Category: Opinion

When I heard Josh Radnor, also known as Ted Mosby from “How I Met Your Mother,” was coming to campus, I was stoked. Since I’m a fan who has faithfully followed his plights and shenanigans through all nine seasons, I jumped in line on Monday night at 6 p.m. to get my ticket.

After waiting for 20 minutes, Campus Programming Board (CPB) told me no more tickets would be distributed today and that I had to come back at noon the next day to “try” to get a ticket. The tickets that would be handed out would be given to those who were first in line, and the rest had to try again another day.

I had a random flashback of when I was little, and I saw “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” for the first time. Willy Wonka went a little crazy and stuffed five golden tickets into five random candy bars and sent them off into the world. Millions of small children wanted those five little golden tickets and so everybody started buying his candy just so they could have a chance. Willy Wonka was an asshole.

So as I walked away on Monday, ticketless, I felt like little Charlie after he opened the first candy bar after paying for it and found no golden ticket.

There are only 300 total “free” tickets to see Radnor on March 19. More than one hundred of the tickets were given away at CPB’s showing of “Liberal Arts” in the Milligan Hub last Saturday and approximately 60 are set aside for what I assume are Radnor’s guests, members of CPB and prospective students.

I’m no mathematician, but that means there are approximately 140 tickets left. And, minus the one hundred students who received tickets at last weekend’s screening, there are potentially 1,700 students who want these 140 tickets.

Houston, we have a problem.

Arguably, not everyone will want to see Radnor and not everybody watches “How I Met Your Mother.” But undeniably, the show has a huge fan base and the main reason Radnor was invited to campus is because the show is so popular. And undeniably, all 1,800 students, whether they get a ticket or not, have paid the student activity fee of $260. So, although the tickets are advertised as free, they were paid for through the activity fee.

The cynic in me wants to remind everyone that nothing is free. Supposedly, it cost $24,000 for Radnor to come to campus. That’s about $13 per student or $100 per ticket, since only 240 tickets are available. So, unless CPB is only deducting $100 from the accounts of students who actually get tickets, everyone is paying for less than one-sixth of the student body to see this celebrity.

There’s more to it. Radnor’s visit was not paid strictly through this year’s activity funds. Money was left over from previous years. So students who have been here in previous years, and who don’t receive a ticket, pay even more for nothing.

How’s that for legen-wait for it-dary?

I’d also like to point out that the student body pays for celebrities such as Radnor to come to campus but does not vote on who visits campus. The decision is made by few who should take the entire student body into consideration before their own wants. If they thought only 240 students would want to see Radnor’s performance, they should not have used $24,000 of the students’ money to bring him here.

My recommendation is this: move the show from the Chappelear Drama Centre Main Stage to Gray Chapel. Although the Main Stage is a beautiful and appropriate setting for a celebrity, it can’t fit all of the students who have paid the activity fee and want to see Radnor speak. That way, every student who wants to see him and who can’t get a ticket has an equal opportunity.

By Roger Ingles

On February 22, 2014, two basketball games occurred in Branch Rickey Arena. The first was the greatest win in Ohio Wesleyan women’s basketball history as they defeated the DePauw Tigers 65-64.

DePauw is the current defending national champions and was the consensus No. 1 ranked team in the nation who came into Branch Rickey with a 58-game winning streak, and with 47 consecutive NCAC wins.

The win secured the Battling Bishops as the number two seed in the upcoming NCAC tournament, our highest finish in many years. It was a tremendous achievement by head coach Stacey Lobdell and her squad.

The Tigers have been the dominant team in not only the NCAC but nationally in Division III women’s basketball. This win showed the dramatic growth our program has made in the past three years and showcased the hard work and dedication these young women have made to get to this level of performance.

The game received attention from several national media outlets and brought a spotlight to our program that was well deserved. The Transcript chose to ignore it. That is a shame. These young women deserved more.

The second event was the OWU men’s team lost on a last-second shot versus DePauw’s men’s team 64-63. It was a great basketball game and the loss caused our team to finish in a three-way tie for second with DePauw and Wittenberg.

This game was meaningful in that it established the final seeding for the NCAC tournament and in its own right, was deserving of a spot in The Transcript.

The picture was great but in no way should ever have been featured over the incredible story of the women’s game.

