Superhero comics are deeply political. Comic book movies are getting there.

This Friday’s Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice draws on the symbolism-heavy 1986 comic book The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller. As the film is about to come out and the comic it draws inspiration from turns 30 years old, the political allegory of Batman vs. Superman is more poignant than ever.

The Dark Knight Returns has been called the best Batman story of all time. It ushered in an era of darker comics and paved the way for the gritty reboot. (For better or worse, it also inspired Comic Sans.) And it’s all about the power of the federal government versus the individual.

Here are three things you should know about Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns:

• If Batman were dropped into the real world, where he actually aged from the ‘40s, he’d be in retirement. In TDKR, he comes out of retirement because… gangs. Also, inner demons. But in this future, the public doesn’t appreciate rogue superheroes and Superman has submitted himself as a government utility. Eventually, Batman’s heroics become too violent, and a Reagan-esque president orders Superman to stop him.

• Nolan cites TDKR as one influence for The Dark Knight Rises (2012), but in Dawn of Justice, the inspiration is everywhere.

• Writer and artist Frank Miller told The Hollywood Reporter this month that Batman would probably be a libertarian. Miller himself is known for his right-wing politics. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Miller started work on a Batman vs. al Qaeda storyline called “Holy Terror, Batman!” that Miller himself described it as propaganda. What eventually came out—which didn’t feature Batman and wasn’t published by DC—has a cover with the “Fixer,” a weakly-disguised Batman ripoff, punching out a wrapped-up mummy-looking jihadi holding a scimitar.

Illustration courtesy of Matt Schumacher.

To Miller, a Superman-versus-Batman fight is nothing if not symbolic. Superman can overhear private conversations, appear across the world in an instant, and kill someone with his vision. Batman just has gadgets and his wits.

It’s the same for Snyder. Batman v Superman’s trailers are riddled with federal symbolism. Superman appears as a Saddam Hussein-esque statue, saves a family from a Katrina-like flood, confronts a bound Batman in a dusty Abu Ghraib-like prison, and—most uncomfortably—stands looking compassionate in a pleading crowd of Latinos. At one point, Lex Luthor says: “You know the oldest lie in America, Senator? It’s that power can be innocent.”

It’s obviously a question Snyder wants to ask. Where should power rest?

Here’s the problem with the pairing: The Dark Knight Returns’ Batman is violent, sadistic and borderline fascist. Adam West’s Batman was a detective working with the police. Miller’s is a military man usurping them. “These men are mine!” he tells police as they close in on criminals they’ve been chasing.

At one point, social order breaks down across the country and Batman imposes martial law on Gotham with a small army made of his own personality cult. He rides a horse and uses a whip. I’m not kidding.

During this whole book, Batman embodies the angst of a society angry with criminals who are afforded civil liberties. The police are castrated in Miller’s Gotham; Batman—in his tank-like Batmobile, with guns and bombs—is the only one willing to do what’s actually needed.

That’s where the politics transcend 1980s comics.

In that same Hollywood Reporter interview earlier this month where Miller called Batman a libertarian, he called Donald Trump a “buffoon.”

“The fact that he thinks he can be president of the United States is one of the best jokes I’ve heard in a long time,” Miller said.

But it’s hard not to see a resemblance between Miller’s Batman and the self-funded billionaire with a personality cult who’s going to fix everything. Both disregard civil liberties. Both go further than the authorities will go. Both seem obsessed with revenge and turning back the clock to another time in history, when things were greater.

Zack Snyder’s film probably won’t delve into this concept too much, but here’s what we can take from a matchup of Batman versus Superman: If there’s inherent danger in Superman—all-powerful but moral to a fault—then there’s inherent danger in Batman, the one person willing to do whatever it takes.

University of Oregon administration and critics of its sexual assault policies have finally found something they agree on: Darci Heroy.

As interim associate vice president and Title IX coordinator, Heroy will report directly to UO President Michael Schill, starting today, about sexual assault on campus.

Heroy’s experience as a Title IX case investigator for the university from 2013-2014, as well as her background in gender equity, make the administration’s critics, like UO sophomore Zach Lusby, hopeful.

