For months now, I’ve been dreading the coming of September, as I do every year. This year — an anniversary year — I knew would be much worse for me. I was newly one-year-old on Sept. 11, 2001. I don’t remember it. I don’t know where I was. I will never be psychologically affected by watching the towers fall on live TV (or even in-person) as many others have been. I don’t want to take anything away from them or their experiences. 9/11 uniquely affected Black and brown people, an often overlooked fact in our “never forget” and “national unity” rhetoric. 

It’s clear that 9/11 was one of our country’s greatest national tragedies. But we are rarely allowed to discuss its less immediately visible consequences. Perhaps some are afraid of offending others or disrespecting the victims or their families. Let me be clear: Those people who lost loved ones on 9/11 deserve their day to grieve in peace. But if you’re someone who is getting sucked into the national unity narrative once again, I challenge you to interrogate the nuances of that narrative and its roots. 

I genuinely want to know why the lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 20 years since 9/11 are simply news noise to us. Are we okay with violence when it’s “them” and not “us”? I want to know why we still use the word “terrorist” primarily for perpetrators of violence who proclaim themselves to be Muslim. I want to know why people in this country and around the world still fail to connect the dots of the rise in hate crimes against Muslim communities since Sept. 11, 2001. I want to know why my Arabic textbook is calibrated to teach me intelligence phrases like “United Nations” and “army officer” before we even learn colors. And I want to know why when I went to a language coordinator with this concern, she said to me: “Who knows, maybe those phrases will be more useful to you.” 

9/11 is a day of profound grief for us, too. Who is “us”? Muslims, Arabs, Sikhs, South Asian people or any Black or brown person who was in the wrong place in the wrong outfit in the wrong lighting at the wrong time. Many marginalized groups became an amalgamated target for hate in the wake of 9/11 — but the American mainstream has largely ignored this reality to accommodate a more hopeful post-9/11 national narrative. 9/11 is a day of intense emotion and sadness for all of us. But we — people of color — do not feel welcome to talk about the layers of our sadness nor the reasons for our anger. 

I’m not allowed to say that just hearing the words “terrorist attack” gives me a knot in my stomach, not just because it’s a sickening thing to hear in general, but also because whenever it happens, I have to pray that the perpetrator wasn’t an “Islamic” organization. Because when that inevitably happens, people twice my age expect me to explain the attack to them. It’s strange to me that people still don’t understand the inherent racism of asking me, an American-born Egyptian, about it. What more about terrorism am I expected to know than them? Sometimes, it just feels like they want me to rationalize and explain the terrorists’ logic for them. That’s not something I’m willing to do.

It’s been frustrating to grow up in the post-9/11 era. Despite having no recollection of the events, I am nevertheless subject to their consequences. A number of strange and upsetting things happened when I was a little kid and I didn’t know why. That was just the world we lived in, I guessed. I was fortunate enough not to have been personally attacked with violence, but the damage manifested in other ways. Growing up as an Arab-American, the first time I heard about the Arab world, aside from news about my relatives, was when my father showed me the newspaper’s recent accounts of the Iraq War. 

I grew up watching a lot of movies and TV. That type of media has made me into who I am. It is what I love. But I never saw an Arab character on TV. I only saw Arab characters in film roles as terrorists. And that made me ashamed to be an Arab because it told me that the only way the people I loved — my family and my relatives — would be seen by the artform I held so dearly was as that awful, awful thing. We couldn’t be inventors, intellectuals, innovators or upstanding citizens of any kind.

So, 20 years after our heartbreaking national tragedy, and 21 years into my life, I’ve started trying to process all of that. It hasn’t been easy. Especially not when your high school choir director announces to a room of 60 students that 9/11 “brought our country together” and you don’t have the strength, the nerve or the comprehension to tell him you have no idea what he’s talking about. Especially not when Paul Krugman tweets that there was no significant rise in hate crimes against Muslims after 9/11. Especially not when a language coordinator  tells you that she thinks Arabic is primarily useful to communicate with intelligence officials, not to learn in its own right.

I don’t want it to seem like I don’t think people should be posting “never forget.” Of course they should. Especially the people who lived through it, who will never be able to forget. Everyone has a right to grieve — for their own specific reasons, and in their own specific way. For all Americans, 9/11 was an unspeakable tragedy that shook this country to its core. But many non-white people also have to carry the burden of its racist aftermath. The current 9/11 narrative must not obscure that fact — that’s all I’m asking for.

In addition to worrying about his senior seminars and thesis, Leonardo Moraveg ’22 faced an additional stressor at the start of this year — mealtimes. Moraveg, who spoke with The Herald Sept. 14, deliberately pushed his meals hours later than normal to avoid what he called the “record-breaking lines” of the dining halls. 

Moraveg is just one of many students whose mealtimes have been affected by the extended wait times at the dining halls. Since University dining halls originally opened for in-person dining at the start of the fall semester, before the University’s recent transition to takeout meals in response to rising COVID-19 case numbers on campus, students experienced overcrowding, prolonged wait times and dissatisfaction with meal options. 

“You have to sacrifice not getting food because of classes,” said Fadilatou Toure ’25, as she stood in a Sharpe Refectory line extending all the way up to Wayland Arch. She said she enjoyed sitting with her friends and being in a social environment, but sometimes finds herself standing in queues without knowing what food options await at their end because of the long lines. 

The issue is temporary, according to Director of Dining Services George Barboza. 

Rita Slaoui ’23.5 stood in a 35-minute line to get a poke bowl from Andrews Commons, all the while lamentingBrown’s two-year meal plan mandate that gave her no option but to purchase a meal plan. 

Jessie Curran, director of wellness and nutrition, wrote in an email to The Herald that the two-year meal plan requirement “is in place to ensure the University is addressing concerns of food insecurity among students. That concern has not gone away during the pandemic.” 

But Slaoui expressed frustration with the lack of food options at dining halls. “It’s definitely better than last year. But compared to pre-pandemic, it has gotten so much worse,” she said. 

“Brown Dining continually introduces new recipes and food items in our planning process,” Curan wrote. “Specifically, menu items are rotated in cycles for variety.” 

The fact that the Blue Room does not accept meal credits or flex points anymore further limits Slaoui’soptions. Last Monday, Slaoui’s roommates went to the Ratty, Andrews and the Ivy Room for dinner, but, due to the long wait times, eventually decided to buy pizza from Thayer — “which again is ridiculous when you pay so much for a meal plan that you’re forced to be on,” Slaoui said.

Moraveg pointed out that the long lines are a recurring problem. 

“You truly know that it’s a systemic issue when the problem is seen across the entire board,” he said.

Longer lines during peak hours (11:45 am to 1:00 pm and 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm) are common during the first few weeks of the semester because students are still solidifying their schedules, Curran wrote, suggesting that students visit the dining halls during non-peak hours to encounter fewer lines. 

 “Dining Services continues to evaluate operations and introduce concepts that improve the student experience,” wrote Curran. One of the solutions that Brown provided is the “Meals in a Minute” program that allows students to order a meal online for quicker pick-up. But this program applies only during lunch hours. 

Despite these issues, Moraveg has chosen to stay on meal plan because, “for a student like me who has a heavy schedule and is always on the go, it’s better to be on meal plan.”

He added that the cost of his meal plan has increased by more than $300 from his first year. “They’re continuously increasing the price of the meal plans without increasing the quality of the service. For a student on financial aid, or even for regular students who aren’t on financial aid, if there is an increase in price then at least keep the service at the same level. But if the service is decreasing, then what am I paying for?”

In response, Curran wrote, “Brown Dining uses only the highest quality ingredients in our operations” and partners with local farmers and producers. “Our recipes are prepared from scratch and menus are written considering seasonality and availability of regional ingredients.” 

“I think the reason why there isn’t a big outrage about this is because people who have to be on meal plan are mostly (first-years)and sophomores. … They don’t really have a reference point,” Slaoui said. “People are so happy to have opportunities to eat in person that they don’t see what’s been taken away.”

Students have taken to social media as an outlet for their frustration and have created several memes about the Ratty lines . 

“There might be some people that think students are overblowing it,” Moraveg said, “but at the point where there are clusters of people trying to exit or find a single seat or table, that’s when you know you have an issue.”

After the Supreme Court overturned the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control eviction moratorium on Aug. 26, the George Wiley Center and other organizations began planning eviction clinics to help connect at-risk tenants to Rhode Island rent relief funds and legal representatives.

Rhode Island has not enacted a moratorium to prevent the displacement of low-income residents; other states and municipalities like New York and Boston have introduced their own moratoriums after the termination of federal protection.

The moratorium provided the “important” service of preventing tenants from being moved out of their residence, according to Jennifer Wood, executive director of the Rhode Island Center for Justice. But it did not prevent judges from issuing eviction court orders that could be implemented after the closure of the moratorium—resulting in the eviction of Rhode Islanders from more than 2,000 households already, she said.

Wood added that the number of evictions could rise to somewhere between 15,000 and 100,000 in the next 18 months, due to unemployment rates and the loss of unemployment benefits.

The absence of a state moratorium occurs as COVID-19 cases — many tied to the Delta variant — rise, placing Rhode Island in the CDC’s high transmission category, Wood said. She noted that the CDC’s own research indicates that the movement and residential congregation of people due to eviction poses a danger to public health.

Camillo Viveiros, executive director of the George Wiley Center, said that “unfair evictions” are never appropriate and argued that these evictions should be avoided, especially at a time when COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are increasing.

“It’s not hyperbole to say it’s life or death,” he said, adding that leaders who don’t act to address these evictions are “responsible for the amplification” of infections.

While Viveiros said that the State’s response to eviction could appear reasonable from “a class-blind or colorblind” perspective on vaccination rates, he stressed that low-income and BIPOC communities are still “disproportionately impacted” by the pandemic.

House Speaker Joe Shekarchi defended the State’s lack of moratorium in an interview with The Herald, describing Rent Relief Rhode Island — a program that provides grants for at-risk tenants to cover rent and utilities back to April 2020 and up to two months forward — as “very robust,” with $170 million still remaining from its original federal endowment of $200 million. He added that RRRI is “a much better alternative to a moratorium, which just delays and compounds the amount (of rent) outstanding.”

“There’s no reason anybody should be evicted for non-payment of rent in Rhode Island,” he said, given the availability of grant funds through RRRI.

Despite the efforts of RRRI, Viveiros noted that barriers preventing low-income and BIPOC communities from accessing rent relief still persist. These barriers include a lack of access to computers and email, computer illiteracy and ID requirements.

