Established 1879
A Voice for the Students FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2018
HOBART AND WILLIAM SMITH COLLEGES
Culture of Exhaustion By Grace Ruble ’21 News Editor
Culture… continued page 5
Photo Credit: Office of Communications
A few weeks ago, I was having a conversation with a friend in the library and she looked over at me and said “You know what the Herald should cover? The culture of exhaustion on this campus.” She continued to explain to me that she felt a good number of students at HWS faced pressure from a myriad of directions in their lives to “Do more!” and “Be the best!” to the point of it taking a toll on their mental health, and no one was talking about it . I think I might have heard actual angels sing when my friend suggested this to me. It felt like someone had finally put the phenomenon I experienced in my own social circles into words. I saw my friends pushing themselves to the limit day after day and had no idea what to do about it. So, within a few seconds of my friend mentioning the idea to me, I had made it my personal project.
Perhaps my immediate enthusiasm for this topic should’ve been my first clue that I was ignoring my own role as someone who was part of the problem. Until a few weeks ago I don’t think I’d ever said no to anything a professor, peer or administrator asked me to do. No commitment was too large. No club too much time. Whether it was by skipping meals or hours of sleep or socializing I was always taking on more because I knew I could “make it work.” Armed with my own definition of the “culture of exhaustion” as “the college culture which encourages and rewards students for being overcommitted, overtired and overachievers,” I did a few interviews with people I knew to be very involved on campus. I heard stories about people who joined ten extracurriculars because they were told that people
Voting on Campus From US Congress to William Smith Congress By Olivia Rowland ‘21 Copy Editor
Almost a month after the midterm elections, students had the opportunity to vote in another election, this time for the executive board of William Smith Congress. But the atmosphere surrounding both opportunities for civic participation was unmistakably different. The HWS community put a lot of effort into mobilizing for the midterm elections. By Nov. 6, HWS Votes and the Center for Community Engagement and Service Learning (CCESL) had gotten 702 students registered to vote via TurboVote, compared to the 244 students who were registered on TurboVote for the 2014 midterms. HWS Votes continued to hold events to promote voting right up until election night. They hosted a fifteenth anniversary dinner and panel about civic engagement and the reasons why voting matters. On Nov. 6, they organized a fairly well-attended election night party for students and community members, who watched the returns come in live.
Additional voter registration efforts were carried out by other political organizations on campus, including the College Democrats and Young Americans for Freedom. The midterm election ended up being significant in terms of voter turnout, specifically the voter turnout of the youngest demographic. According to NPR, around 47 percent of the electorate voted on or before Nov. 6, which represents a large increase from 2014’s 37 percent turnout. The same increase applied to the turnout of 18 to 29 year olds, which, according to Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Engagement, was 31 percent, up from 21 percent in 2014. Of course, there were still many students at HWS who did not vote. Even those who did not vote, however, could not be unaware of the election, and were undoubtedly encouraged to vote by the campus community. The same cannot be said for the William Smith Congress elections held on Dec. 4. This is certainly one factor that affected the low turnout of William Smith student voters. Around 183
VOLUME CXXXX-III
Chief Diversity Officer Search By Ryan Skinner ‘19 Herald Staff
Last spring, amid a flurry of emerging vacancies at the colleges, it was announced that Interim Chief Diversity Officer Solomé Rose would be leaving the position she had held since March of 2016 to join Planned Parenthood of Central and Western New York. Her exit prompted a series of emails from more than a dozen faculty members congratulating Rose for the changes she implemented during her short tenure as Interim Chief Diversity Officer and bemoaning that the Colleges was losing her talents. During her time at the colleges Rose reportedly helped to create the very position of Chief Diversity Officer, established the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and laid out the first Strategic Diversity Plan issued by the Colleges. The Office of Diversity and Inclusion has become a fixture of campus life, promoting diversity on faculty hiring committees, conducting diversity training and workshops on implicit biases, encouraging underrepresented students to enter STEM fields and to attend graduate school, and working with other offices on campus to address bias-related incidents. In the time since the vacancy emerged, Presidential Fellow Sydney Gomez ‘17, who is assisting the search committee, wrote that the Office of Diversity and Inclusion “has been working behind the scenes to explore initiatives from the Strategic Diversity Plan, assess programming currently on hold, and create feedback for the new CDO [Chief Diversity Officer].” The kind of qualities that the search committee is looking for, according to Gomez, include the ability to “build relationships across campus to insure that diversity and inclusion is an institutional priority. The CDO is tasked with working with faculty, students, and staff, but the work of diversity and inclusion has to been done by all members of HWS community.” When asked how the search was going so far, Gomez replied, “The search is going. We have great candidates, some are current Chief Diversity Officers, with diverse backgrounds, expertise in diversity and inclusion, and experience working with faculty, staff and students.” In November, while speaking before a joint meeting of Hobart Student Government and William Smith Congress, President Pat McGuire indicated his regret that the search had been slow to produce a Chief Diversity Officer and assured the quorum that the search was a priority for him. McGuire attributed the delay to disagreements with some members of the search committee over whether or not to recruit a Chief Diversity Officer from outside the Colleges. McGuire and others within the administration favored looking for recruits from outside the institution while many within the search committee favored selecting from internal candidates. President McGuire confirmed that there were currently forty-six applicants, several of whom they plan to bring to campus next semester. A student serving on the search committee informed the Herald that they will narrow the number of candidates to ten or twelve and conduct phone interviews over winter break. The student indicated that a hiring decision for the next Chief Diversity Officer may come as soon as late January or early February if the administration meets its current timetable.
Congress… continued page 5
News First-Year Hobart Class President p. 3 Deans p. 3 HWS-Technos p. 4
Arts & Entertainment S eni o r A rt Show p. 2 D ra g Show p. 5 Musi c Sce ne p. 6 No Exit p. 6