NBN Magazine Spring 2018

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UNBRANDED Images: Hank Willis Thomas, The natives will get restless, 1976/2015, [detail], 2015, and Bleach and Glow, 1975/2008 [detail], 2008, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Funding for this exhibition has been provided by the David C. & Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, and the Illinois Arts Council Program.

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5 pregame A DAM NBN GOOD WAY TO START THE PARTY

16 dance floor

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TIME TO MIX AND MINGLE

features

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Medill’s justice problem Despite years of rumored misconduct, Alec Klein led Medill’s star program for a decade.

LIBBY BERRY

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Tinted windows NUPD is far from transparent, but they don’t have to be – they’re a private entity.

DAN ROSENZWEIG-ZIFF

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Referral to nowhere Morty once said that CAPS gets all the funding it will ever need, so why aren’t students getting the treatment that they need?

RACHEL HAWLEY

57 hangover ‘TIL THE BITTER END

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NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

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MASTHEAD QUESTION:

WHO’S YOUR DREAM DILLO HEADLINER? SPRING 2018

Four actual armadillos with a song in their hearts

NORTH BY NORTHWESTERN

MANAGING EDITOR Emma Sarappo CREATIVE DIRECTOR Emma Kumer PHOTO DIRECTORS Stephanie J. Shin & Sakke Overlund ART DIRECTOR Rachel Hawley SENIOR FEATURES EDITORS Paola de Varona & Meg Pisarczyk SENIOR SECTION EDITORS Molly Glick, Milan Polk & Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff ASSOCIATE EDITORS Duncan Agnew & Elizabeth Guthrie ASSISTANT EDITOR Aliana Ruxin DESIGNERS Claire Bugos, Savannah Christensen, Mariah Carey Aine Dougherty, Lucy Dwyer, Maddie Jarrard, Rita Liu, Audrey Valbuena & Sarah Zhang PHOTOGRAPHERS Cayla Clements, Ying Dai, Stephanie J. Shin & Sakke Overlund CONTRIBUTORS Libby Berry, Aine Dougherty, Lucy Dwyer, Amanda Gordon, Elissa Gray, Rachel Hawley, Maddie Jarrard, Mila Jasper, Devon Kerr, Emma Kumer, Morgan Lee, Andie Linker, Rita Liu, Mia Mamone, Samuel Maude, Jake May, Anabel Mendoza, Lilly Pace, Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff, Aliana Ruxin, Gabe Schmittlein, Jason Derulo Julia Tesmond, Audrey Valbuena & Laura Zornosa WEB LIAISONS Audrey DeBruine & Tiffany Jeung FACT CHECKERS Candace Butera, Margaret Creighton, Margaret Kates, Lillian Aff, Vicky Woodburn & Kiara Joseph

The Mountain Goats ft. Janelle Monae

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Justin Curto EXECUTIVE EDITOR Maggie Harden MANAGING EDITORS David Gleisner & Elissa Gray ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITORS Priyanka Godbole, Jakob Lazzaro, Morgan Smith & Audrey Valbuena SENIOR FEATURES EDITOR Laura Zornosa NEWS EDITORS Karli Goldenberg & Rachel Oh Keyboard Cat POLITICS EDITOR Mila Jasper ASSISTANT POLITICS EDITOR Shreyas Iyer SPORTS EDITOR Jono Zarrilli SCIENCE & TECH EDITOR Carlyn Kranking ASSISTANT SCIENCE & TECH EDITOR Ryan Wagner LIFE & STYLE EDITOR Lilly Pace ASSISTANT LIFE & STYLE EDITORS Zoe Grossinger & Rita Liu ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR Mia Mamone WRITING EDITOR Brennen Bariso OPINION EDITOR Augusta Saraiva One Direction PHOTO EDITOR Cheddar Arias (R.I.P.) VIDEO EDITOR Eddy Park AUDIO EDITOR Marco Cartolano ASSISTANT AUDIO EDITOR Elliot Kronsberg INTERACTIVE EDITORS Audrey DeBruine & Tiffany Jeung SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR Kira Fahmy IDENTITIES EDITOR Cayla Clements

NORTH BY NORTHWESTERN ADVISORY BOARD EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Justin Curto PRINT MANAGING EDITOR Emma Sarappo PUBLISHER Victoria Alfred-Levow DIRECTOR OF AD SALES Lilli Boice

The Chainsmokers

CLARIFICATIONS AND CORRECTIONS: An article published in our last issue, “Jacqueline Stevens vs. The World,” included incorrect information. It was updated to say

that Anya Patel is a research assistant to Stevens and participates in work at the Deportation Research Clinic. Additionally, it was updated to note that Stevens’ books and papers were stored inaccessibly when she first arrived at Northwestern. The previous version of this article said four professors in nearby offices signed affidavits swearing they heard no incident between Stevens and Alvin Tillery. While four professors signed affidavits, one of them was on the floor below. The story also suggested that students hired solely for immigration work at the Deportation Research Clinic examine cables between the Dean of NU-Q and the U.S. government in Qatar. We removed the reference.

In addition, it said graduate students had suggested in a Daily Northwestern letter to the editor that Stevens was a conspiracy theorist. Only one graduate student published such a letter. The previous version of this article suggested that students at a Stevens talk sat agape. We removed the reference. This article was updated to include that Jamil Mirabito worked on statistical analysis of government data for Stevens. The article now includes a clarification to reflect that Stevens has disagreed with two political science department chairs at Northwestern: Sara Monoson and James Farr. This article was updated to more clearly reflect Stevens’ claim that Monoson is involved with Northwestern’s Board of Trustees. It has also been updated to clarify that Stevens co-authored letters with Jorge Coronado that critiqued the selection process for Karl Eikenberry. A sentence describing the timeline of disagreements among the political science faculty was also updated. The article’s headline was updated to include Stevens’ full name. The story also implied that Stevens has filed lawsuits on behalf of immigrants and maintains legal files in her office related to her work on deportation. She does not. The previous of this story suggested that Stevens believes that Tillery and Monoson were put up by the University to fabricate the altercation. We removed the reference. The previous version of this story suggests the article concerns Stevens, Tillery and the CIA. It was the FBI. NBN regrets these errors.

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SPRING 2018

COVER DESIGN EMMA KUMER

pregame A DAM NBN GOOD WAY TO START THE PARTY

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Life advice from Frances Aparicio Aparicio shares some wisdom before she leaves her post as director of the Latina and Latino Studies program.

MILA JASPER

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Scramblin’ up success This cozy cafe offers more than ambiance.

LILLY PACE

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A lot on my plate One NBN writer shares her favorite underrated Evanston eats.

AMANDA GORDON

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The predictive power of Dillo We knew nobody else would take the time to do this, so here’s the data analysis of your dreams.

GABE SCHMITTLEIN

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Something’s fishy If you’ve ever wondered how that salmon swam to Sargent, here’s a hint: unsustainably.

ELISSA GRAY

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What the flock?

Grab your binoculars because bird is the word.

LAURA ZORNOSA

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DIY Duchess How you can become Meghan Markle in five easy steps.

ANABEL MENDOZA

AFTER SCHOOL SPECIAL Curt’s Cafe has two locations, one on Dempster and one on Central Street (pictured). | PHOTO BY SAKKE OVERLUND NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

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life advice from frances aparicio WRITTEN BY MILA JASPER DESIGNED BY AINE DOUGHERTY

*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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hile attending graduate school at Harvard University, Professor Frances Aparicio was invited to teach a Spanish course for heritage speakers — a unique opportunity for the 1980s, when this type of program didn’t exist anywhere else. She discovered a community of students hungry to learn about their histories, but for whom no good curriculum existed. Aparicio launched herself into exploring this space.

The current director of the Latina and Latino Studies program at Northwestern University talked to NBN about her passions and the lessons she has learned.

NBN: What are you working on right now?

I’m working on a book on intra-Latinos in Chicago. I did 20 interviews with young college students here in the Chicago area who are Latinos, but who are more than one ethnicity or nationality – MexiRicans, MexiGuatemalans, etc. I have found the most rich, heterogeneous combinations that I didn’t think were possible. Most of them are second generation Latinos who were born in the U.S. and have grown up here. They shared a lot of their family stories and tensions with me, and how they negotiate in both national communities and in their family lives.

NBN: Did you always imagine yourself doing research in Latinx studies?

I actually started as a music major in college.

I was very excited about it, and then I got there and two years later I thought, “I have to drop out.” I sat on a bench, took the undergraduate catalogue and asked myself, “What can I do that I’m good at but that I also have a passion for?” What I realized at that time is that you can make choices about careers and things like that, but you also have to be honest about what your passion is and what you’re good at. You have to really think about where your heart is, where you’re at and what you see yourself doing.

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SPRING 2018

NBN: How can students be honest with themselves in answering the “what are you good at” question?

One of the things I have learned is humility, and learning to always be a learner. I have to look inside myself and think, ‘What is it that you do well and you enjoy doing?’ The other thing is getting rid of all this competition about who’s the best and who isn’t, because honestly, we live in a world right now where democracy is at risk, and I would say we need to think beyond ourselves.

We need to think about how can we have an impact on this world. In order to do that, you have to put aside competition and think about how we work together, and think about empathy. Think, ‘How can I be generous to others, how can I make a difference in the lives of others by what I’m learning, and how does my own learning impact the rest of the world?’ instead of ‘How does my own learning make me the best?’

NBN: What advice have you given to students you work with that you think other students should hear, too?

I don’t think there’s going to be a one liner that is going to resolve all issues, but I think creating a sense of community on campus is really important. That community can be two friends, or it can be a class, or it can be a field trip. Whatever it is, students usually end up finding some sense of home on campus. The University has done a tremendous job of allocating resources to help students deal with social class difference in particular, along with racial and cultural difference. Yet at the same time, there’s still something really, really cold about this campus. The role that we play here is to help students feel safe and that they belong.

Aparicio shares some wisdom before she leaves her post as director of the Latina and Latino Studies program.

PHOTO BY STEPHANIE J. SHIN

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY EMMA KUMER *Image of Meghan Markle used under CC 2.0 — from Flickr user Genevieve719

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WHAT TEAM?!

WILDCATS!

If you want to be royalty, you’ve gotta act like royalty.

At Northwestern, Markle double-majored in theatre and international studies, calling herself a “theatre nerd.” Time to channel your inner Troy and Gabriella and try out for a leading role. Your theatre training will certainly impress Her Majesty!

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KAPPILY EVER AFTER

In 1999, Markle volunteered at the Chicago nonprofit The Glass Slipper Project with a group of her Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority sisters.

The organization provides thousands of high school girls with formal dresses, shoes and accessories that they otherwise would not be able to afford. Giving back is a quality of truly regal individuals.

DIY DUCHESS How to become Meghan Markle in five easy steps.

WRITTEN BY ANABEL MENDOZA DESIGNED BY SAVANNAH CHRISTENSEN

Before becoming part of the royal family, Meghan Markle was just one of the ‘Cats.

From eating at the Burger King in downtown Evanston to dancing for 30 hours at DM, Markle enjoyed many of the same activities NU students love today. But how did she get to be BFFs with the Queen? Perhaps it was a magical spell cast on the Whoppers or maybe a fairy godmother that led her to Prince Harry.

Let’s follow in her footsteps to find out!

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NORTH TO SOUTH

Though Markle has long since graduated, she was not immune to the tedious pain of walking from north to south campus when she was a student. In fact, when Markle visited campus in 2014 to discuss her role in the drama series Suits, she recalled “the schlep of getting to south campus from up north.” Being part of the royal family requires stamina, so what better way to prepare for a busy, fast-paced life with the Queen than to run back and forth between Tech and the Arch?

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BURGER KINGS AND QUEENS

Buckingham Palace is only a Whopper away. From classic fries to the Creamy Mayo Double Cheeseburger, Burger King was one of Markle’s late-night favorites.

She even gives the fast food joint credit for helping her gain the freshman fifteen.

Gather your friends and head over to BK – your royal feast awaits!

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DANCING QUEEN

Next stop: the dance floor.

During the 26th year of Northwestern’s Dance Marathon, Markle joined nearly 500 of her fellow Wildcats for 30 hours of dancing and fundraising for Gilda’s Club Chicago.

Tie those shoes and get to dancing! One day you might be showing off those moves at your royal wedding.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

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Chips with curry sauce

A lot on my plate One NBN writer shares her favorite underrated Evanston eats.

WRITTEN BY AMANDA GORDON DESIGNED BY LUCY DWYER PHOTOS BY SAKKE OVERLUND & STEPHANIE J. SHIN

T Hecky and his mac

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hose who are new to Northwestern and, presumably, to Evanston, may find themselves overwhelmed with the dining options around town. After a few months of sampling the many fast-casual chain restaurants and upscale farm-to-table options, it’s easy to become disillusioned with the so-called “dining capital of the North Shore.” Bistro Bordeaux and Thai Sookdee are among a long list of beloved restaurants that have closed in the past few years. But if you manage to venture beyond the often bougie and increasingly ephemeral Evanston food scene, you can still find a few savory gems.

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Al’s Deli: Cream of Tomato Soup My Saturday morning routine is as follows: roll out of bed, cobble together a casual outfit that can withstand the unpredictable natural elements of Evanston and head up to Rue Noyes, as the owners of Al’s Deli like to call it. Bob and John Pottinger, the sons of the eponymous Al, can be found slicing deli meats and taking orders at the venerated local institution. The small delicatessen is usually busy on Saturdays, packed with Evanstonians and Northwestern students alike. Pictures of Paris and impressionist paintings line the walls, homemade caramel macarons and rounds of brie sit behind the glass display and the swelling sound of opera fills the room. Some might call it Francophile-kitsch, but these guys aren’t playing around when it comes to their authentic French fare. Al’s Deli is typically lauded for its delicate, impossibly stuffed sandwiches, but I

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implore you to opt for its deeply satisfying cream of tomato soup.

Al’s cream of tomato soup is a revelation.

Pale orange in color and speckled with pepper, the cup of soup fully embraces its hefty cream to tomato ratio. But hey, no one said French cuisine was easy on the arteries. The deep layers of flavor come in waves.

Sweetness is the first note that hits the tongue, a trace of the dish’s floral foundation of onions, garlic and herbs. Soon after, the palate detects a resounding richness.

Finally, cutting through some of the cream, a fresh hint of acidity from the tomatoes emerges.

This satiny soup is served with a pack of Nabisco crackers, but it’s best consumed unadulterated.

For $3, you can enjoy a dish that is more than the sum of its simple parts, a warm and comforting cup of soup that blows its Campbell’s counterpart out of the water.

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Hecky’s Barbecue: Mac and Cheese

I was in Plex West the first time I tried Hecky’s. The 30-year-old barbecue joint catered a special lunch in Foster-Walker East dining hall, and I was eager to feast on something that wasn’t overcooked or severely underseasoned. Hecky Powell, who owns the restaurant with his wife, Cheryl, greeted students and handed out bottles of his signature barbecue sauce. When I reached the front of the spiraling line, the first thing I noticed was a giant mound of mac and cheese. Ravenous, I scooped the golden yellow pasta onto my plate.

On first bite, I was hit with the most concentrated flavor of cheesiness. It’s not the taste of cheddar powder or cheddar shavings, but just cheddar, the essence of cheddar, cheddar in its pure cheddarness.

Admittedly, the texture is not for everyone. The sauce isn’t silky like Velveeta or thin and soupy like Kraft. In fact, it’s hard to qualify it as a sauce at all. The dish is really a

perfect amalgam of cheese and pasta, a mushy mound of soft and crunchy macaroni bits stuck to each other through a glue of thick cheese. It’s the gradient of consistencies among pieces of pasta that makes it unique.

What elevates Hecky’s iteration of the American classic is the subtle smokiness present in every bite. I have often wondered how Hecky’s achieves this feat of flavor, so I decided to investigate by paying a trip to the restaurant, which is a short walk west of campus on the corner of Emerson Street and Green Bay Road. Walking through the doors, I was immediately entranced with the earthy smell of meat cooking ever so slowly. Perhaps this is the aroma that infuses the mac and cheese, or perhaps there is some secret ingredient that gives the dish its subtle smoky sweetness. The world may never know. What is for certain is that the people at Hecky’s make a mean mac and cheese.

Celtic Knot: Chips with Curry Sauce

Whether I’m feeling good on a Saturday night or I’m cold, tired and bleary-eyed on a Tuesday, I want to go to the place where everybody knows my name. No one knows my name at the Celtic Knot, Evanston’s premier pub, but based on my chip consumption, they will one day.

The Knot has been independently owned and operated for over a decade.

It has live music and afternoon tea and storytelling nights and a great selection of standard pub grub. But if

there’s one thing that keeps me coming back, it’s their chips with curry sauce.

Yeah mate, it’s chips not fries. One could opt for the hearty gravy sauce to accompany the thick-cut, fried potatoes; nearly anything would taste good atop the crispy exterior of the Knot’s chips, which are seasoned with flaky sea salt and reveal a fluffy interior upon first bite. The curry sauce, however, is the true gold standard of chip accompaniments. It’s

light russet in color and almost soupy in texture, coating each golden brown chip in a savory sheen. The sauce is both peppery and sweet. I detected a hint of nutmeg, which adds a unique depth of flavor to the curry powderbased condiment.

The starters portion of chips and curry sauce is enough to feed a hungry group, but it’s so good you’ll probably want the basket to yourself. Indulgent?

Maybe. Self-care? Definitely.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

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WHAT THE FLOCK? Grab your binoculars, because bird is the word.

WRITTEN BY LAURA ZORNOSA ILLUSTRATED BY RACHEL HAWLEY DESIGNED BY AUDREY VALBUENA

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Peregrine falcons, like the ones that nest on the EPL roof, are the world’s most common birds of prey – they can be found in tundras, deserts and cities.

They are also known to live on bridges and skyscrapers.

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n this neck of the woods, a “spark bird” – one animal that triggers a lifelong passion for birding – could look like anything from a dark-eyed junco’s signature hood to a ruby-crowned kinglet’s scarlet spikes.

In program chair Libby Hill’s experience at the Evanston North Shore Bird Club (ENSBC), the marmalade hues of the Blackburnian Warbler remind people that beauty is a thing with feathers. Any unsuspecting passerby strolling along the lake could be struck by a “spark bird” – even you.

If you do catch the “birding flu,” you’re in luck. The Clark Street Beach Bird Sanctuary butts up against the southernmost end of Northwestern’s campus, fenced in but in easy eyeshot.

Binoculars are all you need, and even those are optional. To an untrained eye, though, a lot of the avian wildlife can fly right by. Hill recommends joining one of ENSBC’s Saturday morning bird walks on campus, led by experienced volunteers.

To get involved with an ENSBC bird walk, meet up with volunteer guides in the Segal Visitors Center parking lot on Saturday mornings at 8:30 a.m. No sign-in required.

SPRING 2018

Two hundred seventy-one species have been documented on campus; the characteristic mohawk of the red-breasted merganser makes an appearance, as does the bright blue eye of the double-crested cormorant.

Too many run-ins with campus geese for your liking? Head toward downtown Evanston.

There, you can find the Peregrine falcons that have made their home at the Evanston Public Library from March through June for the past 14 years. The Falcon Cam on the library’s website offers a live streamed birds’-eye view of the nest.

To see the falcons for yourself, head toward the intersection of Orrington Avenue and Church Street, near the public library. Keep your eyes on the hollow pillars along the front of the building, where the pair have made their nest.

Peregrine falcons fly among us, as do snowy owls à la Hogwarts (along the lakefront) and bald eagles – as many as 14 near the South Side’s Lake Calumet. Avid birder Justin Breen once covered this “bird beat” for the online newspaper DNAinfo, but today he enjoys the urban wildlife in and around his North Shore home.

“What I still appreciate now is just how incredible the wildlife is within a giant city like this,” Breen says. “And I really wish more people would think about that, because you really can see life cycle through – with birds especially – as the [seasons] change.”