To reach out to those who haven’t accessed Rent Relief RI, State Rep. Leonela Felix — in conjunction with the George Wiley Center, Rhode Island Housing and DARE — plans to create eviction clinics in each of Rhode Island’s five counties to facilitate the process of applying for rent relief, as well as to provide tenants with attorneys, if necessary. The first clinic will be held at the George Wiley Center on Sept. 30.

“The pandemic has shown us that we need to take care of our more vulnerable populations,” Felix said.

Rhode Island Legal Services plans to assist with an eviction clinic on Oct. 2, Housing Law Center Director Steve Flores said. He added that his organization has learned to address problems “in new ways” due to the “unprecedented” nature of the pandemic.

For example, RILS, in partnership with the Center for Justice, is launching a lawyer-for-the-day program this week; staff attorneys will be situated in courthouses to assist unrepresented residents who have an eviction hearing that day, Flores said. He added that the organization is assigning a staffer the responsibility of assisting clients with the rent relief application process and has increased its Housing Law Center staff.

The Center for Justice, along with RILS, has also worked to get judges to extend the timeframe for securing payment for the back rent, to prevent tenants from being evicted while their rent relief applications are pending, Wood said.

“The major challenge is that it’s not like anyone has a magic wand” to promptly mobilize the RRRI funds so tenants can immediately pay their landlords, Wood said, adding that the processing of applications requires time, approximately 30 days. While Wood said that judges have been “very responsive” to the needs of the Center’s clients, she maintained that their current approach is not a “systemic solution.” Instead, she believes eviction cases with a pending rent relief application should have their hearing delayed until the application is resolved.

Wood added that the issue of eviction is exacerbated by Rhode Island’s shortage of affordable housing, which is a pre-pandemic issue “lurking behind” the repercussions of the CDC moratorium’s lifting. In some Rhode Island municipalities, such as Little Compton and Scituate, “less than 1% of housing” is affordable.

At the close of every summer, there seems to be a frantic, retrospective search for the music that defined the season. In honor of this tradition, I’d like to take a moment to draw attention to an album that, thus far, has been subject to insufficient analysis. Solar Power is New Zealand singer-songwriter Lorde’s third studio album — and her most understated yet. In a departure from her previous albums Pure Heroine and Melodrama, which tremble from the emotional power of their raw piano and vocal work, Solar Power is a sun-soaked and self-reflective journey. Lorde is so dreamlike here, in fact, that the psychedelic tone of the songs very nearly obscures the bitterness of their lyrics. In the first track, titled “The Path,” Lorde sings:

Now, if you’re looking for a savior

Well that’s not me

And if you need someone to take your pain for you?

Well that’s not me

It’s sung very gently, but the message couldn’t be any more clear: It’s a plea for boundaries. Lorde is asking for a greater degree of separation between herself and her audience’s expectations — something that’s near unattainable for a woman in the performance industry. 

Lorde wasn’t the only female artist dropping new music this summer, nor the only one using that music to send messages about her relationship with the public. In July, Lizzo released her single “Rumors” featuring Cardi B. The song, brassy and full of good-humored wit, is ridiculously catchy. However, just like in “The Path,” there’s a bite to its clever lyricism. Lizzo has spoken repeatedly about her experiences with sexism, racism and fatphobia over social media, and the song incorporates her frustration into the melody: They say I should watch the shit I post, oh goddamn / They say I’m turning big girls into hoes, oh goddamn. The “they” she refers to repeatedly throughout the track morphs from one nebulous entity to another. “They” refers to not just the bureaucratic forces of industry and the online haters, but also the larger and less defined sense Lizzo has of being perceived by all of her listeners. Without ever using the term, she’s referring to the parasocial relationships that have defined her career.

A parasocial interaction is defined as a “psychological relationship experienced by members of an audience in their mediated encounters with certain performers in the mass media.” This relationship between consumer and creator is characterized by its one-sidedness: an imagined sense of closeness that we, as an audience, have with celebrities who have never and will never know us. 

What is becoming increasingly clear, in the music industry in particular, is that parasocialism is a woman’s game. Try to think of the defining fan bases of the American music scene over the past 20 years. Beyoncé’s Beyhive, Nicki Minaj’s Barbz, Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters, Ariana Grande’s Arianators and Taylor Swift’s Swifties all come to mind — all are dedicated to female artists. These fandoms are among the most organized, intense and cohesive in the industry. It’s that cohesion that gives them notoriety as well as power. In exchange for their Spotify streams, ticket purchases and unyielding devotion, fans ask for not only content but also the entirety of their idols’ selves. Parasocial relationships are fascinating because they seem, on the surface, to be mutually beneficial; they disguise their deep imbalances as something intimate. Questions of privacy, amenability and commodification — the dynamics that define an artist’s performative experience — have profound parallels to the similarly performative dynamics that everyday women live out in their social and professional lives. 

This idea that women be appealing, malleable and constantly available is applied literally when the woman in question is a global superstar — and often with devastating consequences (think of female celebrities from the 2000s, such as Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan). However, in the past decade, the existence of social media has heightened both the visibility of artists and the false sense of intimacy perceived by their listeners. And with this shift, feelings of entitlement to these women are growing, born from devotion to beloved stars. For instance, Lizzo’s body has been co-opted as an object of both adoration and vitriol to the point where she cannot post a TikTok of her daily routine without feeding into one narrative or another. 

That’s not to say that fans don’t have expectations of male artists as well. But these expectations are typically limited to the more overtly professional aspects of their careers. For instance, there were complaints over Kanye West’s delay in releasing his album “Donda” — but not over his smoothie cleanse or whether he has contributed sufficiently to climate activism. “Artists” are allowed their eccentricities, solitude and degrees of separation from their fans while “performers” are not. And when the time comes to make a distinction between the two, we still subconsciously expect women to perform for us. 

Lizzo and Lorde’s new releases are notable because they don’t just suffer under the weight of these pre-written stories, they give them a name, even if parenthetically and with the good cheer of any hit single. But just that act of acknowledgement calls forward a complicated legacy: one of commodification and expectations of women as subjects for projection. These are issues that have been dissected for decades by feminist thinkers from Butler to Beauvoir, but now they’ve permeated one place we can’t ignore: the Billboard Top 100. Rather than capturing the perfect beats for a rooftop party or a beach trip, this summer’s most impactful music instead provided us with an opportunity to reflect on what it means to love and engage with the women behind the play button. 

Alissa Simon ’25 can be reached at alissa_simon@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.

When John Tomasi, professor of natural theology and political science and founder of Brown’s Political Theory Project, first visited the University where his now-wife was getting her master’s degree in fall 1989, he was struck by the pockets of students sprawled on the campus’s greens. 

“There were Brown students sitting around on the green working and also talking with each other and calling to each other, and there was something about it that was so lovely,” he said. “They were obviously intelligent people, but there was a community I felt at the time that just enchanted me.”

Years later, when Tomasi left a position at Stanford University to join Brown’s faculty, his students on the West Coast warned him about the kind of reception he might receive in Rhode Island. “One student told me, ‘They’re going to eat you for lunch at Brown,’” Tomasi said.

Another of his Stanford students, Rachel Maddow, who went on to a career as an MSNBC host, gave Tomasi an eccentric-looking hat and a pack of cigarettes as going-away presents, props to help him fit in at his new gig on College Hill.

But over his 27 years at the University, Tomasi said he has felt welcomed and valued by the Brown community, from which he will be departing come January to enter a new role as the president of a nonpartisan collaborative called Heterodox Academy.

According to the group’s mission statement, the academy was founded in 2015 to “improve the quality of research and education in universities by increasing open inquiry, viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement.” Its founder Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist known for his outspokenness, described in his 2018 book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” about the failings of modern college campuses. 

Tomasi is giving up his tenured position at Brown to serve as the HxA’s inaugural president, a role that he sees as an opportunity to move a voice that he expresses at Brown onto a larger stage.

“What HxA is really about is this positive mission of not fighting against bad things but rather trying to build good things and trying to support the best aspects of the American educational system,” Tomasi said. “We do that by encouraging critical reasoning, viewpoint diversity and what I think of as something like free curiosity. HxA stands up for those kinds of values and encourages people to look for barriers that are preventing curiosity, that are preventing the free expression of our intellect, that are preventing the free exploration of ideas.”

Tomasi “is a highly respected academic with a passion for academic discourse. He has demonstrated sustained commitment to the values of HxA, and he possesses a track record of successfully envisioning and promoting those values in the university setting,” Jeffrey Flier, chair of the search committee and HxA board member, said in the press release announcing Tomasi’s appointment. “John is the right person, at the right time, for HxA and for higher education.”

In his 27 years at Brown, Tomasi has taught courses in both the political science and philosophy departments, in addition to his work for the Political Theory Project, which seeks “to investigate the ideas and institutions that make societies free, prosperous and fair.”

“John has contributed a lot to Brown over many years, and I wish him well in his new role,” wrote President Christina Paxson P’19 in an email to The Herald about Tomasi’s departure. 

Since arriving at the University in 1994, Tomasi has established himself as a proponent of free speech on college campuses. A political philosopher, Tomasi has authored books on topics such as “Free Market Fairness” and has conducted extensive public policy work in Chile. He and co-author Matt Zwolinski are working on a forthcoming volume on a social justice-minded model of libertarianism.

At the University, Tomasi’s classes are spaces for student-centered discussions on provocative themes. He has led the seminars POLS 0920A: “Bleeding Heart Libertarianism” and POLS 1150: “Prosperity: the Ethics and Economics of Wealth Creation.” He is currently teaching his last Brown course entitled POLS 1825Z: “The University,” in which he encourages students to grapple with the concepts and themes that he hopes to work on in his new position at HxA, he explained. 

Tomasi founded the PTP, an interdisciplinary collective on campus, in 2003 as the outgrowth of a Group Independent Study Project of two politically heterodox students eager for more opportunities to have their own viewpoints challenged. 

One of these students, Democratic Iowa State Auditor Rob Sand ’05, who met Tomasi in a first-year seminar, sought out a fellow student writer of a controversial conservative column to be his partner for the GISP. “I just thought I came (to Brown) to get an education and that involves me encountering a lot of different ideas, so I can learn what I think about them and learn their ins and outs, and I didn’t feel like that was happening very well,” he said.

Sand was inspired to engage with an ideologically different peer after he heard University President Ruth Simmons speak at his convocation in her first year as president. Sand recounted Simmons saying, “‘If you’re here to be comfortable, there’s the gates’ — meaning we should be willing to examine everything we talk about and everything we say we believe to really have an opportunity to discuss whether or not we believe it’s true or whether or not we might find something out there that has more truth to it,” he said.

Emily Skarbek, an associate research professor at the PTP, said that the research collective brings together faculty and postdoctoral fellows to collaborate on and lead cross-disciplinary initiatives to promote viewpoint diversity and elevate ideological inquiry on campus. 

