for The Roddey McMillan Record
On September 22 the walkway between the West Center and Digs filled with students of all races to pay tribute to the citizens who have lost their lives due to police brutality. Ignite and Visible set up the vigil and began the program by handing out candles to all of the attendees. The vigil was brought on by the recent shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, who was shot by a police officer while waiting to pick his children up from school. The shooting is reminiscent of ones from the past like in Ferguson, but this one was especially important to Winthrop students because it happened in our backyard. “That is right down the road.. that is home for many of us,” said Meagan Holland, one of the speakers and the person who came up with the idea for the vigil. After multiple heartfelt speeches, there was a moment of silence, a commemorative dance, spoken poetry and a song of mourning. The idea of the vigil started when Holland saw what was going on in Charlotte. She decided that she had had enough. That was when she contacted Visible and asked them to help her set up the event. “I got tired of seeing hashtags and seeing innocent lives taken...enough is enough,” Holland said. Renee King, the Public Relations chair of Visible, pointed out that the vigil was also a way to unite the campus in the midst of unrest. “This is one step closer to making a united campus and this is only the beginning,” King said. As with any cause, equality starts at home. Holland said she feels that the many organizations on campus that strive for equality are important and in order for students to take steps to make their campus more united, they need to get involved in such organizations. “Students need to get involved with more organizations on campus that are dealing with matters such as these,” Holland said. However, King said she feels that taking steps towards a united campus and world can be done in small steps as well. “Talk to each other. Don’t just stay in your cliques with the people you know. Say hello to somebody you don’t know,” King said.
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for The Roddey McMillan Record
In this election cycle, the majority in congress shifted and we now have an overwhelming majority of republicans in the senate. With this comes the usually territory of efforts to make government smaller, defund planned parenthood and other things that typically fall under the republican platform, but so far the republicans that have taken office have been really adamant about repealing the Affordable Care Act. Initially, hearing the republicans speaking about repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act did not come as a shock to anybody. The Affordable Care Act is not by any means perfect and of course since it is a law that a democrat made, the republicans are naturally going to be more critical of it than they would be if it was created by a republican. The part that shocked the country was their replacement for the this health care system that helped make health insurance accessible to millions of people. In the most basic sense, the republicans do not have a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. They have a lot of scattered ideas and what Paul Ryan refers to as a framework of a new plan that the GOP claims will be better than what we have now. The details are supposed to be discussed more by congressional committees but for now, we get to watch the end of healthcare for millions while the congress sits around throwing around ideas like they have all the time in the world to negotiate and argue while people’s health is at stake. The problem here is not that republicans want to change our current healthcare system, because it is true that it has had its problems, but rather the problem is that they want to entirely get rid of a system that has helped people of all walks of life remain healthy- and in some cases alive- with no way to effectively replace it and make it better. However, the GOP have come up with a few ideas that they feel will benefit Americans and help fix the healthcare system. They have one idea that is similar to the idea of subsidies under the ACA but without income limits and gives them a wider variety of plans to chose from. They want to expand the use of private health savings accounts, charge older people more, create stated mandated “high risk pools” to lower deductibles for healthier patients and restructure medicare and medicaid. While many of these ideas seem to help the problems we are currently having with healthcare, they aren’t an entire healthcare system in and of itself. Obamacare can not be replaced if there is nothing to replace it, that will leave America in a worse situation than it was before this law was passed, and it will put a lot of our citizens at risk. For the sake of our country, the GOP in congress need to put partisan politics aside and do what is best for the country as a whole. for The Roddey McMillan Record
