On any given weekend in the Twin Cities, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of events, taking place anywhere from the heart of downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul to the farthest-flung reaches of the suburbs and everywhere in between. Countless standing attractions — parks and beaches, museums and libraries, stores and restaurants — draw visitors from across the world.

But, back in April, one particular and unexpected attraction went viral in Minneapolis’ Uptown district: a 10-foot-deep sinkhole in the middle of the intersection of 27th Street and Girard Avenue.

Initially only five feet in diameter, repair work required more of the street around the sinkhole to be ripped up, resulting in a pit taking up the entire intersection. By day, the site seemed to simply be a noxious obstruction, with construction blocking traffic and causing noise in the fairly-dense residential area.

By night though, the sinkhole was transformed: from a navigational nuisance to an impromptu neighborhood gathering place.

“I walked by it for novelty’s sake,” said Jessica Armbruster, co-owner, editor and writer for Racket and a nearby resident who wrote an article on the new social hotspot. “And then on Twitter, a couple people that I follow were like, there’s parties going on over there, and I was like, ‘Well s—, I’ve got to reinvestigate.’”

Several months later, the sinkhole remains unrepaired.

Sinkholes are likely to continue to pose headaches for Minneapolis residents in years to come, and indeed several others have opened up in the greater Twin Cities area in the past few months. But the inexplicable virality of the Uptown sinkhole seems to remain unmatched.

“It’s like the car last winter that was stuck on that snow cap,” Armbruster said. “Or like the giant snow hill out in the burbs, or like Lake Chipotle, you know, it’s not a real destination. But if you go there, there’s probably some people that are willing to play along.”

Explaining the appeal of unusual one-off phenomena like these is challenging at best, but we can get a sense of this by interpolating based on other attractions in the Twin Cities area.

Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey has sought to promote the revitalization of downtown, begging workers to come back to the office three days a week. With downtown businesses struggling, direct policy and infrastructure changes such as rerouting buses have been floated, but the mayor has also aimed to promote a return to in-person work through events such as Downtown Field Day — a rather bizarre pastiche of attractions that was criticized for its transparent desperation.

Corporate sponsorship has become a given for essentially any event or attraction of significant size. It may be a necessary evil, but many still perceive a sense of moral tarnish around it — or maybe just feel that large crowds and baked-in advertising doesn’t make for a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

Of course, there are plenty of things going on every weekend that don’t involve standing under a firehose of Target logos, and it’s not hard to find them if you know where to look. While these can provide a sense of fun and community, not all are necessarily going to give you a chance to engage with the area in which you live.

Although events like Open Streets Minneapolis do provide an opportunity to get together with one’s neighborhood, more informal attractions like the Uptown sinkhole offer their own opportunity for spontaneous interaction. Armbruster said there were times where she met neighbors and other locals around the sinkhole.

It sometimes feels that Minneapolis is a city constantly striving to be more than it is. Leaders like Frey, and some residents as well, seem to want the name to carry  cultural capital comparable to New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles — or at least Chicago, Seattle and Portland.

In chasing this goal, we must acknowledge both our own flaws and those of our aspirations, and not just at the surface level. Every major city in the United States still has work to do in addressing their histories of racial, social and environmental injustice.

Other concerns are receiving priority for less-than-ideal reasons. Take the uncertain teetering of downtown: while collapse would admittedly have a serious knock-on effect on the tax revenue of the city and state, the demands of businesses are the real reason for its prominence in city policy.

Superficial, PR-driven or corporate-led measures are designed to benefit the politicians and business leaders who promote them. This does not necessarily mean that they are guaranteed to fail, but it does mean that the definition of success that accompanies them should be taken with a heavy grain of salt.

In this vein, the Uptown sinkhole is objectively an infrastructure problem. It is blocking an intersection and construction on it has become a nuisance. Someone I know who lives in the area described it as “annoying.” Complications have slowed repairs to several months past the predicted finish date. To the city government and the Metropolitan Council, it is an embarrassment.

At the same time, it is also true, for a little while at least, the sinkhole was a source of community gathering: a talking point and an impromptu gathering space that drew people together. Was it better at this than big events like Downtown Field Day? Maybe, maybe not, but it was a draw nonetheless.

In some ways, the sinkhole is a microcosm of Minneapolis itself: flawed, but compellingly so. The sooner we can embrace our quirks and superficial imperfections, the sooner we can begin to address the real issues that our city faces.