The shift between seasons is the best time to witness migratory birds traveling North from as far as South America. They trace the Lake Michigan shoreline as a guide, and often pause at Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary, near Uptown.

Here, flocks of observers witness the “Magic Hedge” of Montrose Point unfold into an avian hotspot. The shrubbery on

the western edge of the sanctuary fills with rare birds like Kirtland’s warbler, with its lemon underbelly.

If spring weather cooperates, Montrose Point is a 45-minute bike ride south from Norris – about eight miles down the lakeshore.

This peninsular park swells with more than 300 avian species, and come springtime, seeing more than 100 species in one day is a frequent occurrence.

Yet, sometimes there seems to be as many birders as birds: a living field guide of amateur experts to consult.

Men and women in camouflage with cameras and binoculars trickle down the park’s paths.

They’re mostly solitary, and the only real sounds are tweets and chirps as the crisp Chicago skyline looms in the background. Look where they look, and Le-Conte’s Sparrow’s understated speckles or the Downy Woodpecker’s familiar scarlet cap will emerge from the foliage.

A mother guides her two young children through the prairie.

Montrose is the perfect place to escape urban life for a walk on the wild side, even though it lies within Chicago city limits. “If you just give nature any little bit of chance,” Breen says, “it will survive and many times thrive.”

That it will continue to do.

Take advantage of it: birding is not strictly for the birds.

SOMETHING’S FISHY

If you were ever wondering how that salmon swam to Sargent, here’s a hint: unsustainably.

WRITTEN BY ELISSA GRAY | DESIGNED & ILLUSTRATED BY SARAH ZHANG

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eafood is one of the most unsustainable foods on the planet, but you’d never know that walking into a Northwestern dining hall. From grilled fish tacos and cod fillets to “tangy and spicy shrimp pizzetta,” there’s no shortage of seafood options at Allison. But how does Allison’s shrimp or Sargent’s salmon get from sea to table? Does it cross the Great Barrier Reef to swim right into our own Lakefill?

The journey begins in the great blue ocean. Well, sometimes – but not always.

It varies by fish, so there is no single lake or ocean where all of Plex’s pollock is sourced. Northwestern says it works to ensure the seafood on our plates is environmentally sustainable, but it’s not always easy.

“Fish is not ever going to be sustainable.

We ruined that when people started farming fish and overfishing,” says Amos Pomp, a Weinberg sophomore and Real Food analyst intern at Sodexo.

This summer, the Marine Stewardship Council – an organization that sets standards for sustainable fishing – might update their standards to remove the option of sustainable fish. It’s impossible for environmentallysound seafood to be caught from large bodies of water

because they’re overfished, according to Pomp. “Fish that could count as ecologically sound would literally be from a sustainable pond in your backyard, and that can’t feed all of Northwestern,” he says.

If our dining hall flounder isn’t coming from someone’s pond, where does the chain begin?

Northwestern’s biggest seafood vendor is Slade Gorton, an offshoot of the large food delivery company Gordon Food Services. Slade Gorton has worked with Sodexo, Northwestern’s current food provider, since around 2010, making the company the University’s partner in crime for all things fish – but that’s not the end of the trail.

Slade Gorton, to a degree, is a middleman. The company imports, distributes and manufactures all of the seafood for NU dining halls. They aren’t actually rowing out into the ocean to catch any cod, but this doesn’t stop the company from tracking where the fillet comes from.

Slade Gorton receives its fish from local vendors across the world – their pollock swims in the Bering and Barents Seas, while the shrimp comes from the Mexican Sea of Cortez.

This leads back to one point: you won’t know for sure where your fish comes from unless you do the research. Our dinner could have been partying outside of Miami or shivering on the coast of Juneau and you’d never be able to tell the difference.

But location isn’t all that matters, especially if you care about protecting the environment. The real issue involving seafood is sustainability

– something Northwestern has set its sights on in the past decade.

Seven years ago, Sodexo established a Sustainable Seafood Policy (SSP), which aims to prohibit the use of endangered fish.

Northwestern’s District Executive Chef Chris Studtmann often keeps his eyes glued to the Monterey Bay Watchlist, which keeps track of endangered species, so that he can ensure that the University doesn’t source from at-risk fisheries.

SSP is a Sodexo-specific policy, and Compass will replace Sodexo as Northwestern’s food provider starting next year. But Studtmann isn’t worried about Compass having a plan to follow the same initiatives. Groups like NU Real Food pressure the University to keep a watchful eye on sourcing, ensuring that Northwestern will continue to try to mitigate its negative impact.

Do all these policies actually help to combat overfishing? For Studtmann, there is a marginal impact – the real change has to come from our perspective on food. Seafood is in danger because there is a lack of variety in what’s on our plates – we all want salmon and shrimp, which leads to overfishing. For true sustainability, we have to reverse the process of designing meal plans first and gathering ingredients second, according to Studtmann. Recipes should be inspired by the food that’s available and most environmentally-friendly.

“Sustainability is being adventurous with what your dining tastes are,” Studtmann says.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

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the pre d ic tiv e powe r of

We knew nobody else would take the time to do this, so here’s the data analysis of your dreams.

WRITTEN BY GABE SCHMITTLEIN DESIGNED BY EMMA KUMER

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Gramatik

Dillo Day artists that fit the Riser archetype have been young, with only one or two studio albums and no Top 100 hits. Remarkably, every daytime headliner since 2013 has been a Riser – Anderson .Paak (2016), Saint Motel (2015), Chance the Rapper (2014), and Walk the Moon (2013) – but the only nighttime headliner in the Riser archetype was Steve Aoki in 2012.

Number of Solo Studio Albums Before Dillo

9 8 Smash Mouth

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Reel Big Fish

6 Cold War Kids

5

The Mowgli’s

Walk the Moon

OK Go

Odesza

4 3 2

Ryan Hemsworth

ScHoolboy Q MGMT Anderson .Paak

Cults

1

Porches Little Simz

Big Boi

Danny Brown

A$AP Ferg

D.R.A.M. Chance the Rapper

0 Lunice

Saint Motel

Cashmere Cat

0

10

20

30

40

Google Trends Search Ranking During Month of Dillo

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n 2012, Mayfest booked then 23-yearold Kendrick Lamar for Dillo Day. At the time, Kendrick had released just one studio album, Section.80. He was still several months away from releasing Good Kid, M.A.A.D City (which would eventually reach second on the Billboard Top 200 albums).

Sharing the stage with Kendrick in 2012 was Reel Big Fish, a ska punk band that formed in 1991 and peaked in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.

The Flat-Liners archetype features an odd collection of middle-of-the-road bands, unexceptional pop performers and, of course, Smash Mouth.

It’s hard to understand this archetype because there are multiple ways for a performer to end up here.

The Mowgli’s and Charli XCX (both of whom never actually performed at Dillo Day because it was rained out in 2015) peaked during Dillo Day, but an artist like Cashmere Cat actually peaked both before and after Dillo Day.

Miguel

Their lead singer, Aaron Barrett, regularly wears floral shirts and has mutton chops.

Clearly, Mayfest brings in a diverse mix of performers at different stages in their careers. It’s reflected in the data, which points to three clear archetypes of Dillo Day performers based on career trajectory – the Riser, the Flat-Liner and the Faller – those who peaked after Dillo Day, those who peaked before Dillo Day and those who never peaked at all.

Meanwhile, the Fallers tend to be more seasoned artists with at least a couple of successful albums under their belts. ScHoolboy Q, Wiz Khalifa and 2 Chainz were all nighttime headliners, making Fallers the most popular archetype for that important slot. This archetype isn’t an indictment of the quality of the artist, because some of Dillo’s most successful performers fit in the Fallers archetype. It is, however, an indication that they were more prolific in the two years before Dillo Day than the two years after.

Wiz Khalifa

2 Chainz

Charli XCX Kendrick Lamar

Steve Aoki

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60

70

Riser

2017 Performers* No data yet on whether they’re rising or falling, obviously.

Flat-Liner

Fallers

how did we do it ?

These archetypes were created by plotting Google Trends Search Rate data for individual artists across the four years surrounding their Dillo Day performance.

The artists were divided into tertiles – three evenly populated sections of a distribution – based on Google Trend Search Rates before and after Dillo, and plotted once again.

Google Trends data is a reliable way to measure the shape of an artist’s career – it shows how much they are searched over a time frame, giving a general sense for when they were popular – and when they weren’t.

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(Relative to Other Performers of Same Year) NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

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Scramblin’ up

success

C

urt’s Cafe, situated between a cleaner’s and a real estate office, smells of coffee and freshly cooked bacon. “The Classic,” a soft torta hoagie with fried eggs, cheddar cheese, bacon and mayonnaise, is being prepared on the grill. It’s loud and bustling, with tables filled for work meetings and old friends reuniting over the sound of “Respect”

by Aretha Franklin. The sprawling chalkboard menus list the espresso drinks and smoothies, and their counters are topped with biscuits, muffins, scones and prepackaged cereals. In a side room, a bookshelf is tucked in the corner with board games for children, including Evanstonopoly – a localized version of Monopoly. Fairy lights twinkle below a sign that declares, “With compassion and respect, we promote opportunity and success through food service, life skills, and job readiness training.”

That’s the mission of Curt’s Cafe, a restaurant opened in 2012 by executive director Susan Trieschmann and former colleague Lori Dube. The cafe seeks to improve the lives of at-risk young adults who have spent time in the criminal justice system or have experienced violence, homelessness or abuse.

Each year, 30 teenagers and young adults, ranging from 15-to-24 years old work at the restaurant and participate in a three-month program that includes life skills counseling, mentoring and career coaching to empower them to enter the workforce.

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Students earn a stipend of $50 for an eight-hour shift. They’re paid below minimum wage because the Curt’s program is based on student learning, not traditional employment, according to Trieschmann.

During shifts, students learn essential restaurant skills like how to make sandwiches and lattes, use a cash register and clean tables.

They also receive food handler certifications to prepare them for working in the food industry after graduation.

The second component of the program is centered around the LIFE skills acronym – life, intellectual, food service and experiential skills.

These programs include anger management, table etiquette and GED tutoring.

Trieschmann explains that they focus on teaching students about life outside Curt’s by taking up to two trips per month to places like the National Museum of Mexican Art, Bahá’í Temple or roller rinks.

Trieschmann says her number one goal for Curt’s Cafe is to keep the students they serve from incarceration. “That was it,” she says. “If I could do that, I’d be like, ‘Oh, today is good.’”

Curt’s Cafe partners with the James B. Moran Center for Youth Advocacy, a nonprofit that provides legal aid for youth and their families in Evanston and refers many clients to Curt’s both during and after the conclusion of their cases.

According to Patrick Keenan-Devlin, executive director and staff attorney for the Moran Center, “Curt’s helps people find jobs, and we know how important jobs are in reducing recidivism.”

This cozy cafe offers more than ambiance.

WRITTEN BY LILLY PACE DESIGNED BY SARAH ZHANG PHOTOS BY SAKKE OVERLUND

Recidivism is the tendency of a convicted person to relapse into criminal behavior and reoffend. According to a study by the think tank Manhattan Institute, finding employment soon after getting out of prison reduces the likelihood of recidivism from non-violent offenders by 20 percent.

But after being released from incarceration, many young adults have a difficult time securing employment and thriving outside the flawed criminal justice system. Some companies have policies against hiring people with criminal records.

“The criminal justice system is an unfair and discriminatory system. It’s supposed to be rehabilitative. Yet we all know the juvenile delinquency system is far from rehabilitative,” Keenan-Devlin says. “It is really hard work for men, women and children exiting the criminal justice system to get a second chance and rebuild their lives. We shackle them with records that prevent them from getting jobs, loans, mortgages, housing. Yet we judge individuals with such a shackle when they recidivate. It’s true nationally, but certainly locally as well.”

A 2012 study by the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Association found that 86 percent of youth in Chicago were rearrested within three years of release.

Curt’s Cafe program graduates only have a 3 percent recidivism rate, and 82 percent of students are either getting jobs or staying in school. According to Trieschmann, out of that 3 percent, they

When you really have nowhere else to go, you come here.”

– Brethney Neal, current Curt’s student now only have one graduate who hasn’t yet succeeded. “And he will,” she says.

Nino Nenab Giwargis, a 21-year-old recent graduate, participated in the Curt’s Cafe program for over four months. As a young adult with three felonies, he was worried about finding a job after exiting the criminal justice system. After graduating from the program, he returned for job search assistance. The staff spoke with the Youth Job Center in Evanston, and the YJC agreed to pay Giwargis to continue working at Curt’s.

“Everything’s in our interest, basically,” Giwargis says. “Some people, they find them better jobs. They find a mechanic shop, warehouse, something they would like. You know it’s not like ‘Oh we found you a job,’ it’s ‘What are you interested in?’”

Giwargis doesn’t mind staying at Curt’s, where he’s made a home. Before he returned to his job, he spent three days visiting his friends at the restaurant, occasionally helping out for fun.

In 2015, a new location opened on Dempster Street that exclusively works with young women, many of whom are teen mothers. Conversations from a sewing club, a mom and her young daughter, and friends meeting for lunch drown out the instrumental background music. Four women on shift wash dishes, distribute coffee and serve and prepare sandwiches and salads. The vibrant restaurant’s yellow walls are covered in the student trainees’ artwork.

According to Karen Smith, director of operations for Curt’s Cafe, for an hour each week students have the opportunity to participate in programs that volunteers and community members lead on art therapy, financial literacy, computer literacy and meditation.

For students like Giwargis, these programs are a valuable part of their experience at Curt’s.

“Friday is my favorite. We got [a meditation program] because I really will get stressed out. And you know, majority of us, we are delinquents. So we have a temper fast,” Giwargis says. “But this guy comes in, he calms us down. We want to sit down, chill, relax, clear your mind.

Boom, we go back to work. And we killing it at work.”

Brethney Neal, a 19-year-old student who joined Curt’s three months ago, graduated early from Evanston Township High School and “had nothing to do. And you know, if you have nothing to do, something bad’s probably gonna happen.”

Neal believes that, along with learning people skills and how to take care of herself mentally, physically and financially, her time at Curt’s has helped her become more assertive.

“I used to be one of those kids who were like ‘Yes, mom and dad. I’ll do what you tell me to do. I’ll just not do what makes me happy,” she says. “Now since I’ve been here I learned how to financially take care of myself more so I can pay my own things. And if my parents don’t

agree with it, then I can just be like, ‘I know how to take care of myself.’”

To provide continued support to prevent recidivism, Curt’s has established a spreadsheet containing the information of over 200 graduates, a Facebook group, LinkedIn student profiles and a traumainformed social service provider that keeps in touch with workers after graduation.

And students are always welcome back to the restaurants for free meals.

Trieschmann also stays in touch by visiting the workplaces of graduates.

“We’re a family now. We connect. They’re like my kids,” she says.

“By taking kids that everyone else has given up on and giving them another chance, that to me is just the best thing about Curt’s,” says Curt’s Cafe volunteer coordinator Libby Lewis. “Kids that everybody else has said ‘not worth it,’ and maybe they even feel that way about themselves. But just stepping back from all of that and helping them just basically wipe the slate clean and get a fresh start.”

Although Curt’s gives students a fresh start, this program is only the first step in breaking the cycle of recidivism, violence and abuse. However, Trieschmann believes that with a group of mentors and the option to revisit Curt’s for help, the process is made significantly easier.

“When you really have nowhere else to go, you come here,” Neal says. “Curt’s gives you a home and a purpose and a way to pick yourself back up and get moving again.”

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

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SPACING OUT Astronomy professor J. Allen Hynek taught at Northwestern before leaving to pursue UFO studies full-time. | PHOTO COURTESY OF NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

dance floor 17

The gentrification generation Broke post-grads are elbowing long-time residents out of Chicago communities.

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AUDREY VALBUENA

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All abroad!

Escaping Evanston on a budget can be daunting, but it’s not impossible.

Radio, Television, and Frustration MAG grants, intended to help student filmmakers make movies, are sending recipients into production limbo.

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A little Christ with your coffee The covert Christianity behind your North Campus caffeine fix.

The true story of a Northwestern professor who moonlighted as a famous UFOlogist.

Minnesota nice Minneapolis and St. Paul offer Northwestern students two cities for the price of one.

ANDIE LINKER

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The campaign kids Ever wondered what the kid who raises his hand in every Poli Sci class does in his spare time?

MIA MAMONE

DEVON KERR

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NU phone home ALIANA RUXIN

AINE DOUGHERTY

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TIME TO MIX AND MINGLE

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MADDIE JARRARD

Slurred Moving from a rural town to Evanston’s liberal bubble doesn’t shield you from slurs.

SAMUEL MAUDE

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Rein’s pop culture reign Five decades later, Irving Rein is still teaching the same class – with a little help from his friends.

JAKE MAY

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SPRING 2018

The gentrification generation Broke post-grads are elbowing long-time residents out of Chicago communities.

WRITTEN BY AUDREY VALBUENA | DESIGNED BY CLAIRE BUGOS | ILLUSTRATIONS BY RACHEL HAWLEY

A

t the Pink Line 18th Street Station, street art dances upon otherwise ordinary concrete walls. The Virgin Mary, enveloped in strokes of yellow, rests in prayer upon the side of a wall. Vibrant colors overwhelm the sides of brownstones, depicting women dancing in traditional Mexican dress and blue and white stripes that border four red stars, in a rendition of Chicago’s flag. This is art that waves bienvenidos – welcome.

Just a block over from these murals looms a plain brick building, four windows tall and eight across. It is distinct in its monotony: it is the mold for the developments that continue to crop up in Pilsen.

Jordan Swanson moved to Pilsen two months ago. She lives in an apartment building that sits above a Wells Fargo.

Swanson graduated from Columbia College Chicago last year with a degree in television production and direction and currently freelances, creating music videos and audio recordings for Chicago dancers and musicians.

“I lived in Humboldt Park before, but it was a little bit dangerous so we wanted to look for cheap living that had a little bit of a better neighborhood,” Swanson says, of herself and her roommates. “Pilsen just seemed very lively and nice.”

Pilsen’s latest development trend is precisely what attracted Swanson: affordable new buildings that are

completely devoid of the neighborhood’s rich history. While young people may not intentionally aim to transform historically ethnic neighborhoods like Pilsen, their migration creates a lasting impact.

Like any neighborhood, rising rents play a key factor in the gentrification of Pilsen. The number of units in Pilsen’s top rent category – $1,500 or more per month – grew by 55 percent between 2011 and 2014, according to the U.S. Census. Rising rents hit working-class, predominantly Mexican residents the hardest. In 2016, 42.1 percent of Pilsen residents spent 35 percent or more of their household income on rent. This designates households as rent burdened, according to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development standards.

Juliana Iturralde, a Communication sophomore, has witnessed this disparity first hand. She spent her childhood in Pilsen before heading to Evanston last year. Iturralde has seen neighbors forced out due to rising property taxes and a steep hike in expenses. She traces the transition to her sophomore year of high school.

Small businesses and segundas – family-owned second-hand retailers – gave way to “hipster” coffee shops and high-end thrift stores that “would resell things that cost more than what people pay for new things in my neighborhood,” Iturralde says.

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Meanwhile, the amount of wealth i n Apartment complexes akin to Park E v a n s t o n shocked Iturralde. Though Evanston and E2 now swell the streets she had attended magnet schools in of Pilsen, taking over huge blocks the city attended by rich, white kids, of the neighborhood, breaking up Northwestern still surprised her. the cultural homogeneity of the “Living in a suburb like Evanston, community. where everything is so expensive and so “[Development] is not in itself a bad white, was just like a culture shock to me,” idea as long as you have a balance,” Iturralde says. “I didn’t expect it.”