Hazing is defined as the use of humiliating or strenuous tasks as a way to initiate somebody into an organization. Most cases of hazing that is seen on the news is hazing within sororities or fraternities. According to Caitlan Walzer, a junior at Winthrop and a member of sorority, hazing is any activity that makes someone feel uncomfortable. “Doing anything against your own will that somebody tells you to do whether it be in the form of drinking excessively doing things to your body that you are not comfortable with basically just anything that goes beyond your idea of what you find appropriate,” Walzer said. Hazing is against the law and is a serious offense at many campuses across the country, Winthrop University being one of them. Winthrop’s hazing policy states that any situation that causes mental or physical discomfort, humiliation, or ridicule is punishable. These parameters include, but are not limited to, assault, forcing exhaustion or fatigue, nudity or another form of distasteful appearance, and tasks that interrupt with academic activity, used as a way to initiate someone into an organization. Winthrop students are warned of this policy well before they are even inducted into greek life. “When you go through recruitment they tell you that there is no tolerance for hazing on this campus so i knew about it before i went through recruitment,” Walzer said. Winthrop follows the state law guidelines, making it illegal to assist or conduct hazing, and it is also illegal to not report on hazing if you are aware of its existence. Winthrop University has proven in the past that it does persecute those who haze. In 2013, the Winthrop chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha was suspended due to substantial evidence that students had been hazing new members. The fraternity has since been taken off of suspension. Hazing has been considered a big problem around college campuses for many years now. According to to national study of student hazing, around half of college students experience hazing in a range of different clubs and organizations. The study states that the most hazing happens in varsity athletic sports, where 74% of students stated that they have experienced hazing. Despite these statistics, it seems that sororities and fraternities are the organizations that are most known for this practice. Even so, Winthrop’s hazing policy is meant to make students feel safe to join a sorority or fraternity, knowing that hazing is not tolerated on this campus. “Hazing has been in the media for so many years and it has always shown the negativity of greek life. Many people believe that if you are going to become greek you're going to be hazed, but here at Winthrop hazing is not a concern,” Walzer said. for The Johnsonian
When it comes to police brutality, the statistics are sobering. Seven hundred and eighty two people have been fatally shot by police in 2017, according to the Washington Post. Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people, according to Mapping Police Violence. Additionally, more unarmed African Americans are fatally shot; 30 percent of black victims were unarmed compared to 21 percent of white victims. How Winthrop students are affected Anthony Mims, a senior at Winthrop and National Panhellenic Council president had an altercation with law enforcement where he experienced excessive force. “My first time being pulled over was two years ago on Highway 26 in Charleston. An officer got behind me but did not flash lights or sirens until I passed the semi-truck blocking the lane I was attempting to merge into. I tried to pull off on the exit because it was 5:00, raining and I didn't feel safe. The second I parked the car, several more cars pulled up and officers came out with guns drawn,” Mims said. Unaware of what he had done wrong, Mims said the officers began to yell commands at him, and then they proceeded to strip-search him and placed him in the back of their vehicle while they spoke to his friend, who had been in the car with him. “They have her in cuffs and talk for an hour before coming to the car and telling me what I was even pulled over for. They said I was pushing 100 mph even though we were in traffic. They searched the car so well that they even picked apart my sandwich,” Mims said. Adolphus Belk, Ph.D., a Winthrop political science professor who specializes in race and ethnic politics, said some Winthrop students are affected by these instances in other ways. “I think about Keith Lamont Scott,” Belk said. “I had a student in this department who was his niece.” Keith Lamont Scott was a black man killed in Charlotte by police and, according to the Charlotte Observer, the officer was acquitted. Police brutality can even affect those who aren't directly in contact with an officer. “It’s also possible to suffer emotional trauma from being bombarded by all of these cases. The community is the victim. Because of this sense of linked fate, this connection that people of color -- that African Americans -- have to other African Americans, they feel, ‘it didn't have to be me, for it to be me,’” Belk said. What Winthrop is doing about it Winthrop has had a host of events that deal with the issue of community policing and relations from multiple perspectives. In the fall of 2016, Winthrop students organized a “die-in” at the DiGiorgio Student Center where they laid on the ground for seven minutes and 15 seconds to represent the 715 people that had, at that point in the year, been killed by law enforcement officers. In the fall of 2017, the Winthrop College Republicans held a police rally where the president of