Allison Liu

Current and former democratic presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton spoke on the future of The United States’ criminal justice system before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples 106th Convention in Philadelphia July 14. President Obama’s speech came the day after he commuted the sentences of more than 46 nonviolent drug offenders, more than double the amount of prisoners he commuted during the entire rest of the year. The address also came two days before his visit, on July 16, to El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma, making him the first sitting president to visit a federal prison.

During the speech, the President called for sweeping reforms to the U.S. prison and criminal justice system that would lower America’s rate of incarceration and help former convicts assimilate into society. These reforms include getting rid of mandatory minimums and putting an end to the zero tolerance policies, which have resulted in schools treating students of color as criminals rather than children.

“If you are a parent, you know that there are times where boys and girls are going to act out in school. And the question is, are we letting principals and parents deal with one set of kids and we call the police on another set of kids?” Obama asked.

“That’s not the right thing to do. We’ve got to make sure our juvenile justice system remembers that kids are different. Don’t just tag them as future criminals. Reach out to them as future citizens,” the President continued.

Obama also called for significant changes to be made with how society treats former criminals who have served their time and paid their debt to society. “Here’s another good idea — one with bipartisan support in Congress:  Let’s reward prisoners with reduced sentences if they complete programs that make them less likely to commit a repeat offense,” he said.

“Let’s invest in innovative new approaches to link former prisoners with employers and help them stay on track. Let’s follow the growing number of our states and cities and private companies who have decided to ‘Ban the Box’ on job applications so that former prisoners who have done their time and are now trying to get straight with society have a decent shot in a job interview,” he continued, then added, “And if folks have served their time, and they’ve reentered society, they should be able to vote.”

This speech was the first time the President publicly voiced his support for re-enfranchising of ex-offenders. The U.S. is one of the strictest countries in the world in terms of felony disenfranchisement.

The other piece of breaking information in the speech that had not been previously heard from the White House was that the President had asked Attorney General Loretta Lynch to look into a the overuse of solitary confinement in prisons across the country.

“Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for 23 hours a day, sometimes for months or even years at a time? That is not going to make us safer. That’s not going to make us stronger,” Obama affirmed.

The appeal lasted 45 minutes as the President called for reform for the nation’s penal system. Obama also highlighted statistics related to the U.S. justice system, such as the fact that although the U.S. contains only five percent of the world’s population, the nation contains 25 percent of the world’s prisons. While African Americans and Latinos make up only 30 percent of the country’s population, they make up 60 percent of U.S. prisoners. Furthermore, the U.S.’s level of incarceration is quadruple that of China and there are more people in prison in this country than the top 35 European countries with the most prisoners combined.

During the address, the President also lauded the bipartisan support that reforming the justice system has received.

“This is a cause that’s bringing people in both houses of Congress together,” he said.

“It’s created some unlikely bedfellows. You’ve got Van Jones and Newt Gingrich. You’ve got Americans for Tax Reform and the American Civil Liberties Union. You’ve got the NAACP and the Koch brothers,” Obama told the crowd.

Following the address by President Obama was one by former president Bill Clinton at the conventions closing session July 14. Though Clinton mostly reiterated and reinforced what President Obama said the day before, he also acknowledged that many of the ills that the President is trying to fix were caused by laws passed during his time in office.

Clinton’s speech covered a variety of other topics such as the decision by South Carolina’s state house to take down the confederate battle flag from its grounds. This act resulted in the NAACP’s decision during the convention to end their decades long boycott of the state. The former president mainly spoke to the importance of community building and reconciliation in the wake of conflict.

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Drexel University’s Muslim Student Association celebrated their annual Islam Awareness Week from April 13-17. The theme of the week was M.E.R.C.Y with each day celebrating a different letter of the acronym. It stood for me, empowerment, respect, compassion and you, or as Numan Dugmeoglu, the vice president of DMSA, referred to it, “Mercy is a bridge from me to you.” Many of the events also highlight different Islamic values such as prayer, fasting and the hijab.

The events included Tabling on April 13 where passersby were invited to throw darts at a board of balloons, which after popping revealed notes with inspirational quotes about Islam. It occurred at the Dragon statue, under the name, “Ask Me, I’m Muslim.”

