On Thursday, January 12th, Zak Foster spoke about his exhibition in Morlan Gallery, “Southern White Amnesia”, as a part of the Creative Intelligence series. The exhibition seeks to explore the hidden stories of white people that are often not passed down or told to future generations due to discomfort. Foster works with textiles, comparing them to our second skin, and embraces these relatable materials as a part of his storytelling journey.
Foster’s story begins with an interest in his ancestry, which led him to complete a DNA test and find he was related to both white people and black people. This was a perplexing truth, and he set the goal to seek more of how and why his ancestry looks like this.
Foster discussed how he had no idea he was related to black people, and this uncertainty felt like something he should know. He then began this investigation into how some stories get told, and others do not. He brings in famous quilter Jessie Telfair and her Freedom quilt.
Jessie was a black woman in Georgia who was fired from her job for attempting to exercise her right to vote. After her job loss, she was encouraged to make a quilt out of her frustration– it is bright red with the words “Freedom” quilted seven times in blue. Foster recreated this freedom quilt titled “Jessie Telfair and the white man who fired her”. He describes how the words “freedom, freedom, freedom” were not said in a celebratory way. The quilts are very similar to Foster’s, including a patterned edge of humans holding hands with red and black diamonds above. Foster described how these cries of “freedom” were an act to hold America accountable for its alleged statement that all are free in America. Foster goes on to explain the back of the quilt, which is referred to as “the white man who fired her.” The back is simply the loose ends and stitching which make up the front of the quilt. He describes the back of the quilt as depicting the unfair reality of Telfair’s ancestors knowing her story, while the children of the white man who fired her live in ignorance of his actions.
Jessie Telfair and the White Man Who Fired Her
“We don’t often have a lot of info on our family lineage- where they come from and who those people were.”
Next, Foster goes on to describe this silk chiffon piece titled “Appraisement.” This was a real document from after one of his ancestors had passed away, and the appraiser documented his remaining possessions. The list describes furniture, animals, and people who he enslaved. Foster describes how his third great-grandfather had this amazing obituary, which described him as a devout christian who was content to work out life’s problems. Yet, he participated in the enslavement of human individuals. His obituary was one sided— showing his amazing traits as a person, but leaving out the horrible things he did throughout this time on earth. Connecting back to Jessie Telfair and the white man who fired her, it is clear that the ancestors of white people oftentimes have to do real digging to find out who they truly are.
Foster continues his journey to better understand his ancestors and finds himself in Lawrence, South Carolina, to explore some family land and burial sites. He describes his experience at this burial site, where his family’s graves were fenced in. He illustrates their graves being innately carved with little cherubs and nice expressions. As he looked further, he found concave spots on the ground outside of the fenced in cemetery. He asked the tour guide, and she explained that this was where they buried the black people who worked for the family. Foster was then inspired to memorialize these individuals by creating a floor quilt called “Like Family”, which is known as a common expression to use for black workers. This quilt has a special sense of topography, which is used to really see how the whiteness was used as a gatekeeper— even in the afterlife. As Foster continues to explore his family history and dig into the harsh realities, he finds time and time again how the stories of black individuals are hidden and buried. Without a headstone to commemorate their death, the stories of these individuals are left to fade away.
Like Family
Foster explains how you can’t cancel your own family. What he means by this phrase is that it can be difficult to hold your ancestors accountable, but it is necessary for us to do the work now. He then elaborates on the uncomfortable awkwardness of the research he was doing. These feelings were further channeled into creating a small, handmade doll for each slave-owning ancestor. He piled all of these ancestors together in an antique bed and made one doll for himself to represent the uncomfortable feelings that he had to work through. These dolls have an uneasy look to them, and the choice of dolls creates this action of humanizing his ancestors to further hold them accountable for their choices.
“My ancestors are now very clear on the harm they have caused in their life and working through open-hearted descendants to undo the injustices and harm that were perpetrated.”
The quilt titled “The Snake Handler” describes more than ever that this work must be completed by the living. Foster came about this piece in a dream, in which he was handing off his poisonous snake back and forth with one of his ancestors. He described that when he woke up from the dream, he was the one holding the snake. Family history doesn’t fully disappear with its members. The passing of the snake exemplifies how it must be addressed by the living to not prolong its racist venom.
Foster’s incredible and meaningful work is all done through the medium of textiles. He further explains how we typically associate this type of work with a granny-like nature. Foster elaborates on why he chooses to work through the medium of textiles— describing that when we have this sense of softness and connection, it is here where we can open from a more vulnerable place and understand these difficult questions.
As the Valentine’s Day posts started to roll in this year—bouquets, chocolates, candlelit dinners, and corny photoshoots—I began to notice how many of my classmates have officially coupled up.
During my campus tour around five years ago (I’m old, I know), I remember being told that, historically, something like 40 percent of Transy graduates married another alum. I can’t find any hard data to support that claim, but there are plenty of anecdotes. We all know the classic “ring by spring” phenomenon: As the winter semester slows down and May term approaches, engagement rings begin appearing on seniors’ fingers. Off the top of my head, I can count more than a dozen Transy seniors or recent graduates who have gotten engaged or married in the past year. More than two-thirds of them chose fellow Transy students.
When I think about all the newlyweds on my feed, alum love stories no longer seem like distant legends, but rather evidence of a longstanding tradition. I found one Transy graduate who posted on Facebook a while back to say he met his wife “on Day One, graduated in 1963, and married three weeks later.”
Maybe they first locked eyes during the super romantic handshake line and spent their next four years under the kissing tree.
The story is undeniably romantic. But for my generation, romance alone no longer seems like enough justification to plan your entire future around another person. Today, many women enter college prioritizing independence, education, and career stability, goals that don’t always align neatly with early marriage.
Meanwhile, some Transy students are reluctant even to date another student on campus. This is partly driven by fear that things will go awry within the Transy social bubble, but it may also reflect broader cultural trends.
It turns out that simply having a boyfriend is embarrassing for many straight young women today, at least according to a recent viral article in Vogue. I was mindlessly scrolling on TikTok one night when I came across a video by Chanté Joseph, the article’s author, explaining her theory.
Joseph suggests that, in the context of social media, it has become increasingly distasteful to center one’s entire personality and online presence on a boyfriend. In another online video I saw, a woman says she “won’t post another man until there’s a ring on [her] finger.”
The moment you post a boyfriend, you risk public humiliation. He could very easily break up with you next week, leaving you to take down all of the photos shamefully. According to Joseph, having a boyfriend is “no longer considered an achievement, and, if anything, it’s become more of a flex to pronounce yourself single.”
Is that stopping students from coupling up at Transy? That doesn’t seem to be the case, based on a recent YikYak poll I conducted. Of the 356 respondents, 244 reported that they are either currently dating another Transy student or would be open to dating one.
A YikYak survey is not a scientific poll, but given the number of responses, the results are notable—and honestly surprised me. The campus seems to follow a much less cynical narrative about dating than the chronically online communities I’ve found on TikTok. Many Transy students reported feeling optimistic about future relationships on campus. Here, a significant other isn’t necessarily embarrassing. We haven’t lost all hope.
At least historically, it makes sense that college students would meet their lifelong partners on campus. Before dating apps and algorithmic matching, your romantic prospects were limited to people you knew (classmates, friends of friends, the guy who sat two rows behind you in Econ).
Now, we have the apps. While the idea of expanding your dating pool beyond your immediate circle sounds promising, the swipe-based system often feels transactional and can lead to awkward dates.
I’ve tested it myself a couple of times, mostly out of curiosity. Freshman year, I grabbed coffee with a UK student I met on Tinder. On paper, it checked out: he looked like his pictures, held a normal conversation, and, most importantly, was not secretly trying to kidnap me. However, the spark just wasn’t there. For one thing, he smelled weird (unwashed vintage clothes), which doesn’t show up as a red flag on a Tinder profile. But mostly, I was missing the butterflies of meeting someone in person and instantly clicking. You just can’t replicate that kind of chemistry online.
Maybe that’s why Gen Z has started to romanticize meeting someone “organically.” Whether it’s locking eyes in a coffee shop, talking at a bar, or even bonding over a group project for class, it feels more special than swiping right. There’s an endearing appeal to the old-fashioned campus meet-cute.
However, our nostalgia is clouded by rose-colored glasses. Dating in the past was constrained: the pool of available prospects was much smaller, and social pressure to marry was stronger. If you met someone you somewhat clicked with at college, there weren’t endless alternatives in your pocket. With fewer options available, people didn’t necessarily hold out for the perfect match. Finding a life partner was more of a necessary inevitability and not just about compatibility.
At highly religious schools, that dynamic hasn’t entirely disappeared. In TikTok interviews at Brigham Young University, a Mormon institution, students describe marrying their partners just months after meeting. According to a USA Today article, about 60% of women and 62% of men were attending college with their spouse while at BYU in 2013.Such cases are presumably the result of a conservative Mormon culture, an outlier versus national trends.
Despite the centrality of college relationships in pop culture, there’s been surprisingly little robust research on whether people still marry their college sweethearts. One nationwide survey conducted by Facebook in 2013 found that 28% of married graduates attended the same college as their spouse.
Analysts at the Brookings Institution, meanwhile, describe a pattern known as “assortative mating,” in which people with a bachelor’s degree overwhelmingly marry other college graduates, based on 2016 population data. In other words, education not only shapes our identities and values, but also frames our romantic expectations.
People often pair up with others from similar income brackets and social standing. Education is one of the strongest predictors of both, especially at a pricey liberal arts institution like Transy. We look for partners who understand our experiences: the anxiety before exams, the weight of student loans, and long-term career ambitions. We’re simply more likely to meet people who reflect our own trajectories through certain jobs, friend groups, networking events, and shared social circles.
Maybe meeting your future partner in class isn’t as outlandish as it seems. When your daily life unfolds within a particular environment, your dating market is bound to mirror it. If education and environment shape who we’re drawn to, the bigger question is whether college relationships still lead to lifelong commitments. Or whether it only feels that way while we’re here, immersed in a confined world where it can almost seem like everyone is getting engaged at once.
On a small campus, even a handful of proposals can take over group chats, making a few engagements resemble a community-wide movement. But overall, college students today are waiting longer to get married. Researchers at Iowa State University found that higher education doesn’t make marriage more or less likely; rather, it simply delays it, pushing commitment further into adulthood. College graduates are waiting until they feel financially and professionally stable before walking down the aisle.
There’s no way to predict whether current Transy students will get hitched down the line, but what about who students are choosing right now? We can get a hint by examining the current state of the Pio dating scene.
To learn about dating at Transy, I turned to YikYak, an app where students can anonymously discuss campus life. I published three surveys asking students about their experiences dating other Transy students, including whether they would choose to date another student and if they could see themselves marrying a classmate. The polls remain live and continue to collect responses.
Before getting into the results, a few caveats. There’s no way to conduct a truly scientific poll on YikYak. Not every student uses the app, and its audience may well skew toward a particular type of student. While YikYak requires a .edu email and uses geographic restrictions, making it overwhelmingly likely that respondents are indeed Transy students, it’s at least theoretically possible that faculty or staff with a .edu address could access the platform and choose to participate in a poll for students.
The app also raises some ethical concerns. It has been criticized for racist and sexist posts, cyberbullying, and misinformation, and some students avoid it altogether (which could mean particular voices are underrepresented). Anonymity may also shape how users respond, and the app’s format limited how precisely I could word the questions.
Still, the sample size is hard to ignore. “It’s notable that the poll has a very large sample, with nearly 350 respondents [for one of the surveys] from a college with around 900 students,” said Transy political science professor Steve Hess. But he cautioned that “without demographic data, such as race, gender, or sexual orientation, there’s a strong possibility of sampling bias,” making it difficult to generalize to the entire student body.
