Monday, March 19, 2007

Great article by alum featured in The Advocate

Check out the article "Chasing the duclod man" by Sarah Aswell '04 in the March 27 issue of The Advocate.

You can click on the title of this post to link to it.

It's a creepy, but excellent, read.

—Caitlin Carmody, Editor-in-chief

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

A "Constitutional Crisis" in SGA

We at the S&B work hard to maintain a level of objectivity and detachment from our stories. When people are involved in a newsworthy situation, we do not let them write or edit the piece covering it. This is always difficult on a small campus, where it can feel like everyone knows everyone. The recent run-off election between Eric Olson ’08 and Caitlin Carmody ’08 shows just how hard this can be: Carmody is co-Editor-in-Chief of the S&B.

While we certainly would not have chosen this situation, the significance of this election and its aftermath is too great to ignore. Carmody has not been involved in any way in any part of this story—in fact, we purposely wrote and edited this piece when she was not present. We’ve done our best to make this piece fair to all parties, regardless of our personal affiliations. This story of an election and ensuing constitutional crisis deserves serious attention, through whatever lens you choose to view it.

— Ben Weyl, Co-Editor-in-Chief, Abby Rapoport, News Editor, David Logan, Assistant News Editor


by Abby Rapoport and David Logan

On Sunday, March 11, Joint Board held an emergency meeting to discuss the outcome of an election process that had started a week earlier but was still mired in uncertainty. On Friday, March 9, Election Board had held a run-off election between Eric Olson ’08 and Caitlin Carmody ’08 for Vice-President of Academic Affairs (VPAA). Soon after, an anonymous student filed a grievance with Election Board, questioning Olson’s campaign tactics, and leading Election Board to recommend a revote without Olson on the ballot. Olson appealed the decision, requiring an emergency Joint Board meeting; at that meeting, Joint Board elected to suspend the SGA Constitution, making Olson the VP-AA-elect.

THE CAMPAIGN
Upon hearing that he was in a runoff election Thursday, March 8, Olson decided to ask his friend and Loosehead senator Laura Lienemann ’08 to poster for him. Lienemann had already offered to help at least three times previously, according to Olson. “It was done on a friendly level,” he said.

Lienemann also sent an email out to fifteen friends, asking them to vote for Olson. The email, which was given to the S&B anonymously due to the fact that the source did not receive the original email, began by saying “I know for many of you, I’m not your senator anymore … but I’m sending this to you to tell you why I voted for Eric Olson.” Lienemann did not mention this email to Olson.

According to Election Board member and SGA Treasurer Brad Bishop ’08, Election Board decided that both Lienemann’s posters and e-mail violated Article III Section 1 of the SGA Bylaws which prohibits the sending of “…material promoting any candidate…through campus mail, or through unsolicited email” and “…candidates from soliciting SGA Senators to distribute any campaign materials.”

Olson’s run-off campaign also included posters with pictures of current SGA Vice-President Michael Billups ’07 and Olson, who have been friends since Olson’s first year. “I was just looking for some new, funny material [in my posters],” said Olson. The posters included sayings like “Stay the Course” and pictures of Billups knighting a kneeling Olson. Additionally, SGA Administrative Coordinator Nick Blencowe ’08 helped Carmody poster during the run-off campaign. While current Cabinet members are not prohibited from endorsing or helping candidates, the practice is considered atypical.

Olson received 55.8% of the 451 total votes cast in the run-off. But before he ever found out these results, Election Board received a grievance alleging that Lienemann’s aid constituted a violation of SGA bylaws. Election Board convened the next day to assess the validity of the charges.

ELECTION BOARD
According to Bishop, Lienemann’s violations of election policy would normally result in Olson forfeiting his status as an official candidate; he would still be able to participate in the election, but only as a write-in candidate.

But because the election was a runoff, according to SGA Bylaws, Election Board could not simply remove Olson from the ballot since doing so would have left Carmody as the only official candidate. Election Board also decided that it could not legitimately invalidate Olson’s candidacy or declare Carmody the winner. “We solicited assistance from past members of Election Board to see if this had happened before,” said Bishop. “It had not. We had a constitutional crisis.”

After much deliberation, members decided to resolve the crisis by holding a second runoff with Carmody and Lindsay Dennis ’08 as official candidates while allowing Olson to participate as a write-in. “The course of action was agreed upon by consensus,” said Bishop. “No one on Election Board disagreed with the decision.”

