University’s own report card in need of much improvement

Originally published December 15, 2009 for the Daily Illini’s fall 2009 semester-in-review edition.

Here we are at the end of another semester, final exams the only thing standing between students and their grades. After agonizing over last assignments, projects, and now tests, we still get to play the torturous waiting game until grades are posted.

Thankfully, the University doesn’t have to wait for its report card. I’ve taken the liberty of compiling some of the biggest areas of concern this fall.

So, without further ado, U of I’s final semester grades:

Efficiency: D.

Notes: Hey, remember Lincoln Hall, that building people used years ago for class or something? It’s been closed for so long most people can’t remember when they had a class in there. Of course, the building was closed for important reasons—namely, sitting unused until the legislature and Gov. Quinn sort of maybe approved the idea of funding for renovations in July and December 2009. The university began relocating classes in the fall of 2008, doesn’t plan to begin renovations until 2010, and won’t be finished until the fall semester of 2012.

Integrity: F.

Notes: Ex-Chancellor Herman sent out a mass e-mail way back in May the day the Chicago Tribune broke their “Clout Goes to College” series, which publicly revealed the existence of a clout list used in the university’s admissions process. The scandal continued into the fall, rocking student and university legislative bodies way more than the mostly-apathetic student body.

At some point, many of the members of the Board of Trustees got the hint and resigned. At least Joe White knew when to throw in the towel.

But not Herman! He hung on until the bitter end, and for his efforts, was reward with a year of paid sabbatical and a cushy teaching gig with a $240,000 salary.

The moral of this story: you can make big bucks tarnishing the reputation of a public institution founded as a land-grant university. You can also make big bucks being an untouchable Illinois legislator, none of whom were punished for their explicit involvement in the clout mess.

Budgeting Skills: F.

Notes: Speaking of Herman’s professorial salary, let’s consider the university’s ability to manage its finances.

We can apparently afford $115,000 paychecks and greater for people like Niranjan Shah’s (the ex-president of the Board of Trustees) future son-in-law, who was going to be employed here for less than nine months. But we still needed to raise student fees in November for the next academic year, and though the tuition rate is still a nebulous issue right now, I can guarantee that next fall’s new students will face a price hike.

Not to mention, of course, that since the Graduate Employees’ Organization’s contract ended in August (and well before), the University argued that it could not afford any increase in salary for TAs and GAs.

Knowing that the request for increased payment would anger people without adequate information on the strike situation (read: undergraduates), the University purposely argued that the proposed wage increase was the primary issue at hand.

Ouch, U of I. Sounds like you’ve got some room for improvement—no Dean’s List this semester. Try again in the spring.

Chelsea is a senior in LAS.

Strike at UI to have long-lasting effects

Originally published November 19, 2009.

It’s been a crazy week on campus, but ultimately one that offered an unprecedented experience for University of Illinois students. Regardless of the many different opinions expressed by students, faculty, and staff, one of the most important things to take away from the GEO strike is understanding—understanding of what a strike means, its protocol, its causes, and its effects.

Like many students, especially American ones, I had never experienced or even really seen a strike prior to Monday. I can only remember that when I was much younger, the teachers at my elementary school went on strike.

Being somewhere between four and eight years old, I was more curious than upset. I liked not having any class for days on end. I had no idea what was at stake for my instructors or what was even happening.

Since then, strikes continued to remain only on the periphery of my life, just stories on the news. That is, until recently, as the possibility of a GEO strike loomed large while the University continued to act as though ignoring the problem they created would make it disappear.

As my TAs discussed strike and picket procedures last week, the whole idea was suddenly both wild and real.

Walking out at 7:45 Monday morning to rally in the rain threw off my sense of time, as if I’d stepped into an effort to stop it. In a way it was, as graduate employees marched, shouted, carried signs and played makeshift instruments on the main quad, halting their respective classes. When Tuesday afternoon rolled around I felt like I was in an endless Saturday and had to remind myself of my normal schedule.

The sounds of chanting and homemade noisemakers drifted around the edges of the quad, easy to hear as I passed its south side on my way to a relocated class. It was exciting and disconcerting.

The noise was a very distant cousin to the din of extreme political action, like rioting. It was the softest murmur of violence potential within any opinionated activity. Demonstrations like this, harmless as they may seem, are where struggles—both physical and political—begin.

And yet it’s an impressive feat, equal to the swift, peaceful trade-out of one elected official for another, standard practice in the U.S. but sometimes notoriously difficult to enact elsewhere. A strike is democracy in action.

And that’s cause for excitement—people working hard to organize and spread information, forcing others to think critically about their own opinions.

With some of that thinking came support from a variety of places—from faculty here and across the nation; from graduate employee unions at other institutions; from other local unions; from undergraduate students and university staff and from people in the community. Classes were cancelled, relocated, and voluntarily not attended.

