Student organizations Whitman Teaches the Movement (WTTM) and Students for Education Reform (SFER) hosted a discussion of civil rights and social justice over ice cream on Wednesday afternoon. The event sought to foster conversations about social justice issues as well as to serve as a recruiting push for both groups.

The event consisted of three presentations and discussions covering discrimination in education, the prison system and gender issues. Its attendance of 19 people, including organizers and volunteers, fell short of organizers’ projections of around 30 attendees.

Whitman Teaches the Movement was founded in 2011 following a Southern Poverty Law Center report on national civil rights education that found that less than 2 percent of American high school students could correctly answer a question about the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ended “separate but equal” public school systems.

Originally created as a part of the Student Engagement Center by Associate Dean for Student Engagement Noah Leavitt and then-Community Service Coordinator Kelsie Butts, WTTM is now run by senior Sophie Schouboe with the support of the Community Service Office. It sends student volunteers into local classrooms around the Walla Walla area to teach curriculum about the civil rights movement and other social justice issues. It most recently added curriculum about Cesar Chavez and the farm workers’ rights movement.

“The formatting of the program has been changing and growing as we’ve figured out what does and doesn’t work,” said Schouboe. “So we’re going to see what does and doesn’t work this year and kind of adapt it for next year.”

WTTM holds an event for the entirety of campus each year, but this is the first time they have collaborated with Students for Education Reform.

“We usually do some kind of event that’s not teaching,” said Schouboe. “Last year it was a conference, the year before that it was a teacher panel on civil rights in various disciplines, and we had teachers present and students came. This year I wanted to focus to be on current issues, so this is our event both for recruiting and getting out the names of WTTM and SFER.”

Students for Education Reform was founded in 2012 with the more general mission of bringing together students interested in education and the policy surrounding it.

“SFER is most broadly, in my opinion, students’ best outlet to engage more in topics of education or education reform or explore their interest in the field in any extracurricular way at Whitman,” said junior Michael Augustine, the organization’s head. “Because there isn’t an education minor anymore, there are few classes that directly target education in the K-12 context, and while there are many volunteer opportunities, there isn’t really a centralized place for students to discuss topics of education.”

The two groups’ decision to work together on an event was facilitated by shared membership and purpose.

“The two groups have overlapping interests, and therefore overlapping people within our school,” said Schouboe. “It’s more manpower, more brain power, all of that stuff.”

Augustine hopes that the collaboration will encourage more members of each group to become involved in other’s work.

“I think who we’re targeting as club members are people who are interested in education policy or teaching specifically,” he said of SFER. “This is a perfect partnership, and Whitman Teaches the Movement is a perfect outlet for our club members or people outside the club to try standing in front of a group of students and delivering material.”

Sophomore Edward Ferguson, a regular volunteer with WTTM who co-led the discussion of discrimination in prisons, sees the event as a route to progress in its own right.

“We’re hoping to hear from the people that come to the event because they’re sort of self-selecting, and if they’re there they’re probably pretty interested in this stuff, or at least they want to learn about it,” said Ferguson. “So we’re hoping to hear from people and get some ideas from people, because these movements only really progress when people come together and talk about it. So what we’re doing right now is a part of the movement itself, not just learning about it.”

The groups plan to release a newsletter documenting the event to serve as information on and advertisement for both groups. While precise plans for the newsletter have yet to be ironed out, Augustine has high hopes.

“I think people will see what the program is about in a much more concrete way than any email or advertisement could do,” he said. “I think having a concrete newsletter can show students at the high schools we’re going to, teachers that will be hosting us, Whitman community members, and then obviously students who are considering volunteering … what topics and what excitement that the students who are engaged in the program will bring.”+

In an email sent to members of the student religious group Hillel-Shalom on Oct. 24, President George Bridges asked members to help create “a set of principles” for future convocation speeches. His email led faculty members to issue a statement objecting to possible infringements on academic freedom.

President Bridges’ move to create a set of “simple goals” for future speakers was in response to controversy surrounding this year’s convocation speech by Associate Professor of History Elyse Semerdjian. In her speech, she compared the U.S. persecution of Native Americans in the Walla Walla area to the modern-day Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The faculty has presented a united front on the topic, with a general agreement that no matter the content of a speech, academic speeches such as those at convocation should be restricted only by academic courtesy and accuracy. Chair of the Faculty David Schmitz, with the support of Division Chairs Nicole Simek, Mark Beck and Bruce Magnusson, sent a response on behalf of the faculty to President Bridges in which they expressed concern that these guidelines would limit academic freedom.

