Students Stand Up...on Twitter

So, I probably don't need to tell you about the ongoing protests by students and faculty at UVM over budget cuts for next year and the lay-offs of 109 faculty and staff. It's been really captivating to watch the situation unfold (and makes me glad that the biggest controversy at St. Mike's revolves around student government leaders treating themselves to chicken wings).

What I've been most impressed with has been how the UVM student group leading the protests, Students Stand Up, has done a great job presenting solid, well-considered ideas. Even if you disagree with their mission, you certainly can't call them a bunch of college hippie psuedo-activists protesting for the sake of it — the group has a real plan to fix the university's budgetr.

Yesterday I started following SSU's Twitter account (@studentsStandUp), which has been been providing constant updates since the rally/sit-in. It's kind of surreal knowing that there's somebody sitting in Waterman, Tweeting away from his/her phone while getting threatened with arrest for trespassing, but it's been a fascinating read.

And if I may offer a bit of advice to future sit-in participants: Next time the police begin to get involved, just have someone start a pillow fight across Burlington. That will keep them distracted.

The Continuing Saga of Asher Roth

Though Asher Roth's opening set for the St. Michael's spring concert was canceled over a week ago now, the controversy over his invitation-and-subsequent-uninvitation rages on.

First of all, the S.A programming folks announced Roth's replacement. Local hip-hop group The Aztext will be opening for Lupe Fiasco tomorrow night.

However, a sizable and vocal group of St. Michael's students won't be seeing either act, as they're planning to boycott the concert in protest of Roth's absence. One St. Michael's student, Kate Reynolds, emailed Roth to tell him that students were disappointed in his cancellation, and that it was just "a few administrators and a few 'gender studies' students" that wanted the show canceled. (Quotes around "gender studies" were hers, not mine.) An associate of Roth's posted Reynolds's letter to Asher Roth's blog, along with a video of Roth calling Reynolds. There's also a Facebook event rallying Roth's supporters.

A few of those zany feminists posted their thoughts on the blog and the Facebook event wall, and received a few "fuck you bra-burner"s in response. Classy. Unfortunately the pro-Asher people have yet to really present a convincing argument:

• The views of a small group are ruining it for the majority. If the civil rights struggle (or even the more recent gay marriage debates around the country) have taught us anything, it's the majority cannot be allowed to decide the rights of the minority. When a group of students at SMC feels uncomfortable, offended, and hurt, it's pathetic to expect their concerns to be ignored so that everyone else can get their party on as usual. Besides, it's not just "gender studies" students, or the Center for Women and Gender that were upset. Hell, I'm a straight male journalism major and I was opposed to Roth's concert from the start. Pretending that six people conspired to ruin the fun for the other 1,994 students here is absurd and grossly inaccurate.
  
  
• Roth is just depicting college life as it is. Too bad not all of us can afford (or want) to treat college like it's a teen movie. And yes, girls get objectified at college parties — why is that okay to glorify? Just because that's what happens? It might be too close to reality but that doesn't make it alright. Unfortunately, too many people enjoy the college culture of female objectification to think about changing it.

• Roth has songs with positive messages, too. Uh, that's great, but having a positive song and having a song called "Rub On Your Titties" do not cancel each other out. Not how it works.

• Roth is the victim of censorship. I don't think anyone is denying his constitutional right to say what he does. But Roth does not have the constitutional right to get paid by our tuition money to play a concert at our school. Canceling his concert is not censorship, it's deciding who you want performing for (and representing) your campus.
  
  
• If you don't like Asher Roth, you just shouldn't go to the show. I haven't liked the last two spring concert acts, so I didn't go. This is beyond a sense of dislike. St. Michael's is like home to me and everyone else here, and any performance on-campus means someone is coming into our home. Plus, it sends a message about the school to the greater community — and I'm not okay with Burlington associating me with the college that wants Asher Roth. Maybe that doesn't matter to the people whose social life doesn't extend beyond the 300s townhouses, though.
  
