PGM Special Edition: Everybody Has One

THE GRAPHIC: SPECIAL EDITION

Are All Opinions Equal?:

Students, Faculty Weigh the Costs of Sharing Their Beliefs

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Hope Lockwood Encourages Gender Identity Exploration p. 30

FALL 2021

COVID-19 Breeds a Plethora of Opinions p. 38

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Letter from the Editor G rowing up, I often felt like having an opinion was a bad thing.

Even though nobody ever explicitly said that, the sentiment was palpable in the classrooms at my elementary school. When I, or another female student, would raise a hand to offer an opinion on a topic, I could see the eye rolls across the room. I could see people turn to their friends and snicker.

While my family supported me sharing my opinions, the reaction from my classmates eventually caused me to stop participating in classes — I was tired of being seen as supposedly too much or too intense.

During my first semester at Pepperdine, I took the first of the Great Books in the program with Prof. Jeffrey Schultz. He encouraged all of his students, not just the extroverted male students, to share their opinions about the books we read. Because of him, I cautiously began to share my opinions again, and I remembered how much I had enjoyed participating in class.

Throughout my time working for the Graphic, I have come to love community-building journalism — I even presented on it at the 2021 Spring National College Media Convention. If you ask anybody on staff about me, they will say that I love writing profiles. I even wrote a profile for our Sports section, even though everybody would agree I know nothing about sports.

When I had the opportunity to be editor-in-chief of the Graphic’s fall 2021 special edition, I knew the topic of opinions was perfect because opinions are like a**holes — everybody has one.

I chose to focus on what students, faculty and administration are passionate and knowledgeable about because connecting with each other is even more important now than it was be-

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fore. After so much time apart due to COVID-19, we should celebrate what makes us similar and different. Instead of being nervous about how our peers will react, we should take advantage of being back on campus and grow closer in our community.

Even though I chose the topic of this special edition, I could not have done it without the help of my team.

To the writers, thank you for running with my idea and finding so many voices within our community to feature. To the designers, photogra-

phers, artists and editors, thank you for making my vision a reality. To my advisers, thank you for continuously supporting me and believing in me throughout the whole process. Finally, to my family, thank you for being my life-long support system.

There are articles within this special edition that explore the current opinion-sharing climate at Pepperdine, the psychology of opinions and the connections between opinions and COVID-19.

There is a profile on a student who undergoes a spiritual experience when eating Chick-fil-A sauce. There is also a profile on a student who champions productive disagreement, which is one of the goals of this special edition.

The Pepperdine community is many voices — different genders, ethnicities and political leanings. Creating a special edition with a limited number of articles is challenging because there are always more community members who deserve to be featured. There are also many people who want to use their voices but for a variety of reasons do not feel comfortable having their opinions published. It is my hope that this special edition illustrates not only the background behind why we share our opinions but also the validity and value of both lighthearted and serious opinions.

Most of all, it is my hope that Everybody Has One is only the beginning of a conversation in the Pepperdine community. So, I invite you, no matter what opinions you hold and how frequently you share them, to join me in starting this conversation in our community and beyond.

Editor-in-chief

Staff & Contributors Writers

Ali Levens

Creative Director

Ryan Brinkman Photo Editor

Sarah Best Emily Chase Liza Esquibias Beth Gonzales Yamillah Hurtado Sofia Longo Alec Matulka Ashley Mowreader AJ Muonagolu Emily Shaw Samantha Torre Addison Whiten Abby Wilt Karl Winter Sawa Yamakawa Stella Zhang

Artists

Leah Bae Autumn Hardwick Vivian Hsia Samantha Miller

Designers

Haley Hoidal

Design Assistant

Bryant Loney Copy Chief

Cover by Samantha Miller Staff Photos by Ryan Brinkman Line Illustrations by Haley Hoidal

Kaitlyn Davis Emilia Lekhter Zoe Macarewa Ivan Manriquez Rachel Marek Lillian Wong

Advisers

Elizabeth Smith Courtenay Stallings

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Are All Opin

nions

Equal?

Students, Faculty Weigh the Costs of Sharing Their Beliefs

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By Karl Winter | Photos by Ryan Brinkman | Art by Haley Hoidal

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ontroversial posts and shouting matches at the Freedom Wall.

A bitter tweet about Pepperdine’s dining options.

A conversation about abortion in a first-year dorm.

Discussions in an ethics class.

A humorous take on Yik Yak. These are all ways in which the Pepperdine community expresses opinions — on a campus that affirms how “truth, having nothing to fear from investigation, should be pursued relentlessly” in its mission statement.

Students and professors seek truth in college, but this perhaps looks differently at a small, Christian liberal arts university in Southern California.

“This is the place for you to be able to try to voice your opinion and mess up,” senior Computer Science major Kiana Felkner said.

The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech in the United States, and Pepperdine’s mission statement also holds “that freedom, whether spiritual, intellectual, or economic, is indivisible.”

While students and faculty agree that everyone is free to speak their mind, some students and professors challenge the notion that all opinions should be weighted equally.

“Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, until it’s hateful,” first-year Political Science major Viviana Hernandez said.

In a recent, anonymous Graphic poll, 52.4% of students said there is such a thing as an incorrect opinion.

The poll included as many as 146 participants — but slightly less on several questions.

These students use their many available modes of opinion sharing and communication to determine which opinions they may deem less

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valuable or simply incorrect.

How Opinions Change in College When students depart their hometown bubbles and are exposed to people from an array of backgrounds, their opinions face challenges.

“College is a unique opportunity,” Assistant Professor of Communication Colin Storm said. “You may never be in this sort of situation again, where you have just a such a diverse range of people and opinions and viewpoints that you might not otherwise have engaged with.”

For example, Hernandez, who grew up in California but attended high school in Georgia, enjoys conversations with her suitemates about hot-button issues.

“It was interesting to hear everyone’s different perspectives within my own suite because there are people from all over the country,” Hernandez said.

Not every student agrees — a majority of respondents to the Graphic’s poll said “no” when asked whether professors, course material or fellow students caused them to change deeply held opinions since entering college.

At the very least, Hernandez said Pepperdine offers an inclusive and respectful space for opinion sharing, more so than her high school in rural Georgia.

Junior Psychology major Abby Morrow agreed, but she said her own deeply held beliefs remained at Pepperdine — they were challenged but ultimately strengthened.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Bryant Crubaugh said this lack of change may be due to the fact students can find a like-minded crowd on campus.

“There’s enough of social differ-

ence on campus that people can find their community and find who they’re comfortable with — and that can actually limit how much you’re going to change,” Crubaugh said.

Hernandez and Morrow agreed that some of the best opinion sharing takes place in classrooms, where a professor moderates a discussion and students can hear from peers with whom they would not normally associate.

“In classes I’ve had where we’ve talked about issues like this, everybody’s forced to come at it more respectfully, and I feel like that’s where I’ve had better, challenging conversations,” Morrow said.

Classroom conversations can also be emotional for those unprepared to discuss a certain serious topic, and they raise the question of whether some opinions should be valued over others.

At least one professor believes those who have more expertise and experience on a specific topic also carry more credible opinions.

“Maybe my opinions that are based in fact but they’ve been tested over time — maybe those are different sorts of opinions than someone who blogs on social media,” Professor of Religion Chris Doran said.

Ultimately, while students seem to learn just as much from each other as they do from professors, they can also be poor listeners, Doran said.

“The students’ inability to give grace to each other about trying to find commonality and find similarity and still understanding you can disagree is symptomatic of where we’re at as a society — we can’t seem to disagree with each other without becoming tribalistic,” Doran said.

Take the September Freedom Wall incident, where tempers flared.

Students took down others’ post-

ings, and the discourse at the wall between abortion-rights and anti-abortion students made some feel “unsafe,” according to a Graphic article covering the incident.

Diversity of Pepperdine

Thought

at

Pepperdine’s Office of Institutional Effectiveness (OIE) surveyed students’ political beliefs in its 2018-19 Diversity Report and found a remarkable degree of balance.

Nonetheless, students from opposing sides of the political spectrum said they feel as if they are in the minority, Crubaugh and Morrow said.

“Conservative students feel more targeted from the general student body, and leftist students feel more targeted from staff and the church at the school,” Morrow said.

Crubaugh said students from the South are naturally going to feel as if the Pepperdine community is more liberal than their own background, while someone from the San Francisco Bay Area, for instance, may feel as if Pepperdine is more conservative.

The University’s demographic differences between administration, faculty and students may also contribute to this perception.

While Pepperdine continues to receive less and less devout Christians as part of its student makeup, Doran said, there remains a requirement for faculty and administration to be a part of a faith community and uphold the school’s mission of Christian values.

“Many students, and basically all faculty, come from the same starting point of believing in Jesus Christ,” Storm said.

Pepperdine’s website displays that 53% of students declare themselves Christian, while the faculty and administration number is undoubtedly higher, Storm said. The University hires along “mission fit,” which ensures that faculty upholds

the school’s mission, which includes Christian values, Storm said.

The OIE’s 2017 Faculty Census showed that 88.6% of Seaver College faculty identified with some denomination of Christianity.

“Because it is a Christian school, that diversity of thought is […] a much higher proportion of Christian thought than in your day-to-day life at a career or something,” Felkner said. “So there’s definitely a little bit more of a focus on Christian perspective.”

Students may be intimidated by the differences in diversity of thought between their peers and their professors and administrators. In the Graphic’s poll, 61.4% of students said they find themselves hesitant to share certain opinions because they feel the opinions would not be well-received on campus.

“We have to be careful in any organizational structure not to have the leaders dominate their opinions over the community,” said Stella Erbes, associate professor and divisional dean of the Humanities and

Teacher Education division. “Leaders can facilitate opinion forming, but should they use their leadership to further just their own opinion […] you could see how that power dynamic could be troublesome.”

Despite the hesitancy expressed by poll respondents, more than half also said the campus is a place that fosters opinion sharing in general.

Kiana Felkner

Social Media Making its Mark Erbes mentioned a theory that education and culture favor extroverts, a point that author Susan Cain makes in her book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.”

At Pepperdine, the most outspoken people sometimes dominate the cultural narrative — Pepperdine College Republicans President Spencer Lindquist and Crossroads Gender and Sexuality Alliance President Hope Lockwood were among the most recognizable and prominent figures at the forefront of September’s Freedom Wall controversy.

Social media has helped to change what communication scholars such as Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann call the “spiral of silence” — keeping minority opinions silent to blend in with those around us.

“It’s a little bit easier to criticize and to have conflict in an asynchronous manner than face-to-face,” Storm said.

