1-8-18 Part 2

COLLEGE ATHLETES GIVEN EXCEPTION WHEN IT COMES TO SEXUAL ASSAULT

Tampa Bay quarterback Jameis Winston (3) attempts a pass in the first quarter against the Minnesota Vikings on Sept. 24.

Carlos Gonzalez/Minneapolis Star Tribune/TNS Fellow student Erica Kinsman filed Jordan Mondell the Title IX assault report, which the uniAssistant Sports Editor versity and athletic department promptly When Tampa Bay Buccaneers starting and quietly dismissed. Kinsman alleged quarterback Jameis Winston takes the Winston raped her on the bathroom field, the crowd is focused on one thing floor of his apartment in December of — the game.

2012 after meeting the star freshman Winston, at only 24 years old, is one quarterback at a bar. of the best in the league. A former FlorKinsman did everything right after ida State Seminole, he has had a stellar the horrific incident. She went to the professional career so far — 12,149 allhospital for treatment and received a purpose yards in only three seasons. rape kit — which, months later, did conBut when Winston was 18 years old, clude Winston had intercourse with her he was a part of a major incident in 2013 — and filed a police report. that left but a teeny tiny scratch on his The police did nothing for 10 months, record, an incident that cost FSU nearly and when Kinsman expressed her con$1 million in eventual settlements — a cerns, she was met with skepticism and rape charge. shoulder-shrugging.

A charge that has largely been forgotSadly, this is a familiar story for many ten, especially by a dedicated fan base. women in the United States who are vicAs the #MeToo movement continues tims of sexual assault. to empower victims of abuse, many powOn top of it all, what happened to erful but abusive men are losing their Winston’s career was egregious — it got jobs over allegations, charges and court better. proceedings. But in a male-dominated At the school’s eventual code of conindustry like sports, where the voices of duct hearing in 2016, days before the colmen heavily overpower those of women, lege football playoffs, Winston was it is harder to hear to the victims. EspeSee Sexual Assault on page 34 cially in college sports.

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JAZZ PLAYS O N IN PITTSBURG H Emma Maurice Staff Writer

The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, which has overseen many of Pittsburgh’s historic cultural transformations, can attest to Barson’s statement.

“In the past, there were more jazz clubs, jazz performances, artists, etc. than we see now,” the Trust said in a statement in November.

Despite the loss of James Street and many other prolific venues, the interest in jazz music within the community has still survived throughout the decades.

Jeff “Tain” Watts, a multi Grammy Award-winning jazz drummer, grew up immersed in the Pittsburgh jazz scene.

He attended Duquesne University for two years as a classical percussion major, followed by enrollment at the Berklee School of Music in 1979. Throughout his career, Watts has recorded and perBilly Eckstine is one of many notable formed with musicians such as Michael jazz musicians who have emerged Brecker, Kenny Kirkland and Alice Colfrom Pittsburgh’s historic jazz scene. trane.

Wikimedia Commons See Jazz on page 29

The Pitt news crossword 1/8/18

While the riverboats travelling up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers between 1916 and 1970 brought many people to the Pittsburgh to work in the booming steel industry, it also brought a wave of musicians who created Pittsburgh’s lasting jazz scene.

Jazz in Pittsburgh continues to flourish and sustain years of traditions, unlike many other cities that have seen this culture fizzle out with time. And if it weren’t for the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans moved out of the south, musicians such as Billy Eckstine, Ahmad Jamal and Ray Brown, would not have risen to success.

“There’s just this incredible lineage of players who came out of here, and I think that still has trickled down to the scene there is today,” Pitt assistant professor of music Michael Heller said.

The Hill District was one of the pre-

mier places for African-American art in the country, with a wide array of wellknown places where jazz was appreciated and performed, according to Heller.

“All of this came together and created this very vibrant entertainment scene in the Hill District,” Heller said.