Here are the results of the first survey, which has the largest number of respondents because it was posted earlier, back on Dec. 16, 2025.
Would you date another Transy student?
Total Responses: 356
Yes! But I haven’t: 108 Yes, and I am right now: 107 Yes. I have before and will again: 29 Absolutely not. Too much drama: 72 I tried, but never again: 40
These responses complicate the narrative that I sometimes hear about Transy’s dating scene being hopeless.
When asked, “Would you date another Transy student?” 244 (68.5%) respondents said yes, while 112 (31.5%) said no.
Breaking that down further, 108 (30.3%) said they haven’t dated another Transy student but would consider it; 107 (30%) said they are currently; and 29 (8%) said they have before and would again. Only 72 (19.7%) selected “Absolutely not. Too much drama,” and 40 (11.2%) said they had tried and would never do it again.
Those numbers suggest that most students are at least open to dating within the Transy bubble. The same sentiment seems to carry over into the proposal of marriage, which I asked about in the next survey, which was first posted on February 14, 2026:
Would you CONSIDER marrying another Transy student? (even if you’re not currently dating one or think it’s likely)
Total Responses: 239
Yes: 153 No: 86
Asked whether they would consider marrying another Transy student, 153 (64%) said yes, while 86 (36%) said no. These numbers closely correspond with the 68.5% of students who are open to dating.
But when the question shifts from possibility to plausibility, enthusiasm fades, as shown in the third survey, also posted on February 14, 2026:
Do you think you will marry another Transy student?
Total Responses: 292
Yes: 77 No: 215
When asked more directly, “Do you think you will marry another Transy student?” only 77 (26.4%) said yes, while a whopping 215 (73.6%) said no. The drop is striking. While nearly two-thirds of respondents are open to the idea of marrying another student, only about one-quarter actually expect it to happen. But even so, 77 students who confidently believe they will marry another Pio: that’s a significant number!
Experience also shapes attitudes. When asked whether Transy students have dated another student before, responses were nearly split: 176 said yes and 180 said no. That divide demonstrates how seriously common campus relationships are, while also revealing that a significant portion of students avoid them entirely.
The comments on my posts help explain why. Many concerns appear less rooted in incompatibility and more in social consequences. One respondent warned that dating another student would be “the [worst] experience of your life if you break up,” while another simply pleaded, “Please don’t do it. It’s terrible.” On a campus this small, breakups rarely stay private; your business is everybody’s business.
For some, the risk feels so high that they avoid campus dating altogether. Twenty percent said they have never and would never date another Transy student. Several mentioned preferring to date outside the university instead. One respondent said they prefer “blue-collar” workers, while another noted that “UK is down the street,” implying that a larger campus offers both anonymity and emotional safety.
The YikYak responses reveal a campus caught between desires and self-preservation. Students are not opposed to dating each other; many are actively doing so. But in a social world where circles overlap, and stories travel quickly, commitment requires not just affection but confidence that the risk is survivable.
One comment stood out for its misogynistic tone: “Just don’t date the women here and you’re fine.” The remark sounded familiar to me. I suspect it reflects a deeper undercurrent of gendered tension that may be intensified by campus demographics.
During my first year, 2022-23, undergraduate enrollment at Transy was 59% female and 41% male. This dynamic reflects broader national trends in higher education. According to Forbes, women now make up the majority of college students nationally, and in Kentucky, women graduate at significantly higher rates than men. On a female-majority campus, that imbalance shapes the social economy of dating.
In the context of straight dating, sociologists describe this dynamic through sex ratio theory; when one gender is in shorter supply, members of that group tend to gain disproportionate dating power. Research shows that on female-dominated campuses, straight women report going on fewer traditional dates, are less likely to have boyfriends, and engage in more casual sexual relationships. Even if such women want commitment, there may be fewer men willing or incentivized to offer it. In that context, because hookup culture has become more like a prerequisite for participation in the dating scene, women are not necessarily given an active choice. (Obviously, the sex ratio theory described above only describes one portion of the dating scene, leaving out LGBTQ+ couples who face very different questions of supply and demand.)
As for all those friends of mine with engagement rings, there’s one factor that feels impossible to ignore: every single one of them was a member of a sorority. That makes sense: Sororities and Greek life in general shrink an already small campus into an even tighter social circle. Formals, living in Bassett, philanthropy events, parties, Snapchat group chats, and overlapping friend groups all create constant proximity. There’s a selection effect here, too: A lot of my close friends are in Greek life! But it’s not just me—on a campus where 40 percent of students participate in Greek organizations, that could be a factor in Transy alums tying the knot.
My own experience doesn’t necessarily fit neatly into one narrative. I have dated another Transy student before, and I genuinely enjoyed it. There’s something uniquely comforting about being with someone whose life already overlaps with yours—the same class schedules, the same professors, and the same stress over midterms. Our social lives blended easily. Our friends knew each other. We understood each other’s routines, priorities, and campus quirks without much explanation. It felt natural.
Even though the aftermath of a breakup at Transy can feel like your entire social circle is collapsing—with friends of friends asking what happened and nasty stares from your ex’s buddies—it eventually fades out. Things go back to normal. The effort to find a genuine, long-lasting connection couldn’t be a waste of time when the goal is to find companionship during such a tumultuous chapter of our lives. I wouldn’t be opposed to doing it again, even if the window for campus romance is slowly closing.
At the same time, I’m hesitant to imagine my entire future mapped out before graduation. I want to move to a new city, pursue opportunities wherever they take me, and travel while I’m young. That doesn’t mean I’m entirely opposed to relationships right now. But “ring by spring” feels like an unnecessary ticking clock. Who knows? Maybe in a few years, I’ll run into a Transy alum while visiting Lexington and…the rest will be history.
It’s an exciting time for lacrosse in Kentucky. The Kentucky High School Athletics Association (KHSAA) officially sanctioned the sport just last year. There are pockets of interest in Louisville, Covington, and Lexington, but many lacrosse programs across the state are just taking root.
And here at Transy, the Pios have the makings of twin dynasties: For the last two seasons, both the women’s and men’s lacrosse teams went undefeated in conference play in the regular season and took back-to-back Heartland Collegiate Lacrosse Conference titles.
Logan Otto, head coach of the men’s team, first learned about the sport as an eight-year old wanting to follow in the footsteps of his older brother, who learned the game when he went to a boarding school in Indiana. Watching elite high-school lacrosse, Otto was hooked, and he wound up playing on on Lexington Catholic’s first lacrosse team in the early aughts. His playing career ended there, but after a stint teaching high school, Otto landed an assistant coaching gig at Transy in 2014, and eventually was named head coach in 2021 (altogether, this is Otto’s thirteenth season with the program).
The Pioneers have won eight conference tournament championships while Otto has been on campus, including two as head coach. For Otto, the key has been steady improvements every season. “The ceiling is raising and that’s really fun,” he said. “The metaphor we use is that our program is a lot like a skyscraper, and so we’re building the levels up as we go from the foundation.”
The women’s team is led by Transy alumna Brianna McCulley ’20. Having played throughout her college years as a Pioneer, McCulley noted how meaningful it was for her to give back to the program. After graduating in the initial peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, McCulley earned her master’s degree in teaching and worked as a physical education and health educator, before she became Transy head coach in January 2025.
“I am super happy to be back,” she said. “I love this program. I love this school. I wouldn’t trade my experiences for anything. It truly does feel like I’m back home.”
A PIO DYNASTY: The women’s team celebrates its second consecutive conference championship in 2025. Courtesy of Jayden Otto.
Contact Sport
If you are aching for the ferocity of American football—without the commercial breaks, clock stoppages, and pauses in action for huddles—lacrosse is where to find it.
“It’s definitely pretty electric, and I don’t think a lot of people understand how physical and how fast we go out there,” said sophomore attacker Huck Campbell. “I mean, every play you’re seeing, you’re getting hit, you’re spinning off someone.”
Campbell came to Transy from Trinity High School in Louisville, a tight-knit lacrosse community. He has experienced a lot of “hard coaching,” which has taught him the importance of maintaining a positive attitude even when his team is behind.
“Coaches are gonna be hard on you because they want you to be the best,” he said. “So I’ve learned that in every circumstance you can have a smile on your face and do it with pleasure.”
Lany many Pios, Campbell has been playing since elementary school, when he first picked up a stick in fourth grade. Likewise for Sofie Garrett, a junior attacker who hails from Stone Mountain, Georgia. Garrett’s mom put her in different sports growing up but none gave her the same rush that lacrosse did.
The intensity of the sport doesn’t phase Garrett. “I think that makes me like it more,” she said. “I’m very competitive. I just like to get in there and fight.” She laughed, and looked like she was ready to grab her stick and hit the field. “Sometimes it’s just fun to be out there and troll.”
“Lacrosse,” Cambell said, “is constant contact.”
“Knowing the field”
“Everything I had thought about this sport before was probably completely wrong,” said senior and captain of the women’s team Jayden Otto, who started playing as a sophomore at Transy after originally coming here to play soccer (no relation to Logan Otto, though the Pios head coach affectionately calls her “cous”).
“Men’s and women’s lacrosse, even though they share the same name, they’re very different. Men’s lacrosse, I like to say, is football with a stick. They just, they go ham on each other. Women’s, it’s so much more technical-driven than I think people realize.”
The mental aspect of the sport, referred to as LAX IQ, is something sophomore attacker Kaelin Truman noted as an area of growth for any team. Players have to see plays ahead of time before they happen, develop a feel for the speed and angles of their opponents, and learn the nuances of spacing as their teammates race down the field.
“It’s just knowing the field, and being a little bit more aware of your space and your timing,” she said.
Truman noted that in high school or outside of the school year she used to shoot around with the men’s team in Louisville, but once a scrimmage started, “they’re kind of two different sports.”
Connection
Outside of their love for the game, Transy lacrosse players take pride in their team culture.
“The strengths of our team right now would probably be our connection,” Truman said. “These girls are just amazing. When it works, it works so well.”
Truman came to Transy after her freshman year at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, where she was playing on their Division II lacrosse team. Transferring was mainly about being closer to family and still getting to play the sport she loved.
“The environment between us is just amazing, especially coming from a team that wasn’t the best at being the most supportive teammates,” Truman said. “Coming here has been so refreshing.”
For others, the transition to Lexington can be more challenging at first. Senior midfielder and San Diego-native Sam Archer considered leaving Transy a couple years ago.
“There was a time where I was kind of just like, ‘what am I doing here?’” Archer recalled. “You know, it’s cold, it’s far away. But having to leave Transy, and everything that I’ve done here, making friends and meeting people, just throwing that away—I feel like it would have been silly to leave all that behind.” (While he’s glad he stayed with the Pios, Archer intends to go back home to California after graduation and become a firefighter.)
These ideas of connection and community were echoed by coaches and players alike.
“I’m really proud of the buy-in, how much they want to take care of one another,” McCulley said.
“Our bond together is really just like no other,” Archer said. “I’m really close with my teammates, and I have their backs. I know that they have mine, too. That’s just been very special throughout my time here.”
BACK TO BACK: The Pios huddle during the HCLC championship game in 2025, which they won for the second straight year. Courtesy of Transy Athletics.
Watching Transy LAX is Worth the Hype
Lacrosse may be relatively new to Kentucky, but the Pios don’t lack for online attention. The men’s lacrosse team Instagram is the third-most followed official Transy account, currently with more than 3,600 followers, behind Transy Sports and the official university account (that’s right, more follows for “football with a stick” than the National Champion women’s basketball team!).