A positive example of this is the Instagram account @ B l a c k A t Pe p p e r d i n e , which began in 2020, 09

Viviana Hernandez

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allowed anonymous posters to tell their stories of racism experienced on Pepperdine’s campus to a wider audience and created dialogue regarding those incidents.

Communities like @BlackAtPepperdine and “Pepperdine Twitter,” an undefined group of students who actively post about Pepperdine happenings, allow students to find like-minded individuals online, air grievances, tell stories and — theoretically — effect change.

“During the pandemic, I was just feeling a lot more frustrated with Pepperdine and very isolated from the community,” Morrow said. “So it was nice to be able to go onto Twitter and be able to be like, ‘OK, these people are too.’”

For Morrow, fellow upper-level students on “Pepperdine Twitter” provide that community.

For first-years, it’s a large Class of 2025 Snapchat group where students shares memes and inside jokes.

The drawback of these online communities often comes from anonymous posters who encourage cyberbullying. An example of the negative side of social media’s influence on opinion is Yik Yak, the anonymous discussion board app that sparked racial tensions on Pepperdine’s campus in 2015.

“There is plenty of research that shows that social media increases depression and loneliness,” Storm said. “But there’s also other research that shows that social media allows people who might be more introverted to be able to more clearly express their opinions.”

A place like Yik Yak, Hernandez said, is funny at first but can be rife with bullying.

“That type of behavior from college students — I did not expect that immaturity and cowardice,” Hernandez said.

Tenured Faculty Members Opine on Behalf of Non-tenured On the faculty side, while they may have more direct communication with administrators, they may also feel hesitant to share challenging opinions — if their future and job security do not permit it.

“As an untenured faculty member, I don’t feel as if I can be as honest and transparent as I would like to be,” Storm said.

To have academic “tenure” as a faculty member means to have an indefinite appointment, which a college or university can only terminate under extreme circumstances — providing stability and protecting academic freedom. Non-tenured professors, including visiting, adjunct and assistant positions, do not have indefinite contracts with the University.

Non-tenured professors like Storm and Crubaugh may turn to their more senior colleagues to express thoughts that could be in the minority.

“There are a couple specific [faculty members] who are tenured and will regularly ask untenured faculty, ‘What do you think about this?’”

Storm said. “And then they will vocalize that to the administration, to almost act as a shield in some respects.”

Doran said he recognizes his colleagues’ hesitancy, which may also stem from the knowledge their fellow faculty members may review their work in the future, and he will speak on their behalf. He said he considers it the “socially responsible” action, as he is the president of the Faculty Senate.

“It’s my responsibility to make sure that I voice concerns to either the dean’s office or the president’s office about things that untenured folks

feel uncomfortable or are too timid to voice,” Doran said.

Erbes said non-tenured faculty members can also share opinions via polls or other anonymous methods, in addition to sharing them with more senior faculty.

Students Hold More Power than They Know Faculty do have a chance to speak with administrators regularly, as well as engage in formal actions like passing resolutions through the Seaver Faculty Senate, which carry the weight of all of the professors.

The formal system, Crubaugh said, can be slow at times.

“The general faculty feeling is we want to actually see things change, but we get caught in bureaucracy,” Crubaugh said.

Crubaugh, as chair of the Seaver College Diversity Council and cochair of the University Diversity Council, said he has an invitation to “make administrators uncomfortable,” he said. He utilizes his role to speak on behalf of those who have less privilege, along with co-chair J. Goosby Smith, Pepperdine’s chief diversity officer.

In instances where bureaucracy stops change in its tracks, Doran said it is nice to be at a small school where people know each other by face.

“There are other times where I use the culture of Pepperdine to our advantage,” Doran said. “Which is to say we like to meet with people personally and talk about things rather than having a bunch of formalities.”

Crubaugh said change at Pepperdine is more in the hands of the students than faculty members.

“If a collective group of students get involved, they are the most likely to actually see things change,” Crubaugh said. “Our model of student-centered education only works if you keep responding to students

on most issues.”

At a student-driven university, a critical mass of students can effect change.

The WASC Senior College and University Commission took student feedback on Pepperdine into account when evaluating the University in late October, something student groups touted on social media.

After the sit-in against racism at Waves Cafe in 2015, Pepperdine honored some of the protesters’ suggestions: The University removed a wooden mural from the Caf in 2016 and relocated a Christopher Columbus statue from campus in 2017.

Occasionally, school administrators ignore students — or petitions for change are caught in bureaucracy.

Ask Hernandez: She started and circulated a petition while in high school to rebrand her school’s mascot, which she deemed “offensive to the Native [American] culture.”

The petition has over 47,000 signatures — but with the administration and Board of Education “refusing” to work with her, the mascot has yet to change, Hernandez said.

Or ask Black students at Pepperdine: After requesting cultural sensitivity training for faculty and administration in 1970 and again in 2015, as well as a General Education requirement that focuses on diversity and inclusion, both have yet to come to fruition.

Opinion sharing and longer commitment may be the keys to effecting change at Pepperdine. Students come and go every four years, so they may need to invest in the future of other students to see change through, Doran said.

“The school does an excellent job in its organizational structure to pass the baton, if you will, if there is a change in leadership at the student level,” Erbes said.

When students challenge the status quo on campus with their opinions, they often determine the future of the social climate of the school.

“It’s your job as students to voice your opinions and to try to change Pepperdine for the better,” Storm said.

Abby Morrow 11

Elija Gatling Encourages Mindful Social Media Use

By Liza Esquibias | Photo by Ryan Brinkman

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ocial media serves a different purpose in everyone’s lives. For some, social media is a career; others use it as a distraction, a game or a virtual photo album full of memories. One thing nearly every social media user experiences, though, is an obsession — subconscious or not — with the mindless scrolling and constant comparisons to others.

Sophomore Business Administration major Elija Gatling’s answer to combating social media addiction is to be mindful of whether posts are for him or his followers, along with how the response to his posts affects his mental well-being. He suggests his fellow Pepperdine students do the same.

“We need to be able to prove to ourselves first that we’re awesome and amazing before we show others what we’re doing,” Gatling said.

Social media platforms, Gatling said, give users validation online that they begin to crave during in-person interactions — and even he has caught himself relying on the attention of others to feel happy.

“It’s a short-term sense of validation,” Gatling said. “That’s really how I started — I liked posting pictures, and then I started getting more likes, and people started commenting, and I thought, ‘Oh wow, this is nice.’ But then I was like, ‘I’m missing something because I’m not getting that every single day.’”

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Gatling said his relationship with social media has shifted. Now, instead of posting to impress others, he said he tries his best to express himself authentically on his page.

“When COVID happened, I think we all took a break,” Gatling said.

“And that was a good refresher for me to realize this is a problem I have and start changing my ways and be like, ‘I’m going to do this for fun and not to just let me get a good Instagram picture for all my followers to see.’”

As a young person, Gatling said it is difficult to have a healthy approach to social media, given the pressures certain users create through photoshopping and posting highlight reels. He said influencers have an exciting job in his

opinion, but they also carry the responsibility to not perpetuate unrealistic standards of how one should look or act to get positive attention.

“I feel like jealousy and envy can really stem from social media, because you’re looking at other people’s images, what they’re doing for fun, their bodies, and that could be harming you,” Gatling said.

Instagram allows people to hide the like count on their photos, and although many see that as a step toward removing unnecessary stress from users, Gatling said it actually exacerbates feelings about likes defining one’s worth — it instead sends the message that the number does matter.

“People are hiding their likes, but it shows that they’re ashamed of how many likes they’re getting,” Gatling said.

Gatling’s solution is to be thoughtful when posting and scrolling on social media, he said. There is no reason to post if it is not for yourself.

“What you need to learn from social media is you’re different from this or that person — you are you, and you can be beautiful in your own way,” Gatling said.

Chloe McLeod Champions Student Collaboration

By Samantha Torre | Photo by Ryan Brinkman

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ophomore Art and Biology double major Chloe McLeod said she believes there is too much of a focus on test taking and education as individuals when, after college, many students will be collaborating in groups.

“Test taking, especially in college, has come down to a lot of memorization,” McLeod said. “Which I know is important, but we should be doing a lot more group projects to really demonstrate and learn how to problem solve within groups and use our resources to come about the right answer.”

McLeod said she formed this opinion recently after taking group tests in high school and over Zoom during the 2020-21 academic year. Now, after returning to in-person classes, she sees a difference.

“I worked so much harder,” McLeod said. “I feel like I got way more out of it because I was able to discuss and problem solve and really go back and forth with the other person.”

Even though her partners knew the same information as her, McLeod said students were able to use their resources on group tests, such as notes. Additionally, McLeod said the group members shared their knowledge with each other to get stronger answers.

“It made the experience much more enriching than regular ‘just sit there by yourself and stress out and cry’ tests,” McLeod said.

As for classes where this format would be used, McLeod said she acknowledges it would be difficult in

math and English classes, but nonetheless, professors should implement group learning and testing whenever possible.

“Specifically in my case, like in science classes, I think it’d be really, really beneficial,” McLeod said. “Especially since a lot of people who are in science or trying to go to med school or do research — you do all those things in groups.”

This format, McLeod said, would help students build each other up in academia rather than perpetuate a culture where students try to tear each other down for individual benefit.

“Group work helps to foster community, and it’s less focused on competition and more focused on supporting each other and helping each other succeed, because there’s a lot of university settings where competition can be really toxic,” McLeod said. “And so some people don’t want to help each other succeed because they want to be the best in the class, which is understandable, but we’re all trying to get somewhere.”

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Prof. Colin Enriquez Pushes for Diversity in Humanities

By Ashley Mowreader | Photo by Ryan Brinkman

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iterary scholar, English and Humanities Professor Colin Enriquez said he believes in the importance of studying the humanities with an intentionality toward all peoples.

Originally from Brooklyn, N.Y., Enriquez has taught at Seaver College since 2015.

In looking backward at the evolution of humanity, Enriquez said students often relate to and learn from the characters of the past, as well as better understand where we, as a people, are going.

“Today’s students, or people around college age, think the past is separate from now,” Enriquez said. “It’s important to see there’s a continuum of human experience — that’s built up to now.”

Themes of human nature — such as who we are, what we value, future ambitions and love — appear throughout history, and the study of humanities reveals that, Enriquez said.

“The humanities deal a lot with, ‘What is a human being, what makes up humanity, who are we as people?’ and then, ‘Who have we been?’ and then, ‘Who might we be?’” he said. “These questions are important now, although they get overlooked a lot.”

