeli state exists, as a narrow and exclusionary nationalism, is unsustainable. I invite everyone therefore to entertain a “better understanding of the conflict,” to truly support the rights of both states to exist in whatever imperfect form that they may, and to endorse the Palestinian statehood bid—to therefore question President Obama’s position on it, regardless of party, religious or other affiliations. In my opinion, the ideal form that self-determination could take would be a multinational secular one-state solution in which Israelis and Palestinians live in equality and freedom side by side, equal too in the fact that both have suffered, both have committed wrongs, both are historically oppressed peoples. As it is, however, it’s perhaps time that the Gordian Knot was cut and that both sides move forward as separate states, recovering whatever they have left.

—Katie Howard ’12 is a philosophy major.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

How do you ‘have it your way’ in the Retreat?

“With lots of cheese.”

Jansyn Thaw ’13

“Steal all the cups.”

Cassie Gomes ’12

“Bring everything myself.”

Amanda Messenger ’12

“A cheeseburger with pico de gallo.”

Zack Reid ’13

“The gentleman will have the Buffalo Chicken wrap.”

Sam Scarritt-Selman ’12

“Seriously?”

Dan Flynn ’13 —Juliana Halpert, Photography Editor Alanna Okun, Humor & Satire Editor

OPINIONS

Page 12

October 6, 2011

U.S. exacerbates Pakistani conflict European identity no easy thing to forge PAKISTIN continued from page 9 next day, indubitably wary of another day of poring through videos captured by drones circling lazily over the Afghan-Pak border, tracking the movements of what could be a militant but occasionally, a civilian—trying to learn the pattern of their day. Since 2004, the United States military has fired about 270 missiles into Pakistan, killing thousands of militants with what the C.I.A. proudly exclaims as a “minimal” amount of collateral damage. While drone warfare and the resulting casualties remain largely uncovered in U.S. media, they are central to the coverage in Pakistan. Headlines noting civilian casualties dominate our newspapers, and often result in an outbreak of retaliatory suicide bombs around the country, followed by the claim to destruction by some domestic offspring of the Taliban.

Of course, the relatively “marginal” amount of collateral damage goes unmourned abroad. The process of killing is embedded in and authorized by an American obsession with overused and deductive “terrorist” jargon, reducing the messy on-the-ground act of elimination to one that is decidedly sterile and technical. The anonymity of operators, along with the tracking and hunting of militants via camera, seems relatively clean; however, to overlook the implications of this warfare is to be actively steeped in naïveté. Victims, unacknowledged by the C.I.A. but known to their mourners, transform into the fostering of a new strain of anti-Americanism, materialized in a migration to urban centers, removed from the threat of the deathly buzz of an unknown predator. What the United States refuses to realize is that the repercussions of their alleged aerial efficiency trickles over into an expansionist demographic shift that is very real. Surely urban centers provide for better hiding

places than the tribal north, camouflaged within and changing the city landscape, where outrage at what is viewed as a blow to Pakistani sovereignty is subject to the creation of a newly fashioned and stronger hatred. This hatred uproots and reappropriates local grievances with poverty, unemployment and domestic politics to name a few. These grievances accumulate and meld to fashion a newer, greater, overarching label of a foreign, Western threat that allows citizens to rally around a fiery, singular rhetoric of the external threat. This raises an important question: Is terrorism really homegrown, or is it the result of a causal chain, that is rooted in the negligence on the part of the men in the Pentagon?

There is no denial that there is some truth in Admiral Mullen’s recent statement that the Pakistani intelligence is inextricably involved in terrorism on the ground. There is also no denial that the United States has eliminated key al-Qaeda operatives via drone warfare.

What I do deny, however, is the belief that this will help. The capture of Osama bin Laden, albeit symbolic, has achieved nothing. Terrorism is bred not by the allencompassing power of one chief—it is currently being cradled in the arms of a population of 187 million very fragile egos, nursed by a divisive class structure; a shaky, nuclear-armed relationship with India; unresolved border conflicts in Kashmir; a plummeting economy; and a mass exodus of the educated elite. My fear doesn’t lie in the plotting of tribal chiefs, and my joy doesn’t lie in their deaths. What I am scared of is the very real threat of the bodyguard of the governor of Punjab shooting the man at the back of the head because his decidedly liberal and therefore “Western” policies necessitated such a change. What scares me is that there are more rallies to de-

mand his release than there are rallies to demand a death sentence. What I am terrified of is that my mother was a few feet away from a lethal bullet. A man may strap a bomb to his chest or shoot somebody in the brain in the name of Allah, but it is time that we step away from routine ideological assumptions and look carefully at the implications of collateral damage for the sake of a handful of key symbolic assassinations. Killing civilians breeds hatred and cyclically results in a new pattern of internal, domestic assassination and terrorism.

As I drove home on the Grand Trunk Road that afternoon, we stopped at a red light at the Tarnol pass on the way back to Islamabad. It was next to a granite obelisk, 40 feet tall, with a plaque that read, “Erected in the Honor of Brigadier-General John Nicholson, 1863.”

I forgot about it and a few days later, turned to the Internet to search for what he did that deserved a tribute of this degree. The most famous story recounted a night during the Indian Mutiny when Nicholson strode into the British mess tent and said, “I am sorry, gentlemen, to have kept you waiting for your dinner, but I have been hanging your cooks.”

He had been tipped off that the chefs had poisoned the soup. Upon their refusal to taste it, he fed it to a monkey.

With the monkey’s death, he hung the cooks from a tree in the compound without a trial. It appalls me that my country is still tainted with relics of British bragging rights—but more importantly, perhaps the obelisks of Western triumph are created today for the very same reason, for symbolic victory, for headlines, for Time Magazine covers and trophy corpses.

Pakistan too, demands a trial.

EU continued from page 11 with apprehension at the metamorphosis of the EU from simply an optimum currency area into what they more and more perceive to be a “transfer union.”

If the top-down approach has been so problematic, might there be a path toward a bottom-up, grassroots approach to European politics? Europe’s fantastic cultural and linguistic diversity will always be one of its greatest assets, but bridging those gaps to achieve a fuller political union will also prove one of its greatest challenges.

There have been attempts at forging a European identity similar to the American one, based on unifying symbols and festive events; the EU has adopted a “national anthem” of sorts, “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; uses Europa, a figure from Greek mythology, on much of its print material; and observes an annual Europe Day on the May 9, celebrating the perpetuation of European peace and unity. But these efforts have all begun at the institutional level, and do not translate into an organic culture. American traditions such as Thanksgiving, Independence Day and Memorial Day sprung up within communities and spread gradually through the country; eventually they would come to be legitimated and commemorated by the federal government. But this process, along with all the other countless aspects of American culture, took decades

—Noor Mir ’12 is a political science major.

upon decades to become what has been variously called a “melting pot” or a “salad bowl.”

Might citizens of the EU someday come to think of themselves primarily as European, proudly connected to the histories, languages and cultures of their home states but still profoundly cognizant of their Europeanness—sharing the legacy of a union created to lock away the horrors of history’s greatest wars? Will they someday cease to be wary of a “transfer union”—which is, by the way, exactly what the United States has been for its lifetime?

All of this, if it happens, will take decades to occur, and will require the coalescence of 500 million minds. A full-fledged constitution probably wouldn’t hurt.

The more pertinent question, it seems, is whether or not the EU will be able to survive the next few years, or even months.

For now it is up to the technocrats in the Commission and Parliament to display sufficient conviction toward European unity to weather the current crisis. If they fail to do so, the consequences could be economically disastrous.

If they succeed, the European dream may yet continue to have life in it. Maybe we on the other side of the pond could learn something about the concept of unity as we watch it all happen.

—Lane Kisonak ’13 is a political science major. He is currently studying at the University of Edinburgh.

Crossword by Jonathan Garfinkel ACROSS 1. Common food preservative 4. Tree juice 7. Air vehicle 12. Listening vehicle 13. Soccer chant 14. Cowardly 15. Meth suffix 16. Lawyer’s charge 17. Guacamole ingredient 18. Comedy Central wingdings

20. Homes on wheels, briefly 21. TV receiver 22. One side of a 1973 court decision 23. Gal 27. Mag worker 30. Radar signal 31. Abortion stance 34. Yoda, for one 35. Charged bit 36. Heart and soul 40. 100 years: Abbr.

Answers to last week’s puzzle

41. Iowa straw poll locale 43. Negotiation deadlock 45. Indian bread 46. Finger wagger’s comment 48. Just 49. Job ad abbr.

50. The same, to Caesar 54. “Hip Hop is Dead” rapper 55. Pacific weather phenomenon 57. Everlasting 62. Broke a fast 63. Yahoo! competitor 64. Cleaning instrument 65. IV to III, maybe 66. Narita Airport, for short 67. Teen affliction 68. Marching insect 69. Te ___ DOWN 1. Lincoln feature 2. Site of McCain’s imprisonment 3. Club finance officer: Abbr.

4. 31-down, to Verdi 5. Pub brews 6. First in print?

7. Not con 8. Fond du ___, Wis. 9. Beautiful Gardner 10. Simpsons neighbor 11. British musician Brian 14. Pharmacy chain 17. Say with conviction 19.”Falling Up” author Silverstein 20. Milne’s baby marsupial 22. G.P.S. options: Abbr.

23.Great Society inits.