According to Benjamin Barson, a doctoral candidate in jazz studies at Pitt, the modern-day jazz scene in Pittsburgh can be viewed from two different angles.

Barson said two contradictory things are happening simultaneously within the city. On the one hand, there’s an overall renewed interest in jazz music. On the other, venues such as James Street Gastropub and Speakeasy — catering specifically to jazz — are closing down as a result of ongoing noise complaints from neighbors.

“There’s a crisis in cities for these types of spaces,” Barson said, “and without these spaces, that [renewed interest] will be unsustainable.”

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SUstainable Farming gets Urban Upgrade

Aquaponics systems use a combination of hydroponics and aquaculture to farm aquatic animals for food. Courtesy of Catherine Schrading

Anish Salvi Staff Writer Kareem Adam Rabbat formed an appreciation for nature from fishing with his father as a young boy, which eventually led him to join an initiative as an adult to find sustainable ways of getting fresh food to people.

“That kind of instilled in me a great value for the outdoors,” Rabbat said. “I wanted to do everything I could to save and protect the environment.”

As a sophomore environmental engineering student at Pitt, Rabbat combined both his passions for protecting nature and his academic knowledge to become president of The Aquaponics Project — an initiative meant to provide food for communities using sustainable practices and energy-efficient means. Students from Pitt, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Michigan work together on The Aquaponics Project and develop a facility that provides both basil and fish for local communities in Pittsburgh. The facility was previously used by the students working on the project to educate the public about sustainable practices through tours.

The students involved in The Aquapon-

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ics Project are now working on making improvements and are hoping the facility will start producing food for wider consumption this spring.

The East Liberty facility consists of a 500-gallon fish tank housing tilapia with 30 grow towers — vertical structures within the tank that are capable of growing 27 basil plants each. It operates through the use of aquaponics, a combination of hydroponics — growing plants in water without soil — and aquaculture, farming aquatic animals for food.

Essentially, the facility creates a closed loop system that follows a circular flow.

The waste products of the fish provides nutrients for the plants while the plants keep the water clean for the fish. The only input into the system is the food for the fish. According to Rabbat, the output is food produced in an environmentally sound way.

“We’re really trying to attack the whole food issue from multiple perspectives so we can produce this food and distribute it to the community, but at the same time take food waste that would usually go to landfill and decompose [it],” Rabbat said.

See Aquaponics on page 30

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Women who rocked 2017 Amanda Reed

Contributing Editor

Cardi B is the first rapper in history to place her first three Billboard Hot 100 entries in chart’s Top 10.

Wikimedia Commons

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This past year challenged woman in the United States. A man who was recorded saying, “grab ‘em by the pussy” was sworn in as the president. Title IX, which helps and protects survivors of sexual assault across college campuses, is in jeopardy after Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced a review of the Obama-era sexual assault law in September. And, Planned Parenthood, which provides services, like patient education, breast exams and STD testing, for hundreds of thousands of women, was at risk for defunding. This year, women were told to be quiet and shunned for speaking out against harassment and social inequity.

From taking on negative attention in the press to candidly discussing sexuality, female artists in 2017 took on what it meant to be a woman this year, when more than 100 well-known men were

accused of sexual misconduct. Below are five albums and one song, all by women from different musical and cultural backgrounds, that tackled identity, sexuality and power — all of which were called into question by countless men in 2017 and helped me get through the year in more ways than one.

Taylor Swift- “Reputation” Although Swift’s “Reputation” is a lukewarm album filled with forced, almost appropriative swagger — see the beginning of “Ready for It” and “End Game” — you have to give the songstress a little credit for wanting to reclaim the snake queen narrative spelled out for her in the press. Yes, she represents the white feminism that became especially irrelevant — but still prevalent — in 2017, and her jabs seem more petty than diss track-worthy. But what came out of “Reputation” were calls to action instead of silence, famously purported by Swift.