the organization, Sydney Hankinson, said the purpose was to show law enforcement some appreciation. “We feel that law enforcement is kind of underappreciated right now,” Hankinson said. “There are always going to be a few bad apples in the batch, but in general, none of us believe that police are bad or out to hurt people. In general, they are willing to give their lives to keep people safe and they deserve appreciation for that.” Winthrop also organized an event called “Palmetto Focus: Policing and Race,” a panel featuring Belk, Bakari Sellers, an attorney and media analyst for CNN, and Jackie Swindler, the director of the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy. They discussed the issue of excessive police force and possible solutions for it. Nolan Worthy, a sophomore computer science major, said the event assured him everyone can work together to come closer to a solution. “People from South Carolina have the ability to improve police-community relations in the state and across the country. The panelists each spoke about the actions they were taking to do so and encouraged the students in attendance to take actions to do the same,” Worthy said. There will be another panel on police relations in February as a part of Winthrop’s Leadership and Social Change series. Winthrop University Police Department on Police Brutality Winthrop’s interim chief of police, Kenneth Scoggins, said he thinks that Winthrop Police has a great relationship with the Winthrop community. “I have never seen a time when we have had a contentious relationship with anyone, and we will continue to do whatever we can to improve on an already good relationship,” Scoggins said. Scoggins said Winthrop police officers do three to four months of extra field training, in addition to the 12 weeks required by the South Carolina Police Academy training, to ensure that the officers are prepared for any situation. Diversity training is also emphasized. “Taking into consideration that we are policing and providing services to such a diverse campus, it is really important to us that we have that diversity training. We typically have additional diversity training yearly,” Scoggins said. Belk has hosted a training session specifically for WUPD officers as part of their diversity training, in which he said it became apparent that communication is important. “The problem is that members of the Winthrop community are not necessarily aware of what's involved in providing police services on this campus and how much work they do to promote public safety and solve crimes when they happen. So, the police have to do a better job of communicating that information and then people have to do a better job of receiving and understanding it,” Belk said. Scoggins said he wants “students, faculty and staff to understand that Winthrop Police is here for everybody.” Can this issue be solved? Some believe that police brutality doesn't exist. The Associated Press reports that 33 percent of adults say police brutality is not an issue. Belk said this is a form of denial. “For some people, it is a matter of dissonance; they do not want to accept something negative about an institution that they have been taught to respect,” Belk said. Hankinson said most officers are good and the divide on the issue is because of the media. Hankinson said the case where Walter Scott was killed in North Charleston, South Carolina “was the case of just one individual just screwing up and getting punished for it.” “I think in general there might be some people who abuse their power but that is not why most people join law enforcement. I think a lot of the divide is media portrayal,” Hankinson said. Belk said Americans need to accept and address the problem in order to solve it. “These things happen in this country and when these things happen, the people who end up laying in their own blood and dying tend to be people of color,” Belk said. “We need better people going into law enforcement, we need better training for them to deal with all of these situations that they are going to be facing on the field then on top of all of those things, better relationships between law enforcement officials and members of the community.” Many would argue that this is an issue which can’t be solved, but Belk said if that is true, it would be traumatic to society. “If it couldn't be solved, then what we are really saying is that there is a certain level of death that are we willing to take. As a professor, if I make a mistake, I can submit a grade change form or review an essay -- my mistakes don’t get buried. My mistakes don’t destroy communities and cause the loss of human lives,” Belk said. Scoggins said there is a lack of understanding that needs to be addressed. “I think our biggest impediment to good continuing relations is a lack of understanding,” Scoggins said. “I think that listening, learning about other people, other beliefs and other cultures is paramount to this topic. There is a lot of misunderstanding out there and I think the more that we try to learn and educate ourselves about those things, the better these issues become.” for The Johnsonian