24. Baldwin, Guinness, et al.

25. Cole slaw and fries 26. Subject for a chiropractor 28. What immortals never do 29. “No ___, ands, or buts” 31. Rachmaninoff’s instrument 32.Like M, L, or XL 33. 7’1’’ former NBA star 37. “Just do it” brand 38. Country music station 39. Mini-albums, for short 42. Mets and Jets home on TV 44. Related (to)

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

46. Bluish green 47. 2006 Rihanna hit 51. Late Princess of Wales 52. Huge, poetically 53. Verdi’s very 54. 60’s war zone 55. George Orwell’s alma mater 56. March fast?

57. Wall-E’s counterpart 58. Bronzed 59. Heart meas.

60. Ukr. neighbor 61. Fiend 62. Simile’s center

October 6, 2011

HUMOR & SATIRE

Page 13

OPINIONS

Your junior year abroad decision, made easy!

Michael Mestitz Travel Expert

Weekly Calendar: 10/6 - 10/12 Thursday, 10/6 10 a.m. Study Abroad Fair. I mean, I guess you could go to this if you’re an overachiever who wants “information” or whatever, but the above chart should cover all your bases just fine. Villard Room.

1 p.m. Student Flu Clinic. Attendance is mandatory if you spend any amount of time within a one-mile radius of my respiratory system. That means you, Masked Art History Sniffler. Baldwin.

by Alanna Okun, Humor & Satire Editor

just so you can make pointed comments about your spiritually inferior friends’ cheeseburgers at the DC that night. CC MPR. 10 p.m. Dayglo Toga Party. Good thing this event is finally happening; I wasn’t sure what to do with all that extra paint, bedsheet and dignity I had lying around. College Center.

Saturday, 10/8 7:45 p.m. Yom Kippur Break Fast. You’ve earned that cheeseburger, you beautiful sin-free mensch. CC MPR.

Tuesday, 10/11 3 p.m. Tea. Instead of wearing rompers and crop tops that make them look like urchins, all those waify girls in your Urban Studies seminar have switched to oversized sweaters that make them look like urchins. Rose Parlor.

1:30 p.m. Lecture: Mardges Bacon. I originally read that as “Mardi Gras Bacon.” Whoever is in charge of planning my five-year reunion, please take note. Taylor 203.

3 p.m. Tea. How to tell that it’s finally autumn at Vassar.

Rose Parlor.

Sunday, 10/9

8 p.m. FWA Dessert Cabaret. Combining two things that Vassar has in woefully short supply: musical theater and food that makes you fat. Aula.

12 p.m. Harvest Fest. If your Arlington Street Fair date with that chemistry hottie went well, now’s your chance to ramp it up and show off how good you are at eating doughnuts dangling off of tree limbs (if you know what I mean). Quad.

Friday, 10/7

Monday, 10/10

9:30 a.m. Harvest Health Fair. Whenever I see “harvest” and “health” in the same phrase, I instinctively cover my internal organs that fetch the highest price on the black market. College Center.

3 p.m. Tea. Your housemate has started using organic, locallyproduced apple cider as a mixer instead of Coke Zero. Rose Parlor.

3 p.m. Tea. The fire alarm in your building goes off at least twice per night because the stoners are too afraid of freezing their little toesies outside in the cold. Upside: you get a full panoramic view of exactly who is sleeping over with whom. Rose Parlor.

3 p.m. Tea. The squirrels look extra murderous whenever you walk by nibbling a slice of buffalo chicken pizza. They’re stockpiling for winter and they don’t care how many students they take down in order to survive. Rose Parlor.

5 p.m. Yom Kippur Pre-Fast Dinner. It’s totally worth it to fast

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

10 p.m. Trivia Night. Question #247: What is the name of the phenomenon whereby all your professors make every one of your midterms due at the exact same nanosecond? Mug.

Wednesday, 10/12

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October 6, 2011

HYPE, Hip Hop 101 collaborate with music, dance, DJs Anveshi Guha Guest Reporter

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Courtesy of Hype

assar’s main outlets for hip-hop appreciation and performance, dance troupe HYPE and Hip Hop 101 are uniting together to produce a high-energy music and dance event: HYPE Hop, set to take place in the Villard Room from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. on Oct. 8.

“It’s an opportunity to experience musical preferences and an aesthetic that aren’t necessarily otherwise represented on campus,” explained co-President of Hip Hop 101 Shosana Pierce-Wright ’13.

This is the first event hosted by the only recently VSA-certified group HYPE. Hip Hop 101 has been around since 2004, and has served as a mainstay on campus for uniting students, faculty and community members.

HYPE is an all-inclusive hip-hop dance group. They have no auditions, but instead hold general body meetings in Kenyon Hall for any Vassar community member interested in learning some serious dance moves. The group has a slightly more intense schedule for performances, as they must practice a choreographed dance created by the executive board and a performance team.

Similarly, Hip Hop 101 devotes itself to the performance of hip hop, working to showcase four tenets of hip-hop culture: DJing, MCing, break dancing and graffiti. The group puts on the popular fall event Four Pillars, a celebration of Hip Hop History Month, as well as the spring’s Throwback Jam, during which an artist popular back in the day and an up-and-coming artist each get the chance to throw down their moves.

“We plan events and discuss issues that concern the hip-hop community and tangential issues the community is interested in,” said Pierce-Wright. The group also seeks to

HYPE, above, performs a dance routine in the Villard Room. The group, along with Hip Hop 101, is sponsoring HYPE Hop, which will feature both student and professional DJs and dance performances. break down barriers between Vassar and the larger Poughkeepsie community by bringing in groups from local organizations, such as M*Power dance studio, and provides a welcoming environment for both new and old hiphop fans. HYPE has performed at Four Pillers and Throwback Jam, in addition to other campus events such as Gays of Our Lives, the recent Arlington Street Fair and several hip-hop Theater events.

Past events involving either Hip Hop 101 or HYPE have focused predominately on the performance aspect, but this time the event is largely DJ

driven. The event planners hope to reach an audience beyond hip-hop enthusiasts to students who enjoy many different genres of music.

“It’s solely a place for people who enjoy listening to music and enjoy dancing to the music,” said HYPE member Sienna Brown ’13. It is first major collaboration between the two groups, and was co-planned from its very start. “ HYPE and Hip Hop 101 decided to collaborate because both organizations have had a history of working together in the past,” Brown wrote in an emailed statement. “Both of us have similar interests as far as programming goes and we

have overlapping goals in regards to our mission statements,” she said, adding, “The process of collaborating on this event has been an amazing experience.”

The event will begin with a two-hour set featuring the musical styling of two student DJs, DJ Dro (Alejandro Montoya ’12) and DJ Papi Chuylo (Sal Costanzo ’12). Once midnight strikes, HYPE will put on a performance. “We will be dancing to a mix of current hip-hop songs,” Brown explained. She also noted a new facet to their performance at this event.

“We have the largest performance group that we have ever had, with 14 new members!” she wrote. “I am extremely excited about the performance because it will be a chance to showcase the skills of all of the new people who have decided to become a part of our group, as well as our veterans.”

Mara Gerson ’13, a new member of HYPE this semester, expressed her excitement about the upcoming performance: “I’m so thrilled to be dancing again, especially with such a welcoming and talented group of people,” she explained, adding, “HYPE creates a really safe space where it’s easy to have confidence and put your guard down. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that the music is totally awesome and you get to wear crazy outfits.”

Following HYPE’s performance, off-campus DJ TGIF—who played before at the Throwback Jam, Four Pillars and Computing and Information Services’ CIS Block Party—will return to close up the night’s final two hours.

The constant dancing, DJing and HYPE performance will keep HYPE Hop full of energy all night long. Pierce-Wright explained,“The focus of the event is on the music and providing everyone with a space to come together, listen to dope music and express themselves through dance.”

I Dance on Wednesday Student Band Showcase Nights a new Mug feature a networking opportunity Jack Owen Reporter

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assar College Entertainment (ViCE) has long organized weekly Wednesday night events in the Mug, but this year it is going for a more eclectic angle.

“My freshman year every Wednesday was ’80s night, then the theme changed to ’90s.

It was typically the same crowd every week but with a different theme,” said ViCE Publicity co-Chair Eli Schutze ’12. While these themed parties did provide a fun space for students to dance during the school week, in the desire to feature more student talent, ViCE decided to change its Wednesday Mug event to the appropriately titled I Dance on Wednesdays.

“We decided this year to provide a space for student talent in the dance music genre. Student DJs will be able to play without having to wait for all-campus parties to roll around and hope they get the gig,” Schutze said.

I Dance on Wednesdays, in contrast to prior Wednesday Mug nights, is more experimental, showcasing a wide variety of student DJs and performers and allowing DJs to play from a broader range of music genres.

“It’s great in that it gives new DJs an opportunity to practice and do what they do,” said Dan Flynn ’13, a DJ at Vassar since his freshman year. Flynn has teamed up with Chris Martel ’12, forming iAy Que Wow!, a “world dance fusion” DJing duo. iAy Que Wow! performed at I Dance on Wednesdays this past week on Sept. 28.

“We hope that it would be a nice break from studying or work that people could just come in the middle of the week and dance like crazy and have a great time,” said Schutze.

By Wednesday, many students feel stressed by work and need a chance to decompress, and ViCE is hoping that this new event will provide a good venue for that. I Dance on Wednesdays is also fitting for any students who find the Mug’s weekend events to be too packed and overwhelming.

“Of course, it doesn’t get as crowded as it would Friday or Saturday night, but that just

makes it more pleasant because you’re not bumping into people and it’s not gross,” said Schutze with a laugh. “It’s very ‘dance like no one’s watching’ because a lot of the times no one is watching,” Schutze added.