Just look at Maxine Waters reclaiming her time and Rose McGowan’s outspo-

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kenness toward “shitty media men” everywhere. “Reputation” is far from a perfect album, but its maturity to confront the critics directly is something worth commending.

Kehlani- “SweetSexySavage” On the track “CRZY” off of Kehlani’s “SweetSexySavage” — a play on TLC’s “CrazySexyCool” — Kehlani spits “If I gotta be a bitch, I’mma be a bad one.”

The line hearkens back to the women who took action after Trump was elected, from protesting in the streets to running for office. Unashamed in tone, the funky album takes on the haters unabashedly, interrogating those who try to take women down.

Lorde- “Melodrama” When I reviewed “Melodrama” in June, I was living in New York City and nursing a very strange heartbreak all while seeing if my chosen career path was something I actually wanted. Lorde’s own journey in “Melodrama” helped me See Music Women on page 45

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comic

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Jordan Mondell CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

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The Pitt News SuDoku 1/8/18 courtesy of dailysudoku.com

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Lifelong, pg.9 kids live in all of these houses and there are always new ones coming in.”

Sciulli said the community used to be more townesque with families owning the local food, clothing and other businesses along the Oakland streets. She said she misses the families and the Italian culture — including festivals, clubs and parties — but does admire the “diversity” the large population of student tenants has brought.

“There are always new people and things are always changing,” she said.

“Every year we meet a new set of unique people and say goodbye to the old ones and it can get sad to watch people grow up and leave.”

Andrea Boykowycz, 46, has lived in Oakland her entire life — and has been around long enough to see the rental market overtake the neighborhood. She’s been involved with the Oakland Planning and Development Corporation for more than a dozen years, serving both on its board and as a program analyst.

Boykowycz’s work puts her in touch with people looking to secure home ownership in Oakland, and her organization runs a community land trust to save affordable homes in the neighborhood for prospective permanent residents.

“The rental pressure in Oakland is such that it is very very difficult to have a home ownership market,” Boykowycz said. “One of the reasons we started a community land trust was to offer a bulwark against the utter ‘studentrification’ of Oakland.”

Aside from a large influx of students, another change Boykowycz noticed is that some landlords take advantage of the opportunities they see in Oakland.

She said many landlords don’t live in Oakland — or even in the state or the country — which makes it harder to monitor the living conditions of the neighborhood. Since people are now harder to reach, police have more difficulty getting the proper information

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to investigate landlord violations compared to the past.

“Most of the trash you see on the streets isn’t because college students are just throwing their trash out the window. It’s because the land owners failed to provide any trash cans,” Boykowycz said. “On windy days, the trash gets torn open or animals get into the trash and it gets blown all over the streets.”

Boykowycz said the responsibility has now fallen onto the community to find and report violations committed by landlords in order to keep Oakland clean and healthy. Her childhood, she said, was far less hectic and everything was more localized.

But Boykowycz still defended the new culture of Oakland, claiming it isn’t worse now, just different. While it may not be the quiet, comfortable community it once was, it still has retained many core community aspects of the old Oakland.

“There is a perception that people don’t live here, that it’s all undergraduates, but that isn’t true,” Boykowycz said.

“There are definitely kids here. They get on buses, they go to a neighborhood school, there are community organizations long-term residents are a part of.

There are things going on here.”

Boykowycz said the university culture has also helped the community, but she still misses a few things from her childhood, such as the block parties on Semple and festivals with pony rides, face painting and Swedish meatballs.

She also misses an old pet project of a few university students started back in 1972 that brought fresh food to the community and connected Oakland residents with the students. The project, called the East End Food Coop, has since moved to Point Breeze.

“We also used to have the East End Food Coop here. It was actually started by a few undergraduate students who thought ‘Hey, we’re growing sprouts in our basement, may as well sell them to the public,’” Boykowycz said. “That kind of scene I wish we could bring back.”