“I was really impressed,” Lusby said after Heroy’s appointment last week. Lusby has organized many protests against the administration in the past. “It is a really strong start to getting students involved in taking a role in administration.”

The university is already battling sexual assault on several fronts: Oregon Hall has a crisis and support staff to talk to survivors, UOPD has a detective sergeant who specializes in sexual violence and associate athletic director Lisa Peterson oversees gender equity within Oregon athletics. Heroy will be the person who connects them.

“[I have] the ability to take that 10,000-foot view, rather than being in the weeds all the time, doing the work on the ground,” Heroy said.

Finding someone like Heroy was at the top of UO’s list for addressing sexual assault, which came to the forefront after a high-profile rape case in 2014 and a campus survey that found that one in five UO undergraduate women faced some kind of rape, sexual assault or unwanted sexual advance.

That list came out around this time last year — when things were very different.

Students protest the university’s treatment of sexual assault survivors on Feb. 27, 2015. (Taylor Wilder/Emerald)

Feb. 27, 2015: Clutching a large banner that read “STOP SILENCING SURVIVORS,” protesters marched in silence into Johnson Hall and then started shouting, demanding to speak to the interim university president, Scott Coltrane.

From the moment they entered the building, where the university’s top-level leadership works, it felt like a battle, said Lusby, who helped organize the rally. Administrators locked the doors and didn’t pick up their phones.

“Their faces were filled with dread,” Lusby said. “It seems like they were really scared of conversing with students.”

Days earlier, UO had countersued a student who was suing the university after she was sexually assaulted, she said, by three UO basketball players in 2014. But the university abandoned the suit after a petition signed by 1,500 people demanded UO drop it.

The protesters wanted to talk about moving forward. When an aide let Lusby and three other students in, they told Coltrane they felt betrayed by the university.

About a month later, in April, Coltrane announced his recovery plan to the university via email. The list of objectives, timed with Sexual Assault Awareness month, included hiring a Title IX coordinator and dedicating half a million dollars to expanding staffing and programs for sexual assault prevention.  

What happens now

Heroy is hired on until the end of the academic year. Meanwhile, the UO will continue to search for a permanent administrator for the $105,000-130,000-a-year job. The university has been conducting a national search and has interviewed four candidates, but didn’t offer the job to any of them. Heroy was offered the job but declined to take the permanent post. She said she may yet decide to become a candidate for the position.

Heroy is new to administration, but has worked in law and is a Duck. She was a Title IX investigator taking on sexual misconduct cases at UO, and before that studied law at the university and taught law history classes.

This background is why many critics of the university are lauding her hire.

Some see her as a compassionate figure. Erin McGladrey, director of the Women’s Center, is leaving her job at the university this month because she feels UO has become “a private school” that is not accessible to everyone, but McGladrey said Heroy makes her optimistic about the future.

“I don’t think she’s scared to make the right call, even if it’s uncomfortable,” McGladrey said.

McGladrey hasn’t met Heroy, but has worked with student survivors of sexual assault who felt she was “someone they could talk to” — an ally.

UO administration also considers Heroy an ally: She’s been advising them on strategy since April 2015 — when admins originally posted her job — and they asked her repeatedly to take the position before she finally accepted temporarily, Heroy said.

Historically, when someone has had trust with the administration, they haven’t had trust with students, faculty and staff who are critical, McGladrey said, and vice versa. Heroy has trust with both groups, McGladrey said.

Other students want to wait and see. Sophie Albanis, a junior women’s and gender studies student, was one of the students who talked to Coltrane at the Johnson Hall protest. She’s now ASUO’s sexual and mental health advocate and interviewed two of the four candidates UO brought, but eventually didn’t choose for the position.

“The one thing I’d be concerned with is too much loyalty to the university,” Albanis said. “The students want somebody who will take the university to task if they need to, who will have those difficult conversations.”

Heroy has not criticized the university’s record nor indicated that she will push for any of the controversial measures some students and faculty are asking for, like suspending Fraternity and Sorority Life from growing or giving academics and staff in the UO Senate more power over the athletic department.

