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Elyse Apel | Collegian
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Students react to how the college handled the power outage caused by a late February ice storm. See A5
The Chargers will play in their third straight NCAA Tournament. See A10
Michigan’s oldest college newspaper
The Hoynak Room now has an exhibit featuring the S.S. Hillsdale Victory, a 1944 victory ship. See B5
Vol. 146 Issue 20 – March 9, 2023
www.hillsdalecollegian.com
Holleman appointed president of directors association
Security updates threat response protocols
By Emily Schutte Collegian Freelancer
By Logan Washburn City News Editor
The College Orchestra Directors Association named James Holleman, professor of music, its national president. “I am honored and humbled to serve as president of the College Orchestra Directors Association,” Holleman said in a Hillsdale College press release. “It is a terrific organization of directors who are experienced and supportive of each other and each other’s programs.” As president of CODA, Holleman said his main job is to organize the national conference. According to Holleman, the conference brings conductors and orchestras from around the nation together to perform at the concert. The national conference also allows conductors to network. Holleman said he met Andrew Maxfield at the conference, the composer of a symphony piece that Hillsdale’s orchestra premiered last week. “I’ve gotten to know people all over the country and internationally,” Holleman said. “Steven Lubetkin, another composer that did a piece for my chamber choir, we met through CODA. It’s been really supportive for me.” Other duties include managing the email list for CODA as listserv moderator, Holleman said. “We have the resources of 400 college university orchestra conductors, and their wealth of knowledge where I can just shoot out an email, ask a question, and get all these answers or start a discussion or something,” Holleman said. He said being an orchestra director can be a lonely job since there is usually only one in a small region. According to Holleman, CODA is a way for him to make connections with other conductors and learn from them. “It gives me resources outside of the school,” Holleman said. “I mean, the reality we all know as conductors is in a certain small region we’re the only one. We rarely have somebody we can just go two offices down, knock on the door and talk to the other orchestra director and have give and take.” CODA’s creation in 2003 aimed to fill a networking hole between college conductors and orchestras around the nation. Holleman said he tapped into CODA’s resources as soon as he was aware of its existence.
Hillsdale College Security offered staff training after the Michigan State University shooting that left three students dead last month. “We are always looking for ways to increase our readiness for any emergency and working with staff and faculty to address their concerns,” said Associate Director of Security and Emergency Management Joe Kellam. Security hosted a training for staff on Monday, Feb. 27 at 1 p.m., according to Kellam. He said three years ago, he started security briefings for all new students, and all new hires cover the FBI’s “run, hide, fight” standards in a onehour briefing. “The training that’s coming forth now is potentially for ones that have missed it, that have been here longer than the 10 years of the current staff plan for security, or those who just want a refresher,” he said. “There are a lot of people hired eight years ago that don’t remember all that, so we’ve put together a presentation.” Kellam said security would record the training and post it online for faculty and staff. Chief Administrative Officer Rich Péwé said the college will have college employees review the training annually and continue training programs. Sophomore Esdras Blackwell said security does a good job, but he thinks it would be helpful to hold trainings more often.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of former United States President John F. Kennedy, spoke on the first night of the CCA Jack Cote | Collegian
Pharma CCA draws one of largest crowds in history By Ty Ruddy Collegian Freelancer More than 1,000 students and visitors attended “Big Pharma,” one of the most popular Center for Constructive Alternatives seminars in college history. The event, which was March 5-8 and the fourth CCA of the academic year, focused on COVID-19 vaccines, pharmaceutical companies, and their relation to the federal government. Speakers included Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recently hinted at a 2024 Democratic presidential campaign. “More than 220 students enrolled, and almost 900 friends of the college attended the event,” said Matt Bell, executive director of programs. “I think the timeliness of the topic, with the current controversies surrounding Big Pharma, made it popular.” Kennedy, author of “The Real Anthony Fauci,” spoke on Sunday about Anthony Fauci, who served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the American public health establishment. In 2001, Fauci became the head of bioweapon development, which always includes the manufacturing of vaccines, Kennedy said. He claimed that during the Obama administration, three viruses escaped Fauci’s lab and, denying an appeal from the president to shut the