Your paper chose to highlight the men’s loss with an above-fold front page photo showing the DePauw men’s celebration and chose to ignore the greatest win in OWU women’s history all together. Not even a score of the game was mentioned in your paper about that game.

I find this highly irresponsible and the type of gender discrimination that should make every female athlete on this campus upset.

I am very proud of this team and their accomplishments. Hopefully The Transcript someday will be too.

A few weeks ago I attended every involved Ohio Wesleyan student’s favorite spring-semester reason to complain – OWU Summit.

The three-and-a-half-hour conference is, in theory, a good idea. It seeks to unite all campus leaders (a fairly dubious term) to create greater synergy and collaboration within and between organizations. It’s an admirable goal, but a difficult one to achieve. Because all the people who attend, either by choice or by supreme edict of OrgSync, could be doing something else that afternoon in pursuit of fulfilling our many obligations, we inevitably complain about how it’s a waste of our time.

I kept an open mind. I thought a session about “well-being at OWU” could be particularly fruitful.

I, along with so many of my friends, are involved so heavily in so many things that we often have trouble taking care of ourselves. I thought this session might perhaps address the culture of overinvolvement among the students of this university, how it can be detrimental to us, and offer some advice for mitigating it.

I sure was wrong.

The presenters were engaging. The information made sense, and certainly wasn’t useless. And I’ll admit there was an entire book on which the presentation was based to cover in 40 minutes.

But instead of addressing an elephant in the room – a silently enforced standard of being the “opposite of ordinary” that all our Admissions marketing so boldly purports – the session offered simple solutions to complex problems.

For financial well-being, get a job, save money and spend wisely. As if differing economic circumstances don’t prevent any OWU students from doing so. For social well-being, attend events and talk to people or join a club. As if social anxiety doesn’t often preclude that, or other factors besides the size of one’s social networks – like an over-packed schedule that requires penciling in of time with friends – don’t make social well-being difficult.

I think the Ohio Wesleyan administration proffers simple solutions to complex problems quite often (the $50 million in deferred maintenance to residential buildings, for example). But the simplest solution to something is to not talk about it.

That is the solution posited by the Offices of Student Involvement and Admissions to the aforementioned culture of overinvolvement, enforced by the loaded standard of “the opposite of ordinary” that Ohio Wesleyan students seem to have internalized.

As I interpret the slogan’s dogma, the goal of student life at OWU is to do as many things as humanly possible. That’s it. Fill your planner with a rainbow of color-coded obligations. Spend your evenings in meetings, rehearsals and lectures and your nights and early mornings immersed in homework. Don’t forget to go to class and maintain a high GPA so our average statistics look good next to Denison’s in all the college guidebooks.

This lifestyle is not sustainable. So many people I know run around all day, stay up into the night working and sleep between three and six hours a night for weeks at a time. There is a point when time management becomes impossible because there are too many things to manage and not enough time in which one can manage them. Concessions must sometimes be made, but when they are the standard of perfection “the opposite of ordinary” invokes replaces that skipped meeting or unfinished paper with a burden of guilt – at least for me.

I know this was not the intent of the slogan’s clever authors. It is certainly a reflection of OWU’s extraordinary qualities – its dedication to community, service and broadening worldviews on the part of faculty, staff, administrators and students – and I appreicate it for that. But the egg laid by the hen has hatched a dangerous cock. The tag line is no longer just a reflection of the positive bits, but an engine of the culture of overinvolvement that exhausts me and so many other students.

I don’t think Student Invovlement or Admissions are bad at what they do. They are incredibly successful at getting motivated students to attend OWU and get involved once they arrive. They help students find their niche and a larger sense of purpose, and that is entirely commendable.

But what is missing is any sort of conversation about moderation, self-care and the healthiness of saying no. Being busy isn’t a bad thing. It can create a lot of fulfillment and lay the foundations for important life skills. But it has a point of diminishing returns. Overcommitment leads to unhealthy habits, and sometimes the answer is to withdraw from those commitments. But the culture of our university doesn’t even present that as an option, because if we did we wouldn’t be “the opposite of ordinary.”