Photo Courtesy: Drexel Muslim Student Association

On April 14, at the Dragon statue, the theme was empowerment. MSA students invited others to try on the hijab, the traditional Islamic veil or headscarf, to take pictures and explained why they felt that the garb was empowering rather than oppressive. Noor Jemy, the MSA’s treasurer, explained, “I don’t wear this [hijab] for my ego, for L’Oreal or for my husband. I wear it for the One who knows me better than myself. I wear this for the One who forgives me more than my own mother. I wear this because I have submitted in slavery to the One who has liberated me spiritually. I wear this for God, because He told me to do so. I am not oppressed. I am free. More free than anyone can even think to be.”

On April 15 at the Quad and April 16 at the Dragon statue, the themes were respect and compassion, with events that had students put handprints on sign which read, “We all have our differences, and our differences unite us” on the first day and a rose giving on the second. There was also a fast-a-thon dinner April 16.

The week culminated with a public Jumu’ah, Islam’s Friday prayer service, April 17 at Buckley Field and a sermon by visiting imam and Islamic scholar Khalid Latif, who is the Chaplain of New York University’s MSA. The topic of Latif’s speech was “The Path of Mercy: Lessons From Moses and Jesus,” which incorporated thought from Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions and tied it to the overall theme of mercy.

This is third year in a row that the MSA has held an Islam Awareness Week in the spring and both Dugmeoglu and Jemy said that they had been planning this year’s celebration for months. “We know that we hold it every year, and with this knowledge we began brainstorming interactive activities around mid-winter term when groups to plan each day were decided and meetings dedicated solely to Islam Awareness Week were held,” Jemy explained.

“We try to promote the true meaning of what Islam is, which in it’s most core sense is peace. A majority of the DMSA members (30-plus students) come together in the weeks prior to IAW and get into groups to plan each day of the week. There are lots of artwork, creating of posters, buying of supplies, planning of games, executing of games, ordering of roses, compiling of quotes, staying up late and even midnight runs to get last minute supplies, all to make the week as superb as it was last week. It’s a lot of dedication and our members, many of them freshmen and experiencing their first IAW, loved it and cannot wait for next year’s. It won’t come soon enough,” she continued.

April 16’s event, which focused on the Islamic value of fasting, also served as fundraiser. For every student, Muslim or not, who pledged to fast, the MSA also pledged $5 to the Zakat Foundation of America to support an orphan. They got enough pledges to support an orphan for a year.

Dugmeoglu also explained that in previous years IAW had a different structure, which consisted of inviting mostly different speakers for the Muslim community on campus. However, last year they decided to try a different approach of going out onto campus and having events to make their presence known. “Last year they adopted a new format to just kind of be out there, raising awareness that we are on campus. We have a presence, and we are just like you,” he said.

According to Dugmeoglu, in past years the DMSA’s Islam Awareness Week has been very successful in the growth of the DMSA’s activity within the campus community. Jemy also thought it helped in raising awareness of Islam and everything the DMSA does to the community outside Drexel.

“I believe it was very successful. We got a lot of community involvement and so many people stopped by our tables each day and came to our fast-a-thon and the main event [of the lecture]. We were able to raise enough money from the fast-a-thon to sponsor an orphan for an entire year and the DMSA will be doing so on behalf of the Drexel community.”

The DMSA’s IAW comes on the heels of their win at the “Battle of the MSAs.” The event is an intercollegiate competition akin to Greek Week and features participation from many MSAs from Philadelphia schools. Details about the orphan to be sponsored will be available soon on the DMSA’s Facebook page, Jemy said.

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On April 3, Drexel University announced that it would be adding the subject art history as a major for the upcoming year to the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design. The new major is designed to be one of Drexel’s most flexible subjects, with the hope that students can take it on as a second major while pairing it with a different field. Both Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science options will be offered, with the Bachelor of Arts being slightly stricter in requiring a larger and more guided focus in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Two combined B.S. and M.S. programs that incorporate the major have also been designed, one in arts administration and a second in museum leadership.

Allen Sabinson, the dean of Westphal, explained that the idea of an art history major had long been discussed. However, the actual push to finally bring one about came two years ago when Drexel’s art history faculty began to grow large enough to support a major. Some of those professors include Pia Brancaccio, who specializes in Buddhist cave painting and far Eastern art, Martha Lucy, a former curator of a Barnes Foundation’s collection, and Linda Kim who specializes in African American art and art of atrocity.