Recently promoted to full-time professor, Melissa Reeves hopes to integrate her experiences with the Columbine and Sandy Hook shootings into her teaching. One of Winthrop’s own was a witness to the aftermath of the infamous Columbine and Sandy Hook shootings. Melissa Reeves, Ph.D has been promoted to a full-time position as an associate professor in psychology, and plans to use her experiences to benefit her students as she takes on her new role. Reeves has been at Winthrop for ten years, but this is the first year that she is here as a full time, tenure-track professor. She said that she decided to make the change because she “loves the focus on students and teaching. While research is important, my true passion really is teaching students and that student engagement piece which is what’s awesome about this university, because that is really the focal point.” Reeve’s specialty is in school crisis prevention, intervention and response. She said that this specialty grew out of her time working with the victims of the Columbine shooting. At the time, Reeves was a school psychologist in Denver, Colorado and after the shooting had occurred she and other school psychologists in the area were called upon to help the victims cope with the incident. “I was assigned to one of the local emergency rooms waiting areas to help some of the students that had been congregated and family members.Then, the following day, I was assigned to one of the elementary schools to help those students and staff members cope. That really kind of began my passion when we realized how underprepared all of us were. Even though I have a masters degree in counseling, crisis response is very different than counseling therapy and that is what really led into the prepare curriculum that I developed with some colleagues was realizing that some schools were very unprepared and unequipped to deal with crises in general,” Reeves said. The Prepare Curriculum is a curriculum that Reeves co-authored with other members of the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) that is designed to prepare people to deal with crises. The curriculum was inspired by the Columbine shooting, however Reeves said that “was on a magnitude that nobody could have predicted at the time, but our curriculum even covers suicides, car accidents, bus accidents, death by long term illness, a lot of different things and realizing that a lot of our training programs didn’t have those things in them.” Some of Reeves’ other accomplishments include being the former chair of the NASP School Safety and Response Committee and former President of the National Association of School Psychologists (2016-2017). Reeves is a nationally certified school psychologist, licensed special education teacher, licensed professional counselor and former district coordinator of social/emotional/behavioral services. Along with these accomplishments and her work with the Columbine victims, Reeves has and continues to work with some of the mothers who lost their children during the Sandy Hook shooting. “I do a lot of work with Michelle Gay who lost her daughter Josephine. We have done a lot of advocacy work, we have done a lot of professional development together, and she created her own foundation called Safe and Sound Schools with Alyssa Parker, another mom who lost her daughter. We are just really all about joining those parents and helping to promote school safety and crisis preparedness from a multidisciplinary perspective,” Reeves said. Reeves also travels nationally and internationally to share her curriculum with others, teaching people school crisis prevention, intervention and the impact of trauma on academic achievement. Her drive to work in psychology, especially with an emphasis on education, has grown out of a class Reeves took her senior year in high school. “It actually started in high school. I always just kind of had a passion for helping other people .When i was a senior in high school, I volunteered for a peer mentoring program where I mentored students in the special education so I really got into both psychology and special education,” she said. In terms of bringing her vast array of unique professional experience into her new job as a full time professor, Reeves said, “I really want to be able to do is to integrate my areas of expertise more into the undergraduate curriculum as well as the graduate school psychology curriculum. I would like to be able to eventually develop some specific courses in trauma and looking how that impacts social development, academic development and cognitive development. In that course I would really be able to bring in some of my expertise in the crisis and trauma arena into the curriculum and better equip our students that are going to be going out there to work in the education and mental health field to understand better the impact that that can have on so many different areas of development, the adult world and how that has an impact on their abilities to form relationships and in the occupational world and what that means. I want to bring a more worldly knowledge base into my teaching.” for The Johnsonian
