ALEX LASSITER: Hello, lovely people! It’s Alex Lassiter with the Minnesota Daily here, and you’re listening to In The Know, a podcast dedicated to the University of Minnesota.

For those of you who know me, after this summer I’m moving up to the retirement home of college – senior year. And while I’m not planning to yell at any of you young whippersnappers to “get off my lawn,” I’ve certainly mellowed out a lot since my freshman year. Not only that, but I’ve learned so much about myself and the world around me. Despite being a senior, I’ve only recently realized just how much of a baby I am.

So much of the stuff I wish I knew as a freshman wasn’t a matter of me not figuring it out on my own, I was just never told. So I figured, why not impart some of my wise old wisdom to the next generation? Just so I’m not rambling on my own, I invited three of my fellow graduating senior coworkers to share their own advice.

Joining me today is Sports Desk editor Alex Karwowski, City Desk reporter Ainsley Brown and Managing Editor Amelia Roessler. Fun fact, every single person speaking in this episode has a first name that starts with the letter “A.” That’s not really relevant to anything, I just thought it was cool and wanted to mention it somewhere.

All three of my guests started their college careers at the University of Minnesota. Karwowski said he chose the U because it fit two unique criteria for him.

ALEX KARWOWSKI: My senior year of high school, I applied to six schools. It was like Syracuse, Butler, Hope College, which is a really small school in Michigan, Indiana, Minnesota, obviously and Mizzou, like Missouri. And I chose Minnesota because I wanted to go to a Big Ten school, and I wanted to go to a school that nobody in my family had gone to.  And I wanted to go somewhere that, like, it was far from home, but not, like, inconveniently far, like Penn State or something. So Minnesota just seems like a pretty solid option, so I was like, I guess that’s the one.

LASSITER: Brown was drawn to the U from a feeling of familiarity.

AINSLEY BROWN: I’m not originally from Minnesota, but my family is. And so I grew up being very familiar with the Twin Cities and I applied during the COVID pandemic. And so I wanted to go somewhere familiar, so that was definitely a draw. And then also I got a pretty good merit scholarship to come here and that definitely helps because I’m basically paying in-state tuition.

LASSITER: And Roessler was wrestling between the light side and the dark side of the Force.

AMELIA ROESSLER: I had to choose between here and Madison, and I don’t even know why that was on my list because the U is obviously way better. I was a huge, like, marching band nerd in high school. Literally one of the big things was like, “Oh, the U has a fantastic marching band and Madison doesn’t.” So, shout out to the marching band for being my reason why I came to the U. 

LASSITER: My freshman year, I lived in Middlebrook Hall on the West Bank. I came to the University for theater originally, so the proximity of the dorm to my classes was its main selling point for me. When I was there, I met two of my closest friends and made a lot of formative memories. Funnily enough, Brown and Roessler also lived in the exact same building I did.

BROWN: I lived in Honors housing in Middlebrook Hall, which was definitely, I don’t know. It was a unique experience because for Honors housing, it’s all, usually everybody on that floor is Honors and the people I met on that floor were still friends. Like, we ended up clicking really well, which I feel like is not always the situation. But yeah, we all clicked really well. So it was a really nice living situation, like I’m still friends with my freshman year roommate.

ROESSLER: I lived in Middlebrook on the eighth floor. I’m not going to lie, Middlebrook gets way more hate than it needs. I know it’s on West Bank and it’s far away, but we have our own kitchen and it’s like on-campus, but it’s like kind of on the outskirts. You get to do your own thing, but I had a great time. I met a lot of my current friends there and we had, so much fun times together and it was fantastic.

LASSITER: Meanwhile, Karwowski was living it up in the 17th Avenue dorm, a space closer to the sporting side of the University on the East Bank.

KARWOWSKI: I think the biggest, the coolest thing and the thing I miss most about 17th is just, like, having a spot where I could meet my friends for like meals. Like the dining hall, people hate on the dining hall all the time, but like the dining hall was “free,” in quotes, you know, and like I could just go whenever I wanted. I didn’t have to make my own food. Like it was good. Like I kind of miss the dining hall. I never really went there for lunch or anything cause it was always too crowded, but like breakfast and dinner, I was feasting.

LASSITER: But people don’t just go to college for the roof over their head and the so-so dining hall food. Although, Karwowski is right, the food at 17th is absolutely unmatched. One of the hardest things about my freshman year was deciding which classes to take and what major to pursue. As I mentioned, I entered the University wanting to do theater which obviously didn’t pan out.

My three guests had it all figured out, they all came to the U knowing that they wanted to be journalism majors. However, some of the paths they took within their majors changed from their freshman years to now. For instance, Brown came in wanting to double major in journalism and political science, but that plan ended up shifting over to a journalism and geography double.

BROWN: That was something I actually struggled with for a little bit because on the surface, they seem so separate. And when I was going to do, you know, political science with journalism, there’s a very obvious path there to like political reporting and like that kind of world geography. That’s a little less obvious, especially since I was going into physical geography and not human geography. And that’s when I kind of realized the applicability there was for talking about environmental causes and environmental issues with journalism, because I mean, physical geography is a lot of things. It’s a very interdisciplinary science, but one of the biggest parts of it is environmental science and like environmental information. And there’s definitely a need in the journalism world for, like, effective scientific communication. And so I saw that and was like, this is, I think this is where I fit in.

LASSITER: All this talk about geography reminded me of a story I worked on last summer about the East Anatolian fault over by Turkey, the origin of those major earthquakes in the area. I recounted how I felt so lost trying to follow what one of my interviewees was talking about, which is exactly what Brown said drew her to the geography double in favor of political science.

BROWN: My biggest thing is like, if I’m going to talk about science, I want to understand the science, because I think then you can more effectively communicate it and make sure people actually understand what’s going on. Because then otherwise I think you risk some possible inaccuracies because you’ve missed something, cause you’re not a scientist, you know?

LASSITER: So to all you little freshies starting classes in the fall, just a reminder that you don’t have to have your major, or even the niche path you’ll be taking within your major, completely planned out by the day you start out. Heck, you don’t even have to have it planned out for the whole of your first year. Take some fun classes. Take some weird classes. You might meet some cool people, like how Roessler and I found out in real time during our interview that we would be in the same class during the fall.

I’m taking a pickleball class next semester.

ROESSLER: I am too! 

LASSITER: Wait, wait, which one?

ROESSLER: The beginners pickleball class on Monday?

LASSITER: Yes!

ROESSLER: No, I literally was like, “I want to play pickleball. Oh my God, there’s a pickleball class!” And I was like, “Okay, it says beginner’s pickleball.” I’m not necessarily a beginner, but I want to, like, learn more about the rules, and I just want to go have fun. And so I was, like, so excited. 

LASSITER: You are going to smoke me in that class. I’m so nervous now.

ROESSLER: No, no, it’s okay. I’ll go easy on everybody. 

LASSITER: But if there’s one word of advice I have for incoming freshmen, do not take that 8 a.m. class. It’s not worth it. Roessler and I both figured that out the hard way during our freshman year.

ROESSLER: Didn’t we have the same Spanish class together?

LASSITER: Yeah, we did! We did, we did, we did. 

ROESSLER: That class was awful, because it was… 

BOTH: 8 a.m.

LASSITER: 4 days a week.

ROESSLER: Oh my gosh. 

LASSITER: Not fun at all.

ROESSLER: Coming to college, I was like, “Oh, I can totally do an 8 a.m., like, that’s so easy.” And then I took one 8 a.m. class, and I was like, “I am never again taking an 8 a.m.,” because I used to go to Spanish class, and then I had a break before my 11:15, like, creative writing class, and I would fall asleep in Walter, because I didn’t want to walk all the way back to Middlebrook, so I would go pretend to do work in Walter and just take a nap.

LASSITER: Before we concluded, I asked each of my guests one final question: what is the biggest way in which you think you’ve changed from your freshman to senior year? For Karwowski, it was just taking that dive off the deep end and talking to people.

KARWOWSKI: You gotta, you gotta, you gotta just do it, man. It’s, I don’t know how else, how else to say it, but, like, you just kind-of have to, like, you gotta throw yourself in, in the thick of it, like you gotta go up to people and talk to them. They will not come to you.

And I kind of still am a little, like, reclusive in a sense. My freshman year, the idea of walking up to somebody, like, in Coffman, or, like, anywhere on the street is the scariest thing ever, but, like, now it’s probably one of my better skills as a journalist, just, like, straight-up walking up to people.

LASSITER: Karwowski said he also credits journalism for another skill he learned over time – listening.

KARWOWSKI: So that’s another thing that journalism has really taught me. It’s just like, the biggest gift that we have as humans is our ear. Like, we can talk all day about what we do and how great we are. And we can talk about ourselves all day, but like your ears, like you just gotta shut up and listen. It’s kind of just how it is sometimes. So that’s probably the biggest thing that I’ve learned from freshman to senior year, is I just got to listen. 

LASSITER: For Brown, it was studying abroad in Florence, Italy.

BROWN: The biggest thing that comes to mind that made that change for me was studying abroad. I studied abroad the fall of my third year, of my junior year, in Florence and that was an incredibly helpful experience because I was in a group of seven people. There were only seven of us who studied in the program that semester, which was crazy. But because of that, like none of us knew each other. 

And so I just went out into the city alone a lot of the time and I would travel alone and I got really comfortable being alone and you just learn so much about yourself and how you are as a traveler, as a tourist. That was just, like, so incredibly helpful for me because then coming back, like, I’m so unafraid to just, like, try new stuff by myself or take on new challenges by myself and feel confident and being able to know that I know how to do those things. That no matter what, I’m going to get something out of it. It’s just very much changed my perspective on myself and who I am.

LASSITER: And Roessler said despite the fact she learned a lot in college, a lot of her personal changes came from working behind the bar in Faribault.

ROESSLER: Being on the other side of the bar, I learned to stand up for myself and not take any crap. And that is another thing that, like, I learned from that too, is to stand up for myself and, like, be myself and be not a people pleaser. And so I did learn in college, like, being with my friends and being confident and, like, going through all the hard classes and going through everything. I did learn it that way too. But also, sad as it is to say, I think I learned a lot from being a bartender.