Literature allows for readers to engage with different perspectives longer than a Tweet or a quick video, Enriquez said, because the experience is more time consuming and can give a deeper insight.

“Literature is a unique medium for engaging questions of racial, religious, gender difference — particularly as literature tries to get across to the read-

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er the emotional, psychological place from which a character’s speaking, acting, making decisions — and can be helpful for students to see the world from a different perspective,” Enriquez said.

People have criticized Pepperdine’s General Education Humanities requirement for its Eurocentric nature and exclusion of voices of color.

While he hasn’t sat in on every HUM class or hiring panel, Enriquez said there’s been some effort from Pepperdine to diversify curriculum and faculty.

But more than that, a stagnation of the division is only an opportunity for further development, he said.

“The humanities are about this evolution of humans — so we don’t have to get stuck, even though that may have been a pattern in the past — and that there’s room and opportunity to expand and bring, excuse the metaphor, more color,” Enriquez said.

For the individual, Enriquez encouraged intentionality in engaging with media or perspectives that are different from one’s own.

One example is choosing

movies on Netflix — he suggests scrolling through the Hispanic Heritage Month or Black Lives Matter banners and watching something you might not otherwise pick. Another is inviting people into conversation in your daily lives.

“We often know who’s being silenced or left out, and we just allow ourselves to go on with it,” Enriquez said. “Take that moment to override that voice that says, ‘Oh, don’t make any waves.’ I don’t think it has to be this grand thing — it could be a simple thing of turning to someone and saying, ‘What do you think?’”

Humanities is constantly evolving as humans continue to create history, and Enriquez said he believes people should remember what it means to be here, now, in the span of life itself.

“It is incredible the distance of evolution that humanity has covered in its time, and we often forget that,” Enriquez said. “It’s taken so, so long to get where we are genetically, culturally, and if we have that kind of distance to look at where we are, maybe that gives us some fortitude, patience and vision to move forward.”

Prof. Tomas Martinez Advocates for Mental Health

By Sofia Longo | Photo by Ryan Brinkman

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rofessor Tomas Martinez said his lifetime commitment is to give back to the people in his community, specifically the Latinx community.

As a Psychology professor at Seaver College from Baldwin Park, Calif., he said his passion for community mental health extends to those who are at-risk or disadvantaged across different minority and language groups. Martinez said mental health care should be curated to be both culturally appropriate and competent.

“I do feel that mental health and mental wellness is as important as mental illness,” Martinez said. “For me, this has always been a passion of community mental health — to try to provide mental health care to those who are more in need, to those who have had difficulty finding access to services and those who really are more at risk for care.”

It is important to provide culturally sensitive and competent mental health services because of transgenerational trauma, said Martinez, who recently completed a trauma study on Latinx adolescents receiving mental health therapy. “ [ Tr a n s generational

traumas] are traumas that have been continued from family to family, generation to generation,” Martinez said.

“Even though we would like to think that families get better and improve, oftentimes they have more struggles because of these transgenerational traumas.”

Martinez said the idea is to provide treatment that will help change the structure of the family to improve qualities of life and communication while strengthening the family.

“I do believe in early intervention — the earlier we can help the child improve their mental health, the less issues we’re going to have and feelings of problems [they will] have later on growing up,” Martinez said.

Ma rt i n e z ’s passion for mental health is seen in the number of mental health clinics he developed in the San Fernando Valley. One of the clinics is El Centro Amistad, and he is also involved in the Luminarias Institute, which works with at-

risk charter schools to provide mental health services online.

“When you look at the disparities, when you look at the high-risk conditions, when you look at who is being treated in hospitals for mental health, there is still a tremendous amount of disparity across different ethnic and diverse populations,” Martinez said.

There is a great deal of stigma regarding mental health and misunderstandings about those who have mental health challenges as well, Martinez said.

In one example, people experiencing homelessness, who are “blamed unfairly by society,” may have limitations from mental illness that don’t allow them to survive and function, he said.

“We need to normalize mental health and mental illness in our community and in our world so that we are better able to address it and not [be] so fearful of it,” Martinez said.

The best way to destigmatize mental health, Martinez said, is to acknowledge these are medical disorders that do exist and there are treatments that can be used to reduce or mimic those effects and to make them available who require it, wherever they are.

“When we think about multicultural issues of prioritization and privilege, it’s that being healthy is a privilege in our society — that it’s not a right,” Martinez said. “At the same time, the benefits of care to others is something that, as a human society, we should provide to those who cannot take care of themselves — especially as Christians. I do believe this is something of our life work if we are committed to God and committed to our community.”

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Q&A

By Alec Matulka | Photo by Ryan Brinkman

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he world teems with a range of diverse opinions and points of view, and the Graphic’s newsroom is no exception.

The Graphic’s Perspectives section cultivates and publishes opinions from the Graphic staff, as well the Pepperdine community at large through guest contributors and Letters to the Editor. A junior Psychology major and Journalism minor, Anitiz Muonagolu has held the position of Perspectives Editor for the past two semesters after joining the Graphic his first year at Pepperdine as a staff writer.

As times change, so do news practices, and Muonagolu said he’s seen the Perspectives section grow and evolve over the course of his time at the Graphic.

What is the role of the Perspectives section at the Graphic?

Anitiz Muonagolu: “A lot of people don’t understand that Perspectives is

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a different type of beast than the other sections. The other sections — while they can do reviews and opinions and subjective pieces — a lot of their role is to report what’s going on. But for Perspectives, it is looking at issues that happen in our community and at the school and what those actually look like. Perspectives gives the news and the things we see in everyday life a little more context. So yes, we have no parking, but why is that a bad thing — or is that a good thing? Perspectives comes in to fill in the gaps that a news piece can’t do objectively, because then you’d be force-feeding your audience whatever you think it should be, and that’s not something you should do.”

How does the Perspectives section come up with its ideas?

AM: “The perspectives come from my writers. Everyone else can plan everything out far ahead, but I don’t always have that option. I go to my writers and say, ‘Hey, guys — so, crazy week, right? How’s life been?

What’s going on? Did you see what’s

Perspectives Editor

A nitiz Muonagolu

Discusses the Role of Opinions at the Graphic happening in the news? What do you guys want to write about? What are you feeling and thinking?’ Magically, writers come to me. I have people from all over come to write: IP students and international students, people who are queer, people of color, women, men, people who are non-binary. They come and say, ‘Here’s what it’s like to be me in this circumstance,’ and then they write about it. There’s no big effort on my part, other than that I’m always searching for more people who have their own individual experiences — that can’t be replicated — to write for Perspectives.”

How do you choose which opinions to publish? Do you ever reject opinions?

AM: “I have never rejected an opinion. I never really pick, either, because I’ve never had an issue where I’ve had to tell someone no. There have been opinions where I don’t agree with everything they’ve said, but I know that’s not my job. When I’m editing, I have to check all my biases at the door. My job is to make sure that, one,

you haven’t said anything that’s false, and two, you’re not lying to people. If you write a perspective that’s about aliens shooting the advisers, I’m going to say, ‘No, let’s not do that. We’re not here to do make-believe things.’ I do want people to know that, yes, you can do any opinion, but that doesn’t mean you can say whatever you want, because that’s also not helping people. When I edit, if there is something that is objectively false or spreads something that was taken out of context, I’m quick to address that. Also, we do work to be collaborative and open here in Perspectives, so any language that promotes harm, discrimination or hate speech will never be published, especially since I’m the editor. But so far, I’ve never had to deny a piece.”

Have there ever been any repercussions with the opinions you’ve shared?

AM: “Some of my writers do get hate mail. I encourage them to see it as a chance to grow and be open and to, honestly, be excited about it. It shows

your opinion is making people think in a way they usually don’t like, and people need to be aware of that. It’s not like the reader is thinking in a way they don’t like because it’s wrong; it’s because it probably made sense and their preconceived bias doesn’t want them to accept it.”

How does the Perspectives section maintain transparency in its processes, and how does it help inform the Graphic’s audience, with respect to news literacy?

AM: “A lot of that has to do with how we structure Perspectives. Perspectives doesn’t use a lot of photos, because that’s what other sections use. We’re very solutions heavy, which means that you know it’s an opinion because we’re giving you something to plausibly do about it at the end of the article. We have the word ‘Opinion’ in the headlines on our online database, so people know this is not breaking news. We try to publish things openly, putting our contact information out there and publishing Letters to the Editor.”

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Chris Ganey’s Favorite Condiment Gives Him a Spiritual Experience

By Yamillah Hurtado | Photo by Ryan Brinkman | Art by Autumn Hardwick

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ating fast food is a sensational experience for some. It’s a break from routine meals and a chance to eat something greasy, fried and delicious. One way people enhance their fast food dining experience is by using condiments that add an extra oomph to their meal.

For sophomore Business Administration major Chris Ganey, Chick-fil-A’s self-titled signature sauce is the best condiment he said he’s ever tasted, and eating it is like a spiritual experience for him.

“Chick-fil-A sauce is really powerful,” Ganey said.

Chick-fil-A is one of Ganey’s favorite fast-food restaurants not only because of the sauce but also because it holds sentimental value to him. He said he led the Fellowship of Christian Athletes club at his high school in Virginia, and every Wednesday morning, Ganey would pick up Chickfil-A breakfast sandwiches and bring them to the FCA club meetings.

“I’d have a crowd of people following me to get sandwiches,” Ganey said. “That was a cool way to bring people in.”

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Ganey keeps a bottle of the sauce in his dorm refrigerator and uses it on more than just food from the chain, such as other meats, eggs and hash browns. He does admit, however, that Chick-fil-A sauce can’t work its magic on everything.

“I was munching on [carrots], and carrots are watery, and they kind of got old, so I was like, ‘Let’s try to spice it up,’” Ganey said. “Nope, definitely not good.”

Ganey said he can’t identify what makes Chick-fil-A sauce the best condiment, but that reason precisely explains why it’s so good to him.

“That’s the beautiful thing about Chick-fil-A sauce,” Ganey said. “You can’t pinpoint one thing on it because it’s a combination of so many different things. So the unique blend that they’ve created just creates so much goodness and holiness in this [sauce].”

The major ingredients that make up this sweet but tangy sauce are barbecue sauce, mustard, lemon juice concentrate, sugar, salt and garlic, according to Chickfil-A’s website. The famous sauce was invented accidentally when a Chick-fil-A employee mixed barbecue sauce with the company’s homemade honey mustard sauce, and ever since then, Chick-fil-A sauce has been a fan favorite for many customers.

“The sensation you get when you eat something with Chick-fil-A sauce — you hear that instrumental Hillsong piano music in your head, and it just really takes you to a special place of reflection and spirituality,” Ganey said.