“We firmly believe that the president’s offer to the group to submit ideas for ‘a set of principles for convocation speakers’ is a mistake and that the establishment of such a document would violate academic freedom,” said Schmitz in his email to President Bridges.

Semerdjian’s speech has drawn fire from some Whitman students and parents, including some members of Hillel Shalom.

“It wasn’t welcoming to Jewish students, and it wasn’t a balanced presentation of ideas about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said junior Eliana Schwartz, a member of Hillel Shalom. “I think the general consensus is that we were upset about the fact that the speech was given at Convocation, more so than the fact that we disagreed with the content.”

According to Associate Professor of French Languages and Literature and Humanities Chair Nicole Simek, the objective of the convocation speech is to introduce first-year students to the critical thought processes they will be expected to follow in college.

“I think that we have to be mindful that the Convocation speech is not just ceremonial,” said Simek. “It’s a chance for a professor or a speaker — any speaker — to really try to push the community to think about important issues, to try to model a kind of critical inquiry; [it’s about] raising questions, even uncomfortable questions, as long as it’s done in a respectful way.”

According to Schwartz, Hillel-Shalom members have discussed Bridges’ request in meetings, but any suggestions to Bridges are likely to be made on an individual basis rather than coming from the group as a whole.

“There’s a lot of misunderstanding going on right now,” said Schwartz. “People think that Hillel students are interested in censoring and silencing pro-Palestinian voices, and that is entirely not the case.”

In a statement to The Pioneer, Bridges said that he had worked in collaboration with Hillel Shalom’s interim adviser James Winchell to give students an opportunity to voice their concerns about the speech.

“Convocation provides a specific context for introducing new students and their families to the College. Just as our faculty routinely seek student reactions to and evaluations of their classes, I routinely seek students’ views and assessments of many different programs and policies at Whitman, including those they feel particularly passionate about,” he said in an email. “How the College then chooses to respond to their concerns and suggestions, as always, would be handled with thorough consideration by and consultation with all affected parties. In the case of Convocation, this would include faculty leadership.”

KWCW signed an agreement with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this summer to avoid court proceedings after they discovered an eight-year backlog of unfiled documents near the end of last year. The station will continue to broadcast under a limited license under supervision from the FCC.

The problem was first discovered last year, when then-General Manager Kalen Bergado ’14 realized that the renewal of the station’s broadcast license had still not been approved by the FCC several months after he filed the application. Bergado and his successor, present General Manager Nicole Holoboff, a senior, discovered that the station had filed neither the biennial ownership reports nor the quarterly program lists mandated by the FCC since its last license renewal in 2006.

Photo by Tywen Kelly.

Holoboff and ASWC Advisor and Director of Student Activities Leann Adams worked over the summer with Harry Cole, a lawyer from Washington, D.C.-based telecommunications law firm Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth, to negotiate a compromise with the FCC.

The agreement, termed a “consent decree” by the FCC, was ultimately signed by Adams on Aug. 15. It grants KWCW a broadcasting license lasting only four years instead of the usual eight. This license was contingent on the adoption of a plan to avoid future infractions and the payment of a $1,200 “voluntary contribution” to the United States Treasury.

“Instead of waiting for something to go wrong, we just decided to take care of it now,” said Holoboff. “That was why a lawyer came into the picture, because it wasn’t anything that we felt we were capable of doing on our own.”

Adams notes that while the issue warranted careful attention, the station was never in great danger.

“It’s a big deal because KWCW is accountable to the federal government, which is pretty unusual in comparison to other student organizations, but it’s also not … a huge legal crisis, and we never considered it one,” said Adams. “We just considered it making sure we had everything back to the way it’s supposed to be.”

ASWC granted KWCW additional funds to help pay the fine as well as Cole’s fee at their Oct. 19 Senate meeting. The funds granted by ASWC totaled $13,500 and were taken from the ASWC contingency fund, the fund for travel and student development, and from excess funds typically set aside each year for the ASWC endowment fund for future use.

According to senior ASWC President Tatiana Kaehler, the expenses are far from crippling. Their budget surplus allows for plenty of elbow room in this year’s budget.

Photo by Tywen Kelly.

“[KWCW’s expenses] will leave us with accounts very similar to last year because we ended up having money left over in travel and student development and contingency at the end of last year, and that money rolled over to this year,” said Kaehler. “A lot of that extra money then went towards KWCW’s situation.”

KWCW also contributed 2,000 dollars from its own budget toward the costs and plans to tighten the drawstrings on its already meager purse in response. Holoboff says that the number of concerts and other events hosted by KWCW can be expected to decline this year, in part because of strains on the budget.