LASSITER: My own answer is simple – I figured out who I was, and who I want to become. They are really different people. I’m still a work-in-progress, and that’s okay. Some people come into college thinking that they’re going to completely reinvent themselves, but what ends up happening is they just become more mature versions of the person they are right now.

Don’t break yourself trying to fit the mold that other people shape for you. Show genuine love to one another. Even people you don’t know. Even people you don’t like. College isn’t a time to completely close yourself off, it’s a time to open yourself up more than you ever have before. To seek knowledge and the truth and to re-introduce yourself well, yourself. Take it from this seasoned old senior, change only happens when you let it. And if you haven’t already, open up a credit card and use it responsibly. Trust me, it’s going to be an absolute game changer when you graduate.

This episode was written by Alex Lassiter and produced by Kaylie Sirovy. As always, we appreciate you listening in and feel free to send a message to our email inbox at podcasting@mndaily.com with any questions, comments, concerns or episodes you’d like to see. This is our final episode for the summer season, so I won’t see you and you won’t hear me until September. I’m Alex, and this has been In The Know. Take care, y’all.

ALEX LASSITER: Hello, lovely people. It’s Alex from the Minnesota Daily and you are listening to In The Know, a podcast dedicated to the University of Minnesota. 

This episode is going to be a little bit different because I have a special guest with me, Katrina Bailey. So Katrina, why don’t you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do at the Daily? And what desk you work on and all that kind of cool stuff. 

KATRINA BAILEY: Yeah, perfect. So I’m Katrina, I work on the city desk and I am the senior staff reporter as of right now. And basically what the city desk does is it focuses more on what’s going on in Minneapolis and the Twin Cities rather than only focused on the University of Minnesota. And I’m very happy to be here.

 LASSITER: So today, Katrina, we’re going to be talking about your very first story, which is titled East African Students Process Tensions in East Africa. You wrote this back in February. So why don’t you give us a little bit of context, kind of lay down the groundwork for us on this story.

BAILEY: So, honestly, when I first joined the Daily, I didn’t know what city desk was or what I should write about. So one of my friends who is Ethiopian brought this story to me and I thought it was super interesting because I know there’s a big East African population on campus and I just thought it would be important to cover this issue and see kind of how it was affecting them. So, honestly, the hardest part of the story was getting sources for it because I know this is a very touchy subject for people and they don’t want to be perceived in the wrong way by picking a side kind of. So that was the hardest part. 

I was working with another reporter, her name’s Alex, on this story and she was covering more of the background of the story and I was reaching out to the sources, but like I was saying I didn’t really get any. So I decided to attend the Somali Student Association, like, kickoff event that they had in the spring because I thought that would be perfect. And then I can talk to people directly there instead of trying to go through their email and then not respond. 

So I go there, and it’s really interesting just to see how the atmosphere is. Everyone’s really excited to be there and different things like that because they’re going to have, it’s like a game night type of thing. So I go in there and I approach the president and I’m like, “Hey, I don’t know if you got my email, but I’m Katrina Bailey with the Minnesota Daily and I was wondering if I could talk to someone here.” So then they’re like, “Yeah, of course. Here’s the like board historian who can tell you a lot of information.” So he was very happy to talk about it. 

And he basically said that Somaliland is a territory who wants to be considered a sovereign nation. And they recently made a deal with Ethiopia on leasing part of its coastline for the next 50 years because Ethiopia is a landlocked country and having that access to the water really allows them to like trade more and different things like that. But then Somalia doesn’t necessarily like that because Ethiopian and Somalian have had issues for a while. 

So that’s basically kind of like the gist of the story and a lot of people have family in that area. So it’s interesting just to get their perspective on how they’re concerned for their safety. I spoke with somebody else at the event who said he has, like, his uncle had to flee the area where they were having conflict and that he has, like, a very, like, close tie with the area. And it was just interesting to see because I personally knew nothing about that area. I don’t have any connections to that area. So I was just like overjoyed that they were willing to talk to me about this because touchy subjects are always hard to approach when you’re a journalist. 

So that was honestly super nice. They were all super nice. And they were like, “Oh, you can stay if you want to.” And another thing that I thought was interesting is I wasn’t used to not being the only white person in a room if you know what I mean, that was something that I don’t know if it like took me back, but it’s just something I like immediately noticed. That I was like as soon as I walked in I was like, “Wow I am the minority here,” and that just really put things into perspective because I’ve never really been the minority being like a white female. 

So it was just interesting because they all were like super fun. They were all taking like polaroid pictures of each other and things like that. It was just a nice atmosphere to be in and I’m glad that I made an effort to go to the event because it’s way easier to talk to people when you physically show up instead of like hoping they’ll respond to your email. And then with that, I only had two sources and for a story you need at least three sources. 

So I reached out to like the, it was like the African Association, I don’t remember the exact name on campus. And then they finally got back to me and I was able to talk to the president. And I was like so happy that they were able to make time for me and basically I just like said, “Oh, how was, how do you feel?” Because she said she had both people who were Somali and Ethiopian in the association. And she’s like, it’s more like people don’t want to be perceived the wrong way, kind of what I was talking about earlier. 

That they are afraid if they like bring something up or something, someone will get a different perspective on them about this issue and then maybe they won’t want to be friends anymore or something. So like this subject was very touchy and I’m glad that I was able to cover it as my first story because I honestly haven’t written anything in that dynamic sense, usually I’ve been writing about like funding or grants or you know stuff through the city of Minneapolis that it’s honestly not as interesting as that because I always like the connection that people have with different areas of the world. 

And they’re able to bring that here because the U is a big diverse group of people and being able to cover specific areas is great. My beat is social issues, but it’s sometimes just kind of like whatever you find to write about, you know, because people in my desk kind of cover anything in that area. So, but yeah, it’s been it’s been a good experience. I’m glad that that was my first story and I think that Jack was saying that this was like one of the most read stories on city desk ever.

LASSITER: Yeah, I definitely, I remember hearing about that too. It sounds like it had a really, really big audience and for those listening Jack is the city desk editor. But it’s just really interesting that this is like your first story and it already garnered so much traction and so much interaction. 

And so I’m kind of curious, I have a few questions I want to ask about like the aftermath and everything. But before we get, or before I get too far ahead of myself, I guess I’m just most curious about how it was working on this story, your first story with your co author and how that research was split. How that interview process was split, like what you each contributed and what you learned from your parts of contribution.

BAILEY: Yeah, sure. So when I first started on the desk, Jack said it would be better if you worked with somebody else, which I totally understand, because this is my first ever newspaper job and just trying to get a hang of it was important. And I remember at like the first pitch meeting, I was like really nervous that this idea wouldn’t have been good enough, kind of, because I didn’t know exactly what to expect for the ideas here like my first actual pitch meeting. 

And Jack asked me, he’s like, “Do you have any story ideas?” I was like, “Well, I kind of have one, but I’d rather not pitch it.” And then I was, then I like backtracked on my words. And then I was like, “Actually, I would like to pitch it.” And then he’s like, “Oh, I love this idea. “And then he’s like, “Alex, you’re going to work with her on this story.” 

So we talked and Alex was like, “This is your story and I’m just like a helper basically for your story, so I can do all the background information like find out all the history of it and kind of why they’re at tensions with each other right now. And I think it’d be better if you went and talked to the people about the story.” And I was like, “Okay, that’s fine.” That’s kind of what I was thinking about anyway. 

Yeah, and I was nervous because I mean it’s my first story with like with the Daily. But then I’m more like interested in building the emotional connection is what I’m trying to say, so I’m glad that we were able to do that. And she’s been she was really helpful and kind of like showed me how to write the story how like the application we used to write the story, it’s called Flow, which is basically where everyone submits their articles and then people can like edit them and different things like that. 

Like I didn’t know how any of that worked. So it was nice that she was able to help me with that. It was overall a really positive experience and I’m glad I was able to work with someone on my first article because it made things a lot less intimidating, for sure. 

LASSITER: Absolutely, and that makes a ton of sense. Trust me, coming in, my very first article about a year ago, I was floored, I was flabbergasted. I just, I had no idea where to start, but it seems like you did a really, really good job, and it paid off a lot. Now was this your first article that you’d ever written for anything, or was it just your first article here at the Daily? 

BAILEY: It was my first article probably published ever besides just the stuff you did in like the journalism classes just because I didn’t, I didn’t know about the Daily at first. And I probably would have started writing it sooner, but I’m glad that there’s this opportunity for me to do. And I was honestly worried I wasn’t going to get hired. So, yeah. 

LASSITER: And so, with that first article ever, what did you learn from it? What did you take away from it, like especially in your talking to people in your reporting and pre-reporting and in your tackling of like sensitive issues and topics?

 I’m really interested to hear in what this really beefy, it sounds like, first article taught you in the way and how you’ve implemented those skills that you’ve learned into maybe future articles or like previous articles that you have put out that are future in the context of when this article was released back in February. If you’re able or willing to give a few examples.

BAILEY: What I realized was everyone has something to say about anything. And that’s what I feel like is important because even if it’s something small or it’s like, “Oh, I never thought of it that way.” Different things like that, that’s really what I learned about is honestly, reach out to as many people as possible. It’s kind of how I’ve taken that and because everyone has something different to say. They’re involved in it in maybe a slightly different way or through a different organization or different things like that. 

So it’s good to hear different perspectives and then it makes you think, “Oh, I didn’t think of it that way,” because doing like the pre-reporting or just trying to find out all the facts about it. So like, let’s say you’re talking about some like funding or something like, “Where does the funding come from and what is it used for?” Like, so then you figure out all of that and then when you talk to people you’re more finding out why is this important? 

And then they all have a different idea on why it’s important and maybe how it’s affecting them or the organization they’re a part of or something like that. It’s also important to show up. That’s something I really realized. I know a lot of people probably just like think emails are better or phone calls are better, but it’s completely different when you actively show up to the event and then show that you take an interest enough to take time out of your day to show up and then they’re more willing to talk to you. I understand that that doesn’t work all the time because I mean, we’re busy, especially during the school year. Like I can’t really show up to stuff because I have class. 