6 S.C. Education Deans get together to reform acute teacher shortage Multiple College of Education deans from South Carolina have joined together to form a consortium to address issues in the education system in South Carolina, specifically teacher shortage. The six deans- from Winthrop University, College of Charleston, The Citadel, Francis Marion, University of South Carolina and Clemson- were called upon from the Tri-County Cradle to Career Collaborative, which is a collective impact site from the Charleston area. Jennie Rakestraw, Dean of the Richard W. Riley College of Education at Winthrop, said that she was asked to join the collaboration because of Winthrop’s reputation for having a large ollege of education as well as her other work with the state in education reform. “Winthrop is sort of known as the place to go if you are going to be a teacher, so we were included because we have a big teacher education program here. I have been involved in quite a bit of things involving teacher recruitment as well,” Rakestraw said. Rakestraw and John Peterson, Dean of the College of Education at USC, were also appointed by Governor Henry McMaster to serve on a teacher recruitment and retention committee that was legislated by the general assembly. Rakestraw and Peterson are required to present recommendations for how to fix the teacher shortage that the state is dealing with, and are using the discussions they have had with the other deans in that presentation. “The group of the six deans are continuing on meeting. The TCCC has sort of finished what it was going to do, we finished that statement last week and it went public last week. Dean Peterson and I presented that report to this committee last week, but then on this Monday the 6 deans are meeting again in Columbia and working together to talk about what we need to do to produce more teachers, and looking at particularly multiple innovative pathways to become a teacher,” Rakestraw said. Rakestraw said that the problems that she and Peterson presented to the committee included the number of teachers who are leaving their positions, as well as low enrollment. According to their findings, 6,500 teachers left their positions in 2016, and only 1,700 students graduated from South Carolina teaching programs in that same year. This gap is not expected to get any smaller because enrollment in South Carolina teacher programs is declining an average of 4 percent each year. “There are a lot of wonderful fulfilling things that teachers enjoy, but sometimes the lack of respect is there and the work environment is not always what it needs to be for a teacher to want to stay. So what’s happening is, there’s a crisis- it’s across the country, but certainly in South Carolina- that we have got about 40 percent of the teachers who start out teaching, don’t last five years. And there are many that don’t stay past the first year. Something has got to change that makes teaching a desirable profession, a respected profession, and that teachers are getting paid properly,” Rakestraw said. Some of the recommendations that the deans have for the South Carolina Department of Education and the South Carolina Commision on Higher Education include providing expedited approval of pilot programs and increasing funding for programs like “Call Me Mister” and Teaching Fellows which have proven to be successful. The group plans to address other issues in South Carolina’s education system in the upcoming months as well. These include further analyzing the shortage, figuring out how many students are impacted by the shortage, confirming that all certification pathways produce teachers who are ready for the job, addressing low pay, finding new initiatives for loan forgiveness or tuition programs, figuring out why educators leave during the first five years, and making teaching a more desirable profession. One thing that Rakestraw said she is hopeful to begin is a residency program at Winthrop. It would be a part of the Masters of Arts and teaching program where they would work full-time at a school with a master teacher and get paid a salary, with the only condition being that they would have to work in that school for a few years after they graduate the program. “It would segway them into a job, where they are needed and provide them with a support system during their first couple of years,” Rakestraw said. The overarching goal of these efforts, according to Rakestraw, is to make the job more desirable to students, thus allowing for more highly trained professionals, which will ultimately give South Carolina children a better education and therefore, a better chance at life. “Every child in this state deserves a quality, qualified teacher. The main thing is that we have to think about how do we help every single child in every single school have the kind of education and chance in life that they deserve,” Rakestraw said. for The Johnsonian