  
• Everyone in hip-hop talks about stuff like this. Yes, so Wyclef Jean, who came to SMC last year, also has questionable lyrics. That doesn't set a precedent. I'm glad our campus has become more conscious in the past year. So you hear songs with similar content on the radio — they shouldn't come to our campus, either.

I don't understand how so many people now think next year's spring concert will now be Raffi, Celine Dion, or the Jonas Brothers, as if there's nothing in between these acts and Asher Roth. UVM's Springfest is headlined by Ratatat — apparently a good choice, since the show is already sold out. St. Anselm booked Third Eye Blind for their spring concert this year. Just a few years ago, St. Mike's had The Roots — a hip-hop group with socially aware lyrics. All of these acts would make for a successful spring concert, likely without sparking controversy and hurting feelings. (They're also all way more artistically relevant, but that's a different argument entirely.)

So, Asher Roth fans, stop blaming hippies, feminists, or evil administrators for ruining your Friday night. Grow up.

For those who aren't boycotting the show, it's Friday night at the Ross Sports Center at St. Mike's.  Doors open at 7:00, show starts at 8:00, and tickets are $20 for SMC students and $30 for everyone else.

Happy Record Store Day!

This Saturday, April 18, marks the second annual celebration of Record Store Day, in which the culture of independent record stores is celebrated worldwide. Indie stores all over are celebrating with free giveaways, in-store performances, and tons of Record Store Day exclusives. During last year's Record Store Day celebration, Burlington's beloved Pure Pop Records even threw in a huge used vinyl sale, with so much selection the store's floor was nearly covered in boxes of records.

Check out the list of Record Store Day exclusive releases here. I'm looking most forward to the Wilco live DVD, the My Morning Jacket live album, and the 7" of two brand new Modest Mouse songs. But I hope and expect to discover more surprises on Saturday. So stop by Pure Pop on Saturday and support indie music stores--because without them, we'd have to rely on Best Buy and iTunes, and that's a scary thought.

Asher Roth Dropped

St. Michael's students who love college, drinking, women, and college again (in that order) are waking up disappointed this morning. Asher Roth, the "I Love College" singer who was announced a few weeks back as the opener for Lupe Fiasco at the SMC Spring Concert April 17, has been dropped from the bill due to outcry from students, faculty and staff.

A campus-wide email from the Student Association Secretaries of Programming last night said that Roth was being canceled because his images and messages are "obviously inconsistent with our institutional mission," which I think is code for "People are understandably pissed."

My feelings on the matter are known, and yes, I'm very pleased with this decision. I sincerely believe that a college is represented by who it brings in for concerts, and being represented by a disposable act who so obviously panders to the lowest common denominator wasn't very comforting. Oh, and the blatant misogyny in his video and his songs like "Rub On Your Titties" (charming, isn't he) was pretty awful, too. Having that on my campus would have been far from my proudest moment at this school.

So while I'm still concerned that no one on the S.A. Programming Committee saw anything wrong with Roth's music and videos when they were considering him initially, I'm glad they were willing to listen to the campus community who didn't want to be represented by sophomoric, sexist nonsense.

Thanks to the St. Michael's Center for Women and Gender, and everyone else who let their feelings on Roth be known — and thanks to the S.A. for making the right decision in the end.

Of Onions and Rock Bands

Enough about student government/media drama for a while. Let's discuss more important things: the arts. Today's a big day for arts of the written, visual, and musical kinds at St. Mike's.

Today is the release date for the 2009 edition of St. Michael's annual literary arts journal, the Onion River Review.  The Review contains poetry, prose, paintings, drawings, and photography, and competition is tough every year to get in. I'm impressed every year at how professional and well-curated it is (and I'm not just saying that because I finally got a photograph accepted this year). There's a release party tonight at 6:00 in the Hoehl Welcome Center, but if you can't make it, you can grab a (free!) copy of the Onion River Review at locations around the area, including Crow Bookstore and Muddy Waters in Burlington and the Green Closet in Winooski.