But over the summer it’s different because a lot of people have more free time, I would say. So showing up is definitely important with that. Just allowing people to talk. I give a lot of people free range, I guess, in the interview. I’m just like, “This is kind of what I wanted to cover.” And then they’re like, “Okay, I’ll just start talking.” And then usually when they start talking, they have that flow and then they just keep going and then eventually they get to something. I’m like, “That’s a good quote,” or I was like, “Oh, I didn’t.” It’s like all goes back to the oh, I didn’t think about that because as journalists, you’re constantly learning. 

Even if you do all the pre-reporting and different things like that you’re still learning how this has affected someone in a different way that you didn’t think of because you’re just on the outside of it just learning. Then all you do is continue to learn. I remember when I was first started at the journalism program here at the Hubbard School, it was kind of like, you should know all the answers to your questions before you ask them.

But personally, I don’t necessarily agree with that because how are you, how am I supposed to understand, like, how is it important to you? You know, like on like a personal level. A personal level is what makes the story interesting more so than the context to back it up. While that is important just for people to understand how it works and different things like that, I’m more interested in like those quotes that are like make you feel something. 

Or it’s like, for example, my story that came out yesterday, it’s about the Marcy Holmes Leave a Light On program. And I interviewed a student and they said that, “You couldn’t pay me to live there because of the crime.” And just like, hearing it like that was just like, wow. And then I included that in my story because it was really important. But it was just like, something like that I can’t prepare for or I can’t know the answer to that because they’ll say it in certain ways that just make the story better. 

So I feel like that is important and just figuring out how to best cover the subject, so like with my first story it was like a very touchy subject and I was just trying to figure out the best way to approach it. And I just realized like kind of let them talk about it because one of the people I interviewed just kept talking and talking about like their experience and their family different things like that and it was best for me not to interrupt them or say anything. Just like let the silence sit and then they continue to talk which I feel like is important. So I was just, made sure that when I initially started I was like, “If this is too touchy or if I say anything you’re not comfortable with you don’t have to answer I’m, just trying to learn more about the situation and your kind of like your involvement with it and how it affects you.” 

So I feel like that’s the best way to approach a situation like this. It’s like, put yourself out there as like, “It’s okay to be vulnerable. And if I cross over the line by asking any questions, feel free not to answer because I don’t want to do anything that will like make you upset or anything. I’m just here more like to learn about your personal experience.” So any other story that I would cover to this extent, I would feel like just be available and be like, “If you want to talk about it after the story is written or anything like I’m here for you,” and different things like that.

LASSITER: And so having this first story, and you talked a lot about this in your answer to your previous question, but you came into it, I’m sure, just not knowing everything, the full scope of the situation. What did you learn from talking to people about the situation in Somalia and Somaliland and Ethiopia? 

Kind of like a best hits for people who haven’t read your article yet, the most pertinent pieces of information. And then what do you think, if you’ve had any contact with your sources, post publication, what’s changed? What is something new that we should be aware of if there is anything to that extent?

BAILEY: Yeah, so I haven’t heard from my sources yet because I told them to reach out to me if they had any questions because I don’t want to like feel like I’m prying into their business, I should say. And I don’t really think there’s anything has evolved because it’s more like they were just trying to talk about it. It’s like Ethiopia wants the shoreline and then Somaliland wants Ethiopia to recognize them as a sovereign state. And for Ethiopia to use the shoreline, it would like come into Somalia and that, Somaliland has been disputed territory for a long time. 

So that’s kind of like the background of the article. And then when I talked with people, they were like, “I have family in the area and they’ve had to move away and I just hope that they can find peace eventually.” And it really touched me that some people have, like, are locally involved even if they’re thousands of miles away from them. 

Just being able to hear about their experience and hear how much, like, this is affecting them, even when right now it’s just, like, a conversation, kind of between the groups of people. So that was really interesting.

Like just learning about the background like the first person I talked to, like the board historian of the Somali student group just knew so much information and some of it, like I couldn’t even find online. They just knew so much information about the land and like the dispute and the tensions that have been there since like 1991 or something like that. So it was just interesting that they knew all this stuff and they held it so close to their heart that they were more than happy to share about it. And they weren’t, they didn’t hesitate at all with showing me the information. 

I was really happy about cause I didn’t want them to like, feel like I was over crossing the line in any way, but I’m glad that I was able to do that. And it honestly gave me a lot of confidence. So that’s, I continue to write and make stories it’s like everything became a lot easier. So I feel like after I tackled this really touchy subject as my first story everything else seemed kind of easy you know. So yeah, the my story just to like sum it up it’s kind of like giving more of like the context I’ve talked about throughout the story and just how people react to it and like having family there even when the people don’t know anyone specifically there. 

If they know like, that’s their homeland, or that’s where they came from, or like, immigrated from, or anything, so just knowing about the thing. Oh, now that I think about it, what was interesting is, a lot of people didn’t know about this at the student event, for example. They were like, “Oh, I didn’t know this was going on.” So it was kind of like two sides of like, people who were deeply involved and deeply connected, or people who like, are kind of like, estranged from their homeland, or maybe they’re like, have been in America for years, you know, so they didn’t, they don’t have an emotional connection with that area anymore. 

So they just felt like they didn’t need, they didn’t know about it because they don’t have a connection. So that was really interesting to me because there was kind of like two sides of the story, like, “Oh, I didn’t know,” or like, “Oh, I do know, and my family is involved.” So just trying to find that balance between kind of who to talk to and who is willing to talk about their story. Because if they aren’t involved in it I wouldn’t want to say I don’t want to talk with them, but they don’t, they don’t know anything about the conflict going on. So I wouldn’t be able to get that emotional perspective on that. 

LASSITER: And that does answer about all the questions that I came in wanting to ask. Is there anything else that you’d like to share about your experience writing this story? Is there anything else that you’d like to share with us? That you just think you’d like us listeners to know or anything. Any just last tidbits of knowledge, wisdom, information that you’d like to share with us before we sign off for today. 

BAILEY: Yeah, so thank you for having me on, I really appreciate it. And I’ve never done anything like this. It’s been super interesting. I just think that it’s important to keep an open mind and learn about stuff that you wouldn’t have normally learned about because that’s how you learn about what’s going on in the world. 

It’s like I had no idea this was going on, but then with my friend, it like deeply touched her. So then I was like, “Oh, this will deeply touch a lot of other people.” So then I learned more information about it. I just feel like it’s important to just keep an eye on of what everything is going on. I know like news happens every day and there’s so much of it, but just finding something that seems interesting and learning a little more about it is important. 

Like even like looking on your local news and you just click on one story and read it. Just to kind of get what’s going on and different things like that because you can always learn more. That’s kind of your thing as a journalist is you just continue to learn. I know that I wanted to be a journalist for a long time and kind of what I thought of was I get to be so many different careers and so many different people as a journalist because I just learn so much information about something that I could honestly maybe like teach.

I could teach other people about it is kind of like what you do as a journalist is you teach other people about the story that you have an interest in and then I kind of like become that job or that role for that for that story. And I always think that’s been interesting because I like used to want to be like a biologist or something that has like nothing to do with journalism, but then one day if I find a story that is it and then I can talk to biologists it’s like I become a temporary biologist if that makes sense. 

So I just feel like it’s just interesting to learn about and with this story, it’s good to read on it. I know it happened, like, or like this is still going on, but my story was written back in February of this year. It’s just good to go back and read the story just to kind of learn what’s going on. There is also like a bunch of comments that were left on the story about people’s opinions on it and different things like that. 

So that also brings you in another perspective. So I would say like the last thing is just immerse yourself kind of in learning because that I feel like is the most important thing because you never know what learning about one thing can do to help elevate your life I would say.

LASSITER: Well, thank you so much for dropping that insight on us, Katrina. It was an absolute pleasure to have you. My name is Alex Lassiter with the Minnesota Daily, and this has been In The Know. You can feel free to read Katrina’s story on the Minnesota Daily website. It is titled, East African students process tensions in East Africa, or you can go on her staff page, Katrina, that’s K A T R I N A, Bailey, B A I L E Y and read it there. If you have any questions, comments, concerns regarding this episode or any others, feel free to shoot us an email at podcasting@mndaily.com and we will see you in the next episode. Again, I’m Alex, and this has been In The Know, take care of y’all.

ALEX LASSITER: Hello, lovely people! It’s Alex Lassiter with the Minnesota Daily, and you’re listening to In The Know, a podcast dedicated to the University of Minnesota.

Ever since the spring semester ended, I’ve been watching a lot more movies in my free time. And something that I noticed is that a good movie has a really good score. For those of you unfamiliar, the score is the set of music composed specifically for a movie. And a good score includes several recognizable themes, like this one. Something so recognizable that even if I butcher it like that, you’d know it comes from Star Wars.

This episode will be a little bit different. Since we’re talking about a topic that’s easier to listen to than, well, talk about, and I’m sure you guys don’t want to hear me squawking every time I need to give an example of a piece of music, I’ll just have a piano play certain musical cues throughout the episode. That way, if you don’t remember a certain character theme, maybe the sound of it will help jog your memory.

To talk more about movie themes and what makes them so recognizable, I sat down first with Patrick Warfield, the director of the music department at the University of Minnesota. I came into this episode wanting to talk about the main themes of Indiana Jones and The Avengers, both pretty recognizable themes. However, during my conversation with Warfield, he brought up two other films that I knew immediately would be way better.

PATRICK WARFIELD: I’m thinking of the Star Wars series, especially the first three canonical films. You don’t know right at the very beginning which themes go with who and over time, that’s sort of revealed to you, and the connections between themes become revealed. And John Williams, the composer there, is particularly skilled at that kind of thing.

LASSITER: Which was one of the things I’d wanted most to talk about. In movies, you have themes that represent a single character or a group. The protagonist’s theme can often serve as the main theme of the movie, like the examples of Indiana Jones and The Avengers that I just gave. But where did these themes come from? Why do we as audience members expect to just be able to connect a certain theme to a certain character every time we go to the movies?

WARFIELD: The way we usually talk about it, I think, is going back to some operatic traditions. Especially the music of Richard Wagner, who you may be familiar with, was a big Germanic music drama specialist who is often attributed with coming up with this idea of the leitmotif, the notion that there’s a, can be a melodic or harmonic framework for a particular character, a particular idea, a particular object.

And that, many of the early film composers were enamored with that kind of music and it gets transferred right away. So you find, even quite early on, lots of examples of tunes getting associated with particular people or ideas. Of course, the Star Wars films are kind-of the obvious example, right? The love themes and the Darth Vader theme and all that kind of thing.