Senior Vice President Myron Frans announced at the July 12 Board of Regents meeting the University of Minnesota’s plan to revisit and update building access, among other aspects of the University’s public safety policy.

Back in April, Facilities Management staff discovered someone unaffiliated with the University had gained entry to Appleby Hall before passing away overnight.

Other recent events have prompted additional scrutiny of building access. A mass shooting at Michigan State University saw two students killed in their classroom by a gunman who was unaffiliated with the institution, who then proceeded to fatally shoot another student outside before being killed by police.

Frans explicitly invoked Michigan State as a factor in the decision to revisit the University’s building policies — in other words, to make access more restrictive.

Additionally, Frans indicated Pioneer Hall will be testing the use of turnstiles to control access to dorm space this fall, in response to a plethora of reports of indecent or dangerous conduct. Many of these reports were accurate, though fears around some — including a wellness check in Middlebrook Hall and a suspected incident of indecent conduct in Bailey Hall — turned out to have been exaggerated and propagated by misunderstanding.

If the results of the turnstile test deem positive by whatever metrics Frans intends to use, we can expect to see another hike in room and board fees to pay for permanent installations in every residence hall on campus.

“I think ultimately turnstiles will be more trouble than help,” said Oliver Lee, a rising second-year student who lived in Middlebrook Hall last year. “I feel like turnstiles will just frustrate students, leading them to find more ways around them.”

Meanwhile, while restricting keycard access to classroom buildings would be fairly straightforward, we should be willing to wonder what extent we should go to buy the appearance of a little more safety on campus, particularly if nothing is being done to prevent these hazards from being moved off campus and into the city at large.

To be personal for a moment: as a teaching assistant, the idea of having to deal with an active shooter situation terrifies me. There are few nightmares that are worse for any educator than being helpless in the face of a lethal threat to the students we’re responsible for.

 We must rationally assess where the risks lie. Mass shootings at universities are newsworthy specifically because they are rare. Moreover, when they do occur, they are almost always committed by someone with a direct connection to the institution. 

The Virginia Tech shooting, which remains the deadliest school shooting in American history, was committed by a student. Restricting building access to students, faculty and staff would not have been sufficient to prevent the tragedy.

There is also no particular reason to believe locking classrooms and dorms to external threats will prevent acts of violence overall. Individuals who intend to commit mass murder are not necessarily going to be discouraged by limited access to one potential target if there are other publicly accessible areas available to them, either on or off campus.

As the Appleby Hall tragedy demonstrated, not every outsider who seeks access to a campus building is necessarily intending to do harm. The decision on the part of the parent group Campus Safety Coalition to instantly weaponize this event in favor of access restrictions rather than to take a moment to consider broader community issues such as homelessness, poverty, healthcare access and addiction speaks volumes about their priorities.

In other words, many have adopted the mindset the University is a fortress that must be defended rather than a public institution that should be welcoming and making an active effort to improve its community.

This sense of openness is something that we should value — both in a grand, idealistic sense and from a more down-to-earth logistical perspective. Turnstiles in dormitories will make for a sizable hassle during high-traffic periods like check-in and check-out unless other entrances are left open, defeating the purpose.

The Midwestern tendency to be courteous and hold doors open will also need to be quashed for any security benefit to be gained. What seems likely is that people will continue to hold doors for others, especially those who look like they belong in a particular building at a particular time. In other words, they will be making spot judgments about who doesn’t seem to belong, something that will almost inevitably result in profiling — as indeed it already has.

Overall, the University’s planning around public safety has focused more on optics than on substance. It is telling that during the July update to the regents, Frans chose to open by describing marketing and outreach efforts rather than more concrete investments.

That said, restricting card access and installing turnstiles are still superficial fixes to deeper problems and fail to answer the fundamental question: What does safety mean at a public university nestled in the heart of a major city?

An approach from University administrators that centers data and cites its sources, instead of our current security theater, would certainly be part of that answer. Meanwhile, to the University’s credit, seeking to rebuild community relationships in order to mitigate crime in the area has also been on the agenda but this seems to be receiving significantly less attention, publicity and funding than physical measures. 

But neither of these factors on their own can substitute for the mutual trust that plays an integral role in keeping our campus community safe and well.

“I felt safe in the dorms this year, personally, due to the number of students that live in Middlebrook,” Lee said. “I knew we would all have each other’s backs if necessary.”