Hikari Matsumoto Proposes a New Dining Facility at Seaside

By Sawa Yamakawa | Photo by Ryan Brinkman | Art by Leah Bae Transferring from Sophia University in Tokyo during COVID-19, junior Art major Hikari Matsumoto began her Pepperdine journey during the spring 2021 semester from her bedroom in Japan. Although she had planned to participate in an exchange program with her previous university, she decided to transfer to Pepperdine after COVID-19 altered her study abroad plans.

“I was looking for a small private school with a suburban setting and a limited number of Japanese students,” Matsumoto said. “Pepperdine was the best choice for me.”

After moving to Malibu for the first time, however, Matsumoto said she was surprised by Pepperdine’s location and some of the inconveniences of living on an isolated, hilly campus. More importantly, she was surprised by the lack of dining options.

“It would be helpful if we can get breakfast, snacks or drinks at Seaside instead of walking all the way down to the Caf or Starbucks,” Matsumoto said.

Matsumoto said she often finds herself grabbing food from the salad bar in Waves Cafe due to an extremely long wait during busy lunch and dinner hours.

Although she likes the salad bar, Matsumoto said she believes food should be more accessible for everyone.

“I rarely see people using the Seaside kitchen,” Matsumoto said. “If anything, there should be a store there to provide food for a lot of students [in Seaside].”

On the occasion when she goes to buy her groceries at Whole Foods in The Park at Cross Creek, she uses Pepperdine’s shopping shuttle. Matsumoto said it is difficult, however, to find her way around.

“The shopping shuttle is a little bit confusing too,” said Matsumoto, who does not own a car. “I cannot find any information about where the exact bus stop locations are.”

The shopping shuttle website lists points of interest but does not specify the exact location for pickup. Therefore, getting back on the shuttle may pose some challenges to some users, Matsumoto said.

Matsumoto said she once had to wait in front of Whole Foods, but the shuttle never showed up.

Luckily, her roommate was able to come pick her up. She said with there being no exact shuttle stops, it is hard for first-time users to familiarize themselves with the service.

Since she enrolled at Pepperdine in spring 2021, Matsumoto said Seaver did not consider her a new student, making her ineligible to participate in NSO. Matsumoto said she missed out on learning about various campus resources and meeting community members.

Matsumoto said she believes creating a store near Seaside will not only help her access food more easily but will also be an opportunity to meet new people.

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The Pssych ch Releva elevance ce

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hology ho ogy and oof Opinion

Pepp Community Speaks

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By Beth Gonzales | Photos by Ryan Brinkman

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amily. Christian university.

Social media. These are all elements that contribute to Pepperdine students’ ability to structure their opinions and stand up for them — questioning both good and bad.

The more confident and articulate people feel about their perspectives, the more they will continue to express themselves, said Kelly Haer, therapist and director of Pepperdine’s Boone Center of the Family.

In a recent Graphic survey of 146 Pepperdine students, 55.2% said they often feel compelled to share their opinion with others.

“It’s a part of being you, a part of owning oneself, and sometimes our opinions change over time,” Haer said.

“It’s important to bring oneself into a relationship with others; a sense of authenticity and transparency is really significant for community well-being.”

Senior Psychology major Sam Han said he views opinions as part of our social and cultural ties, which all revolve around individual experiences.

“When I think of opinions, I think of a nature-versus-nurture type of debate where our opinions can be formed in our household,” Han said. “But it can also be formed through interactions with other people, and I view my options as attitudes, and so a lot of the black-and-white areas start to turn gray.”

From the Start The brain receives stimuli from one’s surrounding atmosphere. Based on parental teachings, childhood is the earliest time someone forms an opin-

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ion. Then, friends, co-workers and even social media play a role in developing emotions — and the brain takes that information and forms opinions, said Chiconia Anderson, a therapist at Pepperdine’s Counseling Center.

“When we get that stimulus in, we form some type of emotion around it — whether it’s anger, happiness, sadness — and then all that information gets documented in our brain, and we respond to it,” Anderson said. “So every time something is like [a past experience] we are encountering, we have that same reaction to it, and that’s how we form an opinion around it.”

Opinions can stem from early on when someone’s initial reactions attach themselves to the part of the brain that rewards quick interactions and instant gratification, Anderson said.

“When children are younger, and they’re given vegetables, they form an opinion that they cannot eat a particular item based on what their friends have said — ‘Yeah, that’s gross,’” Anderson said. “Therefore, they are forming their opinion based on the social construct of the environment around them. That’s how the brain starts to attach, through the emotional response to the stimuli they’re getting.”

Students and faculty said the formation of opinions is different for everyone, but they agreed from experience that they stem from family, culture, faith and education.

Senior Psychology and Political Science double major Jerry Calderon said the formation of opinions starts at a young age from one’s household environment.

“Thankfully, I had the privilege of growing up in a Latinx and Indigenous household, and everyone’s opinion was always formed by familial matters and cultural matters,” Calderon said.

“That’s always been at the center of my purview.”

Haer and junior Psychology major Hee Joo Roh said opinions are often based on media and the information people are exposed to and consume. Even though family plays an important role in forming opinions, social media may help a person find their own voice — because it is an individualistic experience. For example, Roh remembers a conservative friend in high school who came from a strongly leftist household.

“Media around us, such as content we consume like TV shows, plays a heavy role,” Roh said. “That’s the realization I came up with because we’re so constantly surrounded by it, and it just works a way into our thoughts.

Even if we don’t realize.”

Roh also said media create algorithms, feeding someone more of what they are already searching for.

“It’s really easy to create echo chambers, like bubbles, and it can cause polarization,” Roh said.

Speaking Out Haer and others agreed that when they understand a topic more fully, they can effectively articulate their words and are more likely to speak their minds.

“If I know I believe X, Y or Z, but it’s harder for me to explain the background and I don’t feel equipped to explain, then yeah, I’m more hesitant to speak my mind,” Haer said.

Being an opinionated college student can be difficult to navigate within family matters, students said. In the same survey, 36.3% of students polled said family has the most influence on their personal opinions.

Roh said she feels comfortable speaking out on issues she is passion-

ate about, like LGBTQ+ rights and Asian American issues, with those she feels closest to — such as her siblings and friends — but it isn’t always easy.

“I’m not usually the person to speak out during family events, mostly because I think very differently from my immigrant parents and I’m the type of person who doesn’t want to rock the boat, who doesn’t want to cause a stir,” Roh said.

Due to someone’s internal conflict, Anderson said sometimes people feel it’s easier to share an opinion they don’t truly believe in order to blend in a social situation.

“But as with an opinion, how we view backlash or how we view our status within our social roots is how we will express our opinions,” Anderson said.

In terms of college culture, Han said Pepperdine does try to be a place where all voices are heard, but sometimes it is difficult to have an open classroom environment.

“We’re polarized, even the classroom — I thought about this because, in some of my classes, it feels very one-sided,” Han said. “I know for sure there are people who are against the side that we’re on, but I feel it’s uncomfortable because you don’t want to get singled out. Pepperdine tries, as every other school does, but to share your opinion, you really need to just have the confidence to do so.”

Even though Pepperdine is a Christian campus, the community should come without expectations, because even Christians can have different opinions — as well as different social and economic stances, Han said.

“Some come to this University expecting, ‘Oh, I’m going to be around like-minded people, we’re all going to worship God, go to convocation and have a great time,’ but I think college is a really good place to have conflict,” Han said.

Bouncing ideas off one another, Anderson said, as well as interacting with

course material, professors and students — helps influence how individuals see the world.

“Hopefully, we can continue to grow and change until the day that we pass away,” Anderson said.

“College is a great little bubble because you are able to throw hypotheses and ideas out there.”

Haer said her experience in seminary — learning about the Bible and God’s overarching creation themes — was one of the most influential factors in shaping her opinions.

She encourages all young adults to speak their minds and discover their own paths through their education.

“I think we need to learn to be OK when people are different than us and not feel like we have to change everybody to be like us,” Haer said.

Maturing in Opinion As college students are in some of the most formative years of their lives, Roh said, surrounding oneself with people from all walks of life can be rewarding.

“It’s beneficial for you to surround yourself with people with a variety of opinions, but it’s a balance you need to make,” Roh said. “On the one hand, it’s really important for you to surround yourself with people with different cultures, but at the same time, if the

person is, for example, homophobic, then that’s not something you should include in your friend group because that’s not a matter of difference of opinion.”

Within balancing these struggles, Calderon said as he explores post-graduate options, he foresees his opinions changing a lot. He hopes to bring his background values into new conversations and continue to manifest a new outlook on life.

“I’ve had opinions change, and that just comes with life and growth and getting new knowledge; that’s exciting,” Calderon said.

The core of one’s personality never really changes, and as students go through life and lose that title of “student,” Haer said it feels worse to suppress your voice than it ever will to free it.

“It can actually feel very empowering to speak your mind and do something different — and be OK with it to stick out,” Haer said.

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Sneaker Culture Shapes the Fashion and Life of Gibson Stump

By AJ Muonagolu | Photo by Ryan Brinkman | Art by Vivian Hsia

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enior Sport Administration major Gibson Stump may not dress in designer clothes, but he sure has opinions on what’s cool and stylish. For him, the epitome of style isn’t shirts or pants but the soles on the bottom of his feet.

Stump said he believes tennis shoes are not only the best thing to wear but also have a range of uses, whether it be fashion choices or lifetime family bonds.

“I’d say sneakers are the best shoes to wear,” Stump said. “You can’t play sports in dress shoes, but you can wear tennis shoes to a wedding.”

Essentially, Stump was born into sneaker culture. From Beaverton, Ore., Stump lived right near Nike’s headquarters, so he and his family are hardcore Nike fans and can’t even look at an Adidas shoe, he said.

“I don’t have any Adidas, and that’s definitely a Portland thing,” Stump said. “It’s huge in my family — we’re, like, anti-Adidas.”

While other kids were excited about a new toy, Stump and his family raved over sneakers. The Nike employee store was their holy grail for where to get the best sneakers for the cheapest cost.

While buying or receiving a new pair of shoes is fun for Stump, another layer of family bonding adds to his love of sneakers.

Stump said sneaker culture has allowed him to bond with his father and ranges from the duo talking about the

latest kicks to engaging in sneaker-related media like podcasts.

One should not confuse a sneaker fanatic, however, with those who just like designer shoes. Stump said people who buy $1,000 designer sneakers are

only paying for the brand and not the actual love of sneakers. A true fan of sneakers, aka a sneakerhead, appreciates the value of tennis shoes.