Die-ins, protests, and commonly avoided conversations brought about a new wave of events to Winthrop University’s campus. The Leadership and Social Change series is a six part series of events in which faculty will speak to students about topics ranging from police relations, to civil rights movements, and even how art and journalism have communicated social issues and changes. The series will feature 3 events a semester, all Tuesdays during common time, and will wrap up in April with a keynote speaker- Cynthia Enloe, research professor in the Department of International development, Community, and the Environment at Clark University in Massachusetts. Jennifer Disney, chair of the political science department and director of the women and gender studies program, is the organizer of this series. “The series was actually inspired by student change agents here on campus. Last year, there were several student actions including a die-in in the Digiorgio campus center, an occupation of Tillman Hall and several campus conversations that took place after that, dealing with everything from police shootings to the naming of buildings on campus. It was out of the student actions that several campus conversations were created by faculty trying to create a safe space for students, faculty and staff to talk together about these issues. During one of those discussions, I made the comment to students to remember that several of us as faculty are experts of these fields. Then in January, President Mahony invited me into his office and he said he had an idea. His idea came from attending these campus conversations and he said that it was the comment I had made that gave him the idea to design a series of events that really builds on Winthrop’s faculty expertise and Winthrop University’s strategic initiatives on civic engagement and diversity among others and use this as a platform to really help build a national model on how do we help instruct and inform our students in the processes of leadership and social change,” Disney said. President Mahony’s strategic plan, that he outlined in his State of the University address in October 2016, includes promoting diversity, creating a culture of philanthropy at Winthrop, among other initiatives that the president thinks will increase the value of this institution. When Mahony approached Disney about his idea, Disney said that she “was just excited to make the vision come alive.” The events are going to tie in past movements as well as current events, as a way to help students learn ways in which they can create their own social movements. “We definitely want to build upon movements that have happened in our past that we can learn from, issues and movements that are relevant today, and future organizing. We want our students to learn that a commitment to leadership and social change is a lifetime commitment. We want to teach our students to be civically aware, civically engaged to what is happening in their political and civic worlds, and to know how and where they can get involved,” Disney said. “ I think of it as a series of workshops building on faculty expertise and building on the student body that we have that has demonstrated an interest in a commitment to observing the challenges in our world and trying to think critically and creatively on how to address those challenges,” she continued. Disney said she hopes that this series will be successful enough to become an annual event and serve as a national model. “I hope that this will not just be a moment in time that it will be continuing conversations that we have already started and maybe it will be a jumping point into future conversations. Maybe we can have an annual series like this,” Disney said. The main purpose of this series, she claims, is to make the world a better place. “It helps us think about how we can be leaders and social change agents and try to leave the world better than the way we found it.” for The Johnsonian
Winthrop has claimed a spot as second place for minority graduation rates in an Education Trust national report, one of the 140 “Best Schools in the Southeast” from the Princeton Review and was named in the U.S. News and World Report’s top 10 southern public schools and best college for veterans. Earlier this year, Winthrop was named number two in the nation for minority graduation rates from an Educational Trust national report, with a 56.2 percent graduation rate for black students. In Princeton Review’s 2018 ranking of best schools in the southeast, it picked 140 schools from 12 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. The website listed some of the reasons Winthrop received its ranking which included its picturesque campus, diverse student body, cultural events requirement, state-of-the-art West Center and professors’ availability to students. Emily Daise, a senior mass communication major, said that her favorite part of attending Winthrop is the professor availability. “My favorite part about Winthrop is having more one-on-one time with my professors,” Daise said. Sara Griffith, a sophomore elementary education major and tutor for the Academic Success Center, agrees that Winthrop stands out for professor availability as well as the community atmosphere on campus. “Winthrop's sense of community is something I haven't experienced in any other school,” Griffith said. “Our faculty cares about their students, our students go out of their way to include each other. It's refreshing to have a school that cares about the community it builds.” Winthrop’s most recent triumph is ranking eighth in the U.S News and World Report’s ranking for top ten southern public schools. The ranking was due to an increase in the average first-year student retention rate from 74 to 75 percent, the student to faculty ratio, the increased percentage of faculty with a Ph.D (89 percent) and a rise the graduation rate from 52 to 55 percent. Winthrop also rose in its rankings from 21 to 19 on the list of “best schools for college veterans.” The school is noted for its Military, Adult and Transfer Services