The question of whether the University of Minnesota has sufficiently met its obligations to its students is frequently discussed. Less immediate, but often still near the surface, is whether it has met its obligations to other stakeholders: its faculty, its staff and the citizens of Minnesota at large.

But one particular question often escapes us: How good is the University at meeting its obligations to the communities that immediately surround it?

Historically, things have not been smooth.

The Prospect Park Association has butted heads with the University in the past, most notoriously with the decision to expand across Oak Street — the neighborhood border — to build the Oak Street Garage in the early 1970s.

“It was one of the first battles that the neighborhood fought and lost,” said Andy Mickel, longtime Prospect Park resident. He described moving in just in time to hear firsthand the stories of disgruntled residents whose homes had been condemned to make room for the parking ramp.

These tensions persisted for decades as the University continued to develop in Prospect Park.

The relationship was not carried out on equal footing. With millions of dollars, and a team of lawyers at its disposal, the University was able to steamroll the concerns of its neighbors to pursue further development. According to community members, corporate connections also benefited, cashing out to build developments like the Dinnaken House on Huron and Washington.

More residences were demolished between Oak Street and Huron Boulevard — the Motley area of the neighborhood — in the 1990s to make room for new health facilities. Mickel spoke of a perception in the neighborhood that dealings with administration and the Board of Regents were not carried out fairly and honestly.

“They snookered us,” Mickel said.

When plans entered the works for the construction of Huntington Bank Stadium (then TCF Bank Stadium) in the 2000s, the state legislature mandated the formation of the University District Alliance (UDA), consisting of representatives from the University and the surrounding neighborhood associations.

However, the UDA has not been a solution for community relations.

“That Board has been spinning its wheels for as long as I can remember,” said Vic Thorstenson, president of the Marcy-Holmes Neighborhood Association. Thorstenson also serves as a neighborhood representative in the UDA.

Unlike Prospect Park, Marcy-Holmes has mostly evaded attention from the University until recently, when crime began to rise in Dinkytown.

“I think it’s improving a little bit,” Thorstenson said. “[But] they’re probably a bit more responsive to these noisy parents’ groups than people who actually live in the neighborhood, which is unfortunate.”

While it has been subject to the University’s development, Prospect Park retains a strong presence of homeowners. Significant changes east of the Stadium Village area began taking off only after the construction of the Green Line about ten years ago prompted new development mostly limited to the area along University Avenue and 4th Street, including apartment blocks billing themselves as student housing.

(Whether these corporate megaliths live up to that image is another story entirely.)

Marcy-Holmes, in contrast, has seen a more dramatic demographic shift, with the areas closest to campus almost entirely taken over by students who treat the spaces they inhabit as an extension of the University rather than as a connected, but distinct, community.

While this mindset is not unique to Marcy-Holmes, over 80% of the residents of the two census regions of Marcy-Holmes east of Interstate 35W, including Dinkytown, are between the ages of 18 and 24 — more than any other region in the University area, save for the campus itself.

A lack of engagement between students and the neighborhood’s long-term residents continues to pose a challenge for neighborhood relations. Thorstenson attributed this partially to a culture of apartments and rentals serving more as off-campus dorms rather than places for student-neighborhood interaction — a consequence of limited housing supply on campus coinciding with a historical pivot away from a “commuter campus” culture.

The result is that the University has created the perfect storm of conditions where students feel compelled to live near campus without necessarily choosing to live on it, instead opting to live nearby. However, this has not led to a better interface between students, the University, and the surrounding community.

Instead, administrators have seized the opportunity to treat their own priorities, as well as those of parents and students, as more important than the concerns of long-term residents who will be around to feel the side effects of University policy. This dynamic predates a significant student presence in Prospect Park, but has also reared its head in Marcy-Holmes as of late.

This is an unhealthy approach to take, and the Board should redouble its efforts to make sure that community concerns are being addressed.

That said, whether we like it or not, students are residents and stakeholders within the neighborhoods we live in and have responsibilities to them. The University’s ability to productively engage with nearby communities has been inconsistent at best. If we as students want to see changes in the surrounding area, it will require us to take action ourselves — not to leave it to administrators with their own agenda.

Thorstenson’s advice to students?

“Improve the neighborhood with involvement and don’t listen to a bunch of old farts like me.”

The junction where Rice Street ends at Highway 96 in the northern Ramsey County suburbs looks innocuous at first glance.