“John has been so formative in terms of the type of programming that we’ve done here at the Political Theory Project,” Skarbek said. “For so long before I joined and before others in the building were here, John was kind of doing a lot of this on his own.”

Skarbek explained that the PTP is responsible for hosting the University’s Philosophy, Politics & Economics student society and large-scale lecture series, like the Janus Forum Lecture Series. 

“The idea (of the Janus Lectures) is to bring in scholars from different perspectives on a particular issue to engage with one another and also to engage with students on different topics,” Skarbek said.

The Janus Lectures have been the site of some controversy in years past, including in 2014 when scholars Jessica Valenti and Wendy McElroy were brought onto campus to debate the topic of the existence of a rape culture on college campuses, The Herald previously reported. 

“There’s a line to be drawn between open thought and open discussion, and intentionally attempting to upset or trigger people,” Sand said. “Different people are going to draw that line in different places. I think we have to be mindful of that at the same time that we do the work of trying to promote open discussion of ideas.”

The PTP itself has faced backlash in the past for its decision to accept funding from billionaire and conservative political ideologue Charles Koch.

Tomasi himself has pushed the envelope by bringing Koch into his “Prosperity” class to speak directly with students and respond to their queries and criticism. 

“Some people see Brown as a place which stands up for a certain set of preconceived notions that they affirm, and they like Brown that way,” Tomasi said. “They prefer that Brown be like that. But that’s not what most people at Brown think. That’s not Brown at its best. Brown at its best is a place that really does celebrate community (and) exploration together.”

Sand looked to Tomasi’s efforts to meld the ideas of political philosophers John Rawls and Friedrich Hayek in his book “Free Market Fairness” as an example of the kind of cutting-edge scholarship he has brought to Brown. “The fact that he wrote a book that said, ‘Look there’s a way to take these ideas and read them together … that actually can be an improvement upon both’ is frankly a little bit courageous, and also I think pretty effective,” he said. 

Sand discussed how an impulse of intellectual empathy has proved an asset to him in his own political career after graduating from the University. “I could tell you so many stories when somebody says something that so many people would be eager to jump on and judge, but then if you just listened to them and only asked a single question you can understand that the place that they’re coming from is a place of curiosity and not a place of bigotry,” he said. “We can’t find partners in good-faith conversation without ourselves being willing to engage in that.”

In Tomasi’s opinion, the best of Brown is an “impatience with the status quo, including the status quos of our own making.”

“Brown creates status quos on certain moral issues, but true Brown is impatient even with that,” he said.

Looking ahead to his future at HxA, Tomasi expressed gratitude for his time at the University and the lessons it has taught him. 

Brown is about “caring so much that you are never content with what you think you know,” he said. “It means caring so much about justice, caring so much about beauty and truth that you question things for yourself again and again in an ongoing way that doesn’t stop, neither when you walk in nor when you walk out. … The battle for what Brown really is, what it really wants to be …  is an ongoing struggle that will go on long after I leave.”

Of the millions of people who have been infected with COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, most have recovered within a few weeks, according to the Mayo Clinic. But some people continue to experience symptoms after they begin to test negative, a condition known as long COVID. 

To better understand the impacts of this condition, a team of University researchers at the School of Public Health have launched the Long COVID initiative. 

The initiative began this summer with the support of funding from the Hassenfeld Family Foundation. As the researchers build their team, they anticipate having preliminary findings in the next few months. 

Dean of the School of Public Health Ashish Jha said that “people can have persistent symptoms for an extended period of time after recovering from the original (COVID-19) infection.” Jha, who is one of the leaders of the initiative, added that what is known about long COVID — a term that still has no clear clinical definition — is quite limited.

There are a wide range of long COVID symptoms that span from mild to very debilitating, according to Adjunct Assistant Professor of Epidemiology Laura Chambers, a co-director of the initiative. “Respiratory symptoms, fatigue, continued loss of taste and smell, memory loss, headache and gastrointestinal issues” are symptoms associated with long COVID, she added.

Current evidence suggests that around one in three people who recover from COVID-19 may develop long Covid, Chambers said. One focus of the initiative is to investigate how many people long COVID affects. 

“Given the number of people who have been infected with (COVID-19) since the beginning of the pandemic, even a 2% prevalence would be an extraordinary number of people and a substantial public health burden,” Jason Maley, a pulmonologist at Harvard Medical School, wrote in an email to The Herald. Maley is also the director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Critical Illness and COVID-19 Survivorship Program.

Current data on long COVID is largely descriptive and based on surveys or cohort studies, according to Maley, who is not part of the Long COVID initiative. “There is no diagnostic test for long COVID. The diagnosis is based on a clinical judgement,” Maley added. 

Through the Long COVID initiative, the researchers hope to dive deeper into publicly available literature to synthesize existing evidence. They also plan to “gather new data through surveys” and medical records, Jha said. 

Using this information, the team ultimately hopes to understand how widespread long COVID is, its implications for healthcare services and its impacts on the welfare of people more generally.

The researchers also want to understand the potential disproportionate impact of long COVID on people of different social and economic backgrounds, Chambers said. Just as the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted communities of color, long COVID likely has disproportionate effects, Chambers added. “We need policies and programs that can meet the needs of all patients affected long-term by COVID-19.” 

The researchers hope their findings will give guidance to policymakers and business leaders. “We want to look at things like how businesses can get workers back to work safely, and how governments should be planning on issues like disability payments and other policies to support those affected by COVID,” Jha said. 

Long COVID has important personal implications for patients as well as societal implications, Maley wrote. “It’s very relevant and timely that Brown School of Public Health has developed a large collaborative effort” to address long COVID. 

In his 1968 book “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” novelist-slash-journalist Norman Mailer offered the following characterization of the rank-and-file Nixon supporters he saw at that year’s Republican National Convention in Miami:

A “principal of a small town high school, local lawyer, retired doctor, a widow on tidy income, her minister and fellow-delegate, minor executives from minor corporations … — the stable and the established, the middle-aged and the old, a sprinkling of the young, the small towns and the quiet respectable cities of the Midwest and the Far West and the border states were out to pay their homage to their own true candidate, the representative of their conservative orderly heart.” 

The passage, exhaustive though it may be, evokes something crucial about the Republican Party at the time. It was the party of the staid and structured, those who wanted things to run smoothly largely the way they were without disruption. That was no inherent virtue — the disruptions they wished to avoid would have included things like anti-war protests and integration efforts — but it was a defining trait of the era’s Republican Party. Now it’s hard to see any remnant of that party in today’s GOP, especially in the viking-horned, Q-flag-waving, frenzied mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.

There are still a few in the Republican Party that can’t help but recall the “congregation of the clean, the brisk, the orderly, the efficient” that Mailer saw in Miami. Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan, the clean-cut scion of a Midwest superstore chain, justified his trip to observe the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan by stressing how it helped him learn about what was necessary “​​to make sure things run smoothly” and address a situation that was “incredibly chaotic” — sounding so much like a respectable functionary from Mailer’s Miami. Northeastern Republican governors like Maryland’s Larry Hogan, Vermont’s Phil Scott, New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu or Massachusetts’ Charlie Baker also fit the mold, serving as reserved checks on the ambitions of their deep-blue state legislatures. But these exceptions are exactly that, exceptions far from the Republican mainstream and even further from the party’s most energetic forces. After Meijer voted to impeach former President Trump, he quickly found himself faced with a primary challenger. Those blue-state Republican governors are often not all that popular with Republicans in their states; they frequently have higher approval ratings among Democrats than Republicans.

Gone are the days of the Republican heart being, as Mailer wrote more than fifty years ago, “conservative (and) orderly.” To begin with the latter adjective, many in the Republican camp strain to be described as anything approaching “orderly.” Attend a Trump rally today and you will not find the punctilious middling professionals Mailer saw in Miami, but ostentatiously misogynistic shirts, Trump-honoring elephants and Lil Pump endorsements. The ineluctable example is the chaos of Jan. 6’s insurrection, the absolute opposite of standing for the orderly workings of an orderly nation.

Mailer’s other descriptor of the GOP’s heart was “conservative” and this too rings hollow today. What do the energies on the frontlines of the Republican Party wish to conserve? William F. Buckley, godfather of American conservatism, famously founded his magazine National Review to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop.” No one in the Republican Party seems as if they’d be very happy if history stopped and things just stayed as they are today. Nor does the GOP base even seem to wish to return to some identifiable, idyllic time when America truly was great. The Reagan presidency, which that slogan harkens back to, for example, was rather sympathetic to immigrants, today surely a cardinal sin for those in the Trump orbit. If the Reagan era was too inclusive for them, earlier eras in American history don’t seem like they’d be that compelling either; unlike mid-century conservatives, modern Republicans by and large don’t advocate for rolling back the New Deal. If conservatism means putting on the brakes on society, or even shifting it into reverse, I would struggle to call the modern Republican Party conservative. If anything, they wish to wrest the wheel away from whoever’s driving (Democrats, the liberal elite, the deep state, lizard people perhaps) and jerk the wheel in an entirely different direction.

That direction is unclear. Some wish to double-down on the spittle-flecked populism that Trump never could or never would turn into real policy. Senator Tom Cotton introduced a bill unsubtly titled the Ivory Tower Tax Act to fund vocational training programs by taxing the most elite colleges, those that are busy “indoctrinating our youth with un-American ideas.” In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis is taking another path: His lax COVID-19 response promotes a libertarian society devoid of obligations to fellow citizens and where one need think only of oneself, a series of policies that has led James Hohmann to pronounce in the Washington Post that “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is no conservative.”  In some recesses of the American right, one can find something resembling a willingness to overthrow the whole system of liberal democracy. Conservative intellectual Sohrab Ahmari’s no-holds-barred approach to the culture wars, advocating for a more active government role in social issues, has led even conservative columnist Bret Stephens to label him “something of a new illiberal.”  This finds a less intellectual parallel in those on the American right’s fringes who have shown a concerning sympathy for the hyper-masculine, nationalist and theocratic Taliban’s defeat of a liberal democracy. These various strands all share one thing in common: They hold little trace of the party that Mailer saw in 1968. Clinging to that understanding of the Republican Party is what left much of the nation, myself included, dumbfounded on Jan. 6. Don’t delude yourself: The blood now animating the frontiers of the American right is pumped by a heart neither orderly nor conservative.

The University reported 61 positive COVID-19 tests from Sept. 12 to Sept. 18 through the asymptomatic testing program as of Sunday night, according to the Healthy Brown COVID-19 Dashboard. The positive cases are primarily among undergraduate students, according to Executive Vice President for Planning and Policy Russell Carey ’91 MA’06.