office as well as its participation in the Yellow Ribbon Program for veterans. Tess Norman, a sophomore integrated marketing communications major and the student program coordinator for staff of the orientation leader program, said she thinks Winthrop deserves the rankings because of the unique opportunities that it provides to students. END FRONT PAGE “Winthrop stands out because the smaller size creates unique and empowering opportunities for its students, giving us ways to achieve excellence and really take advantage of our time in college,” Norman said. Zina Weaver, a senior biology major, resident assistant in Wofford Hall and vice president of the Winthrop University Honors Association (WUHA), said she feels that Winthrop is unique because it helps turn students into leaders. “You can get an education at any school, but I honestly believe that Winthrop has helped me shape my ambitions and grow as a leader. I am more confident and courageous than ever before, and not that I give Winthrop all the credit, but the people I've met and the memories I've made here have definitely had a hand in that,” Weaver said. Even alumni have expressed their gratitude toward Winthrop. Ryan Brooks, an alumnus of Winthrop who just accepted an internship with Buzzfeed Politics in New York, said that Winthrop helped him succeed in the field that he came to Winthrop to pursue. “I think Winthrop stands out because the university is committed to giving its students an education that they can be proud of and a new Winthrop family that they can rely on well past their undergraduate experience at the university,” said Brooks. Brooks continued, “I would have to break up the best part of my time at Winthrop into two experiences: being able to grow in the field I wanted to pursue because of the opportunities to cover politicians that came to Winthrop and watching my classmates that I’ve bonded and grown with for four years step into the fields and dreams they wanted to pursue.” for The Johnsonian
Clemson University hosted an eclipse event that was attended by thousands of people, including many who saw a greater opportunity in the eclipse than just watching the sky go dark. During the event, the lawn outside the Watt Family Center was filled with professionals and science enthusiasts who saw opportunity in the center of the sun’s corona. Clemson University’s communication department used this opportunity to use their Radian 6 technology. Radian 6 is a social media analytics software by Salesforce that retrieves data from publicly accessible posts on popular social media outlets to gauge how people are feeling about certain topics. The Social Media Learning Center has used this software for student research, including tracking online cyber bullying and measuring opinions on popular topics. They saw the eclipse as an opportunity for measuring the sentiment towards the eclipse through keywords picked up by the software. “One of the features of the software is to be able to measure sentiment. We can detect how positive the conversation is or how negative the conversations, we will know very quickly how people feel about the eclipse whether they are excited about it or if it is pulling in a lot of energy and we can know the just by looking at some of the top walls over there and looking at some of the images that come out through Twitter and Instagram and down below with some of the different tweets that are being put out,” said Joseph Mazer, director of the Social Media Learning Center. Other schools also took the eclipse as an opportunity to use specialized software. The University of Maine sent out their High Altitude Ballooning team to Clemson to conduct a launch. They also used an infrared camera to measure the temperature of objects going down and then back up again. “We are launching a balloon that thy will put some bacteria on the ground and put the same bacteria in the sky so we can see if the bacteria is affected by any cosmic waves,” said Larry Snyder, a retired mathematics and physics professors from University of Maine that made the trip with students. Sean Brittain, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Clemson got his students involved in the Citizen CATE (continental-america telescopic eclipse) project which has 68 stations across the nation with identical telescopes to record the path of totality and collect data from it. “We’re part of the CATE experiment. This is a group of 68 telescopes across the continental United States set up roughly every 50 miles or so and what we are going to do is get continuous footage of the total eclipse from Portland Oregon to Charleston South Carolina. We will then have 90 minutes of footage of the corona of the sun so what this is going to do is this is interesting because it complements ongoing NASA missions where they use the satellite to view the sun and the corona graph there blocks out the inner part of the corona so you can only see the outer so this will allow us to see all the way in and kind of pick up where the satellite lets off. what we want to do is understand space weather, the data we are collecting is part of answering that. Space weather is what makes the northern lights, which is beautiful, but it also burns satellites and harms astronauts so we want to be able to predict it better and NASA is