Wally Fisher ’12, a die hard I Dance on Wednesday attendee, testified to this quality of the event’s atmosphere: “Although I’m down to partake in the sweaty mess that defines weekend Mug visits, they don’t really allow me to move around as spastically as I would like,” he explained. Because Fisher so religiously attends the mid-week dance party, he will be giving DJing a stab with Janet Buehl ’12 on Nov. 9. “We go by DJ Queen of Sweden, though we’re decidedly amateurs.

My favorites to draw from include Divine, the Ethel Merman Disco Album, Freemasons’ remixes, Annie Lennox, Cazwell, Gossip and, of course, Beyoncé,” he said.

Additionally, I Dance on Wednesdays creates a good scene for students interested in organizing dance events to check out student DJs to feature. “Especially if you’re from an org. or are a dorm leader and want a student DJ, this is a good way to find out who is doing it and what genres they play,” Schutze added.

“We’ve gotten a lot of interest and have been filled up for except maybe two Wednesdays this semester,” said Schutze. But student performers are still encouraged to contact ViCE if they would like to perform.

“We’re pretty much open to any student DJs and whoever gets in touch with us,” said Schutze, adding, “We usually ask them to send us a sample playlist or track if they’re already an established DJ and have recorded something, just to make sure that it fits the dance description,” she explained.

ViCE is aiming for a weekly event that blends fun “danceability” with student musical experimentation in a highly non-judgemental setting.

“It’s underground, it’s dark, there are crazy lights, and you can just go and have fun and do your own thing,” summarized Schutze.

“And no unsolicited advances from anyone,” she laughed. “It’s just a great de-stresser.”

Ana Santiago

Guset Reporter

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he steady beat of the drum is constant as a pulse resonates from the end of the player’s drumsticks. The fingers of the electric guitar player race each other across the neck of the guitar, plucking each string with intense precision. The bodies of each of the audience members sway in rhythm with the instruments. Live concerts have such an ability to bring people together and create an energetic atmosphere.

On Saturday Oct. 8, this scene will hit the Mug with the first student band showcase of the semester in which indie music will be explored.

The showcase celebrates the diverse music and students alike on campus. This is the first of many band showcases during the year, and each will focus on a different genre of music. Showcase committee member and Facts and Figures band member Andy Dymond ’12 described the eclectic nature of shows in years past, mentioning everything from rock to funk reggae: “We do everything that is on campus. Any musician who wants to play showcases can. If we can find other artists for them to collaborate with we try to get them together.”

Showcases are open to anyone who wants to play music and obviously anyone who is ready to dance. This particular show will feature a wide range of instruments including electric guitars, base, drums and sax. The show will feature mostly senior groups including Calamity Sam, Slick Getaway, The Facts and Figures, Painted Zeroes and more. This showcase will also include the musical stylings of Sam Plotkin ’14 and his band called Mountains on the Moon.

Dymond states that it is important for student bands to have an outlet to perform on campus: “Student musicians are talented and they should have all the resources they can get from a school like this in order to play.” He finds that this particular format is unfortunately undersupported by the Music Department, a reality that caused students to originally form the student band organization. Not only can these students display their musical abilities to receptive audiences made up completely of their peers, but the showcases also allow for musi-

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

cians to interact and network with musicians in a fun and laid-back environment.

When asked what his favorite part of the showcase is, Dymond responded definitively, ”It’s what I love to do. You get to watch people play music and you get to dance and have a good time. It’s like any concert. They are always fun.” According to Dymond showcases are special because they are combine the appeal of several different types of shows on campus. “[They’re] about the same size as a jazz show but you know the people who are playing. You have at least seen them around.”

This concert put on by Vassar students will appeal to music lovers and anyone who enjoys the thrilling experience of dancing to live music. Not only do the showcases feature students from Vassar, but the committee also encourages students involved with bands off-campus to perform. The showcase allows the opportunity for students to open for professional artists, including such bands as Netherfriends, a self proclaimed “bastard-psych-pop-catchy as hell one-man band” that the committee hopes to bring in the future.

Dymond’s fellow committee member and band member, Samuel Caravaglia ’12 stated, “I always love hearing other band’s songs. You’d be surprised at the ingenuity of some of the songs they write. The songwriters at Vassar have an acute knack for stylistic crossbreeding.

For example, I have a song that has a lot of punk in it, but also a lot of ’50s pop. Painted Zeros has a song with a kind of indie guitar rock thing, but with a really tight dance beat.”

These showcases allow the students to show off their talents and express themselves through their music. According to Caravaglia, those who play and those who listen engage in a productive symbiotic relationship: “Musicians need audiences to fully realize their songs, and when successful, the right song sung to the right audience can destroy the silent boundary between people. Musicians won’t be the only ones who get a lot out of this experience; the audience will also gain exposure to some of the great bands on campus, not to mention get an outlet to let loose and cut a rug.

October 6, 2011

ARTS

Kaleidoscope series gem of interdisciplinary analysis Matthew Hauptman

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Guest Reporter

Mardges Bacon to speak on modernism, Art Library

Courtesy of Media Relations

ut an archivist, art historian, classicist and theologian into the same room and, if you can, put a Northern Renaissance painting before them, then let them discuss and pick apart it. Students and faculty will have the chance to see these very four in action on Thursday, Oct. 6 at 7 p.m. when this semester’s Kaleidoscope lecture takes place.

Kaleidoscope is a lecture series held once a semester that brings a group of Vassar professors—all from different departments—to discuss a work of art from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center’s diverse and impressive collection. Thursday’s speakers will include Sarah Gibson Blanding Professor of Art Susan Kuretsky ’63, Professor of Greek and Roman Studies J. Bert Lott, Professor of Religion Marc Michael Epstein, and Head of Special Collections and Adjunct Associate Professor of History Ron Patkus. The program will also include recitations by Vassar students of the biblical account of the first seven days of the creation in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and English. A reception in the Art Center atrium will follow.

The lecture series began just two years ago when Andrew W. Mellon Coordinator of Academic Affairs Diane Butler arrived on campus. As an academic coordinator, one of Butler’s many responsibilities is to make the Loeb’s collection accessible and relevant to all students and professors, no matter what their field may be. “Our life is a barrage of fast imagery,” she explained. Too often, Butler explains, people do not look closely enough at the objects in front of them, even in a museum. Kaleidoscope will give students and professors a golden opportunity to do just that: look closely, thoroughly, at a work of art that lends itself to countless modes of inquiry. She chose for this semester’s lecture series a painting by Northern Renaissance artist Joos van Cleve (1490-1540) called “St. Jerome in His Study,” circa 1530.

As a classicist, Lott will look at the painting from an historical vantage point. He will take into account the central issues of the day during Jerome’s lifetime (347-420 A.D.), such as the Christianization of the Roman Empire and, by extension, Christianity’s transition from a criminal to state religion. As for Jerome himself, the painting’s very subject, he was a highly learned man whose most profound legacy was the Volgate Bible, a Latin translation of the Old and New Testaments, which were originally written in Hebrew and Greek, respectively. By translating these works into Latin, Jerome made these holy texts far more accessible than they had ever

been previously.

Jerome’s image as a tireless scholar eventually became a model for emulation in Europe starting around the 16th century. His popularity during the Renaissance had much to do with the religious turmoil that typified this period. The end of the 15th century saw a dramatic shift in expectations regarding the path to salvation. Theologians and ordinary citizens alike believed that they would do better not to count on the rituals of the Catholic Church and to put greater emphasis instead on the word of God as presented in the Bible.

Jerome’s ability to translate the Bible into Latin—a language in which Renaissance scholars and theologians would have been well versed—opened up the possibility of translating the Bible into modern European languages. As Kuretsky points out, “Jerome is often called a patron saint of the Renaissance because he made possible—albeit indirectly—the democratization of knowledge and accessibility to the Bible that helped characterize 16th-century Europe.” In her discussion of the painting, Kuretsky will assess van Cleve’s painting as an object, both in its materiality and visual vocabulary.

Epstein plans to discuss the iconography of van Cleve’s work—that is, the symbolism and meaning of the objects surrounding Jerome. Many scholars have noted that paintings from this period often include a vast array of domestic, household items that also function as religious signifiers, or what art historian Erwin Panofsky has famously called “disguised symbolism.” By incorporating disguised symbolism into their work, Renaissance painters showed their viewers how they could lead their lives as good Christians in the day-to-day.

Patkus will consider the depiction of books in van Cleve’s work. The placement of books, the purpose of looking at books in a painting like this one, the presentation of books in relation to the composition as a whole; these are some of the core issues on Patkus’ mind and by extension, some of the issues that he will discuss. Like Lott, Patkus is also interested in the period during which Jerome was alive—specifically, the materials that were used to make books. Patkus will consider this in relation to the rise of the printing press that became so paramount during the Renaissance.

The four participating professors all agree that this event is a terrific chance to showcase Vassar’s unique interdisciplinary approach to learning through an exchange of knowledge: “I have no idea what I’ll learn, and that’s the wonderful part of it,” Kuretsky said.

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On Tuesday, Oct. 11, Matthews Distinguished University Professor at the School of Architecture at Northeastern University Mardges Bacon will give a lecture on the design of the Art Library, above.

Burcu Noyan

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Guest Reporter

n Tuesday, June 20, 1938, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York opened to the public an exhibition of 16 architectural designs submitted in competition for a proposed art center in Wheaton College, Norton, Mass. At the opening, interior designer of the Vassar College Art Library and former member of the Vassar Art Department, John McAndrew (1904-1978), made a speech that laid the groundwork for modernist architecture arguing for the development of innovative, organic design in institutions of higher learning.