KWCW is not the only college station slipping behind on its paperwork. The FCC began offering consent decrees as an alternative to court proceedings in May 2013 with the practically identical case of William Penn University’s station KIGC. In the year since the adoption of that policy, at least three other college radio stations have signed consent decrees for similar offenses, including Northeastern Illinois University’s WZRD, Toccoa Falls College’s WTXR and Cazenovia College’s WITC. The FCC’s policy applies exclusively to student-run stations, whose high management turnover rates can allow for paperwork to fall through the cracks.

“The FCC … has entered into consent decrees like this with other college radio stations because they recognize they’re not after college radio stations,” said Adams.

KWCW plans to move forward with slightly increased scrutiny from the FCC and regular guidance from Adams. Holoboff and Adams plan to meet regularly to ensure that the station’s operations are running smoothly. Along with the legal work, Holoboff spent the summer restructuring and expanding KWCW’s staff and hopes that the growth will help to keep the station running smoothly.

Photo by Tywen Kelly.

“Since my first year here up until last year … there were a few music directors and a general manager, and that was pretty much it,” said Holoboff of the student staff. “It just wasn’t supportive enough for the general manager, and it wasn’t supportive enough to keep the momentum going for K-dub … so now we have about 14 staff members, which is really exciting. I think it’s involved way more students on campus and it’s just legitimized us … because we just have a lot more people doing a lot more jobs and creating that momentum for us.”

“K-dub is the only campus organization that has to report to some greater body, being the government,” said Holoboff. “That’s a very unique thing to K-dub, and it’s what makes KWCW awesome and really exciting and powerful on campus, but it’s also something that needs to be checked.”

Adams notes her admiration for the actions of KWCW’s leaders in addressing the legal hiccup.

Adams notes her admiration for the actions of KWCW’s leaders in addressing the legal hiccup.

I am a Batman fan. I’ve seen the movies, watched the cartoons and read a few of the comics.  So when Fox announced the launch of “Gotham,” a police drama documenting the titular city before the rise of the Caped Crusader, I could hardly wait. Unfortunately, “Gotham” is an unfaithful, uninteresting drag of a TV show. Comic-book and casual fans alike will find the series difficult to love at best, as it haphazardly shoves Batman’s allies and Rogues’ Gallery into a story destined to go nowhere.

Gotham City itself has always been outlandishly awful. The Batman mythos depends on a landscape rank with crime, corruption and systemic social ills which only a Dark Knight can save. The story follows a young Jim Gordon, best known as Gotham’s police commissioner and ally of Batman, as he struggles against the near-universal corruption of the Gotham police force and the organized-crime empire of Carmine Falcone. But Gordon’s narrative is paralyzed by the fact that viewers know nothing can change until the Batman arrives — an eventuality that is unlikely to occur before the show’s inevitable cancellation, since Bruce Wayne appears only as an angry and slightly creepy preadolescent.

The show attempts to keep things interesting by constantly dropping members of Batman’s Rogues’ Gallery into improbable places: Edward Nygma, alias the Riddler, works in forensics for the Gotham City Police Department, where he serves as a poor excuse for comic relief. Harleen Quinzel, aka Harley Quinn, kidnaps a young Selena Kyle, or Catwoman. Even Poison Ivy makes a brief and entirely inconsequential appearance as the child of a murder suspect — under the wrong name.

These appearances serve no purpose other than to catch viewers’ attention for the brief moments they appear. As practically every form of Batman media has pointed out, the Rogues’ Gallery is purposeless with no Batman to legitimize the idea of dressing up in a costume and attacking strangers.

The sole exception to this panorama of blandness is the Penguin. As the eventual leader of an organized crime syndicate himself, the Penguin, or Oswald Cobblepott, has a place in pre-Batman Gotham. He’s portrayed skillfully by Robin Lord Taylor of “The Walking Dead,” and is the only character in the entire show with any promise for development. Unfortunately, he was made entirely irrelevant to the narrative in the first episode when Fish Mooney (a series original and entirely uninteresting underboss played by Jada Pinkett Smith) exiled him from the city. So much for your only interesting character, “Gotham.” He’s not gone, but in a show about Gotham City, does it really matter who the Penguin brutally murders somewhere in the hinterlands, especially when nobody else knows he’s alive? Even upon his return to Gotham, Cobblepott is relegated to making small, quiet moves, predicting doom from the sidelines as Gordon’s enemy-turned-occasional-informant. It’s too much to rely on one recurring character to support the vitality of such an ambitious idea as this.

Overall, “Gotham” is just another cop show with a bad gimmick. In this case, that gimmick will undoubtedly self-destruct, and soon. The real question is when the genre as a whole will fall through, because it’s about time for it.