LASSITER: It was interesting to me that such a pivotal part of film music came from opera. I’d heard of Richard Wagner, but I didn’t know he had such a profound influence on film scores. It made me wonder what else he inspired, and how exactly his technique found its way into film.

To answer these questions, I dialed up John De Haan, an opera professor at the University. And I do mean, dialed him up. At the time of our interview, De Haan was in Italy, so I was only able to reach him over the phone. But despite being in a different country, De Haan jumped at the chance to talk Wagner with me.

JOHN DE HAAN: And he especially used the leitmotif in his composition of The Ring. Der Ring des Nibelungen, in German, and it was well received, and it was where he first kind-of showed off his compositional technique of using leitmotifs to indicate characters and objects, and even emotions actually.

While other people are on stage and they’re singing and they’re delivering text and they’re furthering the story, he would slip in a leitmotif of a character so that, even though the character is not on stage, and not imminently to be on stage, you would think of that character in relation to what the onstage characters are saying. I mean, he just changed the music and it worked so, it worked so beautifully.

LASSITER: So he influenced performance music a ton and inspired one of the most widely-used techniques in film and on stage. This Wagner guy must have been an incredible dude, right?

DE HAAN: He was an extremely narcissistic person, not really a nice guy at all. Just what I’m saying, you know and if my daughter brought home Richard Wagner, you know, “This is my new boyfriend, Richard Wagner,” I’d be thinking, “Oh no.” So he was not well thought of even back in his day, but his music is undeniably master-level.

These composers look back and when they’re writing like this, I’m sure it’s going through their heads, “Thank you, Richard Wagner. This is an awesome compositional technique.” And they unashamedly take advantage of it. And what I’m saying is that Wagner was so narcissistic anyway, but had he known how important his compositional technique would become through the decades, into the next century, and through that century, and into our current century, he would have been completely unbearable.

LASSITER: So obviously, having died in the late 1800s, Wagner wasn’t around for the advent of Star Wars in the 1970’s. But if he was, it probably would have blown his mind faster than the Death Star (spoilers for those of you who are concerned about an almost 50-year-old movie, by the way). So how did a composer like John Williams, who did the Star Wars soundtrack, associate certain sounds with certain characters?

DE HAAN: The obvious one is Darth Vader, you know, dun, dun, dun, dun, da da, dun da da, you know, and it puts fear in our hearts. That’s, to me, the biggest leitmotif in the Star Wars and most important and the most dramatic. The one thing that I recognized in, you know, you do, even if it’s subconsciously realize that, okay, this is Leia’s theme and, and this is Luke’s.

John Williams also used different orchestration for these. In other words, he might take Luke’s theme, but depending on the situation in the film, he would use different instruments to play this theme. Or you can kind of tell who Leia is thinking about because if she’s supposed to be thinking about Luke, he’ll play Luke’s theme and you’ll go, “Oh yeah, she’s thinking about Luke.” Just brilliant.

LASSITER: I mentioned earlier that I came into the episode wanting to talk about Indiana Jones and The Avengers as my example movies. Well, I didn’t just substitute both of those for only Star Wars, as iconic as it is. When Warfield and I talked, he brought up another staple John Williams score.

WARFIELD: One of the things I was noticing, for bizarre reasons, I decided a month or so ago to watch the original Superman film, and how good the opening credits music is and I think in some ways that might be, and I’m going to say this really off the cuff, and say maybe that’s John Williams’ best opening theme, because there’s so much happening just in that few minutes of the beginning of Superman.

LASSITER: Though most modern motion pictures have since dropped the opening credits sequence, this trend of an overture at the start of a movie isn’t unique to film. Despite diving mostly into opera, De Haan mentioned musical theater’s use of an overture, or a medley of the major songs from throughout the show, right as the curtain is rising.

DE HAAN: A lot of overtures in music theater are exactly what you’re describing. They will say, “Okay, here’s the cool music you’re going to hear tonight,” and then we’ll just wind through all the music and the leitmotifs as well. 

I’m not as up on music theater, but I know that a lot of their overtures are just a potpourri of, you know, you’ll remember. I think they’re putting this into the brains of the audience so that when they hear the characters sing them, they’ve already heard it once before. This is the exposition, and then, and then when they hear that music again, boom, “I’ve heard that before. I love that melody,” or whatever.

LASSITER: Before I left, Warfield made one more important distinction, and that’s whether the character could hear the music being played. Most of the time, main characters don’t interact with their own themes unless it’s for an audio gag, like Spider-Man having his own theme song set as his phone’s ringtone. But the leitmotif is always set up for the benefit of the audience.

WARFIELD: Diegetic, or the diegesis, is the world of the film. And then the (non-diegesis) is the world of the viewer, in a sense. And so music can get used in both ways. You can think about, when is there music that the people on screen hear? Someone turns on a radio in the movie, and they hear music coming out of the radio. That’s music that’s part of the world of the film.

Or then there’s the music that exists outside of the world of the film. We assume that Superman is not actually hearing his theme. We’ve moved into a space now where we expect largely composed, mostly music outside of the diegesis, the sort-of heroic themes of Superman, and much less of that internal space.

LASSITER: So yeah, I wanted to talk about two very different movies for this episode than the ones I ended up talking about, but the two I landed on were arguably the best possible examples of film composition I could have given. They had clearly defined character themes, unique orchestration and were both plenty iconic within their genres.

Even though I’d planned to talk about two different films originally, I suppose I still ended up talking about a movie with a score by John Williams and a superhero movie, so it all worked out in the end. Whether in a galaxy far, far away, or on the planet Krypton, or right here on planet earth, a well-thought out film score can elevate an average movie to out of this world.

This episode was written by Alex Lassiter and produced by Kaylie Sirovy. As always, we appreciate you listening in and feel free to send a message to our email inbox at podcasting@mndaily.com with any questions, comments or concerns. I’m Alex, and this has been In The Know. Take care, y’all.

ALEX LASSITER: Hello, lovely people! It’s Alex Lassiter with the Minnesota Daily, and you’re listening to In The Know, a podcast dedicated to the University of Minnesota.

As I’m sure our wonderful listeners know, this past Wednesday was Juneteenth. There were celebrations all over the city for the past few days and the University was no exception. Last Saturday, the 15th, the University hosted their third annual Juneteenth block party. The previous two years saw a great turnout from the community, so the event planning committee had tons of new ideas they wanted to put into motion for this year’s celebration.

Terresa Moses, a professor at the College of Design and the event organizer, said a lot had changed since the inaugural event back in 2022. Moses was also the lead planner for that original event.

TERRESA MOSES: I was involved in the very beginning. We planned the event in six weeks. We were kind-of asked by the Office of Equity and Diversity to see what we could do. And I was like, “Oh, I got this. Just let me do my thing.”

And ever since then, it’s been a six month process to be able to give us more time to plan and bring in vendors and work with community members to get their input on the celebration as well.

LASSITER: Moses said the event has been additive. They try out new things every year to get community members involved and put new art forms on display.

MOSES: I don’t know if there are things that we drop because it wasn’t working. More so we just wanted to try out new things. The first year we had a huge activation it was just a mural, which we had painted on the parking lot of UROC, it says “Black Futures.”  And we have updated that mural every year before. 

And then the second year, we had a screen printing activation there as well, as some other sort of art making and folks coming together around that. This year, we still have that, but we have another organization coming to memorialize the movement to help us with some of the murals that we want to do that will be on plywood. 

And we have a fashion show happening this year. That’s probably one of the things I’m most excited about for this event because we haven’t had a fashion show before and like how are they using clothing to talk about the theme? 

It’s a more building-up of what we’ve done in past years, rather than like dropping things because they weren’t working anymore. So, it’s really just sort of like a layering that’s happening that continues to change like the look and feel.

LASSITER: The event was started by the University’s Office of Equity and Diversity as a response to student and faculty push for greater representation. Keisha Varma, an associate vice president in the Office, said she was involved with the planning committee for the inaugural event back in 2022.

KEISHA VARMA: I was part of the original planning committee to just imagine the way that Juneteenth was celebrated with our University of Minnesota community members and community members from the Twin Cities, and have just been a supporter and collaborator with the planning committee as it’s developed over the years.

It started with a conversation with our then-president, President Gabel and her leadership team. In her cabinet meetings, people brought up Juneteenth as a University holiday and being recognized by the University. We’ve had so many people stepping up saying they want to support the initiative. They want to volunteer their time. They want to share their ideas. And it’s grown and evolved into the event we just had last weekend.

LASSITER: Mercedes Ramírez Fernández, the vice president for Equity and Diversity at the University, said that while she was attending the event on Saturday, the thing that resonated with her the most was the community response and reaction.

MERCEDES RAMÍREZ FERNÁNDEZ: One of the awesome things that I heard on Saturday was just seeing like the grandmas with the little kids and, you know, everybody playing and also being happy to see the University of Minnesota in their community. And that’s what they said, “it’s great to see the University of Minnesota here. It’s great that you all are showing up.”

You know, we had over 200 volunteers and students and staff members. And it is important that we sustain this partnership. So that’s kind of like the work that I have been doing with colleagues. It hasn’t been difficult work at all because my colleagues in senior leadership are on board.

LASSITER: Varma said despite her early involvement, the celebration has grown to where it’s much easier to arrange every year, and requires less direct involvement from University management.

VARMA: I think that now it has a life of its own that we can support. So many people know about it and are already, like, even though this just ended, they’re already thinking about next year. With Professor Moses being so committed to the ways that we work with the community on this event, it seems that now we’ve provided the structure, we’ve provided the knowledge that the University supports this, and it has this, its own momentum to keep moving forward.

LASSITER: I sat down with Moses before the event on Saturday, where she told me about her expectations, and what new additions attendees could expect to see this year.

MOSES: This year’s theme is, you know, We Are the Noise: The Echoes of Our Ancestors. So we have things like noisemakers and we have organizations who are going to be tabling at the event to help us in creating other noisemaking things. We really want music and, you know, the crowds to be very lively this year.

This event is very unique in that we’re not expecting folks to pay for, you know, the food or a lot of the activities that we have. The only thing that folks are contributing to are the Black vendors who are there selling stuff from their shops and supporting Black businesses.