Sigcho says. “But if that’s all you A phenomenon called intimate propose, well obviously, you have a segregation occurs in the midst of massive effect on everyone else. You gentrification. In have not neighborhoods like developed a Pilsen, residents balanced economy. live in close You have not “In neighborhoods quarters but might developed a like Pilsen, never interact sustainable with one another. economy. You are residents live in Financially creating bubbles. close quarters, but comfortable postI think it creates a grads like Swanson false narrative and may have no real create alternate a false notion of interaction with “communities” development that within such all, sooner or later, one another.” neighborhoods is going to crash.” that attract luxury Real estate businesses and agents often exclude existing approach working-class Iturralde’s residents, who are father, she says, often people of taking the UIC color. Such Leadership Coach businesses appeal to the millennial taste out to dinner and and average income bracket: young propositioning him to sell his house. people who can’t quite afford a place in They set out to buy such properties and River North, but have the cash for new flip them for higher prices. It’s not too buildings in Pilsen. different from the specialty thrift shops “Each of us as individuals has to that resell clothes at a much higher price live somewhere and has to make an tag than the segundas. individual choice about where we “You’ll can afford to live, given we want to see people have a little disposable income,” says photographing Mary Pattillo, Northwestern’s Harold stuff to plan Washington Professor of Sociology and the new African American Studies. “It’s not that developments you have individual bad guys who are that they’re trying to displace somebody. But the going to be aggregation of our decisions, which building,” are not usually malicious decisions, Iturralde says. creates the kinds of outcomes that While we’re talking about.” gentrification When a flood of incoming millennials is often move in, they set the stage for new labelled as an housing developments — the physical infiltration of gauge of gentrification, says Byron whiteness, the Sigcho, director of the Pilsen Alliance, reality of these a social justice organization focused newcomers’ on developing grassroots leadership identities is in Chicago’s Lower West Side working complex. The residents of these new class and immigrant communities. developments are often

considered white in the sense that they have more money and occupy a different social sphere, Pattillo says.

Even when new inhabitants are people of color, whiteness is a stand in for not being Mexican and not being working class. According to U.S. Census data, Pilsen lost over 6,000 Mexican residents between 2012 and 2016.

“People are not totally off-base to see the Mexican core of Pilsen being threatened by newcomers,” Pattillo says.

“Even if they’re not white, they may not be Mexican. And that in and of itself dilutes the Mexican predominance.”

Swanson frequents the flower shops and savors fresh fruit from the local markets near her home. She says she doesn’t see much gentrification in Pilsen, “other than [herself].” Iturralde, however, notices it in more than Swanson – she sees it in the coffee shops and the people who remind her of her life at Northwestern.

“Anyone who does move in that is marketable to be your ‘friendly neighbor’ kind of makes it more appealing for other people to come in and further gentrify it,” Iturralde says. “It’s kind of scary. Like, every time I go back to my neighborhood, it’s like a little less like it used to be before.”

Neighborhoods change, Pattillo says. For example, Lincoln Park used to be predominantly Puerto Rican, and “Pilsen” itself is a Czech name from the Bohemians who first settled the area.

“The only way to interrupt this process requires very aggressive public policy intervention, because the private market is not going to do it,” Pattillo says. “The history tells us that the city also does not do it.

Which means it doesn’t get done. It requires really radically rethinking housing, for example, to stop the kinds of changes that we’re talking about.”

Preservation Chicago listed Pilsen as an “endangered site” in 2005.

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All abroad!

Escaping Evanston on a budget is daunting, but far from impossible.

WRITTEN and DESIGNED BY AINE DOUGHERTY

O

n a sunny Saturday morning, after a week of classes at the local university in Sydney, Australia, London Edwards-Johnson woke up and headed to her shift at Big Daddy’s Burger Bar, an American ‘50s-themed diner. She greeted her co-workers, a friendly group who was always kind to her, even though she did not share their twangy Aussie accents.

That day, they congratulated her on her pay raise, from minimum wage ($17.70 at the time) to a cool $22 an hour.

Edwards-Johnson worked some nights and weekends during the four months she spent in Sydney as a study abroad student. Thanks in part to her job, she was able to save up enough money to travel to places like Bali, Indonesia and New Zealand. But before she could even think about taking a vacation from Sydney, she had to think about basic necessities. Without her paycheck from the diner, EdwardsJohnson says, buying groceries would have been a challenge, let alone figuring out weekends and free time during her stay in Australia.

When one thinks of college students studying abroad, EdwardsJohnson’s experience is not normally what comes to mind. The archetype is a carefree 20-year-old gallivanting around the world, encountering the culture of a new country and beefing

up their Instagram feed while taking full advantage of the more relaxed drinking laws and neglecting the “study” in “study abroad.” But for many students with high financial need who make the decision to study abroad, well, that experience can seem a world away.

Urban legend dictates that study abroad is inaccessible for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, a belief that can stop some students in their tracks before they’ve even started.

“The message that study abroad is not affordable is probably causing some students to forgo or miss out on the opportunity before even considering it, simply because they heard somewhere that it was not ‘for them,’” says Northwestern Undergraduate Learning Abroad Adviser Francesca Miroballi.

Low-income students face many hurdles if they decide to study internationally. Program costs can surpass that of a term at a U.S. university.

Unseen expenses arise while traveling and living in a different culture with a different currency. Students miss out on a steady source of income at home. But despite the challenges that studying in a different country can pose for students with high financial need, Northwestern and outside scholarship programs are working to change the perception that study abroad is only for those from privileged socioeconomic status.

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The Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship from the Institute of International Education (IIE), sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, is one such program. It provides scholarships to fund study and intern abroad programs for students from all over the country who receive federal Pell Grants. According to the program’s 2016 Evaluation Report, they awarded 2,799 scholarships during the 20142015 academic year, with 64 percent of Gilman Scholars representing ethnic minority groups. The national success rate for Gilman applicants is 27 percent, but for Northwestern students it is 47 percent, according to the Undergraduate Learning Abroad office. In fact, with 10 awards, Northwestern made the 2016-2017 list of top medium-sized U.S. universities that produce the most Gilman Scholars.

Now a senior in the School of Education and Social Policy, EdwardsJohnson has three study abroad programs under her belt. Thanks in part to the Gilman scholarship, her costs were completely covered for her first international experience, a summer spent with the Global Engagement Studies Institute (GESI) working on a sustainable development project in Uganda after her freshman year. The Gilman Scholarship Program also led her to another opportunity that she never expected. “Gilman, when they get certain Black students who stand out to them, they forward your application,” she says. Her infectious smile grows wider as she recalls the moment. “So, randomly I got an email saying, ‘You have another scholarship from the Shawn Carter Foundation!’ And I was like, I didn’t even apply to this!” Yes, that Shawn Carter – although you might know him better by his stage name, Jay-Z. “I feel like I was able to find solutions,” Edwards-Johnson says. “I’m pretty self-sufficient. I think there are a lot of resources out there – you just

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have to take advantage. It’s just about finding them and using them.”

For Medill senior Jacquelyn Guillen, family played a big role in her decision to study abroad in Madrid and complete her Journalism Residency in Johannesburg, South Africa during her junior year. “I would talk to my parents a lot,” Guillen says, “just to make sure it was financially feasible for us.” Guillen also made sure to talk to returnees, whom she found through Northwestern’s study abroad website and who gave valuable advice about what to expect from the programs she eventually chose.

Guillen had studied Spanish and joined a flamenco dance group in high school, so she was immediately drawn to Spanish-speaking countries during her study abroad search. She met frequently with an adviser and finally landed on a Northwesternaffiliated Boston University program in Madrid that she thought would be perfect for her – the only problem was that the program cost more than what she typically received for financial aid. Luckily, she was able to apply for a scholarship from BU that helped her cover the rest of the costs without having to take out a loan.

Another resource that EdwardsJohnson took advantage of was a pre-departure support program called Bridge Builder, offered by Study Abroad Financial Services at Northwestern. According to Manager Krista Buda Bethel, the program is available to students with the highest financial need. It helps them cover up-front costs like airfare, Visa fees and tuition deposits. In her spacious, airy office that has welcomed many students seeking such advice, Bethel explains: “You sit down with someone who’s familiar with the cost of your program, and you go over your specific costs and billing arrangements and budgeting,” which can be useful in easing fears and adjusting expectations before departure.

When students hop on planes and dive headfirst into life in a different country, they can encounter unexpected expenses that can be challenging for a student with very little financial flexibility. When Edwards-Johnson arrived at the airport for the first leg of her long flight to South Africa for her third study abroad experience, she was excited to do independent research in Durban. At check-in, however, she quickly realized that the airline did not cover her baggage – and she was not prepared to pay for it. She used her Target credit card to cover the fees. “I had to come out of pocket, like, $75,” she remembers. “I hadn’t even started yet. I didn’t think that my budget was going to come into effect until I got to the country at least. It threw me off guard.”

And even in the midst of the excitement after safely touching down in host countries, finances still weigh on many students’ minds.

Before even beginning classes in Australia, Edwards-Johnson had to stock her barebones apartment in Sydney: spices, linens, pots and pans.

Moving into her new home felt like a serious investment, even though she would be moving out in just a few months. “I remember the first day at the grocery store, my receipt was this long!” she says, stretching her arms as wide as they can go, as if she is about to lean in for a bear hug. “It was like $350 – something ridiculous like that.” As for Guillen, even more straightforward things like transportation could throw a wrench in her budget: she would often have to take a pricey cab home after a night out in Madrid, since the metro stopped running at 2 a.m.

For some students, study abroad can be the first time where they have to really budget their own money, Bethel says. They can be in danger of mismanaging their funds, especially if they receive a

windfall of a financial aid refund at the start of their program. This issue lies in stretching that refund over a number of months. “Learning how to direct those funds appropriately is a challenge, and then add to that, you’re away from Northwestern, and living in a different culture and currency,” Bethel says.

Overcoming cultural differences, making new friends and learning a new language – these worries usually take priority for more financially stable students, but money is often first on lower-income students’ minds.

One of the biggest challenges becomes balancing a more limited budget with the many tempting experiences abroad, from meals out to weekend sightseeing trips. And that hurdle can seem daunting when students compare their adventures with those of other students who seem to be running on unlimited funds.

Everyone has different resources and experiences abroad, and EdwardsJohnson was able to jet off to other countries for vacation and have fun while she was in Sydney. But she still found it hard to understand how other students were able to travel to exotic places every weekend. “I don’t know how they afforded to have anything, because they weren’t working,” she says. “Seeing them gone every single weekend, it’s like – I can’t.”

Guillen knew that many people in her program had planned more expensive excursions to Paris or Prague, and she accepted that there were certain places that were simply out of her price range. “I usually tried to find plane tickets that were under 100 euros,” she says. But like Edwards-Johnson, even though Guillen had to make tougher choices about her travel plans, she didn’t miss out on the wanderlust. “I ended up going to Lisbon, which was a really cheap flight, and I loved it,” Guillen says. “Everything there was

really affordable, so I kind of got to go to low-key places like that and enjoy my time abroad.”

Guillen also looked for ways to supplement her budget while abroad, and she says BU had a list of resources to help make things easier: “If you didn’t come there with a huge budget, they suggested ways to get money.” For example, she says, many parents in Madrid were searching for tutors to teach their kids English.

From taking on jobs like tutoring or waiting tables at Big Daddy’s, students with tighter budgets often need to put in extra effort in order to navigate their study abroad experiences, but they say it’s all about being savvy and using the resources that are available to them, from the Undergraduate Learning Abroad office at Northwestern to outside scholarships like Gilman (and JayZ’s) to local job opportunities.

As she outlined the different steps she took to make the most of her three study abroad trips and fondly remembered her experiences, a glint of defiance entered Edwards-Johnson’s eye.

“I really didn’t want my study abroad experiences to be a burden on my family at all. It’s already enough paying money here [at Northwestern]. They don’t need to be paying more for me to have this kind of luxury experience.”

PHOTOS BY STEPHANIE J. SHIN and SAKKE OVERLUND

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

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Radio, Television & Frustration While RTVF students struggle to make movies under department funding, theatre students thrive by funding themselves.

WRITTEN BY DEVON KERR | DESIGNED BY LUCY DWYER | ILLUSTRATION BY RACHEL HAWLEY

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SPRING 2018

A

n email from the Department of Radio/Television/Film (RTVF) in May 2016 hit then-sophomore Orli Spierer with a sense of dread. It wasn’t bad news, though. The faculty had awarded her a Media Arts Grant (MAG), funding to direct a dramatic short film she had pitched about three weeks before.

“All the [other] films already had crews, so I couldn’t find people to work on my project,” Spierer says. The department had notified her about the grant late into spring quarter, and potential crew members had all been snatched up during early spring. Spierer had never directed a film at NU before, and she hadn’t even written a script when she received the money.

Overwhelmed with the task of making her film on such short notice, Spierer abandoned the project. The money was never accepted, the film never made. The consequences for Spierer were slim to none. “It definitely felt like nobody was holding me accountable, which is why it was so easy just to not make it,” Spierer says.

Her project is one of dozens that failed under the new MAG system.

Since 2015, the department has shifted extracurricular grant distribution from student-to-student funding to facultyto-student funding. Students seeking funding for an extracurricular film have to apply to the RTVF department directly rather than to a student-run film board.

A vast number of RTVF students have criticized the new funding system – a petition to reform the system reached 162 signatures (RTVF graduating classes are 35 to 90 students) by spring 2018.

Complaints on the petition include, “the loss of well-managed set opportunities, the large number of unfinished projects, and a lack of diverse representation.” “ We understand that the administration has created this new funding system in order to further production, but it has become increasingly

clear that the implementation contains critical, detrimental flaws,” the petition reads.

The failure rate of films has surged under the new system. During the 20162017 school year, out of 14 grant films, only four films were ready for premiere at the end of the year.

Under the previous film grant system, students pitched directly to boards like Studio 22. Students made roughly 10 films each year, and when boards chose a film to produce, upperclassmen on the board mentored and walked students through the budgeting process, script development and equipment rentals.

With the new MAG system, there is no guarantee of mentorship or accountability, despite claims of faculty support. For instance, Spierer’s advisor never followed up after she abandoned her project. The lack of support leaves filmmakers like Spierer, now a senior, stranded when they receive the grant.

As RTVF junior and petition signee Chloe Fourte says, “There’s no system of checks and balances to make sure projects get done.”

In spring 2016, the student-run Arts Alliance Theatre Board chose Communication senior Mary Kate Goss to direct “Heathers: The Musical.” Despite the large undertaking of a full-sized musical with a crew of over 30 people and a budget of several thousand dollars, Goss’ production was a huge success and sold out almost every show. According to Goss, the show wouldn’t have been possible without Arts Alliance. “They provided the foundation for the show,” Goss says. “I didn’t have to worry about the pieces falling together and could just focus on the rehearsal room.”

As the RTVF department slashes student boards, the theatre department’s board-friendly program flourishes.

When stacked against other colleges, Hollywood Reporter ranked the

Northwestern theatre department No. 8 in 2016, and this year the Princeton Review ranked them No. 2. “[The theatre department] gives students autonomy and the chance to explore arts administration in a way that we likely will when we graduate,” Fourte says.

Film boards such as Studio 22 and Northwestern University Women Filmmakers Alliance (NUWFA) now face many limitations to funding their grants. There are only three department-recognized film boards for RTVF, which limits the amount of support boards can offer. Within the theatre department, there are 12 boards under the Student Theatre Coalition (StuCo) umbrella. These operate with little faculty department oversight.

“The whole idea from an educational standpoint is that we are exercising the muscles of ‘What makes a good season?’ and ‘Why do we choose a play?’ and that it would be something different if we were doing it all to impress a teacher and meet their standard,” says Communication junior Sean Finnegan, the current co-chair of StuCo. Students criticize the lack of care that the RTVF department puts into choosing their grants, leading to projects that never reach the post-production stage.

“The student theatre community has boards that make sure things happen ... but within the film department, [boards] are being phased out so now nobody even knows if projects will get done,” says RTVF senior Jessica Zeidman, a signatory on the proposal.

“The MAG application took me one hour to fill out,” Spierer says, “I didn’t even have to submit a script.”

Conversely, theatre boards often go through multiple rounds of applications, interviews and deliberations before choosing their season.

One reason for the implementation of the RTVF MAG system was concerns of nepotism – that student-led funding only led to friends giving their friends grants.

But as Zeidman states, the problem has only gotten worse now. “The only people that work on each other’s MAGs now are their close friends. It’s become a system of favors ... whereas people used to work on sets to get more involved with the Studio 22 or NUWFA community.”

A major way the theatre department avoids favoritism is its wide variety of grant systems. With theatre’s more functional structure, there is even a MAG-like system known as the “Student Theatre Project Series” which the department funds for more experimental or low-budget projects that are faculty-led. The theatre department has a mixed system with both student and department funding through StuCo and the Student Theatre Project Series respectively. Currently, there are over 30 theatre productions at NU each year.

Students have also criticized the new RTVF system for its lack of diversity and female-focused works.

“Because there are so many theatre boards with specific missions like Lipstick [a theatre board focused on tackling women’s issues], there’s a lot more focus on elevating those voices ... Because film boards have been so limited by the department we have witnessed the unintended obstruction of diversity,” Zeidman says.

In the 2017 fall MAG cycle, the department awarded only one woman a grant, compared to eight men.

The enormous gender disparity has raised complaints from Zeidman and other members of NUWFA, whose mission statement is dedicated toward promoting female-led work and an inclusive decision-making process within the MAG system.

The one suggestion that comes up over and over again? “I’d like to see the department returning some form of student-to-student funding,” Zeidman says. “They should trust the students again to do that.”

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

23

CHRIST

a little with your WRITTEN & DESIGNED BY MADDIE JARRARD

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COFFEE

hen he dropped off his resume two years ago, Moses Lee didn’t know the history of Coffee Lab. He had visited their old location years ago, a smaller shop with limited seating — a shop that was still owned by Garrett Theological Seminary (GTS).

The original Coffee Lab that Lee visited opened under GTS in 2012, but experienced a financial crisis roughly two years in that led to a transition of power. Chris An, who served as part-time manager, bought the business from the Seminary and began Beyond Coffee and Beyond Church (BCBC) Coffee Lab.When Lee first interviewed for a job with BCBC Coffee Lab in 2016, An ran the shop in Evanston.

“I remember when I was interviewing with Chris, he did tell me the history,” Lee says.

“He didn’t say it like ‘Oh, we are a religious or Christian establishment’, but he did say that we first and foremost take care of our neighbors. I think that is a little biblical, but I think you can also interpret that however you want to.”

To many, however, the history of Coffee Lab and its ties to Christianity

PHOTO BY YING DAI

are a surprise. Reena Burt, a SESP sophomore studying social policy and economics, learned about Coffee Lab from her older brother. The two would frequent the shop together, but she never suspected it had religious ties.

“I don’t think their connection to the church in any way as an organization really bothers me, as long as while I’m in the space they don’t try and attempt to convert me,” Burt says. “If the space itself is very secular, I’m okay with that.”

Nathan Reiff, a junior studying learning sciences, worked at Coffee Lab last summer. He had a similar experience to Lee; he was told in his interview about the religious dimensions of Coffee Lab. One example he notes is an employee

The covert Christianity behind your North Campus caffeine fix.

Bible study that is offered for those who want to be involved.

BCBC Coffee Lab’s mission — to take care of your neighbor — is echoed by managers, employees and the company’s website. To An, Coffee Lab’s mission separates it from any other coffee shop in the area. He sees religiosity as impacting his company’s customer service, the way that he operates the business.

“We have a different motivation as to why we do our business,” An says. “We are looking to practice God’s love. We focus on human beings more than other coffee shops. I train our staff to focus on other staff and customers and the people around us. It’s not just one cup of coffee; it’s sharing our love.”

One of the ways this mission is translated into action is through Coffee Lab’s collaboration with Connections for the Homeless in Evanston.

