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Perpetua crux, siue, Passio Iesu Christi a puncto Incarnationis ad extremum vitae : quadragenis iconibus vulgo breuiter anté proposita, nunc ex Sacris Litteris, sanctis patribus, & s. theologiae doctoribus vberius explicata
No full textR.P. Athanasii Kircheri e Societate Jesu Iter extaticum coeleste : quo mundi opificium, id est, coelestis expansi, siderumq[ue], tam errantium, quàm fixorum natura, vires, proprietates, singuloroumq[ue] compositio & structura
No full textUniversity News - Volume 100[a], Issue 002 (October 22, 2021)
No full text24 pages.VOL. C No. 2 / October 22nd, 2021 UTHE UNIVERSITY NEWS ocCupy SLU
Commemorating
PHOTO BY ABBY CAMPBELL COVER DESIGN BY GRACE DUNLAVY
n the early hours of Oct.
13, 2014, two months af-ter
the police murder of
Mike Brown in Ferguson,
Mo and just a week af-ter
the police murder of
VonDerret Myers Jr. in
St. Louis, a group of nearly 1500 pro-testers
marched down Grand Boule-vard
where they were met with a long
line of riot police. Shortly after, an-other
group of protestors approached
from the opposite side of the road.
The police were forced to retreat, and
as a result, the group, which split ear-lier
in the day, reconvened by a SLU
entrance.
Out of the large crowd emerged
then SLU sophomore Jonathon Pul-phus,
who invited the group onto
campus as his guests. This moment
marked the beginning of the histor-ic
six day sit-in at the Clock Tower,
eventually known as Occupy SLU.
Seven years later, the University
continues to commemorate the oc-cupation’s
anniversary. This year, the
Office of Diversity and Innovative
Community Engagement (DICE), in
collaboration with Campus Ministry,
hosted several local guest speakers in
events that ran from Oct. 8 through
Oct. 15. To begin the commemora-tion
week, a procession took place
on campus which was followed by a
panel discussion from Kayla Reed
and Kira Banks, PhD., who were
both present during the occupation.
VonDerret Myers Sr., a SLU employee,
also spoke alongside them about his
son’s life and story.
With permission from his family,
organizers led several protests like
Occupy SLU in Myers Jr.’s name in
October 2014, which was dubbed as
‘Vontober’ to remember him. During
the occupation, many SLU students
and faculty joined community mem-bers
from across the St. Louis area as
a unified front.
“Without the community work
and without the streets, Occupy SLU
would not have been possible,” said
Pulphus, who led a reflection session
during the commemoration week.
“Part of our mission was to pop that
SLU bubble. We were successful at
that quest, but the jury’s still out on
the question of how serious SLU is
taking and navigating the promises
that were made in the Clock Tower
Accords today.”
The 13-point Accords were devel-oped
through conversations between
students, staff, activists and admin-istration
leaders, ending the week-long
peaceful occupation in 2014 and
committing the University to enact-ing
equitable changes. Pulphus not-ed
that months prior, in May 2014, a
group of students submitted a list of
demands to the institution after a few
racialized incidents occurred on cam-pus.
That initial list, he says, helped
I
02 NEWS
lay the foundation for the Accords.
“We are building a team now to
re-imagine the Accords and ensure that
our 2021 vision is in alignment with
what is currently happening, and to re-new
[our] commitment and investment
in DICE,” Interim Vice President of
DICE Amber Johnson, PhD., said.
Some of the programming during the
week included an Activism 101 work-shop
led by Ferguson protestors Britta-ny
Ferrel and Jamell Spann and the an-nual
reading of a speech that Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. delivered to the Univer-sity
in 1964. Luella Loseille, Cross Cul-tural
Center coordinator, led the “Say
Their Names” event in which students
read the names of dozens of victims
who lost their lives due to police bru-tality.
“Standing up here and reading these
names really hits home for me as an Af-rican
American,” senior Justice Hill said.
“A lot of times we make adjustments as
a way to survive, but I am here to tell
y’all that I don’t want to survive—I want
to live. Don’t leave this message here.
Take it back to your classrooms, take it
back to your professors and friends be-cause
this is real.”
The commemoration week also aimed
to celebrate the legacy of the late Jon-athan
Smith, PhD., who was a notable
figure during the occupation and the
formation of the Accords. As president
of The Black Rep Board of Directors,
Smith wrote “Do I Move You?,” a play
based on a collection of poetry, music
and dance which was shown Oct. 13 in
his honor.
In another speaker event, “Ferguson
and Tikkun Olam,” Rabbi Susan Talve
and Jeffery Dhoruba Hill shared their
experiences during the Ferguson pro-tests
and Occupy SLU.
“You all are celebrating and commem-orating
this event today, and I want to
stress the point that you don’t have to
be this huge special person to imple-ment
change or to have an effect,” Hill
said. “I was a homeless person with 5
friends, and we were able to organize
Occupy SLU.”
When the original Occupy SLU sit-in
occurred, there were a range of opin-ions
within the SLU community about
the protest. Many parents and students
criticized SLU President Fred Pestel-lo
for allowing the sit-in to occur. The
movement’s legacy, however, lives on as
a powerful event that shifted the Uni-versity’s
culture.
“While we have a long way to go in
terms of institutionalizing anti-racism
and anti-oppressive environments, I
am seeing progress and feel good about
what is possible,” Johnson said.
By ULAA KUZIEZ
Staff Writer
SLU honors
the legacy
of the
original 2014
sit-in at the
clocktower
with a week
of events and
speakers.
7 YEARS LATER:
COMMEMORATING
OCCUPY SLU
Luella Loseille (center) leads “Say Their Names” at the clocktower Oct. 13.
(Abby Campbell / The University News)
News
By BRIAN GUERIN
Staff Writer
enneth Lo-nergan’s
clas-sic
work “This
Is Our Youth “
was the open-ing
produc-tion
of the Saint Louis University
Theatre & Dance Season, running
from Oct. 1-10. Director Tom
Martin said he is optimistic the
show was a hit.