But Lusby and McGladrey are confident that Heroy will be “fair.” For them, this signals that after nearly two years of clashes, things at the university might finally be getting better.

In the last year, UO committed $500,000 towards the effort, hired more staff to investigate sexual assault and support survivors and started the Get Explicit! education program for students living on campus, among other things.

That’s a response to students, faculty and staff applying pressure, McGladrey and Lusby say. And in the past year, the university community’s attention has turned toward this issue. Last year, Helena Schlegel won the race for ASUO president on a slate focused on safety for survivors of sexual assault. The University Senate has formed committees and passed resolutions around the issue.

Heroy calls herself “the accountability person,” and part of her job is making sure the university complies with Title IX and is meeting students’ needs.
“Part of the function [of this job] is to hold the institution accountable to the laws the federal government has set in place,” Heroy said, “but also holding the institution accountable to what’s in the best interest of the students, faculty and staff here.”

To long-time Eugene residents, 44 E. 7th Ave. might seem like an unlucky building. The location, which was a country-themed bar under the moniker “Rock’n Rodeo” from the early ‘90s to the mid ‘00s, has gone through a slew of music venue changes in a short amount of time.

Though the building has hosted artists such as T-Pain, Waka Flocka Flame and Riff Raff in the last few years, the building itself has gone through just as many name changes. Venues like Studio 44 and Dusk couldn’t stay open for more than six months.

Businesses have tried to find promise in 44 E. 7th Ave., but none in recent past have had as much success as the location’s current venue: Hi-Fi Music Hall — which is still running strong in its seventh month of operation.

While still a young music venue, Hi-Fi has already successfully put on shows with big-name artists like Cold War Kids, Mudhoney and Robert DeLong.

Hi-Fi has found popularity in using a completely different approach than past venues by booking a diverse selection of musical acts, offering free live-streaming of their concerts, as well as advertising and gaining brand recognition in innovative and creative ways.

Slow Magic performs at Hi-Fi Music Hall on Dec. 13, 2015.

Many members of Hi-Fi’s team, such as venue owner Mike Hergenreter and partner Danny Kime, have resided in Oregon for years, but have the unique perspective of viewing the building’s previous venues from the outside without ever actually stepping in. Luckily, they have managed to avoid the mistakes that caused those venues to inevitably fail.

Hergenreter and his wife moved to Eugene in 2003. After the move, Hergenreter spent years booking acts for venues around Eugene such as WOW Hall and the McDonald Theatre before deciding to rent out the space on East 7th Avenue and Willamette Street.

“Having talent-buying jobs at a few of the best venues in town previously to Hi-Fi … has allowed me to build and maintain relationships with some of the best booking agents and band managers in the business,” said Hergenreter.

Hergenreter and Kime first met while sitting on the entertainment committee for the Eugene Celebration. While Hergenreter helped with booking, Kime worked on the other side of things as a site and operations manager.

“Mike and I realized that we were a perfect match for each other,” said Kime. “He booked music on the big stages and I understood event operations … Together, we had the experience we felt was necessary to create Hi-Fi.”

Sustaining relationships in the music business has helped Hergenreter and Kime, and the Hi-Fi team as a whole, work towards one of the venue’s major ambitions — beckoning a diverse array of talent onto Hi-Fi’s stage in order to appeal to the broad spectrum of music tastes of the area.

Giraffage performs at Hi-Fi Music Hall on Dec. 13, 2015.

“The music Hi-Fi books covers genres [such as] bluegrass, rock ‘n’ roll, electronic, blues, soul, hip-hop, jam bands, punk — you name it,” said Hi-Fi social media coordinator Emilee Sievers.

Sievers, an Oregon native who graduated from the University of Oregon in 2013, said that although she was vaguely aware of previous venues that had filled the space, they seemed too tightly tailored to specific audiences.

The venue’s layout and moderate size has also given a better platform for artists looking to play in Eugene.

“Eugene has always struggled to bring [in] rising stars, up-and-coming bands and unique instrumental bands — that each draw up to 500 people or a bit more — because most of the venues are either too small or too large,” said Doug Fuchs, a long-time Eugene resident.