Upon hearing these results, Olson decided to appeal Election Board’s decision, which meant Joint Board had to convene an emergency meeting within 24 hours.

JOINT BOARD
As the meeting began, Joint Board voted to make it a closed session, but included Election Board members, as well as Carmody and Olson. According to the minutes of this session—which were given to the S&B by a source who wished to remain anonymous due to the closed nature of the session—Election Board offered senators four options based on whether or not they believed Olson to have violated the Constitution and whether they thought Election Board’s decision should stand.

Olson and Lienemann said they did not know about the rule, and further believed they had respected the intention of the rule, if not the rule itself. “If you’re going to do a technical reading of the Constitution, yes I violated it,” said Lienemann. “However, I don’t think I violated the spirit of the laws.”

According to the Constitution, Election Board must publicize the election rules, but what this means is up for interpretation. “I think it’s the duty of Election Board to make available the rules of elections,” said Bishop. “But I feel it’s the responsibility of candidates to inform themselves.”

Billups had a different take. “[Election Board] should offer a bullet point breakdown of the rules,” he said. “Technically, Election Board is to publicize the document.”
Furthermore, some took issue with the rule itself, believing it to limit speech. “On an individual level, we should never try to stop people from expressing preference,” said Olson. “There’s a line between the office and the individual holding the office.”

Many at the Joint Board meeting expressed their dislike of the rule, and hoped to later rewrite it in an SGA Constitutional Reform Committee.

After much debate, Joint Board senators unanimously voted for “Option D”, declaring that Olson had violated the Constitution, but that the rule he had violated was unfair. But “Option D” required use of the Elastic Clause, which allowed Joint Board to go around the Election Board decision and make a new one in its place. Only the President or Vice President could approve a motion to enact this clause, and since SGA President Chris Hall ’07 was out of town for the weekend, Billups was the only person who could do so.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
Because of Billups’ endorsement of Olson, he was in a difficult position. “In hindsight, I probably wouldn’t have gone that route,” said Billups. “I guess on principle [I shouldn’t have endorsed Olson].”

Vice President of Student Affairs-elect (VP-SA) Jan Koszewski ’08 agreed that the situation was complicated at best. “[Billups’] endorsement was, to be quite honest, out of place,” Koszewski said. 
“He was well aware of the awkward place in which he was caught.”

Ultimately, Billups approved the motion for the Elastic Clause after taking several straw poll votes to gauge interest. While others were displeased by Billups’ situation, no one at the meeting felt the conflict of interest was significant enough to prevent the motion. “I think [the endorsement] was a conflict of interest and a double standard,” Lienemann said. “But I think he did what Chris [Hall] would have done.”

“I’ve said before and maintain that if it happened the other way around, I would have done the same thing,” said Billups. “I acted in the most principled manner I could as a member of SGA. I feel like my personal relationship…didn’t come into play.”

Billups was not the only one whose ability to participate was questioned. Before discussion began, Joint Board members agreed that due to potential conflicts of interest, senators Lienemann and Dennis as well as those senators serving on Election Board were barred from voting. Only two members of Cabinet, Michael Van Hulle ’07 and Karly Newton ’07 were considered far enough removed from the situation to vote.

The decision to enact the Elastic Clause also required a four-fifths majority, and while some members expressed reservations about enacting the clause, they believed it was the best option available. “We’d have gotten much more of an uproar if we’d have thrown out the results,” said Lindsay Dennis ’08, who abstained because she was a candidate in the initial election for VPAA. Joint Board ultimately voted unanimously to enact the Elastic Clause.

Some of those not voting did not think the clause should have been enacted. Blencowe, who had to abstain due to his candidacy for VP-SA, was vehement in his opposition to use of the Elastic Clause. “I don’t think it was appropriate for them to use the Elastic Clause to exonerate people that should have known better,” he said. “What we saw is essentially [SGA] doing favors and fucking with our constitution when we shouldn’t have.”

Blencowe also thought this use of the Elastic Clause set a bad precedent. “I understand the reasoning on [invoking the Elastic Clause],” he said. “But I think this is a bad time to start picking and choosing what rules we follow.”

Because so many people abstained, some took issue with Koszewski’s decision to vote in the matter. “As someone who had just been elected to be either Eric or my counterpart, for him to be making decisions to allow even the slightest advantage for one of us seems to be a huge conflict of interest,” said Carmody. Koszewski said in hindsight, he wished he had abstained. “I tried to keep my … participation at a minimum,” he said. “I felt I had a duty as an active senator [to vote].”