The slogan holds us to a standard we can’t reach. We are ordinary people. Everyone is. We need rest. We need resources for when we’re overwhelmed. We need reassurance that it’s okay that we can’t do everything, and that sometimes it’s good to say no or drop out. We need a culture of healthy student involvement, not overinvolvement. And sometimes we need an ordinary day.

When I wrote my column “Catcalls and harassment: the antithesis of charming and funny,” the only person I thought I might offend was the man I described as making an offensive comment to me after I took a spill on some ice.

I attempted to accurately depict my emotions and the events that occurred in my piece as descriptively as possible. I elaborated on my clothes, what I was carrying and how I was feeling to place emphasis on the way a negative comment from someone affected me, and in the process I learned an important truth.

Despite some of our differing views, Alyssa Long taught me a very valuable lesson in her well thought-out letter to the editor. I was trying to set a scene for my main point, but in the process I distracted readers from my true intention of emphasizing the dangers that can occur for women victims of sexual harassment. Although I never would have thought of it myself, Long makes the strong point that my indulgence in describing my material possessions portrays an image of a classist mindset. It never occurred to me that someone would take that idea away from my editorial, and that is exactly the problem.

We might not always realize the implications of our words, which is why we must make a conscious effort in monitoring them and taking precautions that they do not misconstrue our true meaning. It’s a hard pill to swallow when you offend someone despite your innocent intentions, but it is also a learning opportunity not to be taken for granted. The realization of potential arguments that our words can inspire is a crucial development in conditioning our writing technique, and I appreciate Long’s perspective and her courage to speak on an issue I was ignorant to ignore.

When you were a kid and someone triple-dog-dared you to do something you had to do it. There was some unspoken code that held you to it or, well, you sucked.

The newest online drinking game, NekNominate, thrives on this code. Players are dared to consume excessive amounts of alcohol with 24 hours, or they lose. Once the bottle, boot or toilet bowl (literally) is empty, the drinker passes the dare to another person, who then must drink whatever mix of booze he or she is told to drink. The dare is recorded and posted on YouTube or Facebook as proof for friends or future bosses.

There are more than 50,000 videos on YouTube and multiple Facebook pages devoted to NekNominate. In one video, a ten year old boy chugs a glass of vodka, Nando’s sauce, cream and mayonnaise. In another, a man adds a dead mouse to his brew before he chugs it. Expectedly, these drinkers become violently ill during or after the recording.

The game started in Australia, where to “neck” is to drink something all at once. Since it went viral on Facebook and YouTube and spread to the U.K. and parts of the U.S.  in January, the game has killed five men, all younger than 35.

Earlier this month, 20-year-old Bradley Eames of the U.K. became the fifth known casualty. He downed two pints of gin and died four days later from alcohol poisoning complications.

I’m going to spare the sermon about surrendering to peer pressure. We’re adults on a college campus, and we’re responsible for our own choices. But before this goes viral in the U.S. and is copied by people closer to home, I’m going to give a disclaimer NekNominate doesn’t provide.

A lethal dose of alcohol is one that puts an individual’s blood alcohol content at .40 percent. BAC varies by weight, gender, genetics and how much food one has eaten; but generally speaking, 10 to 15 drinks in one hour is lethal.

The game’s initiators don’t consider this, but they should. Since Eames’s death, drinkers who dare friends to take on lethal challenges could face manslaughter charges.

If you’re nominated for the game, I’m won’t lie — there are probably plenty who will mock you for not wanting to slug back two pints of gin in under a minute. Perhaps that’s what the five dead players worried about before they died. But if they hadn’t cared about what other people thought, they’d probably all be alive. And the people they nominated would not be immortalized online as violently ill and obviously stupid.

Nobody our age drinks without knowing alcohol in excess can have be fatal. When drinking is a game of Russian Roulette, nobody wins, no matter how many “likes” you get.

By Alyssa Long

This particular Opinion piece bothered me. This, before you think it, does not make me less of a feminist. Ms. Youse boldly declares that, “If you believe that sexual harassment isn’t serious, that it’s funny, that it’s flattering — you are dead wrong.” While no reasonable person would disagree with her charge, it is the underlying implication that all women perceive certain situations in the same way, as harassment, which is disagreeable.