According to An, Coffee Lab has set up a program to train members of the homeless community as baristas. Some are hired, and others leave with skills to put on a resume. The shop also donates less perishable items – scones, cookies and muffins – at the end of the day.

For Greg Dunn, the café’s general manager, the priority is making Coffee Lab an open space for conversation between all identities.

“We appreciate Christians coming to work here and we appreciate Muslims coming to work here,” Dunn says. “We have open discussions about [religious] things, but don’t be upset if you hear things that you don’t wanna hear. No one is pointing a finger at you, and we don’t let conversations go to a point where it’s really overwhelming for our belief system.”

He acknowledged that sometimes open conversation, however, leads to open disagreement.

“We try to keep it level to some degree,” Dunn says. “There was a time where ... there were some disagreements between folks. It’s not up for us to tell someone what to believe, things like that. We do our best to balance everything.”

Lee, the sophomore who has worked at Coffee Lab for two years, has witnessed his fair share of tension between employees. He said that usually tension arises when one employee feels like another is too imposing about starting religious dialogue, and even recalls when a staff member switched shifts to avoid conversations with another employee.

“Sometimes this [religious] co-worker would talk to [the non-religious co-worker] about religion and God,” Lee said. “This co-worker had already explicitly stated that they weren’t really interested. But I think the other person didn’t quite get it and just kept persisting, and then after a certain point they got pretty upset and they switched shifts — you have to like the person that you’re working with in a coffee shop.”

It is important to note, however, that these religious conversations are usually limited to employees.

“We try not to open conversation with customers too much,” Dunn said. “If it comes up, we’re very open to discussion, but we don’t force conversation, and we don’t try to guide it to a certain area.”

But sometimes conversations are bound to start. There are a variety of Christian elements to BCBC Coffee Lab (aside from the BCBC part).

On top of the monthly Bible study group, in a Chick-fil-A manner, Coffee Lab is also closed on Sundays. And, if you pay close attention, you will notice variations of the Bible sitting on the bookshelves of Coffee Lab, tucked between sequels of the Eragon series, cookbooks and canyon hiking guides.

Reiff, who was raised Jewish but is not religious, was initially turned off by the Christian aspects of Coffee Lab. “I was weirded out by the religious stuff at first,” Reiff said. “But recently I’ve been like — it doesn’t make a difference at all. I still enjoy the place a lot, and I’ve realized that doesn’t make a difference to the product that they’re delivering.”

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

25

WRITTEN BY ALIANA RUXIN | DESIGN AND ILLUSTRATION BY SAVANNAH CHRISTENSEN PHOTOS COURTESY OF NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

D

eep within Northwestern’s Technological I n s t i t ut e , Professor J. Allen Hynek, Chairman of the NU Department of Astronomy, lectures students on the virtues of the telescope and space exploration: “The Perspective of the Astronomer.” His typewriter notes are littered with blue and red ink, the changes to the plan penned by hand. A student reaches to turn off the lights, enveloping the evening lecture in darkness, save for the projector displaying a glowing New Yorker cartoon: A short, fat, balding man looks up at a similarly drawn man looking into a massive telescope: “Nonsense!” he shouts, “There couldn’t be another civilization out there more advanced than ours — they would have destroyed themselves.”

It’s 1963, and Hynek is not so sure.

Hynek began teaching at Northwestern in 1960; that same year, he was named chairman of the astronomy program. Hynek had been heralded for his work in astronomy at universities and observatories across the Midwest.

His ufology colleague, Mark Rodeghier, describes Hynek as “a classic absent-minded professor,

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SPRING 2018

in a good way.” He once left his briefcase on the L and miraculously recovered it.

But among the accolades, Hynek had a side project NU didn’t love as much: UFO research and investigation.

When Northwestern hired him, Hynek had also already spent 12 years as a scientific advisor for Project Blue Book, the United States Air Force’s formal investigation of UFOs. Between 1948 and 1969, he examined thousands of reported UFO sightings for the project. By determining which known astronomical object or phenomenon could explain these sightings, Hynek could debunk them. In 1969, the project coordinators halted the project, deciding that there was no significant evidence of anything flying that was “unidentified.”

Hynek, however, remained unconvinced. He debunked most sightings, but some remained unexplained. So he set to work of his own volition. He established the Center for UFO Studies in 1973, first out of his own home before moving operations to 924 Chicago Ave. in Evanston in 1975. Hynek’s

goal for the Center, Rodeghier says, was similar to that of any scientific research institution: “do your work and try to learn more about what you’re studying.” Hynek was convinced that the subject merited a cohort of invested colleagues and an administrative staff to investigate and file reportings. In 1978, he retired from Northwestern to focus on ufology and devoted his efforts to the Center.

“I think they [Northwestern] put up with it, but they weren’t that happy about it,” explains Paul Hynek, Hynek’s son. The University found itself caught between two options: satisfy this highly regarded new professor, or formally associate with this fringe science. “I imagine they made some kind of deal: ‘You do it on your own time, don’t use Northwestern stationery, don’t involve us with it.’

And they never really warmed up to it very much,” Paul says.

Rodeghier echoes these sentiments. “The Northwestern administration and his colleagues in the astronomy department tolerated his interests, but I can’t say they were supportive, and they certainly didn’t provide him

anything special.” Many academics anonymously approached him, cautious to use their name in the burgeoning UFO field.

Paul remembers joining his father to investigate UFO sightings throughout his childhood. He emphasizes his father’s ability to meld compassion with scientific methodology: it was an openminded search for evidence.

Hynek’s expertise in astronomy was imperative. A sighting could’ve actually been a weather balloon, planet or temperature inversion, unidentifiable only to those unable to recognize such phenomena. He developed tactful methods for finding the truth, like retelling a sighting story with slight inaccuracies and weighing the witness’s response to discern fabrication.

Even with diligent research, there is no physical evidence to prove the existence of UFOs. They are often conceived of as flying saucers, thanks to Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 report that described them as traveling through the air like “a saucer if you skip it across water.”

And though commonly associated with aliens, the term actually refers to simply “unidentified flying objects:” any size, any shape, powered by anything.

The scientific community does widely accept that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, Rodeghier says, but this question begs further research. The nonprofit Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, sponsored partially

by NASA, searches for signals with radio telescopes.

And since UFOs pose a security threat in the sky, it’s surprising that the politics of UFOs are so messy. But Rodeghier says that the authorities, at least in the U.S., have this “amazing mental disconnect” when it comes to UFOs. “This is post 9/11,” he explains, “security is pretty important, and yet UFOs are something that basically causes a mind freeze among people ... There is this veil of ridicule that surrounds the subject, and it stymies

action when there should be action.”

Sightings remain shrouded in mystery and skepticism, and the Center keeps a close watch. At about 4:30 p.m. on Nov. 7, 2006, a United Airlines ramp worker spotted a UFO among the overcast skies at O’Hare. While several of his colleagues confirmed the sighting, the Federal Aviation Administration refused to investigate the reports.

In December, a leaked video revealed an undercover UFO investigation project funded by the U.S. Government between 2007 and 2012. That same month, The

"UFOs are something that basically causes a mind freeze among people."

New York Times reported that the Defense Department spent $22 million on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, an effort that “was almost impossible to find. Which was how the Pentagon wanted it.” The sightings have stretched to this year. On Feb. 24, 2018, three separate pilots radioed in reports of an unidentified object in the sky in the same location. The FAA dismissed these reports as well — reports that Hynek would’ve surely deemed worthy of great study.

Today, Rodeghier carries on Hynek’s legacy at the Center. His 40-year tenure there began the summer before his senior year of college. Rodeghier moved the Center’s operations to his home in 2009, when it could no longer afford to rent an office. More than 30 contributors currently work there, including academics (some

retired) from a variety of disciplines like history, science and psychology.

Other volunteers are simply interested in the research. He recalls a time when someone claimed they were abducted, which prompted the Center to call a famous hypnotist to assess what the individual could remember. Hynek and his team searched for evidence like radar signals, additional witnesses and physical remnants. He investigated UFO sightings “in a balanced, scientific fashion, trying to take into account both an openness but also a scientific, healthy skepticism,” says Paul, who spent hours listening to his father’s inquiries. “It was fascinating to see him talk to these people and make them feel at ease right away.”

The Center’s interdisciplinary structure harkens back to Hynek’s 1963 astronomy lecture preserved in the Northwestern Archives. His neatly typed notes read: “Astronomy is not only looking through a telescope at remote objects, so to speak, but it is physics and mathematics, combined with other disciplines and crafts; of the latter, optics, photography, electronics and computing techniques are paramount.”

CurrentNorthwesternDepartment of Physics and Astronomy Professor Dave Meyer compares the investigation techniques employed by Hynek and his ufologist successors to a police investigation: a witness claims a sighting and the team investigates, searching for truth, physical evidence or disproving the claim.

Professor Meyer explains that both the Department of Astronomy and the University as a whole didn’t, and still don’t, take official stances on what faculty should and should not research. But, he says the scientific community doesn’t study UFOs since there’s no convincing physical scientific evidence or discernable pattern to sightings. He recalls Carl Sagan’s famous words: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

“So,” Rodeghier concludes, “that’s why we’re here.”

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

27

Minnesota nice Minneapolis and St. Paul offer Northwestern students two cities for the price of one.

WRITTEN BY ANDIE LINKER DESIGNED BY AINE DOUGHERTY

I

know what you’re thinking. Why would I want to travel to somewhere I’ve heard is even colder than Evanston? To put it straight: it’s just as cold as Evanston, but its spring weather is a hell of a lot more beautiful. Minneapolis and St. Paul are known for their nice people, the beautiful Mississippi River flowing through them and a cheese-oozing burger called the Juicy Lucy. Minneapolis has some of the best ice cream shops in the world, is one of the top 10 most bike friendly cities in the U.S. and has three picturesque lakes located smack in the center of the city. Word on the street is they’re trying to rebrand as a part of the Northwest, but they’re not fooling anyone. They’re Midwesterners at heart. Hot take: Minneapolis-St. Paul is the Portland of the Midwest. Go see for yourself.

FRIDAY

Getting there: The drive to Minneapolis takes about 6 to 7 hours if you have a car, which is quite the trek for a weekend.

Amtrak will get you there in about 8 hours and costs around $70. Megabus will take you 8 to 9 hours and cost $50. I got a round trip flight to Minneapolis for about $150, and the flight was only an hour long.

Minneapolis isn’t easy to get to, but trust me, it’s worth it.

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I headed to the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District for dinner and a stroll. My boyfriend and I ate at Young Joni, a trendy restaurant combining pizza with Asian cuisines. The atmosphere was cozy and friendly, and if you’re smart about what you order, the tab won’t run too high.

Fair warning: the Friday night wait at Young Joni will last about an hour at peak dining time. Have no fear! You can go stroll around and find

a few vintage stores, which Minneapolis is full of. You could also grab a drink at Dangerous Man Brewing Company right next door.

After dinner, I walked all the way back to the neighborhood I was staying in: Dinkytown.

This was a lovely walk along Minneapolis’ most beautiful attraction, the Mississippi River. We got great views of the original Pillsbury A-Mill, Gold Medal Flour and Minneapolis’ small but mighty skyline.

SATURDAY The arts scene in Minneapolis is as exciting and vibrant as the food scene.

We got up early and got on our bikes. Getting around Minneapolis isn’t easy. The city has sub-par public transit and is not built for walking, so a car or a bike is ideal. One option is a 24-hour Nice Ride bike pass, which costs $6 per half hour. You can try and beat the system by switching out bikes every half hour and you’ll only pay $6 the whole day. Otherwise, it shouldn’t cost you more than $25 for the entire day.

We started out at Al’s Breakfast, which is so famous that it has a Wikipedia page.

There are only 14 seats along a bar in the entire restaurant.

Their website says they don’t have a freezer to ensure their food is fresh. We ordered the Jose, which comprises of hashbrowns, salsa, poached eggs and cheese. We also got their daily special, one blackberry pancake and two coffees, which cost us $25.

It was greasy and decadent, but arguably one of the best breakfasts I’ve ever had.

While in a food coma, we got back on bikes and rode over to the Mill City Farmers Market via the Dinkytown Greenway (Minneapolis has a network of bike paths called Greenways). This Farmers Market is held between the Guthrie Theater and the old Gold Medal Flour Mill, which makes for a cool industrial vibe. I tried some sweet, delicious lemonade from a vendor called The Bolt. Just be warned: it is less of a farmers market and more of a local market (think of Smorgasburg in NYC). Although

A sweet cone from Milkjam Creamery and an even sweeter donut from Sleepy V’s.

there was some produce, it was mostly vendors from restaurants selling ready-made food and local food producers selling goods like cured meats and honey.

We rode along the Cedar Lake Trail, a rugged-looking bike path next to train tracks.

Minneapolis has been doing commuter bike paths long before Chicago built the 606.

The trail took us all the way to Lake of the Isles (about four miles), a beautiful lake with even more beautiful homes around it. We ambled through the neighborhood and sat out by the lake.

My boyfriend and I found room for dessert and headed to Milkjam Creamery. This iconic ice cream shop is a Minneapolis favorite for the fun flavors its menu boasts.

Its namesake is a flavor called Milkjam which is made of condensed cow and goat milk.

It is also famous for having black ice cream, which is a super dark vegan chocolate. I opted for raspberry chocolate chip. Honestly, I wasn’t a huge fan of my choice, but I have

PHOTOS BY ANDIE LINKER

been there before and can attest it is delicious. The shop also makes a really delicious ice cream sandwich on donuts from another Minneapolis icon: Glamdoll Donuts.

Finally, we took the Midtown Greenway back to Dinkytown. The Midtown Greenway is less industriallooking because it is below ground level in the middle of the city, and it cuts right through quaint residential areas. In the 10 or so miles we biked, we only had to encounter cars once to get to the trails.

Minneapolis is a hidden midwest gem that boasts a wealth of good food and fun activities. Forget their rebrand; if you’re an outdoorsman at heart, but also love city life, Minneapolis is the perfect place for you.

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P

Alex Neumann

romising legalized marijuana + puns + a college campus = increased civic participation of university students?

This is a formula Daniel Biss’ gubernatorial campaign employed when canvassing at Northwestern.

NU students working for the campaign stood at the Arch, holding signs reading “CANNABISS” and asking their peers if they were registered to vote in Illinois.

According to a Tufts study, college student voter turnout increased from 45.1 percent to 48.3 percent nationally from 2012 to 2016. In 2017, Northwestern won five awards at the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge Award Ceremony in Washington, D.C., including highest voting rate among large, private four-year institutions and most improved voting rate among all U.S. universities. College students vote – so these Northwestern student activists have the opportunity to make a significant impact on the political landscape.

For Weinberg political science junior Dylan Doppelt, this work began during the 2012 presidential election. He spent the summer working at Obama’s campaign headquarters in Chicago and making hundreds of calls to voters across the state. He drove out to Iowa every other weekend in a van packed with other volunteers to spend the day knocking on doors.

Doppelt is no stranger to the ups and downs of political campaigns.

After getting his start with the Obama candidacy, he worked on Pat Quinn’s 2014 campaign for Illinois governor. “I think I was the most active volunteer that couldn’t vote for [Quinn],” he says.

“That was a joke in my local area.”

Seeing deportation raids on his block, the border between the two strong immigrant communities of Humboldt Park and Hermosa in Chicago, motivated Doppelt to create change via politics. His father’s encouragement of civic involvement also played a role.

“He always made sure I’d sit down and watch the nightly news with him, so I always knew what was going on,” Doppelt says. “He

The campaign kids Ever wondered what the kid who raises his hand in every Poli Sci class does in his spare time?

WRITTEN BY MIA MAMONE | DESIGNED BY LUCY DWYER | PHOTOS BY SAKKE OVERLUND & STEPHANIE J. SHIN

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SPRING 2018

took me to a couple canvassing events for Obama 2008 when I was a lot younger.”

After the Quinn campaign, Doppelt joined Jesús “Chuy” García’s team when he ran against incumbent Rahm Emanuel in 2015 for mayor of Chicago. Next was Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential election primary, followed by Hillary Clinton once she received the Democratic nomination for the general election. Most recently, he worked for the Daniel Biss Democratic gubernatorial primary campaign.

But, Doppelt is not the only Northwestern student who has worked on political candidacies. During the 2017 election for Evanston mayor, fifth-year McCormick student Sean van Dril stood at the Arch and Tech, campaigning for Steve Hagerty. He says he and other volunteers met immense skepticism from other students in spite of students’ theoretical desires to get involved politically, particularly after the election of President Trump.

Van Dril found students to be most comfortable and familiar with political involvement “from 50,000 feet up” - there were many students who would talk the talk, but few who would walk the walk.

Van Dril says when students are forced to take a stand on something, actions like voting and volunteering locally can be scarier than just echoing what is popular to disagree with. At times, van Dril was accused of not even being a Northwestern student. “They say, ‘Your candidate, he’s paying you, isn’t he?’” van Dril says. “And it’s like, ‘Nope, I just believe in his message.’”

This was a common thread between eight Northwestern students who’ve worked on political campaigns – they certainly weren’t in it for the money.

Though some were paid for their work, they were motivated primarily by their belief in specific candidates, interest in politics at large or personal inclination to make positive change.

Weinberg political science sophomore Alex Neumann also canvassed for Daniel

Cecilia Wilson

Biss. His political interest was sparked by his fathers’ work in fighting for same-sex marriage equality when he was growing up. Since coming to college, the history of corrupt machine politics in Illinois further drew him into political involvement. “I was drawn to how exciting it is, how much people care, but also how much wrong there is, and how much there is to change,” he says.

“We tailored our message as students working for the campaign to what we thought students would be most excited about,” Neumann says, citing the “CANNABISS” signs they employed while canvassing at the Arch.

In college, Weinberg junior Joshua Gottlieb worked on the finance team for Andrew Cuomo’s New York gubernatorial campaign. This was following his volunteer work in Congresswoman Nita Lowey’s office, where he worked specifically in constituent relations, answering phones and helping callers solve problems they had with federal agencies, such as Veterans Affairs. “I thought it was cool how you could help people at the grassroots level,” Gottlieb says.

Most recently, he had an internship with the Chris Kennedy campaign in the race for Illinois governor. This internship built on his previous political experiences and desire to attend law school someday - but not before accomplishing a more short-term objective. “My big goal is to work on the campaign that gets Donald Trump out of office,” he says.

Weinberg senior Cecilia Wilson’s political origin story is similar to those of others her age – she’d always had an interest in politics, but the 2016 presidential election made her want to work in the field. After a summer internship on the Hill last year with her congressional representative from Washington state, Suzan DelBene, she worked as a field fellow for Daniel Biss. In February, she started as deputy communications director for Idaho gubernatorial campaign

Joshua Gottlieb

for Paulette Jordan, who could be the first Native American governor ever in the United States.

“The thing about politics that’s both scary because of a lack of stability but also kind of nice for someone like me is that it has a distinct end date,” Wilson says.

“Nothing is a job that I’m going to get stuck in for a long time.”

Others agreed that they want to have careers related to law and politics, though not necessarily as politicians themselves. Of the students who worked with older (and sometimes paid) members of the campaign, all the male interns interviewed said they were treated just like any other staffer.

This was not the case for SESP sophomore Isabel Dobbel. Since starting in nonprofit campaign work through Engage Chicago last summer, she has worked on four different campaigns for various state offices. In one of these offices – she is not comfortable detailing which – she says she was continually disrespected by older men, with comments made about her looks and ethnicity, devaluation of her work and requests to do menial tasks, such as cleaning the office.

“The campaign manager needed a dog to kick,” Dobbel says an older woman on the campaign told her. “I and the other young woman in the office were [those dogs], because it made him feel better about himself.”

But Dobbel doesn’t let that negative experience keep her from continuing in politics – she hopes to work on a campaign for the 2020 presidential election and do campaign work and political consulting out of undergrad. She plans to eventually attend law school and “[become] the person who can start initiating the change.”