“You’re a sneakerhead if you are upto-date with the releases and what’s coming out and you care about what’s on your feet, and you can recognize, like, ‘Oh, he’s wearing those’ and ‘He’s wearing that colorway’ and ‘He’s wearing that model’ and that kind of thing,” Stump said. “So that’s what people would consider as a sneakerhead, and then sneaker culture is made up of sneakerheads.”

So follow Stump’s lead and slip into your favorite Nike sneakers and go to town, because even though sneakers may not always seem like they are the flashiest choice of shoes, they are the best shoe as you strut into life. “[Sneaker culture] becomes a part of your life and a part of who you are, and that’s what sneakers have been for me and for my family,” Stump said. “We talk about them all the time, we watch sneaker podcasts or we watch celebrities go sneaker shopping on Complex News, and it becomes a huge part of what you care about and what your life is — and then it just becomes a part of you.”

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President Jim Gash Emphasizes Growth in Community Life

By Rowan Toke | Photo courtesy of Jim Gash

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resident Jim Gash said he is passionate about cultivating student community life on campus.

Gash, who is from Santa Rosa, Calif., said the issue of community life and student involvement has been personal to him since before assuming the presidency in 2019. Gash graduated from Pepperdine’s law school in 1993, and he said it was his experience there as a student, professor and dean that has shaped his leadership.

“I remember what it was like to have professors who knew you and cared about you — not just your academic success but your spiritual success and your social connections,” Gash said.

Once the search for a new president began in 2018 after Andrew K. Benton announced that he would step down as president, Gash said he spent quite a bit of his interview talking about his desire to ensure that student community life, including mental health, was at the forefront of the next administration.

“I want to give them not only what I had, but I want to give them what they need,” Gash said.

Gash realized this desire shortly after the University named him the president-elect, when he met with Connie Horton, Pepperdine’s vice president of Student Affairs.

“We had this kind of dreaming session about resilience and about how we can try to partner to become a best-inclass institution that delivers a community life that helps students become more resilient and deal with the challenges they face,” Gash said.

Gash clarified that Pepperdine’s student community life has never been

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lacking under any president and instead said it was excellent but that every predecessor was encouraged to continue the improvement. One of the ways Gash does this, he said, is through relying on his cabinet, his group of colleagues and advisers, and encouraging them and acting as a resource.

“Some of the things that we’re doing differently in convocation, and in all of this, is as a result of people who are experts, who are trained, who are competent and intelligent coming to me and saying, ‘I’ve got an idea. Here’s what we could do, and this is what it would cost, and this is what the results would be,’” Gash said.

Gash said he frequently meets with administrators and students who keep him updated on the happenings on campus. Additionally, he participates in student community life by trying to attend every possible athletic event and artistic performance and walking around campus when he has a gap in his schedule, which he said students seem to appreciate.

“I​​just try to say hello to anybody and everybody, whether they’re looking at me or not, and every single person responds to the smile,” Gash said.

“Everybody’s just really, really friendly and thrilled to be back.”

Gash said the administration has “dozens” of projects relating to student community life that are in progress now, including the temporary fitness facility near Seaside, new scoreboards for the Women’s Soccer team and the Men’s Baseball team that will also function as movie screens, and The Mountain, a new student recreation and event center on top of the Malibu campus.

“The community life isn’t an ‘also ran,’” Gash said. “It’s not an adjunct to what we’re doing — it is a focal point of what we’re doing.”

In addition to Gash’s personal connection to student life at Pepperdine, he said he is so passionate about it because it is the University’s commitment to students.

“Our promise to them is, ‘Come to Pepperdine and you’re going to belong here,” Gash said. “You’re going to be inspired. You’re going to be challenged. You’re going to be equipped. You’re going to learn to lead. You’re going to learn to deal with hard things. You’re gonna learn to fail and bounce back because we’re all gonna fail.’ [Improving student community life is] essentially keeping a promise to our students that what we’re going to deliver to them is excellence in every respect.”

Kelli Brickner Wants a Restful Fall Break

By Addison Whiten | Photo by Ryan Brinkman

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tudents returned to in-person classes this fall after a year and a half of online instruction and adapting to an entirely new way of learning from home. While it’s exciting to have a campus filled with students again, this semester’s transition makes it especially taxing for many students.

For junior Biology major Kelli Brickner, this semester has been draining both physically and emotionally, and she said one way to alleviate the pressure brought on by this period of adjustment is to give students a better fall break. Brickner noticed she and many of her peers aren’t performing as well as they normally would this semester as they transition back to traditional learning.

“There’s this sort of unspoken feeling of, ‘Is everybody feeling what I’m feeling? Is everybody struggling with this as much as I am and nobody’s talking about it because nobody wants to admit that they’re figuring things out again?’” Brickner said.

Students had two non-consecutive days off from classes this semester to commemorate the Labor Day holiday and for a faculty conference Oct. 1, but Brickner said the latter wasn’t a restful break.

“I don’t think it was perceived as time to actually take a break,” Brickner said. “It was like, ‘Oh, here’s extra time to do your homework; you have exams coming up — study for them.’”

By the time Thanksgiving break rolls around, students are entering the final push of the semester. Brickner said these brief three days off are

not restful but rather a time to stress about grades and work on projects.

“That’s two weeks before finals, and I know on my syllabus I’ve got big assignments due around that time,” Brickner said.

In addition to making Thanksgiving break a full week, Brickner said a solution that could be beneficial for students is a week of online classes sometime in the fall.

“I wouldn’t be opposed to doing a week of online classes just to either go somewhere else, get a change of scenery or regroup,” Brickner said.

Brickner said she worries continuing Pepperdine’s traditional fall-semester schedule will affect academic performance and the overall well-being of students — and that caffeine just isn’t cutting it anymore.

“I don’t want to have to be doing homework so much that I’m only getting four hours of sleep a night, because that’s not sustainable, and not being able to fully pay attention in class is also not sustainable, so where do you expect us to cut corners?” Brickner said.

“If you don’t want us to have to cut corners, then something else needs to change there.”

27

Prof. Roshawnda Derrick Emphasizes Bilingualism

By Beth Gonzales | Photo by Ryan Brinkman

W

hen Professor Roshawnda Derrick’s undergraduate linguistics instructor rolled in a TV and began to play MTV Tres in 2011, Derrick said she became enamored with the language and cultures. Now, Derrick, from Detroit, is an associate professor of Hispanic Studies at Seaver College.

During her time in college, Derrick had the opportunity to live in Spain and the Dominican Republic, where she developed a fascination with bilingual communities. Her area of research includes code-switching, when a speaker alternates between two or more languages or a variety of languages in the context of a single conversation — for example, “Spanglish,” the mix of English and Spanish — she said. In a monolingual context, code-switching can include changing a speaker’s language based on the conversational setting.

“We [multilingual speakers] get some negative attitudes from monolingual speakers because they don’t get the cultural and identity parts of what it is to be someone who speaks two languages,” Derrick said.

Derrick said this situation occurs when people feel discomfort in social situations where they do not speak the language being spoken. Yet Derrick said she is proud to see the shift in U.S. media regarding the mixing of Spanish and English linguistics — a time when it is celebrated rather than looked down upon under the connotation of “not knowing your native language well enough,” in a bilingual context.

28

“Magazines, films, social media, there are so many ways where code-switching has been exploding in the U.S., and it has been really encouraging and exciting to see it take form in so many different ways,” Derrick said. “It has been so beautiful to watch it grow, right in front of my own eyes.”

When someone uses bilingual code-switching, Derrick said this does not mean they don’t have solid abilities in either one of their languages or that they are speaking poorly of people behind their back — it is their space where they feel most comfortable, and this should be treated with respect.

“Why would someone who has that talent only limit themselves to just speaking in one language or the other to express their thoughts and feelings?” Derrick said.

Having the most culturally dynamic education, Derrick said, is the best way for college students to prepare for jobs, relationships and more.

“It is so important for you guys to be exposed to things you have to wrestle with — because

then it will put you in a position in your vocation to be able to deal with the things that will pop up that you might not have even imagined,” Derrick said.

When deciding one’s identity and understanding the multitudes of ethnic backgrounds, Derrick said bilingualism is a direct decision to not choose one language over another — in all contexts.

“It is so much fun to be a part of a bilingual community and teach others about it and to see the diversity and inclusion that’s being shown in the American context,” Derrick said. “I hope this inspires more Pepperdine students.”

Alicia Oumsang Combats the Model Minority Myth

By Emily Shaw | Photo by Ryan Brinkman

R

aised in the predominantly white state of New Hampshire, senior Sports Medicine major Alicia Oumsang did not know the term “model minority” until summer 2020 when she read it in an infographic on Instagram. Since then, Oumsang said, she has learned more about the harmful effects of this myth and realized ways in which the concept has affected her life.

Also in summer 2020, Oumsang said she became empowered as a person of Asian descent to support the Black Lives Matter movement after she learned how the model minority myth — in addition to hurting Asian Americans — is used to pit racial groups against one another, particularly between Asian and Black Americans.

“Not only does this [the model minority myth] affect my entire race — so it affects me and family directly — but it’s also harming other oppressed people, so I think all of those things combined made a really powerful awakening for me,” Oumsang said.

Oumsang said she thinks the most harmful part of the model minority myth is how it is weaponized against other racial groups

in the United States — Black people in particular. As a result of this understanding, Oumsang said she felt it was important for her as an Asian American to stand up for her Black peers during the Black Lives Matter movement.

“I need to stand up for Black people because they’re actively being oppressed in America, but I also need to do this as an Asian because I know that in the past, people in power have tried really hard to turn us against each other,” Oumsang said.

The model minority myth doesn’t just drive a wedge between Asian and Black Americans, but the term also communicates a blanket description and stereotypical image of Asian Americans that isn’t true for all people of Asian descent in the United States, Oumsang said.

Oumsang herself is

Cambodian, and her parents came to the United States as refugees after the Cambodian genocide in the early 1980s.

“I really don’t think a lot of people in America have a good grasp on how big Asia is,” Oumsang said. “You really can’t just take a billion people in the continent of Asia, get them all in one category and then throw these values on them. I just think that’s so inaccurate.”

The model minority myth also falsely groups all Asian Americans as extremely successful and wealthy when many aren’t, Oumsang said. In fact, Asians have the largest income gap of any other racial and ethnic group in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center.

“They somehow had all of the successful Asians be the spokespeople for the entire race, and I just think that’s inherently flawed,” Oumsang said.

While the idea of belonging to a “model minority” can seem like it would have mostly a positive effect on Asian Americans, Oumsang said it is important that people do not group Asians under one umbrella term and instead learn its negative effects.