The editor describes an unfortunate morning. She took thoughtful steps in her new boots on the ice that coated the throat of our campus, it’s walkways. A man whistled at her, and she fell, spilling her lipstick, vitamins, credit cards, phone, makeup bag, and iPad out of her “brown leather fringe bag.” Her white shirt wetted, two boys “catcalled” her from outside Smith Hall, and she was late to class.

My first issue lies with the blame shifted onto the whistler. Whether or not the whistler’s actions are harassment, I’ll discuss later. However, the editor clearly insinuates that the man’s whistling caused her to fall. She shifts him the blame for her injury, wet clothes, her scuffed “Zara Italian leather boot,” and the slick film over all the precious things that fell out of her purse. This assumption is unfair and unthoughtful, because it implies that it was either his intention, or control over an invisible cosmic force, that caused her to fall. I think it is fair to assume that it was a combination of her more-ornamental-than-purposeful shoes, the ice, being in a hurry, and a sudden distraction that caused her to fall. If anything, the man’s whistle is correlated with her fall; it is not a causation.

Secondly, if the man who whistled didn’t cause the editor to fall down, can he be further shamed for not halfing out his cigarette to help her up? The editor goes on that, “Instead of coming over to help me, he and his friend laughed and catcalled me.” Have you never fallen, and helped yourself up? Have you never seen someone fall, and didn’t help them up? It is my opinion and experience that women do not need men’s help to stand. It is interesting that the editor is holding the man who is a “sexist” for whistling, accountable for her safety, comfort, and closure. Did she really want his help? Interpretively, having read though not experienced, their follow-up quip: “Get yourself wet there, sweetie?” reads more condescending than sexually threatening. Embarrassing, to a certain self-esteem, yes. Threatening, no. This is not to say that the anecdotes provided were by proxy neither gruesome or incorrigible. Sexual violence is an evil fruiting gravity, and at a gross contrast to getting wet and losing a few minutes, to a class in which you run a, “usual ten minutes late.”

Finally, it’s interesting that at the heart of her frustration are all these things, spilled out on the ground. She curses the universe, not only for making dampening the contents of her purse, made them a bit salty, but that it even “threw in a couple of sexist assholes.” The structure of her sentence invalidates her attribution of blame. She carefully names, and by naming gifts importance to, all the things these men caused her to ruin.

As someone who grew up under-class poor and pays OWU tuition, it was easy to identify class-specific and discriminating language, the privilege to be a materialist. The editor has “109” pairs of shoes, operates under the “look-good-do-good principle,” stressing how intimately aware she is of her external identity, what other people see, and how she wants her adornments to actualize it in the minds of others.

Further, the piece is rich with nouns indicating privilege: “Zara,” a name-brand; “Italian leather,” notoriously expensive; “brown leather fringe bag,” its elaborate description indicating importance, or specialness; “all my credit cards,” obvious; and the “iPad,” $399.00-$929.00 new. There are also adjectives, descriptive phrases and nouns that derogate stereotypically poor or underclass behavior. The devastation the editor felt, beholding her scuffed boot, makes all those living the daily reality of scuffs seem inhuman, or savage.

She derides — not the catcall, or whistle, or men who executed however-you-load-it-behavior which she perceived as inappropriate — them for what their cars must look and smell like, if the kind of man that whistles at a woman is also always one who lives in the, “back of (a) beatup Honda that smells like meth.” The statement is a gesture that, like a catcall, could be taken as a charming joke, or worse, a cruel reminder of the structural power the rich have over the poor.

My critique of this piece is that it should have been more thoughtful, and empathetic to women with dissimilar experiences. Many women will admit that, sometimes, someone hollering across the street about how beautiful they are — though they may not respond, or express disinterest — feels good.  When I have to choose between my only meal for the day and a tank of gas, and some guy at the pump tells me he’d like to give me a pump, I’m not going to blame him for my hunger. I’m not going to be made less by a man, because I refuse to. I take the honesty, the courage, and the juvenescence from his compliment because I have more important things to worry about; and, if someone’s that hungry for my reaction, I think I have power over them.

My criticism is not meant to validate the actions of men who will always be boys, but to qualify the experiences and reactions of women who are not middle to upper class whites, and whose issues are much more grave. As a woman, too, and one whose life has not been so safe, I am not so naive as to think I’ll always have power. I, like all women, have known vulnerability, lied helpless at the mercy of an angry creature. Like all women, whom are systemically and physically vulnerable to men, I sense when someone is not someone to ignore. That’s why I carry a blade.