“It’s got three incredibly won-derful
roles and a compelling
story that I believe speaks to our
audience,” Martin said. “The most
enjoyable part is definitely work-ing
with the actors. They are a
wonderful, committed group of
actors, and they’re all absolutely
lion-hearted.”
The 2015 Tony Award-nom-inated
dark comedy is a snapshot
into the tumultuous lives of three
young adults on Manhattan’s
Upper West Side. After stealing
6,495 to 13,000 by
June 2022, the 50th anniversary of
the grant’s creation. According to
#DoublePell’s website, the grant in
its origination covered more than
three-quarters of the cost of at-tending
a four-year public college.
Today, Pell Grants cover less than
one-third of those costs.
“The goal is to bring it back to
its intended strength,” Dave Rice,
Associate Director of Student Fi-nancial
Services, said.
Rice explained that these ad-vocacy
efforts are not proposing
any kind of changes in the eligibil-ity
requirements, but focusing on
simply increasing the amount of
the award.
“This award is so different from
[other financial aid] because it’s
not tied to the school, it’s tied to
you,” Rice said.
The grant works on a sliding
scale, where the amount awarded
to students changes based on the
financial need as demonstrated on
students’ FAFSA paperwork. Rice ex-plained
that this kind of increase in
aid, though not resolving the finan-cial
burden of higher education as
a whole, could make the process of
paying for college more accessible
and equitable.
“If I’m going to go buy a car to-night,
and I start out with 10 percent
of it or so in hand, I might struggle
to figure out how to do it,” Rice said.
“But if I started out with 75 percent,
I might be more apt to try to go do
that.”
While some believe increasing the
grant amount would give colleges
and universities incentive to increase
tuition costs, Rice was adamant that
the correlation was not so direct.
“You could make that case, but it’s
not a one-to-one correlation,” Rice
said. “It’s not automatically going
to mean that tuition can go up any-where.
And for SLU, it’s important to
know that we publish any tuition in-creases
every year.”
Though Sajwani believes increas-ing
aid money for students through
every avenue possible is important,
she also acknowledged the oppor-tunity
available through increasing
grant money on a federal level as op-posed
to scholarships given from a
school.
“There are other universities that
maybe can’t [increase their endow-ment],
and the students who attend
those universities should not be neg-atively
affected because their institu-tion
doesn’t have the extra money to
provide for them when federally they
can be provided with that money.”
Even though Sajwani will be grad-uating
at the end of this academic
year, she feels strongly about fighting
for this change that could alleviate
some of the financial burden—even if
only by a little—that she, like so many
other students, has had to deal with.
#DoublePell is not the answer to
all of our country’s woes, but it is a
starting point,” Rice said.
L
By ZOË BUTLER
News Editor
.
(Diana Jakovcevic / The University News)
STUDENT ADVOCACY SEEKS
TO DOUBLE PELL GRANT
UNIVERSITY THEATRE
OPENS WITH “THIS IS OUR YOUTH”
03
ius XII Memorial
Library was rec-ognized
as the
2021 Missouri
Library of the
Year by the Missouri Library
Association.
This award came after
18 months of Pius Library
functioning through the
COVID-19 pandemic, some-thing
that caused many li-braries
across the state to
alter their services and sys-tems.
Martha Allen, Assistant
Dean of User Services at Pius
Library, said that one of the
reasons Pius Library received
the award was due to their
pandemic response.
“We did not close our
doors,” Allen said. “Pius Li-brary
was open and had the
longest open hours of any li-brary
in the state of Missouri.
And I’m talking public librar-ies,
special libraries, academ-ic
libraries, school libraries—
the library as rates of e-book
and streaming media check-outs
rose drastically, Allen
said.
Caitlin Stamm, an archi-vist
in Pius Library, says that
these services have always set
Pius Library apart.
“Before I came to SLU, Pius
Library had a great reputation
for having a great collection,”
Stamm said. “When I needed
to find things for my patrons,
I always knew that if I need-ed
a special book or a theolo-gy
book…Pius Library always
had it and was always willing
to help us. And so, I came to
SLU with the knowledge of
Pius Library—a great library.”
That is a reputation that has
been built and tended to since
Pius Library first opened in
1959. Before that, the SLU Li-brary
was located in what is
now the Pere Marquette Gal-lery
in DuBourg Hall, accord-ing
to John Waide, a former
SLU archivist who worked in
Pius Library for 47 years.
“I am really just kind of over-whelmed
by how many stu-dents
use the library,” Waide
said. “You know during mid-terms
and final exams, you
04 News
can’t find a seat in the library, and
there are a lot of seats in the library,
don’t get me wrong. It’s just amaz-ing
to me how much use it gets.”
Students and SLU community
members do use Pius heavily, es-pecially
during the pandemic. Ac-cording
to library headcounts, Sep-tember
2021 saw over 60,000 guests
enter Pius Library. Once they enter,
of course, there are plenty of things
for them to do.
“I just like the environment of
everyone kind of studying, side by
side, and it’s like we’re all kind of
going through it together,” said
Lydia Golden, a senior studying
Health Management and Policy.
“What has become very apparent is
that the library, as a place, is so im-portant,”
Allen said. “The library is
a sanctuary to many students, and
different types of sanctuaries: a
sanctuary for intellectual research,
a sanctuary just for calm and peace,
a sanctuary for recreational read-ing,
a sanctuary just to get a bagel.
You know, where you meet with
your friends.”
A continuation of normalcy was
something Allen says they wanted
to focus on.
“I can’t tell you the number of
students who have said to me how
important it was during the pan-demic
that the library at least was
a slice of normalcy in this chaotic
new world that we were living in,”
Allen said. “They knew that they
could come to the library and feel
safe.”
Ultimately, that sense of safety
and support is what makes Pius Li-brary
what it is, said Allen.
“I just want to say we have such
an incredible team here,” Allen
said. “We didn’t win the award from
one person, one individual person.
It was the team that came togeth-er
to support the needs of the stu-dents.