Later tonight, Higher Ground hosts three St. Michael's bands, all graduates of our campus's Saturday night Turtle Underground concert/open mic series. The headliner is Cadrin, a four piece rock band. The band's titular singer-songwriter, Tom Cadrin, received a lovely review in Seven Days late last year with his previous album, and his music is even more well-rounded with a full band. Cadrin's music is blends emotive, singer-songwriter rock music with prog/math-rock influences like odd time signatures and all kinds of unusual structures. The band's got some chops. It's like pop-rock for music majors.

Opening the show are Fink, a jammy rock band that reminds me of Dispatch or O.A.R. plus jazz, and Free Louis, a scarily-tight bunch that will bring the heady instrumental jams. Show starts at 8:00 and tickets are $10.

Do You Know Where Your Campus Newspaper Is?

So I was walking through the Alliot Student Center on Friday morning when I noticed something awry in the west doorway to the building. This area is where most free publications are dropped off — Seven Days, a variety of free magazines, and the bulk of the copies of The Defender. Well, this past Friday, I noticed that all the copies of The Defender were gone. There were four stacks in that very spot the day before.

I knew people had taken a heightened interest in campus media this week, but that seemed a bit excessive. It was difficult not to wonder if the disapperance was related to the unflattering stories about the S.A. E-board published in The Defender and The Echo earlier that week. But then again, the story about the E-board's food purchases broke too late to be published in print. The top story in the paper was the (relatively less ugly) story about a potentially invalid S.A. amendment vote. (There was a lovely picture of a St. Michael's student working with Dominican children on a service trip there too, but no one ever gets worked up about those stories...)

Of course, Friday was the beginning of Family Weekend and the next day was an Accepted Students Day, so a lot of people had an interest in making the campus look as harmonious as possible for this past weekend.

I let The Defender advisers and executive editor know about the disapperence, and in turn the St. Michael's Office of Public Safety and Security got on the case. They recovered the missing bundles of papers later Friday afternoon and returned them to their usual Alliot place. The Free Press picked up the story and published a short story about the situation on Saturday.

The perpetrator has not been publicly identified, though. Was it an S.A. associate angry about the recent negative press? Was it a member of college administration who didn't want parents or prospective students to see any negative news stories? Was it a janitor on their first day of work who didn't know that was the preferred spot for newspapers? Was a party-happy student looking to build a bonfire later that night? We'll never know...

Recently, 3,000 issues of Catholic University's student newspaper were trashed around campus, apparently in protest of the paper's discussion of gay rights. The Student Press Law Center has an alarmingly long list of similar cases around the country. If wannabe censors are motivated to silence a story, it seems that trashing papers only attract more press and attention.

As for the St. Michael's incident...well, I hope future bonfire-starters will consider using wood instead.

St. Michael's Student Gov't Shenanigans UPDATE

Bad day to be a member of the St. Michael's Student Association E-board yesterday. The Defender/Echo published a pair of stories that did not reflect so well on the S.A. E-board: one on how a recent vote on a constitutional amendment proved controversial and may be void, and another revealing that the S.A. President and Finance Secretary have spent student money on personal food purchases.

Transparency has been raised as an issue this semester, largely due to the efforts of S.A. senator Josh Hoxie, the senator who got access to the E-board's budget and exposed the wings/pizza story. The biggest issue has been the fact that an up-do-date copy of the S.A. constitution is impossible to find — hard copies are tough to come by, and only an outdated version exists on the S.A. Web site.

Similarly, the contents of the E-board's budget have been a mystery until now. Student clubs, funded by the student activities fee that's overseen by the S.A., have the S.A. keeping tabs on their budget all year, and the finance secretary has to sign off on all purchases. Thus it's been something of a double standard that the S.A. E-board has had the ability to spend their money in secret, without oversight. Kudos to Hoxie, the other S.A. members who've been pushing for transparency, and the reporters who followed the story.