“I’d say at the very, very surface level, you could probably argue that it’s [the model minority myth] a good thing,” Oumsang said. “But if you tap into that surface, just a little bit, you’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is terrible.’”

29

Hope Lockwood Encourages Gender Identity Exploration

By Liza Esquibias | Photo by Ryan Brinkman Junior English and Philosophy double major and Graphic contributing writer Hope Lockwood said they do not believe gender and sex are the same, and the difference between the two is simple: Gender is an identity comparable to that of religion, whereas sex relates to body parts.

The power, Lockwood said, should be in a person’s hands to decide who they want to be and what life they lead — how they implement gender and sex into their life is a personal matter.

“Gender is such a personal thing that’s so shaped by the cultural experience that you grew up in — it seems so unfair to classify it to a set of chromosomes,” Lockwood said.

As someone who identifies as non-binary, Lockwood said their journey to finding their gender identity, along with experimenting with their gender presentation, was a long one.

They said they enjoy dressing in a more stereotypical feminine way now but in the past have had looks that would fit into every gender presentation.

“I always joke that I was raised female but no longer practice it,” Lockwood said.

Lockwood is president of Crossroads Gender and Sexuality Alliance, which supports and advocates for people in the LGBTQ+ community. Lockwood said they were raised to be true to themself but still felt unwarranted pressure to fit into the female gender role because of the social constructs they hope to break down.

“A nice step is raising kids in a way where they don’t feel ashamed for playing with certain toys and don’t feel 30

like they have to be confined by other people’s expectations of what they should be when they grow up,” Lockwood said.

Based on their own experiences, Lockwood said they hope the new generation — and future generations — can more freely explore their gender identities. They suggested people of all ages consider the roles that society and stereotypes play into their choices without blindly accepting who they are taught to be.

“I started experimenting and asking questions a little bit more on how much of this persona that I put forward into the world is one that I’m comfortable with,” Lockwood said. “And how much of this has been shaped by other people’s perceptions of me, and am I OK with people’s perceptions of me. So around 14 and then around 16, I started getting a lot of rapid onset gender dysphoria.”

Amid their feelings about the limits of gender identity freedom

in certain areas of life, Lockwood said they are optimistic about the big-picture changes taking place right now.

“The direction we as a society are moving toward is that gender has become somewhat irrelevant in a sense, where people are no longer bound by their gender,” Lockwood said.

“Overall, we’re moving toward a society in which anybody can be anything they want to be.”

Sammie Wuensche Uses Her Family Heritage for Good

By Abby Wilt | Photo by Ryan Brinkman

F

or junior English and Hispanic Studies double major Sammie Wuensche, her biggest passion was not learned by experience; it was and is part of her family heritage.

Wuensche is Indigenous on her mother’s side and said she has spent the majority of her life inspired by her ancestry with the desire to make Indigenous voices heard. Her Indigenous lineage is Cherokee and Choctaw.

“Now more than ever, it is so vital that we amplify voices that have been systematically oppressed for the entirety of our country’s history,” Wuensche said. “And that’s what I have the ability to do as a white and Indigenous woman.”

Wuensche said one of her main missions in life is to teach people about Indigenous peoples, and she tries to do her part through educating her peers every day. This passion for education has taken a bigger role in her life this year through her History of American Peoples course, and she said she has begun to recognize the need for Indigenous education even more.

Professor of History Nicole Gilhuis started Wuensche’s class with acknowledging the land that Gilhuis was teaching on wasn’t Pepperdine’s but instead belonged to Indigenous people.

“That was very powerful,” Wuensche said.

Before this class, Wuensche said she didn’t feel comfortable sharing her beliefs because she didn’t feel safe doing so, but her professor opened the door for her to feel inspired to share her opinions.

“I’ve gotten to speak in the class about my family and our perspectives on colonization,” Wuensche said. “I’ve gotten to, on multiple occasions, talk about my family’s history as well.”

Outside of the classroom, Wuensche said she likes to bring awareness to Indigenous people by telling others about her family traditions and keepsakes — such as a gourd, as seen in the photo, and a dream catcher that her grandmother made her.

“I like to do a lot of education just through inviting people to learn about why I love being Indigenous,” Wuensche said.

At Pepperdine, Wuensche said she would like the University to be more intentional about a ck n ow l edging what land it is on, celebrating Indigenous People’s Month in November more and making Indigenous students feel more included.

Pepperdine’s campus is on Chumash, Tongva and Kizh land, alongside the rest of LA County, according

to Native Land’s Territory Acknowledgment tool.

“Pepperdine talks about how we don’t have a bunch of Native American students on campus,” Wuensche said.

“Well, there’s a reason, and it’s because they don’t feel welcomed here.”

Wuensche said she does see hope at the University, however, with the new diversity, equity and inclusion sector of administration, consisting of Chief Diversity Officer and Vice President for Community Belonging J. Goosby Smith as well as April Harris Akinloye, assistant vice president for Community Belonging.

“I got to meet with them, and they’re wonderful women,” Wuensche said. “I think the University is hopefully going in the right direction.”

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“

History of th

Speech and expression can be messy and difficult, but they cannot be impugned on a campus devoted to discerning truth, especially God’s truth. By providing a location for free expression and critical reflection on ideas from the student community, the Freedom Wall is an integral component of our educational mission.

— Dean Michael Feltner

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SGA establishes the Freedom Wall

Students clash over proposed immigration policy

Installation of 90 anonymous statements about the Good Samaritan Policy

Display calls lack of divers among finali for university President

January 2003

April 2006

May 2018

Januar 2019

February 2004

January 2017

October 2018

The Rock controversy follows a debate on hypothetical White Student Union

Turning Point USA posters are removed from the Freedom Wall

Unite Pepp movement continues conversation on Good Samaritan Policy

he Freedom Wall

s out sity ists y

ry

Research by AJ Muonagolu and Rowan Toke | File photos

HRL and allegations of ethical misconduct

Students with disabilities continue to petition for change on campus

Pepperdine Justice Coalition protests for administrative action about racial inequalities

March 2019

January 2020

November 2020

February 2019

November 2019

March 2020

October 2021

Pepperdine responds to Westboro Baptist protesters through solidarity and peace

Argument over LGBTQ+ inclusion when Chick-fil-A was proposed on campus

Social media fuels posts in support of Prof.

Jeff Schultz

Anti-abortion display sparks discourse

33

Hope Dease Finds Hope in Her Faith

By Abby Wilt | Photo by Ryan Brinkman

W

hether it’s sports, music, academics or politics, most people say they have something they are passionate about and stand firm on, even when their peers disagree. For senior International Studies major Hope Dease, that something is her faith.

Dease grew up in Edwards, Colo., and went to a Southern Baptist Church, but it wasn’t until she moved to Pepperdine that she started prioritizing her relationship with Jesus. She said as she became more independent in her faith, she started to prioritize her spiritual disciplines more and truly give her life to God. “My faith motivates almost everything I do in my life,” Dease said. “[It] motivates the reason I’m studying International Studies, motivates my relationships, motivates why I get up in the morning.”

Dease said when she wakes up, she strives to surrender her whole day and life to God, as well as prioritize spiritual disciplines like prayer and reading the Bible.

“When I surrender to God, I release a lot of stress that I would have had,” Dease said. “The rest of the day — it’s no longer in my hands. It’s not in my control.”

When Dease started her first year at Pepperdine, she studied Computer Science and Math. Then she had the opportunity to study abroad in Jordan with Pepperdine and help Syrian refugees, which she said completely shifted her priorities. Now she said she believes it is her calling to love God and love others well, as well as to 34

spread God’s love — even to people who don’t want to accept it.

“As Christians, as children of God, we’re called to literally include everyone,” Dease said. “The table of Christ is able to feast everyone — that includes people who don’t even want everyone at the table.”

As a follower of Christ, Dease said she encourages new believers to get into community with one another and start a habit of reading the Bible and praying, even if they are just dipping their toes in the water. She also said she believes it is important to be outward in her faith and share it with others.

“We’re created for community — that’s not really argued by anyone,” Dease said.

“Even atheists will say, ‘OK, we need people.’”

Dease said she hopes by being open in her faith, people will recognize there is something different about her and that will be an opportunity for her to tell them about God.

Raymond Rider Wants People to Learn Philosophy

By Stella Zhang | Photo by Ryan Brinkman

R

aymond Rider, a TEDxPepperdine University student speaker in 2019, is a senior Philosophy and Psychology double major. Rider said he believes philosophy extends to every part of his life — from reading and exercising to watching movies with friends.

“Every field, including psychology, needs philosophy,” Rider said. “Every field needs us to reflect on why we hold these beliefs, why we conduct ourselves in the methods — and why we use the methodology — that we use.”

Rider said he believes every student at Seaver College should be required to take PHIL 200, or “Introduction to Philosophy.” The class is accessible to everyone, he said, because of its use of Socratic dialogue. In the Socratic style, students ask and answer questions together, examining topics freely and learning a new philosophical language to discuss certain subjects, like ethics or metaphysics.

Reflecting on the experience of taking PHIL 200, Rider said there was a topic for each day and two readings to read before class — from Plato’s “Euthyphro” to Judith Jarvis Thompson’s paper “A Defense of Abortion” — and then students discuss these readings together.

“This class gives you the knowledge about the arguments that people use, what’s the important literature, what important papers have been written,” Rider said. “But the one thing the class really gives you is just how to think, prioritize what to think about and how to have a meaningful

conversation with people whom you might disagree with.”

Looking back, Rider said he has always been interested in philosophy and asking questions, and if he didn’t like the answers to those questions, he told people. He didn’t know a name for this until his sophomore year when he took PHIL 200.

“This class really helped me sharpen this thing that I really love to do, and I love to have great conversations and talk about these important issues,” Rider said. “I also love to reflect on my own life and how I can improve myself.”

Rider said he thinks philosophy makes life so much better because people learn to reflect and abandon notions that are nonsensical.

“A lot of political discourse right now is based on emotive reasoning, which is reasoning purely based on emotions or what your family believes or whatever is popular in society — whatever the media, movies or art pushes,” Rider said. “Most people are pretty unreflective about it.”

Rider said it’s not students’ fault that they don’t know how to reason well because they haven’t been taught proper methods. For example, when it comes to insulting somebody, it’s not a good argument, because nobody wins an argument by merely insulting others.

“Just look at Twitter,” Rider said. “I mean, if everybody on Twitter took a PHIL 200 class, the world generally would be a lot better.”