In the hours of picketing Monday and Tuesday, it was impressive to see a community mobilized on so many fronts.

While a strike is never a desirable outcome, witnessing our thankfully very brief one isn’t something I’ll forget anytime soon. Its execution and the factors leading up to it (as well as its still-unfolding aftermath) offer a huge opportunity for learning about the nature of contractual labor agreements, community organization and what a strike can be.

In addition, this strike is extreme encouragement for students to be aware of what’s going on around them. It’s easy to ignore things on this campus and in this community, and the strike fought our tendencies toward ignorance and apathy. Sometimes it’s the things that seem small that can have the greatest and most direct impact not only our education, but our lives.

Most importantly, at the heart of a strike regarding tuition waivers is the ongoing battle over the affordability and privatization of college education. This is only the beginning of that war, and a signal that we need to do more than simply pay attention. We must act.

Chelsea is a senior in LAS.

You’ve gotta fight for your right to get an education

Originally published October 29, 2009.

We’ve spent months fighting over facets of the college experience, from the clout scandal to Illinois’s MAP grant funding to the DREAM Act. At the heart of all of these issues lies a single question: do we have a right to a college education?

We’ve spent months fighting over facets of the college experience, from the clout scandal to Illinois’s MAP grant funding to the DREAM Act. At the heart of all of these issues lies a single question: do we have a right to a college education?

When I use the word “right,” I mean a choice that everyone has access to, in which their individual merit is the only factor that determines their attendance at a particular university. Two of the greatest impediments to this, as we’ve seen over the course of the summer through this fall, are political influence and money.

Since the clout scandal broke months ago, apathetic onlookers seem to express the same complaint.

Whether in regard to people’s obsession with forcing trustees to take the blame or to the sense of futility that things could ever change, they respond with the point that many schools have clout lists.

While forcing a good chunk of the Board of Trustees to resign, including Joe White and Richard Herman, may relieve a little of our immediate frustration, the problem won’t be corrected until we demand that the state legislators involved pay the price for essentially starting everything.

If we truly believe in working toward fairness in higher education—that is, insisting that dedicated minds have a right to attend college based on that academic dedication alone—then we need to step up our response and set the example for other public institutions governed by unfair political influence.

The bigger obstacle (one further aggravated by state government in Illinois) is money, as we’ve seen in the recent fight to re-establish funding for Illinois’s MAP grants. Public response to the under-funding of the program over the summer finally pushed Governor Quinn to allot another $205 million for grants two weeks ago. As the state takes out a loan to pay for the expense, people are voicing their concerns about how we’ll manage to pay it back.

Anyone attending college in the last several years has likely noticed a continuous increase in tuition rates, brought on in part by legislative efforts to keep costs down for students. To compensate for flat-lining funding from other sources (in our case, state government), universities jack up their prices, increasing the need for grant and scholarship funding.

Ice that expensive cake with the skyrocketing cost of textbooks and you’ve got a dessert so pricey that many in even the upper middle-class have a hard time footing the bill, to say nothing of the impact it has on lower-income students’ college prospects.

It’s impossible not to recognize that race and ethnicity are tied into this battle against college cost. While certainly not all prospective lower-income students identify as racial or ethnic minorities or vice-versa, the exorbitant price of attending a university plays a serious role in determining the make-up of a college population. Increasing costs and dwindling financial aid resources make college a privilege, not a right.

In some circumstances, the U.S. outright denies people a chance to attend—people who, though technically undocumented, have lived here most of their lives.

This is the problem the DREAM Act aims to correct by providing conditional residency to those who qualify. But if it’s not one thing, it’s another: even if the legislation passes, these students would be ineligible for federal aid.

Greater social, historical, and cultural factors have established much of America’s financial landscape, and it would be naïve to say that making college truly affordable for all would be a simple solution to enact—or that it is a solution able to level out the inequalities created by those factors. But the issues we’ve faced as of late can and must be opportunities to make headway in the struggle to refocus the college experience from a discriminatory business to a truly higher, broader, and better education.

Chelsea is a senior in LAS.

The real world offers a break from college

Originally published October 22, 2009.

Introducing yourself as a senior in college usually garners one of two responses: “Are you having fun?” or “What are you doing after graduation?”

I’ve made the most of college and I have some vague ideas about where I’m headed, like most other seniors would tell you. But part of me feels like what I need to do after graduating is relax from making the most of everything. Perhaps entering Professional Land will help.

It sounds strange to say that the real world promises to be a relaxing place. As we do the customary last-minute scrabble for employment and internship positions, meeting with counselors at the Career Center for the first time since we got to college and trying to tell ourselves exactly what we want to do with the rest of our lives, the real world seems like the looming shadow of doom coming ever closer.

While I understand everything won’t be sunshine and ponies after undergrad, college is tougher than many give it credit for. No one expects you to do a two-floor beer bong at an office job or study for three exams the same week you have a major essay due.