From Sept. 9 to Sept. 15, University Health Services conducted 78 symptomatic student tests, of which between five to 10 — a larger range than that of typical weeks — were positive for COVID-19, according to a Sept. 17 Today@Brown announcement.

The University is “cautious and monitoring” the increased total number of positive cases over the past week, but does not find the numbers alarming “or anything other than what we expected coming into this semester,” Carey told The Herald.

Contact tracing through students that have tested positive and who are in isolation housing show that “much of the spread (of COVID-19) is happening in settings — particularly indoors — where people understandably feel quite comfortable and remove their mask and are in close contact to each other for an extended period of time,” Carey said. “Even in those environments, the Delta variant is still quite transmissible.”

In response to the peak in COVID-19 cases last weekend, the University implemented new community-wide restrictions in a Sept. 13 email announcement, The Herald previously reported. The main changes listed in the announcement include “increasing the testing frequency to twice a week” for all students regardless of vaccination status, “going to grab-and-go dining and encouraging people to really reduce their contacts, particularly the informal gatherings that take place on and off campus,” Carey said.

“Knowing that increases with this particular (Delta variant) can be relatively quick, we wanted to take some steps to prevent that,” he added. 

Public health experts, like Dean of the School of Public Health Ashish Jha and Associate Vice President for Campus Life and Executive Director of Health and Wellness Vanessa Britto MSc’96, were consulted in the creation of these policies, according to Carey.

Due to these restrictions, students on campus have noticed an increase in wait times to receive food from the dining halls and an increase in waste around campus. 

Carey said these “negative consequences” are “outweighed by trying to reduce the risk,” as having large groups of people unmasked for long periods of time and “the act of eating and drinking can increase the opportunities for aerosol spread and transmission.”

A follow-up email announcement was sent Sept. 14, stating that student organizations are still permitted to meet in person; however, all attendees must remain masked both indoors and, in certain cases, outdoors.  

The University is seeing “hardly any positives” among faculty and staff members, according to Carey, “so we feel confident about continuing to have indoor classes, activities and events, as long as they’re masked indoors.” Fully vaccinated faculty members are still permitted to remove their masks while conducting classes, according to the University’s Sept. 14 announcement.

In crowded outdoor settings, such as athletic events with spectators from outside Brown and where there could be a mix of vaccinated and unvaccinated people, “wearing masks outdoors is prudent (and required) as well,” Carey said. 

The University has modeled some of these new restrictions based on other institutions, such as Cornell and Duke University, according to Carey. From what has been observed at these institutions, “most likely this will be a momentary increase (in cases). It will come back down, and we’ll be able to release those restrictions, and we hope to be able to do that soon.”

“We have a variety of networks that are national and international, and we keep a pretty good sense of what’s happening across higher ed, given that the impact of the pandemic varies widely by regions,” Carey said. The increase of positivity among undergraduate students and subsequent actions to raise testing frequency “is not unique to Brown,” he added.

Carey added that there is no definitive “threshold” that marks when restrictions would be loosened. “It is an ongoing holistic review, … and if those (cases) come back down, … we feel confident that we’ll be able to go back to where we were,” he said.

Isolation spaces are one-third occupied, as of Sept. 16, according to Carey. Though spaces are not at full capacity yet, the University is “continuing to look at ways (of increasing capacity).” 

“We don’t expect to have zero cases of COVID-19, but we are trying to reduce what we’re experiencing right now, which is absolutely a spike in positivity among undergraduates, and … to reduce individual and collective risk,” Carey said.

The sound of drumbeats and sirens rang through the air as hundreds of people descended upon Smith Street for the Providence St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Sept. 18.

The parade, which usually takes place on St. Patrick’s Day on March 17, was canceled earlier this year due to COVID-19 concerns. Instead, it was replaced by a virtual celebration where organizers committed to rescheduling the in-person parade for six months later, provided sufficient vaccination rates and an improved COVID-19 situation. 

The Providence St. Patrick’s Day Parade has been a tradition for decades, but the parade took on its modern form 27 years ago when the owner of Patrick’s Pub, Patrick Griffin, revitalized it, according to PJ Fox, vice president of the executive committee organizing the event.

The parade left at noon from the intersection of Wyndham Avenue and Smith Street and ended at the Providence State House nearly 90 minutes later. Each year, the parade honors several designated members in the Irish-American community as Grand Marshals. 

Many of the attendees this year had participated in the IGT Downtown 5k or the St. Patrick’s 5k earlier in the day and stayed afterward to watch the parade. 

There were between 350 and 400 people in the parade and about 70 groups, including local bands, volunteer firefighters, reenactment groups and youth groups, Fox said.

“Over the years, we’ve made a real effort to make sure that the parade is inclusive,” Fox added. “Smith Street, like all neighborhoods in Providence, has changed over the years and we want to celebrate that diversity too.” 

It was important to find a way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day because “the Irish, like most immigrant groups coming to the United States, have struggled,” Fox said. “Getting together is a time to really celebrate that perseverance and the strides that folks have made in this country.”

Considering the ongoing pandemic, organizers were careful to take health precautions for the parade. There were sanitation stations placed in congregation areas such as Patrick’s Pub, and beverage stations were moved outside, Fox said.

Despite the postponement, parade attendees said they enjoyed the event.

Pam Fotopoulos and Michelle Lambert have been coming to the Providence St. Patrick’s Day parade for over 10 years, calling it one of their “favorites.” Lambert said she appreciates the camaraderie of the parade, adding that “it’s a family event.”

Josh Wonjar, member of the reenactment group Steven’s Independent Artillery, which performs in the parade every year, said he was initially disappointed upon hearing the news about the parade’s postponement. “But we were happy to find out it was gonna happen again and take place,” Wonjar said, calling the parade itself “super fun” and a “great community.” 

“We understood why it happened, but it was sad because it was such a big family event, so we were glad they were able to reschedule,” said Chris DeCastro, who added he was related to one of the Grand Marshals. “It’s great to bring everyone together for something so joyous.”

The University offered its first in-person campus tours since March 2020 last week, bringing back a staple of the college process and marking another step toward the Office of Admission’s return to normalcy.

Tours look different than they did in March 2020, mostly due to health and safety requirements instituted in response to COVID-19. Groups are now limited to 26 tour goers with just one guide. Visitors now wear wristbands, which indicate that they’re signed up for the tour, and masks, regardless of vaccination status. Guides, also masked, now speak into microphones, minimizing the need to shout.

But beyond those changes, the content and route of the tour are largely the same, tour coordinator Josh Neronha ’22 said. And on his Friday afternoon tour — just the second he had given since they resumed — the familiar rituals of a tour all appeared. A small line of parents and students followed Neronha two-by-two from the Quiet Green to the Main Green, and from Ruth J. Simmons Quad to the Sciences Quad. Gathering in clumps at each spot, they took meticulous notes — and shared knowing glances — as Neronha discussed housing, food, academics, athletics, campus safety and a litany of other subjects. And, between stops, a student would catch Neronha at the front of the line, checking in with a specific question.

“After doing virtual tours for a year and a half, it’s so nice to be back talking with people,” Neronha said. “Seeing people’s faces and answering questions, it’s a level of connection that I personally think is hard to get virtually.”

Neronha also added information about the Open Curriculum to his tour that he hadn’t provided in years past — in part, he said, because in-person University information sessions have yet to return, instead remaining in an online format that he described as “less risky” than putting 50 people in a room.

Other virtual programming also remains available, such as virtual tours and live Q&As — an addition to admissions outreach that Dean of Admission Logan Powell has previously stressed is very important. 

The University does not measure “demonstrated interest” while reviewing applications, such as whether or not a student visited campus, according to the Office of Admission’s website.

On the route, only two key differences were apparent: Groups did not enter Sayles Hall as they would have in the past, and on Simmons Quad, the group stood on the plot of grass where Untitled (Lamp/Bear) — a former stop on the tour commonly known as Blueno — once stood. Neronha said his opinions are mixed: The new space makes the tour stop easier, but he doesn’t know whether or not to explain the significance of the patch of grass.

“Do I take time to explain that Blueno used to be here — that there was this random blue bear that you don’t really care about, but I’ll tell you anyway? Or do I just not say anything?” he wondered. He admitted that he was leaning toward the latter option, but still wanted to “properly memorialize” Blueno somehow. 

Charlotte Sandford, a high school senior from New York City who joined the tour, said the return to in-person tours improved her ability to get a sense of a school. Her trip to College Hill was the first official college tour she had taken; she had visited other schools, but had to rely on current first-years she knew from high school to show her around. The expertise that a senior brought to the tour, she said, made a difference in the information she gained.

Eric Wolfsdorf, a high school senior from Los Angeles, said that he also enjoyed the tour and learning about the “ins and outs” of the University, down to the details of where students study, eat and live.

“Brown is a warm environment with lots of people who are willing to reach out and help,” he noted.

Wolfsdorf said he had been on a number of other tours, two of which were self-guided. “I felt like I learned nothing from that,” he said. 

“The tour experience here has been the best,” Sandford added, “because I’ve actually been able to have a tour.”

In-person tours mark one of the first pieces of normalcy in the college process for this year’s class of high school seniors, many of whom started thinking about college in the middle of the pandemic: Sandford said that she had a difficult time accessing standardized testing, and college visits to her high school moved online.

“It’s just different,” Wolfsdorf said, adding that COVID-19 impacted last year’s high school seniors significantly more, but that the disrupted college process is all he has experienced. 

A Sept. 13 dinner hosted by the Brown Athletics Department for student-athletes drew backlash from students, who criticized the University for hosting a large event that coincided with its announcement of temporary COVID-19 restrictions.

The short-term restrictions included a halt on in-person dining, more frequent mandatory testing and a requirement that student groups hold all events virtually. The requirement that clubs meet virtually was subsequently reversed.

Vice President of Athletics and Recreation M. Grace Calhoun ’92 told The Herald that the event was University-sponsored and that, despite the rule changes, the Athletic Department was assured that the event could continue as planned. “I was aware that changes (to COVID-19 policies) were coming. I didn’t have full knowledge of what the changes (would) be, but I was clear on the fact that outdoor events that were University-sanctioned were still appropriate,” she said. “We had clarified those questions earlier in the day to ensure that if (the dinner) were outside and University-sanctioned, that was still okay.”

Responses from athletes who attended the event were mixed. Andrea Wei ’22, a member of the women’s swim and dive team, expressed apprehension over the lack of precautions taken. “None of the emails mentioned anything about mask regulations,” she said. “When we actually got to the event, which was probably 500+ people, there was literally not a mask in sight. We also all found out about the (indoor) dining halt halfway through.”