Fuchs works at Flying Ink Media, a publicity and marketing company partnered with Hi-Fi. With a capacity just over 600, Hi-Fi fills “a much needed niche” in the Eugene scene, said Fuchs.

Although the venue has already made an impact locally in its short time of operation, it has also gained popularity globally by live-streaming every performance for free on Hi-Fi’s website.

“We wanted to provide an opportunity for everyone to be part of our shows,” said Hergenreter, a goal that the venue’s live-streaming service has helped achieve.

“We get people from all over the world viewing our shows online, and it excites me when I see stats from our streams being seen in … London, Paris and even remote places in Mongolia,” said Hergenreter. “Folks around the world are finding out about Hi-Fi, experiencing what we are all about.”

The free online streaming feature is not only about the fans, but also about the bands, according to JD Hauger, the head of broadcast and video production at Hi-Fi. “We’re trying to present the bands an opportunity to make their show a little bigger and keep their fans connected, even if it’s an out-of-state audience online,” said Hauger.

Robert DeLong performs at Hi-Fi Music Hall on Nov. 23, 2015.

Hi-Fi has also made attempts to gain brand recognition in other places around Oregon through cross-promoting with a local business called Pedal Power. The company sets up stationary bicycles at events like the Eugene Marathon and Oregon Country Fair. The energy produced from pedaling provides an environmentally-friendly energy alternative for indoor and outdoor events.

Past events at Hi-Fi have involved setting up bikes in the venue in order to power speakers and lighting.

“Our whole mission is to connect people,” said Pedal Power owner Dave Villalobos. “All the electricity that we [produce] is provided by bikes that the audience uses,” said Villalobos.

While the venue has transformed the possibilities for a formerly unimpressive space, it has more importantly become a way to bring people together, both inside and outside of the community.

Pedal Power does more promotion than pedaling with Hi-Fi, but Villalobos agrees that its environment is much more welcoming than the venues before it.

“I think it has to do with the team and the approach,” said Villalobos. “It seems like a recipe for success.”

The house lights fall over the audience as the show is about to begin. The stage lights up and the crowd claps excitedly as the first actor walks out, dressed head-to-toe in grand Renaissance garb, transporting everyone back in time, and setting up the entire show for what’s to come.

When you think of the theater, it’s easy to appreciate the larger parts of it all: the acting, the set or even the story itself. But it takes the little details to pull it all together: the lights, the props and — a sometimes overlooked detail — the costumes. Costumes have the ability to set up the audience’s perception of the show for anything— from establishing the time period to understanding the personality of a character.

This is why the University of Oregon’s theater department provides students with opportunities to hone their abilities in costume design and construction through its costume design program.

“Costumes are a tool to help tell the story, more than anything else,” said Shannon Dunbar, a second year Master of Fine Arts student in costume design. “When you’re at a show and you’re seeing this spectacle in front of you, it’s easy to forget all the minute details that went into every little aspect of that show [like the costumes].”

Each costume takes care and consideration. The long process of conceptualizing, sketching, collaborating and then finally constructing the piece can be tedious. For some, the initial concept development is what takes the most time in order to create the perfect, unique garment for each character in a production.

A recent UO production, Sonrisa del Coyote, featured costumes by Delta Starchild, a senior theater and fine arts major. She began planning the costumes for the show over the summer while she was spending time in London. The show opened Oct. 22, and it was Starchild’s second time designing for a New Voices production — the theater department’s annual scriptwriting competition.

“I did a lot of research into the way the Mexican culture and Native American culture visualize their lore so I could be accurate in what I was portraying,” Starchild said. “It’s really a love for theater and a love for clothing, and the way you can create art on the body.”

The costume design program indulges the creativity of students by allowing them to design for the shows each term and experiment with different ideas to give each show a special look. Because of this, Starchild was able to bring unique costumes to the stage- including a coyote mask made to resemble old coyote mosaics and a headdress with fox fur around it to better portray the personalities of the characters and the culture.