very interested in this,” Brittain said. The eclipse was not just a learning opportunity for professional scientists. There were also a number of science enthusiasts present at Clemson who used the eclipse as a learning opportunity for them and the younger generation. Clemens, North Carolina resident Chris Crumpton planned his three hour road trip to Clemson a year in advance. He used his love for science and an old telescope to give his three young daughters the chance to experience this once in a lifetime event. “Yesterday I made this little contraption where it is going to project the image of the sun onto this little board. That was a Christmas gift that my parents gave me thirty years ago and it is about to see its first eclipse,” said Crumpton. Jason McVeigh, a science teacher at Morgan County High School in Morgan County, Georgia, took 120 students to Clemson to view the eclipse in its totality. “We wanted to give an opportunity to all students that wanted to come on this trip. The physics class is collecting some measurements of the sun- like intensity and things like that - so we can have that data and hopefully go back and use it for more projects,” said McVeigh. Prasiddah Arunachalam, a New Jersey native and astrophysics student at Rutgers University was willing to travel far to experience the eclipse and learn more about it. “There are a lot of people here and we can share the excitement together. It is a total eclipse you don’t get to see something like this often, it is a once in a lifetime thing, and since I am an astrophysicist it is even more exciting for me,” said Arunchalam. for The Johnsonian
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — On Saturday, Marshall Park was filled with people bolstering signs that disavowed racism, white supremacy and Nazis, as they gathered around to witness a candlelight vigil to honor the victims of the Charlottesville counter protests. The vigil was sponsored by a grassroots organization called Charlotte Uprising. According to their website, Charlotte Uprising is “a coalition of community members, local and state organizers committed to ensuring the safety of their communities and advocating for police accountability, transparency and social and economic equality.” Ashe Williams, one of the core organizers of Charlotte Uprising, said that the goals of the peaceful demonstration were to mourn the loss of lives in Charlottesville but to also educate people on how to respond to white supremacy within their communities. “The goals of the action are to mourn the actions in Charlottesville openly, to name victims and learn how to be accountable to one another in the community in the fight of white supremacy,” said Williams. The demonstration was a collaboration between multiple community organizers including Food Not Bombs who gave free food during the event, Pro Choice Charlotte who provided the PA and other community members who made signs and planned the event. The event was a three-tiered program; the first part was a vigil, the second part was a speak out and the third was a call to action. The vigil was meant to honor Heather Heyer, a woman who was murdered during the Charlottesville counter protests. “Heather Heyer dedicated her life to standing up for those who she felt were not being heard,” Williams said. Gloria Merriweather, one of the people who spoke during the speak out portion of the evening, said that this event was also meant to keep the dialogue going, especially with white people, after all the racial tension that has been going on since the Charlotte protests last year. “Today is the culmination of a lot of really awful events that continue to take place around the nation,” said Merriweather. “Charlottesville is almost like a sprinkle on this really huge nasty cupcake of white supremacy, capitalism, all those things … People tend to assume that the labor of civil rights is on brown and black people because it is our issue and because we are suffering but because there are people capitalizing off it, we have to be able to speak to them. So after Charlotte Uprising, we needed to be able to have a space to continue to talk to the community, and this was it.” “We want to, first of all, validate the lives of those who died, actually just Heather,” Merriweather said. “We really needed to commemorate those lives and oftentimes at marches people sit in a different place with their emotions. It is not about remembrance, it is about frustration and anger. And so energetically we wanted to make sure that those people's lives were held with great care by our whole community here in Charlotte because we have been through something similar and also we wanted to make sure that all of us have somewhere to go next.” The vigil closed with a call to action to the Charlotte community. The campaign included raising money for Rayquan Borum, the man in jail for allegedly killing Justin Carr during the Charlotte protests after the death of Keith Lamont Scott. Charlotte Uprising is claiming Borum did not kill Carr, rather the police did. They are trying to raise money as a community to gather money to hire a lawyer for Borum. Other calls to action included supporting activists on trial after their arrests during the Charlotte protests last year. |
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