Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd joked about interacting with many Chinese youth who seemed to prioritize materialism over Marxist ideals — just one of many examples of China’s multidimensionality — while discussing China’s future prospects. In a talk titled “Understanding China under Xi Jinping,” Rudd delved into the current political situation under China’s president yesterday afternoon as a part of the Watson Distinguished Speaker Series and the China Initiative.

The event was mediated by Brian Atwood, senior fellow for international studies and public affairs. In an introduction, Atwood stressed Rudd’s role in helping Australia overcome the financial crisis and advocating for action against climate change by ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, a United Nations agreement aimed at reducing emissions.

“I’m the definition of an area studies guy,” Rudd said in reference to his engagement with China “as a scholar, businessman, bureaucrat, diplomat, foreign minister and prime minister.” Rudd’s work with China includes his positions as president of the Asia Society Policy Institute and co-chair of the China Global Affairs Council of the World Economic Forum. Rudd is also fluent in Mandarin Chinese and has authored a policy report titled “Alternative Futures for U.S.-China Relations.”

Rudd opened his talk by explaining how scholars can better understand the complex issues and identity of China, urging them to “understand the world as seen from Beijing” and not from an outside perspective. “The beginning of wisdom in understanding China’s view of the world is to understand China’s view of itself,” Rudd added.

“Xi Jinping is at the apex of the Chinese political system. It’s important that we have a good understanding of how he sees his country, his party and China’s place in the world,” Rudd said. To enhance comprehension of Xi’s worldview, Rudd proposed a seven concentric circle model based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — a psychological theory reflecting human motivations. He stated that the first and foundational circle is the Chinese Communist Party and its continuing clout, which is Xi’s primary concern. Rudd listed several other aspects, including economic policy and living standards, until he reached the seventh circle — China’s place in the world at large.

Xi’s rise to power is closely linked with the strengthening of China’s national identity, Rudd said. He emphasized the role of propaganda in combining China’s nationalism with communist party imagery to create a “combined Chinese contemporary political consciousness.”

During the discussion session following his talk, Rudd elaborated on China’s international relations. He explained that China’s relationship with North Korea results from China’s desire to have a neighboring ally, which is greater than its hope to have an ally without nuclear weaponry.

While exploring U.S.-China relations, Rudd explained that China’s strategic policy looks at President Trump as a “strategic opportunity” as well as an “uncertainty.” The former results from the Trump administration’s role in abating the ideas of Western liberal democracy, while the latter stems from Trump’s strategic unpredictability, Rudd said.

Karen Ka ’21, a Herald copy editor, said she was especially convinced by Rudd’s multidimensional analysis. “He really went into depth about all the different factors you have to consider in international relations. It was really interesting and eye-opening,” she said.

“The reality of China today breaks out of any box,” Rudd said, describing the Chinese “international identity.” Besides Marxist ideology, Rudd emphasized the essentiality of culture and history in shaping China’s international worldview and politics.

Catcher Gwen Svekis, short stop DJ Sanders and third baseman Jenna Lilley were all selected in the National Pro Fastpitch (NPF) draft on Monday. All players will finish their collegiate seasons before joining their professional teams.

Svekis was drafted by the Chicago Bandits as the No. 3 overall pick in the draft, while Sanders followed Svekis to Chicago as the No. 21 pick in the draft. Lilley was picked No. 22 by the Cleveland Comets with the penultimate pick as the Ohio native gets to return to her home state.

Svekis is the highest picked Duck in the NPF draft’s history — the closest to her being Courtney Ceo and Jessica Moore who were each picked sixth in the draft in past drafts.

Through four seasons, Svekis has been a consistent fixture on Oregon’s roster. She batted .427 in 38 games as a freshman and owns a career batting average of .342. Svekis leads the No. 4 Ducks with 13 home runs (a single-season career-high) this season to go along with 42 RBIs.

Sanders joined the Ducks this season from Louisiana Lafayette, where she led the NCAA with 29 home runs and 82 RBIs. This year, she’s hit 11 home runs with 32 RBIs.

Lilley has been an instrumental part of the Ducks during her four years with the program. In her sophomore season, Lilley was hit by a pitch against Stanford and missed just five games despite being hospitalized overnight due to her injuries.

Since then, Lilley has so far rebounded from a disappointing junior season last year to hit five home runs with 26 RBIs this season.

Lilley’s defensive play has arguably been her biggest strength as she continues to represent the United States on the international level.