Because it is mainly free, we want to make sure the budget’s pretty tight. So I would say organizing first, making sure that budget is tight, getting our theme together, then doing a call for organizations and vendors to participate.

LASSITER: Aside from free food and Black-owned businesses, the event featured multiple musicians and speakers. Rose Brewer, a professor of  African American & African Studies at the University, was one of those speakers.

Brewer said she was invited by Moses to speak as part of the opening session for the event, after the parade. While she acknowledged the importance of Juneteenth as a holiday, she wanted to dive deeper into the history surrounding it and give listeners an expanded understanding of the context.

ROSE BREWER: I accepted because to me, this is a historical question, that it’s not simply a celebration, although freedom is an important component of the Black struggle in this country. But it represented an opportunity for me to lay out a broader historical context. That although Juneteenth certainly is an earmark event because more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the enslaved Africans in Texas still had not been free.

My point was that the struggle didn’t begin with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. I certainly lifted up the fact that the involuntary enslavement of Black people in the society, the resistance to it, went on for 250 years. Juneteenth is a culmination of that, and post-Juneteenth is a continuation of the struggle for freedom. Actually Juneteenth, in some parts, is called Freedom Day, or Freedom, or Jubilee. So it represents a particular node in terms of the Black freedom struggle.

LASSITER: As the days leading up to the event got shorter and shorter, things seemed to be running smoothly. Moses had been leading the planning committee in preparations for the event, Brewer was preparing to speak, word had been put out, people were made aware of when and where to go.

Everything had been meticulously planned, right up to the day of the event. The stage was set, the vendors were vending, the parade was past… and then it started to rain.

BREWER: You know, it was delayed a bit.

LASSITER: A lot.

BREWER:  The rain happened the entire day and into the night.

LASSITER: A whole lot.

BREWER: The crowd obviously was much smaller than it might have been. People did the best they can.

LASSITER: However, even though Ramírez Fernández was there when the rain started coming down, she said she didn’t feel upset or worried about the success of the event. Instead, she felt a completely different emotion: nostalgia.

RAMÍREZ FERNÁNDEZ: I was with the vendors when the rain started to come down, like in sheets. But as I mentioned, one of my most loving memories from Puerto Rico is like running around and being in the rain because it’s warm rain. And so I had not experienced warm rain like that, you know, here because it’s always so cold.

So I was like, “Oh, this is great. This is just like, you know, being back home and just playing in the rain and being with your friends.” So for me, the rain was just not a big problem. The people, the vendors were, like, so upbeat and just, you know, it’s just rain we’re blessed because we have rain.

LASSITER: Before we began our interview, Ramírez Fernández and I found out we had shared Puerto Rican heritage. She said the warm rain that was falling during Saturday’s event reminded her of growing up on the Island. It gave her comfort, and served as a chance to show the resilience of the community.

RAMÍREZ FERNÁNDEZ: I will say there was just a sense of hope and a sense of lightness. People talking about all the other opportunities for us to continue to do the work together. So this has given, I think members of the community that I spoke to, you know, a sense of hope. 

VARMA: I came as the sheets of rain continued and did not let up. I was so impressed that the vendors and the community members, they were there until we packed up. We packed up an hour early. It was pouring down rain the entire time I was there and people were still engaged in all of the spaces, getting haircuts, doing the art stuff, getting food.

Then what I really loved was seeing everyone band together to break down the site. Folding chairs and tables and tarps and we were all just drenched. And the thing is everyone was chatting with each other and still enjoying the whole experience. There were still over a thousand people that came across the day, so it was still a great turnout.

LASSITER: I did reach out to Moses for an additional comment after the event ended, but she felt so exhausted after needing to make all these short-notice adjustments that she told me she was taking some time off to rest. 

Which was completely understandable, given the literal whirlwind she’d just gone through. But she and the other interviewees for this episode did say that the University putting on a celebration like this is a beacon to other institutions, through rain or shine.

MOSES: We’re the University of Minnesota. We are a Research-1 university and for us to put our stamp, our name, on something like this gives an event like this validity. So I think it’s important that institutions with power are able to change the narrative; are able to dismantle systems of oppression. We’re able to disrupt the status quo because we’re seeing in our country the huge fight against things around Black history, and it’s really important that we stand up to support what our ancestors have done.

BREWER: We’re four years out from the uprising around George Floyd and the issues are still relevant. The whole question of policing, the whole question of the tremendous disparities in terms of education, in terms of access to employment, housing. The University has as much a responsibility to speak to those issues as it does supporting a holiday such as Juneteenth.

VARMA: I think the example that we said is that we honor and respect the community that we’re working with. We elevate their voices, and we’re a huge predominantly white institution and we check that at the door when we’re doing all of the things that are part of Juneteenth. I love that about this event and I love that we have been so thoughtful about that.

RAMÍREZ FERNÁNDEZ: The way that I see the University of Minnesota is an anchor, as an anchor institution and what that means, is anchoring all of our communities and the people that form our communities. At a time where it seems like the world has forgotten that, the commitment that everybody had made, you know, or they felt very strongly back in 2020. And the University of Minnesota is here. It’s just honoring its commitment. It’s about the love, you know? You feel the love, you know, you show the love.

MOSES: We understand this is a historical moment. This is something that we will continue to remember and it’s something that we have to remember if we want to move in a more futuristic way in regard to equity and anti-racism and anti-oppression that will be happening throughout our community. 

LASSITER: During our interview, Ramírez Fernández and Varma told me the University is already taking feedback for next year’s celebration, not even a week after this one happened. Despite the sudden rainstorms, everyone involved with the event showed a deep sense of pride with how the organizers reacted and the attendees responded. Whether the day is full of shining sun or massive monsoons, the community remains committed to showing up, and the University will always provide a place to celebrate.

This episode was written by Alex Lassiter and produced by Kaylie Sirovy. As always, we appreciate you listening in and feel free to send a message to our email inbox at podcasting@mndaily.com with any questions, comments or concerns. I’m Alex, and this has been In The Know. Take care, y’all.

ALEX LASSITER: Hello, lovely people! It’s Alex Lassiter with The Minnesota Daily, and you’re listening to In The Know, a podcast dedicated to the University of Minnesota.

I’ll keep it a hunnit, I think it’s lowkey so rad how slang words can change up over time, that’s so totally my bag. You can drop some heat in the middle of a sentence and depending on the crowd you’re rockin’ with, folks can dig it. It’s pretty nifty. But it’s got me thinking, yo, where did some of these words come from? How did they change up over time?

So I did some digging on old words; way older than the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s terms I just used, and I learned a heap about words that are used semi-regularly in American culture, and where they came from way back when.

Amanda Dalola, a professor of linguistics at the University of Minnesota, is here to help me break it down. Dalola specializes in sociophonetics, i.e. how languages are used in communities, applied linguistics, which studies how people learn languages, and phonetics, the pronunciation of different words.

This episode will focus a lot on phonetics and phonology of slang, so I’ll leave it up to Dalola to give us a brief rundown on the difference between the two.

AMANDA DALOLA: Can you do phonetics without doing phonology? Can you do phonology without doing phonetics? So phonology has to do with sounds that are meaningful in language. And so what that means is when you swap one sound for another it will change the meaning.

So it’s something like pat. And then when you swap the P for another sound, like a B, when you say bat, you actually have a different meaning attached to it. So phonology is really focused on the segments that are different, but that also bring with them changes in meaning.

It also looks at how sounds pattern across families of language. Like how sounds change over time. Different sounds will evolve into other sounds, things like vowel shifts and consonant hierarchies, but it has to do with like how sounds are organized in the brain.

LASSITER: Phonetics, on the other hand, focuses on how sounds are made, and how they are perceived by others.

DALOLA: Phonetics is really a detail game. There’s basically two main branches: there’s acoustics and articulatory phonetics.

Articulatory is the production of sound and acoustic is the perception and that has to do with how people hear it and how people mishear sounds and how a lot of those misperceptions can then lead to sound change in the long term. 

Phonetics is really focused on the teeny tiny changes in sound as it has to do with production and perception. And there’s absolutely no attention paid to meaning, in the sense that phonology is only focused on segments that are different. When meaning is attached, phonetics pays attention to all of it.

LASSITER: As you may have recognized from the start of the episode, tons of American slang comes from within American culture. Drip, bussin’, fly, clutch, chill, groovy, hip, and outta sight. But some words we often use didn’t even originate in English. Stemming from 17th century France, the term bourgeois refers to a member of the French middle class, between peasantry and aristocracy. Nowadays, however, the term “boujee” just refers to someone who puts on a show of material wealth. But how did we bridge the gap between these two very different-looking words?

DALOLA: The word starts off being a French word made of French parts, and so in a lot of ways, you have first a case of borrowing. You’ve got this French word, regardless of what it means or how it’s said, you’ve got a French word made of French parts that then gets borrowed into English, another language. And so what usually happens in that context is, regardless of what the languages are, you get this kind of phonological adaptation that happens.

This isn’t like an individual goes to a French speaking place and then adopts it back for the whole community of Anglophones, but it’s more of a situation of when Anglophone society is collectively having a lot of contact with Francophone society and we start borrowing.

LASSITER: After borrowing parts from the French sounding of the word, the next step would be to change them to the language the word is being adapted to; in this case, English. This step of the process sees the parts of the word that don’t have similar sounds in English start to fall away, while the sounds that are shared become more emphasized.

DALOLA: So like bourgeois is probably one of the most French sounding words you could borrow because you’ve got the “ooh”, you’ve got the “r”, you’ve got the “je”, and you’ve got the “wah”.

There are a lot of sounds in bourgeoisie that we just don’t have in English identically to French. So like we do have an “ooh” sound, but it’s a much fronter “ooh” sound than you have in, like, French bourg. The French R is back in the throat. It makes a scratchy sound, almost like a cat hissing.

We don’t have that sound in English, so there’s no world in which we would adapt that R; so we’re just going to give it like a, either a “ruh” sound like we have in English, or we’re going to ignore it altogether, which it looks like we did in the case of boujee.

LASSITER: And, as a finishing touch in the English language especially, the word would be adding in English sounds to round it out and make it more pleasing to the English tongue to speak, so it feels more natural.