Photo Credit: David Klein

Charles Morscheck, co-director of the art history program, said that the program’s flexibility is what makes it attractive for such a professionally focused school as Drexel. The major’s curriculum allows for a student to take 85 credits worth of free electives and Morscheck believes that with guidance students can fill those credits with other more technically or vocationally focused skills.

“Right from the moment of recruitment we asked the student what career do path do you have in mind? And if somebody says, ‘I want to be an elementary school art teacher.’ Well art history would probably be very good for that, right? You’ll probably teach some art historical stuff as part of that, but you’ll want to take our drawing courses, our basic design courses a few painting courses … or if you want to work as a financier to pay your college debt you could fill this up with business courses and get more business than a business major gets, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be the business major, it could just be the business courses you want and not all the business courses they require,” Morscheck said.

Both Sabinson and Morscheck agreed that art history will better serve students as an introduction to graduate school than for finding a job straight of college. However, they are working to establish unique co-op connections in the Philadelphia region.

“Museum work, art gallery work, arts publications, independent curators, there is a whole variety of fields. Philadelphia is enormously rich in the art world. We have got the Philadelphia museum, the Barnes [Foundation], the[Institute of Contemporary Arts], the Rodin museum, galleries in Old City. And New York has got a critical mass, which is 10 times what we have in Philadelphia. Like Drexel we have deep relationships. … We have a lot of connections to the arts institutions in our region,” Sabinson said.

The establishment of an art history major comes at a controversial point when around the country the value of the arts and humanities are being looked over in favor of the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields.

Sabinson explained that years ago he too would have been against the concept of an art history major saying, “To some degree, I was probably a bit resistant to an art history major because it’s a wonderful course of study, but I want to see our students come out and get employment.”

Since then he has turned around his views. “There is a real interesting debate on the value of liberal arts versus a more professionally focused education. I could sit here and make the argument for both sides,” he said. However, he continued, “If you look at the outcomes that can happen with an art history major, it is a great major for pre-law. It is a great major to lead to graduate school. It is a major that teaches you how to critically think, how to communicate, how to write, how to analyze and about cultures. Those kind of skillsets over the course of a lifetime and a career are invaluable.”

The major was approved too late in the year to recruit freshman from next year’s incoming class but both Morscheck and Sabinson said they are seeing significant interest from current Westphal students who would like to either switch to or adopt art history as a second major. Art history will bring Westphal’s total of majors to 17.

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Flikr: truthout.org

Joke Bradt, an associate professor of the college of nursing and health professions at Drexel University, is researching an innovative way to use music to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans. The project is the first of its kind and aims to create a means to carry a portable and convenient method of music therapy for veterans and PTSD patients.

The treatment is aimed for military veterans and other people who struggle to manage their PTSD when confronted with stimuli. The project is also being done in collaboration with other researchers, some of who are also active military personnel, from the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, which leads the field in research on traumatic brain injury and mental health issues.

PTSD is defined by the Mayo Clinic as a mental health condition that is triggered by a terrifying, or in other words traumatic, event and its symptoms include severe anxiety, flashbacks, nightmares and an uncontrollable fixation on the event. PTSD effects veterans at a far increased rate than that of the general population, with some 30.9 percent of U.S. veterans reporting to experience PTSD compared to just 6.8 percent of overall adult Americans, according to the National Center for PTSD. Veterans account for a significant portion of Drexel’s student body with the University ranked in the top 15 percent of schools that embrace U.S. veterans.

Bradt explained that her study will “examine the impact of listening to music on areas in the brain that are involved in emotional regulation in soldiers with PTSD.” According to Bradt, previous studies have established that music can have a significant effect on the areas of the brain that control emotional regulation, but Bradt’s will be the first to attempt to apply those methods to the treatment of PTSD. She’s also hoping to address questions on the value of a board certified music therapist or whether the music can have the same impact when self-administered.

The project is still in its early stages, only having been in production for about a week. Bradt has stated that most of the real work won’t start until at least August when they will begin to recruit subjects.

The study will follow three groups of soldiers with obvious differences for variable and control groups. One with PTSD, who will receive the music therapy, another group, also with PTSD, who won’t and a third, without PTSD and not receiving music therapy as the control group Bradt hopes that the study will yield results showing that those receiving the therapy will show significant improvement over those who are not.