The No. 4 Ducks travel to Washington this weekend to take on a No. 1 Washington team that was swept by No. 3 UCLA this past weekend.

Follow Shawn Medow on Twitter @ShawnMedow

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Maria Mena, a janitor at Santa Monica College, brought her son to UCLA on Saturday to motivate him to pursue higher education.

“A lot of kids in our community aren’t motivated to go to college because they don’t think it’s for them, so they don’t go,” she said. “This can give some first-hand insight for my child to know that it’s possible.”

Education and labor studies students invited the families of garment, janitorial and domestic workers involved in UCLA Labor Center’s Parent Worker Project to campus to teach them about opportunities for higher education. The event offered bilingual tours, a trip to the Fowler Museum for younger children and workshops to help families understand the college application process and how to afford it.

The Parent Worker Project works to improve access to higher education for children from working-class families.

Lizeth Rios, a third-year sociology and education student, brought her daughter to the event to show her the educational opportunities available to her in the future. She said that as a mother from a working-class family, she was able to connect with many people who attended the event.

“The best part of the day is just having the kids on a college campus. Growing up, I did these kind of tours but it was always just with your classmates,” she said. “This event is with your parents so that they can also get the vision that it is possible for their children to go off to college too.”

Rios said the event gave her more information to help her make the right educational decisions for her daughter, such as how to be able to save up to afford college.

“A lot of times these families don’t feel as if they have a place at a place like UCLA, but that’s wrong,” she said. “I’m Latina and I’m pursuing higher education – it is possible.”

Janna Shadduck-Hernández, a project director in the department of labor and workplace studies, brought her students together to run the event. She said parents play an important role in encouraging their children to go to college.

“Parents are the first teachers; they teach us our values and what’s important in life,” she said. “Bringing the parents and children together keeps that important relationship connected while thinking about the future, too.”

Valerie Vargas, a third-year Asian-American studies student, welcomed parents and their families to campus at the event. She said she thinks it helped encourage families to send their children to college.

“This event in essence … gives them the opportunity to really spend time on a college campus,” she said. “These people are always busy and have to work so much, and it just gives them a day with their families.”

Vargas said she hopes the event showed working-class families that they have a place in higher education.

“I have the privilege of being here every day with all resources that UCLA has to offer,” she said. “I hope to see these families be inspired and feel like they have a spot carved out for them.”

Shadduck-Hernández said she thinks it is important to break down the barrier between higher education and being from a working-class background.

“The most important part of today is that the kids meet students like themselves – people of color, working class. A lot of times UCLA feels like a private university but it’s not, and it’s important that these families know that,” she said. “It’s a public university, not an elite club – this school is theirs.”

On Apr. 17, The Herald published spring poll results that found many students report stealing regularly from Brown eateries. When asked to explain their behavior, students expressed the belief that stealing helped them derive more  of the value of their meal plans. For example, one student explained, “If I take one more meal for the week, I really don’t think that’s going over the value of my plan, considering how much I’m paying Brown.” This feeling is understandable, given that a meal credit can cost anywhere from $9 to $20, depending on the meal plan. Like the plans offered by Brown University Dining Services, on-campus housing — which costs roughly $1,140 per month  — is also often considered a rip-off, because higher quality off-campus housing can be substantially less expensive. These frustrations are compounded by the fact that students are the very definition of a captive market, as we must purchase one year of meal plan and live in on-campus housing as underclassmen to attend Brown. (It is also notoriously difficult to get permission to obtain more affordable, off-campus housing.) These high costs and restrictive policies create a pervasive sense that Brown is trying to squeeze every last penny out of us, which leads me to ask: If the University is a nonprofit, why do I always feel like I’m dealing with an airline?

There might be very good reasons why housing and meal plans are so expensive. Perhaps our dorm buildings are older, and therefore need more expensive upkeep than local apartments. Perhaps high meal plan costs are necessary to pay the wages of those who prepare our food, as a student in the earlier Herald article hypothesized. Perhaps high meal plan and on-campus housing costs are used to subsidize financial aid.