And that is thrilling for me
to be in an environment that is tru-ly
committed to their mission.”
P
Paige Fann / The University News)
we were open longer
than anyone else.”
Allen said that along
with the hours that it was
open, Pius Library was able
to continue offering many of
its services during the pan-demic,
which also set Pius
apart from other libraries in
Missouri.
“We were committed to try
and keep the services at a lev-el
that was [similar to] nor-mal
operating services,” Al-len
said. “We really did move
800 chairs, 40 sofas, many,
many tables. And we did that
with the help of distribution
and moving services.”
But more than changes to-pysical
functions, Pius Li-brary
was also recognized for
how quickly it adapted to the
virtual needs of campus.
“The virtual library is ab-solutely
vital to student suc-cess,”
Allen said. “And what
we quickly realized during
the pandemic was that Zoom
enabled us to reach students
that maybe we have never
reached in the past.”
There were many students
and faculty members who
utilized the virtual aspects of
Best in State
By JACK JOHNSTON
Staff Writer
PIUS LIBRARY:
he 2021 United
States Chess Cham-pionship
conclud-ed
on Monday, Oct.
18, with two SLU
students, Dariusz
Świercz and Thalia
Cervantes, competing in the pres-tigious
event. The pair, who are
also members of the SLU chess
team, both played well against in-ternationally
ranked competitors.
Świercz finished with a score of
5/11, earning 8th place, and Cer-vantes
also finished with 5/11,
earning 7th place.
The championship was played
from Oct. 8 to Oct. 20, with elev-en
rounds and two rest days. Only
one round was played per day, with
games often lasting several hours.
The tournament was divided into a
men’s and women’s section, with a
150,000 prize fund for the men’s
section and 64,000 bonus on
top of the first place prize money).
Both players took a break from
busy schedules and midterms to
compete in the championship. Dar-iusz
Świercz is a master’s student
in Applied Financial Economics,
originally from Poland. He obtained
his bachelor’s degree in Economics
from SLU in 2019. Świercz became a
grandmaster, the highest title a chess
player can achieve, at the age of four-teen,
and is currently ranked 102nd
in the world. Cervantes is a freshman
at SLU, originally from Cuba, who
moved to the United States to pur-sue
better chess opportunities. She is
majoring in Sports Business.
Both Świercz and Cervantes faced
stiff competition in their respective
sections. The top seed in the men’s
section was world number two Fabi-ano
Caruana, who won the tourna-ment
in 2016 and was also the most
recent challenger for Magnus Carlsen’s
World Champion title in 2018. World
number six Wesley So, who won the
tournament in 2017 and 2020, was the
second highest ranked player in the
championship section.
In the women’s section, Cervant-es
faced some of the top ranked female
chess players in the world, including
eight-time U.S. Women’s Chess Cham-pion
Irina Krush and two-time cham-pion
Nazi Paikidze. The eventual win-ner
of the tournament, Carissa Yip,
was ranked as the second seed in the
tournament. Yip made history in 2019
when she became the youngest woman
in U.S. history to earn the Internation-al
Master title, the second highest title
that can be achieved in chess.
SLU Chess Team coach Alejandro
Ramirez, commenting on the strength
of the field, said: “It’s the strongest
national championship in the world,
and it is the top chess news for the two
weeks it occurs. The women’s section is
also very strong and has been getting
increasingly stronger as a combination
of international transfers and rising ju-niors:
Thalia is one of those.”
Going into the tournament, Cer-vantes
says she was focused on playing
well, regardless of the outcome of the
tournament. “I was also one of the low-est-
ranked in the field, so I took it as
News 05
more of a test of how I do against these
players. Joining SLU and this being my
first year, I have been quite busy.”
SLU Chess Team coach Alejandro
Ramirez said of Świercz and Cervantes:
“They are polar opposites...Dariusz is
the most experienced and the stron-gest
player on the team and has been
a cornerstone of our team from our
very first showing as a team in the 2016
Pan-American Intercontinental Chess
Championships. Thalia, on the oth-er
hand, is our newest recruit. Thalia
has been a top junior in the American
circuit and has recently reached new
heights of her chess.”
At the midway point of the tour-nament,
Ramirez evaluated the respec-tive
performances of his players: “I
think Dariusz is a bit unsatisfied with
his results. He has been a bit luckless,
pressing for the advantage in many
games but coming up empty handed,”
adding that “I’m sure he wants to score
a couple more victories before the
tournament ends.”
“Thalia comes in as the lowest
rated player in the event, and despite
that, she is currently in a tie for sev-enth.
Again, some things to fix, but it’s
a nice bounce back for her after a cou-ple
of rough tournaments leading up to
the champs,” Ramirez added.
Despite several tough losses early
in the tournament, Świercz played well
in the second half of the tournament,
ending with a win against Lazaro Bru-zon
and a draw against Lenier Domin-guez,
two top-ranked Cuban players.
Cervantes also had solid per-formance
overall, finishing in seventh
place with a score of 5/11. Highlights
of her tournament included a draw
against tournament winner Carissa
Yip, who is currently the third ranked
female chess player in the United
States. Cervantes described her match
against Yip as “aggressive and compet-itive.”
Cervantes also won an exciting
game against Sabina Francesca Foisor
in round three.
“I am proud of my win against Sa-bina
Foisor,” Cervantes said. “It was a
hard fought game and I ended up com-ing
out on top.”
Asked to evaluate her tournament
performance, Cervantes concluded: “It
was a nice experience, and overall a
very solid score as I drew most of my
games. I could have done a lot better,
but I am content with this result. I hope
my performances in this event only get
better and better.”