“Young ideas are on the rise,” she says.

“There’s a lot of successful politicians and college students that have made this huge difference off of the platform that ‘I’m normal, I’m young, but I care about my future.’”

Dylan Doppelt NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

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“W

alking up Colfax!”

I grinned. He finally texted me. My boyfriend was

Moving from a rural town to Evanston’s liberal bubble doesn’t shield you from slurs.

WRITTEN BY SAMUEL MAUDE DESIGNED BY SARAH ZHANG ILLUSTRATED BY AUDREY VALBUENA

finally here.

This was our normal Friday night routine. He would most likely come up to my peach-themed dingle in Elder and we would play Catan or Mario Kart. On Saturday mornings, I’d get to wake up next to him. That sight always made me smile.

When I walked to Colfax to get him, the first thing I did was lay a big kiss on him. In the middle of our kiss, someone screamed at us.

“Are you two kissing?”

I was taken aback and yelled, “Yeah!”

“Fags!”

That word cut our kiss short, and we just looked at each other. I could see pain in his eyes, and I’m sure he could see the pain in mine. Someone pulled the aux cord at our party. There was a loud sound and then absolute silence.

Justin and I stared at each other, absolutely petrified, and started walking back into Elder.

“Are you okay?” he asked. Was I

okay? What was happening?

How could someone on this campus say this?

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said, “How are you?”

“I’ll be okay.”

As we walked back to the first-floor lounge (a game of Catan was set up and waiting), it was like someone had commandeered that aux cord and started playing Metallica.

There was a banging in my head. My vision was hazy, and I quickly lost the game. I couldn’t even think straight.

32

One day during my senior year of high school, I was SPRING 2018

sitting in my friend David’s office. David, a 29-year-old man who was the artistic director at a community theater, had been my mentor since my freshman year of high school. Always honest and open about all things gay, he often helped me to understand my sexuality. Growing up in Iowa and surrounded by subtle bigotry, I needed that.

During one conversation, he said out of nowhere, “Sam, have you ever been called a fag?”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“Of course not! People don’t say that anymore!”

Then David said something that would haunt me for years: “You will be. You need to be prepared. All gay men are at some point. Just reclaim the slur and take it as your own.”

But I shrugged it off. It would never happen to me, and if it did, it wouldn’t be a big deal.

Two days after the incident at Elder, I got called a fag again. I was walking down Sheridan with my friends Allyson and Nia. One of them made fun of the new

clothes I had bought that day. We laughed.

We were right by Plex when someone shouted, “Faggot!”

I looked around. Where was this coming from? He couldn’t mean me, right?

“The dude in the yellow backpack, yeah. He’s a fag.”

Fag. I was a fag.

If you ask my mom today, she will say she raised me in an open household. She will stand by her claim that she knew I was gay from birth and that she was okay with it.

That claim doesn’t align with my reality and the subtle homophobia everyone in my family fostered. It ’s not that they shouted gay isn’t okay, but it was as if they

whispered it. Too feminine wasn’t good, and I was constantly forced to play with more masculine toys or do more masculine things.

When I was three years old, my mom walked in on my friend Parker and I dressed up as fairies. I was spinning around and casting spells on the evil pixies. She made us change. I remember feeling as if I had done something wrong.

A few days later, my mom gave my dad a book called Bringing Up Boys: Practical Advice and Encouragement for Those Shaping the Next Generation of Men by James Dobson. It was notorious for bashing homosexuality. It argued for nurture over nature and claimed that parents control their child’s sexuality. This book instructed my dad to teach me sports and to do “man” things like handywork.

Despite the book, I would go on to paint my nails and get a rainbow tattooed on my arm last June.

When I came out to my sister, it wasn’t because I wanted to. It was because she asked me.

When I came out to my mom, it wasn’t because I wanted to. It was because my sister told her. She asked me a night later, “You’re not going to become a girl, right?

Or do drag?”

When I came out to my dad, it wasn’t because I wanted to. It was because my mom told him. “I accept you,” he said, “But if you’re trans, I don’t know.”

Throughout my coming out process, I lost all of my “rights.” It was no one else’s right to tell anyone about my sexuality, yet the people closest to me did. Their love also had stipulations.

Fag. Fag. Fag. I had to hold it in. I couldn’t be feminine.

I couldn’t process even presenting more feminine. My family wouldn’t allow it, they wouldn’t know how to handle it.

I would lose everything. I would lose family, friends and the life I had grown so accustomed to.

Everything hurt. My head, my body and my mind. I couldn’t escape my thoughts and I felt like I was about to pass out at 2 p.m. I left class and I headed to D&D’s to get shampoo.

Far too much occupied my head, and my vision grew hazy. The word fag played incessantly in my mind. I couldn’t breathe, and the world felt as if it were closing in on me. I had to sit down on the Sherman Avenue sidewalk and calm down.

After about five minutes, I centered my breathing and started my trek to D&D’s

again. I bought the shampoo I should have gotten five minutes before and made my way back to Elder.

When I got back, I stashed my shampoo quickly and climbed into my bed. I fell asleep and woke up to a dark sky and a shooting pain throughout my entire body.

My anxiety flipped my stomach over, knocked my knees out from under me and rammed into my head.

When I was in third grade, my mom and sister were obsessed with the show Brothers and Sisters. The show had a gay character named Kevin. During one episode, Kevin kissed his boyfriend.

My mom and sister shrieked. They made me leave and I retreated to my room, wondering what I had just seen.

About two years later, we watched Get Smart as a family. At the end of the movie, Steve Carell kisses Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a distraction tactic. I was forced to leave the room once again.

I wasn’t allowed to consume any media that may present men as gay or feminine until high school. Anything gay was ridiculed in my house. As a result, I developed an internalized homophobia. I even said my sophomore year that I was okay with gay people, I just didn’t know why they needed to get married.

When I woke up the word took over my body, limb by limb.

I walked downstairs, and I was suddenly on the floor in the RA office. My head throbbed and I could barely breathe.

I couldn’t do anything except call for help.

Soon, I was surrounded by my friend Keith, my boss and three police officers.

All of them gazed at me, as tears spilled out of my eyes, and I choked on my own saliva. My whole body shook, and the noise in my head just wouldn’t stop.

They took me to the hospital, and I was quickly hooked up to an IV. It didn’t stop the noise. My boyfriend was texting me, my family was calling and my friends were coming. It was more noise. More and more noise.

Finally, a woman came in and spoke to me in a quiet, hushed voice. She asked me to explain what happened, and I went through it step by step.

She apologized. She got angry on my behalf. “I’m positive you have depression and anxiety,” she said. She gave me a list of psychiatrists and therapists. She went on to say that we could fix this. It could get better.

The moment she said that, the noise stopped. Someone understood. Someone reached out to help me. Getting a diagnosis was relieving, because I could fix this. I could be okay.

Two months later, I was transferring from the Blue Line to the Red Line. I had just taken a bus back to Chicago from my home town of Des Moines. As I was walking through the dim tunnel, someone shouted at me.

“Fag!” I looked behind me and saw this man looking directly at me. Suddenly, the noise started again. But over all of it was my therapist’s voice.

“Breathe. You can’t control it. Feel the pain, and let it pass.”

So I passed the man and continued on the Red Line back to Evanston, back into Northwestern and back to this place that had caused me more mental pain than I had ever felt before.

I expected Northwestern to be safe, and suddenly, it wasn’t. And it still isn’t. Even though I feel more equipped to handle the stress thanks to anxiety and depression medication, the word still haunts me. I don’t feel safe.

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F

or a space that appears so cluttered, Professor Irving Rein’s office is immaculately organized. There is not a computer screen in sight, and countless beige folders stuffed with documents line the walls and cover the bookcases. Scattered around the room are framed pictures of astronauts, baseball executives, friends and former students. Books, some authored or coauthored by the man behind the desk, are stacked in neat piles or tucked carefully into a bookcase.

Rein sits in the center of this ordered chaos, in the corner office on the second floor of the Communication building, one of the many nondescript, houselike administration buildings that line Chicago Ave. Now, in his 49th year at Northwestern, Rein continues to teach his signature course in the School of Communication – “Persuasive Images: Rhetoric of Contemporary Culture” – which will celebrate its 50th year as a class in winter quarter 2019.

Rein’s career at the University began in 1969 after he left his post as director of public speaking at Harvard University.

Asked to take over a semantics class, Rein shifted the class focus to popular culture. That same year, Northwestern students organized a week-long strike protesting the American government and Vietnam War. “The class was born in a time of protest, and students were ready to learn about the popular culture they were being influenced by,” Rein says.

Being attentive and engaged remains important for Rein’s 80 to 90 students.

He keeps them on their toes by moving around the room throughout the lecture, calling on students at will. “He’s really not one to tiptoe around the students,” says Naomi Wu, a Communication sophomore who took Rein’s class her freshman year before serving as his undergraduate TA this year. Former undergraduate TA and recent graduate Isabel Steiner agrees.

“It’s one of the few classes left where he knows your name and knows if you’re there,” she says, “And you better not have your phone out.”

Rein teaches each class with a video package, put together by his two graduate student TAs, that keys in on a specific sector of popular culture. He frequently pauses the videos to converse with students and allow them to take notes. The overarching project for the class is a team effort of five or six to create a 10-minute video along with a 10-page paper analyzing their chosen aspect of popular culture.

Northwestern Communication Professor Jeremy Birnholtz took Rein’s class on a whim in the winter of 1993 as an undergraduate in RTVF. He recalls Rein’s engaging, direct teaching style and his own final project, in which he compared chain bookstores and their effect on Evanston book sellers. Though they didn’t stay in touch, Birnholtz says Rein still recognized him as a former student upon Birnholtz’s return to Northwestern as a professor six years ago.

When asked about why the class continues to draw students after almost five decades, Birnholtz says, “[Rein] designed a framework that he can slot whatever is going on in the world into.

REIN’SCULTURE POP REIGN Five decades later, Irving Rein still teaches the same class - with a little help from his friends.

He does an incredible job staying on top of what’s going on in the world, and it’s hard to imagine any other class that gets as much attention as his for so long.”

Former Rein TA and Communication sophomore Grant Elliott notes Rein’s constant ability to wow his students with his evolving knowledge of contemporary culture. “Rein’s getting up there in age, so you wouldn’t expect him to be as upto-date as he is,” she says. “He knows the material is always relevant.”

Rein makes a particular point of this constant relevance. “I feel my students can use this material no matter what they end up doing,” Rein says. “I want them to have that third eye that remains objective.”

His passion for teaching and energetic, blunt, witty style remain unchanged. “Classes were always boring to me,” Rein says. “I always thought if I were to teach, I would teach this way.” He acknowledges that Persuasive Images took on a life of its own long ago, forcing him to look at the world through the lens of the class. A shopping trip now involves conscious analysis of the sales tactics and rhetoric at work in the store or mall. Rein believes the class continues to thrive after 49 years because it reflects changes in culture.

“I always feel there ought to be an arc to what I teach. You don’t just start in 2018,” Rein says. “Students have a good handle on certain things, but not the holistic picture; that’s where I come in.”

Even at age 80, Rein remains sharp.

He exercises regularly, and his next book on the new trends and strategies associated with crisis management will be his 14th book. He remains coy about his plans for year 50 of Persuasive Images, vaguely hinting at potential surprises. The content will vary slightly based on current events, and a new crop of students and assistants will appear in the fall ready to tackle the latest round of significant cultural developments.

However, Rein gives no retirement dates or projections, saying his pupils get the final word.

“If I’m not connecting with the students, I have to get out,” Rein says.

“There aren’t many people like me around anymore.”

WRITTEN BY JAKE MAY DESIGNED BY RITA LIU PHOTO BY SAKKE OVERLUND

It’s not you, it’s me

“I kinda got to a place where I felt like things were really, really serious, and that kinda freaked me out.

I was kind of in a place where I thought that I needed to have more of a stereotypical college experience.”

- Maddy PHOTOS BY STEPHANIE SHIN & SAKKE OVERLUND DESIGNED BY AUDREY VALBUENA

Could you face your ex?

They did.

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35

Maddy & Ben

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SPRING 2018

NBN: When did you guys start dating and how long was your relationship?

Ben: I think it was the second week of freshman year fall quarter. Umm, it lasted around, like, what, nine months?

Maddy: Yeah.

Ben: ‘Til the last day of finals spring quarter.

NBN: What was your favorite memory?

Maddy: We went to a couple really good concerts together.

Ben: Yeah, a lot of like, watching movies, and shenanigans with friends – we were all in a friend group that kinda got really close early on freshman year.

Maddy: It was fun to be freshmen together and do all the freshman-y things.

Ben: Everything on campus was pretty novel, so to do it together was pretty fun.

NBN: Why did you guys decide to break up?

Maddy: I guess it was sort of my end of things. I kinda got to a place where I felt like things were really, really serious, and that kinda freaked me out. I felt like I didn’t really see any like reason that we would ever break up, and I was

kind of in a place where I thought that I needed to have more of a stereotypical college experience, so just based on those things I did my best to end it as amicably as possible.

Ben: [laughs] And we’re here doing this photoshoot, so I’d say things… in a while, it made sense. It was good to also have the summer to kinda have that space to think things over. I realized it was probably what was best.

NBN: Is there anything you regret not doing or not saying to each other?

Ben: Right before this photoshoot we were talking about how we didn’t really do that much outside of campus. We didn’t go into the city all that much. A lot of it was just kind of hanging out in one of our dorm rooms, like going to parties and stuff on campus. So looking back, at the time that was fun, because at the time that was all novel and new, but I think being a little more adventurous would have been more fun.

Maddy: Yeah.

Ben, later: Oh wow, my other ex is on the lakefill right now, too.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dylan & Katrina

NBN: How long did you date?

Dylan: Like a little more than a month.

Katrina: Less than two months.

NBN: What is your favorite memory from the relationship?

Katrina: Oh, man.

Dylan: That’s hard. What do you mean by best?

NBN: The one that speaks to you the most.

Katrina: Pike America.

Dylan: [laughs] Pike America is definitely up there. Yeah, it was like the first time we hung out.

Katrina: We just stayed up really late.

Dylan: We were out late just playing around, talking. It was cool.

NBN: What was your least

favorite memory about the relationship?

Katrina: Oh boy.

Dylan: Uh, dealing with all the drama— Katrina: At the beginning, there was a lot of drama. Not between us, but like, some other girl thought they were talking or something that I didn’t know about.

Dylan: Yeah, just some third party stuff that we unintentionally got mixed up in.

NBN: What’s your favorite quality in one another?

Katrina: Dylan’s happy like 100 percent of the time. That’s nice. And down to hang out all the time.

Dylan: Yeah. Down to earth, good vibes. Always like a welcoming personality.

NBN: Why did you break up?

Dylan: We rushed into it. We both just – it just kind of like fizzled out and we were like “Ok, whatever.”

Katrina: It was just kind of like too good at the beginning.

Later on it was like, “uh, I don’t know.”

Dylan: It just got too tough to keep up. I guess. I don’t know.

Different schedules.

NBN: What would you say you are to each other now?

Katrina: We’re definitely friends.

Dylan: Yeah. Best friends, I’d say. Somebody that I trust to talk about pretty much anything with still.

Katrina: Yeah.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

37

d

The author has previously applied for internships with the Medill Justice Project.

Aside from emailing her application to Professor Klein, she never interacted with him over the course of the application process.

d

medill’s justice problem In February, ten women alleged misconduct by the director of The Medill Justice Project.

They weren’t the first.

WRITTEN BY LIBBY BERRY | DESIGNED BY SARAH ZHANG

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

39

I

n December 2017, Lorraine Ma got a message from Alison Flowers.

Several former students and employees had decided to report alleged misconduct by a Medill professor to Northwestern officials, and Flowers, who had worked as a research associate in one of Ma’s classes, wondered if she wanted to join them. She said yes.

On February 7, an open letter made its way into campus, local and national media. Ten women accused The Medill Justice Project Director Alec Klein of bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct, alleging incidents of inappropriate behavior that stretched back nearly a decade. Upon its release, students began sharing the news in Slack channels, in GroupMe messages and on social media. A tweet from Maya Dukmasova, a reporter for the Chicago Reader, highlighting the breaking news garnered 118 retweets.

The University released a

MJP program. Some wrote they were not surprised.

Klein “categorically” denied the allegations to campus news outlets.

It was soon reported that this was not the first time the school had received allegations about Klein.

Alec Klein’s tenure at Northwestern began in the summer of 2008, when he scaled back his work as a newspaper reporter and became a professor at Medill.

Before moving to Evanston, he spent years as an investigative reporter for the Washington Post, taught journalism at Georgetown and American University and published several award-winning books.

On Medill’s renowned faculty roster, he stood out as a star, and his prominence only increased when he took over the school’s investigative program, then known as the Innocence Project, in 2011. He

went on leave and later retired from Medill after around three decades of teaching. That’s when Klein stepped in.

“The goal is to restore trust in the class and the project and rebuild it so that it becomes again a point of pride for students, faculty, alumni, Medill and Northwestern,” Klein told the Daily Northwestern during his first quarter at the helm. “It’s a crown jewel for Northwestern, and we need to fix it.”

For a while, it seemed as if he had. Reintroducing the program under a new name – the Medill Justice Project, he received glowing reviews from students.

“Alec Klein is one of the most caring, compassionate and sincere professors in Medill. I’ve learned more in this class than I ever expected, and I’m sad it’s coming to an end,” one student wrote in the comments of a Course and Teacher Evaluation from Winter 2013, one of many positive comments listed for Klein’s courses. “I’ll never

THEY ACCUSED MEDILL OF FAILING TO PROTECT ITS STUDENTS AND STAFF, CLAIMING “IT’S TIME YOU HEARD US. IT’S TIME YOU LISTENED.” statement that said it was reviewing the allegations. In the following days, both current and former Northwestern students called for action – on Facebook, one alumnus circulated a sample email to send to Medill administration.

Another student created a petition calling for Klein to be removed as the head of the

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had taught the corresponding class before, when longtime director David Protess took a quarter off, and was later installed permanently.

Accused of making false and misleading statements to the University as it addressed a subpoena for class records from the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, Protess

forget what I’ve learned in this class. MJP for life!”

With new ethics policies and an increased focus on multimedia, Klein’s team went on to win several national awards, and Medill’s investigative program reestablished its prestigious reputation. This April, when a classroom full of journalism students were asked whether they knew anything about the old Innocence Project, only one or two raised their hands.

However, in the February letter, some of his earliest students wrote that “Klein is no hero.” They accused Medill of failing to protect its students and staff, claiming “It’s time you heard us. It’s time you listened.” The 10 women who signed the letter wrote that each of them had “experienced harassment or bullying at the hands of Alec Klein,” and collectively called for Klein’s removal from Northwestern, claiming “journalism, especially the emerging journalists who come to Medill to learn in a safe space, will be better served without him.” After the letter came out in February, NBN spoke to three cosigners who spoke about some of the allegations detailed within it. Others contacted did not respond to request for comment.

In a statement to NBN, Klein denied the allegations. “I am shocked and horrified, and my life has been destroyed by these allegations, which are untrue. I have always sought to be kind and gentle with my students. In the past decade as a professor at Northwestern University, I have taught nearly 500 students in scores of classes,” he wrote. “For each of those classes, students submit anonymous evaluations. In those evaluations, my students have overwhelmingly indicated they had a wonderful experience with me. I was never accused of mistreating any students.”

But through conversations with classmates, Lorraine Ma, who signed the letter and took Klein’s class, says she realized she was not the only one who had negative experiences with Klein.

She says she felt that their concerns about what they saw as unprofessional behavior weren’t taken seriously, or felt they were pegged to be an issue related to grading when informally raised with Medill administration.

However, no official complaints were filed.

Fenit Nirappil, who took Klein’s class, also says Medill informally became aware of some of his concerns about Klein in 2012. In an email, he says he had hoped the environment would improve.