“I think lacrosse in the mainstream media sometimes can come off as kind of a bro-type sport or kind of elitist,” Logan Otto said. “I definitely see where those perceptions come from; you know, that it’s a big boarding-school sport like in the Northeast. But with the growth of the game, it’s become so different. We’ve had so many different athletes from different areas and different backgrounds that have been really successful for us. It’s pretty diverse.”
When asked what might attract fans to the games this season, coaches and players said it’s all about the speed: Lacrosse is fast.
“It’s a really fun watch,” Garrett said. “If it’s a close game, it’s intense. It’s definitely something worth watching at least once in your life.”
“It’s fast paced,” said Coach McCulley. “We play good music every time, you know, somebody scores, they have their own goal song. I love that. We’ve got some hip hop, we’ve got some pop, we’ve got some heavy metal. So you get a sense of their personality, too.”
“With the constant action of it, there’s really a big mental thing with it, too, which is like IQ, seeing the play before it happens,” Archer said. “That on top of the physical nature of it, makes it just such a great sport to watch.”
The men’s team lost their season opener against Kenyon College on February 8 before winning the following two against Piedmont and Illinois Tech. Over the weekend, they dropped to 2-2 with a 14-6 loss against Sewanee. Junior Andrew Welch and sophomore Charlie Horner are currently leading the team in goals with four each.
The women’s team started with a win against Oglethorpe, but dropped to 1-2 with losses against Berry and Otterbein. The team suffered a potentially devastating injury when star freshman Layla Hobbs-Powell had to leave the game with an apparent hamstring injury. She is still awaiting news on how much time she will have to miss.
Fans can witness the fast times, LAX IQ, and constant contact at Pat Deacon Stadium for the team’s first home games on March 4 at 7:00 pm against Centre (women’s) and March 11 at 1:00 pm (men’s). Students can reserve free tickets through My Transy Events.
Human Intelligence (Hi!), a faculty-student working group, hosted its first DIY (“Do it Yourself”) event in the Pioneer Rooms on Wednesday, February 11, with a variety of crafts and activities.
Junior Hope Riester taught embroidery, senior Alice Beatty led a key-chain making workshop, and senior Sam Schultz organized students making posters focused on critiquing AI in higher education.
Periodically, painting professor Grace Ramsey would call out from the corner of the room: “Would you like to experience one minute of pure human connection?” She led a fun “DrawTogether” table, where participants had to draw another person in a continuous line without looking down at their paper, creating a wide variety of amusing portraits.
Hi! was started by art professor Kurt Gohde and creative writing professor David Ramsey last semester as a Faculty Learning Community (FLC). According to an email announcing what the group dubbed its “first Hi!DIY event,” the FLC “was founded this year to promote human-centered education, explore possibilities for embodied learning, take a critical look at AI in higher education, and create resources for students and faculty interested in AI resistance.”
Hi!, which meets roughly every two weeks, includes eight professors, along with eight students—which is unusual for FLCs at Transy.
“FLCs, by definition, are meant to be by and for faculty and instructors, with staff involvement as relevant,” said Bingham Center for Teaching Excellence co-director Melissa Fortner. “The Hi! FLC is the first to heavily involve students; we were happy to let Davey and Kurt experiment with adding students to the group.” FLCs have been hosted by the Bingham Center for Teaching Excellence since 2023. “The end goal is for each FLC to take what they’ve learned and share it with the wider community in some way,” said BCTE co-director Julie Perino.
Ramsey said that he and Gohde founded the group because they felt there weren’t enough resources available for those who felt passionately about AI resistance. “We knew there were a lot of faculty, staff, and students at Transy who were eager to think in a more critical way about the use of AI on campus and in higher education,” he said.
Sophomore Sophia Schmer was one of the initial students recruited to the group. “I joined Hi! because I feel strongly that AI reduces creativity and hinders the learning process, ” said Schmer. “Before joining, I was unaware of a lot of the facts and terminology behind AI in higher education, and now I feel much more prepared to argue against it. I’m also so grateful to participate in the rich discussions and to be surrounded by a group of people who also believe in the importance of human thinking and connection that AI undermines.”
Ramsey said that many professors who share these concerns are less interested in trying to “play cop” to enforce AI rules, and more excited about reasserting and reimagining values they believe are under threat. “Nearly all of the people in our group would probably be considered ‘anti-AI.’” he said. “But we called our group Human Intelligence because we wanted a positive vision focused on student-led, bottom-up, durable culture change—anchored in the core values of a liberal arts institution.”
That core mission led to an idea: Periodic HiDIY! events that would bring faculty, students, and staff together to share various skills, focusing on handmade practices and embodied learning. “One of the things I’ve been enjoying learning from Kurt is the ways he thinks about creativity specifically in relation to using his hands, as a sculptor,” Ramsey said. “And the beautiful part is that doing these embodied practices makes you think in a deeper way, because thought is embodied, too. A lot of professors, not just in studio art, are thinking about how we can bring embodied learning into the classroom. So our group decided: let’s start doing this, together, and learn as a community. The students took it from there.”
I attended the inaugural DIY event, which served free pizza from Mad Mushroom, and chatted with a few students and faculty about their experiences. When asked why they chose to attend the event I heard a wide variety of motivations for attending.
“I’m very against AI, and when I saw the Human Intelligence event and heard about it from some professors, I was very interested in seeing what it was all about,” first-year Chloe Cotton said. “I also really enjoy crafts and enjoy the community building of it.”
Cole Wright, a junior, said he only learned of the event twenty minutes before it started. “But as I thought about it, the message behind the event also stuck out to me,” he said. “I’m in a class right now called Cognitive Structures where we’ve been discussing a lot of the ethics behind AI… I don’t really have super solid answers about the future of AI, but I’d really like to see how this club develops over time because these issues are super pertinent today.”
Qian Gao, professor of Chinese literature, culture, and film studies, stopped by the event after receiving the email announcement. “I thought, ‘Wow, this sounds fun!’ Especially in an age when AI seems to be taking over everything!” Gao said she immediately connected the human-centered focus of Human Intelligence with the Chinese calligraphy she is teaching this semester.
“As a traditional but still prominent and popular art form of China, calligraphy embodies human agency, creativity, learning, discipline, moral character and aesthetic pursuit, all through the practice with brush and ink,” she said, “which also cultivates the human body to bring strength, mindfulness and tranquility into harmony.” Gao connected with Hi! leaders and is now planning to teach and showcase Chinese calligraphy at a future Hi!DIY event.
Grace Ramsey, the newest faculty member of Hi!, had one of the event’s biggest hits with her DrawTogether table.
“This drawing activity is really special because we’re around each other all the time but we rarely take a moment to really look at each other, really look into each other’s eyes,” she explained. “So what this does is make space to just be with another person and to really look at them, really see them. And also have fun—the nature of it is that we end up with a goofy portrait of someone else. It’s a moment to share with each other. The goal is to create more empathy with other people, and I really believe that comes from spending more intentional time together. And especially drawing can be a great way to foster empathy. Giving someone your full attention naturally fosters empathy. I feel like our world could use more of that.”
Sarah Harcourt Watts, director of religious life, said that a big part of her role on campus was fostering connection and community, which fits right in with Hi!’s mission.
“I have noticed that AI is a hindrance to human connection, and I love supporting anything on campus that builds it instead,” Watts said. “I’’m also a big fan of crafting and learning new things. I had so much fun learning needlepoint in a zero-pressure setting, and I’ve started my own little needlepoint project at home since. Working with my hands is the perfect antidote to spending too much of my time on screens. I’m so grateful that folks are having important conversations in Hi! and I’ve heard those conversations continue in other spaces.”
David Ramsey said these themes of attention and connection are what Hi! is all about. “The most successful thing about the event for me was just the warm vibe of people coming together,” said. “It was such a cozy zone.”
Departing the event, senior Kate Polson said, simply, “I needed that.”
What’s next for Hi!? Senior Sam Schultz, a student member of the group, described two key objectives in the coming weeks.
“The first goal is concrete: influence Transylvania University not to renew their huge contracts with generative AI companies next year,” he said. “We’ll be circulating a petition very soon and working to communicate campus opinion about AI to the administration. The second goal is to celebrate human intelligence, like with our first Hi!DIY event. We want to keep organizing events where Transy students can enjoy making art by hand together.”
For Schmer, Hi! and Hi!DIY events are happening in the perfect place: “I think Transy is exactly the school to foster this group because of its belief in the importance of education not only for future success, but to nurture the human spirit. I hope that we can harness the energy already here and direct it towards creative solutions for AI. I’d love to see tons of student engagement, shifting minds, and graduates with tools to conscientiously abstain from AI in the future as well as spread awareness.”
Disclosure: Jerrod Croley has no conflict of interest whatsoever, he is merely the captain of Garnet, one of the teams ready to rumble in the A-League this season.
Like many in Lexington, I have been less than impressed with the mighty Wildcats’ play this season (admittedly that’s coming from a salty Tennessee fan). Thankfully, the real show starts Monday night with the season opener of the Greatest Show on North Broadway: Transy intramural basketball.
Intramural hoops: perfect for out-of-season athletes and ex-high-school athletes who think to themselves, “I still got it”—only to find out they don’t still got it five minutes into the first half. I am a proud member of the latter camp. And I could not be more excited for the upcoming season.
The competition is divided between two leagues: The A-League, which features the most competitive squads, and the B-League, made up of good-vibes co-ed teams and sororities seeking intramural glory. Full props to the commissioner Jasmine Fletcher: This year, there’s a stellar assortment of talent on the court, with both leagues presenting top notch ball clubs.
The A-League
The A-League is anchored by storied programs seeking to hang another banner, like KA, Pike, and Phi Tau. It’s no secret fraternities take intramural sports seriously; on Transy’s campus, the games are like the SEC regular season: “It just means more.” Unlike the rivalries you see on TV, there won’t be any jersey swaps or off-season collabs—just good ole fashioned hate. Watch out for the annual matchup between KA Gold and Pike Gold that diehards call The Bid Day Brawl. KA says they aren’t scared of anyone, Pike says they have that match up circled in red.
But watch out for newer upstart teams like the Gooney Tunes and Lebron’s Disciples, both made up largely of soccer players, who faced off in last year’s Final. It was a familiar battle, far from the pitch, as once-teammates became bitter rivals on the hardwood. The matchup came as a shock to the historic titans of Transy intramurals—and represented a clear sign that the fraternity conditioning coaches had to adapt in order to keep up with the HCAC champs.
Under the guidance of esteemed coach Jacob Miller, Lebron’s Disciples easily took down their futbol brethren to take the crown. The on-court chemistry between the Gudorf brothers—Collen, known as “the General,” and Ethan, known as “Big-E”—helped the Disciples handily beat the Tunes for the franchise’s first ever championship. This year, will the high-flying Gudorf brothers, along with Coach Miller drawing the plays, cement themselves as a Transy dynasty? Or will the Gooney boys, or another contender in the A-league, deny the Disciples a history-making repeat? ?
The B-League
They may claim to be less competitive (at least until the whistle blows), but the B-league is on the come up, from sorority showdowns to a potential dynasty with the Delta Sig Ballers.
The boys from Sig battled in the A-League last year but decided their energy ran more to B this season after star John Buckle took his talents to Phi Tau A. How will the Chi Omega Hoopies—longtime B-League stalwarts—handle the new kids on the block? Already there has been some animosity between D SIG and CHI O. Standout D SIG sophomore Cash “Money” Doolin called out a few of the Hoopies starters by name (see card above for just how ruthless the trash talk is getting).
Meanwhile, no B team feels more urgency than the UNCs, a team full of seniors. These guys have one season, the last dance before graduation, the real world, J-O-B-S, and everything that comes with being a certified UNC. Will these guys bring that B-league championship home or mourn what might have been in the nursing home?