On Tuesday Oct. 11, Matthews Distinguished University Professor at the School of Architecture at Northeastern University Mardges Bacon, an architectural historian, will give a lecture on McAndrew’s modernist design of the Vassar College Art Library.

In an excerpt from the MoMa’s online press archives, McAndrew explained, “Recent college building in America has been chiefly pseudo-Gothic and pseudo-Colonial. Neither style is fitted to solve contemporary problems.”

McAndrews then declared his wishes for original architectural design, declaring, “Let our college building committees cease their nostalgic romancing with times and places not our own, and let our architects cease seeking ‘inspiration’ in their libraries and try to meet contemporary requirements with honest con-

temporary buildings.”

The lecture is a follow-up to Bacon’s previous lecture given in November 2009 in celebration of the Art Library’s re-opening after its renovation. Art Librarian Tom Hill said, “This lecture will be focused particularly on the design of the Art Library, whereas the other one was mainly a talk about the opening of the Art Library,” adding, “Since then, Bacon became very interested in the design of the Library and had much chance to do in-depth research.”

The previous lecture was titled “A Conversation on Modernism” and had several speakers, including the principle architect behind the renovation of the Art Library, Charles Platt, and Keeper of Furniture, Textiles and Fashion for the Victoria & Albert Museum in London Christopher Wilk ’76.

“Bacon talked a lot about the architect John McAndrew, who designed the Art Library in 1935-37, and what the Art Department was like at Vassar when McAndrew was teaching here,” Hill said. “She told us about the circle of art historians, mostly from Harvard [University], who taught here and knew one another and the people in the MoMA. This was a very vibrant place considering what was going on in the art world at the time, and it was only natural that McAndrew went on to become a curator for the MoMA.” Professor of Architecture History Nicholas See LIBRARY on page 16

Sophia Harvey appreciates obscure, ordinary in film Emma Daniels

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Reporter

hen asked about her favorite movie, Assistant Professor of Film Sophia Harvey didn’t have a definitive answer. She named a couple of Southeast Asian documentaries—in particular, Tan Pinpin. a Singaporean film, and Mysterious Object, a Thai film.

“I also really like The Big Lebowski,” she added. “My favorites aren’t high art. I don’t do high art; I work in popular genres, like horror, for example.”

Accordingly, Harvey, who teaches a wide variety of film classes at Vassar—ranging from World Cinema after 1945 and Indian National Cinema to senior seminars like Cyborgs in Popular Culture—focuses primarily in her research on popular Southeast Asian films, and within that region she often discusses its range of horror films.

Harvey’s interests stem from her cross-cultural childhood background. Although she was born in Singapore, she went to an American high school in Germany. Harvey’s experience growing up was extremely influential in leading her into her the field of film.

She chose film as her course of study after helping produce her high school’s weekly news

and game show that initially piqued her interest in media and media production. She furthered her interest in the field with an internship in Singapore.

“The spark was planted in high school, but when I interned at national archives in Singapore when I was around 18 or 19, I realized there was a real dearth of critical lit or any kind of history of the moving image culture in Singapore from colonial times to independence in 1965, and it put me on a path towards a Ph.D,” she said. “I wanted to contribute in a critical way to the cinema of my country.”

Her interest in horror was obvious from an earlier age. She became interested after she watched an Indonesian film in the genre, Sundelbolong.

“It was a very foundational moment that made an indelible impression,” she said. “I’ve made it a subject of study.”

Currently, Harvey is working on a book analyzing contemporary cinema in Singapore released from 2000 to 2007. She is looking in particular at how some of the films that have emerged in this period deal with phenomenology, or how these films explore the senses, as well as life and living in the city state of Singapore.

“The films that I’m particularly drawn to explore cinema as a tactile practice—that is, exploring cinema as a sense of touch. Others that interest me have a creative sound design, privileging hearing as opposed to just a sense of sight,” Harvey noted.

Harvey’s other main research project is larger in scope. It is focused on how cinema can be a space and site for healing. She is studying in particular the cross sections between film and various other art forms, like the use of dance and music by Cambodians to explore the genocide of their own people.

“These art forms act as a space for Cambodians to visually and narratively explore impact of genocide on themselves and their families,” Harvey said.

One focus of the project is the Cambodian diaspora in the United States, and the resulting art that has emerged from Cambodian immigrants. She is studying Cambodian-American documentaries, Cambodian-American rap and also the resurgence of Khmer (Cambodian) dance, in particular in a dance academy in California that’s looking to re-explore and reintroduce Khmer dances, many of which didn’t survive the genocide.

Both projects relate to the classes she teach-

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

es and her genres of interest. One section in her course Screening Southeast Asia, for example, explores cinematic representations of trauma and memory.

“We spend three weeks engaging with the period of Khmer Rouge and genocide through not only the study of the Cambodian-American diaspora but also the study of cultural production from within the country of Cambodia,” Harvey said.

“One of the more potent forms or genres that has emerged in terms of dealing or engaging with this trauma has been horror so I’ve screened some Cambodian horror films that deal with that narrative,” she furthered.

Screening Southeast Asia is not the only class where Harvey employs her specialties; she also screens Southeast Asian films in her other classes, and in those same classes is notably knowledgeable about all types of film on a global level. Her classes are both popular and accessible.

Spencer Tilger ’14, a current student of Harvey’s World Cinema After 1945 class, has only positive things to say about the professor.

“She’s really smart and engaging, and good at placing films in a historical, cultural and societal context,” Tilger said.

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October 6, 2011

Bacon covers Utopian world of Art Library Raphael a rhyming Renaissance man Charlacia Dent

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Assistant Arts Editor

t was in fifth grade that Ade Raphael ’12 discovered he had a special way with words.

An early creative writer, he would turn his dreams into fantastical stories about Egypt or spend the entire day writing poetry. However, during his senior year in high school he realized that he needed to be a poet. “I found my voice and I felt like it was something I had to do, to pay homage to the people who came before me. It was my first way to get my thoughts out,” said Raphael.

Now a senior and English major at Vassar, the natural artist has found multiple outlets for creative expression since his early epiphany. The Virgin Islander is a frequent, wellknown rapper on campus who goes by the name of Ade-Ra (Ra being the ancient Egyptian sun god), a dancer who helped found the on-campus dance crew HYPE, a poet, a nude model for the art department, and an actor.

Like his idol Bruce Lee, Raphael uses his art to navigate and understand life. “For Lee living was an art and you go about life trying to express yourself through movement and everything comes out as art. He would always talk about going with the flow and understanding your direction,” Raphael explained.

Similar to his ideologies about life, Raphael’s work reflects many of his inquiries. In his lyrical writing, many of his pieces grapple with issues of religion.

“A lot of my raps are influenced by myths and religious ties. I want to break down some of these religious symbols in my work because at the end of the day they are all the same. I don’t see any religion as being the gospel of all truth and anyone can argue that their religion is right,” Raphael explained.

However, one symbol that Raphael has grown to love, through his long fascination with ancient Egyptian life, and has tattooed on his right bicep, is an ankh. Also known as the key of life, the symbol is an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph that means eternal life.

“I feel like the Egyptians knew so much more about life, death, identities and science than we do now,” Raphael said. “It’s almost like we are trying to catch up.”

Raphael has also found expression through

Alex Schlesinger/The Miscellany News

LIBRARY continued from page 15 Adams, who arranged the lectures by Bacon, pointed out some of the design aspects of the Library that Bacon mentioned in her previous lecture. “Bacon told us about where the striking colors of the Library came from. … Why bright blue? Why are all the rooms in different colors?

There was a careful program behind it all. The bright blue of the columns and of the bookshelves become the sky holding up the place, and when you’re pulling out books, it’s as though you’re pulling out knowledge from this notion of a sky,” said Adams. “Very poetic in a sense.”

McAndrew, the first curator of architecture and industrial art for the MoMA, taught architectural history and drafting at Vassar from 1931 to 1937. His experience as an educator gave him a deep and practical understanding of the needs of the students and the department. His aesthetic vision as an architect gave him the tools to carve an interior design that has value and meaning as an art form and also a design that conforms to a high degree of functionality.

Bacon offered a few comments on the interior design in the light of her upcoming lecture. She explained in an emailed statement, “The Art Library is among the earliest North American libraries shaped by the design principles of the modern movement. Largely stripped of historicist references, its interior emphasizes light and color, industrial shelving and Bauhaus-inspired furniture and fixtures,” adding, “Treating the walls as surface planes, McAndrew employs the rich color palette of the 1930s, which connects his architecture to modernist painting. Through its use of earthbound colors and glass blocks to provide privacy but still allow for the transmission of light, the Art Library embodies John McAndrew’s aspirations to synthesize modernist ideas.”

The talk will address what modernism is all about, how it came to apply to McAndrew’s design of the Art Library and why. “There’s a whole new worldview that came with the industrial and modern age, as to what the society could be like. The class structure was to be knocked out and people were supposed to collaboratively go into the future, with scientific ideas in mind, and based on education,” Hill explained. This utopian worldview is exactly what McAndrew’s Art Library design embraced in 1937 and what it continues to embrace today.

Ade Raphael ’12, pictured above, founded the Vassar dance troupe HYPE his freshman year. An aspring poet, his pieces seek to navigate and understand life, often grappling with issues of religion. dance. His mother—a published poet, dance instructor and dancer who has performed on and off Broadway—has supported Raphael and inspired him in many of his creative endeavors.