Klein declined to comment on whether or not he was aware of students raising concerns about his behavior with others in Medill.

In April 2015, former MJP staffer Olivia Pera quit her job and filed a complaint against her former boss with the Northwestern Department of Human Resources, accusing Klein of inappropriate sexual behavior. Title IX investigators determined there was not a preponderance of evidence that a policy violation occurred.

In emails reviewed by NBN, an investigator mentioned concerns about her credibility.

She later filed a claim with the Illinois Department of Human Rights. According to reporting from the Chicago Tribune, the University reached a settlement with Pera for $8,000 that did not include any admission of wrongdoing and stipulated she would not apply for any future jobs at the school. Klein declined to comment on the Pera allegations and investigation.

A year after Pera lodged her complaint, campus media covered a different alleged incident. On May 18, 2016, Amanda Terkel, at the time a senior political reporter and managing editor for the Huffington Post, published a series of tweets detailing a conversation she had with a Medill professor during a routine reference check for a Northwestern student who had applied for an internship.

According to Terkel, when she asked the professor about the student’s writing ability, he said that undergraduates tend to be poor writers and suggested that she likely had issues as well since she sounded young. She accused his comments of being sexist, and she decided to tweet about

it. She did not name Klein in her tweets, but he later acknowledged to NBN and the Daily Northwestern he had spoken with her, not admitting to any sexist conduct. At the time, Klein told NBN in an email that the incident was

on a corrective-action plan for poor work performance several years ago.” The statement did not identify the former employee.

“The University takes seriously all complaints that are brought to its attention,”

called Dean Bradley Hamm to loop him into the conversation.

Doppelt says he knew at least half of the women who had signed the open letter and felt uncomfortable with remaining silent, imagining that many were wondering why no

“IT MAY NOT BE VISIBLE TO YOU YET, BUT THE ALLEGATIONS YOU MADE SHOOK MANY OF US TO THE CORE.” a “misunderstanding.”

“It was never my intention to leave the impression that the Huffington Post editor’s voice had anything to do with her writing ability,” Klein wrote in an emailed statement to NBN at the time. “I wanted to make sure the misunderstanding didn’t hurt the student’s chances and I was assured it wouldn’t.”

“I was really surprised, honestly, by the amount of attention it got from other journalists, from other women, professional women in other fields who have faced similar things, and also just from people at Northwestern,” Terkel says, reflecting on the her tweets two years later. “I received calls from faculty and staff at Northwestern, from alumni, students – you know, a lot of people were obviously interested in finding out who the professor was.”

When the Medill #MeToo letter was published on Feb. 7, it created a “medillmetoo” email account to collect other potential stories. In a February statement to NBN, Klein said that many of the allegations involved a “disgruntled former employee who had been

Vice President for University Relations Alan Cubbage said in a University statement on Feb. 7. “Many of the allegations were contained in a complaint brought several years ago by a former employee. At that time, the University conducted a thorough investigation and the complaint was not substantiated.”

Then, in March, the writers of the original Medill #MeToo letter announced that 19 more women had come forward with stories alleging improper behavior by Klein.

“Lost in the public attacks against me is that accusations don’t constitute the truth,” Klein said in another statement to NBN. “But the pendulum has swung so far in one direction that it’s accepted as fact when some use the media to level false allegations, creating a toxic environment without due process.”

In the immediate aftermath of the letter’s publication, some Medill faculty members decided to respond during an unrelated meeting for tenured professors. According to Jack Doppelt, who teaches Medill’s media law and ethics course, they didn’t want to ignore “the elephant in the room,” so they began to discuss the allegations against Klein and quickly

- FACULTY LETTER one was saying anything.

The group carefully drafted a letter intended to indicate that faculty members were listening and to demonstrate their commitment to creating an environment where no one experiences abusive treatment, sexual misconduct or discriminatory behavior.

Klein declined to comment on the faculty letter.

“It may not be visible to you yet, but the allegations you made shook many of us to the core,” the faculty letter reads.

“In hallways, in classrooms, in meetings among faculty, we have begun a period of profound reflection on the issues you’ve raised.”

University policy dictates that all employees are “obligated to promptly report sexual misconduct of which they become aware in the scope of their work” at Northwestern, including sexual harassment and sexual violence – but knowing what should be reported can sometimes be confusing.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

41

“If you think you might need to report, you should probably report it if you’re asking that question,” says Kate Harrington-Rosen, the Equity Outreach and Education Specialist for the Title IX office. She says she advises members of the Northwestern community to reach out if they are unsure about what qualifies as sexual misconduct or about the circumstances under which they heard about potential wrongdoing, adding that she is available to discuss situations as hypotheticals in order to make the proper decision.

Once someone reports potential misconduct, Harrington-Rosen says, someone from her office reaches out to individuals named in the complaint to discuss how they would like to proceed. If they do decide to pursue an investigation, representatives meet with them to gather information about the incident or incidents, review evidence in the form of texts or emails and interview potential witnesses to the alleged behavior. The purpose of this initial inquiry phase is to determine whether or not, if taken at face value, the behavior in question could rise to the level of a policy violation – it is not about whether or not investigators believe those who report misconduct. If they find that a policy violation may have occurred, the inquiry becomes a full investigation.

The day the letter was released, Cubbage released a statement that said the University was reviewing the allegations of inappropriate conduct by Klein.

The following day, he released an additional statement that said Klein had requested a leave of absence from Northwestern until the investigation was complete, and that the University had granted it.

In a late April email reviewed

by NBN, a representative from

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the Office of Equity told one of the women that investigators were still gathering information by contacting witnesses and asking follow-up questions, but hoped to soon move on to analyzing what they had collected.

This is Klein’s second full investigation by the Title IX office. In 2015, with Pera, the Title IX investigation found that a preponderance of the evidence did not support her claims. The current, open investigation has yet to conclude. “Because this matter remains under investigation, I am limited in what I can say as I honor the university process,” Klein wrote in a statement to NBN. He declined to comment on his role in the investigation.

According to HarringtonRosen, the standard of evidence for finding if a policy violation has occurred is just over 50 percent – investigators must determine that it is more likely than not that behavior took place.

When asked about Medill administration’s response to the allegations, Hamm and Assistant Dean Beth Bennett did not respond to request for comment. Hamm, Bennett and Senior Associate Dean Tim Franklin did not respond to request for comment about previous complaints related to Klein. Associate Dean Charles Whitaker said in an email that he could not discuss the case. He wrote he may be called upon to adjudicate the allegations against Klein due to his position at the school.

In May, the University announced that Whitaker will serve as interim dean starting July 1, following an April 11 announcement that Hamm will step down as dean at the end of this school year.

In the statement, Hamm said he wanted to spend more time doing research on Asian media and be more involved in his son’s education in Japan. He will take a one-year

sabbatical before returning to Northwestern as a tenured professor.

In a separate email, Whitaker wrote that it would be inappropriate for any member of the administration to comment on the investigation at this time. If the Office of Equity determines that it is more likely than not a policy violation involving a faculty member occurred, HarringtonRosen says, the findings are then passed along to the faculty member’s Dean or Associate Dean for Faculty and the Associate Provost for Faculty.

Any resulting sanctions or actions are decided based upon procedures outlined in the Faculty Handbook. Individual schools are not involved in the investigation process, and the Medill administration has refrained from discussing the allegations against Klein as the investigation wraps up.

For some faculty members, however, the Medill #MeToo letter pushed them to continue the conversation surrounding gender and sexism in their classrooms. In Douglas Foster’s feature writing course, for example, he replaced part of the curriculum with a study of reporting on the allegations against film mogul Harvey Weinstein. “We focused on the steps taken by the New York Times and the New Yorker to finally break through and publish a story about the common knowledge of the regular abuse of women by one of the most powerful people in our culture and how he got away with it,” he says. “Inevitably, a part of the conversation focused on what young women felt about the environment at Medill.” He noted that he and a few other professors also attended an event at the Women’s Center to hear about the role of sexism in newsrooms.

When asked about potential tools the school could use, Ed Malthouse, a tenured professor in integrated marketing communications, suggested possibly enacting a system similar to the Institutional Review Board, which certifies those seeking to do research on human subjects. An online training course is required and certification typically lasts three years, meaning people are frequently refreshed on ethical and professional standards. “There need to be a set of guidelines and faculty probably need to be reminded of those periodically,” he says. According to Sara Lynn Brazeal, Medill’s Director of Marketing and Communications, Northwestern’s current requirement is that all faculty, staff, graduate students and professional students must complete an online course on preventing and reporting sexual misconduct and sex discrimination within 30 days of starting at the University.

With Klein still on leave, Brazeal says in an email that MJP’s work continues today and in the future. Others have filled Klein’s role in the classroom for now, but the school not announced any permanent leadership changes.

Current MJP employees Rachel Fobar and Allisha Azlan did not respond to request for comment about the controversy’s impact on the program. Foster says it’s important that MJP moves forward in a way that supports student journalists who have dedicated themselves to learning the craft of investigative reporting. “We want to protect the values of the project, stand up for the values of the project,” Foster says – “no matter what accusations are made about the faculty member who led it.”

Justin Curto contributed reporting.

Tinted windows Evanston’s NUPD is far from completely transparent, but they don’t have to be - they’re a private entity.

WRITTEN BY DAN ROSENZWEIG-ZIFF | DESIGNED BY LUCY DWYER | PHOTO BY STEPHANIE J. SHIN

I

t’s a well-known area. In the fall, as the sun starts to rise, students rocking Northwestern gear walk from tailgate to tailgate. Freshmen are glued to their phones in giant packs, mapping out where the next big party is. It’s football season, and Evanston’s fifth ward, comprised of famous off-campus streets like Maple, Garnett and Simpson, is making its presence known via crushed beer cans, trap music and occasional public urination.

The bass is booming. The people are vibing. The alcohol may or may not be flowing. The lights are flashing. While some things at parties may be uncertain, others are clear: for ordinary Evanston residents, this darty could be disturbing the peace.

And there sometimes are consequences.

The police arrive. Who’s responsible?

Weinberg senior Ben Zimmermann* and McCormick senior Alex Cohen have both had their fair share of experiences involving the police and parties. One day, as they were getting written up for another noise complaint at their off-campus house, the police officer issuing the ticket somewhat off-handedly told them they were on something called the “nuisance list.”

When Zimmerman asked how to get off the list, the police said they didn’t know. He thinks the Evanston Police issued the ticket, but isn’t completely sure because the lines between the NUPD and the EPD often blur. He also is confused with the EPD’s link to Northwestern.

“Sometimes we’ll get a ticket, sometimes we’ll get a warning from the police, and even without the ticket Northwestern will find out and send us an email via student conduct,” he says. “I’m always confused about how that works.”

For NUPD Sergeant Tim Ruess, the ability to discipline students in multiple ways outside of just arresting or ticketing them is actually helpful. “We can refer them to the dean, which hopefully holds a lot of power here. Sometimes writing a ticket is just a fine, [whereas] you send them to the dean’s office, they can discipline a little more harsh,” he says.

“We have those options and I think most kids know that.”

But many students do not, and feel confused when they recieve punishment.

While students may know that there are two entities, many do not know the difference between them. The problem is that while the NUPD and the EPD have the same powers under Illinois law, they are subject to different requirements because one is private and one is public.

Public entities like the EPD are subject to certain transparency laws that private

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ones like the NUPD are exempt from.

This nuisance list, Zimmermann and Cohen later found out through the Office of Student Conduct, is a list of “problem” houses that could get ticketed without warning should they cause a, well, nuisance. Cohen says there was no official notification of being placed on the nuisance list, of why they were put on it, or how to get off it.

“I don’t know the difference between the [NUPD and EPD]. I don’t know the difference in power that they have or rules that they have to follow,” Cohen says. “Any interaction with a police person in a Northwestern context I have no clue what to expect.”

According to Reuss, in the fall and late spring, a NUPD officer, along with someone from Student Conduct, goes door-to-door telling those on the nuisance list that they have been put on it. To his knowledge, this door-to-door knocking has not yet occurred this quarter. Once students are placed on the nuisance list, Reuss says, they stay there until their lease ends. However, this is not always communicated to students.

While the nuisance list consists of both Northwestern off-campus houses as well as other buildings, Northwestern students are subject to both the rules of the city and the University, which makes it confusing to determine who’s really policing them.

“I view Northwestern police, Evanston police, student conduct and the administration all as one entity with the same agenda,” Cohen says. “Which could be flawed, but they’ve given me little reason to not.”

POLICE POWERS Police, just like every public agency, are supposed to be held publicly accountable according to the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). FOIA keeps public bodies accountable by ensuring citizens can stay informed through requesting public documents, allowing for transparency of these public bodies.

At first glance, the private police force of Northwestern, the NUPD, seems like a normal police department. Officers can arrest. They carry weapons. They can shoot. They can protect. They carry a special responsibility on campus to keep students and faculty safe.

“Working for a city, working for a university environment, everything is pretty much the same,” Ruess says. “We have the same authority.”

Unlike the public police, however, the

NUPD is not bound to transparency laws like FOIA. The NUPD does produce the annual Clery report, which is federally mandated for universities that receive federal funding, almost all in the U.S.. The report focuses on campus crime statistics like the annual number of burglaries or liquor law violations, as well as basic security information. But the Clery report data is much less information than public police are required to report. The University police can decide what information it wants to publicly release and what information it wants to keep hidden.

“Without people’s ability to monitor government and see what they’re up to, we can’t fulfill our duty of being good citizens and making sure we have the democracy that we deserve,” says Matt Topic, a media attorney who specializes in FOIA requests and worked on the LaQuan McDonald case to make the Chicago Police Department released video of his death. “That’s not to say that there aren’t costs associated to complying with FOIA, but this is one of the most important things government has to do is remain accountable to the people.”

Still, the NUPD has gone beyond its minimum requirements. The department publishes traffic stop statistics, detailing whom they stop with reference to race and gender. “We post those statistics on our website in the interest of transparency,” says Bruce Lewis, the NUPD chief of police. “The state law requires that we do it annually, we do it quarterly. We exceed the requirements that the state mandates.”

The NUPD website also includes an officer complaint form on their website and and an “Accountability and Transparency” tab that explains initiatives like body-worn cameras.

“I think we are transparent in everything,” Reuss says. “Everything you need to know about what we do or how we do it, if you go to our website, a lot of the information is on the website.”

Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago clinical law professor and leader of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Clinic, notes that while they may be transparent about some information, the NUPD can still use its discretion as to what it is transparent about.

“I’d say that’s great, good for that university, they’re doing what they ought to be doing. But as a matter of policy, I don’t think that should be a matter of private choice,” Futterman says. “Along with the extraordinary powers that we give law enforcement to make arrests, to take our freedom, use force, to shoot, to kill, come those responsibilities, responsibilities to

the public and to the communities that they serve.”

If you take a quick glance at the NUPD website, you’ll find the word transparent nine times, in an effort to hit home the point. The site also tells users to contact the department if they have any questions or concerns. However, Lewis declined or didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment for over a month before responding. Various NUPD staff, including police officers and the deputy of police either denied or didn’t respond to interview requests. One mentioned that they were instructed to not do interviews with the media. Apart from Lewis, only Reuss, who’s been with the NUPD for 30 years, agreed to comment.

“I think we do a much better job with the community here versus what they don’t share. And that’s their business, that’s above me. I can’t control what they do and what they don’t do,” Reuss says. “[By they, I mean] other departments worldwide, other city departments, state departments, university departments.

There’s a lot of things that are not shared; it’s just the way it is.”

But under the way it is, Lewis admits, the University makes the final call about releasing some information to the public – and can refuse.

“The outcome of police complaints, a person would have to request that information from the police department,” Lewis says. “That information is not posted on the website, it’s a personnel matter. We wouldn’t release the outcomes of personnel investigations unless the state’s attorney’s office would be informed and assist us in releasing that information.

The [media] can made a request, and the University would consider the request.”

QUESTIONS OF JURISDICTION In accordance with Illinois law, the NUPD has the same municipal powers as the Evanston police, along with cojurisdiction with the EPD. According to Evanston Police Chief Richard Eddington, Northwestern is the only Big Ten school that has co-jurisdiction with its local police forces. Jurisdiction extends north to the border of the city of Wilmette, south to Lake Street, east to Lake Michigan and west to Asbury and Green Bay Road. That said, the two departments work side-by-side on policing the area known as Beat 76; other Big Ten schools’ police need a formal request from their local police to work together.

As a result of the current co-jurisdiction rules between the Evanston and

I don’t know if there’s power. The importance of it is to give students and others the opportunity to have a venue where there’s dialogue with the police, to raise any issues … that are of concern to the community Northwestern police departments, two different polic bodies could theoretically arrest or stop a student, and they could have completely different access to information. One week, they could be arrested by EPD, a public body subject to adhering to FOIA requests. The next week, they could be arrested for committing an identical crime by the NUPD. The student’s access to the internal workings would be subject to the discretion of the department. The NUPD decides what information can be accessed, on a case-bycase basis, according to Lewis.

Although one could technically submit a FOIA request, Lewis says it is ultimately still the University’s choice about what information they release. “The University as a private entity has their obligation under the FERPA. We would review with the request within the context of those obligations and make a decision,” he says.

But, there’s a legal argument that private police should fall under the same requirements of FOIA that public bodies do, Topic says. The statute applies to the government’s various bodies, and can also apply in certain situations to its subsidiary bodies.

“I think there’s a very good argument to be made that they are required to be compliant with disclosure laws even though they are not on their face a public entity,” he says. “The fundamental question is whether private police forces are performing a governmental function, and there really isn’t any function that is more governmental than policing.”

Eddington notes that there have been positive effects from the partnership, including successfully attaining federal grants for the research and the implementation of body-worn cameras for both the EPD and the NUPD. The two departments help each other out when staffing issues occur, he says, because they can make a seamless transition between policing an area when the other department needs assistance.

The active shooter hoax in mid March, which started with an anonymous police

- Patricia Telles-Irvin, Vice President for Student Affairs

call that there was a shooter on campus and resulted in an hour and a half campus lockdown, showed how well the two institutions can work together Eddington says. While Eddington made sure the proper streets were closed and the people of Evanston were safe, Lewis attended to campus security and getting access for both departments into the necessary buildings.

“We worked in conjunction to come to a peaceful resolution of that event,” Eddington says.

“I would describe it as an equal partnership vis a vis the campus.”

Without this close partnership, Eddington says, that peaceful resolution would have been that much harder to attain quickly and efficiently.

WHAT NU DOES Even if Northwestern and its police department are more transparent than required, how does it compare to their counterparts in Evanston? And is it enough?

“Often, it’s very comforting to have an appearance of transparency but it can be very difficult to follow through on good community policing behavior,” says Karen Sheley, director of the Police Practices Project for the Illinois ACLU. “One of them is having conversations with the public about what you are doing.”

According to both Reuss and Lewis, the NUPD aims to consistently have those conversations.

“We have programs for the community to come in and to experience the police department,” Lewis says. “Whether it’s a ride-along with the police officers, or whether it’s attending an open roll call where our police officers go out into the community and conduct roll calls, briefings so that the community can have a close up view of what some of the interactions of the police department is.”

The Northwestern Police Advisory Board (PAB), chaired by Northwestern NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

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Vice President for student affairs Patricia Telles-Irvin, aims to provide a space for students and faculty to come together to discuss and review the actions of the NUPD. The board meets about two times per year and does little outside its meetings, according to Telles-Irvin.

“I don’t know if there’s power. The importance of it is to give students and others the opportunity to have a venue where there’s dialogue with the police, to raise any issues … that are of concern to the community,” Telles-Irvin says. After hearing this student feedback, TellesIrvin says, the police then try to address any issues that arise.