Last night there was an open forum for the candidates for Student Association positions for next year. About 150 students showed up, and many posed pointed questions to the candidates about budget and procedural transparency, as well as issues of sustainability and social justice. For example, the (unopposed) Class of 2010 VP candidate was asked, after he made a speech detailing all the sweet senior socials we'll have, if he had any plans for the class to make a wider impact in the community instead of just social events. Zing. Perhaps the Barack Obama era really has inspired a new level of political involvement by our generation, even at the college election level.

(Full disclosure note: I work on the staff of The Defender/Echo. I'm the editor of The Naked Opinion though, so I wasn't privy to the details of this story until I was putting it on the Web site just before publishing. I've got my own bone to pick with the school regarding the selection of Asher Roth as our spring concert opening act, which I discussed here, but that's a story for another time...)

UPDATE: As expected, the plot thickens. S.A. president Steve O'Neil, and finance secretary Jon Kaptcianos sent a campus-wide email today, rebutting the claims made against them. They say that the nearly $2,000 was spent on buying E-board members meals in the campus dining hall, so that they could "increase the visibility" of the E-board after their meal plan of 40 meals ran out. $900 was spent on food for finals-week study spaces.

They do admit to some personal meals taken, though. $70 was spent on Wings over Burlington after an S.A. meeting one unspecified night (no doubt that anyone who's ever been to one of those dreary borefests wishes they could have wings on someone else's tab as a reward for sitting through it). About $70 more was spent on pizza for three E-board members on the day in which they were having budget meetings with clubs. Makes sense that they would want some sustenance for dealing with budgets for an entire day — but clubs have been forbidden from using their funds to buy food this entire year, unless the food was for an event open to the entire campus. In this sense, there's clearly a double standard.

Most interesting is that the email claims that the invoices for all of these purchases "are available to anyone who would like to see them." Based on discussions that occurred in public at the candidates' open forum last night, amongst other evidence, this is not the case. I vividly remember last night that a Class of 2011 presidential candidate said he attempted to get access to the budget "several" times and was never successful. Additionally, the article on the food-spending controversy says, "Defender and Echo editors have made numerous requests to review S.A. club expense reports, as provided for in the S.A Constitution. Each request has been denied."

Maybe those invoices are available to everyone NOW, but this transparency has not been available until this controversy blew up.

Congolese Playwright to Speak at Champlain College

Continuing our jump into theater, Champlain College's first City of Refuge Visiting Writer and internationally acclaimed writer and intellectual, Pierre Mujomba, will be at the Alumni Auditorium to speak of his life on April 7th. Mujomba's speech, "A Writer in Exile: Reflections on Censorship and Freedom," draws from his views on censorship, and the hardships he had with artistry and expression as a playwright in The Democratic Republic of Congo.

Mujomba, who formerly worked as an African linguistics consultant at MIT, Boston University, and Brown's African Studies Department, fled the Congo in 2003 after the publication of his best-known play, The Lost Envelope. He has been awarded the Roger H. Perry endowed chair, and has spent much of his time at Champlain lecturing to classes and writing plays. Mujomba has a fascinating story, and is certainly worth seeing.

The event is free and open to the public. Doors open at 6pm.

Champlain Theater at The Flynn

Champlain College playwright and director of Champlain Theater, Joanne Farrell, will be showcasing the College's acting chops with a presentation of "The Beauty Queen of Leanne" this week at the Flynn. The Irish drama, written by Martin McDonagh, takes a hard look at mental illness, loneliness, and betrayal. Knowing Joanne Farrell, I'm sure this work will be done justice.

Performances are April 1st-4th and April 9th-11th and all start at 8pm.

Tickets are $20 and can be purchased at the Flynn website.