Author Archives | Tannock Blair, Associate News Editor

SLU’s Latest Budget Cuts Show that the First isn’t Always the Deepest

At the beginning of April, all of SLU’s deans were issued budget cuts by the provost, Chet Gillis. The college of arts and sciences was issued the biggest number, that of $4.1 million. In addition to $1.6 million that the college still has left in “academic reinvention” that they have to complete in spring, this functionally rounds out to about 10 percent of the college’s budget.

Most of the college’s budget goes toward personnel, so the options left to Dean Duncan are to cut adjunct spending, graduate assistantships and faculty. Communication Department Chair April Trees expressed her confidence in the dean despite the difficult circumstances, “I know the dean is committed to minimizing the impact on students.”

This isn’t the first time the University has experienced budget cuts of this scale. In February 2016, Magis’ “Operation Excellence Program” was launched. This was – according to SLU’s website – an attempt to “make SLU more efficient and effective and identify opportunities for increased revenue and growth.” One part of Magis was “academic reinvention,” which involved academic cuts as well. However, according to Trees, “they had the year to plan what to do and then had three years to implement it.” This year, the deans only had until the end of the month to turn in a plan that would be implemented next year. Another part of Magis was “organizational redesign” in which they laid off over a hundred staff-people, without an expectation that those positions would be refilled.

SLU had a deficit the year before Magis was implemented, “and this year we had a deficit again” explained Trees. Because of the deficit, a new “position control process” was implemented at the University. This meant that new hiring of any sort (faculty, staff, etc.) would be subject to a process before being accepted. According to Trees, this process began with Mike Lewis, the acting provost at the time, who had criteria that he used to determine if the new position would affect accreditation or if the department was teaching more than 300 student credit hours. From there, the application would be passed on to a cabinet that would then decide whether or not the open position would be filled or not.

It is important to note that it is not only academic programs being cut; $3 million is being cut from non-academic programs and other cuts that will be made to SLUCare as well, said Trees. President Pestello sent out an email to the community earlier in the semester outlining these cuts, expecting that they would reduce expenses by $10 million. Mike Lewis explained that “the Provost’s Office is working hard with the deans to achieve this goal.”

There are concerns within the faculty over the accuracy of the data they are using to come up with these numbers, however. It may be hard to get accurate data because it is difficult to account for things like course releases for grant work (faculty who get big grants buy out courses and that money then gets used to cover their teaching). It is also difficult to account for faculty with other responsibilities (department chairs, for example).

The expectation for departments is that faculty teaching averages out to at least 300 student hours a semester, or about two classes of 25 students each per semester. However, this kind of mandate doesn’t account for certain specialist teachers. For example, according to Trees, a piano teacher would teach fewer hours because their teaching is most often one-on-one and the hours for the instructor of a large introductory seminar would be much higher.

One possible alternative to layoffs is the “Voluntary Early Retirement Program.” VERP gives people salary and benefits if they don’t need to be replaced. Any college or school that has someone take the VERP contributes to their budget goal. Even this creates problems though, because classes are already registered for next spring. If teachers choose to take the VERP and leave, the classes they were supposed to teach will have to be covered.

These budget issues are not unique to SLU either; universities all across the country are experiencing economic challenges. Earlier in April, Wheeling Jesuit eliminated all majors in the liberal arts after finding themselves deeply in debt. As a result, the university is now being forced to sever its Jesuit affiliations. And just last week, an essay in the City Journal on the University of Tulsa exposed the university as pushing the liberal arts aside in favor of turning itself “into a glorified trade school.” While SLU’s situation is far from these other universities at this stage, it is important to note that the academic landscape is changing.

The future is uncertain at this stage. Although, it is clear that these cuts are an unsustainable method of solution, “doing this repeatedly, without strategic planning isn’t good,” explained Trees. “We need to have a different sort of solution. Until then, I don’t think this year is the end of it,” she said.

President Pestello and Provost Gillis are hosting an “All college meeting” for the college of arts and sciences on Monday May 6 in the auditorium of the business school, where hopefully some of these issues will be addressed.