Of the many different people who sit on the PAB, the students have a few permanent seats. According to former ASG VP of Student Life Vikas Kethineedi, six students were on the email list for the fall PAB meeting, though not all of them attended. One seat is filled by a member of the Associated Student Government. But because of the recent elections, the most recent PAB meeting was not attended by anyone from ASG. Last fall, Kethineedi did attend one of these meetings. It was a typical meeting that focused mostly on police updates, he says.

“They were super receptive. They even reminded us at the end, ‘If you have any feedback or questions, don’t hesitate to call us or come to our office,’” Kethineedi says. “They’re trying to do their job the best they can. Obviously not everything is going to run smoothly. I feel like their heads are in a good place and they really want to make an impact on the Northwestern community.”

Kethineedi notes that while it was

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mostly the police giving updates at the meeting, the police did ask the students present for their feedback on the department’s initiatives, including the new bike program and work around mental health.

While the PAB appears to be a minimal time commitment, the NUPD’s website highlights it as one of the pillars of transparency that holds the department accountable. The website also emphasizes its publication of traffic stops and outlet for police complaints as a significant showcase of its transparency, Sheley, however, notes that there is still hidden data, which could be useful for officer training and checking for any unseen bias.

“They’re not reporting on what the outcomes of the stops are, whether or not there was a frisk, whether there was a search, the location of these events. All this information is useful for the public to better understand how police are operating and whether more training is necessary.” Given that it is more difficult to get information from private police, Sheley says that is even more important that the University police provide the full information required of public bodies under state law.

“They should be subject to the exact same requirements as public agencies,” he says.

“Policing is special. Policing is different.”

For Cohen, it’s not just about the transparency, but more about who exactly the University is looking out for. He says it’s not necessarily the students.

“It’s clear that they’re about protecting their own asses and not protecting the students, which I think for me is the most frustrating thing,” he says. “I love

Northwestern with all my heart, but my biggest knock to it is they care more about themselves than the students and their mental health.”

ATTEMPTS AT REFORM In 2015, the Illinois Senate stalled a bill that would have required all private campus police departments to disclose information required of all state law enforcement agencies. The bill stemmed from a controversy surrounding the University of Chicago’s police force, the second largest private police force in the country. When UChicago announced wider transparency rules, including the publication of all traffic stop incidents, the Senate slowed down the process and the bill never came to fruition.

“The private police forces weren’t very enthusiastic about having to be subject to any disclosure laws, and pro-transparency people weren’t pleased because there were all types of carve outs and exceptions and very watered down,” Topic says. “There wasn’t a lot of support for it on either side.”

Texas, which had a similar bill go through their state House and Senate, passed a bill requiring more transparency in private police forces unanimously in 2015. Illinois and Texas are unique, among other states, in the powers they confer to university police. According to Futterman, most campus security forces do not fully have those special powers.

The University would comply with the bill should it become law, Lewis says, but until that happens they are under no obligation to. While Reuss notes that the reasons for the bill not passing are above

him, he doesn’t fundamentally disagree with what it was aiming to achieve.

“I think we all should be treated the same. You’re the police, doesn’t matter where you work,” he says. “Our goal is pretty much to make sure the community is safe. That’s our number one goal. So based on that alone, I think everybody should be treated equally when it comes to the police, and transparency should be pretty much the same straight across the board.”

TRANSPARENCY Again, public police are subject to stringent transparency measures.

Specifically, they must publish traffic stop reports, outcomes of complaints against police officers, crime statistics and provide any related records to investigations and complaints. Beside private information regarding identifying information of private individuals, such as social security numbers or mental health records, many police reports and documents of police activity in general are public and can be attained by regular citizens via a FOIA request.

“Police transparency is the bedrock of insurance trust between the community and the police,” Sheley says. “Given the amount of power we turn over to police officers, it’s incredibly important for them to share information about their practices, what they’re actually doing and who they’re doing it to.”

Sheley notes that police often have implicit (not plainly expressed, though still present) or even explicit (clearly expressed) biases, and if they are not held accountable for these biases, the public will suffer. Futterman points to the special powers America gives its police to show why public oversight of the police is crucial to upholding democracy.

“There aren’t other groups of public or private workers that have those extraordinary authorities and responsibilities that we give police officers and need to give police officers,” Futterman says. “So that makes police special and if you have those extraordinary powers and state powers, along with them come accountability and responsibility to the public.”

Those powers impact the way the Evanston Police Department operates on a daily basis. According to Eddington, the EPD dealt with 69,000 CAT events – jobs that they do or tasks that they are assigned – last year alone, averaging almost 200 a day. With all those different tasks and responsibilities comes much work to stay transparent, Eddington says.

“We handle a lot of FOIA requests. As a public body, by law we have to be more open to that scrutiny,” Eddington says.

“For the EPD, there is a series of policies and procedures [overseen] by the Illinois Attorney General’s office that dictates what we have to respond to.”

According to Eddington, the sheer number of FOIA requests, forms and records the EPD has to keep up with can be tedious. It can also cost the taxpayers by having to add more employees to go through all these requests, some of which he says are irrelevant and useless to the public.

“I think the transparency issue needs to be seriously reviewed. There’s some things that we’re going to have to release, that we should release, that needs to be in the public discussion,” Eddington says. “I just think we need to step back for a minute and decide how to go about that, because I think we have kind of wandered off into an area where the burden on public agencies to respond to FOIA requests is significant.”

Eddington argues that private companies do not use FOIA as it is intended, instead using it as a research tool. Insurance companies, for example, make FOIA requests about one specific type of accident every month in bulk. This lets them get ahead using public dollars, according to Eddington. But, there is a statute in the FOIA law to prevent just that, Topic says.

Futterman sees it similarly to Topic, noting the accessible use of technology as a primary vehicle through which public bodies can distribute information.

“With respect to government, it’s pretty easy in the age of information and data that good government is generally open and transparent and honest government,” he says. “Police departments in particular, how you build trust and become more effective in addressing crime is by being honest with people, by sharing information, by not hiding, by not denying, by not covering up.”

Transparency holds the police accountable and facilitates a mutual trust between the police and the people, Futterman says. This accountability leads to better practice and safety, something which he says should be applied to both private and public policing bodies. In terms of transparency, Reuss agrees.

“I think everything should be the same,” Reuss says. “I go to the same police academy, same education, wear the same uniform, same equipment, same car, same facility in a different manner. We’re all pretty much one big happy family.”

The Evanston police chief, on the other hand, thinks that Lewis should be wary of

further transparency demands.

“I, as someone who is subject to all that, would advise individuals like Chief Lewis to continue to maintain [their] different status only because if you come to the status I’m in, you’re going to have to hire more people to fulfil those requests,” Eddington says. “I think that just in it of itself is significant. How much information do we need to pump out to be transparent? What are the controls on the demands that are being placed against the public body? I think the public gets the information it needs to participate in democracy, and I’m not sure that it needs to be expanded.”

GOING FORWARD Today, NUPD is shielded from scrutiny, but Sheley says students can make a difference in altering this reality.

“Students are powerful. They have a voice,” Sheley says. “Student activism has always had a huge role in changing the ways universities engage in all kinds of behavior. Students should definitely feel empowered to ask questions to ask for changes and ask for more transparency.”

Topic adds that students have always been at the forefront of change in this country.

“Do the things that you do when you believe that powerful institutions are not acting the way that they ought to be. It is essentially a civil rights issue, that matters,” he says. “That’s something that universities probably care about because they want to keep recruiting new students. So calling attention to it, making a big deal about it… are ways to go about changing how the university behaves.”

According to Futterman, the information one has access to shouldn’t depend on the luck of the policing draw.

Rather, it is something that is necessary to the great deal of power police have, regardless of private or public entity.

“It shouldn’t be a matter of discretion or choice,” he says, reiterating, “It shouldn’t be a matter of private discretion.”

Topic goes one step further, saying that better transparency does more than just let the public know what is going on.

“You shouldn’t hide behind their status as a private university or hide behind any exemptions to releasing the documents, you should get that out there,” says Topic. “I think smart and progressive police chiefs around the country are recognizing that they can do a lot to improve community relations by releasing information quickly.” *Note that Ben Zimmerman has previously contributed to NBN. NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

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Morty once said that CAPS gets all the funding it will ever need, so why aren’t students getting the treatment that they deserve?

WRITTEN BY RACHEL HAWLEY | DESIGNED BY AINE DOUGHERTY

E

mily* looked like a ghost. She had barely slept or eaten in three days, and was at a loss for what to do when she found herself in the CARE waiting room.

One night this past October, Emily walked into the room where her close friend was attempting suicide. After saving their life, Emily and a counselor at the Center for Awareness, Response, and Education (CARE) helped her friend schedule an appointment CAPS. Emily had met with a CARE counselor shortly after helping her friend. The counselor recognized Emily’s vomiting and inability to sleep as symptoms of post-traumatic stress.

“Probably the most helpful thing I have gotten from CARE or from CAPS was that she explained to me biologically what was going on,” Emily says. “So I stopped feeling weak about my trauma responses. Because it’s biology, and it’s not my fault.”

Emily, the counselor reasoned, was in need of short-term counseling - of someone who could help her work through the symptoms of her posttraumatic stress until the worst of it had passed. That’s how Emily initially got referred to Northwestern’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS). “[The counselor] was like, ‘you’re still exhibiting signs of PTSD and trauma, and you’re still having biological trauma responses to some extent,” Emily says, “and I think you should see someone at CAPS.” At her intake appointment, the CAPS counselor who Emily met with told her that while she would be an ideal candidate

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for CAPS’ treatment model, the long waitlist for individual therapy meant that she should probably seek outside treatment. But Emily’s health insurance left her with a high deductible and costly copays which Emily and her family could not afford.

After several weeks of waiting and frustrating attempts to navigate low-cost off-campus therapy options, Emily was eventually offered a spot off the waitlist at CAPS.

Bad Reputation While it’s impossible to know how many students have experiences at CAPS resembling Emily’s each year, her story is far from an aberration. Over the past several years, students have frequently voiced complaints about the availability, accessibility and effectiveness of Northwestern University Counseling and Psychological Services.

“I feel like it’s a failure on the part of the University to recognize how big of a problem this is,” says Medill sophomore Alex Schwartz. In April, he penned an editorial in the Daily Northwestern titled “NU is grossly underfunding students’ mental health services,” in which he recounted his experiences being turned away from group therapy at CAPS earlier this year due to a limited number of spots.

“I was disappointed,” Schwartz says.

“Obviously, this is a resource that students are told about coming in to Northwestern.

You’re constantly told every time an event occurs in the national news, or there’s a

PHOTO & ILLUSTRATION BY STEPHANIE J. SHIN

you, ‘Go to CAPS. Go to CAPS, they’re here for you.’ And then, when you finally do decide to seek them out, you’re basically told that there’s not enough room.”

Frustration from the student body over CAPS’ perceived ineffectiveness reached a boiling point in the spring of 2015, when McCormick junior Jason Arkin killed himself in his dorm. He was the second student to commit suicide that school year, after the death of Weinberg junior Avantika Khatri. In the weeks following his death, reports from the Daily revealed that Arkin had been referred to a waitlist for therapy at CAPS after discussing his thoughts of selfharm with a CAPS staff member.

Arkin had struggled with depression and anxiety throughout his life. He first reached out to CAPS in fall of 2012; his family noted in a letter to the Daily that he had been given the option to be put on a waitlist for individual therapy at CAPS, or to seek outside treatment. “(CAPS) asked this freshman who was just getting ready to start his first final in the fall of his freshman year to go out and get help on his own,” Arkin’s father, Steven, told the Daily in 2016.

“That’s where the big disconnect is …

You can’t get in the front door on the first try.”

In the wake of Jason’s death, CAPS faced heightened scrutiny from students, many of whom lobbied criticism at the “12-session limit,” that capped the number of individual sessions a student could be seen for at 12. The following spring, Christina Cilento and Macs Vinson, the 2016-2017 Associated Student Government president and executive vice president, made the 12-session limit a central policy in their campaign pillar on mental health, with the plan

by CAPS to eliminate the limit already in the works.

In response to the controversy, a task force comprised of the Dean of Students, CAPS staff and student leaders was formed in fall of 2015 to re-evaluate CAPS’ policies. In April of 2016, Patricia Telles-Irvin, Vice President for Student Affairs, announced via email that CAPS would eliminate the session limit based on the findings of the committee.

“That number, 12, was indelible in people’s minds, including [those of] my staff, so what we wanted to do was remove that barrier,” says John Dunkle, CAPS’ executive director.

According to Dunkle, the elimination of the 12-session limit stemmed from concerns that students would hesitate to seek treatment at CAPS in their freshman and sophomores years for fear that they would need counseling later, after having already reached the limit.

But according to CAPS’ 20162017 annual report, the elimination of session limits did not change the average number of sessions per student at CAPS. While the elimination of the 12-session limit was widely considered to be a step in the right direction, CAPS continued to court controversy; in September of 2016, Northwestern announced it would disband the long-term individual counseling run through the Women’s Center to redirect those personnel resources to CAPS. The decision outraged many students and alumni who believed that the Women’s Center provided more effective and accessible counseling than CAPS’ services. Shortly after the announcement, a Tumblr blog called “Save NU Women’s Center Counseling” was created, featuring testimonials of the Women’s Center counseling services from current and former students.

In the three years since Jason Arkin’s death – three years in which

“I FEEL VERY MUCH LIKE I GOT DROPPED OFF AT THE END OF IT.

I was keeping count of sessions, but I was trying to think, like, ‘is this my 11th or 12th?’

AND THEN IT’S LIKE, ‘OKAY, WE’RE DONE TODAY! GOODBYE!” - Callie Leone

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the Northwestern community would also come to mourn the deaths by suicide of Weinberg senior Scott Boorstein, Weinberg sophomore and women’s basketball player Jordan Hankin and SESP junior Kenzie Krogh – no substantive changes have been made to CAPS policy beyond the elimination of the 12-session limit and the absorption of Women’s Center’s counseling responsibilities. But confidence in CAPS remains low among the student body, and given stories like Emily’s, it’s not hard to see why. So what, exactly, is the problem with CAPS – and how can it be fixed?

Beyond the 12-Session Limit Behind the desk in his office on the second floor of Searle Hall, where CAPS is housed on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus, John H. Dunkle leans forward intently, placing his glasses down on the desk and putting them back on with a rhythmic regularity. Dunkle joined the staff at CAPS in 1995 as a staff psychologist, directly after his predoctoral internship at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Prior to this, he received his Ph.D. at the University at Albany, SUNY working as a counselor at SUNY Albany; in 2005, he took over as Executive Director from his predecessor, Dr. Kathy Hollingsworth.

CAPS has always functioned as a counseling center primarily focused on brief, skills-based treatment, in keeping with the norm at counseling and mental health services at universities across the country. According to Dunkle, the short-term treatment model is based in empirical evidence for effectiveness from organizations like the Center for Collegiate Mental Health.

“What I hear and see from [national surveys], is that the vast majority of counseling centers are brief,” Dunkle says. “There’s a lot of great research out there on the efficacy of brief treatment.

You can accomplish a lot within six to 10 sessions, believe it or not. So what a lot of universities are doing is, they’re trying to meet the needs of as many students as possible, and in order to do that, you have to have some type of a plan for brief treatment.”

“Whether or not we have a session limit, the vast majority of students get their needs met within six to seven

sessions,” Dunkle says. “There are some who would definitely benefit from more, in which case, now that we’ve eliminated session limits, we come up with an individualized plan for each student. The beauty of this approach is that each student gets an individualized plan.”

According to Dunkle, about 15 percent of students who seek treatment at CAPS are referred to outside treatment after one or two sessions there. This was the case for Emily, who was encouraged to seek off-campus treatment because of the weeks-long waitlist.

There are many situations when it makes perfect sense for counselors at CAPS to refer a student to outside treatment – oftentimes, a student will arrive at CAPS with acute needs that require a dedicated care team, or complicated needs that require uninterrupted long-term therapy and psychiatry.

Weinberg junior Tasha Petrik was referred out of CAPS after her first appointment in October of 2017, and found the services she accessed through the referral to be a good fit. But the process of getting to that first appointment with her outside therapist was long and arduous, during a period of time when her mental health was already at a low point.

“It kind of felt like I was going through steps to prove how bad I was ... like, ‘do you really need therapy,’” Petrik says. “No one said that to me, that wasn’t their goal, but having to jump through so many hoops to go somewhere ... it made me feel like I had to keep justifying that I was bad enough off to get therapy.”

After Petrik reached out to CAPS via their online sign-up form, she was asked to schedule a 15-minute intake phone consultation with a CAPS counselor, but because Petrik’s class schedule conflicted with most of the available times, it took about a week for her to actually have that phone call.

“I don’t know what the point of [the phone call] was, frankly,” Petrik says.

“There’s really not that much you can talk about with someone over the phone in 15 minutes with someone that you don’t know, they’re basically like, ‘Do you have typical signs of depression?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s why I’m calling.’”

“I REALLY JUST FELT BAD FOR ALL OF THE STAFF THERE, because it seemed like they were really trying to help, and it’s not like they’re bad people, they just don’t have enough assistance, and THEY DON’T HAVE ENOUGH FUNDING TO HAVE STAFF TO SEE THE LEVEL OF STUDENTS THAT SEEK THEIR ATTENTION.” - Alex Schwartz After that phone call, it took another week for Petrik to get an in-person intake appointment due to the lack of available times outside of her class schedule. After that, she spent two weeks working through CAPS’ referral list to find an outside therapist who practiced nearby. All in all, it took a month from when Petrik first reached out to CAPS for her to meet with her therapist – a month that, Petrik says, could have been much shorter if CAPS had more availability and cut down on steps like the 15-minute phone call consultation.

Weinberg senior Callie Leone was seen at CAPS for 12 sessions during her sophomore year, before the elimination of the 12-session limit. At the end of her final session, Leone was referred to outside therapy and psychiatry practices – only to find that, like Emily, and like many other students at Northwestern, her healthcare coverage would leave her with weekly copays in excess of $100. “[The counselor] said, ‘the good news is, now you know how your insurance works, the bad news is ... it doesn’t work.’

She was super up front with me about it,” Leone says. “She was like, ‘it’s going to be super tough for you, because ... unless you’re going to spend $6,000 dollars this year [out of the deductible], everything is coming out of pocket.’”

But Dunkel says that CAPS works hard to ensure that students find affordable outside options.

“My staff, especially Meghan [Finn, CAPS’ Care and Referral Coordinator]

is really good at navigating insurance plans,” Dunkle says. “Sometimes it’s really tricky, but we will help [students] try to find someone in the area who is on their plan and affordable. We will even go so far as if in the past, if a student can’t afford a co-payment, if we can find financial resources for them, we do – we spend a lot of time on that. We also just got another gift recently for that exact purpose, to help with copayments and things like that, because I didn’t want finances to be a barrier, and neither does my staff.”

Leone, however, had never been informed of this option – neither had Petrik, Emily or any of the other students talked to for whom cost had prevent from accessing the providers they’d been referred to by CAPS. For many students, the high cost of copays for those with insurance or outof-pocket expenses for those without it can present an insurmountable barrier to seeking mental health treatment. But there are other reasons that a student whom CAPS has referred to outside treatment may be unable to actually access treatment. For some, “cultural taboo can make it difficult for students on their parents’ health insurance to explain what they need treatment for.”

Yet Leone feels that the structure of her visits with CAPS didn’t sufficiently equip her for the transition to outside care, leaving her feeling abandoned at the end of her last session.

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Number of students per clinical and counseling staff at CAPS, compared to peer institutions

Clinical staff to student ratio Counseling staff to student ratio

All data reported by administrators at the mental health services of each university, with the exception of Vanderbilt University. Data for Vanderbilt was taken from the Psychological & Counseling Center website.

1200

800

400

0 Northwestern

Duke

“The problem was, I would see the psychologist, and we would have these kind of meandering discussions,” Leone says. “Which is fine if you can see someone for a period of several months, or if you’re time-indifferent, but if you only have 12 sessions, you need a super structured program.