On the south side of the highway, massive signs read “Vadnais Heights” and “Welcome to Shoreview” on the east and west sides of the intersection, respectively. The latter, in particular, rhetorically indicates an openness, at least in theory, toward the presence of guests, visitors and non-residents.

Meanwhile, on the north side of the intersection, Rice Street turns into Pleasant Lake Road, which winds itself around a grassy median and quickly snakes into the trees and out of sight.

The sign that sits on that median is much smaller than the two opposing it from across the highway, and significantly more terse: “North Oaks — No Trespassing — Private Roads & Land.”

North Oaks, a city of about 5,000 people, was once Minnesota’s largest gated community and was likely the only one in the state to have been a municipality of its own. The gates were removed almost forty years ago, but the city retains an unusual quirk: property lines extend to the middle of roads, meaning that there is no public property anywhere in the city.

The result is an unusual tripartite power-sharing arrangement with three major players: the City of North Oaks, the North Oaks Homeowners’ Association (NOHOA) and the North Oaks Company, the main developer in the city.

The city has authority over municipal planning (something it has fought the company over in the recent past). NOHOA maintains roads and other city amenities traditionally managed by a municipal government. The company owns the parks and conservation land and generally manages new construction on unoccupied plots.

What draws people to live in a community that’s gated in every sense but the physical?

Having the money to live there is certainly a factor. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, North Oaks is demographically similar to neighboring communities Shoreview and White Bear Township in terms of race and ethnicity — all three are over 80% white — but is significantly wealthier than both, with a median household income of about $220,000 a year, double that of Shoreview and White Bear.

North Oaks may be the wealthiest city of its size in the entire metro area by this metric. Ultra-rich lakeside enclaves like Minnetonka Beach and Sunfish Lake have it beat but are significantly smaller. Even suburbs with a reputation for being fairly affluent, such as Edina and Wayzata, are nowhere near, with median incomes still much closer to $100,000 a year.

Wealth is certainly a determining factor for North Oaks residents. But privacy and seclusion may be just as crucial to determining why residents choose to live there.

A posting on the city’s website reminds residents solicitation is trespassing and should be reported to the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office. NOHOA distributes identification badges for cars and bicycles so that residents can quickly tell if someone is one of their own.

One notorious example of this mindset took place in 2008 when Google was first collecting data for its Street View service. The city sent a cease-and-desist, on the grounds all imagery collected in the city limits had been acquired illegally and demanded it be expunged.

Google complied.

There are no doubt other draws, such as the privately managed trails, parks and conservation land in the city. But even without gates, there’s no doubt that exclusivity is a draw.

Is this a healthy mindset?

“It’s less about exchange or encounter with a public that anyone and everyone who you know is able to access public space, and it’s more about having control over land, over streets, over parks, so that you know who you can find and encounter and engage in these types of locations,” said Fernando Burga, a professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

Many Minnesota suburbanites and rural residents have expressed the view that the metropolitan core, and Minneapolis in particular, is a dangerous or foreign place that must be kept at arm’s length.

Minneapolis has been compared to Gotham City and described as a dangerous place where one cannot even walk down the street without being accosted by suspected criminals, a city that is a “shell of its former self” where residents and leaders alike are disconnected from reality.

This mindset, brazen or latent, appears in a variety of places: nauseatingly racist comments on panic-stoking social media accounts like Twitter’s CrimeWatchMPLS, letters to the editor in local news outlets like the Star Tribune and even municipal governments, as seen in White Bear Lake’s rejection of Metro Transit’s proposed Purple Line rapid bus route.

It is also not always accurate. At least some of the recent firework mayhem in Dinkytown has been attributed to suburban youth. In the western suburb of Orono, teenagers with fireworks started a fire that damaged five boats and a pier on Lake Minnetonka. 

North Oaks is not unique in wanting to keep the hustle and bustle of the city out.

Where it differs from other communities is the extent to which it chooses to go to achieve that end — perhaps not so far as gated communities, which are frequently criticized for being an extreme embodiment of that attitude, but certainly to the same extent with regards to potential legal consequences for interlopers.

“What kind of civil, civic discourse can happen in public space if it is private?” Burga said. “There needs to be more questions asked about this. And that’s where it’s tough to really understand what’s going on in these communities.”