Billups said he would have abstained had he been in Koszewski’s situation “in light of the fact that you’ve got a whole other six weeks as vice-president elect to build relationships. This really sets the tone for your whole vice-presidency whether or not you’re going to act in a principled manner.”

Koszewski and Olson will join Megan Goering ’08 as next year’s SGA Executive members, but some are still pondering the election itself. “I still have doubts [about the decision],” said Billups. “I sort of feel for public officials who have to make those decisions that can be seen as overly political. You do the best you can at the time.”

Friday, March 09, 2007

Extended Q&A with jazz critic Gary Giddins '70

This week’s Arts section features a Q&A with jazz critic Gary Giddins, who has been on campus for the past month as a guest lecturer teaching about jazz and writing. Here are further excerpts from his conversation with the S&B.

Interview by Pat Caldwell

(On his time as Concerts Chair)

My feeling was, as a general rule, jazz and blues and country … were so much less expensive than rock that we could have a concert every month or two instead of blowing it all at once. So we got B.B. King before he started playing really for white audiences. In fact in my new book Natural Selection I finally published the interview I did with King on the steps of Darby Gym with two or three other kids, him sweating, wearing his tuxedo after the gig and talking to us for about two hours.

(On his time at Grinnell)

I was a terrible student—that is my single biggest regret. I really regret the classes I didn’t pay any attention to. I was an English fanatic and I put all my time into the English courses.

I edited a literary magazine, Montage. We had 1.5 issues, because the second one, the school closed so we never published it; I still have the galleys in my closet, including an unpublished manuscript of Lenny Bruce that someone gave me. But the first issue was exciting. We printed it in Victor, Iowa because nobody in Grinnell would publish any Grinnell [College] publication because of obscenities. I wrote to the S&B, I produced the films, I produced the concerts.

I think almost entirely positively about the experience; it was just the right place for me. I came here as an accident because the idiot guidance counselor at my high school told me it had the best writing program in the country; of course he’s thinking of Iowa City … But it turned out to be a complete mistake—I would have hated Iowa City. Going to a big university and becoming a cog in that. I used to spend a lot of time visiting there, but I needed a small liberal arts school and there isn’t a better one.

(On how Grinnell has changed)

I think in a lot of ways the school is incredibly well-endowed now in a way that it wasn’t then. As an institution for education I think it has probably improved in many ways. On the other hand I’m very disappointed to see that the music department has no serious interest in jazz. They’re searching for somebody now, but I would have thought there’d be a department here.

And I’m a little surprised that there doesn’t seem to be the institutional memory here. We used to hear and tell Grinnell stories about Gary Cooper riding his horse into Gates and we knew about James Hall being here, and the whole Roosevelt brain trust and Hallie Flanagan and all those people. We had a sort of sense of the history, that from talking to people I don’t think is still there anymore.

I think it’s ultimately the same place. I do think you’re wasting the goddamn Forum. My God, that great building. We used to have dances in the North Lounge. The Jackson 5 was so little known that we didn’t even put them in Darby, we put them in North Lounge for a dance with little Michael.

We had Skip James perform in south lounge which is where Borges spoke as well. So those lounges were used a lot. There were jukeboxes in them. Cecil Taylor when he was here emptied his pocket of change into the jukebox and picked only the Aretha Franklin tracks, which there were at least a dozen, and there was a piano there as well, and he backed her for an hour. He just sat there accompanying Aretha Franklin. It was unbelievable.

After graduation, what did you do? Did you start right away in journalism?

I tried. I sent resumes to every newspaper in New York and collected more rejection slips than I care to remember, from just about every magazine that I could imagine myself writing for. I had a terrible first year, it was just unbearable. My father had been very ill, so he and my mother were in Texas being operated on. So I was virtually alone in a house in Long Island, writing and sending out stuff and getting rejection slips.

After about a year of that, the New York Post called, which was a liberal paper back then—a lousy paper, but a liberal paper. They must have run out of nieces and nephews because they had an opening for copyboy. So I got that job and things just started happening…For the next year I was writing movies reviews for the Hollywood Reporter at $5 a review and music reviews for Downbeat at $7, occasionally $15. I never had to pay taxes, that was the only good part. But the copyboy gig which I kept for a while was a pretty good salary, so I was keeping head above the water. And then I sent a piece into the [Village] Voice which they ran, and then they invited me to write every week, and after a year of that they gave me the column, and that’s what really made my reputation.