T
ŚwiercZ, Cervantes
ComPete In Us Chess CHampionship
By CONOR DORN
Editor-in-Chief
(Grace Dunlavy / The University News)
Photos Courtesy of Lennart Ootes
(Diana Jakovcevic / The University News)
E
By MORGAN HAUSBACK
Staff Writer
very Saint Louis resident and college stu-dent
has seen them and paused to take
a picture of the beautiful, historic town
houses that decorate many St. Louis
Conclusiones physicae / disputabuntur publicè Romae in Collegio Romano Soc. Iesu, a Gaspare de Caualeriis Romano, anno 1665, mense [blank] die [blank] hora [blank]
No full text
Ioannis Eusebii Nierembergii Madritensis ex Societate Iesu in Academia Regia Madritensi physiologiae professoris Historia naturae, maxime peregrinae, libris XVI distincta : in quibus rarissima naturae arcana, etiam astronomica
No full textUniversity News - Volume 100, Issue 004 (April 29, 2021)
No full textMislabeled as Volume XCVV. 24 pages.VOL. XCVV No. 4 / April 29th, 2021 UTHE UNIVERSITY NEWS
SEASONS OF CHANGE
Cover Design by Grace Dunlavy
t. Louis native Tishaura
Jones made history on
April 7 by being elected
as the city’s first Black
female mayor. Jones is a
self-described progres-sive
who has worked
as a Democratic Com-mitteewoman,
has served two terms
in the Missouri House of Representa-tives
and was most recently the Trea-surer
of St. Louis.
SLU senior Savanah Seyer, who has
also worked as a staff writer for the
University News, is the executive ad-ministrator
at MO Political, the firm
that represented Jones. She worked
strategically throughout the cam-paign
to interview the volunteers
participating in community outreach,
including canvassers, door knockers,
phone bank staff and general organiz-ers.
“A lot of people wanted to help out
with the campaign, so putting to-gether
the right team was something
I really took seriously,” Seyer said.
“[Jones] just inspires a ton of hope
and motivation in a way that I’ve nev-er
seen with any other candidate.”
Matt Rauschenbach, the campaign’s
political director and spokesperson,
said that since the beginning of the
campaign, Jones has had three main
priorities. The first is public safety.
One notable topic is the Workhouse,
St. Louis City’s Medium Security In-stitution
which has historically and
presently treated inmates inhumane-ly,
largely based on their inability to
afford high cash bails. Jones has made
S
02 NEWS
Photo Courtesy of Tishaura 4 Mayor
a commitment to close the infamous
Workhouse within her first hundred
days in office.
“She likes to say that public safety is
not something we’re going to reform,
it’s something we need to transform,”
Rauschenbach said.
This campaign objective touches on
multiple facets of how our city oper-ates,
including how 911 dispatch cen-ters
are organized. The overarching
goal is to limit the community’s direct
exposure to armed officers. People
experiencing a mental health crisis
would receive a mental health coun-selor
and people experiencing home-lessness
would receive a case manager.
“I think that’s something really un-comfortable
for people to hear, but it’s
necessary,” Rauschenbach said.
Her two other priorities are equi-table
recovery from COVID-19, which
includes planning and building public
health infrastructure for the next pub-lic
health crisis, and economic mobil-ity.
“As treasurer, she implemented the
college kids program, which gave a
college savings account to kindergar-teners,
and they loaded it with the first
340 million. In April of 2018, demo-lition
began, with construction final-ly
beginning at the site in July.
Initially, City Foundry STL was ex-pected
to be open spring of 2020,
however COVID-19 provided a
unique challenge for the Foundry
team. Many public elements of City
Foundry STL halted their plans, but
steadily, they’ve begun to organize
an opening, while still planning to
follow COVID-19 precautions.
Recently, it was announced that an
outdoor concert series is underway
at the Foundry, and will host local
acts until June 23. The Floozies, Andy
Frasco and John Moreland lined up to
perform. The concert series is being
hosted in collaboration with Jamo
Presents, an independent concert
promoter and venue management
company.
“Seventeen of the first 24 in-door
shows at City Foundry sold out,”
said Drew Jameson of Jamo Presents.
“There aren’t many places out there
right now in the country where you
can see live music up to four nights a
week in a socially distanced setting –
especially outdoors.”
Amidst COVID-19, City Foundry
STL has prevailed and remains on
track to open and be a hub for the St.
Louis community.
C
s the SLU com-munity
finish-es
up the spring
semester and
looks ahead to
fall, emotions are
mixed. Some hold
a sense of optimism and hope about
things to come, including graduation
and the possibility of a more normal
semester next year.
But the moment is bittersweet,
especially in light of the immense
amount of suffering and loss that
many in the SLU community have
experienced and continue to experi-ence.
As we look ahead, questions re-main
about how we process this grief
and move forward without forgetting
or disregarding what many have gone
through.
In the last edition, The University
News highlighted a number of SLU
courses which offered insights into
how students can better understand
and navigate the pandemic. Con-tinuing
with this theme, professor
Vincent Casaregola, Ph.D., is now
teaching a unique class on how loss
and grief are processed during times
of disease.
In this class, entitled “Medicine
and Literature,” Casaregola and his
students have examined the history
of pandemics and the literature and
arts that respond to loss, grief and
loneliness. The emphasis, however, is
on how poets, visual artists, memoir
writers and composers have moved
through this grieving process to a
“vision of hope and continuance be-yond
the loss.”
One of the most exciting parts of
the class is that for the final project,
each student is working on a project
which will be donated to the Saint
Louis University Archives for future
students and scholars to learn from.
These projects consist of a multimod-al
collection of sources, ranging from
scientific literature to journalism and
art, that can help future generations
understand the COVID-19 pandem-ic
and how it felt to live through it.
Casaregola sees these projects as “a
kind of time capsule for the future.”
Casaregola added that a common
practice in the course is studying how
“we come to terms with loss and move
through it to continue living a produc-tive
and fulfilling life while never for-getting
those we have lost or what has
been suffered,” he said.
To this end, the class looks at a range
of material culture, from literature and
film, to scientific research and journal-ism,
and how they are all in some way
related to disease, loss, loneliness and
isolation.
Casaregola also noted the inspiration
he took from the early history of the
Jesuit order: “The Jesuit educational
tradition emerged from times of con-flict
and uncertainty, and also times of
plague and suffering, and yet the first
members of that company decided to
join together and carry their mission
throughout that troubled world to
bring healing and hope to others. In
that tradition, we are seeking to move
through the darkness to the light. ”
The class was originally planned for
the fall of 2019 and the winter of 2020.