DALOLA: I think one of the things that marks it as English is the fact that we put “-ee” on the end of it. I’m sure you’ve noticed that adjectives in English often end in “-ee”. Happy, silly, and it’s not exceptionalist, there are tons of words that are adjectives that don’t follow that model, but that’s a really common pattern in English words.

And so the idea that we would take this hella French word, we’d cut off part of the French morphology, we’d ignore the R altogether because we don’t have it and we’re not going to try to translate it, and then we would just smack on the equivalent of an American adjective ending is pretty hilarious.

LASSITER: Interestingly enough, this phenomenon of borrowing from other languages isn’t just limited to English. Claire Halpert, the director of the Linguistics Department at the University, specializes in the Zulu language, spoken in South Africa.

CLAIRE HALPERT: The variety of Zulu that I have worked on the most is an urban variety. It’s spoken in the city of Durban and around the city of Durban. So there are lots and lots of slang innovations and really interesting things happening with specific terms that come and go, but also with sort-of innovative ways that people are using the grammar. And so those kinds of things always catch my attention.

LASSITER: As we just discussed with Dalola, the anglicized version of bourgeois, which is boujee, had English speakers borrow a French word and add a very English-sounding “-ee” suffix to make it sound more natural within the language. In her research, Halpert said she noticed a similar trend of Zulu speakers adding suffixes to borrowed English words to make them fit the language.

HALPERT: One of the things that I’m working on right now with a student at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa is this phenomenon where people—where speakers of Zulu will borrow words from English, and then they’ll put a fake suffix on the end of it to make them sound more Zulu. But then it kind of sounds like a Zulu suffix, but it’s not a suffix that exists in any other environment.

LASSITER: As fascinating as hearing about Zulu is, I unfortunately don’t speak it, so we’ll have to return to English as an example, which still proves to be very interesting in terms of the languages it borrows for slang. French isn’t the only language that gave us English slang words with heavily borrowed parts. During my research for this episode, I found out that booze came from the middle Dutch verb būsen, which means “to drink to excess”. Būsen turned into bouse, spelled B-O-U-S-E in middle English.

When looking at this word, it seemed really strange to me that it was pronounced like “booss” and not like house or mouse would be pronounced. So naturally, I went totally off-topic and looked up what house and mouse sounded like in middle English, and what I found confused me even more. 

It turns out house and mouse came from the middle English hous and mous, but they’re written as H-O-U-S and M-O-U-S; the same as their modern spellings without the “E” at the end, but a totally different sound, much more similar to the modern day booze. As glad as I am that we don’t say, “you shouldn’t come over right now, I just found a moose in my hoose,” I wanted to know what caused this drastic difference in pronunciation between three very similar-looking words.

DALOLA: So if you speak any other Germanic languages, I’m thinking of like Swedish in particular, house, the cognate is hous. Mouse, you have mous. And so you have these forms still in their previous forms. The reason why hous and mous came to mouse and house is because we had this thing called the great vowel shift, which happened between like 1450 and like 1700-ish. It was a much earlier sound change that took place in pieces over like 300 years.

So these vowels, one moved out of space, well one moved out of place, and then the other one moved up in it. It’s the same reason why we now have spellings in English, like M-E-E-T is pronounced the same way as N-E-A-T. Those didn’t used to be homophonous. They used to be pronounced differently. But the great vowel shift caused them to sort of incur on each other’s spaces.

LASSITER: So if that’s the case, I still wondered why bouse and house-slash-mouse had different pronunciations. After all, if the great vowel shift changed the way certain words sounded, shouldn’t bouse have been included with that?

DALOLA: In terms of the būsen thing, this actually was a later borrowing. So it happened well after the great vowel shift. And so this is a really cool situation of this could, if this borrowing had happened earlier between Dutch and English, it would have then already been part of the English lexicon. And by the time we had the great vowel shift happening, it would have just been assimilated into the vocabulary, like all the other words that had come from English earlier. And we probably would say something like bouse (pronounced like house). But because this happened later, the change was already effectuated, and so then it just came in as it was.

LASSITER: So when it comes to booze not being pronounced like house, it was just in the right place at the right time, and its spelling was later updated to match modern English so it looks the way it sounds.

The phenomenon also saw booze change primarily from a verb to a noun. And though it’s still sometimes used as a verb in English-speaking cultures, it’s mostly used to refer to hard liquor. With the instance of booze turning from a verb to a noun, I was intrigued to hear Halpert’s experience with learning about a noun turning into a verb, though not the noun she first thought.

HALPERT: People always come to me with their weird verb findings and often it’s really innovative slang terms. I think maybe the last time I taught it, we went down a really deep rabbit hole with “sauce”. The verb not to, like, sauce your food.

I wasn’t familiar with it, but about half the class knew what it meant, and it means to toss something to somebody. So the people who knew the verb had very clear intuitions about how exactly one “sauces” something. It’s not like an overhand throw, it’s more either, it’s like a gentle toss, I think.

So at first I think people thought it was, sauce the noun turning into a verb, and we were trying to figure out why that would be. But when we dug around and we looked for uses of it, and, you know, places where it could come from, we found that it’s not just a noun use turning into a verb use, it’s what they call a clipping. So there’s a bigger phrase that gets clipped down and then it gets transformed, and it comes from saucer pass. 

And so I think it was originally hockey slang, so it’s a certain kind of pass that you do. So it’s a noun, that whole thing has a verb-type use; “pass”, the noun, “pass”, the verb. But then it got clipped all the way down to that first syllable, and that first syllable is what sort-of lives on in the slang term.

LASSITER: We as college students are probably more likely to be using the words boujee or booze because we’re grown, but what about the younger generation? As some of you with kids or young siblings are sure to know, they’re already developing slang words of their own. Words like “sus” and “rizz” are just shortenings of existing words like “suspicious” and “charisma” that make them quicker and easier to say.

DALOLA: If you look at charisma, and then rizz, the reason why you take “ris” out of that instead of “cha”, like why do we say rizz and not ma, or why do we say riz and not cha? It’s because ris in charisma is the stress syllable, and so that’s where all the emphasis is when we say the word.

It’s the most salient, as we would say in linguistics, like noticeable. I think for the spelling for rizz, I think it’s really just a question of the fact that when you, when you truncate the form, if you were to spell it like it’s written, then rizz with an S would be “riss”, and people probably wouldn’t know to make a “za” sound and it doesn’t quite look the way it’s spelled. So I think probably the fact that they put Z’s on it was just to make it phonetic.

LASSITER: So that makes sense as an example from Gen Alpha, but that’s a little out of my area of expertise, since I haven’t used their slang unironically. What about Gen Z slang, something I’d be more familiar with? 

I’m not sure how many people listening right now grew up playing in Call of Duty lobbies, but oftentimes if someone could tell it was your first time on the game, you’d be marked as a “noob” pretty quickly. Since noob is derived from newbie, I wondered if it shared any themes with rizz in how it was truncated.

DALOLA: The situation here is the same thing. So in newbie, “new” is the stress syllable, but the question is why is it “noob”, and not “noo”? Well, new is already a word, so if we were going to truncate newbie to “noo”, that would already overlap with the word new. English likes to have syllables that end in consonants, so “noob” on some level is more English like than “noo” would be, even though both words exist.

LASSITER: During my discussions with Dalola and Halpert, I noticed a lot of trends these words shared when being formed from a root to a slang word, like truncation and borrowing sounds. So I’d wondered if there was any way to actually predict through speech patterns a way to create a new slang word. While I was told there’s not much linguists can do to predict what will become a slang term, they’re actually quite reliably able to predict what might not.

HALPERT: So much about slang is, it’s being rooted in particular cultural moments and particular social groups, right? And I think there’s a huge amount of sort-of creativity and playfulness with language that yields these things. I think what linguists might be really good at is predicting what’s not going to happen.

Plenty of linguists would be able to predict that if you’re going to shorten charisma, you’re going to get “rizz” and not “zmuh” or “ism” or, like, any of the other segments that you could potentially take out of that word. So linguists have lots of good models to sort of predict which parts of words you’re going to take if you’re going to take words and to sort-of predict what might turn into a productive process.

Another place where you see a lot of these shortenings is like “cas” from casual or “uge” from usual. There’s certain sort-of phonological properties that make those words susceptible to those kinds of changes.

DALOLA: What’s really exciting is the question mark phenomena, right? Like, we have no idea what language is going to look like in 200 years because, you know, tomorrow’s influencer could have us all speaking in a completely different way.

So I like the idea that linguistics allows us to make these like very calculated, very precise predictions, but sociolinguistics makes it such that none of those ever have to be true. So in a lot of ways we’re working, even though we’re working sort-of bottom-up, we never really know what language change is going to look like. And I think that’s really great.

LASSITER: I thought there was no slang word more fitting to close the episode with than “goodbye”. Goodbye actually derives its origins as an abbreviation of “God be with ye”, used to bid farewell to people in 15th century England. What most intrigued me about this bit of slang is that we can see similar shortenings in other languages, like “vaya con Dios” becoming “adiós” in Spanish, or “à Dieu” turning into “adieu” in French. Furthermore, goodbye in English is often shortened even further, to just “bye”.

DALOLA: There was an expression that we learned once, which was that yesterday’s syntax is today’s morphology. And what that means is what yesterday was a bunch of words in sequence together, tomorrow will be a bunch of parts of words smashed together into a big word.

Over time, things kind of run together just because they become fixed phrases. So you can think about how we might previously have said like, “he is going to go to the store,” and if you were talking casually be like, “he’s gonna go to the store,” and you get “gonna” out of “going to go”, right? It’s just a kind of like natural coarticulation that happens when you speed up the way you pronounce things because you don’t necessarily need to clearly articulate each and every part given context and, you know, given we know the phrasing works.

You might think about how you might talk to your family, people really close to you versus how you might write something out for like a formal paper. That difference between how you would say things quickly and in a familiar way and then how you would pull all the things apart, that difference is also, is often this kind of change where you run things together and truncate things and swap familiar words out for less familiar ones.

LASSITER: Aside from just the words we talked about today, I’m sure many of us use slang on a daily, maybe even an hourly basis depending on the crowd we hang with. And that’s not even getting into text slang like BRB, LOL, and TTYL. So the next time you tell your friends, “bet, it’s finna be lit,” hopefully you’ll want to do hours of research on where these little words came from like me.