When Raphael first came to Vassar, he and a group of friends had auditioned for FlyPeople and were unsuccessful in making the cut.

However, this disheartening setback led to Raphael’s future involvement in the founding and success of dance group HYPE. “A lot of people that are currently a part of HYPE had the similar feeling that there was not a space for them to dance. We started talking and formed a group to audition for Vassar’s Best Dance Crew that year. Our original name was Act Bad and Hype Shit Up, but it got shortened to HYPE,” Raphael said laughingly.

Now, nearly four years later, the group has carved a space and name for themselves at Vassar College. Shortly after making their appearance at Vassar’s Best Dance Crew, they

were asked to perform at a Hip Hop 101 event when they decided that they wanted to become an organization. Today, you can catch Raphael in Kenyon Hall leading a room full of dancers in his latest pieces of choreography.

“I almost feel like I have this disease now where I can’t not dance. When I hear a song or a beat, something is always moving. I have to move, it just hits me so hard,” Raphael said.

Raphael plans to continue as a rap artist after graduation. He would also like to be a published poet. But first he plans to stay around Poughkeepsie next year and be on the Starkey Project, a documentary web series that will air on TV. The reality show is funded by the Starkey Hearing Foundation, a group that raises money for the international distribution of hearing aids.

“In terms of how I view the world, I just like to do the ‘what ifs.’ I have a loose relationship with reality. The world is a crazy place, and you have to just do what feels right,” Raphael said.

Ephemeral structures construct campus inclusivity SUKKOT continued from page 1 artists have worked in collaboration with the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life and the Vassar Jewish Union to develop a design that not only abides by the confines of traditional sukkah parameters, but also serves as an aesthetically innovative approach to the traditional structure.

On Monday, Oct. 10 at 5 p.m. there will be an installation ceremony held at the sukkah site followed by a panel discussion in Rocky 200. Additionally, there will be a Sukkot dinner and service on Wednesday, Oct. 12; however, all are encouraged to use the sukkot whenever and however they wish during their two-week installation.

According to Sam Shin ’12, one of the artists working on the project, “The goal is to make Sukkot a much bigger deal for the whole community, not just the Jewish community.” Although Sukkot is no doubt an intrinsically religious holiday, the hope is that such large and centrally located structures will facilitate unity and togetherness among different groups regardless of religious background.

Assistant Director of Religious and Spiritual Life Rena Blumenthal explained that in light of the College’s anniversary, the event will highlight the history of Jewish life at Vassar and also reflect the broad spectrum of Jewish experiences on campus: “The fragile shelter of the sukkah is an apt metaphor for the ways in which the Jewish experience at Vassar has been at times quite vibrant and secure, and at other times very fragile and isolating,” she said.

Though the Bayit has its own sukkah and

annually hosts Sukkot services, the Vassar Sukkot Project 5772 allows students to creatively engage with the custom in a large and inclusive way. Because each sukkah is located near a prominent campus dining facility, the structures welcome all passersby to share a meal under the shelter and participate in a religious activity without necessarily needing the spirituality or belief system to back it up.

President of the Vassar Jewish Union Benny Witovsky ’12 explained the impetus for the project: “The idea developed last fall, it is based on a program that was held in New York City called Sukkot City in which artists were invited to design innovative, funky sukkot. We decided that it would be interesting to try that here.”

Blumenthal joined forces with Adjunct Professor of Art Tyler Rowland to adapt the project to Vassar. Instead of the competition format of Sukkot City, the Vassar Sukkot Project 5772 emphasis collaboration between students, faculty and campus groups and gives studio art majors the realworld experience of a large-scale commission.

Kristin Regler ’12 testified to this unique feature of the independent study, declaring decidedly, “This is the most important class I’ve had in the Art Department. We actually have a client. There is such a real world application.” Shin also shared this sentiment. She explained, “We’re dealing with non-negotiable deadlines, we’re gathering large groups of people to work together.”

Perhaps the most meaningful part of the project, however, is the imagination with which the artists approached the daunting Sukkot com-

mission. According to studio arts major Noah Lourie-Mosher ’12, “It’s interesting especially because the religious text and laws some people see as strictly a way of life can be adapted into something so beautiful and free.”

Like Lourie-Mosher explained, the artistic choices made by the group were in many ways informed by Jewish tradition. For one, the larger sukkah that will be installed between Lathrop and ACDC creates a crescent shape framed by seven walls, a symbolically recurring number in Judaism. Additionally, a Star of David shape forms the crescent’s center where the enclosure is tallest and most open.

Shin detailed the reasons for choosing such a curved form: “The whole idea of the crescent is that it blocks off the buildings and opens up towards the trees. The view erases the chaos and makes it a private space on a huge scale.”

Materials used for the sukkah construction also carry heavy undertones of the Jewish community. Historically, Sukkot were built as ephemeral structures during harvests when there was little time to travel from the field to the homestead for meals and sleeping. Thus, the walls of the larger sukkah are made almost entirely of tall, delicate reeds harvested from the creek in front of Skinner Hall. These vertical organic forms adorn the sturdy steel frame of the structure, creating a dichotomy between notions of the light and strong, the fragile and the sturdy.

A smaller sukkah that will stand near the Retreat will be made of a series of wooden frames, creating somewhat of an accordion structure.

Student artist Matthew Kramer ’13 had the idea

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

to enhance the frames with intertwining string webs connected by a perimeter of nails. “The large structures have these linear lines, but the small structures then have these lines bending.

It’s a beautiful echo. There will also be hemp on the outside wrapping around the whole structure. The idea of tying together again goes into the notion of community,” explained Shin.

Not only will members of the Vassar and Poughkeepsie community be invited to participate in using the Sukkot, they are also welcomed to help reconstruct it for future use. “After we take it down, we’ll color code each piece and draw a map, basically explaining how to put it back together. After assembling the skeleton, you’ll only need to harvest more reeds,” explained Lourie-Mosher.

Studio art and biology double major Sierra Starr ’12 worked in conjunction with the Biology Department to decide on a plant species in need of a mass harvest due to its invasive presence on campus. For the upcoming Oct. 10 installation, reeds are still needed to complete the Sukkot. Those interested in gathering materials are encouraged to contact one of the students involved with the project.

More critical to the Vassar Sukkot Project 5772 than its spiritual roots is the collaboration it has fostered between departments, students and faculty, and the general sense of community it hopes to facilitate after its first installation.

Lourie-Mosher testified to this, explaining, “There is a space in religion that is not steadfastly dependent on a greater being. We’re using this as an artistic opportunity.”

ARTS

October 6, 2011

Page 17

September offers surprising delights Erik Lorenzsonn Senior Editor

T

he Songs of September are, no matter how you slice it, kind of a bummer.

The balmy fare of summer is a hell of a tough act to follow; this holds especially true this year, considering what an exceptional season it was. While the raunchy slo-jam “Motivation” by Destiny’s Child alumna Kelly Rowland was the pinnacle of the pack, a bevy of solid singles were in hot pursuit. Bon Iver’s “Beth/Rest” capped a poignant sophomore album with a gorgeous ode to ’80s adult contemporary. Pusha T’s “Trouble on My Mind,” a collaboration with hip-hop starlet Tyler the Creator, killed it with a stone-cold beat and the rhymes to match. The Handsome Furs’ “Repatriated” pulsed with all the energy of a European synth-pop anthem. So all LMFAO aside, the summer of 2011 had it going on.

Granted that early autumnal offerings will inherently come off as the denouement to summer’s sizzle, this fall has nevertheless held its own. Here are three burgeoning singles that have already emerged as winners in the crisp and colorful season-to-be.

“Weekend,” by Class Actress

Did you catch this up-and-coming Brooklyn act at the Vassar College Entertainment post-Serenading concert? I most certainly did not, but have since discovered their popgenre panache on the web; now I spend my

Campus Canvas

days steeped in utter self-loathing for having missed them.

Their standout “Weekend” is the best dance hall fare since Robyn’s slice of Swedish pop heaven “Dancing on My Own” made a splash in 2010. This ’80s-inspired stomp is similar to “Dancing on My Own” with a surprisingly bittersweet tone. When Elizabeth Harper sings of her distress and self-pity stemming from unrequited love—“What am I ever going to do to make it easy on me?”—it is a lament most palpable. But what ultimately defines the track is its production, with pumping synth and crisp percussion that inspires you to say it along with Harper: “Bring it on—bring on the weekend!”

“Marvin’s Room,” by Drake

Drake has been pushing the hip-hop and R&B envelope since 2009, and he continues the trend with his new single “Marvin’s Room.” The track instantly immerses itself in minimalist hip hop aesthetic, a light beat with airy strands of electronic embellishment. But this lush soundscape is soon overshadowed by the absurd skeeziness of Drake’s verses.

Wasted off of “cups of the rosé,” he calls up an old fling who has found happiness in a monogamous relationship, and tells her in no unclear terms to leave her man—”I’m just sayin’ you can do better”—and be Drake’s booty call.

He may be clubbing and drinking posh liquor à la every other top-40 charting artist under

A weekly space highlighting the creative pursuits of student-artists

the sun, but unlike the rest of the crowd, his position is not to be idolized: Here, Drake is a pathetic loser who has hit a new low. The conflation of the beat’s beauty with the narrator’s ugliness is an utterly fascinating experiment that somehow pays off big time.