Casaregola’s original plan was for a
more traditional class, but when the
COVID-19 pandemic hit, he decided to
radically alter the program and struc-ture
of the class, making it much more
experiential and experimental: “In
a sense, we have been inventing the
course as we draw on the lived expe-rience
of the pandemic time and have
shaped our understanding by studying
the history of pandemics and the ar-tistic
representation of them in many
different art forms.”
The university archives have been
excited about the idea of donating the
final projects as testament for future
generations of scholars and students
to learn from, and it will be imple-mented
at the end of this semester.
A
By DIANA JACOVCEVIC
Staff Writer
Photo Courtesy of City Foundry STL
SLU COURSE CREATES
PANDEMIC TIME CAPSULE
CITY FOUNDRY STL
OPENING IN SIGHT
04
n April 12, Provost
Michael Lewis, Ph.D
sent an email update
regarding the ongoing
Academic Portfolio
Review (APR), which
announced that 40
programs are to be
closed, including 29 undergraduate
and 11 postgraduate programs.
The total number of students cur-rently
enrolled in the affected pro-grams
is 260. Of these 260 students,
222 are undergraduates and 38 are
graduate students. These program
closures will not affect current under-graduate
and graduate students who
are currently participants in the af-fected
programs, nor will it affect 2021
recruits planning on participating in
the affected programs.
The review formally began in 2019,
when the then-interim provost, Chet
Gillis, Ph.D formed an Academic Port-folio
Review committee to evaluate
SLU’s degree-granting programs to
“assess the value and effectiveness
of academic degree programs based
on metrics and university priorities.”
This committee was tasked with iden-tifying
programs which were “under-subscribed”
or “unviable.” After Gillis
announced that he would step down as
provost in April 2020, Michael Lewis,
who was then serving as the Dean of
the College of Arts and Sciences, took
over as interim provost, and by exten-sion,
began to oversee the APR process.
The fact that the APR process, an ac-tion
with potentially far reaching con-sequences
including program closures
and termination of faculty, was initi-ated
by an interim provost, Chet Gillis,
and then continued under interim pro-vost
Michael Lewis (who was named
permanent provost in Feb. 2021), was
the subject of some controversy. Be-fore
Lewis was named permanent pro-vost
in February, the position had been
filled with interim appointments for
nearly two years, after Provost Nancy
Brickhouse stepped down in August
2018. In a memo sent in July 2020, a
number of professors voiced the opin-ion
that a full scale academic portfolio
review should take place under a per-manent
provost who had been chosen
by a national search committee, per
the Faculty Manual and the principles
of proper shared governance between
faculty and administration. Howev-er,
no permanent decisions on program
closures were made by an interim pro-vost,
either Gillis or Lewis.
0
02 NEWS
By CONOR DORN
Associate News Editor
(Grace Dunlavy/The University News)
ies, Latin American Studies and, Rus-sian
Studies. Language study was also
severely affected, with closures in
German Studies, Italian Studies, and
Classical Humanities/Greek and Lat-in
Language and Literature. The Uni-versity
will still offer courses in these
language areas, but it will no longer be
possible to choose these areas as a ma-jor
area of study and course variety will
likely decrease.
In addition to the major programs
slated for closure, ten minor programs
were recommended for closure, with a
total of 57 students currently pursuing
these minors. The program closures
also include six masters programs,
which have a combined current enroll-ment
of 26 students, and four doctoral
programs, which have a co
University News - Volume 100, Issue 003 (March 25, 2021)
No full textMislabeled as Volume XCVV. 24 Pages.VOL. XCVV No. 3 / March 25th, 2021 UTHE UNIVERSITY NEWS
COVER DESIGN BY REBECCA LIVIGNI
oi Lee, a junior
at SLU, woke up
Thursday morn-ing
too upset to
make it to class. It
was March 18—the
heart of midterms
and two days after a white male shot
up three different Asian spas in the
Atlanta area, killing eight people,
six of whom were Asian women.
“We couldn’t even focus,” Lee said.
“We couldn’t even go to school. We
couldn’t even live our normal lives.”
Lee is Korean, and her roommate,
junior Abby Kwon, is Korean-Amer-ican.
They found a small comfort in
talking with each other in the days
following the shootings, but most-ly
needed time alone to process the
events. Later that day, though, they
were already helping Luella Loseille,
the program coordinator for the
Cross Cultural Center at SLU, orga-nize
a virtual Stop the Hate Vigil,
held Friday, March 19. It’s goal was
to commemorate the lives lost in
the mass shootings and to address
the wider problem of anti-Asian
sentiment that has grown in the
United States over the past couple
years, focusing on what can be done
about it.
Earlier in the day on Friday, Lee
and Kwon gathered with friends and
fellow students in the quad, bring-ing
armfuls of chalk and posters to
create a make-shift shrine and call-to-
action. Phrases like: “Stop Asian
Hate,” “Racism is the virus,” “Learn
how to say our names” were written
along the clock tower.
One unidentified person, however,
wrote “End Feminism” along a bor-dering
wall in broad daylight. Be-cause
the security cameras around
the clock tower haven’t been work-ing
for some time, the individual
has yet to be held responsible. This
sparked a fire in Kwon, and gave her
the courage to speak out at the vig-il
consisting of around 200 partici-pants.
“I’m not usually a person who likes
to public speak,” Kwon said. “At the
vigil, I was just so heated, and I felt
so compelled to speak up, where it
didn’t really make me nervous. I had
to say what was on my mind”...“I’ve
never felt like that before.”
Kwon believes the message echoed
a misogyny that was showcased in
the spa shootings, as the shooter
claimed to have targeted the spas to
eliminate his sexual “temptation,”
according to the New York Times.
“There’s a lot of misogyny and rac-ism
that we need to combat in our
own communities,” Kwon said. “It
affects us a lot closer than we think
it does.”