If the University has good reasons for charging us such exorbitant prices, where does the money go? To be clear, I’m not accusing Brown of taking advantage of us, and I’d like to believe that Brown is actually justified in charging the prices that it does. Rather, in the absence of transparency, it can feel like Brown is ripping us off. The University does publish an annual fiscal report that includes a broad overview of the budget. In 2017, Brown spent 41 percent of its budget on salaries and wages, 12 percent on employee benefits, 8 percent on graduate student support, 8 percent on depreciation, 15 percent on supplies, 10 percent on purchased services, 3 percent on utilities and 3 percent on interest. Yet these statistics don’t answer students’ primary questions: Why are room and board so expensive, and where is our money really going? This question is especially salient considering that Brown charges $14,670 for room and board, while private, nonprofit, four-year universities charged on average $12,210 for room and board in the 2017-18 school year, according to the College Board. Sure, higher education in the United States is expensive across the board — but an annual premium of $2,460 is a sizeable sum.

Brown doesn’t have an obligation to offer us an explanation of how they spend our room and board payments, and we, as students, will likely continue to purchase meal plans and on-campus housing in order to attend. Yet this lack of transparency encourages harmful behavior, allowing students to feel justified in stealing from Brown eateries. More importantly, it contributes to a sense that the administration does not have our best interests at heart, acting more like an exploiter than an accountable steward of the student body. Greater transparency and thoughtful communication will help build trust between the administration and students, and ultimately strengthen the basis of our community.

Rebecca Aman ’20 can be reached at rebecca_aman@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.

Although Phi Delta Theta’s Sunday night philanthropy event lacked in size, it was full of entertainment.  The Colorado State University chapter of Phi Delta Theta hosted a fundraising concert featuring country artist and former “Bachelorette” contestant Luke Pell in the Lory Student Center Grand Ballroom for the Live Like Lou Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps supports […]

A Perfect Circle’s gloomy and ominous fourth studio album Eat the Elephant takes listeners through a list of troubles faced in today’s society with a sound that’s reminiscent of their early 2000s work.

Tool front man Maynard James Keenan and Tool’s former guitar tech Billy Howerdel are back to release Eat the Elephant, their first album together after a 14-year hiatus. These long breaks are an ever-present theme in Keenan’s music, but despite the lengthy hiatus, Eat the Elephant holds true to the band’s original sound, forcing the listener to recognize A Perfect Circle’s dominance in the genre.

For most rock and metal bands, leading melodies from electric guitar riffs are any given song’s main attraction. In contrast, this is almost never the case with A Perfect Circle, creating the band’s distinct sound. Multiple songs off Eat the Elephant are propelled into the rock stratosphere by bass guitar, drums and piano, arranged in a variety of manners to create variation throughout the album.

Just as important as instrumentation is to A Perfect Circle’s sound, so are Keenan’s lyrics and vocals. It’s apparent today’s social and political climate is on the front of Keenan’s mind, something on full display with the LP’s second song on the album “Disillusioned,” where Keenan addresses society’s relationship with technology. During the chorus, the song dramatically slows while Keenan sings “Time to put the silicon obsession down / Take a look around / Find a way in the silence,” expressing his distaste for society’s obsession with information. The song “TalkTalk” follows the same trend, calling out hypocritical members of society who do not practice what they preach. Keenan’s lyric “Sit and talk like Jesus / Try walkin’ like Jesus” hones in on this critique. This overarching narrative is the most notable characteristic of Eat the Elephant and persists throughout. Keenan doesn’t provide the listener with a break, hammering them with problems in our society, from the threat of nuclear war alluded to in “Hourglass” to growing animosity between fellow citizens and neighbors expressed in the song “Feathers.”

These heavy-themed songs are sandwiched in-between the opening title track and the simple but dramatic closing “Get the Lead Out,” a perfect beginning and end to the list of troubles in the album. Eat the Elephant kicks off with a simple, somber expression of the fear of a challenge, takes the listener on a roller coaster of different concerns and gripes and then concludes on a positive, more hopeful note. This strategic arrangement of songs and themes ties the album together and makes it a complete composition, a trait many albums lack today. “This massive endeavor / Ominous and daunting / Crippling undertaking” speak to this, with the “daunting” task being problems laid out in throughout the album. “Get the Lead Out” ends the album on a hopeful note, encouraging us to work for a better world. Keenan’s lyrics stress this by saying “We got places to be / We got mountains to climb / Shape the rainbow with me.”

All said and done, A Perfect Circle’s “Eat the Elephant” isn’t a groundbreaking record by today’s standards, sounding similar to something the band could have released in the early 2000s. But A Perfect Circle deserves credit where credit is due. After 14 years, Keenan and Howerdel still have a green thumb for growing consistent alternative rock albums. This project does what it sets out to do, providing a commentary of today’s issues from the perspective of an older generation while at the same time remaining true to the group’s original style.