This Is Your Captain Speaking
Last year the intramural world was introduced to the ragtag soccer-team crew of the Gooney Tunes. Naysayers view them as nothing but wanna-be big timers, but some campus takesters see them as real-deal contenders. The Rambler spoke with team captain Gus “Killer Cameraman” Dickman to see how the Tunes are thinking about the season to come.
Asked about Dickman’s comments, LeBron’s Disciples star Collen “the General” Gudorf said he had a lot of respect for the Goon squad. “But they said the same thing after the first game last year,” he said. “And look what happened in the playoffs.”
“Ref, you suck!”
When you think of intramural play, your mind probably goes to the athletes. But this forgets a key component of the league: the student refs. An old saying goes, “a great referee is one you can’t see.” But the refs at intramural games seem to have mixed up the cliché. As far as I can tell, they can’t see at all.
The Rambler spoke with two referees to dig deep into the inexperience of our officials. They asked to remain anonymous, both to maintain the integrity of their role as officials and out of fear that if their names got out, their initials were going straight to YikYak—or worse.
“I’m not really sure what to expect,” said one referee, a newcomer this year. “I’m not gonna call anything unless I see blood.” I admire the honesty because the second referee, when asked what the price of bribery was, said he could be bought off with “a crisp 50 dollar bill.” While these confessions were telling, they weren’t surprising—intramural sports is like a night in Whitley County jail: a free-for-all that leaves you with great stories but sore the next morning.
For the Love of the Game
Great basketball needs one more element along with players and refs: The fans.
Sure, you could flip on an NBA game and see all-stars windmill dunk. You could walk down the street and see a historic D1 program.
Or you could swipe in at Beck any given Monday, Tuesday, or Thursday night and see guys and girls play with heart. No shoe deals, no NIL, no contract negotiations—pure basketball.
And let me tell you something, I have talked to a few team captains, and whether you like it or not they’re going for it all—they’ll shoot, score, foul, and claw to hold that trophy. One thing they all agree on: everything is going to be left on the court this season.
Power Rankings
Developing intramural basketball power rankings is the most ambitious project The Rambler has taken on in years. We consulted sports writers, coaches, oracles, adjuncts, and freelance pundits. We then used a complicated regression analysis developed by Dr. Michael “The Sabermetrician of Gratz Park” Kelly, then let the numbers cool in Rafinesque’s tomb.
A-League Preseason Power Rankings
1. LeBron’s Disciples
The soccer team boys are reigning champs, bringing back the Gudorf brothers, Coach Miller, and now they’ve added youngsters like Seth Hickerson in the off-season.
2. Garnet
This Pike & bros squad has got some DAWGS in the paint (a.k.a the writer of this article–bite me).
3. Gold Team
The Kappa Alpha crew is physical down low—an older team with experience to go around.
4. Phi Tau A
The addition of John Buckle significantly helps Phi Kappa Tau’s finest around the arc. Dangerous on runs.
5. Gooney Tunes
Another soccer squad, and last year’s runner-up. The loss of Shelton “Shoota” Smith was significant, but this championship-caliber team picked up five-star prospect Daniel Mullins in the off-season.
6. Pike Gold
The loss of seniors hurts Pike’s odds, but the acquisition of Shelton “Shoota” Smith and the development of other long-range bombers like Gavin Sheets helps their chances.
7. GOATS
Young team made up of Kappa Alpha freshmen that bring raw talent and size but lack experience in this league.
8. Crimson Team
Sleeper team, led by George “the King” Thacker—this Kappa Alpha team of sneaky athletic guys might shock the world.
B-League Preseason Power Rankings
1. Ball Ticklers
Bringing women’s soccer athleticism together with dominant track and field power—can beat you in the paint and in fast breaks.
2. One Finger Wonder
Young team of women’s soccer players that has all the facets of a championship team: depth, chemistry, and athleticism.
3. Delta Sig Ballerz
A collection of BALLERZ that bring with them A-League experience and guidance from upperclassmen John “Rage’n Cajun” Mantooth.
4. Team of Friendship and Dreams
Athletic squad from Phi Kappa Tau that brings size in the paint and years of veteran experience.
5. Hoopies
Energetic crew from Chi Omega that brings the vibes.
6. Delta Sig Hoopers
A crew of athletes that are well known around Transy Swim and Dive, but unclear if Cash “Money” Doolin and Cole “K-Swiz” Brannock can get the job done.
7. Cutie Pi’s
A crowd favorite, this group of athletes from Alpha Omicron Pi seem cute but will kill on the court.
8. The UNCs
A decrypted crew of Pike boomers; Robbie “Big Scary” Crady and Jackson “Prez” Holt try to make up for the lack of youth with experience.
Music has always been a source of solace in my times of worry. As a toddler, I hummed “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” alongside my mother’s words as she protected me from closet monsters. In my awkward, middle-school angst, I screamed “Complicated,” echoing Avril Lavigne’s anger towards my drama-filled friend group. After my first heartbreak, I bawled Olivia Rodrigo’s “Traitor,” wondering how I would ever recover from the new-found loneliness.
As I’ve grown older and childhood troubles have shifted to trepidation reading the headlines, I’ve realized the monsters to fear aren’t in my closet, but running wild in American streets. So, as fear and hopelessness overcame me a few months ago while following ICE’s surge of terror, I turned to my familiar comfort.
Scrolling through the news, Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” has been an uplifting voice for me in a swarm of hatred and injustice. Cooke wrote the soulful song in response to the prejudices he experienced as an African-American man: “It’s been too hard livin’, but I’m afraid to die / ’Cause I don’t know what’s up there, beyond the sky.” Cooke’s painful words also resonate with the experiences of countless immigrants today, struggling with the cruelties and abuses of ICE.
In that sense, listening to Cooke is not a means of distraction, but a mechanism for deeper awareness of the horrors I read through every day. When I feel as though my opinions exist in a meaningless echo chamber, music acknowledges my fears and mirrors my worries through passionate lyrics. It consoles me and accompanies my solitary thoughts.
But it is not an escape. Sam Cooke’s voice doesn’t transport me to a utopian world away from Earth’s current inequities; rather, it gives me the endurance to face today’s calamitous truth. And the truth is terrifying.
The truth is that millions of dollars have been allocated to building the mass detention center Alligator Alcatraz. The truth is that Venezuelan and Salvadorian men have been sent to the mega-prison CECOT without due process. The truth is that ICE has been granted authority to enter homes without a judge’s warrant. The truth is that people living in America have been murdered at the hands of masked agents.
And the truth is that none of these things have occurred in secret. They have been publicly televised, and our so-called leaders have been shamelessly celebrating the perpetrators.
Silverio Villegas González was a 38-year-old father. He was from Mexico and working as a cook in Chicago when he attempted to flee ICE agents at a traffic stop. He allegedly dragged an agent with his car, but eyewitnesses said they never saw this take place (the agent himself later said his injuries were “nothing serious”). Silverio was shot with a bullet through his neck that rested in his chest. He died at Loyola University Medical Center, where cocaine was found in his system. His funeral was later held in his childhood home in Mexico. His casket was adorned with red and white roses, yellow lilies, and green foliage.
The truth is that Silverio Villegas González did not deserve to die on September 12, 2025.
Isaias Sanchez Barboza was a 31-year-old Mexican man. He was wearing camouflage and walking with a group of people in Rio Grande City, Texas, about five miles from the Mexican-American border. Border Patrol encountered the group and attempted to detain Isaias. After participating in an “active struggle” for two minutes, an agent shot Isaias three times. He later died at Starr County Hospital.
The truth is that Isaias Sanchez Barboza did not deserve to die on December 11, 2025.
Keith Porter was a father of two daughters. He was living in Los Angeles and firing his rifle into the air in celebration of the new year. An off-duty ICE officer lived in the same apartment complex as Keith, and claimed to respond to an “active shooter situation.” It’s hard to know what happened next; there were no cameras and authorities have released very little information to the public. All we know for sure is that when LAPD officers arrived on the scene, Keith, 43 years old, was on the ground, shot dead. Friends and family of Keith have said they hope he is remembered for his “joyful attitude” and being a “proud girl dad” and “the life of the party.”
The truth is that Keith Porter did not deserve to die on December 31, 2025.
Renée Good was a mother and a writer. She was warmly bundled up in a beanie while driving her maroon Honda on Portland Avenue in Minneapolis, where ICE agents were operating and their vehicle got stuck in the snow. When Renée stopped driving, her partner, Becca, went and stood behind the Honda to question and record the agents. Renée started backing up, and an agent attempted to open the Honda’s driver door. Another agent moved to the front-left of Renée’s car before she drove forward and steered to the right, away from the agent. The agent to the front-left of the car then fired three shots as Renée was driving away. Bullets struck her left forearm, her right breast, and the left side of her head. Immediately afterward, an agent called Renée a “fucking bitch.” This incident happened within the span of less than three minutes.
Bystanders pleaded with agents to allow a physician to check on Renée’s condition, but ICE refused, claiming they had medics on the way. She was denied medical care for six minutes after she was shot. Renée was pronounced dead soon after.
The truth is that Renée Good did not deserve to die on January 7, 2026.
Alex Pretti was an intensive care unit nurse. He worked in a Veterans Affairs medical center. On Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, Alex began to record an ICE agent with his phone, in a reported attempt to document a nearby detention. He was wearing a concealed and registered gun on his waist. After directing traffic, Alex tried to help a woman up from the ground who had been knocked down by agents. Alex and others were pepper sprayed. Alex then fell to the ground, and was tugged by the hood of his coat into the street by an agent. Agents then began to pin Alex down and punch him repeatedly before one drew a gun and removed Alex’s from his waist. One agent shot Alex, then another. Ten shots were fired within five seconds. He passed away at the scene.
The truth is that Alex Pretti did not deserve to die on January 4, 2026.
Heber Sánchez Domínguez, Víctor Manuel Díaz, and Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres were all immigrants who died in ICE detention centers.
Heber, a Mexican immigrant, was found hanging by his neck in his detention room.
Víctor, a Nicaraguan immigrant, also died in his detention room. Agents claimed his death was a suicide, but Victor’s brother told ABC News, “I don’t believe he took his life. He was not a criminal. He was looking for a better life and he wanted to help our mother.”
Luis Gustavo, a Honduran immigrant, suffered from a heart-related death. His brother wrote, “Sadly, his life was cut short due to the lack of adequate medical care while he was in ICE custody.”
The truth is that these men did not deserve to die.
Reading these stories has been one of the most difficult and deflating things I’ve done in a long time. Scrolling through pictures of the men and women, now gone, who were once alive and well, left an excruciating pain in my chest.
Keith taking a selfie with his grandmother. Renee’s curly hair flowing at the beach. Alex crouching on a wilderness hike. Heber smiling in his orange hoodie. Each photo captured carefree moments, each subject tragically naive of what would happen next.
The photos are a reminder that each of these lives are a universe in themselves. They had an entire family and personality and history before their unjust demise. They once feared the monsters in their childhood closets and cried over juvenile relationships. They were human. They had joys and hardships. They endured. But now their existence has been reduced, in the headlines, to the label of yet another “ICE victim.”
But their lives were more than their victimhood. Something is wrong with us if we simply see them as a name in a list of those abused by ICE, without considering the previous worlds these people once woke up to every day. Like all of us, they were flawed. Like all of us, they tried to grow, and failed sometimes, and tried again. They had mothers and fathers and sons and daughters. They had reasons to continue searching for a better life. They were, each of them, their own universe.