I wrote the column for 30 years. After I had been doing it for about 6 years, Oxford University published a collection of pieces I had done. That was my first book; I have 9 books altogether. I was also teaching. I taught a little bit at Pennsylvania for a semester, Rutgers for a semester, I taught criticism at Columbia for a couple of years. But for the most part I would write the column, and when I need the time to finish a book they were great about giving me whatever leave I needed…But things started to change there, and after 30 years I realized that you get to a point and you don’t know how much time you’ve got left and there are a bunch of books I really, really need to write, and I don’t want to go to my grave thinking that because I was afraid of not earning enough money to survive, I stayed at the Voice past my interest. My wife totally encouraged me. That was in ’03, exactly the 30th year [of working at the Voice]. I left and I’ve published two books since then, Weather Bird and Natural Selection, and I’m working on two now.

What do you think of the current [Village] Voice?

I’m appalled. I’m just appalled … I don’t know what to say. I still occasionally pick it up. It takes me about 10 minutes to read. The cover stories, with one exception that they did on landlords which was sort of throwback to the old Voice, they’ve been trivial … It’s not a New York paper anymore. Most of the critics are part of this national syndicate of Voice Media.

What do you think of the nationalization of alternative newspapers?

To me that’s antithetical to an alternative paper. What makes a paper an alternative paper is its very city-centric, specific to that area, because you want to wage the battles that concern you and your neighbor. If you’re a reporter, you want to talk about the bad judges and landlords in New York. You want to talk about corruption in New York. If you live in Des Moines, if you live in Los Angles, wherever you live, you want to deal with that city. When it becomes nationalized it becomes another rag that exists for one reason primarily, which is to get ads; to make a profit … Whatever it is, it’s not alternative—it is the establishment. It’s just the establishment by some guy in Arizona who’s in it as a business.

Movies, My Family and Sexuality

By Lindsay Dennis

God bless the cinema. I’m so thankful for the fact that this country wholeheartedly supports a multi-billion dollar industry designed to allow us to spend quality time with our friends and loved ones without actually having to engage in that pesky business of conversation or looking at one another. This makes life so much easier for those of us stricken with debilitating cases of extreme social awkwardness. Or, at least, it used to.

Back in the day when they’d just come out with those new-fangled talkie films, cinema was much simpler. The storylines were classic and wholesome, so as to appeal to the whole family. But these days, all those heartwarming tales of angels getting their wings and whatnot have all been done to death, leaving filmmakers with no other option than to start pushing the envelope with crazy raunchy sex movies (because sex is the last thing that still really makes Americans uncomfortable).

There’s not anything inherently wrong with these movies, per se. They are often sincere, artistic, thought-provoking, or even just downright hilarious. The problem I have with these movies (which really hit home for me this weekend in Harris as I was sitting between my good friends watching the third or fourth orgy in scene in Short Bus) is that I never think through the implications of watching certain films with certain people. Surprisingly, as aware as I am of my own awkwardness, I never seem to think ahead about the content of a movie before sitting down to watch it with the family. This has led to me making the questionable life choice of watching American Pie, Kinsey, and the 40-Year-Old Virgin (uncut, no less) with my parents.

Granted, my parents were hippies. They are both alums of Reed College, and they have a history of liberal politics (marching through the streets of Portland shouting “Nixon eat shit!”, etc). However, this fact does not overcome our family’s uncomfortable WASPy tendency to completely ignore the reality of sex. For example, my primary experience with sexual education from my parents comes in the form of two succinct statements: “Herpes lasts forever” and “Don’t ever have sex…well, don’t ever have unprotected sex”. There was also a brief but exceedingly uncomfortable discussion about how diaphragms are no longer effective if you lose a lot of weight, a fact that is apparently proven by my existence on this planet. Still, despite these moments of mildly earnest sexual discussion, the general rule in the house is silence about sex.

As such, watching scenes of Jason Biggs humping a pie, an old lady masturbating, and Steve Carrell watching porn in a Circuit City was more than a little upsetting. Even though I never really got a clear impressive of what my parents expected normative sexual behavior to be, I was pretty certain that it wasn’t this. So I merely laughed awkwardly and tried to pretend not to understand the raunchier jokes. Those for which I couldn’t hide my knowledge, I simply played off as things I learned about in that one Bible class on what you should never do if you don’t want to burn in the fiery chasm of Hell. I assume that I was fairly convincing. But really, how would I know? We don’t talk about these things.