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HIJAB AWARENESS DAY at SLU

In the midst of Atlas week this year was Hijab Awareness Day. The Muslim Students Association organized an event to mark the occasion, “Women’s Rights in Islam.” The discussion was introduced by Dr. Haifaa Younis, who was invited by the MSA to speak. The dialogue was mainly focused on the roots of feminism in Islam, rights of women and the hijab itself.

Younis began by explaining that she enjoys participating in discussions, particularly those with non-Muslim youths. According to Younis, it is in these discussions that she could be most effective in shedding light on the truth of Islam.

The word “hijab,” Younis clarified, does not translate to “head cover” like many believe, it actually translates to “barrier.”  “So when I’m covering my hair,” she explained, “I’m putting a shield between my hair and whoever else.”

A hijab is also not only a headcover. “It is meant to cover your whole body,” Younis said, “if I know your size, you’re not wearing proper hijab.”

Specifically, she admitted that “you may see people wearing it differently,” which she deemed totally fine, “it depends where you are from.”

“Religion is a choice. So if you’re a part of a religion, every action that you do under the scope of that religion is going to be a choice,” said one member of the MSA. “So whether you choose to follow things that are ordained in your religion or you choose not to, that’s a personal lifestyle that you’ve chosen.”

Younis went on to say that hijab is not restricted only to women in Islam. “For the men, it’s the same thing also; loose clothing,” said Younis. “That’s the whole idea of the hijab.”

Younis is a practicing obstetrician and gynecologist, originally from Iraq. Her pursuit of Islamic knowledge began around the time of her studies at Washington University, where she simultaneously began to study with various Islamic scholars from across the United States.

She went on to become the founding member of the Jannah Institute, a non-profit organization based in St. Louis. The institute began Islamic educational programs for women and young girls in 2013, with all kinds of different courses ranging from both online and onsite, weekend or weekday, seminars, halaqahs and more.

The MSA had invited students to try wearing a hijab for the day prior to the event and free hijabs were available for pickup from the MSA table the week leading up to it. One student described her experience wearing a hijab for a day as one full of judgement. “Constantly, there are people asking me about it,” she explained. “It’s been a shock to my friends and colleagues.” Her friend from Pakistan helped her put it on, but she explained “I am constantly messing with it because I feel like it’s showing some of my hair and I have to readjust it.” Relating to those in the room that were actually practicing Muslims, she said “I can only imagine the transition process.”

“This is the flag of my religion,” Younis summed it up. “This is what I’m supposed to be as a Muslim. It is different, it is difficult, it is not the usual, simply because I live in a time and society in which it is not the norm.”

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MEN’S STORY PROJECT – LIVE at SLU

On Wednesday, the second annual Men’s Story Project was performed in the Chaifetz Business School Auditorium. The performance involves 12 men from the St. Louis area, all from the ages of 19 to 38, who share personal, true stories about their life experiences with masculinity. Each story is told in a unique way, including spoken word, monologue, poetry and even rap. Another show will play on Thursday night in the same venue at 7 p.m., with doors opening 30 minutes before the presentation.

 

The event was kicked off by the director and producer of the event, James Meinert, and he began by explaining how the Men’s Story Project was started. Meinert gave credit to founder, Jocelyn Lehrer, Ph.D.who was in attendance. Meinert explained that Lehrer “wanted to end violence,” specifically gender-based violence, and her way to do this was through the promotion of healthy masculinities and gender equality.

 

Some of the topics covered by the speakers included unhealthy and abusive relationships, infidelity, sex abuse, African American masculinity, sexuality and gender identity and more. The presentation was then followed with audience discussion.

 

Hayden Peterson, a junior studying Philosophy and Urban Poverty Studies was, as he explained, “one of the two SLU students doing it this year.” Peterson was drawn to the Men’s Story Project “because I’m a white, straight, Christian male so I kind of had to fall into the category of the oppressor in almost every scenario,” he said. “But it’s not the case that those identities make me like that, so I thought it might be valuable to try do some work to combat those toxic stereotypes.”