Bradt also said that even when the study — which she termed “exploratory” — is complete, it will still be a long time until we see changes in PTSD treatment, as the study will need to be replicated with a much larger sample to be deemed accurate. “If we can replicate these results in a larger study, this could have implications for helping soldiers with PTSD with emotional regulation via a very accessible medium,” Bradt said. “Listening to music will not cure PTSD, of course, but we hope we can teach soldiers specific techniques for how to use music effectively for emotional regulation.”

Bradt has yet to reach out to Drexel’s student veteran community about her work. The study will take place at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, which is based out of Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

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Three Drexel professors were named by Thomson Reuters as among the most-cited researchers of 2014. The professors, whose fields include extragalactic astronomy, materials engineering and atmospheric particles, were Gordon Richards, Yury Gogotsi and Peter DeCarlo, respectively.

The list, which consisted of 3,215 researchers across 21 fields in both the natural and social sciences, ranked scholars by the popularity of their most highly cited papers. This means only the top one percent in the past 11 years since the last time Reuters put out such a list were included. This is a change since the last list, in which researchers were judged purely by the number of citations they received. According to DeCarlo, this helped younger researchers be on par with their older colleagues in the selection process.

DeCarlo’s research and paper, which have been cited most, were primarily about the measurement of particles in the atmosphere. His work has been used to measure the effects of pollution as it ages in the air. As a doctoral candidate, he helped develop an aerosol mass spectrometer, an instrument that measures airborne particles. He said this is the one of the biggest sources of his citations.

Though the three professors agreed that being on Thomson Reuters’ list would not necessarily translate into obtaining more grant money, they felt it would have a positive influence on their careers.

Gogotsi wrote in an email that being on the list “means that our work over the past decade made a difference and many of our papers were within the top one percent most-cited publications in the field. So, we have done something important that other researchers care about. This is a great feeling and it’s very rewarding.”

He also mentioned that it is beneficial not only to him, but to the University as well. “I already see growing respect from my colleagues. More scientists will pay attention to the work that we do and read our papers. Besides bragging rights, this recognition also provides an additional reason for top-quality graduate and undergraduate students to join Drexel University in general and my Nanomaterials Research Group in particular.”

Gogotsi, who is a distinguished University and trustee chair professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, has focused on developing nanomaterials, substances that are anywhere from 1000 to 100,000 times smaller than a human hair. Gogotsi’s research has been adapted for electrical energy storage, water desalination and health care.

Richards, an associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Physics is what he calls an “extragalactic astronomer,” meaning his focus as an astronomer is on things outside of our galaxy. According to him, his research is particularly into quasars and black holes.

What Richards was commonly cited for was a project called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which he described as being the astronomical equivalent of the Human Genome Project.

“Basically every one person that was on the original paper for that project is on this list regardless of whatever else they have done. The goal of the project was basically to make a digital map of a quarter of the sky,” Gordon said. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which began in 1994, was an effort to modernize previous mappings of the sky by digitalizing them.

Regarding being on Thomson Reuters’ list, he said ,“It is a nice surprise, it’s not something I normally pay attention to … but it’s nice that your work gets recognized even if it’s part of a bigger thing.”

Richards is now working on a project called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which he described saying, “The goal of SDSS was to make a map of the sky; LSST is making a movie of the sky.”

He explained that while the SDSS took eight years to map the sky, the LSST would do what the SDSS did in three days and continue repeating that for 10 years.

Though Drexel only had three researchers in a list of over 3000, this is no small feat since, according to Gogotsi, the entire country of Russia with its large scientific industry has only 5 percent researchers on the Thomson Reuters List. In the 2001, Drexel had only one researcher on the list, Michel Barsoum from the materials science and engineering department.

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Speaking before a dramatic collage of various depictions of the Christ, New YorkTimes bestselling author and renowned religious scholar Reza Aslan addressed a crowd of students and faculty May 7 in Drexel’s Main Auditorium to discuss his most recent book, “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.” Aslan was the fourth lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences’ annual Distinguished Lecture Series.