The Board of Regents met briefly on June 26 to approve the University of Minnesota’s annual operating budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

The meeting was brief and without incident. After just 20 minutes of discussion, the Board voted 11-0, with Penny Wheeler absent, to approve another 3.5% tuition hike for Twin Cities and Rochester students and a 1% tuition hike for students at all other campuses.

While senior administrators patted themselves on the back for keeping the increases below nationwide inflation, inflation in the Twin Cities is significantly lower than in other parts of the country, down to just 1.8% in May.

Despite impassioned appearances from members of the University community at the June 8 public forum, Vice President Julie Tonneson was quick to reassure the Board that no substantive changes had been made in the interim. “There are two corrections,” Tonneson said. “They are minor and they have not changed any of the substance of our recommendations.”

Despite some concerns from the Board about raises in tuition, it was clear that the real decisions had already been made.

“I’m hoping that over the next year … we can bring those costs down for students,” said Regent Robyn Gulley. 

In other words, it’s too late to do anything about it now.

While the overall framework remained the same, Tonneson’s assurances to Regent Kodi Verhalen on the subject of the ethnic and gender studies deparment’s budget revealed the extent to which senior leadership engages with college-level issues.

“[CLA] had to help us understand their internal decision-making process within the college, and our understanding is… there will be no budget reduction in the departments [CLA leadership] has listed,” Tonneson said.

It should be noted that CLA at large continues to face budget cuts, There are certainly reasons why a more decentralized budget model that keeps the Board out of day-to-day decisions about funding for individual units or departments might be advantageous.

One need only look at the way appointments to university boards have been politicized of late — most notoriously at Florida’s New College, where Governor Ron DeSantis has effectively placed the board of trustees under his direct control — to see the hazards of political micromanagement of a university’s affairs.

Local fans of DeSantis and his anti-woke crusade, meanwhile, would do well to remember that in Democrat-controlled states like Minnesota, the shoe could easily end up on the other foot. Top-level intervention into department-level funding is, for now, the exception rather than the rule.

But even that is not set in stone.

That said, the current model at the University seems to be purpose-built for buck-passing. 

Departments are at the mercy of their colleges, which are stuck with fixed fractions of the pool of unrestricted funds — tuition and state money without strings attached — corresponding to their number of enrolled students. Tonneson and her staff set the size of this pool by playing with “levers” like tuition, compensation and so on. They pass off final approval to the Board, which, presented with no alternative, bemoans the limited state support and votes to approve it, just in time for the whole cycle to start again for the next academic year.

“When USG has dug for answers, we’ve come up with a good idea of all of the variables that change during the budget process,” said Undergraduate Student Government President Shashank Murali and Vice President Sara Davis in an email statement. “But, fundamentally, what all students need from the University is a clear answer to the question, ‘Where does our tuition go?’”

Can we kick the habit?

One fix, at least to cover matters of internal allocation, could be to fund colleges and departments based on how many credits they have students enrolled in. In other words, a CBS student taking mostly classes in CSE for a semester would add greater weight to CSE’s column.

More transparency in decision-making would also offer a view into how things like tuition increases are decided on.

However, this fails to address the bigger elephants in the room.

Increased contribution from the state is often touted as a solution. Why has this not been forthcoming?

One could argue that, in some ways, it already is, with the state moving to expand access to tuition-free education in the coming term to students from families making less than $80,000 a year, as well as to Native American students.

More controversial is the argument that other institutions need the money more or will use it more wisely.

The idea that Minnesota State, or the numerous tribal colleges across the state, could wring more benefit out of each state dollar than the University is anathema in these conversations. Nevertheless, it is a view that should be given more credence given that the University has struggled with budget shortfalls while continuing with non-essential land purchases.

Back in late April, former CLA Dean John Coleman estimated CLA’s shortfall for the coming year at about $1 million after deducting money that was not being regularly spent. This will almost certainly equate to lost jobs for adjunct faculty and graduate assistants and a worse educational experience for the students who will lose out on course offerings or section options.

Meanwhile, the purchase of $3 million worth of farmland in Mower County for the FAARM project was approved in the Board’s consent report for May, with no further purpose attached and no substantive questions asked.

There are procedural changes that can be made to help address the issue of allocating funds between units. These should be assessed and implemented if they will provide the desired effects.

That being said, there is a more fundamental issue at hand. The University continues to prioritize pet projects over the needs of students, faculty and staff.

If the Board is truly dedicated to addressing these needs, they need to take charge. The administration won’t do it for them.