 

“It is really a blessing how diverse the set of stories are within this group,” Peterson said. “One of the overlapping things throughout all of the stories is the sense of vulnerability; a kind of genuine storytelling that all of these men are opening up about aspects of their life and their story that they probably wouldn’t tell to some of their good friends, and yet they’re telling it to an auditorium of 150 people.”

 

“In all of these stories we try to show how we can move forward from it,” Peterson said, summarizing the event. “Our hope is that we try to foster more open conversations on what it means to be a man and why it doesn’t have to fit into the toxic stereotypes of masculinity that permeate throughout our culture.”

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Midtown Overhaul in Action

There is a major development going on around SLU that was last year branded “Prospect Yards.” The name was voted upon last March by select members of the SLU family, SSM Health employees and others within the community. The area connects north and south campuses; bordered by Grand Boulevard and Vandeventer Avenue. The project, led by the St. Louis Midtown Redevelopment Corporation, is composed of a number of individual redevelopment projects that coincide with one another as an attempt to revitalize an area of midtown that has since become largely vacant.

 

One such individual project is that of the Northeast corner of Grand Boulevard and Chouteau Ave. There stands a six-story, largely vacant building that the owner and developer, Michael Hamburg, intends to renovate into a 145-unit apartment complex.

 

The vicinity of these apartments to SLU and SLU Hospital will be particularly pertinent to students as well as SSM Health employees. “Our goal was to cater to a wide array of different tenants, including students,” said Hamburg, “most of our units are one-bedroom because of that.”

 

The relationships between these developments and the SLU community has always been at the forefront of the planning process. Meetings and discussions have been organized not only with the St. Louis Midtown Redevelopment Corporation, but also SLU CFO, David Heimburger and President Pestello, as well as various SLU board members. “My goal is always to make sure that I’m delivering what the university’s demands are,” explained Hamburg, “So that means, obviously, listening very closely to what the leaders of the university are wanting or what they are hearing students wanting.”

 

One of the big focuses of this new project is to turn midtown into a stronger entertainment area, given that it is currently lacking in its supply of bars and restaurants. New developers like Hamburg want to change this, “we want to make this a live, work, play, type of environment for students.”

 

The first phase of the apartment building is scheduled to be done by the end of May with 33 apartments completed. Sometime towards the end of Summer it is expected that the second phase will be done, including another 15 apartments and a microbrewery below. The third and final phase of 96 apartments is expected to start construction sometime in mid to late Summer; completion being in late 2020, close to the completion of the new SLU Hospital building.

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SLU students prepare for life after college

Students were invited to Chaifetz School of Business on Wednesday, Feb. 1 to attend Make Me An Adult. The event was intended to prepare students for life after college and was organized by Delta Sigma Pi in association with US Bank.

Beginning at 5:30 p.m. in Anheuser Busch Auditorium, students were introduced to all of the speakers and then welcomed to visit whomever they wanted to hear speak in designated rooms throughout the building. The speakers were a number of local professionals provided by US Bank, who all spoke on various topics including Retirement Saving Account Strategies, Basic Budgeting & Saving, How to Pay Less in Taxes (Legally) and Paying Off Student Loans.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Nearly 65 percent of students do not prepare for their future after college and they find a lifetime of digging out debt and staying away from future financial success.”

The two student co-planners of the event were Marissa Oxendine and Charles Elliott. Oxendine is a first-year International Business and Marketing student who joined Delta Sigma Pi at the recommendation of her older sister. Elliott is a senior Economics major who joined the professional fraternity for its networking potential.

“The premise of the event is learning the financial and adulting skills that the classroom doesn’t teach you,” explained Oxendine. She went on to stress that the event is not just for Business School students. “We realize that most majors will not get a chance to learn these valuable life skills in a classroom setting. We want to bring the classroom to them.”

According to Elliott, there are often many small and technical details that graduates easily miss. “For example, it hurts your credit if you consistently spend a large fraction of the credit available on your credit card,” he said. “That’s something you wouldn’t know if you didn’t speak to an expert.”