Both Kwon and Lee were study-ing
abroad in spring 2020, when the
coronavirus first impacted our lives.
Kwon was in London and Lee was
in Denmark, and both said they had
experienced radical, racial wake-up
calls in their time in Europe—before
the outbreak of COVID-19, and af-ter.
Kwon remembered one night, spe-cifically,
where she was travelling on
a bus in London, and a white man
called her a slur, along with making
many racially-charged sexual re-marks.
“Everyone thinks of study abroad
as a great experience; you get to
travel the world,” Kwon said. “But as
a person of color, you have to think
about how other people in that
country are going to perceive you,
and you’re not safe from racism.”
S
02 NEWS
(Claire Battista / The University News) She had another similar experi-ence
in Barcelona. And then again in
Scotland. They were different from
each other, but all preyed on the fact
that she was a young, Asian-Amer-ican
woman. SLU’s study abroad
team hadn’t prepared either of them
for these experiences.
When the coronavirus became
more prevalent, and the two were
sent back to the States, the rac-ist
remarks picked up and packed
more aggression as the culture of
anti-Asian hate became normalized.
Lee and Kwon both had countless
stories of times people made ve-hement
associations between their
race and the virus.
“One time during the lockdown,
me and my friend went on a walk,
and these two white men yelled at
me and told me to go back to China,”
Lee said. “It’s just like, you don’t
even know me. How could you say
things like that?”
Kwon believes this blatant racism
was made more mainstream when
the news outlets were focusing on
Wuhan, China as the epicenter of
the disease, especially when former
president Trump’s language about
the virus was derogatory to Asians.
Many people interpreted this
knowledge to mean that China was
responsible for the outbreak, which
progressed into harmful stereotypes
of Asian people, specifically sur-rounding
their food and culture.
“We’re still seeing the effects of it
now, a year later,” Kwon said.
As of this year, 11.4 percent of
SLU’s undergraduate student body
are Asian. It is a dismal statistic next
to the 64.3 percent who are white,
but it is still the second most com-mon
ethnicity at our university. Yet,
APIDA students are feeling unheard.
Kwon said that in order to move
forward, SLU must realize how
much they’ve benefited off of sys-temic
racism and white supremacy,
and find even the smallest ways to
dismantle that.
“The demands that we listed are
good steps,” Kwon said. “I don’t
think it’ll fix the damage that is
already done, but it’s honestly the
least that they could do.”
Lee agrees, emphasizing a need
for accountability. For the person
who defaced the clock tower’s me-morial.
For SLU, itself.
“I really hope they know that we’re
here,” Lee said.
Lee and Kwon let out a light laugh
and then a deep sigh.
“Yeah,” Kwon agreed.
By ZOË BUTLER
Staff Writer
The Cross Cultural
Center hosted a
Stop the Hate vigil
Friday, March 19 to
honor the lives lost in
the anti-Asian
mass shootings days
before and to raise
awareness of the 150
percent surge in
anti-Asian hate crimes
since 2019.
STOP THE HATE VIGIL
CALLS FOR CHANGE
News 03
By MARK BURBRIDGE
Staff Writer
n March 5, Saint
Louis University is-sued
a message to
notify all students
and staff that the
University had ac-quired
more doses
of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine
by way of the Missouri National
Guard.
This announcement also had
a survey for students to com-plete
regarding vaccine eligibility.
COVID-19 vaccine research and
development has been a prominent
part of SLU’s plan to handle the
pandemic within its own campus.
Generally speaking, vaccine re-search
is no small task, a point
emphasized by Daniel Hoft, Ph.D.,
head of the Center for Vaccine De-velopment,
who elaborated on the
long process of creating the vac-cine.
“It starts with identifying a
potential target for a vaccine, of
course. Is it a big enough problem
to develop a vaccine? Are the con-sequences
severe enough that we
want to prevent it?”
After addressing these prelim-inary
questions, “then there is ini-tial
preclinical work that needs to
be done. You need to know what
type of vaccine you’re gonna make:
are you gonna make a RNA vaccine,
a protein based vaccine, a viral-vec-tor
vaccine, virus-like particle type
vaccine, or other newer methods?”
When COVID-19 was identified
back in the spring semester of last
year, there was no question for SLU
researchers, led by Hoft, that a vac-cine
was in order, due to the mass
disruption it caused through both
its infection rate and economic dis-ruption.
“The magnitude in mor-tality
as well as the complications
that are occurring in many people
in COVID-19, that’s affecting ev-eryone
in the world and it’s spread-ing
like wildfire,” Hoft said, “para-lyzed
our economies, and that has
become a divisive force in politics.”
SLU got right to work re-searching
potential treatments
for COVID-19, as well as potential
vaccine technology. In March 2020,
the same month in which in-person
instruction was halted, SLU initi-ated
an Adaptive COVID-19 Treat-ment
Trial to determine the effec-tiveness
of Remdesiver on treating
COVID-19—with Remdesiver even-tually
being approved by the FDA
during October.
In August of 2020, SLU’s Cen-ter
for Vaccine Development began
recruiting participants for a Phase
3 trial of the Moderna vaccine in
order to better understand its ef-ficacy.
According to Dr. Horton, by
the end of the semester, SLU was
monitoring the various research
studies that were released. With the
release of vaccines from companies
like Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech,
SLU began applying through the
state to be a provider of COVID-19
vaccines. “Dr. Terri Rebmann and I
led the efforts on that [applying for
the vaccine],” Horton shared, “we
got rejected five or six times before
they [the state] finally said we got
approved.”
Regarding SLU being an ap-proved
vaccine provider for the
state of Missouri, Horton noted that
the university now stores some of
the vaccine for the National Guard.
“It’s a collaborative effort working
and speaking with them about our
needs, as well as seeing what their
needs were,” Horton said, “when
the Johnson and Johnson vaccine
got approved, they were generously
able to give us some of the Moderna
vaccine that was given to them...”
A longtime in the making, Afri-can
American studies is finally be-coming
a department at Saint Lou-is
University, and is set to get full
department status by the fall 2021
semester.