Illustration by Sophie Cooper-Ellis.

With midterm elections approaching in November, Whitman students hosted a voter registration drive on Friday, September 26th.  Juniors Gladys Gitau and Michael Augustine organized the drive through the Washington Bus, an advocacy group which promotes youth political involvement.

Gitau, who worked with the Bus over the summer, collaborated with Augustine, who was fresh from doing research on the topic of voter registration.  The pair prepared for the event over the summer, receiving training and resources from the Bus.

Gitau and Augustine led a team of ten volunteers during the drive.  The event included tabling in Reid, a base on Ankeny near Maxey Hall and a campus canvass by volunteers.  Working in pairs, the volunteers went to various buildings across campus to advocate registration.

“It was helpful to have that kind of a two-pronged attack of having a base…but also having extensions throughout campus,” Augustine said.

The drive yielded 53 newly registered voters, 49 of them in Washington State.  Students also registered in Oregon, California, Utah and New Jersey. Gitau had expected a higher turnout of around 150, but says she’s satisfied with the results.

“I think when you’re doing voter reg sometimes the numbers don’t always reflect the amount of effort that you put into the event,” Gitau said.  “Any number of new voters is important to us.  So whether we had done five or whether we had done 150, I think it still would have been important that those new voters registered.”

While practically every election brings a registration drive with it, the drives are not consistently supported by any one group, and their organization has been left largely to individual students over the years.  As such, the future of the drive is dependent on individual students’ initiative.  Gitau is uncertain of whether she will take charge again.

“I think it’s something that should be done every year,” Gitau said.  “Whether it’s going to be Michael and I that do it, I’m not necessarily sure.”

Though nearly all the newly registered voters filled out Washington forms, it’s unclear how many registered in Walla Walla.  Neither the drive’s organizers nor the Walla Walla County elections office could provide data on the number of Whitman students registered in Walla Walla.  Augustine and Gitau both hoped to see some students register in town, but are not extremely concerned.

“I think that something like that is pretty much personal preference,” Augustine said. “But there are a lot of values to registering here at school, especially if you’re a first-year or a second-year… to have that perspective of where you’re living, where you’re going to live for the next four years.”

Sophomore Sean Hannah canvassed outside Penrose Library with junior Thida Doowa.  Together they recruited around 12 voters, by Hannah’s estimate.  Hannah focused particularly on getting students to register in Walla Walla.

“I would ask them if they want to move their voter registration to Walla Walla,” Hannah said, “because it’s going to be where [students live] nine out of twelve months of their year.”

This year’s seven ballot initiatives served as another motivator for Hannah.  Walla Walla voters will be asked to decide, among other things, on two opposing initiatives regarding background checks for firearm purchasers and a third that would allocate funds to public schools across the state with the aim of decreasing class sizes.

Walla Walla County Elections Supervisor David Valiant says that college voters, like many others, come in fairly regular waves without dramatically changing the county’s election results.

“We see regular cycles of voter registration that peak in the presidential years, but tend also to ramp up in other even-numbered years,” Valiant said.  “With college towns, it’s very typical that… voters graduate and move on.”

Last year’s vote on an initiative to label genetically modified foods created a surge in voter interest on Washington’s college campuses, according to Valiant.  He doesn’t anticipate a similar level of growth in 2014.

“This year there’s nothing quite that polarizing,” Valiant said.

October 6th was the last day for online and mail-in registration, but in-person registration at the county elections department remains open until October 27th.  Gitau encourages anyone who can to register.

“Everyone should vote,” Gitau said.  “Everyone should register to vote, and if they’re not sure about what to vote for, or they’re not sure if they care about voting, I think registering is a good way to ensure that they have options.”

Sherman Alexie, the author of Whitman’s 2014 summer reading book, “Reservation Blues,” came to campus Wednesday, Oct. 1. He delivered a speech to a packed house in Cordiner Hall, which consisted of Whitman and Walla Walla community members as well as members of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

Alexie spent the day of his visit traveling around Walla Walla and the Whitman campus.  He visited an Encounters class and the Lincoln Alternative High School, and dined with Native Whitman students, members of the Umatilla tribe and of the Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts, a Pendleton-based nonprofit intended to provide artistic opportunities to Native Americans.

When Alexie began his talk, it more closely resembled a stand-up comedy routine than a book lecture. He joked at one point that he had not read “Reservation Blues,” published in 1995,in so long that he had forgotten it.

“It was 19 years ago!” he said. “I have a dim memory of it … and so for two weeks now, I’ve been thinking ‘I need to read that.’”