“Zealot” is an attempt to separate what was likely the life of the historical Jesus from the narrative of what Aslan calls “the Christ of Faith.” Since there is very little evidence regarding the life if the historical Jesus, Aslan stressed that a way to investigate Jesus’ life is by exploring the political and social realities of first century Palestine, along with an intense study of the original language of the New Testament, Koine Greek.

According to Aslan, there are three things upon which most Biblical scholars agree..

Photo Credit: Andrew Pellegrino

“We know maybe three things, and when I say ‘know,’ I mean we can be somewhat confident in. … We would agree that Jesus was a Jew — sounds obvious but it is good to remind ourselves of that every once in a while. In fact truly, truly, the difference between the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith is that the Jesus of History was a Jew preaching Judaism to other Jews, and I want you to lock that in back of your mind because that is the key in separating the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith. We know that sometime in the first half of the first century he started a Jewish movement predicated on this notion called the kingdom of God … and that he was executed by Rome as a result of this movement for the crime of sedition, and that’s it. Remove the Christian writings from the equation and that is all we can say with any kind of confidence,” Aslan said.

Due to this, Aslan explained, many scholars feel that because there is so little known about the historical Jesus, their only option is to focus on the Christ of Faith because it is more accessible to them.

Aslan, however, disagrees and said that though we know little about the Jesus of History himself, we do know a large amount about the time in which he lived.

“First century Palestine is an era that is exhaustively documented, thanks in no small part to the Romans who occupied this land. Whatever you want to say about the Romans, they were pretty good at documentation,” he said. According to Aslan, because of detailed Roman documentation, historians know how much a bushel of wheat cost in the time of Jesus.

Thus, Aslan explained that one of his analytical methods was to take those few facts known about the historical Jesus, place Jesus firmly in the time and place about which so much is known, and use the Gospels to try tease out the real truth of the historical Jesus.

The time of Jesus was one of intense conflict in the provinces of Judea and Galilee where he preached. Political and social groups such as the violent Sicarii, aristocratic Sadducees, monastic Essenes and strict Pharisees were only some of the larger groups vying for power in the Holy Land. All the while, the country was being crushed under the boot of Rome.

Aslan explained that Jesus was far from being the only person to have declared himself the Messiah in and around his time. In fact, according to Aslan, the 72 followers he had at the time of his death suggests that Jesus would have been considered nothing in comparison to another self-proclaimed messiah only known as “the Egyptian” in surviving texts, who had 4,000 followers before he and his followers were killed by the Romans .

According to Aslan, because of the intricate political structures in Judea, Galilee and Perea, to call oneself messiah in first century Palestine was to blatantly say one had aims to remove Roman rule from Palestine, and therefore was a treasonous act. Aslan explained that in previous Hebrew Scriptures and tradition the Messiah was simply a man that would do his work on earth in one life time, but the concept of the resurrection of Jesus changed all that. While there was a belief in both the miracle of one person bringing another back to life and a national resurrection of the Jewish nation as a whole, the idea that an individual could die and three days later rise from the grave unassisted was unprecedented in Jewish thought.

Aslan explained that for the apostles to say this, whether historical fact or not, gave Jesus’ movement momentum after his death. However, what really made his movement into the world religion it is today, according to Aslan, was neither Jesus nor the apostles, but the teachings of Paul. Aslan explained that the movement in the early years after Jesus’ death was led by his brother James and was centered in Jerusalem.

James’ movement was not a unique religion but simply another sect of Judaism, and James treated it as such. James and his assembly followed the teachings of Jesus, but they also followed all of the dietary and purity restrictions of ancient Judaism. The assembly of James would accept gentiles, but only on the condition that they first convert to Judaism. According to Aslan, however, it was Paul who went out to preach to gentiles and, unlike James, not only ignored the laws of the Old Testament but actively replaced them with his interpretations of the teachings of Jesus. Then, with the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. by Titus’ forces, James’ movement was decimated and scattered, leaving Paul’s followers to shape the course of what we now call Christianity.

After Aslan’s lecture there was also an extended question-and-answer session.

James D’Angelo, a senior journalism major, said he very much enjoyed the event and that Aslan seemed charismatic and engaging. As a Catholic, D’Angelo said he learned that, “there’s a lot more to the story of the history of making the Bible than they teach you in church or Sunday school and stuff like that, which I guess was the point of his lecture; there are different ideas of the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith and people really don’t know either of them.”