All in all, I like to think of these mildly traumatic experiences as opportunities to learn about the importance of considering consequences. I figure things have to normal out someday, and I will either find myself avoiding these situations entirely, or finally coming to terms with my sexual identity in a way that I feel comfortable sharing with my family. I’m thinking silence and avoidance is probably the more realistic option.

Monday, March 05, 2007

Debaters argue their way to top positions in Kansas tournament

By Rebecca Park

While the basketball team may have gotten more attention last weekend, they were not the only ones representing Grinnell in a regional tournament. At the Capital City Classic Invitational, the Grinnell debate team scored eleven points overall, to tie for third with William Jewell College. Among the highlights, Megan Goering ’08 and Zach Razavi ’08 placed first in the team competition and Michael Billups ’07 was awarded second overall speaker.

The debates were conducted in parliamentary style, meaning teams had 20 minutes to prepare an argument either for or against a government policy. Subjects included “a ton of different current legislation in Congress and some metaphysical, philosophical kind of stuff as well,” Goering said.

According to Billups, the team usually at least “breaks”, meaning they proceed to the next round, at each tournament. But this tournament marked the team’s greatest success in recent years.

In addition to the team’s overall success, Walter Liszewski ’08, Danny Haupt ’09 and Ethan Struby ’10 placed individually. “It’s just gratuitous that we managed to have a team win,” Billups said.

Razavi and Goering, who occasionally writes for the S&B, attributed some of their success to a strong team dynamic they developed when debating together in high school. They also said they benefited from a familiarity with judges’ expectations since the tournament was held in their home state of Kansas. The team was able to perform to the judges’ preferred style of debate, which Razavi described as “very fast, very technical, very high-impact.”

The team also benefited from the relatively relaxed approach to the competition. Because their priorities were “speaking our best and just having a good time,” Goering said, “I think that’s part of the reason we were so successful.”

Despite the team’s success, it is not resting on its laurels. Recent practices have been focused on improving counterargument skills, which judges highlighted as an area for improvement.

The success will not, according to Billups, alter the team’s plans for the future. “As far as the big picture goes,” he said, “[tournament success] won’t encourage us to go to any more debates than we would normally go to, and it wouldn’t make us stop going to debates either.”

Upcoming tournaments include one this weekend at Stanford and the National Parliamentary Debate Association Nationals at Colorado College in the spring. Whether the team hopes to replicate its success is hardly debatable.

Sunday, March 04, 2007

EXCO provides quirky classes, but participation has been low

By Alisha Saville

To the majority of students on campus, Anne Geissinger is known as a dean of the college and coordinator of the Grinnell-in-London and Grinnell-in-Washington programs. To a select few, she is the “Permanent Belly Dance Member.” Thanks to the SGA-run Experimental College program (EXCO), Geissinger has been able to fuel her passion for dance over the past six years.

Historically, EXCO classes have always enjoyed a large participant base, but the past few years have seen a decline in both the number of classes offered and the level of participant interest, though it still attracts between 150 and 200 students. One reason for the decline could be the infamously busy schedules of Grinnellians. “It’s one of those things that Grinnell students are really intrigued with, but don’t really have time for,” said Ben Bowman ’08, one of three Belly Dance teachers.

Because the classes do not count for credit, EXCOs are often the first activities dropped from a busy schedule. Even so, Matt Johnson ’08 said that the low-stress nature of EXCO is generally what draws students to the classes. “It’s really chill, something students do for fun," he said.

Despite its previous popularity, EXCO nearly did not happen last semester, which some worry might hurt student participation in the future.

Suzanne Polivy ’08, coordinator of EXCO programming this semester along with Jackie Graves ’09, said that administrative difficulties last fall also played a large part in the program’s reduced presence on campus this year. “We’ve had fewer responses than in previous years [to teach classes], probably because of last semester,” said Polivy. But she and Graves said they are pleased with the eight classes that will be taught this semester.

The program was originally intended to bring students, college staff and community members together to share interests, skills and particular talents that are not normally part of the college curriculum. In recent years the program has veered away from this initial goal, catering mainly to students.

To increase the program’s presence in the entire community in the future, Polivy suggested inviting those from town to participate. “EXCO was designed to bring together students, professors and townspeople,” said Polivy. “It would be nice to open it up again, to foster more of a sense of community.”

With an operating budget of $2000 per semester, potential teachers do not need to spend their own money to share a skill or interest they feel could benefit others. “A lot of students have ideas and talents to share,” said Polivy. “EXCO gives them the resources to do so.”