Women’s hockey player Sonja Bjornson ’24 pointed to the irony of her team attending the event amid their own COVID-19 concerns. “Two girls on our team are in quarantine currently, so they couldn’t attend the event, and it’s ironic because we took a team picture (without) masks outside,” she said. “We had our scheduled fitness testing Monday afternoon, (but) because of people testing positive on our team and other people (having) woken up feeling a little bit sick, they canceled our fitness testing. But we were still told to go to the event.”

Others felt comfortable at the event given its setting. “I thought the dinner was perfectly safe (because it was) outside,” said Sierra Bornheim ’24, a member of the women’s sailing team. “There’s less transmission outside (and) we were all fully vaccinated.” Still, Bornheim understood her peers’ criticism of the event. President Christina Paxson P’19 “was there at the dinner speaking about 10 minutes after I first learned about (the restrictions), so I just think it was really poor timing on (the University’s) part,” she said. “I kind of knew there would be backlash.”

Women’s soccer player Sheyenne Allen ’23 believed that knowledge of the new restrictions didn’t substantially change the event. “I have a feeling many people didn’t know about it when we were all mingling,” she said. “I think those that did know about the changes weren’t immensely affected by them.” Still, Allen expressed her support for the new restrictions overall. “It definitely makes sense due to the influx of students and rise in cases,” she said. “I believe the restrictions are necessary in order to keep students safe and allow us to continue to have in-person learning (and) activities in the future.”

There has been widespread student criticism of the administration’s policies and the event being held in the midst of increased restrictions, most notably expressed through social media. One of the primary outlets for student discontent is Instagram page @browumemes, a meme page with more than 6,000 followers. Chas Steinbrugge ’24, who runs the account, has made a number of memes poking fun at the administration’s actions in recent days.

“What’s motivated me to make so many memes about the new guidelines is mostly just how it seems that the administration doesn’t follow them themselves,” he said. “I understand lowering the group sizes for students but then to see these massive gatherings put on (by) the administration just seems hypocritical.”

The meme account, Steinbrugge said, has been a space for he and classmates to air mutual frustration about the University’s recent action. “Having such strict guidelines in the student body with an administration that doesn’t seem to follow the practices they’re preaching has angered the student body,” he said. “I think the meme account is giving people an outlet to sort of vent their frustration.”

Steinbrugge points to levity and responsiveness as key factors in the popularity of memes amid changing circumstances for students. “The most important aspect of a meme account versus a more formal news source is that meme accounts can be more responsive. When a new guideline is announced, I can create a meme (much) faster than” a formal student publication could publish an announcement, he said. “I also think it adds a little bit of humor to the subject. People are more comfortable sharing a meme than they might be sharing an article.”

Madye Arundale ’25, who was not associated with the dinner, also sees the University’s actions as hypocritical. “Brown being so lenient with themselves but not with student organizations is hugely hypocritical and very frustrating,” they said. “The outcry could have been lessened if they didn’t ban club gatherings and required masks for both school-sponsored events like the athletic dinner and club gatherings. (The University) should have encouraged more outdoor interaction in their email as well.”

Part of the controversy stemmed from the Athletics Department’s promotion of the event on their official Instagram page. A since-deleted post shows a video of large numbers of student-athletes mingling and taking pictures, almost entirely unmasked, with the caption “It is PAR-TAY time for our student-athletes here at Brown!” The post was deleted within a few hours of its posting, but it was screen-recorded and reposted by @brownumemes with the caption, “Brown deleted this video of their massive in-person party today. It was their first event since banning student-organized events.”

Calhoun said that she was unaware of the video. “I have no knowledge of that video nor of it being taken down,” she said.

Still, the @brownumemes post was shared and re-shared a number of times, and for Steinbrugge, the deleted video was a major sticking point. “One big driving factor behind the meme was that a school Instagram account posted a video of the party and celebrated it,” he said. “That just made it way more frustrating. They can’t own up to their big gatherings and they try to delete evidence” of them.

Steinbrugge further cited the social consequences of the restrictions as a reason for student anger, especially among members of the class of 2024. “It’s really disappointing because we were so close to having a more integrated, more connected Brown community. The club fair was a moment when a lot of sophomores finally realized how we can connect with people across campus and form bigger networks, and then just three days later, to have all that tugged away was pretty disappointing,” he said. “The five person gathering limit is such a drastic change of plans for many students who were expanding their networks.”

Josephine Miller ’24, a Theatre Arts & Performance Studies concentrator, criticized the dinner as an example of Brown prioritizing athletics above other extracurriculars. “As somebody whose entire life and career kind of revolves around shows, (this) looks to me kind of like (a) replication of the common high school trope of money being poured into athletics while the arts are completely disregarded. Brown is going to keep the things that bring them revenue running, while things like the arts that aren’t as lucrative to Brown — but that they’re going to talk about publicly when marketing their school to prospective students — just aren’t given the attention,” she said. “Athletic (practices) were allowed to continue all throughout the pandemic last year, whereas this is supposed to be the official beginning of the arts coming back to Brown.”

Calhoun disputed these statements, pointing to stoppage of athletic competition. “We shut down athletics for more than a year. We were the only conference in Division I to do that,” she said. “I would certainly contest that sentiment on the basis (that) that’s not what our track record is.”

She also reiterated that the University is focused on outdoor, supervised events. “We’ve really focused on University-sponsored (events), the reason being because then you’ve got people there whose job is make sure people are following the rules (and) being safe and to break things up if not.”

Miller expressed greater concern about the mental health impacts the University’s policies could have on students. “I feel like (the University) just botched it every step of the way, bringing the (Class of 2024) in in January and telling people that they would be breaking the school’s Code of Conduct if they attempted to make friends in any way and then providing us no virtual avenue through which to form connections. (This) set everybody up for mental health crises.”

University spokesperson Brian Clark acknowledged the difficulties posed by ongoing restrictions. “We fully appreciate that for students and many others, the vigilance and flexibility required to successfully navigate the COVID-19 pandemic is causing considerable fatigue,” he wrote in an email to the Herald. “At the same time, the ability to be flexible and adjust course as required by a continually evolving pandemic remains essential.”

However, he rejected the idea that the University’s policies have been inconsistent or unwarranted. “What might feel like ‘flip-flopping’ is in reality effective management of a fast-evolving public health situation, grounded in and guided by science and data,’’ he wrote. “We continue to strive to maintain as close to normal operations as we can at Brown, while also protecting the health and safety of everyone who lives, works or learns here.”

Clark expressed optimism that the restrictions would be short-lived, permitting on-campus Covid-19 conditions. He cited other institutions who have implemented comparable policies. “It’s important to note that the limitations put into this place are temporary and targeted specifically to the settings in which we’ve seen evidence of COVID-19 spread,” he wrote. “The experience of other university campuses is instructive; they experienced similar spikes at the beginning of the semester, imposed similar temporary restrictions, and saw their positive rates come back down in a couple of weeks. We hope to accomplish the same here at Brown if we can work together to curb the uptick in cases.”

Nearly two weeks into the semester, Jo Kavishe ’25 has no clue how to get to her classes, and for good reason — she’s never attended them in person. Kavishe tested positive for COVID-19 Sept. 7, the day before classes began. As of press time, she had never stepped foot in a college lecture hall.

Since she received her positive test result, Kavishe has done her best to keep up with her courses through a mixture of lecture capture, hybrid Zoom sessions and notes posted on Canvas.

And Kavishe is not alone: As tallies of COVID-positive students continue to grow, so do the challenges of keeping students up-to-date on their in-person courses. For many professors, the solution is a return to the pandemic norm of Zoom teaching.

With high vaccination rates among student and faculty, the University administration previously spoke of a nearly fully in-person semester, with a few hybrid and online courses, The Herald previously reported.

The University has given guidance to instructors in the form of a FAQ posted Sept. 3, which outlines that “instructors teaching in-person-only courses should be flexible and support students with excused absences as they normally would” and “instructors may consider recording lectures, if feasible, or other online learning tools to help students catch up on materials and assignments.”

According to Dean of the College Rashid Zia, deans can provide notes to students “requesting flexibility” from instructors if a student tests positive. Absences due to being in COVID-19 isolation should be treated as normal excused absences by professors, Zia wrote in an email to The Herald.

“Faculty are expected to do whatever they reasonably can to support students who have to go into quarantine due to COVID (or other illnesses, for that matter),” wrote Kevin McLaughlin, dean of the faculty, in an email to The Herald. “Faculty are notified about students in their courses that have had to quarantine.”

Three of Kavishe’s four courses already had an online component, either in the form of lecture capture or Zoom accessibility. But one of her courses was meant to be entirely in-person. The professor added a Zoom component after Kavishe inquired about how to take the course in isolation.

“All of my professors were extremely understanding” and accommodating, Kavishe said. “That surprised me.”

Ellie Masto ’24 said she was able to get off the waitlist of two classes while in isolation, despite being unable to attend in person — partly because professors were “super considerate and nice” when she emailed them about her situation, she said.

Masto also had a class introduce a Zoom component to accomodate students in COVID-19 isolation.

Some of Masto’s courses had lecture capture or were posting slides from lecture. For those courses, she’s been keeping in “regular contact” with her professors to avoid falling behind.

Alberto Saal, professor of earth, environmental and planetary sciences, switched an in-person course to hybrid instruction because a student had to quarantine after his roommate tested positive.

“The best thing for me is to consider all the possibilities,” Saal said, leading him to plan for a hybrid model before the start of the semester. Because all courses in-person in the past year had a Zoom component, Saal’s classroom already had cameras and other infrastructure for hybrid instruction.

Saal was not told he had to move his course online. Rather, he did it because it was “common sense.” He said he’ll offer students access to his class on Zoom as long as there are students in isolation or quarantine.

Still, hybrid teaching comes with its drawbacks. Omer Bartov, professor of European history, has transitioned both his lecture and seminar courses to hybrid instruction after several students were put in isolation. But he said he prefers teaching in-person.

Hybrid instruction “works if it is for the few who cannot attend in person but is a nightmare as a general method, unless things are better set up for it, which they are not,” Bartov wrote in an email to The Herald.

According to Bartov, he was not told by administrators to move either of his courses online — he chose to do so himself to allow all students to participate.

When asked if there are challenges of keeping students engaged, Bartov wrote that he cannot yet say. “Hopefully it’s only a matter of one or two class sessions.”

In the first episode of season two of The Bruno Brief, we go to a protest of Chase Bank organized by climate justice activists on Thayer Street. We talk to Senior Staff Writer Jasper Yeh, who was on the scene and spoke with protestors about their stance against the bank’s investments in fossil fuels.

Subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or listen via the RSS feed, and send us tips and feedback for the next episode: herald@browndailyherald.com. The Bruno Brief is produced in partnership with WBRU.