Rating 7/10

Members of the club Psypher embodied the complexities of modern dating by dancing to Sabrina Claudio’s R&B song, “Belong to You,” in a parking lot Friday night.

At its first meeting of the quarter, Psypher began exploring its spring theme: the impact of personal relationships on mental health. The club, which was founded in fall of 2017, uses dance to educate members about mental health issues. In biweekly workshops, the club will encourage members to share their opinions about both romantic and platonic relationships in group discussions and dances, said Matthew Diep, founder of Psypher.

“Dating is a huge part of our mental health,” said the fourth-year psychology student. “Especially at this point in time, I feel like it consumes a lot of us, and it is worth talking about how different it is.”

Before they begin dancing, club members discuss solutions to stigmatized issues – previous workshops touched on topics such as depression, domestic abuse and addiction. They also share their own handouts that contain research and statistics on mental health issues before they start dancing, Diep said.

Psypher uses choreography from many different dance styles, such as jazz or hip-hop, to investigate mental health issues. Diep acted as the guest choreographer Friday night, and taught a dance that included hip-hop steps like the pony, which involves the body shifting down as the legs move up, and slow, full gestures such as the body roll. The controlled motions and sensual song expressed intimacy and welcomed participants to the idea of talking about relationships, Diep said.

“Mental health (issues) are … diverse. … It’s not like we’re always sad or we’re always angry or happy,” Diep said. “I feel like all these different genres can help us capture all these different emotions.”

While Diep led the dance portion of Friday’s workshop, third-year communication student JK Suh guided the dialogue about today’s dating landscapes, discussing the impact of dating apps and changing attitudes toward sex. Suh said he encouraged participants to take a new view on a familiar topic by focusing on the positives of modern dating rather than the negatives, such as how technology makes it easier to communicate with a significant other.

Following an open discussion, guest choreographers explain how their pieces connect to that quarter’s mental health topic and then teach the dance to participants. Diep said the workshop’s dancing component is a way for the dancers to take a break from their daily lives and physically experience their feelings.

“If it’s a hardcore, intense piece, you have to embody that character,” Diep said. “It’s a whole way to slow down and connect to your body, connect to your emotions and express those things.”

Suh said one of the group’s past workshops showed how the hip-hop dance called popping, which involves a fast motion of muscles contracting and relaxing, could release tension for people who have experienced trauma. Another workshop explored mental health experiences in the LGBTQ community, and Psypher dancers attempted empowering movements that originate from the community, such as “waacking” and “voguing.”

Alexia Diaz, a first-year biology student, said she feels that Psypher is a safe space to discuss stigmatized topics and voice personal opinions. Her interest in neuroscience and psychology, as well as her dance experience, drew her to the group. She said a workshop focusing on dance therapy showed her that movement can help people explore mental health issues if they are not comfortable speaking about them.

“Sometimes there is stuff that you feel is burdening you, and it’s hard to put it into words. Sometimes releasing it through a physical medium, through your body, lets you release that without having to say anything,” Diaz said. “That’s a cathartic experience.”

At Friday’s workshop, Diaz said she appreciated the freedom she felt through Diep’s choreography. Movements like the body roll allowed her to take on the essence of a character undergoing an intimate experience. Diaz said embodying a character through dance is a fun way to understand another person’s perspective.

“On the one hand, you’re creating this character, so it is like a persona, but on the other hand, it is like exploring and thinking outside of yourself,” Diaz said.

Psypher helps participants understand they do not have to deal with mental health on their own, but can instead explore and destigmatize the topic communally, Diep said.

“(Talking about) mental health is just really unapproachable and sometimes boring for people, and having this cool, fun aspect to it can keep you engaged,” Diep said. “It … makes these learning experiences more impactful.”

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  1,000 students to receive free access to the first-of-its-kind, all-access subscription for course materials KANSAS CITY, Mo., April 20, 2018 — Cengage, an education and technology company, today announced it is providing 1,000 college students with a free semester of Cengage Unlimited, the new subscription service for college course materials. The announcement was made […]

Editor’s Note: The Collegian is starting a section in Spanish for our Spanish-speaking readers. Spanish articles will be available online and in print. Find the English version here. Traducido por Daniela Navarro.  Mota. Yerba. Porro. María Juana. Marimba. Grifa. Con tantas palabras para describir el cannabis, ¿por qué muchas personas todavía usan la que tiene implicaciones racistas? La […]