This episode was written by Alex Lassiter and produced by Kaylie Sirovy. As always, we appreciate you listening in and feel free to send a message to our email inbox at podcasting@mndaily.com with any questions, comments or concerns. I’m Alex, and this has been In The Know. God be with ye, adiós, adieu, goodbye and take care, y’all.

ALEX LASSITER: Hello, lovely people! It’s Alex Lassiter with The Minnesota Daily, and you’re listening to In The Know, a podcast dedicated to the University of Minnesota.

Now, like quite a few college students with an Instagram, my school spirit also shines through in the accounts I follow. Of course, that includes official University of Minnesota sanctioned activity, like the main account and the RecWell’s social media page, but sometimes I like to get a little silly-goofy with it.

That is why I also follow a good handful of gopher meme pages. Y’know, Instagram accounts that are run by UMN students, for UMN students, but aren’t associated with the University at large. They’re a fun way to get a look at real student life here. For every campus tour group, there’s a cluster of dysfunctional drunk people, and those meme accounts do a great job of directing college humor towards college students.

One of those accounts is @farstoolgophs. It’s an Instagram page run by two seniors at the University of Minnesota. The admins behind the account said they wanted to remain anonymous for the interview.

They plan to do a face reveal in their own time on @farstoolgophs, but for now, they said they’d prefer to continue keeping up the anonymity of the account. For the remainder of this story, we’ll call them Maroon and Gold.

Maroon said she and Gold met through a University Facebook group before fall semester in 2020, when they were both incoming freshmen.

MAROON: I think we just like exchanged Instagrams and Snapchats and we kind of just clicked. We bonded over like music, and we really liked the same TV shows. And then once school started and COVID happened, we kind of met and I think especially because COVID you couldn’t really interact with that many people.

LASSITER: Gold started the FarstoolGophs account in September of her sophomore year at the University.

GOLD: My format was like, I would make a Tweet draft and then I would take a screenshot of it and I would post it and it was ugly and not a lot of people would reshare it and not a lot of people would like them. And like the most interaction I would ever get is like maybe a hundred likes.

LASSITER: Gold said Maroon would help her come up with content ideas during class, and as they kept talking, Farstool would come up more and more frequently in conversations between the two.

GOLD: And so then eventually I was just like, do you want the password? And it’s so much easier to manage with like two people, cause there’s days where like I’ll post more, but there’s a lot of days where she’ll post a lot more.

LASSITER: The name “FarstoolGophs” drew obvious inspiration from BarstoolSports. The name was a mishmash, using Barstool as a base and the trend of a “finsta,” or “fake Insta(gram).” So FarstoolGophs was a kind of fake Barstool. And, as the name would suggest, the account turned into a sort of antithesis of Barstool.

Maroon and Gold said as the account grew in popularity, they wanted to define it as more of a women and queer centered account, separate from the athletic, Greek lifey-vibe that Barstool put out.

GOLD: When we like first started, it was very like U of M specific, like the point, I was like, okay, this is like a U of M account. Everything has to be like U of M related. And then, we got a little bit of explore page clout, and that is like a drug because now the more vague you make something, the more shares it gets. And that’s so fun.

The other day you were like, “annotated bibliographies low key suck,” over a picture of like Mindy Kaling in a rainbow dress. And it has like 7,000 likes from random a** people. But it’s just like, it’s fun to do stuff that’s more vague while still being school related, so it’s not meaningless to the U of M people that actually do follow us, but it’s fun to get engagement from other people. 

MAROON: We got a DM last week that was from this girl who doesn’t even live in America. She goes, “oh Farstool, I don’t even live in America, but I love your content.” So I think at this point too, we’ve kind of, obviously it’s predominantly U of M students or Twin Cities area, but I think that’s definitely helped.

LASSITER: After taking their time to set up the account and find the style of content that worked best for them, Maroon and Gold wanted to find unique ways to interact with their followers. Eventually, Gold landed on the idea of holding a giveaway after reaching a new account milestone, like hitting a certain number of followers.

GOLD: Our first giveaway was for 400 followers, and we put together a giveaway bag of literal, like, sh*t that we like accumulated. It was like a half smoked pack of cigarettes, and one random shooter.

MAROON: Packs of Advil.

GOLD: I don’t know, very random stuff, but it was like fun, and then that kind of became our tradition. And now our tradition is like bedazzled giveaway gifts.

LASSITER: While FarstoolGophs has been a mainstay in the University of Minnesota social media game for a while, a new social media brand is taking the University scene by storm.

OneBuzzMinnesota, a submission-based Instagram account run by University of Iowa sophomore Colin Speiker, has surged in popularity since the brand first launched in December of last year.

The OneBuzzMinnesota and OneBuzzUIowa accounts, which are both currently managed by Speiker, are just two of 26 total platforms under the up-and-coming brand name “OneBuzz.”

Speiker says his plan is to hire people to run the individual university accounts while he and his two business partners focus on managing the brand.

COLIN SPEIKER: We’ve got like seven or eight big accounts that are over 5,000 followers and continuing to grow. And then we’re trying to bring up the other half with hiring and some compensation strategies for our interns.

LASSITER: Out of all of the OneBuzz pages, OneBuzzMinnesota has the largest follower count: a whopping 16,000. That’s more followers than even the main OneBuzz account.

Speiker said getting the brand off the ground at the start was hard work. He and his business partners would try to drive up engagement by posting multiple times a day on each account, following people from each university, responding to comments, and posting polls and other content on their stories.

SPEIKER: I remember being on Christmas vacation in Scottsdale, Arizona, and just working, like posting four times a day. We wanted to really get as much content out there as possible. 

Once they started to pick up traction, we got a few viral videos. The algorithm really is starting to take care of us now, and you’ve got to pay the price up front if you want to see growth on the long, on the backside. So I think we did a pretty good job of that.

LASSITER: Speiker said OneBuzzMinnesota wants to differentiate itself from Barstool and other similar brands by taking social media engagement off the app.

He said he and his buddies are planning on holding in-person campus events that would be unique to each university, hosting bar crawls, and reaching out to concert and event spaces to host other events under the OneBuzz name.

SPEIKER: I think a lot of Instagram pages are just, “oh, we’re an Instagram page and we’ll do some paid promo for like some side income.” We see this as something bigger than that, and we want to make it real. We want to bring it in-person and start a movement.

LASSITER: As the brand grows, Speiker said he could see it turning into a recognizable, nationwide brand like Barstool or LineLeap.

SPEIKER: It’s the fact that we’re a small company, we can take a lot more risks than them, like you would never see Barstool putting on a bar crawl just because of all the liability and the legal stuff.

We’re young. We’re just getting started. We can take a lot of risks to really get our name out there. I think next semester you’re going to see us a lot more on campus. 

LASSITER: While OneBuzzMinnesota is just getting started, activity on FarstoolGophs will be winding down as both of its admins wrap up their senior years at the University and graduate this spring. Gold said even after they stop posting regular content, they plan to leave the account up as an archive of their time at the U of M.

GOLD: I think we both feel too like protective over it to give it to someone else. And also there’s just a lot of people that talk to us in the DMs, that it would be weird to be like, “okay, here’s a random person logging in and seeing all your stuff that you’ve talked to us about for the past two years.” And then we might face reveal, and that might be our final hurrah.

LASSITER: Gold said she hopes someone will pick up the torch once they’re gone and usher in the next era of Farstool under a new name.

Maroon said one of her biggest takeaways from running the account is that as long as someone enjoys what you’re posting, it’s worth posting. She encouraged any budding content creators to focus on making things they would give a like if it came up in their feed or post to their personal accounts.

MAROON: I’ve always had kind of a messy public story on Instagram. I’ve always posted things, and I had gotten messages from people where they’re like, “oh, this is so funny,” and so I think even before going into it, don’t be afraid to just kind of make jokes on your main account and see what kind of works for you.

I’m not saying you need to share your life story nor am I doing that, but I think you can kind of test the waters on things and just make jokes and see if people like it.

LASSITER: Maroon also said running the account taught her a lot about herself. She said looking back on it helped her realize where she was at the start of the account’s activity, and how much she’s changed up to the present day.

MAROON: I was really going through it my sophomore year of college. I was a mess. And so I think a lot of the content that I make now, it’s me reflecting on those experiences that I had. You know, sometimes you kind of need a bit of hindsight to be able to laugh at it because when you’re going through it, it’s pretty bad.

And it’s funny because we’ll get DM’s from like disgruntled men that will go, “You need to stop, you know, going out and getting drunk and hooking up with all these people.” And it’s not even necessarily what we’re doing. We’re just looking back at a certain time.

LASSITER: University of Minnesota Instagram meme accounts aren’t my Roman Empire, but they are my Library of Alexandria. Whether new or old, branded or niche, stepping out or stepping back, they serve as both a chronicle of University of Minnesota culture, and the personal journey of the people behind them. The lessons both learned and imparted from them could never be taught in a university classroom. And even as they come and go alongside their student admins, the experience of them will never be lost.

You can follow both the accounts mentioned in this story on Instagram at @farstoolgophs, that’s f-a-r-stool-g-o-p-h-s, and at @onebuzzminnesota, all one word, spelled how it sounds.

This episode was written by Alex Lassiter and produced by Kaylie Sirovy. As always, we appreciate you listening in and feel free to send a message to our email inbox at podcasting@mndaily.com with any questions, comments or concerns. I’m Alex, and this has been In The Know. Take care, y’all.

Editor’s Note: The Board of Regents also heard from UMPD for its updates on public safety and 2024 initiatives. A separate story can be found here.

The University of Minnesota Board of Regents met on March 7 for their first regular session meeting since the conclusion of the presidential search.

During the meeting, the regents voted to approve a five-year contract for the new University president, Dr. Rebecca Cunningham, who was appointed to the role at the special Board meeting on Feb. 26.

The Board also received an update on public safety around campus for the spring semester and heard from two of their student representatives about current issues students are facing.

Cunningham’s contract

The Regents voted unanimously to approve future President Cunningham’s contract, which will take effect July 1 and last until the end of June 2029.

Cunningham was not in attendance at the Board meeting Friday.

Before Cunningham fully assumes her new role, she will be working closely with interim President Jeff Ettinger for the transition process.