Ben Glickman 

Welcome back to season two of The Bruno Brief from the Brown Daily Herald and WBRU. I’m Ben Glickman. We’re excited to bring you more stories for this semester. This week, climate justice activists staged a protest of Chase Bank on Thayer Street to take a stand against the bank’s investments in fossil fuels. 

Protesters 

[Chant] No more gas! No more oil! Keep your poison in the soil! 

Ben Glickman

Herald Senior Staff Writer Jasper Yeh and Bruno Brief Producer Max Karpawich were on the scene. Jasper, can you introduce yourself to the listeners? 

Jasper Yeh 

My name is Jasper, I’m a senior staff writer for The Herald. 

Ben Glickman

You were on the scene when this protest at Chase Bank began. Could you paint a picture for us?

Jasper Yeh

So, it was about 15 or 20 people, and they were all wearing these really bright green-yellow neon shirts. And on the back it said “Chase Criminal Bank.” And then they had a lot of signs and posters talking about Chase the “criminal bank,” you know, their funding of fossil fuels. And then they met about two blocks up from the Chase Bank location. And they marched really, really slowly down Thayer Street to the bank. And a lot of the cars, they actually honked when they passed by either in support of the protests –

Ben Glickman

Or maybe in opposition?

Jasper Yeh

Yeah. So as they were walking down, two blocks down Thayer, they kept switching between different chants. Some of them were shaking maracas, some of them were tapping on their drums. And they were just making a lot of noise to, you know, attract the attention of people around.

Protesters  

[Chant] Which side are you on? Which side are you on?

Ben Glickman

So tell us about what happened when they actually got to the Chase Bank location.

Jasper Yeh 

So when they first arrived, they started off by standing outside and chanting for a while.

Protesters   

[Call and response chant] Get up. Get up. Get up, get up. Don’t give up the fight. Don’t give up the fight.

Jasper Yeh  

After which they had a few speeches delivered. One of them was from a previous Brown graduate. And he’s also — he was also a part of the Rhode Island House of Representatives. And the other one was from a Rhode Island state senator, Kendra Anderson. 

Kendra Anderson 

I’m a politician. As much as I don’t like that position, I do know that it comes with power and I accept that power. And what I am absolutely devastated about is what young people are facing today.

Jasper Yeh

After that, one of the protesters, they said they were expecting the CEO of Chase Bank, Jamie Dimon to show up. And at first I was kind of confused because I thought he was actually going to show up. But then later, she came back dressed in like a suit and, and like a hat. So it turns out it was a skit. And the skit was to mock Jamie Dimon and to mock, you know, the company and their funding of fossil fuels.

Protester (as Jamie Dimon)

Listen, I think you’re taking these headlines about hurricanes and wildfires and flooding, and people drowning in basements and apartments for weeks a little too seriously! 

Second Protester 

Well,

Protester (as Jamie Dimon)

Here at Chase Bank, we like to make sure that you have everything you need in terms of credit.

Jasper Yeh

They also unveiled a really long piece of paper, which was 150,000 signatures to a petition to tell Chase Bank to stop funding fossil fuels. They unrolled the signatures, and it stretched across the bank and down the sidewalk.

Protester

[Unclear] Being rolled out is actually just a portion of it. It’s 155,000 names of people like ourselves who want the planet not to just be [unclear] floods and hurricanes and fires.

Ben Glickman

It sounds like they were definitely theatrical, a bit. 

Jasper Yeh 

Yeah, definitely. One of the leaders of the protest, you know, as they were marching, she was also like, we have to be as loud as possible, and we’re going to walk as slowly as we can.

Ben Glickman

For maximum effect. 

Jasper Yeh

Yeah.

Ben Glickman

So I wonder if you could kind of give us a sense of the mood among the protesters.

Jasper Yeh

Yeah, so I think there was definitely a lot of anger in there. A lot of passion. I didn’t know what to expect of the protest. I thought it would be a larger crowd. So it was a pretty small crowd. But despite having only a few people, they were all really passionate about it. You know, they were kind of on their own, I feel like, but they were all chanting really loudly. They were all you know, making as much sound as they could. 

Ben Glickman

So small in number, but enthusiastic?

Jasper Yeh

Yeah, definitely.

Protesters  

[Call and response chant] Mic check. Mic check. Mic Check. Mic check. Around — the people around you, say “Just do what I’m doing.” Jamie Dimon! Jamie Dimon.

Ben Glickman  

Tell us a little bit about kind of what prompted this specific protest. Was there something that they were kind of reacting to?

Jasper Yeh

So this particular protest, it was partly caused by the publication of the 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report. And the IPCC, this organization, they are in charge of disseminating information about climate change. This is kind of what triggered these protests in response to the kind of disastrous results that the report claimed. But it’s also important to note that this is definitely not the first time that this protest has happened. It has happened multiple times and in multiple locations, because more generally, they want Chase to stop funding fossil fuels because they claim that Chase Bank is the number one funder of fossil fuels. 

Ben Glickman

So, at previous protests, we at The Herald reached out to a spokesperson at Chase to ask about some of the claims that were made. And they told us about different initiatives they have, not necessarily directly responding but giving some answers about the work on climate that Chase is doing. What did they say this time? 

Jasper Yeh

I separately emailed a spokesperson from Chase Bank. She referred me to someone who oversees Sustainability Communications at the bank. At the bank, we also weren’t able to talk to anyone in the office. Some protesters tried to get into the bank, but there were three police officers who stood right inside the door, watching the protest. 

Protester

Chase Bank’s not gonna come out. They don’t want us to come in, and the police are ready to arrest us if we go in. We’re not gonna go in. 

Jasper Yeh

And (The Herald) did try to go in. But it seems like the police officers thought that we were also part of the protest. So they also weren’t going to let us in.

Ben Glickman

When I was a senior staff writer, I covered two of these protests that were very similar. But the protesters are still here. Do you think that there was some frustration that nothing has changed? 

Jasper Yeh

Yeah, there definitely is. A recurring theme from the protesters when I interviewed them — they just kept telling me about their children, their grandchildren and how they’re running out of time. So I think there’s definitely this recognition that, you know, this problem has persisted for so long. And the protesters themselves, they don’t see this problem ending any time soon unless they take action, like participating in this protest.

Protester 

We don’t want dividends from Chase. We want Chase to straighten up and fly right. And we want a safe environment for our children and our grandchildren.

Ben Glickman

When you say that they’re talking about their children and their grandchildren — that’s sort of implicitly morbid, I think. That, you know, the world they’re leaving might be worse off. Did you get the sense that the protesters were hopeful at all?

Jasper Yeh

Yeah, so one of the people who spoke to the protesters, he was a previous legislator in the Rhode Island House of Representatives. He talked about how there was a lot to be fearful of in regards to these climate change issues. But then I remember that he also told everyone how there’s also a lot to be hopeful of. So he encouraged all the activists there to continue their work in climate change activism.

Aaron Regunberg 

And it doesn’t happen on its own, right? And that’s why we’re here today. And that’s why we are going to continue to show up, to speak out, to put our bodies on the line: because our future is worth it.

Ben Glickman 

Jasper, thanks so much for being on the Bruno Brief.

Jasper Yeh 

Thank you for having me.

Ben Glickman 

Thanks for listening to the Bruno brief. Our show is produced by Libby Burnett, Corey Gelb-Bicknell, Max Karpawich and me, Ben Glickman. We’ll see you next week.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

____________________

This episode was produced by Olivia Burdette, Ben Glickman and Corey Gelb-Bicknell, with audio reporting contributed by Max Karpawich.

Music: 

Denzel Sprak by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)

Cab Ride by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue) 

Kid Kodi by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)

The women’s soccer team (5-3) cruised to a 3-1 victory over the Northeastern University Huskies (3-4-1) Sunday afternoon at Stevenson-Pincince Field. After two tough road losses to the University of Notre Dame and Providence College, both of which finished 2-1, this weekend’s win was much-needed for Brown as they prepare for conference play against Ivy League opponents. The Bears were led by a pair of goals from rookie forward Miya Grant-Clavijo ’25, another goal from forward Brittany Raphino ’23 and five saves from goalie Kayla Thompson ’21.5.

Brown remained on the attack after the initial goals, running the Northeastern defense ragged as they pushed towards the goal repeatedly. Grant-Clavijo tried to complete her hat trick on multiple separate occasions, but the Northeastern defense held firm. The second half followed a similar pattern to the first: sporadic Huskies’ attacks fended off by the Bears, followed by prolonged stretches of Bruno possessing the ball. The game started to get more physical in the second half, with each team being issued a yellow card. Northeastern got on the board in the 63rd minute on a penalty kick by Katherine Marchessault to cut the lead to 2-1. The Bears responded quickly, with Raphino scoring her third goal of the season in the 69th minute off an assist from midfielder Gianna De Priest ’25. Head Coach Kia McNeill was able to rotate other players in as the game wound down, and Brown held off Northeastern en route to a 3-1 victory.

McNeill’s biggest takeaway from the win was her team’s versatility, depth and preparedness. “One of the biggest things I take away is just how much depth we have. We can rotate a lot of players up top and in the midfield,” she said. “We played a different formation today that we haven’t played this season yet, so our girls are really receptive. They take feedback really well (and) they can implement a game plan really well. That’s a good thing to have going into Ivy play.”

After a grueling three-game road trip, the team appreciated being back in Providence in front of a friendly crowd. “We love seeing people out here.”

The Huskies’ goal to cut the Bears’ lead to one was a pivotal moment in the game. But being able to respond with another score was crucial to Brown’s victory, according to Raphino. Her goal “was really important because (Northeastern) had the momentum,” she said. “They were really fired up after (the goal), so the fact that we capitalized and came back and got another one was huge.”

Raphino is confident as the team heads into Ivy League play. “We can put multiple goals away on anybody,” she said.  “No one in the Ivy League can stop us. We just need to keep going at ‘em and keep the fire going.”

For Thompson, the start of conference play is a new chapter for the team. “We’ve talked about this being the end of one season and (the start of) another,” she said.

Though the team’s non-conference schedule was rocky at times, McNeill was happy with how it went overall. “We purposely scheduled a tough non-conference schedule to get us ready for Ivy League play. I think regardless of some of the results, I still feel like we were in every game and (in) a lot of those games the ball could have bounced either way,” she said. “We feel really confident and it was a convincing win today. We’ll get back at it this week to get ready for Dartmouth.”

The Bears will kick off their Ivy League season Saturday at home against the Big Green at 7:00 p.m. The game will be broadcast on ESPN+.