The first thing I noticed as I walked up First Street was the festival. Music audible from down the block, tents, vendors and the hubbub of a large group of people enjoying themselves.

The second thing I noticed was the protestors.

Hudson, Wisconsin’s inaugural pride festival had not come without opposition. Riled-up conservatives had worked themselves into a frenzy over just about every event on the schedule, with the inclusion of a drag queen story hour drawing particular ire.

I had expected pensioners in polo shirts: a small group of infuriated but mostly non-threatening seniors slinging Scripture at anyone who ventured too close, but mostly minding their own business.

The reality was very different.

A dozen black-clad, masked figures stood just off the sidewalk, chanting through a megaphone. Most were young and middle-aged men, but I could feel the eyes of one young woman fixed on me, inscrutable behind a black face mask and sunglasses.

Any plausible deniability about their ideology was dispelled by the “white lives matter” sign one carried.

It was a clear reminder of the ways threats and violence have escalated against the LGBTQ+ community in recent years. Fascists on the streets of Hudson are far from an isolated phenomenon. 

Thirty-one members of the white supremacist organization Patriot Front were arrested last year on a charge of conspiracy to riot after showing up with riot gear and a smoke grenade to a Pride celebration in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

As a trans person, I knew how I was supposed to feel in that moment: intimidated, othered and out of place — even in the town where I grew up.

We often associate queer spaces with urban centers, and it is true that cities like New York and San Francisco have historically been at the vanguard of the fight for queer liberation. 

The Stonewall riot of 1969 is often considered a pivotal moment in a movement that started off with a radical edge, one that was often led by trans women of color and, in many cases, built in solidarity with other movements at the time, most notably the anti-war movement.

Today, meanwhile, pride is mainstream in major cities across the country. Pride Twin Cities is larger than ever, expanding across I-94 from Loring Park into the Sculpture Garden for the first time; meanwhile, the website for this year’s Pride Parade features screen-filling logos for Delta Airlines and other sponsors above the parade’s lineup.

But this pinkwashed facade is not reflective of the reality many queer people live in every day.

Rural areas continue to be hotbeds of hostility, as the Little Theatre in New London, Minnesota, found out last year when selecting a drag performer for an artist residency.

“Within a month I found out that almost over a dozen churches had gotten together for an emergency meeting to discuss what [our] project meant and how they should handle it,” said Bethany Lacktorin, the theater’s director. “The pastor said, ‘If you pursue this, you have been warned.’ He absolutely was threatening us as an organization, and he wasn’t kidding.”

Meanwhile, in the metro, tensions remain between a moderate establishment and the grassroots organizers who see TC Pride — and many of its attendees — as forgetting their roots.

“For us, it’s really about getting people to understand what the point of [Stonewall was], which was securing rights for black and brown trans people primarily, who were bearing the brunt of these attacks and raids on bars and gathering spaces,” said Jae Yates, an organizer with the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice for Jamar (TCC4J). 

Each year, TCC4J helps lead Taking Back Pride, a disruption of the annual pride parade seeking to draw attention to police brutality and other ongoing issues faced by queer and trans people of color, along with a broader dissatisfaction with other aspects of corporate pride.

“We are protesting the presence of corporations and the FBI having a booth in the pride in the park section,” Yates said. “What we’re trying to do, more specifically, is to get people to understand these people are not your friends.”

“They’re here so long as they can cash in on you,” Yates continued. “They don’t care about you being liberated.”

The frustration with commercialization is not limited to TC Pride. Corporations that have tried to play both sides after conservative criticism have suffered and rightly so. Target was criticized after deciding to pull pride merchandise from some of its stores and the cancellation of Bud Light’s promotion with a trans influencer led numerous gay bars, including the Saloon in downtown Minneapolis, to pull Anheuser-Busch beers from sale. Across the country, Starbucks workers announced plans to strike through this week over bans on Pride-themed decorations.

What should we learn from this?

Queer people and allies cannot afford to wait for corporations to decide that we are worth defending.

We cannot allow our enemies to decide which of us are to be tolerated in the public space and which are to be stigmatized and shunned.

We must remember that a necessary consequence of our love for one another is righteous fury at the forces that seek to use us, whether as a target for persecution or as a marketable demographic.

“It’s not about us being visible. It’s about taking away power from the state to oppress us,” Yates said. “That’s what’s resonating with people more and more.”