“I’m editing my French essay: Les Animaux Malades de la peste..Ou de Roi?.”

“Someone Like You,” by Adele

From a certain perspective, it makes total sense that Adele hit it big this summer with two number-one Billboard singles. Her powerful pipes resonate with a culture obsessed with soulful female vocalists: Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Cristina Aguilera and oy vey, how the list goes on. The talented Brit was bound from the get-go to inspire a tidal wave of YouTube video covers from American Idol wannabes.

Nevertheless, it feels strange to consider that a chart-topping song like “Someone Like You” could be so…good. The simple four-chord piano ballad resonates because of Adele’s voice, but also because of its lyrics.

When she addresses her ex, there is no vitriol, calling him “old friend”; it saliently lacks the vengeful fire of “Rolling in the Deep.” Consider the heartbreak imbued in the opening lyrics: “I heard that you’re settled down, that you found a girl and you’re married now. I heard that your dreams came true; guess she gave you things I couldn’t give to you.” When paired with Adele’s overwhelming vocal presence, this makes for an emotional experience that rarely graces the mainstream.

Patrick Brady ’15

“Microeconomics flashcards.”

Michael Kaluzny ’14

“I’m writing my live animal lesson plans for the Exploring Science at the Vassar Farm.”

submit to misc@vassar.edu

Eadaoin Harney ’12

“We’re writing our Biology homework on asexual and sexual reproduction of sponges. ”

Isabelle Zee and Megan Lin ’13

“My to-do list!”

Ethan Engel ’13

As my approach to art has developed I have become more and more interested in exploring a way of looking that allows me to discover the various visible and hidden geometries in the objects and spaces around me. This interest in geometric forms has lead me to my funny, almost obsessive, fascination with plastic bags. These sheets of plastic, which I have stolen from empty trash cans more than once, present me with a seemingly infinite source of forms—geometries that exist in the various pockets, crinkles, reflections and shadows that arise from my manipulation of the plastic.

This work is a two-part piece that was for an assignment for Painting 2. We were asked to first make an assemblage and then a painting that responded to it. I immediately looked to my developing curiosity with

plastic bags and geometry as a starting point, and so created an assemblage centered around a large form made by weaving together several sheets of plastic. As I was working I was interested by how the plastic took on a somewhat anthropomorphic nature. I felt like I was constructing a creature—a plastic organism of sorts—which I sought to explore further as I shifted my focus to painting. As I translated this 3D figure that I had created I tried to take the geometric shapes I saw as suggestions for ways of describing and further developing the ambiguous character that I saw in the work.

—Lina Kavaliunas ’13

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

“A text message to Jesus.”

Evan Schlaich ’14

—Rachael Borné Arts Editor

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October 6, 2011

Teams provide key function in athletes’ social lives Corey Cohn

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Sports Columnist

Carlos Hernandez/The Miscellany News

hen picturing Vassar College student athletes, our first thoughts often identify their experiences on the fields of play. We think of sweat, fatigue and adrenaline. We try to imagine the pain of a bitter defeat and the pride that accompanies a thrilling victory. But what about their lives from beyond the sidelines— specifically, their social lives?

From a pragmatic perspective, the biggest issue athletes face when carrying out a social life is the time commitment their sports entail.

Four team captains—seniors Emily Maier (field hockey), Elizabeth Forbes (cross country), Alix Zongrone (women’s soccer) and Felicia Hansell (swimming and diving) each reported that their respective sports require between 15 and 20 hours per week to dedicate to practices and games/matches. They agreed that, for the most part, this significant amount of time doesn’t take away from their separate social lives, but there are occasional, isolated disappointments—particularly on the nights before competition, when athletes have to stay in. “[There are times] that I’d rather not have to go to bed at 10:30,” Forbes explained. Maier said that having to miss scheduled campus events, like Mug Nights, because of a game scheduled for the next day can be difficult. Still, these captains accept the sacrifices they have to make and ultimately feel they are beneficial.

“Though there are times where I may want to do other things,” Zongrone wrote in an emailed statement, “I love the sport and my teammates and wouldn’t give either up for any amount of free time.” Forbes shared this sentiment, saying, “Looking at the big picture, I have no regrets.

With any commitment, there are choices involved.”

Fortunately, no student-athlete is alone in making those choices.

Teammates spend a lot of time together during practices and games, but they also form strong ties away from these athletic settings. Captains make concerted efforts to facilitate team bonding.

“I’ve had such a positive experience [on my team] … I want to provide those same sorts of opportunities,” Forbes said. “We don’t want the team to be all work and no play.”

Forbes listed tie-dye T-shirt making, apple-picking and pre-meet pasta parties as some of the activities she helps organize for her team. Hansell said the swimming and diving team holds a team dinner every Wednesday night along with team breakfasts after Saturday practices. Maier and Zongrone both mentioned team gatherings that take place at the seniors’ town houses. “The underclassmen really enjoy it,” Maier remarked.

“They have an open invitation.”

The captains agreed that this cohesion has tremendous benefits for their teams’ performance during competitions. “Team chemistry off the field directly translates to team chemistry on the field,” Zongrone wrote. “Without a strong team bond it is nearly impossible to find that drive to want to play together and win together.” Hansell observed that the leisure time her teammates spend together results in a more sincere investment in each other’s success. “[Swimming and diving] is a very individual sport, but everyone takes interest in how everyone else is doing,” she said.

Once the season ends, athletes may not see as much of each other, but the friendships they form often continue. “Obviously, we’re not spending 20 hours a week practicing together,” Hansell said. “But we have offseason activities and we’re friends … we do a good job of coming togeth-

From left to right, seniors Emily Maier, Austin Gitomer and Maura McCarthy relax in their Town House. As athletes on the field hockey team, they often find balancing a college social life with their team requirements a challenge. er on our own.” Forbes has observed that there’s often about a week of “lag time” once the cross country season ends before everyone realizes that extra efforts have to be made. “Then we get our act together,” she said.

As for athletes’ friends who do not participate on a varsity team, these four captains expressed that they generally receive support. “Some [of my friends] ask ‘How can you still be busy?’” Maier admitted. “But a lot of people understand.” Forbes’ experience mirrors Maier’s. “[My friends] respond really well—besides the occasional joking jab…they understand how important my role on the team and the success of the team are to me.”

Hansell recalled that freshman year was probably the most difficult time for non-varsity friends to accept her time commitment. “It was sort of a foreign thing to them,” she

NBA lockout detrimental to longterm league viability Andy Sussman

W

Columnist

ith every hour that passes by, there is an increasing chance that there will be no 2011-2012 NBA season. At the very least, it will be a virtual certainty that a severely shortened season, due to a disagreement between the owners and players over how to split $4 billion in revenue, will take place. Over the past several days, the owners and NBA Player Association representatives have stated that they are working long hours to try to reach an agreement, yet the sides are only marginally closer than they were before. Rather than inundate you with the specific numbers, however, I want to express my immense frustration with everyone involved in the negotiations.

The 2010-11 NBA season was, from the beginning of the offseason to the end of the NBA Finals, the most entertaining season I have witnessed as a sports fan. The fact that I do not even have a team that I consistently support in the league says all one needs to know about the quality of play and storylines that took place last year. We all know about LeBron James’ now-infamous “Decision,” which, to his shock, made his Miami Heat public enemy number one. The Los Angeles Lakers looked to have a real chance to win three straight championships, with Kobe Bryant on the precipice of tying Michael Jordan’s six NBA titles, only to be swept by the previously much-maligned Dallas Mavericks in the second round of the playoffs.

Derrick Rose of the Chicago Bulls transformed from a very good young point guard into an MVP, and led the Bulls to the Eastern Conference Finals for the first time since Jordan was their shooting guard. Even the bad teams

had players to root for, such as the Minnesota Timberwolves power forward and NBA rebounding leader Kevin Love. In short, it truly was a banner year for the league, and clearly a springboard to an even more compelling season this year.

Alas, the fans do not run the NBA, and really we have no say in the goings on of these labor negotiations. We are pawns that continue to buy merchandise and season tickets and watch games on television—a means to an end.

Owners want shorter contracts, a harder salary cap and a larger percentage of the revenue than they received in the previous Collective Bargaining Agreement so that the rules prevent them from making foolish signings that they clearly would continue to do otherwise.

Meanwhile, players are upset that the owners are punishing them for choosing to sign them for exorbitant amounts of money, and have little interest in giving up any financial progress they have made in the past decade. Add in Commissioner David Stern doing his best to play hardball on behalf of the owners, and agents discussing decertification, and we are left where the NFL was in April—only that was five months before the regular season was scheduled to start.

Since there has been no sense of urgency until last week, the NBA has far too much ground to make up for a timely solution to take place.

Thus, all the momentum the league has built up over the decade will entirely disappear. So I hope the league is happy, when they will inevitably come to an agreement and both sides force smiles and claim victory, because in the end everyone loses. The NBA: Where Leaguerazing Happens.

said. “But once you figure it out, [the team] becomes an integral part of your Vassar experience.”

For some, alcohol is another integral part of their Vassar experience.

The student-athlete commitment treads over this particular element of their social lives but not, according to these captains, in detrimental fashion.

NCAA policy dictates that no student-athlete can drink alcohol within 24 hours of competition. Some teams at Vassar adhere strictly to this guideline, while others tighten the belt even further. Maier stated that she and her co-captains extended the rule so her teammates stay alcohol-free for at least 48 hours before each game, and 24 hours before each practice. She explained the latter provision, saying, “If you want to be competitive in a game, you have to practice in that same competitive

nature.” Maier added that they considered implementing a dry season last year and discussed the possibility this year, but ultimately decided against it. “We didn’t want people to feel like they were losing their college experience,” Maier said.