In Brown’s first football game on the new Richard Gouse Field at Brown Stadium, solid performances from captains EJ Perry ’22 and Allen Smith ’22 weren’t enough to secure the Governor’s Cup trophy against University of Rhode Island Saturday. The game ended 45-24 in favor of the Rams (3-0), giving them their best start to a season in 16 years. The Bears (0-1) showed glimpses of a potent offense, but key turnovers and defensive miscues cost them the win.  

Bruno’s defense started the game with intensity, stifling URI’s running game and forcing them to punt after three downs. After the Bears received the punt at their own 40-yard line, Perry and Smith showed no signs of rust as they advanced downfield with a series of completions and runs for short gains. On the second down at URI’s 14-yard line, Perry received the snap in shotgun and dropped back, surveying his options. As Hayes Sutton ’23 streaked past defenders en route to the corner of the end zone, Perry let the ball fly. Sutton turned and leapt, snatching the ball out of the air and dragging his toes across the end zone turf to secure Bruno’s first points of the season.

“Hayes is a phenomenal player and has improved tremendously since 2019,” Perry said. “He showed it not only on that touchdown grab but throughout the entire game. Hayes ran a great route and it was a great catch.”

Brown’s energetic celebration was short-lived, as URI answered quickly with a touchdown coming from a 35-yard connection between dual-threat quarterback Kasim Hill and halfback Justice Antrum.

Hill and Antrum, two key ingredients in URI’s early success this year, made an immediate impact; even when they weren’t running the ball, their presence opened up opportunities for URI to attack using the passing game. “They’re both excellent players,” said Brown Head Coach James Perry ’00. “I thought our guys actually did a really good job trying to defend them. It is what it is — they’re going to get some plays.”

The first of Brown’s crucial offensive miscues occurred immediately after URI’s touchdown, with Perry narrowly avoiding a sack and then throwing a desperation pass into the waiting arms of a URI defender at Brown’s 30-yard line. URI, taking advantage of the exceptional field position, kicked a field goal to make it a 10-7 ballgame. The Rams scored a touchdown on their next drive to take a 17-7 lead into the second quarter.

With under 11 minutes remaining in the second quarter, Hill scrambled out of the pocket in hopes of converting a third-down pass. Cornerback Cooper DeVeau ’23, reading the play perfectly, made a beeline for Hill and unloaded for the sack to force a URI punt.

“There was no rust on our energy,” Coach Perry said. “I was very happy with (the energy) on the sideline and when we came out of that locker room.”

DeVeau’s electric defensive play and the sideline’s response put a charge into the Bears offense, which steadily marched from its own 17-yard line into the URI red zone. Once the Bears were within 10 yards, Smith took two consecutive rushes — the second of which did the job, tightening the score at 17-14 after the extra point kick. 

Smith, a stalwart of Brown’s offense, had 15 carries and ran for 65 yards on the new turf. “We played pretty fast considering we ran 105 plays,” Smith said. “Even then, we think we can play a little bit faster and take it to the next level. The new turf was great — I think that was reflected by how we were able to make some big plays and move the ball.”

URI started the second half with a resounding sack of Perry that forced a fumble and wrenched possession of the ball away from the Bears. From there, the Rams didn’t look back, running off two touchdowns in the first 10 minutes of the third quarter to take a 31-14 lead. 

Brown then appeared to threaten with a scoring chance, but their foray into URI’s red zone quickly turned sour. In a brutal sequence of events for Bears fans hoping for a comeback, Perry was called for intentional grounding and URI’s defense forced a fumble. The following URI drive was brief but deadly, with a three-yard run by Antrum setting up an 80-yard touchdown pass from Hill to Matt Pires. 

Once again, offensive turnovers by Brown — and URI’s knack for capitalizing on them — proved crucial as the game unfolded. “In addition to just throwing the ball to them twice, we put the ball on the ground a little bit,” Coach Perry said. “Then there were some critical moment errors — when you get in the red zone, what we refer to as situational football, we’re not doing at a high enough level.”

“I think I made a number of mental and physical errors that negatively affected our offense and rhythm,” EJ Perry added.

Brown narrowed the gap slightly with a fourth-quarter field goal to make the score 38-17. On Bruno’s next possession, another critical error led to the nail in the coffin when URI’s Jordan Jones picked off a Perry pass in the end zone and ran it back the entire length of the field for a pick-six. Though Brown scored another touchdown on a pass to Wes Rockett ’23, URI’s hefty lead proved insurmountable. With the 45-24 victory, URI improved to 3-0 on the season and claimed the 2021 Governor’s Cup.

Offensively, Brown’s scarcity of scoring wasn’t for lack of production. Their total yardage exceeded URI’s by nearly 80, and on certain occasions, the Bruno offense appeared to outmatch URI’s defense. “We moved the ball very well — I think we mixed run and pass well,” Coach Perry said. “Execution, when the bullets are flying, is difficult.”

The Bears have six days to rest and recover before they launch into Ivy League play with their game at Harvard Friday. “Our guys, we work hard,” Coach Perry said. “I was not anticipating as many errors, and those are things that we’ll work hard to correct. And we only have six days to do it, so we’ll be back at it tomorrow. It’s a terrific group — I have no doubt they’ll be ready to work.”

Nightmares surrounding STEM PhDs are plentiful — classic examples are the student who spends 14 hours a day in the lab, the coworker who sabotages others’ experiments and the newly graduated student who stares down the barrel of two consecutive postdoctoral positions because they are unprepared for the job market. Each of these scenarios can be traced back to one well-defined yet unsolved problem: bad mentoring. PhD students are voicing concerns about their supervisors, and it is time that academic institutions listen to their students and compel faculty to become better mentors. The data is clear: Students who are supervised effectively are more likely to publish papers, graduate and pursue a satisfying career. On the other hand, students who are poorly mentored underperform and more often develop moderate to severe anxiety and/or depression.

Most STEM PhD students rely on one faculty mentor — known as a principal investigator — throughout their graduate program. As such, it is important that this mentor be adequately trained in management, leadership and communication skills. But too many professors in STEM are hired almost solely on the basis of their ability to bring in money for the university by obtaining grants for their research. Even though graduate students are advised for several years by these professors, universities often do not require formal training to educate professors on the best practices of managing and mentoring students. The lack of human relations and people management skills lead to particularly dark consequences; more than 10% of respondents to Nature’s 2019 PhD student survey experiencing aggressive or overly critical behavior or other forms of bullying from their supervisors. Twenty-one percent also reported experiencing discrimination or harassment. Despite these staggering results, over half of those who reported bullying felt unable to speak out against it. Such a rate of unreported incidents can likely be attributed to fears of repercussion and a lack of trust that the institution will take appropriate action against the supervisor.

This bullying happens right here at Brown. I have personally heard of supervisors manipulating students into working long hours and pitting students against each other to drive competition and increase performance. I have also witnessed supervisors making fun of multilingual students for word choice or pronunciation in front of others. These actions go unreported and unpunished due to the armor of tenure that shields professors. It is thus unsurprising that almost one in four respondents would change their supervisor if they could restart their program, and 23% of respondents said that the impact of a poor relationship with their supervisor was their primary PhD concern. The data is clear, and academic institutions — including Brown — must address these alarming statistics to improve graduate student wellbeing, performance and satisfaction.

According to Stanford University sociologist Morris Zelditch, effective graduate student mentors are multifaceted tutors and support systems. They should readily provide moral encouragement, career guidance and constructive feedback and serve as role models for their students. As Nature’s survey indicates, PhD mentorship tends to fail on most of these fronts — and the anecdotes from Brown graduate student shows that our University is no exception. By holding graduate student mentors to Zelditch’s standards, universities including Brown could not only improve the PhD experience, but also better equip them for their future career path.

To solve the PhD mentoring crisis and achieve Zelditch’s criteria, academic institutions should approach this problem from two perspectives: one that demands faculty meet the expectations of effective graduate student mentors as outlined above and one that encourages graduate students to build a network of mentors at the start of their PhD to fill in gaps when a supervisor falls short. To establish good mentoring practices, institutions should require faculty to attend regular, formal training in human relations, people management and leadership development. Institutions should also regularly solicit graduate students’ feedback on their mentors and take appropriate action against faculty failing to meet expectations. These evaluations would give an anonymous platform for students to rate their supervisors across the six parameters defined above as well as report incidences of bullying, bias or harassment.

Universities must also make it easier for students to form a network of mentors from the outset of their PhD program, rather than expecting that students rely on one supervisor for all of their advising needs. To find this team of mentors, students should be encouraged to seek out and participate in programs, events and courses that are not in their specific field of study to aid in personal, professional and career development throughout their education. Students who cast a wide net in their search for mentors will open more doors for themselves than those who rely on just one.

Selahaddin Gumus GS can be reached at selahaddin_gumus@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.

Dr. Peter Hollmann ’76 MD ’79, chief medical officer for Brown Medicine and clinical assistant professor of family medicine, was recently elected president of the American Geriatrics Society. 

The American Geriatrics Society is a “nationwide, not-for-profit society of geriatrics healthcare professionals dedicated to improving the health, independence and quality of life of older people,” according to their website. 

As president, Hollmann will serve on  committees and work on special projects. He will preside at all society meetings and will help the AGS to carry out its aims of providing high-quality, person-centered care. 

AGS presidents are elected from the AGS Board of Directors by members of the organization. They serve a one-year term, followed by another year as chairperson of the Board of Directors, according to Lauren Kopchik, senior membership communication coordinator at the AGS. His term as AGS president will last until May 2022.

As president, Hollmann will work on long-term goals such as advancing the science of geriatric care and helping to support all healthcare workers. In the short term, he is working with AGS members to improve the Medicare payment system. 

“We are working to make sure that the Medicare payment system really recognizes and properly pays for geriatric care, and provides good access.” Hollmann said. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has also prompted new initiatives by the AGS.

“When the pandemic hit, everyone had to convert to telemedicine, and weren’t sure how to get paid for it,” Hollmann said. In response, Hollman and one of his colleagues developed a “cheat sheet” for health care workers to implement telemedicine to prevent confusion about payments. The AGS also advocated for audio-only telehealth appointments — primarily used by geriatrics patients — to be covered by Medicare. 

Despite his success in the field, Hollmann did not originally plan to become a leader in geriatrics. After finishing a residency in internal medicine at Brown’s medical program, he was asked to join the first geriatrics fellowship at the University. He started working with the American Medical Association on coding and billing processes, an area of expertise that he would later translate to the AGS. 

Hollmann began his time at the AGS as a representative to a panel that crafted terminology for medical procedures. He then helped the AGS with coding and payment policy and founded the AGS Practice Management Advisory Group. 

Coding, which led him to AGS, “was a quirky thing, and was not what I planned to do,” he said. “It just happened. And it worked out great.”