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D

Q&A

By Samantha Torre | Photo by Ryan Brinkman

ebates are par for the course for the members of Pepperdine’s Debate Team — it’s in the name. As such, members are taught to check their biases at the door and to form arguments based on facts rather than their personal preferences and opinions. Morals are relative, so arguments are usually based on logistics such as efficiency, said Hannah Kate Albach, a senior International Studies and Hispanic Studies double major and vice president of finance for the debate team.

Explaining the Word “Opinion” When she debates, Albach said she puts herself in the shoes of someone who holds the opinion she is arguing.

Q: What do opinions, or what does the word “opinion,” mean to you?

HKA: “When you join a debate team, you’re taught how to lose strong opinions, because you are able to recognize all sides of an issue. And it forces you to be able to argue from a perspective that you may not have or from a side that you may not agree with. So if I had to define ‘opinion,’ I would say that in my life, there are facts, there are things that are definite and to be true based on evidence. And then there are opinions, which are things that we agree 36

with or believe based off of our own experiences, our values and our culture.

So debate allows you to expand your experience to develop more articulate opinions and ones that are more based in reality and on a variety of different experiences. And ones that are not as set in stone.”

Defending Contrary Opinions Junior Teddy Flunker, Political Science major and British Parliamentary debate chair, said when building an argument, he finds a way to boil the argument down to one sentence and then fleshes out his ideas from there.

In British Parliamentary debate, participants receive their topic at the competition and are given 15 minutes to prepare an argument with no outside sources.

Q: How do you approach debating an opinion you don’t agree with?

TF: “It’s a really good exercise.

When I got involved in debate, most forms of debate are dichotomous and with two sides that were assigned, or that could be assigned. One of which may be more aligned to what you believe in, and the other that doesn’t, but you can be prepared to speak as if you believe that opinion. So the skill is essentially being as effective or advocat-

ing for another opinion as your own.

And by doing that, again, you’ll also get familiarized with that opinion, and that helps you improve your own discourse as well if you have an opinion on that issue.”

Applying Lessons Debate to Daily Life

Learned

in

Third-year senior Coco Zhao is a Liberal Arts for Education major, Hispanic Studies minor and vice president for the Let’s Argue elementary school program. She said her time in

Members of Pepperdine’s

Debate Team

Explain the Process of Setting Aside Bias debate has challenged her opinions because of the variety of people she had met through the organization.

As vice president, Zhao coordinates and finalizes curriculum with partner elementary schools.

Q: Do you take your experience in teaching kids how to argue — and your experience participating in the debate team — and utilize this in your day-to-day life at Pepperdine?

CZ: “It helps me be not so close-minded. It helps me be more open because, even on the debate team, there’s a differing of opinions, and through debate, you listen to other people’s reasoning, other people’s stances, their perspectives — and oftentimes behind each perspective and each opinion, there’s a personal reason why they believe these things. So on the day-to-day basis, that lets me be more aware that people deal with different things, and that might be the reason why they have different opinions — not just because they’re, like, a horrible person, but they’ve gone through stuff that makes them who they are in that way.”

How Debate Alters Opinions Sophomore Advertising major and Multimedia Design minor Courtney Wisniewski serves as publicity chair of the debate team. Wisniewski said participation within the team helps her make informed decisions about her opinions.

(Left to right) Hannah Kate Albach, Courtney Wisniewski, Coco Zhao, Teddy Flunker.

Q: Have any of your opinions changed as a member of the debate team, and has anything made you reevaluate why you’ve formed an opinion or what the opinion is?

CW: “A lot of us make unwise opinions and decisions. And so in listening to other people agree and disagree on the facts of certain topics, you realize, ‘Oh, I made that opinion from information that I heard from a biased website, or that I heard from a friend.’

And so with the debate, you have the opportunity to know the actual facts, the non-bias, so that you can look at all this information that you’re receiving and be like, ‘Oh, I made an uninformed decision, which is OK, but this is how I’m gonna go about it now.’ So that’s great that we have that opportunity. And it’s not always so serious; we did a pop-culture debate over, like, which Taylor Swift song was the best.

So something really silly like that — but you’re listening to people be like, ‘Oh, this album is good because this shows this in her emotions.’ You’re like, ‘Oh, you know what, I never listened to that album, but now I might.’

Same way if it was an important topic and you know nothing about it; after listening to them talk about it, you might be like, ‘Wait, I’m really passionate about learning more about that; maybe I should go do my research.’”

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COVID-19 Plethora 38

Breeds a of Opinions 39

By Abby Wilt | Photos by Ryan Brinkman

A

year and a half of COVID-19 talk, COVID-19 arguments and COVID-19 opinions — and the debates are ongoing. People question everything from whether the virus is fake to whether the pandemic will ever end. While there might be relief in sight for the pandemic, there isn’t any in sight for the ongoing divide over its effects.

Whether someone is extra careful about masks and fully supportive of vaccine mandates, or they are opposed to masks and refuse to get vaccinated — everyone has an opinion about the pandemic. In addition, 48.6% of Pepperdine students polled say their relationships have been negatively affected by people’s opinions over COVID-19, according to a recent Graphic survey of 146 Pepperdine students.

“It seems that we can all agree on facts surrounding COVID,” senior Psychology and Philosophy double major Raymond Rider said. “What everybody seems to be so heated about is what we ought to do with that data.”

How Opinions COVID-19

Form

About

Opinions can change throughout the course of the pandemic, as 61.6% of students polled said their opinions changed, and 42.4% said their opinions about masks changed since spring 2020.

“When this first started, every day, I was looking at the statistics, the numbers, hospitalization rates, infection rates, death rates,” Rider said. “It was just making me crazy.”

But as the pandemic went on, Rider said people started to hear about other’s opinions instead of just the facts.

“I have crazy family members on Facebook; I know how it goes,” Rider said. “There’s that one person in 40

the family who goes a little crazy on COVID stuff. I don’t think that’s helpful.”

Not only are people opinionated about COVID-19 for their own health and safety but also because the pandemic has affected lives across the country and the world for over 18 months — whether through quarantine, unemployment, a loss of a family member or friend or a financial hardship.

“It’s like an issue of life and death in a lot of cases,” sophomore Art History and Italian double major Mirielle Cox said. “That’s obviously a pretty big reason why people would have an opinion.”

Senior English major and History minor Kennedy Royster agreed and said people are opinionated because it has been a major part of people’s lives for the past two years.

“It’s an invisible killer,” Royster said.

In addition, people’s personal experiences with the pandemic shape the way they feel about it, Royster said.

“If you have grandparents who are old and sick, then you don’t want to be around them,” Royster said. “But of course, if your family — like the majority of families — are healthy, then it’s not as

affective to you.”

Assistant Professor of Communication Daniel Overton said opinions formed about COVID-19 when it became less about guidance from the CDC and more about guidance from political leaders.

“People felt like it was the kind of issue you had to take a political stance on,” Overton said. “If you’re on one side, you’re all about what he [former President Donald Trump] is saying. And if you’re on the other, then you’re very much against it.”

In addition, Overton said people’s opinions form based on where they are from and based on what the proto-

Raymond Rider

cols they are required to follow.

“People in different places have very different levels of respect or protocol for the virus,” Overton said. “I certainly see a wide variety from especially my California friends that I have here, versus a lot of my family and friends back from Tennessee in my home state.”

Speaking Up About the Pandemic While some students are extra vocal about their opinions on the pandemic, others don’t want to say a word in fear of offending someone around them.

“People touch on the subject but then instantly step back,” Rider said.

“We don’t want to possibly alienate somebody who feels a different way.”

Rider said the unspoken protocol is not to ask others about their vaccination status or their opinions on COVID-19.

“The general etiquette that people have picked up is like, ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’” Rider said. “I’m not gonna ask if you’re vaccinated, so I think there’s a lot of self-censorship going on.”

Even if people do have strong opinions, Rider said it’s hard to know when to bring them up — and when to share them.

“I don’t know what I don’t know when it comes to what the correct etiquette is,” Rider said. “It can be really personal.”

While some students don’t share their opinions, others are more vocal, with the hopes of influencing others around them. And it may be working, considering 52.7% of surveyed students said their family and friends influenced their opinions about the pandemic, and 54.1% said family and friends influenced their opinions about vaccines.

No matter students’ opinions, Rider said it’s important to discuss topics like COVID-19 so people can converse and learn from each other — but with this subject, he sees people stray away from the issues at hand.

“It’s definitely good to be considerate about what other people think about topics,” Rider said. “But when that’s at the expense of discussing important topics that might be uncomfortable for people, I don’t think that’s good for any society.”

Social Media Spreading People’s Opinions With social media having a big role in society today and everyone having access to information with the click of a button, social media could also be playing a part in how people form

Mirielle Cox

their opinions about the pandemic.

The survey reveals 58.2% of students polled have shared their opinions about the pandemic on social media, and 62.3% see more political posts regarding COVID-19 now than at the start of the pandemic.

“You have crazy people on both sides who are being influenced,” Rider said. “It depends on who you follow on social media and what you’re seeing.”

In addition, Cox said people seem to like the hype of an opinion instead of just clicking on happy, uplifting stories from their news feed.

“People get fired up and angry and read more and more,” Cox said.

“There’s this algorithm, I think, where social media wants you to stay on their site and keep looking so, they want things that will keep you there, which are generally things that make you scared, afraid, angry and divided.”

Rider also said anyone can post their opinions on social media without any type of fact-checking to make sure it is true. Viewers can read the headline and not take the time to distinguish whether the post is fact or opinion.

“There has been genuine stuff that’s just blatantly not true,” Rider said. “Stuff that’s just for fearmongering.”

Royster agreed with Rider in that people’s opinions depend on what type of social media they are on and who they follow, saying people follow particular news sources based on their political alignment.

41

“I do have a few friends who are leaning toward the right,” Royster said. “And they have a lot of sources that say, like, ‘Oh, COVID is a sham,’ or ‘it’s just the flu’ or ‘just a little cough.’”

Moving Forward and Keeping Relationships Over Opinions As society continues with COVID-19, Rider said people should learn that everyone has the right to their own perspective, and even if two people disagree over an opinion about the pandemic, it doesn’t mean they need to fight about it.

“People will post inflammatory things on either side,” Rider said.

“Because it’s based on their core beliefs, when someone disagrees, they’ll feel like they’re being attacked or like their life is being attacked.”

In addition, Cox said when people prioritize their own opinions over relationships, they aren’t being helpful in bridging the current divide.

“It is high stakes, obviously — decisions about COVID — but realizing that not everyone’s opinion means someone

is going to die,” Cox said.