As June draws to a close and we reflect on queer history, it is not enough to celebrate queer identities. We must also be mindful of the justified wrath that won us the ability to do so in the first place and understand that our work is not yet over.

When University of Minnesota President Joan Gabel announced her departure this past spring, a flurry of speculation arose as to who would fill the role until a permanent replacement could be found. Senior Vice President Myron Frans? One of the more ambitious system chancellors? Controversial outgoing Board of Regents chair Ken Powell? 

Optimism about the direction of the university came tempered with bitter cynicism. While Gabel had seen her share of criticism, there seemed to be even less appetite for someone associated with her misdeeds who also lacked her redeeming qualities.

This lack of association with recent scandals offers perhaps the most charitable explanation for why the regents opted to pick a candidate with a near-total lack of experience in higher education over the aforementioned Frans or Crookston Chancellor Mary Holz-Clause. 

Interim president Jeffrey Ettinger’s experience in higher education prior to June 10, when his employment contract began, consisted of just a handful of classes taught as an adjunct faculty member. His cover letter freely admitted his only real ties to the academic world were connections to the University through his work as CEO of Hormel Foods, then as chair of the Hormel Foundation.

Regardless of the extent to which one buys into the idea that corporatization of higher education is a problem, Ettinger’s time at Hormel was punctuated by what should be examples of clear misconduct, even for defenders of a free-market model. Examples include suspected price fixing, USDA investigations for animal cruelty and labor and safety violations — including the breakout of a neurological disorder among employees of a subsidiary company.

These issues were neatly summarized by the Daily Beast in 2022, when Ettinger was seeking the Democratic nomination for Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District. The fact that these matters are on the public record, yet were not sufficient to dissuade his appointment, speaks to his ability to dodge bad press — perhaps the most valuable attribute the interim president of an embattled public university can have in the eyes of the current board.

Ettinger’s ties through the Hormel Foundation to the University’s Future of Advanced Agricultural Research in Minnesota (FAARM) Project are arguably even more concerning. 

Announced in February 2022, the FAARM project was billed as a “visionary agricultural research complex” to be established on tracts of Mower County farmland near Austin — and Hormel headquarters — to the tune of $220 million. 

The University’s initial release also announced a “cornerstone commitment,” from the Hormel Foundation, of $60 million, complete with a chipper quote from none other than Ettinger himself. 

Moreover, Ettinger’s involvement in the project has gone back a while. His cover letter touts his collaboration with both Gabel and her predecessor, Eric Kaler, who retired as president in 2019.

Does Ettinger’s prior involvement with FAARM constitute a conflict of interest?

The Board has been desperate to avoid any perception of this, grafting additional language into Ettinger’s conflict of interest plan to establish a strong firewall between the interim president and any FAARM-related decisions and activities (with the notable exception of lobbying for state funding). 

It makes sense.

Board Chair Janie Mayeron is a retired magistrate judge and a skilled lawyer with an interest in using strong language to protect University interests. She is up for reelection in two years and, considering the ignominious rejection of her predecessor Powell over his support for Gabel’s Securian arrangement, knows that her reputation is at stake. The rest of the Board faces similar pressures. It is realistic to assume that they will keep Ettinger in line for their own sake.

Even without the presence of an overt conflict, however, major questions remain over Hormel’s influence over FAARM.

“There are risks with bringing in the corporate money for sure,” said Richard Painter, a law professor at the University and former White House ethics advisor. “This is a project that I might very well want to take a really good look at, to make sure that we are meeting the ethical standards, protecting our research independence.” 

It should be noted Painter previously lost to Ettinger in the DFL primary for Minnesota’s first congressional district, and began our conversation by noting his respect for his former political opponent and his hopes that someone from a corporate background would be able to cut red tape at the University. He has also been associated with other notable critics of Gabel, including former regents Darrin Rosha and Michael Hsu and former GOP governor Arne Carlson.

“There’s no reason to put [FAARM] in Austin, Minnesota other than Hormel, and, you know, I think Hormel has a better outlook on education than the Koch brothers,” said Jerry Cohen, a horticultural science professor. “But what they’re doing is very similar to what the Koch brothers did with economics departments, like at George Mason University … where they basically drove the discussion in the academic direction by using corporate money to influence educational activity.”

This does not mean that Ettinger’s service as interim president will automatically hand over the keys to the University’s research enterprise to a large corporation with a financial stake in FAARM and other projects. Yet, it says a lot about the Board’s current stance that they would rather take someone whose prior interest in that research has been limited to ensuring it benefits the corporation he is associated with, instead of seeking out a candidate who has experience balancing the needs of students, faculty and the state of Minnesota at large.