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Jazz pianist Erroll Garner’s memorabilia is kept on display in the William Pitt Union. Thomas Yang | VISUAL EDITOR

Jazz, pg. 18 “[Jazz] seems like it was a constant in Pittsburgh,” Watts said. “During my college years it just felt like a normal, healthy scene …There were always opportunities to see live music for free — like in the summertime there would be jazz in the parks.”

Watts said when he was in college there weren’t many places to pursue a career in jazz. But since then, Watts noticed that jazz education in Pittsburgh has grown with more institutions offering jazz programs.

Heller said, over the last several years, there has been a major boost at Pitt in both the general interest and appreciation of jazz, and the increasing number of jazz activities. Just a few years ago, the University’s music department hired three new jazz faculty members — Heller being one — after years of only having one faculty member.

“I think the University has really embraced jazz as a part of what we do here in the music department and in the University more broadly,” Heller said. “And that helps — a great deal — in terms of the campus life ... it’s just something that the department and the University really values.”

Heller also mentioned that faculty members, graduate students and under-

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graduates in the jazz department have been taking new initiatives toward planning performances in different locations and venues.

“The scene is mourning the loss of James Street — but something else will present itself,” said Watts. “Venues change, but it feels like there’s just a lot happening educationally. The Jazz Seminar at Pitt is recognized worldwide.”

Heller noticed that within the University and the city, students are not the only ones involved with jazz. There is a strong connection within the community as well from Pitt Jazz alumni and other musicians who emerged from the city. A handful of people who were part of Pittsburgh’s jazz community for decades can be found at the Annual Pitt Jazz Seminar and Concert every year.

Music is continuously going in and out of fashion, Watts said, so there is always the possible threat of jazz dying.

Yet the Trust has been working to keep Pittsburgh’s jazz tradition and rich history alive by developing the Pittsburgh JazzLive series of programing for the last 8 years.

“There’s a strong handful of people from the community that have been involved in the jazz scene here for decades,” Heller said. “There’s a really nice intergenerational, intercultural feel to the scene here.”

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Aquaponics, pg. 21 Catherine Schrading, a junior majoring in environmental science, co-founded The Aquaponics Project as a first year in 2015 alongside fellow first year and computer science major Vinh Luong with the intention of finding a solution for “food deserts” — communities across the globe without easy access to fresh, healthy foods.

“It’s a portable farm to bring fresh food,” Schrading said. “And also educate people about where their food is coming from, and bring that to communities that would otherwise have no knowledge of those sorts of things and no access

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to fresh food.”

While the project did begin at Pitt, additional members from the other schools joined to bring a more varied approach with their differing majors, including information sciences and engineering. The original group met its new members from outside of class through volunteering opportunities and Pittsburgh’s environmental community, Schrading said.

“We needed people in different majors and we have students from three different universities and basically every major that you can think off which provides a lot of different insight,” she said.

“There are people just very passionate about environmental work in all the different universities.”

The team recently won first place in the 2017 Ford College Community Challenge — a sustainability contest held by the Ford Motor Company Fund — for their project in November.

They received $35,000 and a 2017 Ford Transit for their “portable farm.”

Farah Harb, the education program coordinator for the Ford Motor Company Fund, said the projects in the 2017 competition focused on sustainability and that mobility was also part of the challenge — either literal movement or social mobility.

“We want [the students] to think more about community needs, impacting lives,” Harb said.

“By exposing them to a project like this we put

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leadership in their hands.”

According to Rabbat, the team began designing the project in 2015. After a year of collecting grants, fundraising and coming up with a final design for the facility, they began constructing their farm out of a decommissioned shipping container, completing the facility in the summer of 2016.

“The idea is you put this container really anywhere and you don’t have to put that much water into it, don’t have to put that much energy into it,” Rabbat said. “It’ll just provide food for the community whether that be a food desert in the United States or a place in the Sahara Desert in Africa.”

Rabbat said the system allows for 90 percent less water to be used for growing fish and plants compared that for traditional farming.The group had its most successful crop yield this past summer.