Let us remember them, and their stories: Silverio Villegas González and Isaias Sanchez Barboza. Keith Porter and Renée Good. Alex Pretti and Heber Sánchez Domínguez. Víctor Manuel Díaz and Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres. Remember the totality of their identities and lives. Remember their names, and fight for a better world. For everyone.
Being alive today is a never-ending whirl of intimidation and distress, but we have the power to incite change, through protest and speech and care. My form of opposition is grounded in both writing and listening. I was inspired to compose this article by Sam Cooke and his steadfast words: “It’s been a long, / a long time comin’, / but I know / A change gon’ come / Oh yes it will.” Listening to Cooke’s voice, I am filled with the strength to endure and refuse to succumb to hopeless melancholy. I am fueled by the rage of generations who have suffered through injustice. I am empowered to speak out.
They surround me when I sleep on the blue corduroy couch in the half-finished basement back home where I go to migrate as the summer heat in my bedroom is no longer tolerable with a box fan on full blast. They stare at me with their multi-colored spines, titles ranging from infamous to utterly unknown.
I can’t tell you exactly when my personal DVD obsession began but I can tell you where the obsession came from: my Dad. He used to work at Suncoast, a now-defunct (as they all practically are) mall video store. It was a job I was meant for but born too late to have.
Dinosaurs and monsters were early subjects of my obsession. I became utterly fixated on toys, books, movies, etc., which featured dinos or monsters, no matter the quality. Jurassic Park III and Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters were ritualistic after-preschool viewings.
I was allowed to watch most things in our extensive collection. But despite David Bowie’s titular song being one of my first favorite songs, Paul Schrader’s remake of Cat People was off the table for its explicit eroticism. I could (and often did) watch the original film from the forties. But I was permitted to watch Kuroneko despite the brutal assault and murder scene within the first ten minutes. Turns out that scene was more brutal than I remembered (more than I care to describe; viewer discretion advised). I only discovered this when I rewatched the film while writing my First Year Research Seminar paper on another J-Horror childhood favorite, Hausu (a film where you too can witness a piano eat a woman!)
The most alluring of these forbidden films was John Carpenter’s The Thing. The DVD we had was really nothing special. SteelBooks and limited edition releases weren’t as big with the collector market as they are now. We just had a basic DVD with the classic, cold poster on the front cover. This was another case where I was allowed to watch the original (the 1951 The Thing From Another World), but not the eighties remake. My Mom was afraid that the visceral dog death would give me nightmares. Typical excuse.
My Mom was the warden at the Kentucky Correctional Institute for Women for most of my childhood, so she sometimes had to be out of town for correctional conferences. One of these trips came around when I was seven years old. The moment she stepped out of the house, dragging her black carry-on suitcase behind her, I began to plot my escape from the cell of not knowing what all the fuss was about this Thing.
I sat on the living room carpet in the middle of the three sunbeams coming through the front door. I was taught to pray to a similar trinity of light, so I interpreted this as a good sign. I turned to my Dad, who was sitting in his brown, pleather chair browsing Facebook.
“Can we watch The Thing?” I asked. I’m sure I plastered the sad eyes I often practiced in the mirror onto my face. He didn’t answer for a couple seconds. I thought he was for sure going to shoot me down. But then he stood up.
He walked over to the tall shelf closest to our old, heavy TV, and reached for the DVD. . “Do not tell your mother I let you watch this.”
~
I came out as asexual to my Dad in the Target dollar section.
I never had real crushes growing up. By “real,” I mean real people. I certainly have plenty of fictional crushes. Highlights include:
A triangle in a tophat (Gravity Falls)
A polygonal woman who only speaks in insults and business lingo (ƎNA: Dream BBQ)
An eldritch tree monster that sings opera (“Over the Garden Wall”)
The manifestation of a man’s desire for punishment donning a metal triangle (what is up with me and triangles?!) on its head (Silent Hill)
A shirtless freak with perfect teeth (No, I’m Not A Human)
Hate Pillar (“I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”)
Incredible taste, I know.
But that’s all fiction. The closest I ever got to kissing anyone in real life was in the fourth grade. As it does in elementary school, some miscommunication culminated in my classmate Josh and I being surrounded by the rest of our class on the recess field. They spun around us in a layered circle with an almost choreographed dance, pleading for us to “KISS! KISS! KISS!”
Josh and I spent five minutes whispering through gritted teeth trying to figure out how to fake a kiss before everybody lost interest and disbanded, leaving us alone in our confusion and discomfort.
Painting by Allie Conover
I didn’t get why everybody cared so much. Sure, Josh was an acquaintance. We traded Five Nights At Freddy’s keychains a couple times. But I didn’t like like him.
I never like liked anyone.
Four years later, I discovered the term “asexual” by complete accident. I came across the term “demisexual” (a microlabel on the asexuality spectrum) as a search recommendation while looking up Demi Lovato. From there, I fell upwards into the arms of an angel cloaked in monochrome with a purple sash. And while holding me in their porcelain-smooth arms, they told me everything was going to be okay.
At Target, my Dad stood across from me as I picked up each miniature Pride flag in the dollar bin and explained what they meant. I went through them one by one until I found the four-striped, mostly monochrome flag with its singular purple stripe at the base. I held it up, took a breath, and said:
“This is the asexual flag. Which is what I am.”
My parents are both pretty open-minded, but I was still afraid they wouldn’t understand. By that point, I had been going back-and-forth about whether I even wanted to tell them for a few years. I figured it would be as good a time as any since I was about to start high school, supposedly a time for new beginnings. Maybe coming out would be the first step towards becoming more comfortable with carving the shape of my life ahead of me.
Still, I had been terribly anxious since eating my club sandwich at McAlister’s Deli an hour earlier, second-guessing my plan to come out (even hoping that I could avoid it if they were out of my flag in the dollar bin).
My Dad simply said, “Okay.”
And he bought me the flag. It’s still in my room at home, balanced in the crest of my antique secretary desk.
~
My Granny gave me a portable DVD player when I was five so I would stop hogging the TV watching Generation Three My Little Pony and Cats & Dogs: Revenge of Kitty Galore when we visited her house. I took that player home with me eventually and it lasted me a little under a decade. In 2015, I took it to Florida and performed a one-person show in the hotel of the final chapter of “Over The Garden Wall”while the episode played on the tiny screen behind me. The only other thing I remember about that trip is making my Mom buy me six Warrior Cats books at the Barnes & Noble in Destin. All of which I had to haul home in my red, blue, and yellow suitcase.
I’ve always had my little hyperfixations. Warrior Cats was nestled inside my frontal lobe from the fourth to seventh grade. I’d gather all my cat plushies into a basket and drag them outside to throw around under the big tree in my grandparents’ backyard, pretending they were at war.
Chucky, the slasher villain, was one of my imaginary friends in the third grade. Whenever my class was pulled down the hall to attend Mass every Tuesday, I would imagine that he was running around the altar and parkouring across the ceiling beams. I have to this day never seen any film in the Child’s Play franchise.
Despite my extensive list of specific obsessions (see above list of fictional crushes), I’ve had a more general interest in collecting since I was trusted with a debit card. First, there were long sprees at independent record stores. But once that became too expensive, I broke up with the wax for bound paper, and a different kind of disc.
Half Price loves to see me coming. I’m often called a book addict by my friends. I have no idea why. It’s not like I go twice a week. It’s only once! Usually…
Found in many shopping centers with shitty parking lots, Half Price has everything I want.. They’ve got books that aren’t actually at half price, especially if they’re Harlan Ellison paperbacks (I can’t believe I spent twenty bucks on a singular mass market paperback of Paingod once.) But I’ll give them a pass since they have cheap Blu-Rays and DVDs. (Ignore that I spent seventy dollars on my copy of Possession during one trip a couple years ago. They’re usually cheaper than that.)
I have followed in my father’s footsteps. I have about four-hundred films packed into my shelves. The collection keeps spreading, growing like a pretty mold across my dwindling shelf space. I have no plans of stopping the spread.
~
In such a sex-and-romance-obsessed society, it’s sometimes hard to explain that I have no personal interest in those subjects. For me, it’s like having a salisbury steak slid in front of me, and I cannot stand salisbury steak, but everybody around me is constantly talking about how delicious it is. I could never eat the meat.
I had been plagued by the question, “Do you have a boyfriend?” since I could hold a coherent conversation with another person. My Mom even used to joke about me having a boyfriend sometimes, especially around Valentine’s Day. It was a bit I never found funny.
Those kinds of jokes stopped after I came out.
I consider myself lucky for that.
My asexuality (and later realized aromanticism) has not prevented other people from developing crushes on me. One person even asked in writing for “JUST ONE CHANCE ALLIE I BEG!” But despite the Devil In Miss Jones poster nailed on my wall and the section of vintage pornos on DVD at the bottom of my bookshelf, I remain just as repulsed at the idea of getting just a peck on the cheek as I was in fourth grade. I guess whatever wire in my brain that was supposed to be attracted to other people decided that boutique Blu-Rays were far sexier.
~
When I was three, I found a small, orange-and-yellow dinosaur toy in my preschool’s parking lot. I believe it was meant to be an Allosaurus. The mold the company used made it look like a chunky chimera of carnivorous prehistoric beasts. I loved it for what it was. It only left my side when I placed it on the light wood bookshelf across from my converted crib to look over me while I slept. I took it to school in the front pocket of my blue overalls and let it go ahead of me on the slide. I brought it to the park in Brown County, Indiana where we rolled around in the bug-infested leaves after staring at the confectioners at the candy shop in town making Red Hots all afternoon. Though I already had the exact same dinosaur toy at my house, I had found this one. I fell in love with this little orphaned toy.
OBJECTS OF DESIRE: “Boutique Blu-Rays are far sexier than other people.”
When I love something, I like to keep it close. I like it within my grasp.
It’s probably why I have a giant, talking Bill Cipher plush at the foot of my bed. It’s why I sit across from my The Thing poster, the same art that was on the DVD my Dad sold a long time ago and I later found at Barnes and Noble for $9.99.
When I like a movie, why should I have to rely on what streaming has in stock for a limited time? You think physical media’s dead? Well, if the end of the world comes, don’t come crying to me when you can’t watch The Black Cauldron on Disney+. Me? I’ve got four copies.
When I’m home, I sleep not in the embrace of some romantic partner, but within the comforting, collective gaze of my favorite shitty slashers and A24 collector’s editions. Phantom of the Paradise sits below the entirety of Twin Peaks. The unknown Goatsucker under Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. They all have a home on my shelf. The only thing “allo” about me remains the tire-scuffed Allosaurus watching me from beside my Fire Walk With Me themed lava lamp. I am content.
So I sit amongst the discs that reflect rainbows when angled just right. If I look closely, I can see my angel in the circular mirror. They have the same glasses as me.
This article, which was co-written by Katie Axon and Becca Orjala, is the first in a series on AI at Transy. In the coming weeks, The Rambler will explore student perspectives, environmental impacts, accessibility, ethics, and other issues.
Disclosure: Katie Axon is a member of the Human Intelligence (Hi!) faculty learning community, a working group taking a critical look at AI in higher education; David Ramsey, the advisor of The Rambler, is the co-founder of the Hi! FLC.
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All Transy students, faculty, and staff found something new when they logged in to their MyTransy portals this fall: links to ChatGPT 5, Google Gemini, and Google NotebookLM. The university spent $120,000 to purchase this suite of “AI” consumer products for everyone on campus this year.
“I think of AI as a tool,” said Amanda Sarratore, the university’s Vice President for infrastructure & chief information officer, who directs IT on campus. “It is just like any other technology tool that we make available to our faculty, staff and students.”