Many in the SLU community
have waited for African American
studies to become fully departmen-talized,
and it was a prominent goal
of both the Clock Tower Accords
and the more recent list of demands
from the Breonna Taylor Memorial
incident last fall.
In the 1970’s, SLU began of-fering
their first African-American
Studies classes, pioneered by Bar-bara
Woods, Ph.D., who directed
the SLU African-American Studies
Program. Woods was known as one
of the architects of Black studies
throughout universities across the
nation.
As the African-American stud-ies
program solidified, SLU created
a certificate and a contract major,
where students put together class-es
that would be viable for an Af-rican-
American Studies degree and
had it signed off by a professor.
In the 1990’s, SLU’s African-Amer-ican
Studies became a formally in-stituted
program under the lead-ership
of Karla Scott, Ph.D., and
was granted the ability to graduate
traditional B.A. majors through the
program in 2010.
In recent days, Christopher Tin-son,
Ph.D., the current director of
African-American studies and oth-er
members teaching within the
program have taken part in facul-ty
meetings and conversations to
make the African-American studies
program a full department. How-ever,
the road to becoming a de-partment
has not been smooth
or quick. As movements for Black
empowerment have gathered mo-mentum,
so too has the push for
the departmentalization of the
African American studies pro-gram.
One obstacle that stood in
their way was repeated question-ing
of the necessity of the pro-gram.
Tinson responded, “We’ve
been making the case over 40
years for why this is a viable area
of study.”
With departmentalization
comes a more official footing
within the university. Tinson
elaborated on the benefits of de-partmentalization,
saying: “It
gives us more visibility and via-bility.
And also, most important-ly,
it allows us to hire and tenure
our own faculty who have lines in
African American Studies.” The
program is currently in the pro-cess
of interviewing candidates
for a joint position within Afri-can-
American studies and the
School of Education, as well as for
community-based endeavors.
“It’s definitely exciting,” said
Clarke Taylor, senior and student
worker within the African-Ameri-can
studies program.
“Education and African de-scendants
go hand in hand, and
we always want to make sure
people understand that [and] ap-preciate
that. We’re here to cele-brate
that, as well as produce new
people who can carry on that tra-dition.
So that’s what we’re here
for,” added Tinson.
By KLAUDIA WACHNIK
Staff Writer
AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES
TO BECOME A DEPARTMENT
VACCINES AT SLU:
WHERE ARE WE NOW?
SLU African-American Studies Faculty (Photo Courtesy of St. Louis University) O
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News
By MARTIN SHARPE
Staff Writer
arch 2021 is
just over a
year since the
first confirmed
COVID-19 death
struck the Unit-ed
States. Since
then, life has become drastically
different; classes are either par-tially
or completely online, and
our social lives remain largely
static as many worry about in-fecting
ourselves or others with
the virus. Each day we are met
with countless unsettling statis-tics
about new cases and death
counts. Adding to our unnerving
new reality is the rise of political
unrest that continues to shake
the nation, with social justice
movements taking particular aim
at police brutality and increases
in hate crimes. Amongst all this
turmoil is another problem that
has seen extensive growth since
the onset of the pandemic: dete-riorating
mental health.
In a time when Ameri-cans
are spending more and more
time indoors without social con-tact,
the negative effects on men-tal
health are becoming apparent.
In fact, a report by the US Census
Bureau showed a 31 percent in-crease
in people reportedly expe-riencing
symptoms of depression
or anxiety between December
2019 and December 2020. Unfor-tunately,
mental health is a topic
still somewhat stigmatized and
its importance is often dismissed
or erroneously discredited, de-spite
growing efforts to encour-age
awareness of it.
Thankfully, many stu-dents
at SLU are making an ef-fort
to change this reality. The
Bandana Project is a multi-cam-pus,
student-run project aimed
at providing student-to-student
mental health support to those
at SLU and other participating
universities. The project was first
conceived and employed at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison
before making its way to SLU’s
campus thanks to SLU student
Dan O’Connell. O’Connell, a ju-nior
at SLU majoring in psychol-ogy,
took the first steps in getting
the project established on cam-pus.
“I reached out to the peo-ple
at Wisconsin to see how we
could get it started at SLU, and
they sent us a packet of informa-tion
about how they went about
starting theirs,” said O’Connell...
M
s COVID-19
struck Saint
Louis Univer-sity’s
campus,
s a f e g u a r d s
were swiftly
put in place,
including an influx of quarantine
housing and strict health proto-cols
on campus. Soon after, stu-dents
were exposed to the poor
conditions of SLU’s isolation
housing and the alleged mistreat-ment
of Residential Advisors.
On May 26, 2020, SLU’s
fate was decided. Administration
chose to allow over 11,000 stu-dents
to return to the university,
despite an increase in COVID-19
infections since campus was first
shut down.
In August, the wrought-iron
gates of Saint Louis Univer-sity
creaked open for the school
year once again, allowing a flood
of students to move back to cam-pus
for an in-person fall semester.
After a warm, socially distanced
welcome, however, the mood
shifted—SLU became intent on
limiting COVID-19 infections
to keep campus open for the re-mainder
of the school year.
In a plethora of emails
from university administration
to the student body throughout
the 2020-2021 school year, the
messaging began to transform
from upbeat communications to a
more harsh, reprimanding tone.
One email from early Feb-ruary,
entitled “Breaking point or
turning point?”, detailed that SLU
is “on the brink of implementing
severe COVID-19 restrictions be-cause
some students, it appears,
have just given up,” and explained
that students should have “no
more beer-pong parties,” among
a list of other flagrant actions.
“Don’t spend Mardi Gras
‘day drinking’ instead of going to
class. (Yes, we’ve heard about that
plan.) You asked for more mental
health days in the calendar, and
February 17 is the first one. Use
it as it was intended, not recover-ing
from a day of partying,” wrote
Debra Rudder Lohe, the Interim
Vice President for Student Devel-opment
at SLU at the time.