According to the contract, the Board will review and evaluate Cunningham’s performance annually and will continually discuss her ongoing goals and accomplishments with her.

“Board leadership has worked closely with our general counsel to prepare this agreement,” Board Chair Janie Mayeron said. “It is a market competitive agreement that speaks to Dr. Cunningham’s skill and experience.”

Cunningham’s starting salary will be $975,000 annually. This is a 52% increase from former President Joan Gabel’s base salary of $640,000. Including salary, bonuses and retirement funds, Gabel’s yearly compensation was more than $1 million by the time she left in 2023.

Mayeron said Cunningham’s base salary places her in the 50th percentile of her Big Ten peers. She added there is a new provision in the contract, which would prohibit Cunningham from accepting any paid positions at outside public or private institutions during her presidency.

“It is a very significant commitment, both for us to have a new president and for the new president to come [to the University],” Regent Robyn Gulley said. “I sometimes struggle with these very expensive employment agreements, so I appreciate the work folks did to get this right.”

Students for Climate Justice

The Board heard brief remarks from Students for Climate Justice on why they believe the University needs a comprehensive zero-waste plan.

Currently, non-recycled and non-composted trash from the University is sent to the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center, which Students for Climate Justice member Gracelyn McClure said contributes to the highest asthma rates in the state.

The University’s facilities website states a long-term goal is to keep 90% of waste out of the trash, but McClure said there is no current plan or timeline for this goal.

“We urge the University of Minnesota to develop a zero waste plan with the active involvement of relevant department leaders, workers, students and community members at every step of the process,” said Students for Climate Justice member Maia Bowman.

Student representatives deliver their report to the Board

Flora Yang, chair of student representatives to the Board of Regents from the Twin Cities campus, recommended an assessment of systemwide basic student needs and to implement them into long-term strategic planning.

“We want to acknowledge each campus is different,” Yang said. “However, there are still gaps to be identified, acknowledged and addressed.”

Hal Johnson, the student representative vice chair from the Morris campus, said another issue troubling students systemwide is mental health. They recommended solidifying practices outlined in the President’s Initiative for Student Mental Health (PRISMH) after MPact 2025 concludes activity next year.

Johnson also recommended fostering a greater sense of student belonging across all five University campuses.

“We cannot rely solely on the metrics of the Twin Cities to determine whether we are meeting goals regarding a sense of belonging and community,” Johnson said.

Regents said they were impressed with the content of the report and the way it was presented. The materials mentioned in the 2024 report to the Board were made into a 15-minute video presentation, branching away from the audit style of previous years.

Regent Kodi Verhalen said it provided a great starting point for the Board to familiarize themselves with and work towards mending these student issues.

“You have to start somewhere,” Verhalen said. “We’ve started, now what’s the next step, and where do we take it and how do we carry it forward and [ensure] it’s not something that just falls off the plate because it was an MPact 2025 goal?”

After a lengthy search process, Rebecca Cunningham was selected by the Board of Regents to serve as the 18th president of the University of Minnesota during a special board meeting Monday afternoon.

The Board unanimously voted to appoint Cunningham as the next president of the University. Before a motion to appoint Cunningham was presented, she received 7 nominations from the 12 regents. Laura Bloomberg was the runner-up with 5 nominations. James Holloway received no nominations.

“She really expressed an appreciation for the attention that is needed across the system,” said regent Kodi Verhalen. “She wants to emphasize preparing teams on the issue of the day so it doesn’t become the crisis of the day.”

Cunningham was chosen from three total finalists who were asked to visit the University. Before being selected for the position, Cunningham served as the vice president of research and innovation at the University of Michigan and brings experience from 25 years of working in healthcare.

During a conference held shortly after the announcement, Cunningham said she was feeling excited and relieved to be chosen for the position.

Cunningham said she was excited to transition to the University, and her first priority is to fully immerse herself in the culture by meeting people and forming connections. She said she hopes to foster a community where students can do their best work and thrive in the University environment.

“Students are central to everything we do and I’m so excited to get to move forward as your president,” Cunningham said.

Mark Bee, chair of the Faculty Consultative Committee, said in a statement Cunningham’s past experiences in leadership at the University of Michigan made her an excellent fit to lead the University of Minnesota. He said he looks forward to Cunningham’s development of a new strategic plan past MPact 2025.

“I think the Board had a really tough decision today between three excellent candidates,” Bee said. “I certainly look forward to working with Dr. Cunningham through our strong system of shared governance here at the U.”

Minnesota State House Rep. Mohamud Noor (DFL-Minneapolis) congratulated Cunningham in a statement on her new role and said Cunningham would help the University in its educational mission.

“The University of Minnesota is a tremendous asset to our state, and stalwart leadership is required to continue its mission of providing world-class education, groundbreaking research, and community-engaged outreach,” Noor said. “I wish Dr. Cunningham the best of luck, and look forward to working with her at the Minnesota Legislature.”

Interim President Jeff Ettinger will remain in his current position until the end of June, and will work closely with Cunningham as she transitions into her new position. Cunningham will fully assume the role of president on July 1.

This article has been updated. Reporter Georgia Jensen contributed to this report, as well as editors Olivia Hines and Jack O’Connor.

For Valentine’s Day, students both single and taken at the University of Minnesota shared their reasons for using dating apps.

In response to an anonymous 40-person survey conducted by the Minnesota Daily, many students had a variety of reasons for using dating apps. Some wanted to find a long-term partner, some wanted to explore their options and some just wanted to swipe.

Anthropology professor David Lipset, who has a focus in romance, social media and personhood, said the motivation to use dating apps is standard: to meet other single people who come from similar backgrounds and have similar hobbies.

“I don’t think that varies from age group to age group, or from part of the country to part of the country,” Lipset said. “Why else would people use a dating app? To look for a new car?”

According to an unscientific survey conducted by the Daily, 36 student respondents said they used Tinder, 27 used Hinge and 22 used Bumble either actively or recently.

Matthew Zeichert, a third-year student, said he only uses Hinge because it feels more tailored toward people who are looking for long-term relationships.

“I never focused on finding a relationship in my freshman or sophomore year,” Zeichert said. “[This is] my first year wading through the waters of online dating.”

Zeichert said so far he has not had a negative interaction on Hinge, but he is not surprised when a conversation with a match of his reaches a stalemate.

Lipset said the cultural meaning of Valentine’s Day can vary from country to country. In Japan, Lipset said it is celebrated by women giving their romantic partners chocolate, and men return the favor on “White Day,” which falls on March 14.

In a country like the U.S., Valentine’s Day has a bigger focus on affection between the couple, Lipset said. Gifts are given on the same day rather than separate days.

Kinsey Anderson, a fourth-year student who found their current romantic partner on Bumble, said they came onto the app with the intention of looking for love.

“Lots of ghosts, cricket chirps, and then I found my Princess Charming,” Anderson said.

Results of the anonymous survey can be found here. Certain cells have been edited for content and to protect personal information.

At their February meeting on Friday, the Board of Regents approved the three final candidates for the presidential position. The selected candidates will hold open forums across all five campuses, and be interviewed by the Board after. The next president will be selected by the end of February.

The Board also reviewed and unanimously approved a letter of intent to buy back their teaching hospital from Fairview Health Services.

The deal, as outlined in the letter, will see the University of Minnesota paying Fairview 51% of the agreed-upon price by the end of this year, and the remainder by the end of 2027. The letter of intent set a deadline of Sept. 30, with the opportunity for an extension.

And then there were three

The Board was presented with the four finalists for the position of 18th University President, as decided by the Presidential Search Advisory Committee (PSAC) in January. Of the four that were brought before the Board, only three were advanced to the public forum and interviewing stage of the process in a unanimous vote.

The three candidates, Laura Bloomberg, Rebecca Cunningham and James Holloway, were named in a press release sent out Friday afternoon. According to Regent Brian Steeves, interviews with the candidates will begin as soon as Feb. 12.

Bloomberg is the current president of Cleveland State University. Before that, she served as the Dean for the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Cunningham is the current vice president for research and innovation at the University of Michigan, a peer school to the University of Minnesota.

Holloway is the only candidate with no prior connections to the University. He currently serves as the provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of New Mexico.

The conversation to invite the three finalists to campus went through five phases: an inter-regent discussion where Board members could state their opinions on each of the candidates, a dot voting phase where each regent votes on which candidates they’d most like to interview, a more in-depth discussion, a consensus phase and the final vote.

For the duration of the discussion, the candidates were left anonymous, and were referred to as “Candidates A (Bloomberg), B (Cunningham), C (Holloway) and D” with gender-neutral pronouns to protect their identities.

In the dot voting phase of the meeting, Bloomberg received nine votes, Cunningham and Hollway both received seven and Candidate D only received one. Candidate D was the only finalist not advanced to the next stage of the process, and remains anonymous.

The PSAC spent three months holding public listening sessions and reviewing applications to narrow down the candidate pool. PSAC Chair Mary Davenport said the four finalists were unanimously selected by the committee.

Letter of intent to Fairview

The Board voted unanimously to approve a resolution on a non-binding letter of intent to buy back their teaching hospital from Fairview over the course of the next three years. The letter gives the University and Fairview until Sept. 30 to finalize the buyback agreement.

The letter was introduced into the Board’s agenda the morning of the meeting, and was met with enthusiasm from many members of the Board.

Medical School Dean Jakub Tolar said the best way for the University to achieve its vision for academic healthcare, they need to have more control over their own healthcare facilities. The letter of intent is a big step forward in giving the University more financial and executive control.

According to Senior Vice President of Finance and Operations Myron Frans, the letter of intent allows the University to regain control of its former teaching hospital over an extended period of time.

“We are now taking those very first critical steps toward a new, reimagined partnership,” Frans said.

Regent Kodi Verhalen expressed concern that the Sept. 30 deadline would require a lot of work between the University and other collaborators mentioned in the letter. Tolar said the work on negotiations would begin the week following the meeting.

Regent Robyn Gulley said she was excited about the possibility of being able to serve more patients across Minnesota. She said the most important thing to her was that there was a sense of continuity for employees as the changes in ownership were made.

Frans said the deal would not change the care given to patients or the status of any current employees as the ownership of the teaching hospital shifted from Fairview’s hands back to the University.

The piece was last updated at 3:51 p.m.