But many on campus have questions and concerns about whether these “tools” undercut the values and mission of a liberal arts education: Do “generative AI” chatbots like ChatGPT enable shortcuts that undermine the learning process? Should an educational institution encourage the use of products prone to misinformation and plagiarism? What about the environmental impacts or broader harms to society and culture?
“A university should be a place that values learning and community more than efficiency, profit, or the next trendy hot topic,” said history professor Hannah Alms. “I feel that higher education as a whole has been too quick to embrace generative AI without protecting core values such as independent thought, individual development, and the exploration of what it means to be human.”
Some professors believe that the consumer products purchased by the university are actively harmful to students and to Transy’s mission.
“I think it was a capitulation to the technocrats, none of whom have our students’ interests at heart,” said Spanish professor and Humanities Division chair Jeremy Paden. Learning can be transformative, he said, but it takes time, practice, and attention.
“AI threatens everything we value in higher education,” English professor Kremena Todorova said. “It’s anti-creative and anti-critical thinking. It’s anti-meaning and anti-learning. It is anti-human. It’s terrible for the environment. Billionaires love it, and love the idea of marketing it to young people, because they want to crush labor costs.”
Health and exercise science professor JJ Wallace has a different perspective, seeing a need to embrace these products. “It’s everywhere, and it’s going to continue to be everywhere, so we can’t keep our head in the sand,” she said. “We need to be able to use it effectively, appropriately, and ethically, because it’s not going to go away. I’m sorry, it’s just not.”
Wallace, the co-director of Transy’s Digital Liberal Arts initiative, said that AI represented an opportunity for faculty to take a leadership role in guiding students on how to (and how not to) use systems like ChatGPT. “I would love to see them actively engaging in how and if this technology is appropriate for what they do in the classroom,” Wallace said.
But not everyone shares her enthusiasm for the chatbots now a click away in every MyTransy portal. “It makes me want to retire,” said physics professor Jamie Day.
J.J. Wallace discusses using AI chatbots as “study buddies” at an Academic Affairs presentation on Jan. 15
How AI came to Transy
“Artificial intelligence” can refer to any computational system that does tasks normally done by human beings. The current hype you’ve probably been reading about refers to “large language models,” or LLMs.
LLMs use vast quantities of data, typically gathered from the Internet, to generate text, images, or other content (often called “generative AI”). It’s a prediction system: If you ask it a question, it will provide an answer by predicting each bit of language that a human being—or a human being with instantaneous Internet searching—might use. If a student asks an LLM chatbot to write an essay or short homework response, it can do a passable job of producing something that sounds at least moderately like student writing. Or it can do the same with solving a complicated physics equation.
During the winter term last year, a Board-level ad-hoc working group began reviewing a “framework” document—general guidelines for AI at Transy. The bulk of the work on this document was done by Sarratore and then-Dean Rebecca Thomas, with all cabinet members providing input.
In addition to Sarratore and Thomas, the working group charged with evaluating the framework included Board members Michael Finley and Prakash Maggan, JJ Wallace (who served at the request of Thomas), and two professors nominated as faculty representatives: history professor Gregg Bocketti and computer science professor Jack Bandy. (Thomas and Bandy have since left Transy for academic jobs elsewhere.)
Bocketti and Bandy, according to a letter sent to the Faculty Concerns Committee last May, were alarmed by the scope of AI implementation that the working group had been planning, including in ways that would impact pedagogy, research, and curriculum:
According to their letter, Bocketti and Bandy were able to convince Thomas and Sarratore to revise the framework in substantive ways that they believed would make it more acceptable to faculty.
However, their concern that the university was moving on an “unnecessarily condensed calendar for the development of such a wide-ranging policy framework” went unaddressed.
While Bocketti and Bandy had input on the framework, they were not involved in the university’s biggest policy decision: Contracting with for-profit companies to purchase access to AI systems for everyone on campus this year.
Sarratore said that determination was made by evaluating existing AI products already in use on campus, reviewing current spending with the university’s controller, and incorporating feedback from an IT survey she conducted. “The Bingham Center for Teaching Excellence also served as a key partner and provided valuable input,” she said.
But the decision was otherwise made without direct faculty input.
Faculty concerns
The $120,000 price tag of the new AI products had not been previously publicly reported when The Rambler learned these figures last semester. Paden said it raised questions about the university’s priorities.
“Ten years ago, we had a cafeteria in the student center, a sandwich and fry shop in the basement of MFA, a coffee shop where Gratz Perk is, and an honest-to-goodness late night food option in Thompson Hall,” Paden said. “Currently, the only real place to get food is the Cafeteria. It is open for dinner only for two hours and the late option closes at 9 pm. The constraints are economic, but we are choosing to spend our money on things like AI rather than food availability.”
Todorova said she was appalled when she learned of the cost of the AI suite from TheRambler.
“There has been little to no input from faculty or students,” she said. “Many of us believe they are antithetical to learning and have no place in the classroom. Why was this decision made without a discussion within the campus community? What about students who aren’t ethically comfortable using AI for legitimate reasons? It seems like we’re rushing in to latch on to the hype without any kind of plan or safeguards in place.”
Julie Perino, co-director of the Bingham Center for Teaching Excellence, said she thought “the school’s response has been pretty measured.”
Transy’s first action, Perino said, was establishing an AI integrity policy in 2022. “We made sure to put that into place pretty quickly. And we’ve been bringing in speakers to talk to faculty about teaching with AI since April of 2022.”
For some faculty, however, the workshops and training offered on AI have appeared to be one-sided, pushing for the implementation of AI in the classroom whether faculty (or students) like it or not.
David Ramsey, an adjunct professor of English and WRC and faculty advisor for The Rambler, said that the AI workshop he attended as part of the training for FYS this fall featured sixty slides on how to implement AI. Just one slide had any information for faculty who wished not to use AI in their classrooms at all, Ramsey said. It was a sample policy statement disallowing AI. The statement itself had been written by AI.
Kurt Gohde, professor of studio and digital arts, said that giving only one side in such trainings was a problem given the number of faculty eager for a very different approach.
“I think we should have equal resources and equal training and equal workshops for people who want to find ways to live without AI as we do for people who want to find ways to use AI,” he said.
Though he never found it useful himself, Gohde previously experimented with assignments that required AI because he thought students would need those skills after they graduated. The idea that students need AI training (or “AI literacy”) to compete in the job market is likely the most common argument advanced by proponents of AI in higher education. But Gohde ultimately concluded that products like ChatGPT were so easy to use that no training was necessary. Gohde said he was confident that someone with a good liberal arts education from Transy would have no trouble figuring out how to use an AI chatbot if a job required it.
For critics of AI in higher education, the problem is not just that products like ChatGPT typically don’t actually require specialized skills, but that reliance on AI may weaken other skills that Transy promises to offer students.
“The argument that we need to teach them to use this tech responsibly is malarkey,” Paden said. At least in the Humanities, he said, “the only way to use it responsibly is to know how to do the very things you are asking it to do.” But students have not yet read or written enough to have that mastery, he said. “Language is a life-long endeavor that changes over time, due to context and use,” he said. “We lose it, if we don’t use it.”
The faculty members most critical of AI said they aren’t avoiding the topic or denying its widespread use; they are actively trying to come up with innovative new approaches in their pedagogy to respond to the problems these products create.
“Of course we know ChatGPT is everywhere,” Todorova said. “That’s not an argument for paying to invite something harmful onto campus.”
“The process is the point”
University leaders said that their aim was not to replace human thinking or judgment, or to undercut deep learning experiences.
“The goal isn’t to take away the human element or creativity,” Sarratore said. “It’s about removing the repetitive, time-consuming tasks so we can focus on the work that really matters.”
But for art professor Grace Ramsey, LLMs are “the worst possible thing for any creative process.”
She expressed frustration with LLM marketing that promises to let students skip the slog and get the product. The value of going through the process is the whole point, she said. Even if the final product doesn’t turn out well, she added, the experience of making it helps the student grow: “The mistakes, the epiphanies, the slog, the hours of labor, the unexpected results, the hard-won revisions—you bring all that forward to the next thing you make and the next thing and the next.”
At a certain point, she said, students find pleasure and meaning in the process—including the parts that are challenging or may feel tedious at first:
The fact that this process can be difficult means that teaching it is difficult, she said. But she believes that labor pays off: “Students need the challenge of doing the thing not just to learn the subject, but most importantly to learn who they are and how they might face future challenges.”
AI in the classroom at Transy
One challenge for students with the advent of products like ChatGPT is that rules and expectations about the use of AI vary widely by professor.
Perino said she was “conflicted” on its use: “I think it is something that should be used sparingly because of the environmental impacts. I tend to think it should really only be used by people who know how to get to the end result they want and understand how to get there.”
Wallace said her approach was to establish “an overall course policy.”
“If you use AI, I have a really robust citation policy about how to treat it as if it is an expert source,” she said. “So when using quotations, if you’re taking it word for word, or if you’re doing paraphrasing—you still cite it, just like you would any other source.”
Wallace also sees the potential for much deeper integration of AI at Transy. In a recent Academic Affairs presentation, she shared research on creating a “custom study buddy with ChatGPT,” expressed an interest in incorporating AI products in the Writing Center, and suggested the possibility of a chatbot programmed to offer the students the virtual experience of communicating with William Shakespeare.
Other professors have experimented with AI-based assignments with limitations on what students are allowed to use it for; some have had students critique content generated by AI.
Alms said that her approach this semester was to involve her students in crafting their own classroom policy.
“From that point, they are accountable to themselves, each other, and to me,” she said. “The responsibility is on students, in those courses, to create their own community guidelines and to hold themselves responsible to them.”
Alms said that she was pleasantly surprised to learn many of her students were quite skeptical of AI and concerned that it would harm their learning experience and ability to think independently.
Other professors have completely shifted the way their classrooms function in part as a response to AI.
After realizing that some of his students’ self-reflection assignments were generated with AI, Gohde decided this semester to have his students handwrite them instead. “The worst thing to steal is the act of self reflection,” Gohde said.
Eventually he decided that all writing assignments in his courses should be handwritten. “I’m going to suffer through reading bad handwriting as a result because I think it’s better for everyone,” Gohde said.
Todorova has taken a similar approach, also initially inspired as a way to avoid generative AI. But it has become key to her teaching philosophy, she said.
“By the time last semester began, I saw these assignments as central to my pedagogy, which stresses learning as embodied, relational, and communal,” she said.
Her students seem to enjoy the change, she said. In one reflection, a student stated, “I barely write on paper anymore because of technology and it was nice to be able to do that again. I would recommend that you keep asking students to do this because I feel like it also leaves less room for distractions.”
Physics professor Mostafa Tanhayi Ahari allows his students to use AI, but he recognized there can be problems in an academic setting. “Mathematically AI is doing a good job, but physically, sometimes it gives you the wrong answers,” he said. Students without the experience to catch those mistakes should avoid using it, Ahari said.
Among professors who do not allow any use of AI, few are punishing students who break the rules or taking disciplinary action.
“I don’t have the interest or bandwidth to play cop,” David Ramsey said. “Even if I did, there’s too much potential for false positives and false negatives.”
If someone appears to have used AI, Ramsey said, he has a conversation with the student.
“These are addictive products that harm society and young people,” Ramsey said. “Students who use so-called AI are responding to societal and institutional pressures and incentives, including the fact that their university provided the products to them. So for me, if someone violates the rules to use AI in my class, it’s an opportunity. I want to know what led them to make that choice, and I want to share with them why I believe that reliance on these products is damaging to their education and their future. And for those willing to try a different approach—or nervous about their ability to do college work themselves—I’m there to help.”