If you know me, you know I love shoes.

I never discriminate against a cute pair of high top sneakers or turn down an opportunity to wear five inch heels. I have about 109 pairs, and my collection continues to grow.

The Transcript’s editorial staff and I lay out the paper every Tuesday, and because I operate under the look-good-do-good principle, I always dress up on Tuesdays so I stay in work mode. Dressing well makes me most confident and keeps me constantly alert, and for me, dressing well equates wearing nice shoes.

That is why this morning en route to Phillips Hall to get the paper ready for all the editors coming in to lay out their pages, I was wearing a pair of Zara Italian leather booties with a two-inch heel. The treacherous ice sheet that has become the residential side of Ohio Wesleyan’s campus did not welcome the leather soles warmly. As I exited Hayes Hall to walk to my car, I carefully watched my feet as I walked down the exit ramp.

I told myself “Ellin, you cannot fall. If you fall you will ruin your whole day. You cannot afford to ruin your whole day. Whatever you do, do not fall.”

I was off the ramp and on to the even icier parking lot when I heard a man whistle at me.

I looked up to see who it was, and the second I stopped looking at my feet I felt my beautiful boots fly into the air. My arms flailed, and my brown leather fringe bag went flying and simultaneously expelled all its contents.

I fell on my thigh and my right wrist. My lipstick was about 30 feet away. Next to it was my wallet, and in the opposite direction were my vitamins, all my credit cards, my phone, my makeup bag and my iPad. My white t-shirt was soaked under my thin leather jacket, and didn’t have time to go inside and change.

Then, the same voice that whistled at me started crackling.

It was someone smoking a cigarette outside of Smith Hall. Instead of coming over to help me, he and his friend laughed and catcalled me. One of them yelled, “Get yourself wet there, sweetie?”

As if it wasn’t enough that I had a long day ahead of me, that I was already running my usual ten minutes late, that my beautiful leather boots now had a massive scuff mark.

As if all of those things weren’t enough, the universe threw in a couple sexist assholes.

I’ll never understand what these men want to accomplish. What do you want me to say?

“Yeah, let me just drop the tens of millions of responsibilities I have to attend to today and we can get it on in the back of your beatup Honda that smells like meth.” Nope.

I didn’t respond, and I was fine. I’m writing this in Phillips Hall with wet clothes and a strong desire to punch someone, but I’m fine.

Unfortunately, this kind of incident does not always turn out okay for women like me.

Let’s take, for example, the 33-year-old women in San Francisco who, Jezebel reported, was stabbed in the face last January when she rejected a man who was sexually harassing her on the street. Or the 15-year-old girl in Chicago whom. the Chicago Tribune reported, was hit by a car and killed after she leapt a from a bus trying to run away from attackers.

These women were not okay. They didn’t just get a wet shirt or a scrape on their hand. Me falling on my butt and getting a late start worked out fine. I still shouldn’t have had to fall because of two jerk guys, but comparing that to being killed or seriously injured by dangerous attackers, I consider myself lucky.

This kind of thing happens every day, and obviously happens here. Apparently, it happens relatively frequently here, too. Just the other day, my best friend was walking to the gym and a male student yelled at her from behind, “Damn girl, I’m going to rape you!”

Not okay. Not in a million years is that ever okay.

If you believe that sexual harassment isn’t serious, that it’s funny, that it’s flattering—you are dead wrong. No one appreciates being treated like a piece of meat in leggings. No one likes to be yelled at the creepy guy from Smith Dining Hall whom you have to ask to make you gluten free pizza upon request.

We have to stop shrugging these incidents off as just “some asshole yelling at you on the street.” It isn’t flattering, and it isn’t funny.

Not every woman is lucky enough to keep walking by that asshole and go on with her day like I did, or like my friend did. We have to remember that.

This winter has sucked. The cold, the rain, the sleet, the snow and that weird hail thing the other day have all been present during this long winter. For me, so has depression.

As a person who suffers from depression and anxiety, this winter has been horrible for me. The endless gray days have done nothing to boost my morale, nor has it been beneficial to my mental health. And I’m assuming I’m not the only one who has been feeling this way.