Then again, no one gives you a free week-long vacation in March, either.

But seriously, while many employers certainly do expect you to get work done five days a week without huge summer and winter breaks, there’s something to be said for normalcy.

You walk into work at a set time every day, accomplish as much as you can during that time frame, and then leave it there when it’s time to clock out.

Unlike classes, your time commitment isn’t scattered over the course of your day, sometimes running from early morning into the evening with only awkward breaks in between.

While some employers definitely differ, most don’t ask that you come into work and take weekly if not daily assignments home with you to be done before your next shift. No one expects you to pull an all-nighter to accomplish designated tasks.

It’s certainly not to say that college instructors expect this kind of desperate action, but students get so caught up in “making the most” of being at school that we often forget important things: that coming to a university is about getting a particular kind of education, and that “making the most” of something should entail having fun, not being stressed.

At a university that boasts one of the largest networks of student organizations, this is especially true. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by all of the offerings at Quad Day and within the Champaign-Urbana community as far as your interests or personal goals. There are a wealth of opportunities to be had, and sometimes we push ourselves to participate in things that are supposed to be recreational without realizing how it will interact with our ability to do coursework.

Acting in that play and working part-time sounded great until you hit midterms and tech week at the same time.

Having money to do the things you like around town can help you make the most of your time and offset college costs. It might also give you great stuff to put on a resume.

But sometimes it’s another thing to throw on the “making the most of things” pile, especially if you work in some place like University Housing, where your home is your place of work. Some days, it just seems like your routine never ends.

Will I miss my undergrad days? Definitely. It’s a unique time in life.

But so are the experiences I’m headed for after leaving, after getting my footing in the real world.

I don’t think I’ll land some dream job that immediately puts me on the road to a magical easy life.

But I’m looking forward to getting back the pauses in life, the precious time when nothing happens, and nothing is expected.

Chelsea is a senior in LAS.

Let the farmer’s market convince you to eat your vegetables

Originally published June 29, 2009.

Farmers’ markets boast a wealth of interesting sights and sounds for anyone willing to crawl out of bed by eight in the morning: one-man bands (a surprising number of which tend to include banjos), artfully-shaped bonsais, and lines a mile long waiting not for concert tickets or driver’s license renewal, but for fresh strawberries.

The conjured scent and phantom taste of those berries brings me to the most important aspect of a market comprised primarily, of course, of farmers. The produce from local farms is not only one of the best parts of summer and early autumn, but is also a flavorful epiphany (and celebration) regarding the “growing up” of our tastes.

I can remember countless people new to college who, having secured the freedom to choose their diet by living on campus, ate the same junky comfort food every day.

A la carte dining plans facilitate this much more than the buffet-style dining of UIUC, but it’s always possible to find something to satisfy the desire for something uninventive and unhealthy in dining halls.

Much of this comes from a desire for at least one aspect of the “college experience” to remain static. A hot, tasty meal goes a long way towards making a day or even a whole week in a new place more tolerable, even (or perhaps especially) when it’s bad for you.

In the meantime, either the hesitance to jump on the Try New Things bandwagon or the obliviousness to nutritional knowledge tends to keep vegetables at arm’s length for many students.

We come to campus with established dietary likes and dislikes and stick to them at all costs.

In my case, they took the form of an avowed hatred of broccoli and asparagus and to a lesser extent, bell peppers and tomatoes. I do know people who refuse to eat things they despise no matter how they’re prepared. But I mostly just couldn’t eat these banes of my taste buds’ existence on their own.

And yet, the produce offered at farmer’s markets looked incredibly appealing, perhaps even delicious. Seeing such beautiful, unique goods was completely different than the homogenous, bland “perfection” of the grocery store stuff, imported and out of season.

Of course, learning to like foods has as much to do with preparation as it does growing practices.

Veggies tend not to taste so great when they’ve been cooked to the consistency of mush in mass quantities, as is often the case in dining halls.

Not only does it completely change the taste, it also eliminates most of the nutritional contents that make eating vegetables necessary.

Eating lightly steamed broccoli was completely new for me. The plastic-bag flavor of the frozen variety and camouflage green color were nowhere to be found. The delicate tanginess of ripe local tomatoes replaced the watery smushiness of giant store-bought ones, as with red peppers. I even learned that in addition to tasting better, red bell peppers are actually better for you than their unripe green counterparts.

And, in an unexpected coup of my previous feelings about veggies, I went back for seconds of asparagus grilled briefly with lemon juice and black pepper.

For all of you out there who swear six ways to Sunday that you could never like spinach, radishes, or kohlrabi, do yourselves a favor. Do whatever it takes to get out of bed this Saturday and get to the Urbana farmer’s market.

Buy fresh, buy local, and don’t forget to enjoy the banjo music.

Chelsea is a senior in LAS.