“Appropriate guardrails”
Asked about the concerns from faculty and students about AI on campus, President Brien Lewis responded in a statement compiled for him by key cabinet members: “Those concerns are both valid and shared by the university. Transylvania’s framework begins from the premise that AI is a tool, one that must never replace human judgment, creativity, or the deep learning experiences that define a Transy education.” (For critics of AI, even the word “tool” can be controversial.)
Transy’s leadership does not see the AI products they purchased as something new. Many faculty, staff, and students were already using various AI products, Sarratore said. “Our goal was not to introduce new technology, but to put appropriate guardrails in place to protect institutional and student data,” she said.
These “guardrails” seem to be the university’s primary explanation for the purchase. Instead of the standard AI products, the university acquired custom versions that OpenAI and Google promise will protect users’ data and privacy.
“We were able to make sure that when using the tools, all this safety is in place,” Wallace said. “That ensures that when we are using the tool as a campus, we’re doing so with as many safeguards as we possibly can.”
It’s hard to know precisely how these additional privacy or security measures function, or how reliable they are. But Bocketti and Bandy got a look at two relevant agreements that Transy signed with OpenAI. These documents state that Transy can make a written request, no more than once per year, for OpenAI’s most recent independent audit report regarding privacy and security, as well as summary details of certain other audits or security reports, “upon reasonable request.”
When asked about privacy concerns at one AI workshop last August, Wallace said that Transy could sue if a company like OpenAI didn’t follow the agreement, but acknowledged that the university was ultimately trusting the companies to hold up their end of the deal.
But AI skeptics worry about the long history of tech companies breaking promises about privacy. Companies like Facebook, Youtube, and Google have paid out large settlements and fines for breaking privacy agreements with customers (none of which threatened their business models).
“Given that history, I wouldn’t trust their promises of privacy, even if they offer a third party audit,” Gohde said. “I couldn’t advise students to trust them either.”
David Ramsey said he viewed these promises as a marketing ploy to infiltrate college campuses with a large potential user base. “Even if I trusted these companies,” he added, “why do AI apps get a special deal? Many of our students use TikTok or Instagram or Snapchat or any number of other apps that collect their information.”
Transy’s licenses with OpenAI and Google are purchased on an annual basis, so university officials will have a decision to make on whether or not to renew the current suite of products for next academic year.
Sarratore said that the $120,000 investment in these products didn’t mean the university was pushing AI on campus. “What we’re doing is making it available for those who are interested,” she said. “For people who want to use it, it can be a real benefit.”
What about the students?
Sam Schultz and Alice Beatty present action ideas to the Human Intelligence FLC, Jan. 14.
The workshops provided to faculty have emphasized the need for safeguards for students using AI and careful instruction about how to use it in safe, ethical, and academically appropriate ways. But if the goal is to protect students, what did the university offer to help them navigate these new AI consumer products when they suddenly popped up in their MyTransy portals? Based on The Rambler’s reporting, it seems there was little plan in place to offer guidance on this transition to students last semester, other than relying on faculty to do so in their classrooms.
AI-critical faculty have generally disparaged the resources offered by Transy as unhelpful, but there have been workshops for faculty, and more offerings to come. The Bingham Center for Teaching Excellence and the Digital Liberal Arts Initiative, for example, are both expanding programming for faculty who choose to engage with AI. Last summer, Transy librarians Katrina Salley and Lori Bird created a microcourse that “provides information about what AI is, the capabilities and limitations of AI, and ethical ways to use AI,” Salley said. The microcourse was presented to faculty at a faculty retreat prior to the fall semester, with the hope that they would incorporate some of its lessons into their courses.
The microcourse was designed for a student audience, but fits the pattern of reliance on faculty to deliver the message. The university offered no similar direct outreach for students, but Salley said the library plans to launch a website on the topic for students this summer, which will cover similar ground as the microcourse.
There was also little to no opportunity for students to share their thoughts (or raise concerns or objections) before the AI products suddenly appeared.
According to the statement provided by President Lewis, “the [AI] framework and related investments were developed…with input from…SGA representatives.”
But SGA President Sean Gannon said that during their only meeting on the topic with Sarratore in February of 2025, the dialogue was vague—focusing on what tech they used as students and overall opinions about AI. “We, in general, opposed AI because of ethical and accuracy concerns,” Gannon said. “Nothing else much came of our conversation, and she never followed up about the specific topic.”
Last semester, Gohde and David Ramsey founded a faculty learning community (FLC), Human Intelligence (Hi!) in part to try to fill the gap on resources for AI-free pedagogy, resources for students who want to pursue AI-free education, and opportunities for students to express their opinions about AI at Transy. The group chose its name because, although most members are staunchly “anti-AI,” they wanted to emphasize promoting the liberal arts values they believe are under threat. Gohde and Ramsey said they wanted to start small (the FLC includes seven faculty members and eight students), but have been inspired to see students taking the initiative on plans to expand Human Intelligence to a campus-wide effort in the coming weeks.
During the FLC’s preliminary discussions, students have expressed frustration that the $120,000 purchase was made without regard for their input even though the products are in large part for their own use.
For her part, Wallace maintains that giving students these programs help them with “critical thinking and thinking about the ability to identify misinformation and the ability to verify information. If we can still continue to teach these foundational skills, we can apply that to anything, including AI.”
What about students who want no part of AI in their education? Ramsey said that anti-AI sentiment—including some more radical in their opposition than professors—was common among his students. One student in Ramsey’s current FYRS class made this comment in a recent assignment:
According to Perino, such students have options. “I know very few [professors] who are like, you have to use AI to do this,” she said.
If a student is uncomfortable with an assignment that does require AI, she said, they can opt out by communicating their concerns with their professor. At that point, she said, the professor should offer an alternative assignment..
But students should think carefully about opting out, Perino said. “Faculty who use AI in an assignment aren’t just doing it as an exercise. There’s some deeper goal there. So I’d ask the student to think about the goals of the assignment and make sure they’re not missing out on anything by skipping the assignment or by asking to do it in a different way.”
But there is no official university policy guaranteeing this option, Perino acknowledged. In practice, it’s hard to believe students would feel comfortable telling a professor they are refusing to do an assignment on principle.
While the debate over AI on campus continues at Transy, students in the Hi! FLC have begun planning workshops and activities to promote human intelligence and embodied learning, including a series of “Hi! DIY” events teaching handmade skills such as embroidery.
Students in the FLC said they are also planning to start a petition asking the university to end its investment in the suite of AI products next year and reinvest those funds in human-centered education.
Since taking office, President Trump has mobilized U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to carry out an unprecedented mass deportation agenda, so far removing 230,000 people from the country. Countless others have been detained and incarcerated by ICE while awaiting the adjudication of their cases.
A heavy ICE presence in cities where many residents don’t want them has also led to tense clashes in the streets. On January 7, an ICE officer fatally shot U.S. citizen Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.
Immigrant families across the country have been living in a state of fear and high alert. The Rambler spoke with a number of immigrants in the Lexington community who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal from federal immigration authorities.
One local green card holder said that it had become clear that nothing can guarantee safety, not even American citizenship. “Do we comply or not comply if ICE questions us, detains us, harasses us?” they asked. “What does complying even mean?” Another said they have stopped speaking Spanish in public and are now afraid to go to work.
Transy President Brien Lewis said that his administration is monitoring the situation closely and will “share updates with the campus community as appropriate.”
The university, he said, “complies with all applicable federal and state laws and is committed to protecting the privacy of our community.”
After the Good shooting, hundreds of anti-ICE protests took place nationwide, including in downtown Lexington. Immigration advocates in the city and members of the Transy community are now scrambling to answer the question: What’s next? Could the chaos in Minneapolis and other communities come here?
Tracking ICE
For immigrant families in Lexington, one of the most challenging aspects of Trump’s ICE surge is the uncertainty: It’s next to impossible to predict just when and where ICE agents might show up.
As with communities across the country, individuals and advocacy groups periodically post warnings on social media about the presence of ICE in certain neighborhoods or surrounding cities. In some cities, DIY social media accounts or new grassroots activists have led highly effective responses, and at times have been more nimble or deeply plugged into information on the ground than established immigrant-rights institutions.
But many of the social media warnings are unverified, and may turn out to be false. People desperate for answers are sometimes confronted with rabbit holes of potential misinformation, furthering anxieties.
“Sharing unconfirmed ICE sightings creates fear and causes real harm to people who miss work, school, medical appointments, and even appointments because of unconfirmed activity,” said Executive Director of Neighbors Immigration Clinic, Mizari Suárez. She said that the only two ICE hotlines that people should trust are Louisville SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) and Neighbors Immigration Clinic. “We are actively sending trained volunteers to verify and respond,” she said.
Adding to the confusion, even the data about past ICE activities is extremely difficult for the average citizen to understand. ICE has field offices in Louisville and Bowling Green, so there is nothing unusual about the presence of ICE officers in Kentucky. Since Trump took office, their activities have increased: According to the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, ICE has made 1,950 arrests between Jan. 20, 2025 to Oct. 15, 2025. In the same time frame in 2024, 1,475 arrests were made. But the concern now is an all-out surge of the kind imposed on Minneapolis, where around 2,000 agents suddenly arrived in a single city.
Kentucky represents a potentially attractive option for temporary ICE detainees. So far, 22 law enforcement agencies in the state (with more in process) have entered into special arrangements, known as Section 287(g) agreements, with federal immigration authorities. The terms of these arrangements vary. The most expansive version, known as the “task force model” and used by 18 agencies in the state, essentially deputizes state or local law enforcement agencies to make immigration arrests during routine policing. The Lexington Police Department is not currently participating in any 287(g) arrangement with ICE, but agencies in nearby cities like Georgetown, Stanton, and Winchester are.
Fear in local communities
“ICE has been in Elizabethtown, Paducah, and the South End of Louisville,” one local immigrant told us, adding that they feared a surge of agents would be in Lexington soon. Around two months ago, they said, ICE picked up and detained five people in the Cardinal Valley area in Lexington. These activities were not widely known, they said; very little information can be found about them online.
The panic in local communities has been palpable, regardless of immigration status. One naturalized citizen told us they now carry all their documentation every time they leave the house.
“My dad has his green card and had done the process, but he’s scared,” a U.S.-born citizen told us. “My parents are trying so hard to not seem worried but I can see it.”
“We have our daughter’s phone number written on our arms, just in case,” a recently naturalized mother told us.
As rumors abound, Suárez and the Neighbors Immigration Clinic work to sort between fact and fiction, responding immediately to investigate any reports, including sending volunteers to physically survey the area.
Concerned citizens can reach out to the clinic to verify whether or not a claim is true, as well as learning about rights and resources available to help keep them safe.
The clinic also has recommended guidelines for what to report if people do spot ICE in their communities, based on the acronym SALUTE (Size, Actions/Activity, Location/Direction, Uniform/Clothes, Time and Date of Observation, Equipment and Weapons). See below for a hypothetical example.
What if an ICE surge comes to Lexington?
Asked about enforcement activity in the region, a spokesperson from the ICE field office in Chicago—responsible for overseeing activities in Kentucky and five other states—replied by email: “ICE does not share mission information for security reasons.” (Prior to receiving the email response, The Rambler had also attempted to reach the field office by telephone dozens of times; each time, the line was busy.)
Sergeant Bige Towery said the Lexington Police Department was not aware of any specific ongoing or future ICE operations in Lexington.
And if an ICE surge does arrive in Lexington? “When requested, the Lexington Police Department assists all federal enforcement partners to ensure the safety of all those involved,” Towery said. “The Lexington Police Department enforces state and local laws. Any federal laws are the jurisdiction of federal agencies.”
President Lewis focused on protecting the privacy rights of campus community members when possible under the law:
DPS Chief Steven Herold was unable to comment in detail before press time, but said the department has contacted Transy’s Justice and Safety Cabinet for clarification.