The women’s soccer team, meanwhile, is conducting its first-ever completely dry season, after going alcohol-free during the season’s first four weeks last year. “We were the most successful team we’ve ever been this past season,” Zongrone elaborated, “and we can only assume that the lack of alcohol in our systems had something to do with it.” She admitted that it can be difficult for her and her teammates to see their peers indulge over the weekend, but she added that this policy produces the best effects. She wrote, “As a whole, we keep a good perspective on the See SOCIAL LIFE on page 20

Professional leagues too quick to hand out big fines Andy Marmer Sports Editor

S

t. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa was recently fined an undisclosed amount by Major League Baseball for disparaging remarks he made towards an umpire in a televised in-game interview last Sunday.

The practice of fining coaches and/or players for their language is so common that La Russa expected punishment as a result of his comments. This pattern of behavior by all the major professional sports leagues is one that needs to stop.

Causes for fines by the leagues can be broken down into three main categories: actions on the field, words and actions off the field.

The purpose of fines in general is to discourage the behavior by players and coaches and of course there are times when this is warranted.

Take, for example, the hefty fines Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison amassed in 2010. Harrison was fined over $125,000 last season for various hits on opposing players. In this instance, Harrison’s actions directly endangered other NFL employees, creating an unsafe work environment and thereby justifying the hefty sum of money.

Harrison’s case, though, is very different from La Russa’s, in which the manager told TBS during his team’s postseason game against the Philadelphia Phillies that it was as if home plate umpire Doug Meals had “two different strike zones.” Ultimately, other than potentially hurting Meals’ feelings, La Russa’s comments were harmless in nature; the expression of a frustrated manager competing

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

in a high-stress game. In this instance, MLB had no justification for its actions. Anyone exposed to La Russa’s comments would understand the situation—he was trying to help his team win and felt that his efforts were being undermined by the umpire. The practice of fining players and coaches for similar actions has become increasingly commonplace in professional sports and is one that serves no real purpose. Nobody reading or hearing La Russa’s words would confuse his comments for an objective report on Meals’ ability or even his performance in that particular game; they would recognize La Russa’s obvious bias based on his role in the game.

In actions that happen away from the field the league also oversteps its bounds in fining team personnel. Just before the start of the current NFL season, San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Braylon Edwards was fined $50,000 by the NFL for violating the league’s substance abuse policy when he was caught driving under the influence. Edwards was on his own personal time when this occurred and will face the full brunt of the American legal system as a result of his actions. This amounts to the NFL regulating its players’ private lives in a police state of sorts. Once the NFL, in addition to the law, begins telling players what they can and cannot do, the league crosses the line. I shudder to think what would happen if an NFL player were ever convicted of murder. In addition to the jail time the player would without a doubt receive, would the NFL fine him millions of dollars? We have government to police the lives of players; we do not need professional sports leagues to fill the same role.

October 6, 2011

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Vassar Athletics embraces social media Alicia Salvino

I

Guest Reporter

Juliana Halpert/The Miscellany News

n the age of social media, Vassar College Athletics is not far behind the times. In addition to a detailed and comprehensive website, Vassar Athletics maintains a Facebook fan page boasting a following of 903 fans and has just started a Twitter page as well. Links to both can be found on the left hand side of the official website. As soon as the Athletics website is updated, both the Facebook and Twitter page are as well, providing regular updates with pertinent information on all of Vassar’s varsity sports.

Assistant Athletic Director for Marketing, Communications and Promotions Robin Deutsch acknowledged, “We live in a culture [where] people get information in different ways,” referencing the variety of options provided by the Internet alone. While the two social networking pages work in conjunction with the Vassar Athletics website, each has something different to offer. Deutsch commented, “The Facebook page is an ancillary option for people who tend to visit [social networking websites] first. Twitter only offers 140 characters, so it provides simple updates with only the headlines.”

With so many sources offering so much information, Vassar Athletics’ social networking tools seek to provide a quick summary of important news without overwhelming the reader. The Facebook page gives the headlines of new articles with a small chunk of text, while the Twitter page presents headlines alone. Both provide links back to the article on the Vassar Athletics website so that a follower may seek out further information if desired. As Assistant Sports Information Director Shane Donahue ’10 pointed out, “With 27 [varsity] sports, [the reader] is still getting a lot of information.”

One major benefit of these additional social networking sites is a drastically improved accessibility. Both provide simultaneous instant updates, so that as soon as a new article comes out, a follower will know. Twitter is particu-

Sports Calendar: 10/7-10/9

by Andy Marmer, Sports Editor Friday 10/7 4 p.m. Field Hockey at William Smith College

In fifth place in the Liberty League, Vassar takes on second place William Smith, 9-2 (2-1 Liberty League). The Brewers will be looking to avenge last year’s one-sided 6-1 loss suffered at the hands of the Herons.

Saturday 10/8 9 a.m. Women’s Golf at Williams Fall Classic

Vassar Athletics now offers Facebook, above, and Twitter pages for fans to remain up to date on sports at the College. The social media sites hope to provide quick summaries of important news. larly helpful in this case, as its updates can be sent directly to the follower’s phone. Donahue stated, “This allows [the reader] to still see what’s going on from the mall or a car or anywhere else.”

Deutsch also emphasized the interactive nature of Vassar Athletics’ social networking tools. “[Followers] can express themselves,” he explained. “On Facebook, they can respond to articles by posting a comment or pressing a Like button.” Donahue added, “Twitter allows [followers] to reply or re-Tweet. Individual coaches may use their personal Twitters to reTweet as well.”

The finished articles on the Vassar Athletics webpage as well as their headlines will instantly inform the reader of the sport that the Brewers played, their competitor and the final score. These articles serve as game recaps, providing nuanced details of the performance and telling a complete story of the contest that just took place. The website also provides articles containing news surrounding Vassar athletics, in addition to live statistics, rosters,

schedules, biographies, archives and other Brewers sporting news. Additionally, one can use this website to find information on Vassar’s athletic facilities, access photos of past performances and visit the Vassar Athletics YouTube page, which features interviews with players and coaches.

Deutsch hopes that the Facebook page will soon eclipse 1,000 fans but isn’t yet sure what to expect of the brand-new Twitter page. He’s optimistic that both will help Vassar Athletics reach a greater number of students, parents and alumnae/i. “We’re trying to build a following, to build the brand,” he said.

Of both pages, Donahue said, “It’s the easiest, most convenient way to access Vassar Athletics.” Deutsch added, “There are now three separate ways to access Athletics—we are trying to deliver our message to where you are. I want everybody to join.” “[Social networking websites] cater to the way information is disseminating,” Deutsch said. “We would be remiss if we weren’t providing these options.”

After having last week’s tournament, which was scheduled to be played at Middlebury College, rained out, the Brewers will play their penultimate fall tournament at Williams College.

11 a.m. Women’s Cross Country at Saint Lawrence Pre-Regional; 12:00 p.m. Men’s Cross Country at Saint Lawrence Pre-Regional

The men’s and women’s cross country teams will have the opportunity to run the course that will be used for this year’s NCAA Regional when they race in the Pre-Regional Tournament. The Vassar runners will look to gain crucial knowledge about the competitors and the course, which will aid in their attempt to qualify for the NCAA Championships later this fall.

12 p.m. Women’s Rugby at Quinnipiac University

Coming off a heartbreaking 28-27 loss to Stony Brook University, the Brewers will look to right the ship, and in the process improve to 3-2 as they travel to Quinnipiac.

12:30 p.m. Women’s Volleyball vs. Bryn Mawr College; 3 p.m. Women’s Volleyball vs. Smith College

This weekend, the women’s volleyball team will travel to Wellesley College for the Seven Sisters Championship. The last time the Championship was held, in 2009, the Brewers did not drop a set, cruising 3-0 in all three of their matches.

2 p.m. Women’s Field Hockey at University of Rochester

The field hockey team will continue its road trip, traveling straight from William Smith to the University of Rochester.

2 p.m. Women’s Soccer at Skidmore College

Sitting at 1-1-1 in the Liberty League, the women’s soccer team faces Skidmore College in a crucial League contest. Last season, a 1-0 Brewers shutout in the final weekend of the regular season helped propel Vassar to a No. 2 seed in the Liberty League playoffs.

[TBA] Men’s and Women’s Rowing at Head of the Housatonic

The Vassar rowers will compete in their second meet of the year at the Head of the Housatonic in New Haven, Conn.

Sunday 10/9 2 p.m. Women’s Volleyball at Wellesley College

The women’s volleyball team will conclude the Seven Sisters Championship with two Sunday contests, including a final match against tournament host Wellesley College.

Mia Fermindoza/The Miscellany News

This past weekend, the ultimate Frisbee team hosted its annual Huck for Red October tournament. Above, Rosie Russo ’12 passes to a teammate in one tournament match. In the women’s tournament, a team of Vassar alumnae finished third.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

9 a.m. Men’s and Women’s Rowing vs. Schuylerskiff North America

The rowing teams continue their season with their second meet in as many days, this time in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. 1 p.m. Men’s Rugby vs. Seton Hall University

The men’s rugby squad will seek to build on this momentum in their final home match of the regular season. Last year, the two teams were even, tying 16-16 at Seton Hall.