There are so many people on campus that deal with the same things I do. Hell, I would be shocked if I was the only one. However, I do feel there is still a stigma surrounding depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses.

I was diagnosed at the end of my sophomore year in high school, about a year after my best friend Laura died suddenly. I was relieved to finally know what was going on with me.

I didn’t feel like myself. I didn’t care about grades or school, and everyday was a struggle to get out of bed. Finally, there was a key to help unlock some of the answers that I was trying to find.

About two weeks after I was diagnosed, I decided to tell a girl I was close with at the time. It was after finals, and we met at a Starbucks nearby. I remember mustering up the courage to tell her this news; it was a big deal.

After I told her, she looked at me with her big brown eyes and said, “Emily, are you depressed because you don’t have a boyfriend? Because if so, that’s no reason to be upset.”

I looked at her slack-jawed. This friend was smart; I thought she would know what caused depression. “No, Jenny, that’s not the reason,” I said, and I went into the same spiel my psychiatrist gave me when I was diagnosed.

My former friend continued to insist my lack of a love life was causing my depression.

After that experience, I was very hesitant to talk about anything having to do with my mental state. I told a handful of other people, who responded better than my former friend.

Still, I felt weird — it seemed like everyone around me was happy and perfect, while I was the one weirdo taking medications to make sure I stay sane. I really kept everything to myself while in high school.

As soon as I came to OWU, everything changed. I felt more open talking about my conditions. At this point, I decided to completely be myself — and besides, my parents said I’m not the only one.

So I started talking. I don’t introduce myself like this: “Hi, my name is Emily Feldmesser and I suffer from severe depression and anxiety!”  But I talk about it with people whom I feel close to, people whom I feel as though would appreciate knowing that other facet of myself.

Throughout my time at OWU, I’ve met people who have gone through similar things as I have, and some who have gone through worse. When I do decide to open up and talk about Laura or my depression, I know the people I talk to appreciate me opening up. Because it’s a damn hard thing to do.

This winter has worsened my depression, my mom can attest to that looking at our phone bill. But I know I’m not the only one dealing with these issues on campus, which does comfort me. One thing I can say for sure is that I’m ready for spring.

While reading about the tragic death of Denison senior David Hallman, I found another troubling story on The Denisonian’s website.

A news story and letter to the editor posted last week describe how a three-page letter, filled with racially charged remarks against President Obama, was shoved under the door of Denison’s Black Student Union last December.

The remarks described the Affordable Care Act, a signature law of the president’s administration, as “the noose that hangs America,” made repeated references to President Obama as “boy,” an epithet with strong racial implications for the African-American community, and said that all Muslims are terrorists.

Reading this was especially troubling for me, both as an officer in Sisters United, an umbrella organization of the Student Union on Black Awareness, OWU’s equivalent group, and as someone who only a few weeks before the incident had been at Denison, working with students from there and around the area on how to challenge racism on college campuses.

Given our club’s focus on challenging racism and sexism, I am especially sickened by the letter’s use of rape language, which I will not repeat here.

This incident, much like the incidents of racist violence and vandalism at Oberlin last spring, are yet another wake-up call that racism still thrives in the United States, even at liberal arts colleges like our own.

Overlooking it or thinking that it only happens at other campuses accomplishes nothing and only perpetuates racism — or sexism, homophobia, and countless other forms of oppression.

While this incident is frankly mind-boggling to me in its ignorance and cowardice, it’s no laughing matter.

No one knows how many African-Americans were  killed by lynching from the 1860s to the 1960s, but the Tuskegee Institute estimates it was around 3,500.

Most lynchings, which peaked in the late 1800s, were a community affair — mobs of white men would kidnap the victim, followed by a large crowd who watched as they were either hung on the spot or tortured first.

In one case in 1893, a former slave accused of killing a policeman’s daughter after being attacked by the policeman was tortured for almost an hour before being burned alive. A crowd of 10,000 spectators cheered as it all happened.

While some prominent cases of lynching, like this one, involved extra judicial punishment for alleged crimes, many lynchings were carried out to enforce  white supremacy in the South.

It should be pointed out that lynching as an overall American phenomenon has been used against many ethnic minorities in many parts of the United States, and against white men who were either accused of crimes in the Wild West or of helping challenge the white supremacist systems of the South.