Because Transy is a private institution, ICE would be required to obtain a signed judicial warrant to enter the campus center or any academic or residential buildings. But nothing is stopping ICE from approaching people in public spaces. Outdoor spaces, even on Transy’s private property, may not necessarily offer constitutional protection from warrantless searches—there would typically not be a legal expectation of privacy on campus green spaces. If ICE agents are spotted on campus, advocates suggest that anyone concerned should stay inside a university building.
Legal advocates also emphasize that the important thing people can do to prepare is to know their constitutionally protected rights. Here are the basics from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), all of which apply to citizens and non-citizens residing in the U.S. alike:
My sex education consisted of my mom silently leaving The Care and Keeping of You 2:The Body Book for Older Girls on my bed one random Tuesday, a singular line from “Parks and Rec” from the fictitious pornstar Brandi Maxxx about“penis in vagina,” an online health course in 9th grade, and the iconic 2000s television show “The L Word.”
Over the past five years, I’ve asked nearly every Gen-Z sapphic I know if they’ve seen “The L Word.” Out of probably at least fifty people, only like three said yes.
“The L Word,” created by Ilene Chaken, aired on Showtime from 2004 to 2009 (there’s also a reboot that we don’t talk about), depicting a group of lesbians in L.A. The show had a profound impact on queer culture and made huge strides in lesbian representation, especially in the early 2000s. As far as I know, there has never been a piece of media before or after “The L Word” that has as much concentrated lesbianism as this one, to my intense chagrin. I’ve heard rumors of dykes gathering in bars when it was on the air to watch with bated breath if Dana would die or mass-sigh with disappointment when Shane left Carmen at the altar (I imagine it was something like the scene in Midsommar when the girls are all crying in unison).
I found out about this show when I started heavily questioning my sexuality, which was during quarantine. I was 14 or 15 or 16. I was spending a lot of time living like the main character in a coming-of-age movie. I remember lots of long, contemplative walks and bike rides where I would listen to “Lights Up” by Harry Styles on repeat.
Being in quarantine also meant I had a lot of time to sit on the internet and learn about gay people. “The L Word” came up pretty soon into my research, and I began watching it on Hulu before I knew what I was. I would lay in bed and watch with the volume as low as possible in case my family could somehow hear the salacious noises of people doing things to each other that I didn’t really understand. I had to avert my eyes at times, as well as delete the show from my watch history after every session. The possible embarrassment was too much to bear.
I was very grateful I could hide under a blanket and watch it on a portable device instead of rapidly switching the channel on a living room TV like the millennial lesbians had to do. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I was born earlier. Would I have remained the self-sheltered “straight” girl who gave kids dirty looks for cursing in middle school? Or would I have entered my “rebellious” phase earlier than twenty years old?
~
There aren’t a lot of shows about a group of gays navigating life and love. “The L Word” is the only one I knew about, at least. That made it my field book for social expectations for queer people. These expectations came most of all from a fan-favorite character, Shane McCutcheon. She is the only main character who is left-of-femme, as well as the resident “cool girl.” She’s also white and very thin (for as progressive as the show was, it hasn’t aged well: mostly white and femme and thin characters, very little—and at times offensive—bisexual and transgender representation, and other cringe-inducing aspects make up a good portion of the show).
A lot of sapphics, including myself, want to be her, be with her, or both. A lot of us look up to her. She also canonically has a body count of over 900 (with no STDs!), poor communication skills, and is a serial cheater (actually, all of the characters on this show are serial cheaters). In the pilot, a protagonist named Bette says, “Have you noticed that every time Shane walks into a room, someone leaves crying?” If this was said about a male character, we’d probably hate him. But Shane wasn’t a male. We wanna make girls cry, too, even if we can’t fully admit it.
Now, how do we think this affected impressionable 15-year-old Scarlett, the same Scarlett who wasn’t even gay yet, the same Scarlett who had gotten all of her social cues from TV and the preppy girls at her childhood dance studio? It turns out, pretty poorly.
This show taught me that to be a cool gay, you have to dress differently than the straight girls, be really skinny, and fuck as many girls as you possibly can (there was no such thing as protection in that show, by the way).
In high school, I wore sweatpants every day and had exclusively unrequited crushes. I was also recovering from an eating disorder, so being really skinny was out of the picture for me for the sake of my health and happiness and my relationships with my family or whatever.
My senior year, I walked into my dance studio and read the cast list for our “Beauty in the Beast” Recital, wondering what role I was going to get for my final year, a question I’ve been asking myself since I was four years old. I scanned the list for my name. My gaze lowered until I found out: I was the dog/footstool.
~
Going to college, I knew this could change. It took a lot of bumbling around, though. My style was not fully formed my freshman year, unlike these aliens from Fashion Planet that call themselves the class of 2029. Nor were my social skills, which took manymanymanymany failed conversations and two years of putting in effort on the dating apps like I do my schoolwork—I have a 4.0 GPA—to get anywhere. I also didn’t drink or do drugs my first year. (Which I don’t regret! Be sober children! And adults!)
Things finally changed in October of my sophomore year, when a girl with mutual friends asked me out at a party. Earlier that week, the first time I’d ever met her, she showed off her skimpy bra in front of me and a couple friends when explaining some anecdote about accidentally flashing a frat brother. At the party, she was drunk off Pink Whitney and wearing white face paint and goth makeup. Not my normal type, but they were too intriguing and too gay to say no. This experienced queer—who was also a stripper and college dropout—was nervous to talk to me?
The next morning, we went to a coffee shop and talked for four hours. On our second date, let’s just say Scarlett had a lot of firsts that night. On our third date, I threw up next to her car in a parking lot.
She answered my texts quickly, called me “pretty girl,” and told me I reminded her of a song called “Jackie Onassis.” Before we could go on a fourth date, I found out she was racist. Like shockingly racist. Like even my frat boy brother who just recently called my friends “insufferable libs” agreed it was way past problematic. I was reliably told that at a late Waffle House run, she told the waitress: “Calm down, Rosa Parks.” I stopped seeing her after that.
~
A few weeks later, I hung out with this other girl a few times. Those times also lined up with my first experiences binge-drinking. She introduced me to Lauryn Hill, which is really ironic, because she’s the exact type of person Hill warns about in “Doo Wop (That Thing).” She just wanted to show off her voice. Don’t be a hard rock when you really are a gem. Well, she didn’t seem to listen to the song. (We may have randomly celebrated our “anniversary” this past October. Frankly, no regrets.)
Nearly a year and many painful anecdotes later, I’m a little more like Shane, but I don’t really have the control and power and charisma she seems to have. Deep down, she must feel pretty out of control, since she can’t commit to a relationship.
I’d like to think I could. I’d like to think I’d do great. I’d save my money to buy her flowers and learn how to write poems for her. I’d make her a playlist and learn her favorite color and tell her good morning and good night. I’d pay for her food even though I don’t have a job. I’d trace hearts on her hand with my thumb. I’d pay attention to the stuff she wanted but didn’t buy at Target and get it for her later. We’d have a shared Pinterest board. I’d introduce her to my family, maybe even come out to my aunts and uncles.
But in my lower moments I feel afraid sometimes. Afraid that I’ll never stop feeling like the dog-slash-footstool I’ve always been.
Or if we’re in a really dark timeline, there’s a different movie I see playing out. First, I meet someone off the apps. Or better yet, organically. Something corny and amazing like I drop my books and she picks them up, or we happen to have the same coffee order. Maybe she has princess blonde hair or Aubrey Plaza dark brown hair; I don’t really care. She asks for my number. We start texting (and she texts me back quickly!), then that turns to meeting. Then that turns into meeting multiple times. Then one day she hands me a bouquet of flowers similar to one I’ve saved on Pinterest (she’s stalked my account, of course). On the tag, it says “Will you be my girlfriend?” I say “Yes!” and we embrace and then it starts raining and we recreate the one scene from “The Notebook.” A month or so passes and it’s going great. I have a partner! I’m living my dream. Sixteen-year-old me would be so happy.
Then a familiar feeling creeps into my stomach and scurries to my brain. I suddenly hate myself for no reason. I feel out of control and insecure. So I smoke and drink in my room. Then I walk to a bar by myself in the dark and drink more. I buy a drink for a girl there. A different girl. Maybe she has the same hair as my partner, maybe completely different; I don’t really care. I pretend I’m nice. I pretend I’m a good, secure person. Jackie Onassis. We go back to her place. And in a few moments I’ll have started something that inflicts unimaginable pain onto the partner I love.
Over the summer, I watched “The L Word” with this girl on a first date in her apartment. She was 21 or 22 and watching the series for the first time. She was a baker. She drank Soju. She rented her own apartment in downtown Louisville. She wore these colorful waist beads she believed would fall off when the universe needed them to (and made her Snaps more memorable). Anyway, we picked up at the episode she was on. Lo and behold, it was the episode where Dana Fairbanks fucking dies from breast cancer. I’ve actually always purposely avoided this episode, since I haven’t wanted to watch something so sad. But I thought it would be cool to share the experience with someone else, especially a cute girl whose head was in my lap. It was a pretty good episode.
I wanted to share more moments like this with her, but deep down I knew I wouldn’t. Deep down, I knew she was going to ghost me a week later. I would give her the benefit of the doubt. I would say, “she just lost her job.” But then I would see Snapchat stories of her having fun at the bar. Deep down, as we lay down together and watched the clock on screen count down to Dana’s death, I knew this moment would crumble into dust so rapidly it was like there was no point in watching this episode with her altogether.
For most of my life up to this point, my heart has been whole—not broken, not fractured—but buried beneath a pile of dust such as that. Dust made of first and last dates. Of texting me until you get tired of pretending that you’re interested in me. Of postulating our own definitions of queerness never to explore what they look like in tandem. Of explaining why I love “Community” and you pretending to be a nerd about something, too to hide the fact that you’re going to be a bitch to me. Of saying that we’re “meant to be” on Hinge but not asking me out. Of “forgetting” we had plans. Of sharing why we go to therapy five minutes into meeting each other and never seeing each other again. Of me paying for my own Lyfts home. Of pathetically waiting for you to finish your round of Fortnite before we talk. Of sending me a long paragraph of why I’m special, then not realizing you weren’t stable enough to pursue me until our second kiss, followed by a cinematically teary-eyed Uber home in the night. Of taking another melatonin gummy due to the heart-racing anxiety of fearing I’m going to be flaked on again. Of texting me asking to read over your three-page poem of why you wanna fuck your shitty cowboy Kroger boss that you would play Apple Arcade Games with while I was in bed, right before asking me if we can just be friends. Of constantly annoying my friends about this stuff. Of telling me what songs I remind you of and then giving she/they strippers a bad name at Waffle House.Of teaching another girl why they’re “not ready to date me.” Of being told by the girls that say yes at first that I “deserve better.” Including the ones who asked me out on a Crumbl Cookie box and almost taught me what love was. Of redownloading Tinder. Of giving my energy, my time, my charm, my body, myself, unappreciated.
Can someone please blow all this dust off and give my heart a hug? A hug that lasts? A hug they’ll bury us in?
~
This semester, my “Jane Austen and Film” professor told us, “Remember, literature and film are representations of life, not models of them.” Everyone chuckled, but I knew I sincerely needed that advice. I am learning and relearning that through my English major. When I write notes about Shakespeare or Jane Austen, I am not just marking anaphora or acute characterization, but also—with a 5-subject notebook, a sprained wrist, and a blue pen—breaking and rebuilding my ideas of what life, relationships, and queerness entail.
Then I go home and brush my teeth and see a picture of Shane taped on my mirror with a sticky note that reads “U R HER.”