1 p.m. Men’s Soccer vs. Skidmore College

The men’s soccer team is off to one of the best starts in program history, with a 7-3-1 record (2-1 in the Liberty League). Last year at Skidmore, the teams tied 1-1. This year, the Brewers will look to improve upon this result as they host the Thoroughbreds.

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October 6, 2011

Across teams, Brewers rounding into mid-season form Andy Marmer

W

Sports Editor

Juliana Halpert/The Miscellany News

hile a number of Vassar teams celebrated successful weekends, none matched the accomplishments of the men’s tennis doubles team Andrew ’13 and Ben ’12 Guzick. The Guzick brothers won five matches this weekend to conquer a 32-team field in the ITA Northeast Regional Championships. With the tournament win, the Guzick brothers will join this week’s Miscellany News Athlete of the Week Ava Sadeghi ’15 at the ITA National Small College Championships in Mobile, Ala., which begins Oct. 13. This will be the second appearance for Andrew Guzick, who competed last year in the singles tournament. A team of Brewers competed in the ITA National Small College Championships once previously when Greg Katz ’11 and Max Willner ’11 qualified in 2007.

The men’s soccer team had a similarily strong weekend. After making quick work of Liberty League foe Clarkson University, 4-1 on Sept. 30, the Brewer soccer team found themselves at 2-0 in the Liberty League for the first time under Head Coach Andy Jennings. Juliano Pereira ’14 notched a hat trick in the win with a trio of impressive goals, including a blast from well outside the goalie box and a missile off of a free kick.

With the win, the Brewers found themselves hosting No. 1 nationally ranked St. Lawrence University in a battle for first place in the Liberty League. Against the second top-ranked team they’ve faced this year, the Brewers took the Saints to the limit. Although Vassar created a number of opportunities, they were unable to score. The Brewers’ defense held firm for most of the game, but St. Lawrence went up 1-0 when

While the women’s rugby team, above, fell to Stony Brook University 28-27, despite scoring one more try than their opponents, the Brewers hope to make a comeback this weekend when they compete against Quinnipiac University. one of their corner kicks landed in the back of the net. The Vassar men’s soccer team now holds a 7-3-1 (2-1 in the Liberty League) record and will host Skidmore College this Sunday.

The women’s soccer team also played two Liberty League contests this weekend, visiting Clarkson and St. Lawrence Universities. The road trip began on Sept. 30 against Clarkson. The 90 minutes of regulation was not enough time to decide the contest, but the Brewers came from behind to win 2-1 in double overtime. Clarkson began the scoring off the opening touch, taking a 1-0 lead

within the first minute. Kelsey Domb ’15 answered for Vassar, knotting the game at one goal with 35 minutes remaining. The teams were tied for the remainder of regulation and the first overtime period; however, 103 minutes into the affair, Chloe Wheeler ’15 connected on a rocket from 25 yards out for the game-winner.

The following day against St. Lawrence, the Brewers found themselves in overtime again. Domb scored her sixth goal of the year on a penalty shot in the 19th minute, but St. Lawrence equalized with less than 15 minutes remaining. Neither side

could muster a goal in the extra time, and the game ended in a 1-1 draw. The Brewers women’s soccer squad now holds a 6-4-1 (1-1-1) record. They are now 1-2-1 in overtime. The Brewers will travel to Skidmore this Saturday.

Like the women’s soccer team the women’s volleyball players found themselves playing a bit more than expected. In a weekend that featured four Liberty League matches, the women’s volleyball team played a total of 20 sets, the maximum possible. The Brewers earned one victory during the weekend over Union College 3-2 (19-25, 25-20, 17-25, 25-23,

15-8). Vassar dropped matches to St. Lawrence 3-2 (25-23, 25-22, 10-25, 22-25, 14-16), Skidmore 3-2 (22-25, 25-14, 8-25, 25-17, 13-15) and Clarkson 3-2 (19-25, 25-18, 11-25, 25-22, 6-15). Against Clarkson, hitter Amy Bavosa ’12 notched her 1,000th career kill.

This past weekend, the field hockey team took time off from Liberty League play, instead earning their fifth victory of the season over Morrisville State College. During the game, Rachel Waldman ’14 scored her first collegiate goal, and Maura McCarthy ’12 scored her team-leading fifth of the season. Sophomore goalkeeper Maggie Brelis tied her season-high performance with 12 saves. The Brewers now have a 5-4 (12) record and will continue Liberty League play Friday, visiting William Smith College.

The men’s and women’s cross country teams continued their season, racing in the Paul Short Run at Lehigh University. The men finished 18th out of 46 teams and the women’s team finished 19th out of 46 teams.

Next Saturday, both teams will travel to St. Lawrence, where they will have the opportunity to preview the NCAA Regional Championship in the St. Lawrence Pre-Regional.

Men’s rugby improved to 3-1 in the Metropolitan New York Rugby Conference with a 19-13 win over Fairfield University. The Brewers were led by a try and three penalties from Brett Anker ’12 as well as solid defensive play from the entire unit.

Women’s rugby did not find themselves as fortunate. Despite scoring one more try than Stony Brook University, the women’s rugby squad fell 28-27. Both teams will compete this weekend, with the women taking on Quinnipiac University and the men taking on Seton Hall University.

Sadeghi shining in freshman season Social ties Jesse Hartman

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Guest Reporter

strong on, off the field

Jonah Bleckner/The Miscellany News

n Sept. 26 Ava Sadeghi ’15 became the first Vassar women’s tennis player to win the ITA Northeast Regional Championship, besting a 64-player field to earn a spot in the National Small College Championships in Mobile, Ala. on Oct. 13. But Sadeghi’s journey to stardom began long before the freshman stepped on Vassar’s campus. “I started playing tennis when I was five.

My parents were members at this club and they put me in the ‘pee wee’ sessions. The coach played music and we played games. Ever since then I loved playing tennis,” Sadeghi wrote in an emailed statement.

Sadeghi described the recruitment process that landed her at Vassar this fall: “I was first interested in the academic part of Vassar, so I contacted [Head Coach Kathy Campbell] about playing on the team. I came up several times and decided that Vassar was where I wanted to play tennis.”

Sadeghi hasn’t looked back, and her most recent success at the ITA championships certainly exemplifies that. After winning eight of her nine matches in three days, Sadeghi was ecstatic. “When I won that match point, I couldn’t actually believe it. It didn’t hit me until the next day when everyone was congratulating me.

I am so thrilled and honored to be going to nationals in Alabama where I will be playing against all the top players in Division III

tennis,” she wrote.

Sadeghi’s championship run included six victories in singles matches, in which she dropped a total of one set. Sadeghi entered the tournament as the No. 5 seed and quickly dismantled her early opponents, dropping just two games in her first two matches.

She continued to roll throughout the tournament without dropping a set until the final where she faced off against Frances Tseng of the University of Rochester.

Sadeghi ultimately prevailed in a decisive third set, winning the match 6-3, 4-6, 6-4.

Despite this historic accomplishment, Sadeghi looks forward to achieving even more as a team.

“I think the season has been going really well,” she commented.

“Most of the tournaments have been individual tournaments and I think all the freshmen and returning players have been playing very well and it is just going to get better from here. I can’t wait to play in a team versus team situation and see everyone’s talents come together.”

The remarkable thing about Sadeghi’s success is that she is still very new to the program. However, it has not taken her long to appreciate the team dynamic. “I think that always having someone cheer you on or having to cheer someone on is my favorite part; I love the support from the team,” she wrote. “The most challenging part is not getting down on yourself when you lose because you have either another match to play right after or other teammates to

A player on the women’s tennis team, Ava Sadeghi ’15 became the first in the history of the team to win the ITA Northeast Regional Championship. cheer on. I think that in collegiate tennis you just have to be able to learn from your losses and put out a good attitude for the rest of your team.”

So far this season, Sadeghi hasn’t had too many losses upon which to reflect. Her outstanding play has not only led to the capture of the ITA Regional Championship, but also recognition as the Liberty League co-Performer of the Week, a feat that thrilled Sadeghi. She commented, “I was

so excited to be named Liberty League co-Performer as a freshman and be recognized by the athletic committee.”

As Sadeghi continues her stellar season, she hopes to build on her early success. She wrote, “I think that after [winning], I will put more pressure on myself and have higher expectations for myself because now I know that I can compete against many of the top players of [Division III] tennis.”

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

SOCIAL LIFE continued from page 18 ultimate goal of our season and our choices: to do what is best for our bodies and for the team.”

Forbes, whose team doesn’t enforce a dry season, mentioned that some cross-country runners impose one upon themselves. “We’re not going to dictate what you do,” she said. “[But] we do make you aware of what not taking care of your body does.” She added that she trusts her teammates to do what is beneficial not only for the team, but for themselves.

Hansell explained that the swimming and diving team endures two separate dry periods: one to two weeks before the Liberty League Championships start in early December and four to six weeks before the state championships begin in February. She said that she has never seen any of her teammates violate the policies in place. “[If you break the rules,] it’s going to show,” Hansell remarked. “Your teammates will hold you accountable.” Zongrone expressed a similar attitude. “The girls on our team have made a promise and a commitment to each other this year, and anyone violating that promise would face severe consequences,” she wrote. “However, I believe the worst punishment would just be the feeling that you let your teammates down.”

This dependency and trust in one’s teammates help define the way in which the student-athlete’s social life forms at Vassar. The experience of playing for a varsity team adds balance and purpose to one’s time at the College. Hansell perhaps summarized it best: “I spend time with people I love spending time with, and I’m doing something that makes me happy.”