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SARN’s helpline brings sexual assault program to campus

The Sexual Assault Response Network (SARN) of HelpLine of Delaware and Morrow Counties, Inc. is bringing a sexual assault program to Ohio Wesleyan.

The facilitator of the support group, Nora Flanagan, said her “role will be to start the meeting with an introduction to a topic regarding sexual violence, open up for discussion and then have time for sharing more personal stories if people wish.”

The group is a peer-led support group and therefore members have a majority say in how to spend the time.

“The facilitator is there to explain and keep ground rules of the support group in play and to be ready to assist if anyone is triggered or needs extra support after the group,” Flanagan said.

“This particular group is based on a four session curriculum. The topics we will talk about include what is sexual assault; setting boundaries; trust after trauma; triggers; and self-care. After the sessions participants are welcome to continue to access our services in any way that is found to be beneficial in their healing journey.”

Flanagan explained her role is also to ensure confidentiality, provide a non-threatening, supporting, open and non-judgmental conversation. She is trained in trauma informed care.

“We provide rape crisis and recovery services for all survivors of sexual assault. Sexual assault is any unwanted sexual activity you don’t agree to when you are coerced, threatened, forced, intoxicated or unable to consent in any circumstance, for any reason,” Flanagan said.

Flanagan has worked in the field for 15 years, first as a liaison to the judicial system then to volunteering at a nonprofit. She then took the position as the SARN coordinator. Flanagan works with survivors both in hospital and law enforcement settings but most often will work with survivors who reach out to the SARN hotline in a one-on-one capacity.

Senior Ali Smith said, “I think it’s great that this program is being offered at OWU. Women that have experienced sexual assault will have a safe place to discuss issues caused by the assault.”

Flanagan said “this group has been designed specifically for the 18- to 20-something-year-old female population who identify as sexual harassment, abuse or assault survivors. Registration consists of interested participants contacting us, getting more information and being signed up.”

Junior Macie Maisel said, “I don’t think we have a major problem on our campus compared to large campuses, however I think taking precautionary steps is needed so that this doesn’t become a large issue.”

The program is currently being offered and is being considered for fall 2015, spring 2016 and possibly this summer.

HelpLine’s SARN program has been a yearly participant in Take Back the Night, various campus awareness and educational groups and held a similar support group last spring.

Activity fee increase would prove student investment

It’s in our blood at Ohio Wesleyan to complain.

That’s not a criticism. Our complaints aren’t petty or vapid but substantive. They’re real responses to real problems. We don’t resent tuition increases because we’re penny-pinchers. Rather, we hate to see our friends leave because they cannot afford OWU anymore.

Sometimes our complaints lead to solutions. But other times we fall short and solutions fail to materialize.

This week, though, the Wesleyan Council on Student Affairs posed a strong solution to part of a big problem facing the university – raising the student activity fee to offset the budget shortfall low enrollment has caused.

OWU had about 100 fewer students this year. Fewer students entering the university and paying tuition means the university has less money to spend.

Some calculations tell us just how much less. Last academic year it cost $51,180 to attend OWU (tuition, average room and board and the student activity fee). Taking into account the average tuition discount of 60.9 percent, or $31,169, the average student paid $20,011.

Multiply that by 100 and you get about $2,000,000. That’s a big drop.

Administrators have to make up for it somewhere, WCSA is rightly concerned it will have detrimental effects on some of the most important services students use every day.

The student activity fee hasn’t increased since 2011, and a modest hike to help preserve such crucial services just makes sense.

WCSA would use part of the higher fee to help fund different student affairs departments. Some are vital to student health and safety, such as Counseling Services, Health Services and Public Safety. Others, such as the Community Service Learning Office and Career Services, enrich our lives as students and future citizens.

Beyond serving our own interests as students, increasing the fee shows we care about the university and the people who do important work for us. It shows we’re financially and emotionally invested in this place and want to make it the best it can be.

It’s complicated, though. Not every student can afford any more costs, and we can’t afford to lose any more of our talented peers to money.

So I think WCSA ought to make its proposal more progressive. Instead of an across-the-board increase, each student’s fee should be adjusted based on how much they and their family are expected to pay for their education, according to the Federal Application for Student Financial Aid (FAFSA).

Students who have lower expected contributions and can afford to pay more get a bigger hike, and vice versa. This would ensure students who cannot take on any more financial burdens would not have to.

Students complain because we care. We must channel that passion into solutions. WCSA has made us proud by putting forward a good solution, and we ought to help the council make that solution work.

