9-12-18

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The

Davidsonian

Independent Student Journalism Since 1914

inside

davidsonian.com Davidson welcomes Lisa Forrest as the E.H. Little Library Director

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Volume 114, Issue 2

September 12, 2018 Carl Sukow ‘21 reflects on the importance of registering to vote before the midterms

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Personal Essay feature: the reality of reproductive rights in North Carolina

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President Quillen Issues Advisory Students Regarding Freshman Plague

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Men’s Basketball Team Visits Auschwitz EMMA BRENTJENS ‘21 STAFF WRITER

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Students participate in the annual Hackathon, located this year at the Hub. Photo by Emma Brentjens ‘21

Hurt Hub Hackathon Promotes Communication, Innovation JACK DOWELL ‘21 STAFF WRITER

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ast Saturday, the Jay Hurt Hub for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Davidson College hosted the annual Hackathon, during which teams of students used coding and communications to create applied solutions to a given challenge. This year’s event followed an inaugural on-campus Hackathon in the spring of 2017. The competition was relocated to the Hub as construction is complete and the space is newly opened to the student body this semester. According to Dr. Michelle Kuchera, one of the event’s organizers and a member of the Physics Department, the competition was held at the Hurt Hub

because the Hub is “a great co-working space ... and [the Hackathon] is also in the spirit of the Hub in that we’re bringing a lot of people of different backgrounds together to achieve a goal.” The prompt challenged participants to “create a digital submission that allows some targeted group of people to experience Davidson in a new way.” While the term “hackathon” suggests coding, students were allowed to tackle the given problem in any way they desired. According to Kuchera, one of the most targeted skills at the Hackathon is communication; “if you can’t communicate [your idea] well, people won’t know you’ve done something great.” The competition was structured to promote innovation; the prompt was released

at 8:30am, and students had until 5pm to complete their entry. They were also tasked with preparing a presentation to be shown to a panel of judges, who would evaluate it for a trio of awards categories: an overall award winner, a coding award, and a communication award. Kuchera pointed out that “for the communication award, the students didn’t have to do any coding at all.” Unlike some other Hackathons that require certain skills or coding languages, Davidson’s event made a point of being accessible to participants of all levels. According to Kuchera, “We wanted to create a challenge that was open-ended

mid the flurry of the March Madness tournament, Davidson men’s basketball coach Bob McKillop received an unexpected email from Amanda Caleb ‘02, a former member of Davidson’s field hockey team. Caleb, an advisory board member of the Maimonides Institute for Medicine, Ethics, and the Holocaust, invited the Davidson basketball team to a summer trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau, known as one of the most savage Holocaust concentration camps located in Poland. “I’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching Davidson basketball over the years and have been repeatedly impressed with the ethos of the program, which is about more than winning games: it’s about character,” Caleb wrote. Caleb considered the basketball team as a candidate for the trip so that they could “bear witness to the atrocities of the past, and ... support human dignity and justice for all peoples.” The team was accompanied by Eva Mozes Kor and her nonprofit organization, CANDLES (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors [2]). As a Holocaust survivor and victim of Josef Mengele’s experiments on twins, a notoriously inhumane study conducted by Nazis to reinforce hereditary hierarchy over environment, Kor has turned her personal experience into advocacy and forgiveness. McKillop explained that Mozes Kor played a prominent role in the team’s experience. “I think the most poignant aspect of the experience was standing on a selection platform with Eva Kor,” the same platform where she was separated from her family 74 years earlier. “For her to recapture that moment so vividly for us, and for her to have forgiveness in her heart was perhaps the most powerful message that I saw,” McKillop said. When asked if he felt the same impact returning to Auschwitz four years after his first visit, McKillop felt it much more personally “because of the presence of Eva and knowing what she went through and how graphically she explained and recalled what her experience was.” For sophomore on the team Kellan Grady ‘21, Kor’s stories were especially harrowing and unforgettable. He mentioned one instance in which she and other victims of the twin experiments “were starving, and there was no food for days.” While there was a table of food in a nearby house, Kor had a

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North Carolina’s Loophole in Defining Consent

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SAVANNA VEST ‘22 AND BETSY SUGAR ‘21 STAFF WRITERS

n North Carolina, “no” does not always legally mean no. Through the 1979 court ruling in State v. Way, North Carolina’s Supreme Court explicitly ruled that once a woman gives consent, it is valid for the rest of the act, and if she withdraws consent, it does not have to be considered by the other participating party. The law emerged from a 1979 second degree rape trial, in which the judge said that consent is reversible; the jury disagreed, and a loophole was thus legally created. The final

verdict states that “If the actual penetration is accomplished with the woman’s consent, the accused is not guilty of rape” (State v. Way). State legislators have since interpreted the law to mean that once a woman consents to penetration, the initial consent holds over for the entire act, even if she changes her mind. Last summer, two women’s legal proceedings and encounters with this law garnered media attention. According to the individual women, each had given then withdrawn consent, and their respective partners ignored the request to stop. Yet, since the alleged incidents occurred within one act of penetration, police told the women there would be no way to prosecute for rape.

That same month, Senator Jeff Jackson (D) proposed Senate Bill (SB) 553. SB 553 was the second iteration of a bill to overturn State v. Way. Jackson proposed a bill that stated: “A person may withdraw consent to engage in vaginal intercourse in the middle of the intercourse, even if the actual penetration is accomplished with consent and even if there is only one act of vaginal intercourse.” But, the Republican majority Senate never allowed Jackson’s bill to be heard on the floor. In a 2017 interview with The Fayetteville Observer, Senate leader Phil Berger (R) claimed he did not feel that changing laws

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reports of alleged sexual misconduct from 20142017. Source: Davidson College three year summary of sexual misconduct reports


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