operation down, he moved the project to Wuhan. Big Pharma companies capture lobbyists who protect them from pollution charges, he added. Other speakers discussed the line between operation of private businesses and necessary government intervention in the public health sector. Jordan Schachtel, an independent investigative journalist, discussed on Tuesday the collaboration between the federal government and the pharmaceutical companies that have released COVID-19 vaccines. “Pfizer has been interlinked with the federal government in ways that still kind of remain unexplained,” Schachtel said. “The U.S. government also jointly owns the Moderna vaccine.” Naomi Wolf, CEO of the Daily Clout, spoke on the medical and legal content of the Pfizer documents. Ordered for release in January 2022 by a Texas judge, these documents contain information on the COVID-19 vaccine that was available to the FDA and Pfizer — but not the American public — during trials of the vaccine and immediately following its rollout. When the records first emerged last summer, thousands were released per week and those without proper medical and legal training could not have worked through them to a sufficient degree, according to Wolf. She called for a team
Music fraternity to split from nationals By Lauren Scott Assistant Editor Hillsdale’s men’s music fraternity Phi Mu Alpha is in the process of dissociating from its national headquarters and has changed its name to Alpha Mu Phi. “We realized our chapter’s values did not match the values of the national fraternity,” Vice President of Alpha Mu Phi and sophomore Stephen Berntson said. A majority of the chapter morally disagreed with some of the “secret stuff ” in the fraternity, Berntson said. “There was a moral issue with a lot of the brothers,” he said Professor of Music and faculty adviser of Alpha Mu Phi James Holleman said he was a member of Phi Mu Alpha when he was a student at
Michigan State University. He said Phi Mu Alpha has had an active chapter on Hillsdale’s campus since the early 1990s. He said there was a split from nationals in the early 2000s, and the result was the formation of Mu Alpha. “I think that severing our ties with nationals is a prudent decision for our campus, at this time,” Holleman said. Alpha Mu Phi Secretary and sophomore Jack Walker said the fraternity’s attachment to nationals has been weak the past few years, but the idea of breaking away was not presented until fall 2022. Berntson said last fall the majority of the fraternity realized they had a role to fulfill at Hillsdale and can easily fulfill that role without nationals.
See AMΦ A2
of professionals to boil down the language in the documents, and more than 2,500 across the world rose to the challenge. “Some of the results are scary. For example, Pfizer told women not to get pregnant during the trial stages. Of the 270 women who did, Pfizer lost the records of 234 of them and 80% of them lost babies from either spontaneous abortion or miscarriage,” Wolf said. In his 2020 book, “Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America,” journalist Gerald Posner gives a comprehensive history of the American pharmaceutical industry, from its origins as a private sector to its relatively recent explosion in the 1960s when famed psychiatrist Arthur Sackler began to market drugs on a large scale to increase company profit. “I know it’s a fine line — the line between private business and public health — but as long as we have companies serving both Wall Street and Washington primarily, patient health takes the backseat,” Posner said in his speech on Tuesday. The mingling of science and public policy has raised questions about ethics and perverse incentives for pharmaceutical companies, according to Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy Allison Postell, who spoke at the faculty roundtable on Wednesday. “One of the questions I would raise is ‘what is the point and purpose of drugs?’ The
criticism of the Sackler family is that profit went ahead of patience, right? That’s not to say profit is bad, but health always needs to be the goal in medicine,” Postell said.“We want profit to be the proper reward for serving people. The argument is that there are just really bad incentive structures for Big Pharma.” Kelli Kazmier, assistant professor of chemistry, also spoke on the panel Wednesday evening. She discussed the issue of trust raised by many speakers over the course of the seminar. “I was mostly deeply sad because there seemed to be a pretty toxic mix of general misunderstanding and distrust,” Kazmier said. “Science is not inherently easy, right? You have to be willing to trust. We actually talk about this a lot in the scientific community about what we can do to better communicate things. And I don’t know that there are any really great options.” Postell said students hoping to work in pharmaceuticals should consider how they can best influence the industry. “Pharmacology students should be trained to see their expertise as contributing to patient welfare, and ethical panels should guide companies to avoid overvaluing or undervaluing risks,” Postell said. “Hopefully, the liberal education students receive here will inspire them to enter Big Pharma and improve it.”
Voting to open for senior class officers After nominating four candidates per senior class officer position, rising seniors will begin voting for officers on Monday, March 20. All members of the junior class may vote for one candidate per position. Below are the students on the ballot for each position, according to Senior Class Officer Adviser Kayla Wright.
President
Vice President
Secretary
Jonah Apel Claire Gaudet Joseph Perez Caleb Sampson
Michael Bachmann Brooke Hillis Victoria Kelly Konrad Verbaarschott
Hannah Allen Elizabeth Dickinson Phoebe Johnston Mary Ann Powers
Treasurer
Social Chair
Grace Hearne Luke Joyce Sarah Pataniczek Tristan Wertanzl
Mary Clare Hamilton Benjamin Hinrichs Holly Stover Emma Widmer