In addition to “Zealot,” Aslan has also written two other books titled “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam” and “Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization.” All three of his books were available for purchase at the event, and Aslan held a book signing for audience members after the question-and-answer portion of the evening.

Aslan is also the founder of Aslan Media, a global social media network that aims to educate about social, political and economic conditions throughout the Middle East, and co-founder and chief creative officer of BoomGen Studios, an entertainment company that also seeks to provide creative content from and about the Middle East. Born in Iran, he lives in Los Angeles and is an associate professor of creative writing and cooperating faculty for the Department of Religion at the University of California, Riverside. He has appeared as a religious expert on numerous television networks and shows such as Fox News, “The Colbert Report” and “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” The talk was free and open to the Drexel community.

Previously lecturers include The Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington, neuroscientist David Eagleman and author Sir Salman Rushdie.

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Photo Credit: Julie Kimelman

Drexel students, faculty and alumni gathered this past week to honor the memory of the 6 million Jews and 5 million other human beings killed by the Nazi regime between 1939 and 1945, during the Holocaust.

Drexel Hillel and the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity hosted the events around Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. Events began April 23 with a speech , at Gerri C. Lebow Hall by Holocaust survivor Vera Goodkin, who often speaks at schools and events about her experiences during the Holocaust.

“I normally tell my student audiences, especially young students, that if the world had learned anything from the Holocaust, I would probably not be standing in front of them nor would I be standing in front of you. It does not get any easier. It is not cathartic. But it is done because the world has learned nothing. All you have to do is turn on the TV, listen to the radio, pick up a newspaper to see that some place in the world there is lots man’s inhumanity to man. While the victims are different and the perpetrators are different, the ugly act of ethnic cleansing and hatred goes on and on,” Goodkin said.

Goodkin was born in former Czechoslovakia in a village near Prague. She was the daughter of a doctor, and her middle class, Jewish family lived a relatively happy life before World War II. However, that was all shattered with the Nazi invasion. Nonetheless, the Goodkin family managed to escape through much hardship across the border to Budapest, Hungary, where, though already under Nazi rule, Jews were yet to be put into ghettos.

The reason for this, as Goodkin explained, was that “Adolph Eichmann, that spirit of evil who was entrusted with the final solution, was also a prize coward. The Germans were beginning to lose the war and Berlin was really not a fun place to be. So he took his people, his cronies, and took them to Budapest, a wonderful cosmopolitan city. And somebody had convinced him that if he left the Jews of Budapest somewhat scattered throughout the city, the allies would not bomb his headquarters and thus the delay.”

Goodkin was 12 when she and her family made it to Budapest. Unfortunately, their relative safety did not last. Two months after their arrival in Budapest, the Goodkin family was arrested in the middle of the night by the Nazis and taken to a Hungarian castle that was used as a Nazi base. There, she explained, they were imprisoned with thousands of others for about a month. It was in this castle where, after years of hiding together, Goodkin and her mother lost touch with her father when the men were separated.

After this, Goodkin said, she and her mother were taken to another work camp called Kistarcsa. It was there in Kistarcsa where Goodkin was found. She and her mother were taken out by the commandant of the camp to speak with men claiming to be from the Swedish Red Cross.  The commandant informed them that the men had convinced him to let children go with the Red Cross if their mothers would let them. While most didn’t, Goodkin’s mother pushed her into the arms of the Swedes.

As they left the camp the Swedes informed her that they in fact did not work for the Red Cross, but for Raul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat in Budapest who had made it his mission to save as many victims as possible. He would distribute special passports to those in danger, declaring them Swedish subjects and housing them in special buildings purchased by the Swedish crown, thus protecting them from the Nazis under diplomatic immunity.

According to Goodkin, he was most interested in saving children because “children were humanity’s hope for a better future.” He managed to save over 10 thousand people this way. Unfortunately, at the end of the war, while trying to secure food for his wards from a Russian general, the Russians imprisoned him. According to Soviet sources, he died in a gulag in Siberia in July 1947, though this remains debated.