But in the context of how this letter tried to twist the African-American experience against President Obama and his supporters, lynching was chiefly a means of maintaining Jim Crow laws and disenfranchisement of African-Americans, in subversion of the post-Civil War amendments aimed at protecting the rights of freed slaves.

Even into the civil rights era, murder and terrorism was used by the Ku Klux Klan, their allies in the police and other white supremacists to try to maintain Jim Crow; guns replaced rope but many killers were never caught.

Last week, I penned a graphic on some of the many heroes and martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement; here are some of the fates of those who challenged racism and paid the ultimate price.

While the images of police brutality and Klan beatings are common images of the movement, the fates of these brave men and women have largely been forgotten.

Herbert Lee, who worked to help African-Americans reclaim their voting rights, was killed by a state legislator in Liberty, Miss. The legislator was never charged.

William Moore, a white man who went on a solo march challenging segregation, never finished it. He was shot and killed in Alabama on April 23, 1963.

Two months later Medgar Evers, state director for the NAACP in Mississippi, was assassinated.

Dozens of other activists,  black and white, and many uninvolved black men, women and children were killed by bullets, beatings or bombs in the violence of the 1960s.

To combine this imagery  of nooses and racist murder with the nation’s first African-American president is indeed “troublesome,” as Lester Harris, president of the Denison Black Student Union’s Freshman Foundation, said in an interview with The Denisonian.

“I was extremely uncomfortable with what I was reading,” Harris said in the interview; he was one of the first to see the full letter after it was found.

Denison’s Campus Security worked with an outside company to determine the level of threat the letters posed; they were deemed a low-level threat.

Director Garrett Moore said in an interview with The Denisonian that the letters weren’t threatening, but “insensitive” and contained “a lot of political ramblings.”

He said they believe the letter may have been written by a member of the Granville community rather than a Denison student, as they refer to old songs and radio statements by Glenn Beck.

The full content of the letter has not been released at the Black  Student Union’s wishes, but the group provided information in its letter to the editor and interviews with The Denisonian.

Black Student Union members started a committee to address the incident, and hope to hold larger discussion with the campus community about issues of racism and everyday microaggressions.

As a Sisters United officer, I hope to use this unfortunate event to hold similar discussions here, and show our solidarity.

By Spenser Hickey
Managing Editor

Sometimes you’re not the best person for the job; sometimes the job isn’t the best fit for you, either.

Both these things played a role in the joint decision made by our advisers, Ellin and myself — that it is in the best interests of The Transcript and both of us if Ellin and I trade positions on the editorial staff.

It is a change I welcome, as the current definitions of each role suit our skill sets much better, and will provide an opportunity to formally define each role for the next generations of editors to come.

As Managing Editor, I’ll be able to work to my strong suit, leading a team to write long-form articles like my Tent City and hate speech reports from the past two semesters.

These reports, combined with the work of students in Advanced Reporting and New Media courses, will provide The Transcript with much-needed investigative and multimedia content, in addition to our weekly news coverage.

This change will benefit both of us, as we work to our strengths, and make The Transcript a greater news source.

 

By Ellin Youse
Editor-in-Chief

This semester began as a whirlwind for the Transcript staff, with news of the flooding in Elliott Hall, and while we worked hard to cover the story and all events of the first month, we hit a roadblock in staffing.

The strengths of the two highest-ranking editors, my good friend Spenser Hickey and myself, were not being utilized.

I was acting as the paper’s managing editor and Spenser was acting as editor-in-chief. Although Spenser was doing a great job, he wasn’t able to do what he loved — writing long-form, investigative stories.

Being editor-in-chief is a tough job, almost like running a business. He was trying to do both — run the day-to-day business of the paper and write, taking on way too much. I was left picking up the pieces slipping through the cracks, and there were a lot of them.

Our solution became to switch places. As managing editor, Spenser will be able to help oversee the day-to-day of the paper and invest a sufficient amount of time to writing in depth investigative stories and help keep the Transcript a home for hard-hitting news. I will be acting as editor-in-chief, running the ins and outs of the paper, tying up loose ends, making ethical decisions and taking on the responsibility of the paper’s mission statement. I’m honored to be trusted with such a large position, and I am lucky to have Spenser by my side to catch me if I fall.