*A quick disclaimer: trigger warnings for discussion of sexual assault and domestic abuse*

It’s On Us is an organization founded in 2014 as an initiative of the Obama-Biden White House. The mission of this group is to prevent sexual assault as well as to communicate that it is on all of us to have important conversations with one another on serious issues. Because its main target audience is college students, the initiative has presently been rejuvenated at Transy with the group’s sponsorship of a book club.

The It’s On Us book club will be holding meetings on the second Tuesday of every month. The spotlight of these meetings is about the novel, In the Dreamhouse, by Carmen Maria Machado. The book will be given to all members complimentary of joining the club. However, you do not have to join the club to receive a copy of the book. If you would like to read the novel, the It’s On Us book club just ask that you attend at least one meeting. Mainly because the goal of this club is to spread awareness as well as provide education for topics needing to be discussed.

This beautiful memoir follows Carmen, as she recalls her experience in an abusive same-sex relationship. Written in a very poetic way, this piece shines a light on the gremlin of abuse. This astounding piece of literature opens the mind to see that domestic abuse doesn’t just happen between a man and a woman. It can happen to anyone by anyone and that is why such a serious topic must be discussed.

The It’s On Us book club will allow students to openly discuss problems and issues revolving around sexual assault and domestic abuse while also having the necessary resources available to them if need be. One example of these resources will take the form of staff being at each meeting to assist with anything that arises. The book club will meet on the second Tuesday of every month with its first meeting being held on February 8th in the Hearth room located in the campus center. A last little note that I was told to include is that at every meeting there will be mandatory reporters present.

To further elaborate: It’s On Us to make tomorrow better, today.

Meeting Allison Spivey at Gratz Perk for coffee during the chaos that is finals week, what seemed to be most on her mind was the fate of printed journalism. Perhaps this was because as Editor-in-Chief she’s overseeing a printed version of The Rambler, Transylvania University’s student-run newspaper; and for context, The Rambler went entirely online in 2017. This switch is obviously not just a Transy thing: the internet has been compared to the Printing Press in regard to how it has revolutionized human life. When was the last time you picked up a newspaper and read an article or two from it? If you can answer that question, you’re better than me. Podcasts, online magazines, YouTube, Tik Tok; our senses are bombarded with an endless stream of stimulation. On top of that, we use technology from morning till night. An iPhone (our “pocket-sized God”, as Spivey calls them) even directly contributed to the writing of this article.  Because I was worried about forgetting something important after the interview was over, I recorded the whole thing using the Voice Recorder app. Before the iPhone I would’ve had to use a tape recorder, and before that I would’ve had to learn to take notes fast or in shorthand. Oh, how times have changed! 

If you ask Spivey, the change is not necessarily for the better. “This is just me being a baby,” she tells me, “But I don’t want to look at my phone for too long. It hurts my head. It hurts my eyes. It makes me feel like I’m missing something looking that far down…I like the written word. There’s something final about it. There’s something honest about it. You can’t go back and be like ‘oh, I missed a comma, let me fix it’. I mean, who cares?” Over the course of our conversation, what could not fail to strike you is how much The Rambler means to Spivey. To say The Rambler is important to her would be an understatement. She’s not doing this as a favor to Transy or just to pad her resume. She has found a real passion, and her mission is to spread that passion. “I want to go around and ask ten people I see and eight of them to be like ‘oh yeah, The Rambler.’ I don’t care about the other two. That’s fine. But I just want the majority of students on campus to at least know that we have a paper.” The concern is not unwarranted since the paper currently lacks a certain presence on campus that you would think a student-run newspaper would have at a school with roughly a thousand students. How did we get here and how did Spivey become the person keeping the paper alive?

When Spivey came to Transy in the fall of 2018 she, like freshmen from time immemorial, wanted campus involvement. But not “hav[ing] the money or the means” to join Greek Life and not being “musically inclined or athletic in any way”, writing for The Rambler seemed like the best option and a creative outlet that her high school had lacked. Back then contributors got paid to write their stories and the advisor was a “big New York Times style guy” with strict journalistic standards (Spivey hesitates to use the word “tyranny”). The paper had an important presence on campus, and students kept up to date with it.

“It felt very prestigious when I started,” Spivey recalled, “and it got to my head.” In her sophomore year, she rose in the ranks to News Editor, which at the time was the first step in the common trajectory for someone wanting to become Editor-in-Chief. “It used to be you got to be an editor sophomore year…a copy editor junior year and then you’d be Editor-in-Chief senior year, so I was on the right track.” She was one of the few freshmen to join and stay with the paper that year, so it made sense to think that she might be at the helm one day. But her trajectory would deviate from the norm for as John Lennon says, ‘Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.’ In January and February 2020, a new virus, COVID-19, began to spread, and by March 2020 the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic. As the death toll rose schools closed, businesses shut down, and our lives were driven to a halt. It was one of those moments after which your life is never quite the same afterward. 

Most universities opened up again by the fall of 2020, but it was anything but a normal year. In the hopes of minimizing complications if everything shut down again, Transy’s administration decided to switch out the semester system with the module system. Instead of four classes for around three months, there were two seven-week periods in which the students took two classes. For this reason, the editor at the time, Abby Stone, decided that the paper should take a hiatus. This was not an uncontroversial decision, and to this day Spivey wonders if The Rambler would have kept its readership if the work had continued. But the module system was hard on students and professors alike–it even sparked an organized student protest–so it seemed like the best decision at the time. As the world returned to semi-normalcy by the Fall of 2021 Spivey brought The Rambler back to life. So after a very unexpected detour, Spivey’s trajectory with The Rambler got back on track. 