Both co-planners welcome students or interested parties to email dsp.slu@gmail.com for further inquiries into Make Me An Adult or Delta Sigma Pi.

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How the Government Shutdown is affecting SLU and wider Saint Louis community

The federal government’s partial shutdown became the longest in American history on Jan. 12. As of the time this article is published the shutdown will be entering its 33rd day, far surpassing the previous 21-day record set in 1995.

The Senate will vote on President Trump’s proposal to spend $5.7 billion on a border wall and on a competing Democratic bill that would fund the government through Feb. 8 without a wall. As Senate leaders plan these competing solutions, an estimated 800,000 federal workers enter their fourth week without pay.

The effects of the shutdown have been felt all across the nation; SLU and the wider St. Louis community being no exception.

In the early stages of the shutdown the safety of food was questioned as food and safety inspections had stopped on Dec. 22. Given the E. coli scare with romaine lettuce over Thanksgiving break last year, many felt uneasy about these developments.  

DineSLU’s marketing manager, Marianne Rogers, explained that SLU was quick to react after the romaine lettuce incident. “We pulled everything,” she explained, “not only from our dining hall, but from our partners and [other on-campus eateries] as well.” She went on to explain the importance of keeping the SLU community safe. “We have to be on top of these things,” she said.

It wasn’t until Jan. 15, that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration resumed some of these inspections. Given the shutdown, however, they have been forced to focus on “high-risk” foods such as leafy greens and other fresh-cut processing plants.

DineSLU works with Sodexo, a Fortune 500 company that has relationships with food purveyors all over the country. All of these food purveyors have their own methods for monitoring the safety of their product, as approved by Sodexo. This means that even if the FDA are not regulating all foods, the foods relevant to SLU are being monitored.

Keeping with this theme of  stepping up in place of a failing government, residents of St. Louis have been doing the same for the community. The St. Louis Diaper Bank hosted the St. Louis Shutdown Social and Resource Fair, an event intended to provide relief to any federal workers and their families. The event was held at Vincent de Paul Parish Hall on Sunday, Jan. 20.

Many of the federal employees expressed their appreciation for the charities that organized the event. “I really admire the support of the community,” one Coast Guard employee said. “That’s what has made this entire shutdown feasible and possible.”

The founder and executive director of the St. Louis Diaper Bank, Jessica Adams, got the idea for the fair after her company started receiving calls from federal employees seeking assistance. “It became pretty clear, pretty quickly, that families who needed diapers didn’t just need diapers,” she said. She had heard a story on NPR about a family in Maryland who did a potluck for furloughed workers and decided to try something similar. “I was like, alright, let’s do that. Let’s have a meal and then lets just get resources here so that people can go home with stuff that they need right now,” she said.

Adams didn’t start out with any grand ambitions, she simply describes herself as an optimist who wants good things to happen. “If it needs to happen and somebody needs to do it, might as well be me,” she said.

The whole event was organized in only four days, and other organizations are following with similar support plans.

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SLU Alum Manages NASA’s Successful Mars Mission

On Monday, NASA’s InSight robotic lander made contact with the rocky red ground of Mars’ surface. The event went somewhat viral after a St. Louis-born engineer involved in the landing was filmed celebrating with an NFL-inspired victory handshake. The event had another St. Louis connection in the form of SLU graduate, Fernando Abilleira.

Abilleira served as the deputy mission design and navigation manager for the mission. Working in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Abilleira has supported multiple flight projects and studies, such as the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter, Mars Science Orbiter, Mars Netlanders, Mars Sample Return and preliminary manned mission-to-Mars studies. Originally from Madrid before attending SLU, Abilleria has been working at NASA for 17 years.

According to NASA’s website, the InSight mission is attempting to understand “how a rocky body forms and evolves to become a planet,” as well as determining “the rate of Martian tectonic activity and meteorite impacts.”

The Mars lander, InSight, which stands for “Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport,” is currently settled in Elysium Planitia, a region of the planet that is rather flat. There, it will conduct its studies for a planned two-year mission. Abilleira’s involvement in the mission includes the formulation, design and implementation of the lander and its project.

