NEWS SCIENCE COMDEB ACTIVE LIFESTYLE Swastikas found carved on Photographic memory: fact The Iran crisis and the fail- Nation’s best gather at Mathias doors or fi ction? ure of political discourse local climbing competition Owen Anderson Jesse Paul 2 Claire McNellan 5 Joe Jammal 6 & Eli Michaels 10 Volume 41 No 17 Love, art, and THE INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF COLORADO COLLEGE the White Stripes Page 11 Responsible endowment revolution: uniting our investments with our ideals > March 2, 2012 catalystnewspaper.com Award shows misrepresentative and out of touch Robby Caseria Staff Writer ward show season has come and gone, leav- Aing us, the consumers of popular culture, with a number of questions: is Billy Crystal re- ally going with a blackface routine in 2012? Why couldn’t Michel Hazanavicius shoot “The Artist” in HD? Who or what is Bon Iver? Though these are all valid inquiries that deserve answers, one Illustrated by Erick Nelson looms large over the rest: should we even care Alex Kronman sues and processes; as the end users of products reflect our community’s core values. about award shows anymore? Former Editor-in-Chief flowing through global commodity chains Beyond our individual roles as consumers, Though the Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, connecting distant peoples and places across the the endowment question brings to light an even and Golden Globes have served as valuable his editorial is different from the countless world, we are all constantly involved, conscious- more significant manner in which our lifestyle barometers of culture in the past, cataloging TCatalyst articles you’ve read lamenting injus- ly or not, in the global economic processes gen- is connected to and implicated in the creation what achievements mattered most in a given tice and indifference. This is a call to action. erating sickening profits for a few and grotesque and reproduction of so many troubling aspects year, these accolades have failed to keep up with It is a simple demand that Colorado College poverty and destitution for so many. of our global economic system. Our collective entertainment’s changing role in the 21st century. change its investment policy to comply to the The endowment can no longer be CC’s dirty community and institution is investing in and Over the past few decades, television outlets fullest extent possible with our College’s “core little secret; we must take responsibility for it profiting from a set of industries and corpora- have proliferated at a rate truly unprecedented, values,” including our “ethic of environmental and its consequences. tions that operate with blatant disregard of the creating more ways for more people to receive sustainability” and our commitment to “social We reject the notion that the management of human and environmental consequences of more content. Netflix, Hulu, DVRs, foreign responsibility at local, national, and global levels.” our endowment must be driven by a singular their practices and moneymaking operations. In cable, video-on-demand services, network- As Wyatt Miller put it in the February issue of focus on “return on investment” and ignore the essence, the comfortable conditions in which sponsored episode streaming sites, Apple TV The Cipher, “[the] fantasy is over… the bubble social and environmental consequences of the we live and work on this campus are being paid (and competitors), and an explosion of domestic is burst.” The release of information about the corporations and investment funds where we for through social injustice and environmental cable channels have all contributed to the array types of industries and corporations that the place the institution’s money. We reject the idea degradation. of available programming growing larger than Colorado College endowment is invested in has that CC must conform to a vile status quo that The question becomes: are we, as a com- it has ever been. Twenty years ago, people ev- a certain shock value, triggering the proverbial puts our comfort above the lives of those less munity and an institution, comfortable with erywhere basically watched the same TV shows “WTF?!” moment in many of us. fortunate. this situation? Are we willing to continue with and saw the same movies. Yet thanks to a surge Such reactions, these immediate sensations It is high time that our community engages in the fiction that our investment decisions can of in-home viewing technologies starting with of anger and frustration, all too often lead to an open and honest discussion of our endow- be guided solely by a single-minded pursuit Betamax and now taking the form of Blu-ray or nothing more than individualized discontent and ment’s impact on the wider world; it is time that of profit maximization, without any concern the iPad 2, people have much greater freedom resignation. If we are lucky, we engage in some we take action to divest from interests that we as for the social and environmental practices and in how they entertain themselves. More choices heated, if fleeting, conversations about the issue a community abhor. consequences of the businesses we invest in? means a more divided audience, and a more in our classrooms and amongst our friends. Our shared revulsion must be channeled into We hope not. And we dare to imagine that divided audience means, in the case of television, However, it has always been an illusion that something more sustained and intentional: a things could be different. major network shows that cater to the broad- our conversations, interactions, and educational collective conversation amongst all of us who est market spectrum possible are struggling to trajectories could in any way be disconnected make up Colorado College (students, staff, Next week in The Catalyst we’ll be taking a look at grab hold of ratings while more nuanced cable from the broader social problems plaguing our faculty, administrators, and trustees) to identify what responsible investing looks like across the country shows aimed at more selective demographics are world – from poverty and inequality to injustice our values and our expectations regarding the and how CC fits into that larger context. On Monday, flourishing. and exploitation, human and environmental. investments made in our name, to make explicit CCSGA is holding a forum on the endowment at 5 The same can be said for music. As recently as The relatively comfortable lifestyle so many of our demands for the “responsible investment” p.m. in Perkins Lounge in Worner. us live implicates us in these broader social is- of the College’s endowment funds in ways that continued on page 12 2 March 2, 2012 News CC joins Arizona book ban protests books back to students and setting up under- Erica Plumlee ground libraries,” said Lee. The underground li- News Editor braries will be located in Houston, San Antonio, Albuquerque, and Tucson. The Librotraficante Caravan intends to collect a complete set of all This past January, the Tucson Unified School the banned books for each one of these under- District published a list of banned books as ground libraries, and it is relying on the dona- part of the suspension of the Ethnic Stud- tions and support of groups like CC’s to make ies/Mexican-American Studies program. The that happen. majority of the banned books have Mexican- In fact, Tony Diaz, the founder of Nuestra American authors, but even books like Shake- Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say and speare’s “The Tempest” have been called into the charge behind Librotraficante, cited CC as question. As the movement continues to draw the first student group in the country, outside national criticism, CC’s own protest against the of students in Tucson, to actively protest the racially charged book ban has begun to take movement. However, the Arizona-based stu- shape. dent group U.N.I.D.O.S. reached out to several The Tucson Unified School District super- colleges and universities right after the ban was intendent says he banned the books in accor- announced, and found tremendous support. dance with Arizona State Law HB 2282, which “I’ve talked to lots of people here who don’t declares that public school students should even know what’s going on,” said Lee, citing yet “not be taught to resent or hate other races or another reason she joined the protest. “We want classes of people.” This entails terminating to inspire other schools, but we need to do it any program causing ethnic tension; the elimi- A row of books on Mexican-American history sits on a shelf in Tutt Library. The question of here first.” nation of Mexican-American history educa- whether books that may cause “ethnic tension” should be available to students is a large The next few weeks leading up to the Libro- tion just happens to be a consequence of that. aspect of the protest. Photo by Carrie White. traficante Caravan will be crucial, as the CC “I thought it would be good to get involved protestors work to educate and engage the com- since we are a college community, and this is munity. very significantly an issue of academic free- any campus group, but is comprised of a small hoping that this activity on YouTube can spread “As peoples living on the same land, we have dom,” said CC sophomore Guojun Lee, who group of passionate students who want to reach across the campus and across the country.” not only the right but also the pressing need prompted CC’s involvement in the protest. out. They spent much of block break visiting The group is also planning to design posters to share our perspectives, cultural knowledge Lee took Student Activism in the Civil with faculty to get their support and suggestions.