“It relies on the symbiotic relationship between fish and plants,” Rabbat said. “[This relationship] also takes out the toxicity of the water so it is clean for the fish so you can just recycle the water through the entire system.”

The group has used their project as a teaching device for Pittsburgh residents. According to Schrading, the group has given tours to the community to explain how the project worked and how this was a sustainable method of procuring food because it produced little to no emissions.

Rabbat said the group has also developed partnerships with several Pittsburgh organizations, including The Door Campaign, an organization that encourages STEM-based learning among young people. The Door Campaign at Savoy utilized the basil that the group grew for hors d’oeurves and drinks at an event last summer, according to Rabbat.

The team plans on reinvesting their prize money back into their aquaponics project by adding on an anaerobic digester that will take on any food waste produced and convert it into energy.

“Food waste would usually go to landfill and decompose and produce methane,” Rabatt said.

“But we can control it, have it decompose, harvest that methane, and use it for energy to grow more food.”

The group hopes to finish completing the digestor this spring. Schrading said finding funding for this device is one of the reasons the group entered the Ford College Community Challenge.

“This Ford grant ... made us rethink our focus so we’ve expanded our view from just aquaponics to now the food system at large with the anaerobic digester,” Schrading said. “We’re looking at all different aspects of the food system now, so we might actually rebrand.”

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Glitz, pg. 8 various conduits I’ve experienced university life this past year — whether as editor, student, friend, host or random passerby — I’ve seen and felt the complexity, ugliness and beauty of an entire new year’s worth of life. To have a front seat on humanity against the dramatic contrasts between Oakland’s green spaces, stone structures and grimy streets only adds to the drama of the everyday.

My own personal experiences in col-

lege as a white man obviously don’t necessarily touch on some of the very real problems that affect my classmates. I’ve never feared for my own deportation, worried about finding a roof to put over my head or been drugged at a party.

Taking time to recognize the untapped complexity of our everyday surroundings shouldn’t make us blind to the fact that a larger context still exists.

But it’s difficult — if not entirely impossible — to face off against the bigger demons in our lives without keeping in mind what exactly they’re made of.

Without the knowledge of how to deal

with the evils in everyday life, it’s also unlikely that we’ll be able to solve the problems that make it into the news.

Another fleeting advantage of college life comes in its position near the groundspring of social change in the United States. At any given time, at least five or six conservative commentators are busy writing mindless think pieces about collegiate “safe spaces,” but that doesn’t change the fact that we are specially positioned to scrutinize the seemingly insignificant in our society and to push against it every day.

According to a study from the Uni-

versity of California, Los Angeles, published in 2016, some 8.5 percent of college first years in 2015 said that they were “very likely” to take part in a protest while on campus — a number higher than ever before recorded since the annual survey began in 1967. It’s a sign that more of us than ever are discontented with our everyday lives, and willing to do something about it.

Our everyday experiences today mirror what our everyday experiences will be like in the near future. It’s important to focus on the here and now — instead of just the dragons waiting to be slain on the horizon — not only because it’s more manageable, but because it’s what the future is built on.

Of course, the small things in our daily lives are also valuable simply for themselves. Taking a walk around campus — once it gets warm again, that is — seeing people, hearing sounds and spotting spaces around us in the Pittsburgh that we’re all accustomed to can be a reassuring, almost anchoring feeling if you go about thinking of it in the right way. Surely it can’t hurt to stop on your way to class and take a look at the decorations on the tops of buildings, the plants growing up out of the ground or the clouds whisking past overhead.

As I start my 2018, I feel both nervous and cautiously excited about how both my own world and all of our existences are on the brink of dramatic change. Whether that change is for better or worse will be determined by what we do this year — but in the meantime, I want to take one more look around.

Henry is the Opinions Editor of The Pitt News. Write to him at hgg7@pitt.edu.

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