Dunbar, who will have designs featured in the theater program’s next production, Water by the Spoonful, feels that sometimes the fun in working with costumes is in how they have the ability to change the way people’s bodies are seen on the stage.

“It’s fun to do things that alter the shape of the body like [add] padding, or giant wigs and hats,” said Dunbar. “Things that make people look not necessarily human anymore are really interesting.”

In order for the costumes you see on stage to come to fruition, people spend hours behind the scenes hand-sewing, beading and building each piece from scratch. This work takes technical skill and practice, which is why the theater department is offering a course called Costume Construction (TA 419/519) this term.

“If anybody wants to design costumes, they have to know how to make them,” said Jeanette deJong, the new head of the costume department. DeJong has taught costume design for three years now, and has designed costumes for approximately 160 shows all around the country for a variety of companies and story themes.

With a capacity of only 10 students, deJong’s class is small and hands-on and assigns multiple projects over the term to allow each person to develop their construction skills. Students in this class can expect to walk away with skills in tailoring and even constructing a corset. Even those who already have design experience under their belts like Dunbar are excited to take the class to help strengthen their technical skills.

“You can easily spend a couple weeks on a costume,” said deJong. “Dyeing fabric, designing, fitting, painting the fabric and adding details … I think that when you see all the costumes together on the stage and everything moves beautifully, you feel you’ve done your part in the play beautifully.”

But is it feasible to have that feeling of joy and satisfaction in your craft and still make enough to pay rent? Oregon is ranked fourth in the nation for average salary of costume designers, with the average hourly wage settling at $30.61, and a yearly salary of $63,680, according to Sokanu, an online career service. And that’s just for the design —  not taking into consideration the construction of the pieces, which can be done by both designers and technicians.

“I would say there’s more demand for costume technicians,” said deJong. “The people who know how to make the beautiful things are more in demand. The students in the class now are learning skills so they can better make costumes for the stage.”

While Oregon is ranked in the top five for pay, for professionals like Vicki Vanecek-Young, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to find work locally.

“It’s a small costume market in Eugene,” said Vanecek-Young, who has worked in costume for 40 years. “It’s a way of travelling. You’ve got some opportunity out there, you just need a little time to find it.”

Despite the late nights and countless hours spent bent over a sewing machine, lining up the perfect color compliments and trying to seamlessly pull everything together before a show, those who go to bed dreaming up new costume concepts are grateful for the challenges that come with the craft.

“I love the collaboration, and I love the opportunity to be a storyteller as well as a visual artist,” said Dunbar. “That’s the most rewarding part, being able to see your work put in front of you and come to life.”

Jaeci Hall was dipping her feet in the Rogue River when the first song came to her.

This Southern Oregon river is where her ancestors lived, and just upstream is the bend where, in 1855, Rogue River natives were ambushed from the banks after signing a treaty and mown down by militias’ gatling guns.

But at that moment in 2002, the river was peaceful, and Hall was experiencing something that would change her life.

Hall had just started learning Tututni, the language of her native ancestors.With the new words fresh in her head, she composed her first Tututni song.

“Mountains, do you have any stones?” Hall translated. “Yes, a lot. River, do you have any water? Yes, a lot. Earth, do you have any children? Yes, many sing here.”

It was a moment of pure joy, said Hall, a doctoral student at the University of Oregon. But that joy had a tinge of sadness: Tututni, at the time, was essentially dead. All fully fluent speakers passed away within the last few generations.

Robert Elliott, NILI’s associate director, next to a whiteboard with NILI’s motto on it. Photo credit: Scott Greenstone

This is where many Native American languages are headed, according to Ives Goddard, PhD, senior linguist at the Smithsonian Institute. When Europeans first made contact with North America, there were as many as 500 languages spoken. Twenty years ago, there were 210.

In the United States, this is a direct result of persecution. Young Native Americans were often sent to boarding schools where the mantra was “Kill the Indian, save the man.”

The Pacific Northwest and West Coast are particularly deprived. Linguist Michael Krauss, PhD, reported in 1996 that “in the entire Northwest or Pacific Coast no Native American language is still spoken by children.”