Because I feel very much like I got dropped off at the end of it, like I was keeping count of sessions, but I was trying to think, like, ‘is this my 11th or 12th?’ And then it’s like, ‘Okay, we’re done today! Goodbye!’”

Underfunded, Understaffed Because Northwestern does not publish or disclose budget information, there is no way to know what CAPS’ annual operating budget may be. In October of 2016, University President Morton Schapiro told the Daily that there is “no financial limit” to CAPS’ funding, saying, “We’ve given CAPS everything they’ve ever asked for and will continue to do (so).”

What we can analyze, even without access to CAPS’ budget information, is the number of clinical staff members at CAPS. According to Dunkle, CAPS employs 13.7 full- time equivalent

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Cornell

University of Chicago

clinical staff on the Evanston campus 14 individual staff members in total, one of whom works part-time. Dunkle says that the clinical staff at an institution like CAPS fall into two categories – first, psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses and residents, who primarily handle medication management, and second, psychologists, counselors, social workers and psychology post-docs, who primarily handle individual and group counseling sessions. With a total of 16,675 students on Northwestern’s Evanston campus, this means there is one clinical staff member at CAPS for every 1,217 students, and more specifically, one counseling staff member for every 1389.6 students.

Compared to many of Northwestern’s peer institutions, that number is disconcerting.

Duke University’s equivalent of CAPS, also called Counseling and Psychological Services, boasts 19.55 full time equivalent clinical staff members, totaling 777 students per clinical staff member, less than half of Northwestern’s, with 949.5 students per counseling staff member. Cornell University’s equivalent of CAPS? 562 students per clinical staff member, and 619.7 students per counseling staff member. The University of Chicago’s?

739.3 students per clinical staff member, and 952.7 students per counseling

Vanderbilt

Washington University

staff member. Vanderbilt University announced in October that it plans to replace its counseling center with a new and improved counseling center to “prioritize mental health and wellness”; while we were unable to confirm their exact full-time equivalent staff count, their website lists 30 licensed clinical staff members, translating to about 420 students per clinical staff member and 740.7 students per counseling staff member.

Of Northwestern’s most similar peer-institutions by enrollment, endowment, national ranking, and degree programs, the only school we were able to identify as having a similarly high rate of students per clinical staff and counseling staff was Washington University in St. Louis, which has 1123.8 students per clinical staff member and 1498.4 students per counseling staff member.

Dunkle acknowledges that CAPS’ clinical staff for ongoing counseling is “lean” compared to peer institutions’, and says that he is “trying to advocate for more staff” at CAPS. According to Dunkle, clinical staff at CAPS have felt the pinch of an increased caseload in the face of changing national trends at university mental health centers.

“What we’re seeing nationally, and it’s true here at CAPS, is that what’s

been on the increase for about five to six years is what we call rapid access appointments, meaning students who need to be seen right away,” Dunkle says. “That’s a really important service for us to offer, because if someone’s suicidal, or compromised in some other way, we want to make sure they’re seen right away.”

“Like the rest of the country, here at CAPS what we have seen is that has gone up just exponentially, whereas what we call ‘routine access’ – individual therapy, and that type of thing – has remained sort of steady, maybe slightly increased,” Dunkle says. “The problem is, with the rapid access appointments, those take up an enormous amount of time, impinging on our ability to be able to offer the more routine stuff sometimes.”

It’s difficult to pinpoint the root cause of this spike in rapidaccess volume at colleges across the country, but the most current research indicates a likelihood of increased stress on college students combined with greater likelihood of students to seek help at their school’s mental health services when they are struggling. Dunkle sees the latter as a positive trend, and attributes it to a growing culture of openness when it comes to discussing mental health.

“I really just felt bad for all of the staff there,” Schwartz says. “Because it seemed like they were really trying to help, and it’s not like they’re bad people, they just don’t have enough assistance, and they don’t have enough funding to have staff to see the level of students that seek their attention.”

Dunkle is currently developing a proposed framework to help CAPS handle the influx of rapid access appointments. Central to that plan, the addition of two counselors who would focus primarily on rapid access appointments, relieving some of the caseload from routine access providers. But this solution, like every potential solution to CAPS’ understaffing problem, requires the hiring of more staff, which requires a larger budget.

Looking Forward Things are looking up for Emily.

While she’s still dealing with the consequences of the trauma she’s suffered, and has experienced many ups and downs over the past few months, she feels that she is in a better place now – despite her rocky experience with CAPS. Northwestern University was ranked at No. 11 in the 2018 US News college ranking, and has hovered around 12th place for more than a decade. US News divides its ranking criteria into the areas of first-year student retention, peer assessment, faculty resources, admissions selectivity, financial resources, alumni giving and six-year graduation rate. Another prominent college ranker, The Princeton Review, thematically groups its rankings; the “Quality of Life” ranking factors include student ratings of dorms, campus beauty, food and general happiness. Neither ask about the quality, availability or accessibility of mental health services on campus.

And so, on a cold morning in December, Emily left her apartment and made her way across campus – past the multi-million dollar construction projects for new dorms, each more luxurious than the last; past the Kellogg Global hub and the Ryan Fieldhouse and Walter Athletic Center, which were constructed as a result of Northwestern’s $3.57 billion funding campaign; past the Norris University Center, a building which displays on its ground floor a scale model of a newer, better, asof-yet unbuilt University center with a $150 million price tag. Had she made an appointment a few months prior, she may even have walked past the busses taking each member of the Class of 2021 and transfers to a showing of Hamilton in Chicago as she trudged on to the second floor of Searle Hall, where she would be given the choice between a referral to outside therapy she could not afford and a month on the CAPS waitlist.

When CAPS can’t see you and you can’t afford typical referrals, you’re not out of options. There are many low-cost counseling services you can turn to in the Chicagoland area.

Open Path Collective Open Path is an opt-in group of private practitioners who have agreed to offer individual therapy sessions for between $30 and $50. With a onetime fee of $49 and an affirmation that you can’t afford typical outof-pocket rates, you can access the full directory of therapists. You get to choose your own therapist, and private practitioners typically have much more availability than therapists at sliding-scale clinics. openpathcollective.org / info@openpathcollective.org / all across the country

Live Oak This counseling service has five locations, including ones in Evanston and Lakeview. They accept NU-SHIP and have a sliding-scale option, and all of their providers have time set aside specifically for sliding-scale clients. liveoakchicago.com / 773.880.1310 / 1740 N. Ridge

The Family Institute’s Bette D. Harris Family & Child Clinic The Family Institute offers individual, couples and family counseling to people of all backgrounds and income levels all across Chicago and Evanston. Specifically, the Harris Family & Child Clinic operates on a sliding scale based on self-reported income. Prices for sessions with Northwestern graduate therapistsin-training, who are overseen by professional, licensed therapists, start as low as $15 for individuals. family-institute.org / 847-733-4300 / 618 Library Place on campus and multiple other locations around Chicagoland

*Editor’s note: name has been changed to protect student’s identity.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

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“Fashion knows no gender.”

Elijah Warfield, Communication ‘19

Students share the clothes that speak to who they are.

“When I was in middle school, my friends and I were really bad and we would shoplift all the time, and these [rings] were the first things that we ever shoplifted.”

Jamaica Ponder, Medill ‘21

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SPRING 2018

“It’s a gift from one of my best friends when I was in UWC Costa Rica. This is one of her most favorite clothing items at that time. Before we left, like before the graduation day, she just came to me and she said, ‘I just want to give this to you, because apparently you love it a lot.’”

“When my friend came, we went to this thrift store in Argyle, and he thrifted this jacket. He could tell that I wanted it more than he did. He conveniently left it at my place when he went back to New Jersey, so it’s sort of mine now.”

Marie Mendoza, Medill ‘21

“I always try to find stuff with pockets cause I think I’m usually really frustrated when women’s clothing doesn’t have pockets. It’s like they want us to not be functional.

This kind of went to the extreme where every single patch on this is a pocket.”

Vy Duong, Medill ‘21 PHOTOS BY CAYLA CLEMENTS, SAKKE OVERLUND & STEPHANIE J. SHIN DESIGNED BY AUDREY VALBUENA

Florence Fu, Medill ‘18

Rory Tsapayi, Medill ‘21

Tsapayi on his purse chain: “A big part of [coming into my style] was like being flamboyant and being extra but with the materials I already had available to me, if that makes sense, you know?

That’s what I’m trying to do in my life – use what you have to make something very cool. You don’t need to go out and shop for the best when it’s right there in an unexpected place.”

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

55

Nicole Andonova, WCAS ‘21

Avery Van Etten, Medill ‘21

“My boyfriend got me this necklace for Valentine’s Day. It has a moon on it that’s the same phase as the moon on the date that we started dating, and it glows in the dark.”

Mahito Indi Henderson, Communication ‘20

“I found these cool shoes.

I’ve never seen ones like them.”

“I got these a few years ago when I was starting to take improv classes. They’ve just kind of turned into my lucky shoes because when I’ve performed with them, it’s gone well.”

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hangover ‘TIL THE BITTER END

58

So excited to announce...

Dissecting the invasive species taking over your Facebook feed.

NBN STAFF

59

Skeletons in the archives Here are some historical student actions the University hasn’t co-opted yet.

MORGAN LEE

60

Tribadism troubles What to do when you scrape the bottom of NU’s eligible bachelorette barrel.

JULIA TESMOND

61

The Dillo drought They’re dry so we don’t have to be.

RITA LIU

62

Which overrated class at Northwestern are you?

Screw horoscopes, the only way to really predict your future is to read the CTECs. EMMA KUMER

CASHMERE CATS A crowd of Northwestern students cheers at the Dillo mainstage back in 2016. That year, the headliners were Schoolboy Q and Cashmere Cat. | PHOTO BY ZOE DAVIS

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57

So Excited To Announce…

Dissecting the invasive species taking over your Facebook feed.

WRITTEN BY NBN STAFF | DESIGNED BY SAVANNAH CHRISTENSEN

Jobbus Announcivs

Bill Stewart May 9 at 12:00pm

I know you were waiting with bated breath to know what I was doing this summer. Well, I’m employed! I’m excited to spend the summer at the Smith, Jones, and Johnson firm (my dad’s college roommate’s company)! Let me know if you have any low-cost housing recommendations (I’m getting paid $0) or suggestions for fun things to do (I will be spending my parents’ money). I applied for 63 internships, and after the dust settled I got 21 offers. It was so hard to choose, but I’m blessed to be literally living my dream in Indianapolis this summer and applying my work in the classroom to the real world. Hit me up if you’ll be in the area, let’s do brunch (SIGP money is great for $12 mimosas)! #blessed #livingthedream #internlife

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Jake Smith, Bob Jackson, and 90 others

Barbara Stewart So proud of you, I know your mother is over the moon!

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Linda Stewart You bet I am! #proud Mama Like

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Hashtaggus Incorrecticus Mommus Impressionus

Here are some historical student actions the University hasn’t co-opted yet.

WRITTEN BY MORGAN LEE DESIGNED BY CLAIRE BUGOS

Storming up Sheridan Road In the 1950s and ‘60s, Northwestern was a hotbed of anti-war activism. This activism mostly came in the form of silent protests at the Rock, teach-ins across campus and demonstrations against the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC) program. These demonstrations often involved forming barrier-like lines of students outside NROTC buildings until police arrested or forcibly removed students. Roger Friedman (Speech ‘70) recalls the largest student demonstration during his time at NU as an event in the winter of 1968. Between 50 and 100 students sat down in the middle of a freezing Sheridan Road in protest of the Vietnam War, effectively stopping traffic. “We tried to do this during rush hour in the afternoon to really create a mess. The idea was really guerilla theatre — just to create attention and press and media that there were a lot of students, even at a place like Northwestern, that were very much adamantly against the war,” he says.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

Frats criticized by the Chicago Defender The Psi Upsilon president removed Sherman Wu, a firstyear Chinese student, from the frat in 1956 when several white students refused to join the chapter on the basis of not wanting to associate with a Chinese person. A Chicago Defender article detailing the event asks, “We wonder if our schools are educating bigots instead of men of vision.” According to this story, a total of seven white men boycotted the fraternity’s recruitment of Wu, ultimately convincing chapter president Jack Lageschulte to coercively “depledge” him. Among other things, the article points out that “this nation is committed to the liberation of the subjugated peoples,” but the decisions of these college students sparked “screaming headlines around the world that Americans are hypocrites.”

Queer Kiss-In In April 1997, about 20 students made a point of PDA in front of the Rock. After a speech by the director of the Illinois Federation on Human Rights (today known as Equality Illinois), students got to smooching. The students had a competition for best kisser and awarded “butchest” walk and “queeniest” walk titles. While the Daily Northwestern quoted a CAS (no W yet!) sophomore who “didn’t mind gays and lesbians” but wondered why “they have to make a circus out of it,” others were more accepting, like another sophomore who said he wasn’t “used to seeing same-sex kissing,” but found it “cool.”

Co-organizer and Bisexual, Gay and Lesbian Alliance member Shana Krochmal (Medill ’99) “didn’t want to sit around saying ‘Oh, we’re gay and oppressed.” Instead, the organizers of the event wanted a “celebration” – and to shock the “campus’ conservatism.” Oh, how the tables turn!

PHOTO BY ZOE DAVIS

They’re dry so we don’t have to be.

WRITTEN AND DESIGNED BY RITA LIU

E

veryone loves Dillo Day: it’s the one day that us Northwestern nerds get to act like our undeniably wilder state school friends. Morty even closes down the library so we can “get turnt” without the guilt of ignoring our obscene load of work.

With the copious amounts of dorm drinking and unruly shenanigans, it’s inevitable that someone is going to have to be the “mom friend,” and this responsibility often falls on RAs and the Mayfest crew, who have seen the absolute best and worst of the student population on Dillo Day. Some of these Dillo Dads (or Daddies, if that’s your thing) are here to tell their stories.

RAs RAs differ in motivation. Some do it out of love for the job and some, quite frankly, are in it for the free room and board. Despite these differences, most of them were probably not thinking about Dillo Day when they signed up, but boy, do they have things to say.

“Last year, the baseball team tried to break into Bobb,” says Chris Dungey, a Weinberg senior and former Bobb RA. Dungey proceeded to go above and beyond by “chasing them around the frat quad.” Most sports teams have their quirks and traditions – the hulking members of the Northwestern football team are usually riding tiny Vespas around campus, and apparently the baseball team enjoys running boisterously around the frat quad, being pursued by a particularly motivated RA. While Dungey was getting a workout with the boys, most RAs were having a less exciting day. According to a former Plex RA who prefers to remain unnamed, Dillo Day depends on the attitude of your rounds partner. “If your partner doesn’t really care, it’s a really relaxed day.

If your partner really likes being an RA, you’re in to write a lot of citations,” he says.

Being an RA on Dillo does come with certain perks, though. For this anonymous Plex RA, one particular story stands out: “When you’re in a dorm, you are only allowed to have as many bottles of alcohol as there are people, even if you’re legal,” he explains.

60

SPRING 2018

“Last year, my rounds partner and I ran into a group of four that had, like eight bottles of Svedka. I watched my partner dump two of the bottles into the toilet.” Unable to bear the wastefulness, he selflessly did some negotiating and grabbed the two bottles for later use. “I felt awful. Those poor dudes,” he adds, sounding convincingly dismayed.

MAYFEST While the RAs are off wrangling their many dorm children, the Mayfest staff spend their time chauffeuring the performers. It’s hard to tell who has the more difficult job.

Isabel Schwartz, a Medill senior, recalls one particular heart attack-inducing experience: “I’m a producer, so I handle contracts and logistics for a main stage artist. One time, one of my artists went missing during the festival,” – cue to Schwartz hastily driving around the Lakefill in a golf cart looking for a rogue musician. As many know, Dillo artists can be extremely unreliable – sometimes they take the stage an hour and a half late for the headliner show (looking at you MGMT), but hey, I’m not bitter.

In any case, Dillo is not easy for our Mayfest and RA heroes. This year, remember to give a Dillo Dad a hug – they sacrifice so much just so we can day drink to our heart’s content.

tribadism troubles What to do when you scrape the bottom of the eligible NU bachelorette barrel.

WRITTEN BY JULIA TESMOND | DESIGNED BY MADDIE JARRARD

S

o you’ve dated every queer girl at Northwestern; all the eligible people in your sorority, in the Gender Studies department, at the local Ace Hardware and in the Natasha Lyonne club you founded. Now what?

2

1

Crack open a sweet, sweet microbrew on the edge of the lakefill, even though the wind keeps blowing your beanie off.

Spring quarter is finally in full swing, and you know what that means: supporting small, local, GMO-free businesses by drinking the brewski your friend Alex makes in the trunk of her 2007 Subaru. Crack open that crisp “Sapphic Pilsner” while gazing into the abyss of the lakefill, reminiscing about what could’ve been if you had gone to Sarah Lawrence instead.

ILLUSTRATION BY RACHEL HAWLEY

Finally have the time to maintain the undercut you got after Kristen Stewart came out.

In 2013, you made the mistake that would change the course of your entire life: You got an undercut. You’ve really let the undercut go while you’ve been dating other women with undercuts, and now it’s in shambles. But after watching 12 different gay YouTubers’ vlogs, you’re basically Shane from The L Word. Not only can you start a small Northwestern business for all of your ex-girlfriends, you can set up shop on the ground floor of Norris next to the CRU table (and legally call yourself “CRU-Cuts”).

After your year of heartbreaks, your undercut will be better maintained than Kristen Stewart’s beard, Robert Pattinson.

“There’s no one new around you.”

3 4

Watch Carol for the ninth time.

Because Blue is the Warmest Color is a gay movie for straight people and you can’t watch Piper whine for another season of OITNB. Write another strongly worded email to the Academy about how they snubbed Cate Blanchett at the 2015 Oscars.

As soon as Cate Blanchett’s wistful smize fades into the credits during your eighth viewing of Carol, it’s time to start dialing your local (Academy) representative. You’ve never forgiven them for the great Brokeback Mountain best picture snub of 2006, but the Cate Blanchett affront has to be reversible…right? I mean, look at the way she smokes a clove cigarette whilst whispering the name Therese into her fur coat.

Plus, she’s the only queer woman still alive at the end.

5

Grow your nails out?

Self-explanatory.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

61

Why did you get put on probation your freshman year?

I tried selling to my RA, but in my defense, the opportunity cost was worth it

I hotboxed the Bobb laundry room

I didn’t do anything, but due to determinism, it was bound to happen eventually

I had sex in the lounge

Which friend are you in the squad group chat?

What’s your excuse for failing that midterm?

Changes the group chat name once a Always week flirts with everyone, but actively denies it

C’s get degrees!

I am who I am because society made me this way

Has an Android and forces the group to communicate via GroupMe

You’re at a darty. What’s in the cup?

Cheap beer

ABSOLUT LIKE THE RUSSIANS DO

Water. You’re going to “play drunk” and see how many people notice. It’s a social experiment.

Understand symbolic interactionism

Ah, a reasonably warm spring day. Catch me on the lakefill...

Tossing a frisbee with the bros

ROCKS FOR JOCKS

What do you have to do before you graduate?

WRITTEN & DESIGNED BY EMMA KUMER

Lying in an ENO, postulating the meaning of life

RUSSIAN LIT

Have dinner at Morty’s

Who are you just dying to hear on Dillo Day next year?

Peoplewatching

INTRO TO SOCIOLOGY

The Schapussy video on repeat

MORTY FEAT. MORSON

Get engaged on the Lakefill

Ed Sheeran

MARRIAGE 101

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What do we love the most about this community? The people we share it with! That’s why we support the families here, the local businesses and the charitable organizations, too. Beyond providing banking solutions, we also take pride in giving back to the people who work to make this area so great. Why? Because this isn’t just home to us; it’s home to all of us. And, as a true community bank, we know that when we all do our part, we can help make Evanston better for everyone.

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