The worst is yet to come

The other day my friends and I were trying to recall the most embarrassing concert we had ever attended. Performers such as Lil’ Kim and the Jo Bros were mentioned before it donned on us: the most embarrassing was yet to come – Drake Bell, courtesy of the Campus Programming Board’s (CPB) Bishop Bash.

This begs the question: why Drake Bell? What has Bell done besides singing the theme song for Drake and Josh and tweet about how much he hates Justin Bieber?

Seniors may vaguely recall the Hellogoodbye debacle of the spring of 2012. The event was so poorly attended the school decided to stop bringing in “big name” performers for a while; well, until now. Until Drake Bell.

When similar small schools have concerts featuring artists like Hoddie Allen, Chiddy Bang, T-Pain and Chance the Rapper, it’s pretty obvious why a Nickelodeon has-been doesn’t bring the excitement. The thing is, some of those artists and others like them are well within our price range. Obviously Delaware, Ohio, isn’t a sought after tour destination – but hey, for $20,000 one would probably be willing to make the trip.

According to The Huffington Post, in February of last year Bell filed for bankruptcy, with his debts totaling over $500,000. In 2013, Bell made only $14,099. We are paying him $20,000, which is more than his income for all of 2013. You are welcome Drake Bell.

CPB’s treasurer Paige Springhetti, a sophomore, said the remaining $30,000 in the club’s concert fund went toward the opening act – Liberty Deep Down – and production and advertising costs.

This $50,000—granted to CPB by WCSA—is coming from the $260 each student pays per year as an “activity fee.” If you do the math, each student is paying around $28 for Bishop Bash, not including the $10 one must pay for a ticket.

It will be interesting to see if attendance is high enough to make this Bishop Bash an annual event, but if 2012 is any indication, I wouldn’t say I’m optimistic.

The students who planned Bishop Bash are passionate and committed – that is obvious if you talk to any member of CPB about the event. I just wish their choice of artist was someone our campus could support without having to channel our 12-year-old selves, especially because we are the ones paying for him.

Finding a Friend

By: Campbell Scribner

I recently reread an essay by a friend of mine, a teacher and pastor, with whom I have kept in touch since college. Actually, not a teacher or a pastor: he quit both jobs a long time ago. They felt fake, he said, rote and repetitive and hollow. So he became a freelance writer.

He wrote the essay, and I first read it, in a climate of fear and uncertainty. The United States was engaged in irresponsible, possibly illegal military actions, and we had mutual friends getting involved (a little over their heads) with the peace movement. Corporate scandals led to a series of financial shocks, one of which cost my father his job. The liberal circles in which we moved were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the conditions under which their food and clothing were produced, leading to heated arguments about what counted as “organic” or “fair trade.” My friend stopped eating sugar for a while.

He touched on all this in his essay, but the real focus was the precarious fate of young people as they entered the workforce. Finding employment required shameless self-promotion, he complained, if not outright dishonesty. And for what? So that one could earn a living exploiting others and performing pointless tasks, laboring (as he so floridly put it) under a “harness of routine and obsequiousness.”

It was no wonder that so many college graduates had grown cynical, shielding themselves with irony and rolling their eyes at any sort of idealism. The world was built on lying, cheating, and shopping, all of which the rising generation cruelly mocked but engaged in anyway, because they didn’t feel like they could change anything. The most noble of them might pursue academic careers (as I later did) but they would have to subsist on debt and charity, and even then would feel guilty for enjoying a level of success denied to others who were equally qualified. There was no way out. It seemed that we were all doomed to the moral corruption of adulthood.

Despite all of its hand-wringing, however, the essay ended with a hopeful image: young men and women not yet beholden to the capitalist system, free from the chains of consumption that constrained Western society. The term “Arab Spring” did not yet exist—and my friend abhorred both religious orthodoxy and political violence—but he spoke approvingly of the fervor and faith with which young Muslims had reshaped the Arab world. A similar group of American youths, willing to sacrifice financial gain for more moral, meaningful work, might radically transform our own country, he wrote, renewing protections for women, children, workers, and the elderly while establishing a robust sense of the common good.

That message inspired me. It didn’t matter that Ralph Waldo Emerson and I were of different backgrounds, or that his essay, “Man the Reformer,” first appeared in 1841. We were wrestling with the same questions about the individual’s place in the modern world, and I considered him a friend.

I do not mention all of this so that you will go and read Emerson’s essay (though you should), but instead to offer some advice for study at OWU. One of the benefits of a liberal arts education is the ability to recognize that others have confronted the same quandaries and challenges that you do, albeit in times and places that may seem remote. Whether you pursue history, literature, or some other discipline, remember that learning is most effective when it captures the immediacy and applicability—the moral stakes—of other people’s experiences. Making that connection can lead to the best kind of companionship.