There are multiple faculty members still in SLU’s aerospace program who remember working with Abilleira during his time at the university, including John George, Ph.D., K. Ravindra, Ph.D., and Michael Swartwout, Ph.D. Swartwout, who was on Abilleira’s Master’s thesis committee recalled his “boundless enthusiasm,” stating that Abilleira was always “very excited to learn about space exploration and was [both] eager [and] hopeful about making his own contributions.”

According to Swartwout, Abilleira also had an “amazing attention to detail.” For his Master’s thesis, Abilleira, appropriately, designed a human colonization project for Mars. While most students picked one or two elements to focus on and left the rest largely unexplored, Abilleira did everything. According to Swartwout it was an “astounding amount of work,” including orbits, rocket selection, payload sizing, landing sites, human habitation modules and resource consumption plans such as water and energy.

Abilleira was also known to have tremendous determination in overcoming obstacles. As a foreign national, he faced great difficulty getting into the U.S. space program. This is a result of concern over potential sharing of technological secrets. While NASA doesn’t have any official security clearances and is technically independent of the federal government, space programs still require an element of public privacy. Despite these severe hiring limitations, Abilleira was undaunted, continuing to push until he was able to secure a job at the laboratory. Swartwout calls Abilleira’s optimistic perseverance “admirable.”

“I’m sure we share the same, common inspiration,” said Connor Morris, a current aerospace engineering student at SLU who is currently interning with NASA. “We are pioneers, who else will discover the unknowns of our universe except for us?”

During his time at SLU, Abilleira earned a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering in 1999 and then a master’s degree in the same field in 2001. He went to work for the laboratory in 2004.To learn more about Fernando Abilleira and the InSight mission, visit https://www.nasa.gov/insight.

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The Hidden Dangers of Vaping

Ever since their appearance in 2004, electronic cigarettes have found success by cornering the market as the safer alternative to their traditional counterparts. The assumption has long been that e-cigarettes are harmless because they contain no tobacco and involve no combustion.

However, a new study published in the Environmental Health Perspectives journal last month seems to indicate otherwise. The findings of the study indicate that e-cigarettes could be potentially dangerous sources of exposure to toxic metals like Chromium, Nickel, and Lead and to metals that are toxic when inhaled, such as Manganese and Zinc.

The study, which was conducted by a team of scientists from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, showed that e-cigarettes generate an aerosol by heating a solution with a metallic coil. The purpose of the investigation was to determine whether the transfer of metals from the heating coil to the e-liquid in the e-cigarette tank was dangerous.

The team, headed by senior study author Ana María Rule, sampled the refilling dispenser, aerosol, and e-liquid tanks from 56 e-cigarette devices of daily e-cigarette users. They found that aerosol mass concentrations for the detected metals exceeded current health-based limits in close to 50% or more of the samples for Chromium, Manganese, Nickel and Lead.

The ingestion of these metals can lead to a number of health issues. According to the study’s press release, “chronic inhalation of these metals has been linked to linked to lung, liver, immune, cardiovascular, and brain damage, and even cancers.”

There has been a steady growth in e-cigarette popularity on college campuses all across the country. Like most things these days, its popularity has grown rapidly thanks to the internet culture popularization such as the trending hashtag #VapeNation.

SLU introduced a Tobacco-Free Policy that went into effect on July 1, 2016. The policy includes e-cigarettes (although they technically do not have tobacco). However, college students between the ages of 18 and 24 are still the largest e-cigarette users over all others.

The popularity of vaping comes from the nicotine “hit” experienced while providing the look and feel of tobacco-smoking. The assumption that vaping is “safe” has been contested for a while now, however. This is just one of many studies that have been released over the last year that seem to indicate vaping is not the refuge many initially thought.

It is within the Food and Drug Administration’s ability to regulate e-cigarettes, but they are still considering how to do so. This recent study could serve as the most recent development to encourage the FDA to make it a major focus moving forward.