It was in one of Wallenberg’s children’s homes, this time actually run by the Red Cross, where Goodkin spent the next two months. Fortunately, Goodkin said, she became very ill and had to be hospitalized for several weeks. During this time, the Arrow Cross, a Hungarian division of the SS, drunkenly raided the children’s home and murdered 26 children. After Goodkin’s hospitalization, she was moved to an orphanage where she remained until, in Wallenberg’s office, she was finally reunited with her parents who had both miraculously survived the war.

As the war continued to go poorly for the Germans, Budapest became a battlefield and the Goodkin family spent the last 10 weeks of the war hiding out in a cellar of one of Wallenberg’s protected buildings.

“On January 16, 1945, the sewer covers lifted miraculously and out came the elite troops of the Russian army. And of course that night I don’t think I’ve slept as well before or since because I spent the night listening to the balalaika, as the Russian troops were trying to entertain the children, feed us chocolate and generally we realized we were alive,“ Goodkin said.

After the war, the Goodkins attempted to return to their old life in Czechoslovakia, but fled the communist takeover and came to America.

Josh Cige, a senior biomedical engineering major, said he enjoyed the event. “Especially being Jewish, there’s a lot of contribution to how I’ve grown up and what I’ve experienced. It’s kind of a matter of pride to see those that survived,” he said.

Cige also thinks events such as these are particularly valuable to people his age.

“It’s also important to take into consideration that we are kind of reaching the end of the generation of [the] last living Holocaust survivors, so opportunities to see them in person and hear their stories [are] very important,” he said.

Senior fashion design major Estee Kalina also enjoyed the event. Having gone to a Jewish day school, Kalina said, “I always make a point to come to things like this. It’s something really close to my heart.”

She also said that Goodkin’s speech was unique among other testimonies from survivors, in that she was particularly engaging, and her story was different than from others that she had heard.

In addition to Goodkin’s story, Hillel also hosted an event on Sunday afternoon at the Intercultural Center. The event featured a video of another woman’s holocaust testimonies, as well as the saying of “Kadish,” the mourner’s prayer in Judaism and the lighting of traditional Yahrtzeit or Yizkor memorial candles.

The Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity also organized their own remembrance, “We Walk to Remember,” in which a group of brothers and other Drexel students walked around campus wearing yellow badges reminiscent of those worn by Jews under Nazi rule and sporting the slogan “Never Again.” They also distributed flyers explaining why they were walking, reminding students of the lessons to be learned from Yom HaShoah.

Yom HaShoah began the evening of April 27 after sunset and lasted until sundown April 28. Yom HaShoah’s date on the Gregorian calendar varies from year to year as the day’s only official date is the 28th of the month of Nissan on the Hebrew calendar, a day established by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, due to its proximity to both the date of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and Israel’s own independence day.

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Further expanding its eastern borders, Drexel University will soon begin work on a planned “Innovation Neighborhood” for startup businesses and academic buildings alike above the train tracks at 30th Street Station.

Photo Credit: Miranda Shroyer

Representatives from the University have been hearing design proposals for the area, and construction is expected to begin as early as in two weeks. Work is expected to continue over the next 15 to 20 years as the University finds clients interested in occupying the space.

As part of the University’s strategic plan published in 2012, the neighborhood, which will cover an area of 12 acres stretching from Market Street to John F. Kennedy Boulevard and from 30th Street Station to University Crossings, will provide spaces for both the University and private businesses, with the hope that they will be in closer proximity to Drexel’s campus and co-op students.

According to Vice President of University Facilities Robert Francis, the neighborhood is modelled off of a similar area at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called Kendall Square.

“It’s a physical place where we can have all of these things come together. Students, employers’ startup companies, established tech companies, faculty laboratories, just everybody all mixed together and generating exciting stuff,” Francis said.

Francis also explained that this isn’t the only Innovation Neighborhood planned, but that a second western neighborhood was a possibility if the University manages to acquire the site of University City High School.

“We would like, if we conclude this arrangement with the University City High School site, to rethink the whole mix and have an Innovation West and an Innovation East … so that [we can] bookend the traditional Drexel University City campus with these innovation clusters,” Francis said.

The neighborhoods will hopefully bring many co-op positions closer to campus for undergraduate students along with providing new laboratories for graduate students.