Alexie careened throughout the night from stream-of-consciousness comedy to more serious, pointed storytelling, particularly one about a trip around Wisconsin he took last week. The tale ended with a cryptic statement about the story’s purpose.

“You can figure out what that had … to do with ‘Reservation Blues,’” he said.

Alexie’s lecture lasted nearly an hour and a half.  He jokingly attributed its lengthiness to his Native heritage.

“The scariest thing in the Indian world is when an Indian guy gets up to a microphone and says, ‘I have a few words I would like to say,’” said Alexie. “I figure the longer I talk, the more of you leave, and then I can sign less books later.”

He concluded the talk with an impromptu performance by Umatilla singers and drummers Elijah Bevis, Ian Sampson and Wilbur Latman. Alexie called them onto the stage to accompany a brief scene performed by a Umatilla woman he had met earlier that day who had said she wanted to be an astronaut.

“I’ve been thinking about it ever since I met you earlier this evening, about this Indian woman walking on Mars,” he said.

He went on to describe the scene. After testing several possibilities, he eventually decided that she would ask permission from the red planet before walking onto it and burst into song. At this point, he turned to the Umatilla attendees.

“Who’s the best drum group of the Umatilla?  Who’s the best drum group down there?  Are you guys here?” he said. “Get up here. I want to hear you.”

Bevis, Sampson and Latman, after some deliberation, sang an unnamed song that Alexie dubbed a “grand entry” while the would-be astronaut walked across the stage.

“We were the only singers around,” said Bevis. “We raised our hands, all of us, and were like, ‘Oh, might as well go up there.’”

“Ask and you shall receive,” said Sampson.

The song itself was a spur-of-the-moment choice.

“It came to our minds. Whatever song comes to our minds, we sing it,” said Bevis.

President George Bridges, whose chose “Reservation Blues” to be the summer reading book, cites Alexie’s multifaceted style as a major drawing point for the lecture.

“He has a terrific sense of humor, is a powerful storyteller and an engaging lecturer,” said Bridges in an email. “We are honored to have him visit and speak about his work and his life.”

First-year Heather Hamilton has seen Alexie speak before and said that the free-flowing format of the talk didn’t surprise her.

“I enjoyed it. It was interesting and also entertaining,” she said. “It was interesting to me that he didn’t really talk about ‘Reservation Blues’ very much. And I don’t know if I wish that he had or not.”

ASWC representatives prepared for the upcoming legislative session this weekend on the annual ASWC retreat at the Johnston Wilderness Campus. The goal of the retreat is to educate  newly-elected senators on Senate procedures and on their roles on ASWC. Whitman-owned Johnston Wilderness Campus lies 15 miles southeast of Whitman College.

The retreat occurred a week earlier than normal this year due to changes in election rules which shifted elections from the last to the third weekend of September. Last year the retreat occurred in early October, the day before the first Senate meeting. ASWC President senior Tatiana Kaehler hopes that the change will allow for a stronger first week in session.

“I think it will help us because now we’ll have at least a week in between the two first committees to meet and go about their business, which will give us a lot of material for the first senate,” said Kaehler. “We typically have a ton of business at the first Senate.”

The retreat, which began Friday evening and lasted through Saturday, focused on team building as well as parliamentary procedure and the duties of the various committees within ASWC. Senators met with their committees, held mock business debates and participated in team-building activities. Oversight Committee senior Chair Molly Olmsted said that the retreat serves to familiarize senators with procedure and with each other.

“All of Senate flows a lot more fluidly if people are more comfortable with who they’re around and know each other better,” said Olmsted. “That way they feel like they can get up and talk in front of this huge group in this really formal setting more comfortably.”

This semester a Senate seat for the junior class remains vacant, but this does not worry Kaehler or Olmsted. While they hope it will be filled at some point during the year, ASWC has no qualms with training a senator on the fly.

“I think once that junior senator is elected, then of course we’ll have to work with them to ensure that they’re caught up and feeling comfortable with all the things … that they missed,” said Kaehler. “We’ve had situations in the past where senators have had to resign because of … prior time commitments. And so this isn’t something completely new to ASWC.”

The retreat cost around 360 dollars and was funded with the 2,500 dollar ASWC Executive President’s Fund.  According to Kaehler, the money went largely toward food. The ASWC Executive Fund, which totals 6,500 dollars, often runs dry by the end of the year.

“Unfortunately we typically end up using it all because we keep it as low as possible,” said Kaehler. “But it’s my goal this year to ensure that we spend that wisely.”

First-year Senator Deepraj Pawar came back to Whitman with a positive view of the retreat.

“We got a lot of work done, and it was just really good to establish ourselves as a group,” said Pawar. “We all really got to know each other.”