Dr. Rule wanted to express that “it’s important for the FDA, the e-cigarette companies and vapers themselves to know that these heating coils, as currently made, seem to be leaking toxic metals—which then get into the aerosols that vapers inhale.”

Rule and her team are now planning further studies of vaping with particular attention paid to how exactly these metal exposures will impact people.

Rule says, “We’ve established with this study that there are exposures to these metals, which is the first step, but we need also to determine the actual health effects.”

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Update on the 200 Years-in-One Challenge

It has been nearly two and half months since SLU began its 200-Years-in-One Challenge. The challenge involves logging 200 years’ worth of service over the course of the year. The intention was to encourage people to give back to the community, whether they be SLU affiliated or not.

When SLU announced its ambitious project at the beginning of the Fall semester many were skeptical of its prospects for success. However, this didn’t shake the optimism of Bobby Wassel, assistant director of the Center for Service and Community Engagement. “Saint Louis University has a long history of volunteerism and service,” Wassel had said. “In addition to our campus community, we get alumni, parents and others from the area serving to help us celebrate. I have no doubt we will succeed”.

As the clock stands today, the University is far from achieving its goal. It is nearly a fifth of the way through the year and the Service Clock is only a tenth of its way to completion. At the time of writing this article, the Service Clock stood at 21 years, 4 months, 24 days, and 23 hours.

The ambitious undertaking was always a longshot and it has always been possible that it might not succeed. However, this has been an opportunity for SLU students and alumni to show the pride they hold for SLU as an institution that has always been interested in supporting the community. It is still the early days of the challenge and certainly within SLU’s power to turn this slow start around.

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Coffee Coaching: Spoon SLU Event a Success

Last Wednesday night, Nov. 29, the Spring Hall community kitchen was filled beyond capacity by eager coffee enthusiasts of the SLU community for Easy Ways to Make Great Coffee. The event was organized by members of Spoon University SLU in collaboration with Kaldi’s Coffee Roasting Company. The wholesale coffee trainer for Kaldi’s, Matt Foster, came to teach SLU students how to make the best coffee possible with minimal time and a meager budget.

Foster simplified the coffee-making process into two different inexpensive and effective methods: the immersion method and the hybrid method.

The immersion method is perhaps the one that most of the “uninitiated” would understand and involves using the French press. Foster explains that it is important to use a coarse grind, or larger particles of coffee, for this method, as too fine a grind would make the coffee astringent. He also recommends waiting for four minutes instead of immediately plunging once the water is poured on the coffee. The immersion method creates a heavy body coffee and sometimes has an oily or somewhat gritty texture.

The hybrid method is less common and perhaps more popular to the coffee enthusiast crowd and involves using a more recent contraption: the Clever Dripper. It is called the hybrid method because it combines the immersion and drip method. It uses a paper filter to stew the coffee in the carafe and then drips the brew into a cup—at two and half minutes, according to Foster. Unlike the immersion method, fine grinds of coffee work better because it extracts more nuanced flavors. The hybrid method creates a light to medium body coffee with a smooth texture.

When it comes to buying coffee, Foster emphatically discourages buying preground coffee. Obviously, a huge aspect of coffee is personal preference; however, Foster explains that the roasting process can have a huge impact on flavor. Typically, dark-roasted beans tend to have a tougher flavor, while lighter-roasted
beans give better aromas. He explained that coffee oxidizes quickly, so preground coffee loses its oils (an essential part of the flavor). When it comes to coffee shelf-life, Foster compares a bag of coffee to that of a loaf of bread—around two weeks. Foster recommends using blends and medium roast coffee with the immersion method and single-origin and light roast coffee with the hybrid method. Foster also went on to explain the coffee-making process. It takes four to five years of growth for a Coffea, a coffee plant, to be ready for harvest. The fruit is hand-picked, and two beans can usually be extracted from each cherry. On average, there is about one pound of coffee per plant. The coffee beans then go through the roasting process.

The event was a huge success, with many students walking away with a greater respect for the craft of coffee-brewing and practical applications for the student lifestyle.

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