In addition to the corporate and lab spaces, new retail will also be part of the Innovation Neighborhood.  Senior Vice President of Corporate Relations and Economic Development Keith Orris described the layout of the proposed building: “Retail on the first floor, another one or two floors up of Drexel academic programs, and then above that would be corporate tenants who wanted to locate in our neighborhood to be close to Drexel innovation programs, close to students for co-op and graduates to come work with them. That is the Innovation Neighborhood.”

In addition to firms that Drexel has established relationships with, Orris also said that he hopes the neighborhood will particularly attract new firms from outside Philadelphia that will “broaden our market and our innovation ecosystem.”

The University is currently in the process of finding firms and companies interested in bidding for the opportunity to design and build the Innovation Neighborhood.

In addition to the Innovation Neighborhood, the University is simultaneously initiating another project aimed at finding a way to utilize the airspace over the rail yards north of 30th Street Station to expand the campus east toward Center City. This will include a two and half year study of the area by engineers from multiple disciplines to assess the different options available.

Since the rail yard project and the Innovation Neighborhood are so close to each other, the University hopes to coordinate the adjacent to projects to assimilate them into the campus master plan.

“What’s great is that that planning and the planning for the Amtrak Septa Rail Yards will be occurring roughly at the same time,” Francis said.

Orris explained that the University wants to avoid the development of the Innovation Neighborhood in a way that would prohibit strategic connections to the development above the rail yards. “For instance,” Orris said, “we want to make sure that we don’t put a building or a feature that had it been five or 15 feet one way or the other, we would not be blocking the extension of a road, a street, a walkway or a park, so we have to make sure that they coordinate with one another.”

In addition to the 12 acres of the Innovation Neighborhood, the area over the train tracks comprises over 70 acres, a significant expansion of the University City Campus.

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University Crossings will undergo renovation starting this spring and continue throughout the next year, resulting in a four-month closure of the complex in the summer of 2015.

According to Jason Wills, the senior vice president of on-campus development for American Campus Communities, which owns University Crossings, most of the renovations will be on the exterior of the complex. Interior changes will include new retail space, which Wills said they hope to open by the fall, as well as additions to Drexel office and classroom space in the lower levels of the building.

Photo Credit: Ajon Brodie

“Most important of all is improving the student residential spaces. So we are going to go into the units and put more efficient lighting systems in, we are going to paint them, we are going to re-carpet and really work on the surfaces and the feel of the units. They are really spacious and they have beautiful, large windows and we are just going to try to kind of enhance those spaces. In the kitchens we’re probably going to put in all new appliances and make new sinks and surfaces,” Wills said.

Amenities in the building, such as the fitness room and theater, will also undergo renovations.

Though the complex is always filled with residents, many students have complaints about the building.

Stephany Rosa, a sophomore computer engineering major who lives on a floor designated as Drexel housing, complained, “The elevators are always an issue. Half the time they are out of order or very, very slow. We have a lot of leaks especially in the hallways. Noise is always an issue as the walls are very, very thin here.”

She also commented on a shortage of laundry facilities. Despite those shortcomings, she said she enjoys living in University Crossings.

Wills explained that the renovations will hopefully address many residents’ complaints: “We are going to put in better quality laundry rooms and a better trash system, try to freshen up the corridors and bring in new lighting.”

Wills acknowledged these as preliminary plans with the main goal of the renovation being to modernize the building.

The closure of the building may be an unexpected hiccup in the lives of many residents and Drexel students who are used to a 12-month leasing cycle.

According to Wills, residents were informed of next year’s nine-month lease structure through emails and postings around the building.

Christine Piccirillo, a junior entertainment and arts management major who does not live in the building but will be moving in next year, felt that she was not informed before signing a lease and said that the shorter lease was never mentioned to her when she dealt with a leasing agent.

“I know traditionally that [University Crossings] had always been a year-long lease from September to August, and that’s what I assumed was the lease until I signed it,” Piccirilo said, “And until the last page, nobody mentioned the fact that it was a nine-month lease. So I thought that was a little ridiculous that they didn’t seem to mention that to people who were signing a lease that things have changed from the past.”

While the apartments on floors designated as Drexel housing are slightly more expensive than others in University Crossings, Rosa explained that many students find them more convenient because those residents that pay Drexel directly can use various forms of financial aid to pay rent.

Though the structure is owned by American Campus Communities, the land it sits on and the air rights are properties of Drexel University, according to Robert Francis, vice president of facilities at Drexel.

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