Cox added it isn’t helpful to demonize others about the topic even if they have completely contrasting opinions.

“When someone has a different opinion, whichever [side of the political spectrum] they’re on, consider why they hold that belief and don’t just be like, ‘You’re evil; you’re ign o ra n t , ’ ” Cox said.

“Maybe

Kennedy Royster 42

this person has been exposed to information and has a reason for their their opinion from their background.”

Nicolas Armenta Campaigns for Universal Health Care

By Sarah Best | Photo courtesy of Nicolas Armenta

A

fter years of seeing his family struggle to obtain proper medical coverage, senior Public Relations major Nicolas Armenta’s passion for free, universal health care amplified as the government continued interfering with the benefits they’d receive.

While studying abroad in London his sophomore year, Armenta — who is the president of the Pepperdine College Democrats — and his fellow classmates gained access to the National Health System, the United Kingdom’s free health insurance.

Armenta ultimately paid the same amount he was paying each month for his health insurance in the United States for an entire year’s worth of coverage in the U.K. “I have never experienced anything like that, and the level of care was on par if not even a little better than here [in the United States],” Armenta said. “It really made me an advocate for universal health care, having experienced the majority of my life in private health care — and the one year I spent in the U.K., is obviously not indicative of how the system is as a whole — but that system was leaps and bounds better than it is here.”

His general visits, prescriptions (both emergency and non-emergency), delivery of the medication to his home, blood work and the offering of free physical therapy, cost him nothing.

“The U.S. is number one in health care, but not for the reasons people think,” Armenta said. “We’re number one for spending over $10,000 per

capita, which is double the amount of countries with universal health care, and we don’t even guarantee our citizens health care.”

Regarding the Affordable Care Act, Armenta said he suggests the “repeal and replace” notion for Republicans who are actively trying to revoke the health care that the legislation provides. Rather than revoking the legislation altogether, Republicans should propose an alternative that provides Americans with other forms of health care in return, Armenta said.

In Ronald Reagan’s 1986 Inaugural Speech, which Armenta quoted, Reagan stated, “The nine most terrifying words in the English are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Armenta argues that one should not fear the government, considering it is an institution intended to help.

Armenta, who has a Certificate in Conflict management, said he advocates for a social change in our country in which this sentiment from Reagan

is abandoned entirely. He argues for a system where U.S. tax dollars can be tangibly seen in the overall improvements to their health care.

“To have something that you’re paying for and actively seeing it work every day — every time you go to the doctor and having that real-life impact because of your tax money going to it — that will change people’s narrative,” Armenta said.

“Nothing is too ambitious in the wealthiest country in the world.”

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Prof. Sarah Fischbach Argues Against Single-Use Plastic

By Sofia Longo | Photo by Ryan Brinkman

G

rowing up on a farm in Alpha, Ill., Integrated Marketing Communication Professor Sarah Fischbach said she and her family didn’t really think about the concerns of the environment. It wasn’t until Fischbach moved to Malibu to teach at Pepperdine and listened to a podcast called “Green Dreamer” when she became passionate about sustainability, specifically in fighting against single-use plastic waste.

Fischbach said after meeting with Diana Cohen, the co-founder and CEO of Plastic Pollution Coalition, she immediately stopped using plastic — even going so far as using shampoo bars and bar deodorants. This difficult lifestyle caused Fischbach to rethink plastic, and she said she changed her mind and determined she would not be completely anti-plastic but rather wanted to stop single-use plastic waste.

“I don’t think plastic is bad,” Fischbach said. “I just think having a Starbucks cup every day really stacks up the amount of trash you’re creating, and it’s a problem.”

During quarantine, Fischbach said she participated in the Scripps-Rady Ocean Plastic Pollution Challenge, which ran from January through June and ended in a final challenge to pitch solutions to an expert panel, according to the website. She and her team determined that creating policy is the best solution to combating plastic waste.

“It’s got to be pushed down to force people into it; otherwise, we’re just humans, and we go with whatever is the easiest path until we have some

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monumental shift — maybe it’s climate change or maybe you made more money — and all of a sudden, you can think about things that are more sustainable,” Fischbach said.

Changing one’s lifestyle from using single-use plastic doesn’t have to be a big change. Fischbach said it can be asking for a hot cup instead of a cold cup at Starbucks, using reusable water bottles and grocery bags and keeping each other accountable.

“Plastics isn’t bad; it’s just accumulation over time, [and] I feel like people should have to be accountable for their trash,” Fischbach said.

Fischbach’s fight against single-use plastic waste inspired her to apply for a grant with the idea of implementing a badged plastic patrol program in elementary schools. Fischbach said students would get points while participating in “Plastic Patrol” and win a competition, so they come out of the program being educated about the world and believing they can impact it.

“I don’t need everybody in the world to be single-use plastic waste enthusiasts,” Fischbach said. “We should all just find some passion and go in headfirst.”

Stephen Weinstock Spreads the ‘Gospel of Wealth’

By Emily Chase | Photo by Ryan Brinkman

D

eeply moved by influencing the outcomes of people’s lives, first-year Business major Stephen Weinstock said he wants to enrich the lives of others and — through the avenue of business — use philanthropic efforts to do so.

Weinstock said he wants a career in which he can enrich people’s lives, noting he puts a heavy value on the act of giving back. He said he believes other people should share this sentiment.

“People shouldn’t hoard money or just sit on it — we should give it away to those who need it,” Weinstock said.

Weinstock referenced Andrew Carnegie in the way the 19th-century entrepreneur made his money at an early age and then was able to turn into a philanthropist, not just a powerful, rich businessman. Like Carnegie, Weinstock said he wants to simply “make money to give it away.”

With this in mind, Weinstock said he believes there is no reason others shouldn’t want to do the same if they are in a financially stable position. On the other hand, he knows every person is different and there shouldn’t be an expectation to give back if somebody has no financial means to do so.

“Philanthropy and being a blessing because you have been blessed is really what I am focused on,” Weinstock wrote in an email to the Graphic.

“Whatever that means for you, that is good, but we cannot expect everyone to be held to the same standard because everyone is so different and in different situations in life.”

Weinstock said he trusts in God to

guide him in a direction to practice what he preaches.

“I know that God is going to do wonderful things with my life,” Weinstock said. “In whatever way he chooses to use me, I am satisfied.”

Not everyone in the world gets the same starting point in life, Weinstock said, and not everyone can be blessed with a world filled with love, stability and security.

He said there are ways, however, to aid others in their search for a better life.

“Whether that is through financial means, the use of their time or anything else, it is really about utilizing the gifts God has given you to best serve those around you,” Weinstock wrote.

Weinstock said it is necessary people understand that there is a world beyond the bubble they are living in and issues far greater than their own they can help relieve.

He said he believes

in Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” — that those who are blessed financially should be charitable in their distribution.

“It is rather the responsibility of those who are financially blessed to do something worthwhile with their money,” Weinstock said.

Through Weinstock’s efforts and those he persuades along the way, he said he hopes the world may become “a little better, a little brighter” — and just a little bit more giving.

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p d n ris ver cies one eryo woul

By Addison Whiten | Photo by Ryan Brinkman a relig truth hen controversy erupted at engaging with each other on issues. In People easily assume and share opinthe Freedom Wall concernthe days of philosophers like Aristotle, ions using anonymous identities lowed ing abortion rights Sept. 29, he said, it was possible to have open online. Virtual anonymity protects have m discourse quickly became tense, and conversations without fearing hostilipeople from having to reap the conseemotions ran high on both sides of the ty. quences of anything they say because food. Y discussion.

“They were much more willing to they’re not attaching their identity to The vac Senior Political Science major Chase disagree with one another, much more their words, thus creating a toxic envi- d oughnu Johnson, Student Government Asso- willing to express how they thought ronment for discussions, he said. ciation president, said the events sur- the other’s logic was flawed, and that’s “In that you become less respect- is worthy rounding the Freedom Wall highlight- how everyone learns,” Johnson said. ful, you become less willing side, a nd ed an issue that’s recently been present As a more recent example, Johnto listen to the other side,”b elieve th in discourse in the United States. He son said comparing the 2008 presJohnson said. “It’s just fosa said people have forgotten how to disidential debates to those from tering this cycle of extrem-on a hill. W Taylor s agree with each other and productively 2020 makes it easy to see just how ism, disrespect, aggression w discuss issues. much our ability to discourse has and hatefulness on both on cam ift pus.

“People just immediately get hostile, devolved. In the 2008 debates, sides.” z a they get emotional, they get volatile,” both candidates were respectJohnson’s belief is a pers han cat o Johnson said. “They’re not willing to ful of each other and the that we should tres. Ge listen, and they’re not willing to pres- stage they took as Presilearn how to odispinions that ent their views in a factual, careful, indential candidates, while agree with each g o o d . tentional way. the same can’t be said other in a respectI lik isn’t rea e ch Johnson said after the events at the for the 2020 debates, he ful and productive l. Bla Freedom Wall, SGA considered the pos- said. way is rootedsin octhe ial justi c ce. sibility of holding an event for students “Now, we’re just dofreedom of speech. w i l l h to continue the conversation and dising anything to get He said while shar- ave last i of tcan cuss their beliefs. Some SGA members that five-second reel ing one’s beliefs he matt n er. Y believed an open forum could quickly or that five-second sometimes be is ghard, ood, bu devolve into an aggressive conversavideo where we can it’s important roadbtolo t I als tion instead of a productive one. He bepoint out how speak up when an is- ck on our P o lieves the assumption an open forum extreme the sue matters. lynesia n sauce would do more harm than good is in- other side is “Lean into panandeimm dicative of where we are as a nation in to further portant conflict re- ic by wear thewith i r profefer terms of discourse. our side,” spect and the objective ence t h e vasaid.

“Few people are willing to take a po- J o h n s o n education,” Johnson ccine is s a n’t ca tioquestions. sition unless they’re on one end or the said.

“Disagree. Ask ns and opinion other, and it seems like no one’s willing Being in Listen. Think. in. Respond. s I t ’s either y to have the conversation about why the digital Try to find common ou Wouthe ld conthey’re taking the position they are,” age is a big ground. End Jesus w ob ear a m Johnson said. part of the versationwh onenay neuo u r p Reflecting on the origins of dis- p ro b l e m , tral topic and express rofesso did r n’ ill h course, Johnson said, can give us an Johnson gratitude for thet kother i m s e l parte. M f. idea of how we should be productively said. party’s openness.” andatin Pe election g was rigg a va ed guide th e tide of . B history

Chase Johnson Champions Productive Disagreement

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Let’s Start a

Conversation

“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton