The independent newspaper of Washington University in St. Louis since 1878 THURSDAY, AUGUST 31, 2023
VOLUME 145, NO. 1
WWW.STUDLIFE.COM
NAVIGATING INTRODUCTION CLASSES
FIRST DAY PROFILES Checking in with students on the first day of the fall semester. (Photo on pg 8)
Upperclassmen give advice on how to navigate 100-level courses. (Scene, pg 4)
EXCITEMENT PLUS EXPERIENCE
Led by a group of graduate students, there are high hopes for football going into this season. (Sports, pg 7)
Missouri ban on gender-affirming care goes into effect AVI HOLZMAN MANAGING NEWS EDITOR Missouri laws SB39 and SB49 took effect this past Monday. Both are facing lawsuits from multiple organizations. SB39 makes it illegal for students at all public, private, and charter schools to play sex-specific sports that do not match the gender they were assigned at birth. SB49 bans the new administration of “cross-sex hormones” or pubertyblocking drugs for minors, incarcerated people, and people who use Medicaid; however, those who were receiving treatment before Aug. 28 remain eligible. Washington University professors with expertise in transgender studies believe that the ban will have a profound impact on both the university and the wider Missouri LGBTQ+ community. At the moment, the University has not released an official statement responding to the ban. Some students have reported feeling disheartened by the University administration’s lack of public acknowledgement. Vice Chancellor for Marketing and Communications Julie Flory sent a statement about the ban to Student Life. “[We] remain committed to providing compassionate, family-centered care to all of the patients and families we serve,” the University said. They said the Center has reviewed all allegations before determining that “physicians and staff have treated patients according to the existing standard of care.” Sophomore Penny Thaman, co-president of Transcending Gender (TG), a student-run group that offers a safe space for individuals who wish to discuss and find support for their gender identity or expression, was one student disappointed by the University’s lack of public statement responding to the state ban. “I don’t feel like the
administration is doing everything they could to really support trans rights,” she said. She was specifically upset with the fact that Chancellor Martin willingly let public officials investigate the WashU Trasngender Center (WUTC) earlier this year. The notion that this ban is a part of a larger political agenda is an opinion shared by multiple university professors, including Brown School Lecturer Elizabeth Fuch, who also serves on the University LGBTQ Council. Fuch believes there is a chance that full bans on gender-affirming care could pass into law in the future. “Some entity is really interested in homogenizing further the United States,” she said. Fuch, who was a lobbyist for trans rights in Missouri, helped escort transgender children to the state capitol in an attempt to make politicians aware of who was affected by signing anti-trans legislation into law. Medical bans have a direct impact on Fuch’s students. She once saw one of her students coloring a protest sign which read “Hitler started with trans people too.” Fuch said that it was “the most surreal moment of [her] life.” Brown School Professor Paz Galupo studies queer resilience and BIPOC members of the transgender community. When Galupo started at WashU earlier this semester, they were interested in seeing how many families with at least one LGBTQ+ member are leaving Missouri due to legislation like SB39 and SB49. Initially they thought it would be hard to find people who were fleeing – but it wasn’t. “You talk to anybody, you know, within the community and everybody has a story about people who are making these really heartwrenching decisions for their family,” said Galupo. Galupo believes that these families are choosing to leave because “they are not having any
SAM POWERS | STUDENT LIFE
Laws that restrict gender-affirming care in Missouri passed on August 28. Washington University has not yet released a public statement addressing the ban.
of their basic needs met,” and “can’t keep their kids safe.” Galupo sees laws like these, and the politicians who write them, as having the potential to fracture the LGBTQ+ community, and cause “lesbian and gay individuals [to] want to distance themselves from the trans community.” According to them, the politicians have been intentional in “isolating trans issues as if we’re not talking about human rights, and if we’re not talking about the right to autonomy of everybody’s body.” One thing that has really stuck with Galupo is the fact that these transgender bans are actually passing in state legislatures. Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Tamsin Kimoto spoke about the ban in Missouri specifically and said that other states are viewing it as a legal “litmus test.” Kimoto agrees with Galupo
and sees the issue of transgender health as part of a larger medical and political debate. “I think what a lot of people have tended to miss in thinking about the political significance of something like Roe v. Wade is that it wasn’t just a landmark case for abortion. It was a landmark case for the right to privacy,” they said. Teaching Professor for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Professor Amy Eisen Cislo said that the part of SB49 that prohibits prisoners who weren’t receiving gender-affirming care before Aug. 28 from doing so now seemed like “cruel and unusual punishment” and a violation of Title IX. She described this ban as being the work of politicians pushing an agenda rather than doing what constituents actually want. “There are people who aren’t even sure what the legislature is trying to ban and some people are believing the false narrative…
Faculty implement range of guidelines to address AI’s effect on academic integrity
ILLUSTRATION BY RYAN DAVIS
JULIA ROBBINS INVESTIGATIVE NEWS EDITOR This is the first full academic year for professors and students to contend with the academic integrity implications of generative AI. In the past, students could plagiarize information, but their work could be scanned by highly accurate plagiarism detection tools. These tools could also pinpoint which parts of the content were taken from other parts of the internet. AI detectors are unable to
pinpoint why they f lag content as potentially plagiarized because they learn to make their decisions based on data from other pieces of writing. This leads to a higher rate of false positive f lagging for AI work, and makes it nearly impossible for a professor to ever be sure that a given piece of work was plagiarized with AI. The academic integrity section of the “Syllabus Resources and Template Language” document that faculty receive states that “in all academic work, the ideas and contributions of others (including generative
artificial intelligence) must be appropriately acknowledged and work that is presented as original must be, in fact, original.” How professors take it from there is up to them. Syllabi run the spectrum of how much to permit or ban the technology, with little to no way to enforce those bans. Jennifer Smith, Vice Provost for Educational Initiatives, said that professors should assume that students are going to be using ChatGPT and that nobody she’s spoken with is “banning generative AI,” although she added that might not be the case for all professors. Smith said that beyond banning directly copying and pasting a chat bot’s direct response to a prompt, which professors might be able to f lag on their own as plagiarized, it is futile to ban the technology. She said a philosophy colleague argued that enacting an unenforceable ban undermines the rule of law. “When you make rules that are fundamentally unenforceable, you diminish the value of rules in general,” Smith said, summing up her point. Turnitin is still being used on
Canvas as a way to try and catch academic integrity violations, including AI related ones, with the caveat that professors should not rely solely on the technology to assume that someone has used AI. “I don’t want students to be freaked out that they’re going to get falsely accused of using AI,” Smith said. “That’s why we ended up in this middle place where that’s something that might alert a faculty member to take a closer look at a student’s work to see if it shows any of the other signs of use of AI.” Some professors are letting their students use AI, but are requiring that the students let them know. Dr. Joseph Loewenstein, Director of the Humanities Digital Workshop and the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities, said he’s asking students to tell him when they’ve used AI, in part to help him pinpoint why something in their work might be inaccurate. “I’m going to encourage students to tell me if they’re using it, but frequently I won’t
SEE AI, PAGE 3
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[that] trans and drag are all of these scary, evil, gender-bending bodily changes that disrupt normative society,” she said. She highlighted that knowing someone who is transgender can make “you just feel threatened by the legislation,” but that if someone knows nothing about transgender studies they could be more likely to believe “false narrative[s]” of politicians as facts. Looking ahead, Cislo has one message for all students, especially those concerned about this legislation. “Vote! Vote. That would be my message. Make sure you understand the issues and vote for people who will advocate for what you think best. If you don’t vote, you have no say,” she said. “And if enough people who care about LGBTQ+ rights care to elect representatives who have that same concern, we’re not going to be dealing with this.”
New restaurants introduced into dining scene ZACH TRABITZ JUNIOR NEWS EDITOR Washington University has introduced five new local restaurants to campus, while also changing pre-existing dining locations such as the Danforth University Center (DUC) and Bear’s Den (BD) dining halls. The new restaurants include Beast Craft BBQ and LaJoy’s Coffee Cafe in the Schnucks Pavilion, Collins Farm in Anheuser Busch Hall, Corner 17 in Olin Library, and The Fattened Caf in McKelvey Hall. The University is prioritizing bringing local Missouri or St. Louis restaurants on campus, in a similar model to Coffee Stamp in Hillman Hall. The restaurants are also all women or minority owned. Director for Dining Services Andrew Watling explained why the University has taken on these local restaurants.
SEE DINING, PAGE 3