“Administrators can’t predict the future because scientists create the future,” Cohen said. “You can’t have a forward-looking activity without consulting with those people who are creating the future.”

Correction: This article initially misstated the title of Jerry Cohen. He is a horticultural science professor.

As the end of the semester approached last month, the usual foot traffic around campus slowly faded, replaced by grinning, gown-clad groups of graduates flocking to the most iconic and picturesque sites on and around campus to take photos and celebrate.

Even for a graduating class with a quiet and uneventful experience at school, there would be plenty of cause for excitement. The past 10 years have seen a massive rise in stress and mental health disorders in college and university students nationwide. 

Tuition keeps going up.

While average student debt nationwide has plateaued, this is due, in large part, to the desperation of students doing everything and anything in their power to get out with as little debt as possible. 

A quarter of full-time undergraduates nationwide work at least 20 hours a week, and universities are beginning to meet the demand for students looking to get out in less than four years with new programs designed to do exactly that.

Meanwhile, systematic disparities continue to hit marginalized communities disproportionately hard, both in terms of making it to graduation and even making it through the door in the first place. 

Only 36% of Black 18- to 24-year-olds, and only 19% of American Indian and Alaska Native 18- to 24-year-olds are enrolled in college, compared to 42% of white 18- to 24-year-olds. Meanwhile, Latinx and Black students are 20% and 30% less likely, respectively, to complete a four-year degree than white students. 

In this day and age, making it to commencement is still an accomplishment.

The past few years have been particularly challenging. The class of 2023 spent the better part of their first two years under the shadow of COVID. They lived through the uprising following the murder of George Floyd.

On campus, they have watched as their tuition has gone up, their staff has threatened to strike over low pay and poor treatment and their administrators have lost credibility in real time. 

Now, over the last year, they were given a front-row seat to this dynamic of administrative fumbling playing out one last time over the University’s plans for commencement.

The first sign of trouble came from a cryptic email in October, sent out by each dean to their respective college, noting that with the closure of Mariucci Arena — traditionally the venue for college commencement ceremonies — the University would instead pursue a joint conferral of degrees at Huntington Bank Stadium. 

Understandably, this raised questions, foremost among them: would students get the opportunity to cross the stage? The answer, in a campus-wide follow-up from Provost Rachel Croson, turned out to be a resounding no.

The backlash was swift.

In memorable coverage from the Minnesota Daily at the time, seniors slammed the administration for failing to provide even the simplest recognition to its students. Nor were they particularly satisfied with the announcement, months later, the University would be making it up to them by offering them the chance to schedule their own time for a separate stage crossing, albeit at a different low-profile location and time.

Although it could not have been intentional, the issue makes for an unwitting paradigm of shifting landscapes in higher ed, a move away from hidebound academic tradition toward a more individualist, corporatized approach. This has often been exemplified in the academic realm with things like grade inflation, emphasis on lucrative research over classroom education, increased use of term faculty and more. 

The trappings of commencement itself carry long history with them: the ceremonial mace, the Latin honors, even the gowns themselves. This symbolism, however, has now been crossed with a “Build-A-Graduation” approach: hit up the department celebration, schedule a stage crossing with your besties and convince Grandma Ann that the conferral isn’t going to be worth the drive down from Crosslake. 

The stiff, collectivized formality of a classic grad ceremony has been supplanted with a freshly 21st century outlook — in other words, commencement as a commodity. The best part for admin? Regardless of which ceremonies and events you attend, your money is already in their pockets.

This does not mean conventional grad ceremonies, and indeed many of the things we associate with academic tradition, are automatically worth preserving. To want to bring academia back to the “good old days” neglects to acknowledge who those days were and were not good for. 

At the same time, the attempt to spin a scheduling slip-up into “additional opportunities for individual recognition,” as Croson’s January email claimed, is both insulting to students and depressingly predictable.

As senior Rowan Halm said in prior coverage, “It felt more like it was celebrating the University than the students, which I wasn’t necessarily surprised by.”

But in a new Gilded Age of privatization, corporate thinking, and administrative self-aggrandizement even in public institutions, can we say we expected anything else?

At the end of the day, students got the last word in. When President Gabel came up to speak at the undergraduate ceremony, the crowd booed.