But linguists around the country are fighting to save these endangered languages before their last living speakers pass away, according to Goddard. At UO, the Northwest Indian Language Institute is on the front lines.

Jaeci Hall and her daughter Tahhili walk home from a park. Hall is teaching Tahhili to speak Tututni, their native language. Photo credit: Scott Greenstone

NILI’s weapons are dictionaries, online courses, e-books, videos and immersion schools. Linguists and teachers drive all around the Pacific Northwest, building curricula and then helping teach the language.

NILI also uses songs, like the ones that come to Hall. She now works with NILI and is working toward a doctorate in linguistics at the UO. When she sings in Tututni, she feels that anyone can understand her.

“They don’t understand what my words are, but they get my emotion,” Hall said.

Linguists’ work preserving and teaching the language is painstaking, Goddard said. One example: Whereas most English verbs have five forms — see, sees, saw, seeing, seen — many Native American languages have hundreds, even thousands. Hall’s dissertation will be centered on verb forms.

“If people knew how hard Native American linguistics was, they wouldn’t say ‘It’s not rocket science’,” Goddard said. “They’d say ‘It’s not Native American linguistics.’ “

But what’s even harder is getting the language to stick. Young learners have grown up with no use for a language other than English. The first part of bringing a language back is finding a function for it, according to David Lewis, PhD a tribal historian who got his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate from the UO.

Lewis signs his emails with “Go Ducks!” in Chinuk wa-wa, a language the Grand Ronde community east of Lincoln City has been trying to revitalize for almost 15 years. Even after pouring millions of dollars into education efforts like curricula and an immersion school, less than 10 percent of Grand Ronde’s population speaks any Chinuk wa-wa, and only a handful speak it fluently.

Jaeci Hall is raising her daughter Tahhili speaking both English and Tututni, a language of their ancestors that very few in Oregon speak. Photo credit: Scott Greenstone

While older generations feel an obligation to revive the language, younger generations aren’t always as concerned. Hall is trying to raise her daughter, Tahhili, to be bilingual, speaking English and Tututni. She feels these struggles first-hand.

“I can speak sometimes to my daughter — sometimes she knows what I’m saying,” Hall said. “Sometimes she goes ‘What does that mean?’ and I translate it for her. …Sometimes it’s like that and sometimes she doesn’t care or doesn’t want anything to do with it.”

Bringing these languages back to where they were hundreds of years ago isn’t necessarily the goal of their work, NILI’s Associate Director Robert Elliott said.

That’s what he thought when he first began teaching: the goal was for everyone to speak the language all the time.

“That doesn’t necessarily have to be what your goal is,” Elliott said. “It can be to just start using the language again for identity purposes.”

Staff and students at NILI gather most Fridays to eat home cooked food and talk linguistics. Photo credit: Scott Greenstone

With the death of every language, a world of culture is lost, Hall said. Linguist and advocate Kenneth Hale compared it to cultural genocide.

“Every language lost is like dropping a bomb on the Louvre,” Hale once said.

Many Native Americans feel this absence spiritually; Elliott compared it to “missing an arm.” There are cultural terms and ideas you can’t communicate in English, so if the language dies, the culture disappears.

“When you lose your language, you lose elements of your culture,” Elliott said. “You can easily lose elements of your identity.”

So for Native Americans like Hall, restoring this language is reclaiming her identity, and every step forward is a miracle.

“We’ve already hit rock bottom. We’ve lost all of our fully fluent speakers,” Hall said. “Whatever happens with it, is miraculous.”

The first Democratic presidential debate is tonight, and University of Oregon College Democrats are hosting a Democratic debate watch party. It’s in Straub Hall 245 at 5:30 p.m., and the Emerald is going to be live-tweeting the event and covering it on Snapchat. Follow @smgreenstone on Twitter or below and DailyEmerald on Snapchat for updates.

Tweets by @smgreenstone

Two long sheets of paper hung on the walls of the Erb Memorial Union following the shooting at Umpqua Community College, about an hour south of Eugene. The pieces of paper were originally blank, with only the words “The UCC tragedy makes me feel…”

University President Michael J. Schill’s email to the campus community was also printed out and posted on the wall. It urges students affected by the tragedy to contact the Counseling and Testing Center.