Campbell Scribner is an education professor whose teaching-related interests include the history and philosophy of education and the history of childhood.

Low enrollment numbers forcing budget cuts

Ohio Wesleyan’s budget is suffering cutbacks because enrollment is not as high as school officials want.

According to an email sent to school faculty by OWU President Rock Jones, the projected budget deficit is going to be $4.5 million for the 2015-2016 fiscal year. As a result, the university is looking for ways to save money.

Chris Wolverton, a professor in the botany department and head of the university governance council, said the council was tasked by the president to come up with ideas to save money.

“Bottom line, we’re down a lot of students, not just this year, and not just last year, but in general, the school’s enrollment is really low, and as a result, the school just isn’t making as much money,” Wolverton said.

Susan Dileno, vice president of enrollment at OWU, said the 2013 freshman class had 572 students, while the 2014 freshman class had only 484 students.

According to the email, the school administration is considering several options to save money. These ideas include “operations reductions, compensation adjustments, staff reductions and frozen vacant faculty lines.”

Wolverton explained that frozen vacant faculty lines are when a professor retires or is fired by the university; that position is called a faculty line. So keeping those lines frozen means not hiring new professors to a certain position to save money that would otherwise be spent on their salary.

“The size of the faculty is actually very difficult to change,” said Wolverton. “Right now, we have around 145 full-time faculty members.”

There are also the discretionary expenses that Wolverton said the council has considered cutting. These are the amount of basic office supplies like printer ink, staples, pens, and pencils and other similar items.

Wolverton also explained one of the main options the council is considering to save money – which he says many faculty members have been in support of – is to forego the salary raises which were planned and budgeted for the next fiscal year.

Another option being considered is increasing health care premiums.

“There are lots of different salary tiers at OWU, some people are paid on hourly wages, and some people – the administration members – make six figures,” Wolverton said. “So not everyone pays the same premiums for health care. We are considering increasing how much the higher tiers have to pay for health care.”

The council on university governance – which is made up of six faculty members – will present the administration with money-saving ideas by the end of March, and the administrators will then make a decision by May 15.

One choice. 7000 lives.

These chickens lived their entire, brief lives in this room. Photo courtesy of advocacy.britannica.com.

Nearly every American over the age of 18 is at least vaguely aware that the meat they consume doesn’t come from happy cows, pigs and chickens leading long, natural lives on a picturesque farm. However, most people try not to think about what these animals actually go through during their brief, hellish lives, and this willful ignorance needs to stop. Now.

The majority of birds and mammals that end up on platters in this country are born in factory farms. They’re called that because the animals are treated like manufactured products – mere objects with only monetary value. And the average American will eat about 7,000 of these “products” in his or her lifetime.

I’m not trying to preach. I’m not dead set on changing your mind and making you become a vegetarian or vegan. But eating animals is thrown in my face on a daily basis and I’m going to throw it right back.

The weight and size of the average hen in America over time. Photo courtesy of huffingtonpost.com.

Because nine out of ten non-marine animals killed for food in the United States are chickens, I’ll focus on them.

Factory workers sort newborn chicks by sex. Females used for meat often live for only a few months, and during that time they are pumped full of growth hormones. As a result, the hens grow so fast their legs break beneath them because they can no longer support their own weight.

But the chickens aren’t the only ones growing and aging at an unnatural rate. These growth hormones are still present in the chickens’ meat when people buy it at the grocery store, which is the main reason Americans go through puberty about a year earlier than they did a century ago.

That’s not all. The ends of the hens’ beaks are sliced off with a hot blade without the use of anesthesia because the cramped quarters the hens live in make them go insane and peck at each other violently. The hens are commonly killed for their meat at such a young age that they still make the peeping sounds commonly associated with chicks.

Hens used for eggs become prisoners in their own bodies because of genetic engineering, which causes them to produce 250 eggs each year. This is nearly triple what the average hen produced a century ago. They live their entire lives in cages, never seeing sunlight or breathing fresh air.

Because male chicks cannot lay eggs and are less valued for their meat than females, they are killed immediately. A common murder method is to dump them into a “macerator,” a grinding machine that shreds them alive. This happens to 260 million male chicks every year in America.

Of course, meat tastes good to many people, and it can be difficult to give up. Your food options become more limited. You have to deal with people asking you lots of rude, ignorant questions. For me, those questions even came from my family and best friends.