“Come on. You know bet-ter,”
she wrote.
This pressure to bring
case numbers down was especial-ly
imparted on resident advisors
of the campus’ residence halls,
who deal with COVID-19 safe-guard
violations first-hand.
One resident advisor who
has worked for the university for
two years detailed the dismal
conditions of her stay at Grand
Forest Apartment quarantine
housing. The student, who chose
to remain anonymous for fear of
losing their job at the university,
is called Abigail.
Abigail was randomly se-lected
to be tested for COVID-19.
When the test came back posi-tive,
she was rushed into isolation
housing at midnight, where she
would stay for the next 14 days.
When she arrived at her
temporary new home, the bath-room
door was locked and the
bed was without sheets, covered
in unknown stains. Luckily, she
said, she was given “a roll of toilet
paper—thank God for that,” she
laughed.
She called the Student
Health Center’s COVID-19 ho-tline
to have the bathroom door
opened, who said they would
have to check if this was feasible
and call her back. When they did
get back to her, they said some-one
could arrive in two hours to
fix it...
A
By RILEY MACK
News Editor
Dan O’Connell, SLU’s Bandana Project founder, poses with his green bandana.
(Sanjott Singh / The University News)
POOR TREATMENT, QUARANTINE
CONDITIONS REPORTED
THE BANDANA PROJECT
COMES TO SLU
04
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To continue reading this
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below:
ince SLU first tran-sitioned
to virtual
learning last March,
the COVID-19 pan-demic
has upended
almost every tra-ditional
method of
teaching and learning across all
majors and colleges. And while it
is widely recognized that virtual
learning is no substitute for face-to-
face interaction, tools like Zoom
and other creative means of con-tent
delivery have allowed learning
at SLU to persist and even to thrive
during the pandemic.
As the pandemic has stretched
on, there have been opportunities,
across all colleges and disciplines,
to incorporate the COVID-19 pan-demic
into course material and to
draw on insights reached in the
classroom to better understand
the current moment. Predictably,
courses with a STEM basis have
had ample opportunity to study
COVID-19, in classes on virology
and epidemiology, for example. But
disciplines in the humanities in
a diverse range of fields have also
studied aspects of the pandemic
in the classroom and the insights
reached are indispensable towards
understanding the pandemic and
the world it has made.
If the pandemic has reaffirmed
one thing, it is that the sharp di-visions
between academic disci-plines
that are often most accentu-ated
within a university setting are
less useful outside of it, especially
in times of crisis.
For instance, questions early
in the pandemic about the most
effective way to stop the spread
of COVID-19 from an epidemi-ological
standpoint couldn’t be
separated from questions relating
to the economic or social impact
of lockdowns or political ques-tions
about the responsibilities
the government has to its citizens
and their welfare. The rapid devel-opment
of vaccines, including the
cutting edge mRNA technology,
were rightly hailed as extraordi-nary
scientific achievements. But
there remain other vaccine related
questions, about inequalities in ac-cess,
or the morality of patent laws
on life-saving technology, that sci-ence
cannot answer alone. To ad-dress
these complex questions, an
interdisciplinary approach is nec-essary,
and as a Jesuit university,
one which SLU’s, as a Jesuit school,
is well attuned to.
The University News spoke to
three professors representing three
different disciplines—Anthropol-ogy,
English and History—in the
humanities, all of whom have in-tegrated
the COVID-19 pandemic
into their class material in some
capacity. They shared insights
that they and their students have
reached so far this semester and
the interdisciplinary approaches
they have taken to do so.
Amy Cooper, Ph.D., a profes-sor
of anthropology and sociology,
teaches an introduction to Medical
Anthropology course this semes-ter.
Listing some of the topics cov-ered
in her Medical Anthropology
course that offer parallels for our
current moment, Cooper said: “We
study how involuntary migration
and poverty shape experiences of
medical treatment for Hmong ref-ugees
in the U.S., how racism and
class inequalities affect people’s
attempts to build families through
high-tech medical interventions in
Ecuador, and how government pol-icies
meant to promote health ac-tually
dehumanize and traumatize
generations of indigenous commu-nities
in the Canadian Arctic.”
As Cooper elaborated, one of
the central insights she hopes to
communicate in her course is that
illness is not strictly the result of
a biological process, rather “health
and illness are shaped by social, po-litical,
and economic inequalities,
adding: “The way we organize so-ciety
has created vast inequalities
and hugely differential health out-comes,
and a pandemic can exacer-bate
these inequalities when insti-tutions
don’t intervene to stop it.”
Ellen Crowell, Ph.D., a profes-sor
of English, teaches a unique se-nior
English seminar called “Read-ing
AIDS in the Time of COVID.”
Through weekly engagement with
literature, film and music produced
during the height of the AIDs cri-sis,
students in Crowell’s class ask
themselves each week: “When we
explore how and why artists ad-dressed
the horrors of AIDS (in-stitutionalized
hatred, racism,
homophobia, healthcare inequity,
politicized medical treatment, the
restructuring of human intimacy,
etc.) what do we see about our own
pandemic moment?”
News 05
By CONOR DORN
Associate News Editor
The idea for the class came, Crowell
said, as she was running on the SLU track.
While running, Crowell began listen-ing
closely to a song from the 1980s and
thought: “This song was about AIDS and I
didn’t notice that then.” Another thought
quickly followed: “The only reason I am
noticing this now, is because we are again
living in a pandemic.”
A phenomenon that most people are
no doubt familiar with is that as the pan-demic
has gone on, things which were
once incredibly bizarre—extended isola-tion
from friends and family, conducting
meetings and ceremonies over Zoom, for
example—have started to feel somewhat
Necessaria ad salutem scientia partim necessitate medii, partim necessitate praecepti, per iconas quinquaginta duas repraesentata : quarum ligneae laminae gratis dantur / auctore r.p. Iudoco Andries e Societate Iesu
No full textUniversitas: the magazine of Saint Louis University
No full textSummer 1995 issue of Universitas: the magazine of Saint Louis Universit