Two sheets hang on the walls of the EMU with the words “The UCC tragedy makes me feel…” (Scott Greenstone / Emerald.) Photo credit: Scott Greenstone

“The UO is a community that takes care of one another,” Schill said in the email, originally sent four hours after the shooting on Thursday.

Here are a few of the notes left on those sheets of paper.

1. Some reactions were simple.

2. Some sentimental.

3. Others indignant.

4. One writer seemed to be re-traumatized, and is presumably a survivor of the Thurston High School shootings in 1998.

5. Some reactions were feeble.

6. Some showed school pride.

7. Some community members were feeling the ripple effect.

8. Some felt exposed.

9. Some were in agreement with President Barack Obama.

10. Some poignant.

For an upcoming story, we’re testing the knowledge base of the student body on Minors in Possession charges and hospitalization.

Thanks for participating.

[yop_poll id=”4″ tr_id=””” show_results=”-1″]

A SWAT member dropping off his kid at the Patterson Street YMCA caused a stir on Wednesday morning.

South Eugene High School and Roosevelt Middle School were both placed on lockdown at approximately 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday while Eugene police responded to a “suspicious subject” in that area, KEZI reports.

That suspicious subject was an unidentified officer clad in SWAT gear with a gun in his holster and a black bag in one hand, The Register-Guard’s Josephine Woolington reports.

A delivery driver reportedly tried to talk to the officer. When the officer didn’t respond, the driver called it in.

The schools were only on lockdown for about 20 minutes.

Update: South Eugene High and Roosevelt Middle School are no longer on a lockdown. Everyone is safe. More on Midday. pic.twitter.com/La6s58ftmX

— KEZI 9 NEWS (@KEZI9) June 10, 2015

Writing journals and completing community service will no longer be a punishment for student offenders in sexual assault cases, the University of Oregon board of trustees decided Thursday at a board meeting.

The board of trustees also removed the six-month statute of limitations, meaning that if a sexual assault is reported, it can be investigated and offending parties punished at any time.

Other changes made the timeline move faster: The Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards now has to alert an accused student of the allegations made against them within 60 days instead of six months, and the accused student only has seven days to respond — not 14.

Also, the UO can also now place holds on students’ transcripts if they withdraw from the UO before the conduct proceedings are complete and a verdict has been reached. That makes it hard for possible offenders to enroll at other schools.

Punishments for sexual assault offenders can include suspension, expulsion from campus residence halls and even removal from the university. Usually university boards don’t change student conduct code, but since its creation last year after the sexual assault case and the ensuing lawsuit against the UO and basketball coach Dana Altman, the board is reserving the right to make changes.

Panel hearings were also officially removed from UO’s student conduct procedures in Thursday’s decision. The hearing process involved a panel of judges who determined whether or not a student was responsible of violating the student conduct code. Hearings were removed as an option for any type of conduct violation because some professors and administrators didn’t think was appropriate to involve students in adjudicating sexual assault cases, The Oregonian reports.

Administration at the UO said it was the widest reform to the university’s Student Code of Conduct in more than a decade, according to The Oregonian.

Some of these changes have actually been in effect since fall, but only temporarily. This vote finally made them official.

One member of the board didn’t think it was time to do that yet.

Helena Schlegel, the only student representative on the board, was also the only member to vote “no” on both of the changes to the student conduct code. Schlegel felt that students weren’t involved in the process of proposing those changes because the subcommittee which suggested these changes to the board didn’t meet over the last year.

“I would have preferred to keep the changes temporary so that students would have had a chance to submit their input on the proposed changes,” Schlegel said. “It was a member of administration proposing the changes.”

She pointed out that this wasn’t a move taking power away from survivors: If more people had voted “no,” the changes wouldn’t have reverted. They would have remained temporary until students could provide their input.

Schlegel was recently elected to be next year’s ASUO president and ran on a platform that championed support for survivors of sexual assault.

Schlegel also disagreed with the board’s decision to remove hearings from the student conduct process.