But you know what? It’s worth it. I now lead a healthier and more ethical life, will save thousands of animals in my lifetime and make a positive difference in the environment. So the next time someone asks me, “Why are you a vegetarian?” I’m not going to list the million and one reasons I make the choice every day to abstain from eating meat. I’m just going to say, “Why are you not?”

*Free t-shirt not included

Faculty discuss changes to faculty handbook

Discussion centered on problems with the budget and changes to personnel policy at the Ohio Wesleyan faculty meeting on March 23.

Provost Chuck Steinmetz expressed concerns about faculty involvement in the budget problems in light of the recent closure of Sweet Briar College in Virginia.

Sweet Briar College, a small, all-women’s liberal arts college near the Blue Ridge Mountains, announced on March 3 that it would be closing in August, citing financial problems, according to The Washington Post.

This announcement came as a shock to both OWU faculty and students.

Steinmetz does not want the same thing to happen at Ohio Wesleyan; he proposed to have a summit in May for him and the faculty to discuss strategies moving forward.

“This has been a difficult year to serve as your provost,” he said. “The faculty needs to take the time to come together as a faculty on the future of OWU.”

Sean Kay, professor of politics and government, and Dan Vogt, professor of chemistry, also brought up concerns that austerity measures the university is taking to fix the budget won’t work. Instead, they could lead to faculty and student dissatisfaction.

President Rock Jones responded by saying that he thinks “austerity does not drive prosperity,” but he still supports the budget.

Other faculty expressed concerns that the Board of Trustees are not doing their jobs and that they are taking hits themselves with no rewards in overall salary. This came after the announcement that there would be a freeze on salary and compensation pools for next year.

Chris Wolverton, professor of botany and microbiology as well as chair of the committee on university governance posed a question to the OWU faculty.

“How can we make OWU one again, instead of fiefdoms, which don’t work,” he said.

Faculty also discussed at length the proposed changes to the personnel policy in the faculty handbook.

After much discussion and many presentations by various professors, the changes were approved with a vote of 65 to 24.

WCSA backs gender-inclusive housing

Senators passed a resolution in support of gender-inclusive housing at the Wesleyan Council on Student Affairs (WCSA) full senate meeting on Monday, March 23.

The resolution was discussed by WCSA at a Feb. 9 session, but was tabled until revisions could be made.

“Today we have an opportunity to endorse it,” said junior Jerry Lherisson, president of WCSA.

In tandem with the Spectrum Resource Center, Residential Life (ResLife) drafted the proposal under consideration. If it is approved by President Rock Jones, gender-inclusive housing options would be made available to Ohio Wesleyan students as early as next semester.

In addition to logistical considerations, the proposal includes letters of support from the community, the Admissions Office and Counseling Services.

The proposal was unanimously accepted by WCSA, with the full senate voting to endorse the resolution.

Executive members of WCSA also mentioned that their cost sharing initiative, introduced at last week’s meeting, needs to undergo some changes before progress can be made. “The proposal we have is not in its best form,” said junior Emma Drongowski, vice president of WCSA. “Instead of giving money to the student affairs division, we are looking to fund certain events that are important to students.” The revised proposal will be presented to the senators on March 30.

Tim Miller explores gay identities through performance

Tim Miller is a performance artist whose work currently focuses on marriage equality and addressing the injustices facing lesbian and gay couples in America.

Miller visited Ohio Wesleyan on Thursday, March 18 and performed a lecture-rant entitled, “Sex! Body! Self!”

Miller said, “My performances over the last several years at OWU, which have explored gay identity, marriage equality and immigration rights for gay bi-national couples, were breaking new terrain. For a long time my performances would be the only internationally touring show on the subject.”

This event was made possible by a theory-to-practice grant received by senior Ryan Haddad and professor of theatre and dance Edward Khan.

“I thoroughly enjoyed the performance, particularly the last one which was about his marriage because that occurred during a week in which I was doing a workshop with him,” Haddad said. “This was right around the time that the Defense of Marriage Act was overturned so he [Miller] went right away and got married.”

Miller said, “though Ohio remains one of only 13 states without marriage equality today, after the coming supreme court decision this June, I am sure the next time I land at CMH I will be arriving to an equality state.”

Miller said his performances have been presented all over North America, Australia and Europe in such venues as Yale Repertory Theatre, the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Walker Art Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

According to his biography, “Miller has received numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1990, Miller was awarded a NEA Solo Performer Fellowship, which was overturned under political pressure from the Bush White House because of the gay themes of Miller’s work.”

Miller worked with OWU students for a week to put on an ensemble performance. This performance occurred on Saturday, March 21 in Chappelear Drama Center. Miller worked with students from the two classes, theories of performance and political/social cabaret and others.