Dr. Richard Besdine, director of the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine and professor of medicine, health services policy and practice, has worked with Hollmann for more than 30 years in the University’s Department of Medicine . 

“He was invaluable to the American Geriatrics Society as being the one member who knew something about funding of healthcare, and had expertise in the Medicare program.” Besdine said. 

For Hollmann, the nomination was an honor since the AGS, in his mind, embodies collaboration and empathy. 

“In geriatrics, we are extreme believers in teams. We know that we can’t function in caring for older people with multiple issues unless we have a team of people,” he said. “And that’s how we function as an organization too.”

“Hollmann has been a treasured resource for geriatricians nationwide,”  Besdine said. “And is a tireless advocate for improved quality of care for all people.”

Vartan Gregorian Quad has been called “New Dorm” by Brown students since the days when it was actually new. But over the past year, as an incoming class of students entered onto a mostly empty campus, a new name for the residence hall emerged: “Greg.”

This change, while amusing, was also alarming. For the upperclassmen among us, it felt as if we had failed to pass on some basic knowledge. And the fact that “New Dorm” was no longer “new” only emphasized our old age.

The Brown experience is defined by more than our slang. But we also recognize that each and every one of our traditions distinctly shapes what it means to be a Brunonian. In pandemic times, so much of our shared cultural heritage has faded — even Blueno has left us. As we move into this new year, we urge the campus community to simply reflect: What have we lost? What can we — and should we — preserve moving forward?

Today, all four classes are together on campus. But College Hill does not feel complete. Only one class of students has ever been on campus for a full year (or experienced a live Spring Weekend concert). And two graduating classes — who have each made indelible marks on our campus — have left without the goodbyes they deserve.

It’s hard to know what it means to be a Brown student when we haven’t had the chance to exist as a cohesive community for so long. Over the past year and a half, we’ve lost so many opportunities to learn from each other, especially from those classes that came before us. We’ve lost the moments of contact (Ratty meals, club meetings and study sessions) where we could revel in the Brown experience together. 

And not only have we lost experiences, we’ve also lost our sense of direction. We are doing things for the first time again. We’re relearning how to interact with real people and failing to recognize familiar faces through masks. Not to mention, we are still living through an ongoing pandemic. Campus continues to suffer from the uncertainty of the Delta variant and all the unpredictable policies that go along with it. We are not back to normal.

It is in spite of all this that we remain hopeful about our community’s ability to persevere and preserve our institutional memory. Already, we see many traditions and experiences quickly reviving with the start of the semester. Clubs that died down during the pandemic are starting up again. The Main Green is bustling. And finally, we can learn from professors in an actual lecture hall. Some traditions may need to adapt, but we are optimistic that they, too, will survive in some form. Perhaps this year we can have a not-so-naked donut run instead — not-so-naked due to our new masking policy. 

The pandemic is also a chance to define new traditions and experiences. “New Dorm” may evolve into “Greg,” and maybe the change will feel okay. And the empty patch of grass where Blueno used to be might house new art in the future or serve, at the very least, as an excellent spot for a picnic.

What we are craving is not necessarily continuity. We don’t need our traditions to stay the same, nor have they stayed the same over time. What we crave, truly, is a sense of community, cliché as this may seem. In an age of grim, pandemic pragmatism, there is a necessary place for hope and idealism. And our hope is that we will figure out how to lean on each other this year, even at a distance or with masks on. Only then can we begin to remember what it means to be a Brown student.

Editorials are written by The Herald’s editorial page board. This editorial was written by its editor Johnny Ren ’23, and members Clara Gutman Argemí ’22, Catherine Healy ’22, Olivia Burdette ’22, Devan Paul ’24 and Kate Waisel ’24.

Organizations such as the World Bank, United States Agency for International Development or UNICEF rightfully focus on inequalities at the country, province and village levels in their quest to improve lives. But inequality also stems from an even smaller economic agent: the household. For children not lucky enough to be the focus of their families’ meager resources, the challenge isn’t broadening access to schools — it is overcoming the perceptions of their parents that deem them worthy or unworthy of an education. An incorrect assumption that returns on early education are not large enough to compensate for the cost of school attendance drives families to concentrate their spending on one child, ensuring that they finish high school. Parents are not acting on favoritism. They are simply trying to give their families a better future by ensuring that at least one of their children receives the returns promised by secondary education. While governments and nonprofits have made enormous strides in giving children across the low-income world access to schools, their next obstacle is making sure parents are giving their kids the opportunity to attend. When these parents pick winners, millions of children are left behind.

The financial constraints that families face across the world, and especially in developing countries, force families to make hard choices about which children they will send to school. In their book, “Poor Economics,” economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo explore this phenomenon. They recall a strange conversation with a mother of seven in the agricultural village of Naganadgi, India. She explained that six of her children had quit school by the second grade. Her youngest, however, was a seventh-grader at an expensive private boarding school. What surprised Banerjee and Duflo most was the mother’s candor about her children’s abilities. The youngest child, she said, was the only “intelligent” one — the others were “stupid.” Read from the United States, where education is free and compulsory, her words are jarring. But they are also consistent with a worldview that is common in poor countries that encourages families to concentrate limited resources on a single child with a high perceived chance of success. Because of misguided perceptions questioning the future payoff of education, parents across the low-income world invest in their offspring according to each child’s relative potential — robbing children perceived as unintelligent of social mobility before they even leave grade school.

Education is a disproportionate burden on family budgets in poor countries, of which secondary education can amount to more than a quarter, compared to no more than 5% in most high-income countries, according to the World Bank. With this cost in mind, it’s no surprise that the family dynamics Banerjee and Duflo encountered are far from unique to Naganadgi. Using data from Burkina Faso, economists Richard Akresh, Emilie Bagby, Damien de Walque and Harounan Kazianga noticed significant variation in enrollment within families — in 54% of households, some children had attended school while some had not. The authors studied this intrafamily variation to better understand the factors that influence parents’ decisions to educate their children. First, they evaluated children’s cognitive skills, then they examined parents’ perceptions of their offspring’s future prospects using a survey. Strikingly, a child was less likely to be enrolled if they had siblings perceived to have a higher chance of future success. Having at least one such sibling decreased a child’s likelihood of enrollment by seven percent. Parents seem to base their evaluations at least in part on their observations of cognitive aptitude. They found that a child with cognitive ability measured at one standard deviation higher than the average of their siblings was 30% more likely to be enrolled in school. Parents really were, as Banerjee and Duflo argued, putting “all their educational eggs’’ in one basket. And given that families in many poor countries face similar financial constraints on getting their children educated, it is likely that this approach — parental investment in children according to their relative potentials — is common across the world, and therefore ought to be in the forefront of efforts to build educational capacity in poor countries.

Having to single out one child to bear their hopes for financial success has implications even beyond family spending on education; the forces that drive families to choose which children go to school also play a role in determining which resources children have access to. Because it is difficult to observe the allocation of resources like food and medicine within families, researchers Mark Rosenzweig and T. Paul Schultz instead measured childrens’ survival rates in rural India; those who survived, the authors assumed, had received more resources. In virtually all areas, boys were more likely to survive than girls. The authors reasoned that this was a result of parents’ higher perceptions of boys’ earning potentials. To test this hypothesis, Rosenzweig and Schultz next examined areas where women had relatively better earning potential and more economic opportunities. In these areas, the gap in survival rates was smaller, proving that parents really were allocating resources which would support academic performance according to perceived likelihood of success.

Humanitarian intervention at its best takes into account the worldview and values of those it’s trying to help. If the goal is to increase the educational opportunities of these countries, aid organizations like UNICEF need to understand not just the regional manifestations of problems but the domestic ones as well. This includes understanding the decision making processes that put some kids in school and keep others at home — only then can they deliver truly holistic educational aid.

Arjun Shanmugam ’23 can be reached at arjun_shanmugam@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.

Visual artist Teresita Fernández visited campus virtually Wednesday evening as part of the Virtual Artist Talk Series organized by theDepartment of Visual Arts. Fernández is known for her work reimaging the idea of landscapes, a theme that often holds deep historical and cultural references.

The talk began with an introduction by Heather Bhandari ’97, adjunct lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts and program director of the Art World Conference. Bhandari noted Fernández’s achievements as a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Fernández was also appointed by President Obama to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, making her the first Latina to serve in that role, and her artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

The artist started off by explaining her focus on the concept of landscapes. She uses the idea of “landscape” to have multifaceted conversations about places where an individual is “located spiritually, racially, socially, historically, psychologically, legally and environmentally” in relation to their surroundings, she said.

Fernández explores “how the sense of place is very often informed by history, (extensive) research and by drawing connections between all of the things that I am learning about,” she said.

She described some of her own works and how she integrates landscapes into them, such as her forty-foot long installation “Blind Blue Landscape” situated on a curved wall in Naoshima, Japan. The artwork is composed of tens of thousands of differently sized glass cubes on a wall which emulate a large mirror reflecting the landscape in front of it.

“It’s essentially bringing the landscape indoors but also distorting it and breaking it off and … reflecting your own image superimposed onto the landscape so that each tiny cube becomes almost like a miniature landscape painting of the view behind you,” she said.

“Fata Morgana,” a piece temporarily located in Madison Square Park in New York City, consisted of 500 feet of golden, polished discs that created a canopy over the park’s Oval Lawn. She explained that this piece, the title of which is the Italian phrase for a mirage, worked as an optical illusion. The metal, a reference to mining, formed intricate patterns, similar to foliage, as it filtered sunlight at different hours throughout the day. Diverging from the traditional norms of a public art installation, Fernández aimed to create an immersive experience for pedestrians in the park.

She described how she pushed the bounds of artistic integration between the public, performers and sculptures. Fernández partnered with choreographer Stephen Petronio to create a performance incorporating dancers, music and passers-by to highlight themes of erasure and visibility. Titled “Luminous Mischief,” the performance enhanced the structural features of “Fata Morgana.”

Fernández’s other works include “Fire (United States of the Americas)” where she depicts the continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii and the U.S. territories through the use of charcoal and hand-drawn shadows. “It is a reference to slash-and-burn techniques (that Indigenous people used) to shape and cultivate the land for thousands of years,” Fernández said. She noted that this piece relates to ideas of nations, territories and borders while exploring the destructive history of the United States. The plural “Americas” in the titles is meant to serve as a keen reminder that the United States is only one part of the larger American continents.

At the end of the talk, Fernández answered questions and mentioned one of her current projects: an online interactive exhibit she produced around the start of the pandemic entitled “Maelstrom: A Visual Essay.”

“It’s a visual essay of my research and my work woven together and was an important outlet for me to contextualize some of my writing and some of my research,” she said. The exhibit “gives a good sense of the holistic aspect of my practice.”