Now a senior in the class of ‘22 double majoring in Education and Social change and Psychology, Spivey is aiming to usher in a “Rambler Renaissance” and turn The Rambler into a “dorm-hold” name again. Spivey, like a lot of us post-pandemic, is operating on a gnawing sense of lost time. “I don’t know if this is true, but I always felt like the senior class and all the classes affected by Covid–including yours, including everybody else’s–just don’t have that same sense of small campus community that Transy always advertised. And I don’t know if that’s just because they have false advertising and you’re always gonna have your little cliques, or if it’s because we’ve spent years stunted by a pandemic. But for whatever reason, I think it’s important to share student experience, especially in the student-run media.”

Scanning through the archive on the website, the student experience definitely shines through. The various voices and the breadth of subject matters covered in the paper are impressive: everything from baseball superstitions to the importance of mathematics education to theatre, gallery, and food reviews. As well as campus, local, and international news. The Rambler website has articles dating back to August 2016, although you can find older issues on the Kentucky Digital library website or in the special collections section of the university’s library.

Ask Spivey if she’s aiming for a career in journalism, and she seems unsure. “That’s a good question.” She says. “…out of all of my classes all I want to do is work on The Rambler stuff. Whether it’s the layout of the physical copy or writing pieces about student opinions or whatever. I have found a love for journalism, and I would definitely look into a career along those lines. I’ve looked at some grad programs at different schools and they’re all really fascinating except they tend to require a journalism major in undergrad. I just wish I wasn’t living in a time where everything is Buzzfeed…[But] Print’s not dead, and I hate that people think it could be…” Spivey’s voice trails off. But the passion quickly resurfaces. “Yeah, okay, I’m gonna be a journalist. I am.” 

For now, at least being Editor-in-Chief at The Rambler will suffice, and Spivey is already bubbling with ideas. “My main focus next semester [will be] an app. We need a way for someone to just click on it and [have it] pop up. They need to get notifications that a story was posted.” 

“Using technology to help rather than hurt!” I replied. It’s a clever idea. Build up a digital readership, and then maybe a printed version would be more viable. But as always, the question of money comes up. The paper would need more members. Someone for layout, someone for copyediting, someone for stocking the paper all across campus, and not to mention the expenses. And the Rambler would need more stories to fill a physical copy each week. The goal just seems to get more and more complex the longer you think about it. 

Having said that, The Rambler may not be what it was, but things are looking up. “You know, not to toot my own horn but the Rambler began this year as just myself,” Spivey explains with (in my opinion) undo modesty. “And now we have almost fifteen writers which is awesome. And if we could end next semester with twenty and go into next year with twenty and then by the end of that year have twenty-five. And then we could have stories posted at least three times a week!” This is what she wants to leave behind after graduation. Only time will tell. But regardless, on behalf of all the staff at The Rambler and on behalf of all people who would rather read a book bought from a second-hand bookstore than on a Kindle I want to say to Allison Spivey thank you.

On October 28th, the inaugural meeting of Transy Speaks was held in the Campus Center. The question that was to be debated was whether Transylvania University should retire its current moniker, the Pioneer.

In recent years, there has been pushback against mascots that present disparaging portrayals of indigenous groups. The Washington Football team recently retired their long-standing controversial mascot, and Cleveland’s major league baseball team officially changed their name to the Guardians at the end of the 2021 baseball season. There have also been calls for teams such as the Kansas City Chiefs and the Atlanta Braves to change names. Amid these calls for change, some have questioned Transylvania’s mascot. Despite the athletic mascot being Raf the bat since 2017, Transy’s sports teams still go by the name “Pioneers.” Some have argued that this moniker is disrespectful to indigenous groups, as it signifies a group of people who forcibly removed Native Americans from their homes in the name of “Manifest Destiny.” Thus Transy Speaks, a new student-run organization aimed at promoting debate between students, decided to take up the topic.

To open the debate, a sophomore student who wished to remain unnamed argued that the mascot should remain unchanged, as the term “pioneer” does not necessarily have to refer to the settler colonialists of our country’s past. The student said, “We work and attend Transylvania to deepen our knowledge and understanding of the world, so we may share it with the larger community around us. Transylvania produces educated students to contribute to and change society. One might observe that we are pioneers.” The student argued that Transylvania has a long history of pioneering, specifically citing the fact that Transylvania was the first college west of the Alleghenies. They admitted that the actions of the pioneers who expanded west were wrong, but argued that their actions should not taint the word pioneer itself. The student claimed that by keeping the moniker of Pioneer, Transylvania could, as they put it, “show what a term like this should stand for.”

Next, sophomore Ysa Leon, while agreeing with the previous student that the term pioneer was not necessarily a bad one, the historical context of America’s westward expansion makes the mascot insensitive towards indigenous groups. They said, “I think that the campus community would benefit from a statement from the university’s administration considering the past connotations of being a pioneer.” They noted that while pioneers don’t necessarily have to be linked to America’s westward expansion, up until recent years the university used a logo that prominently featured an archetypal image of a pioneer, irreversibly linking Transylvania’s mascot to that time period.

Leon supported changing the mascot for this reason, saying that “it would go a long way for indigenous people and people of color on campus.” 

Pro and anti pioneer arguments largely fell along these lines for the rest of the meeting, with those in favor of keeping the mascot arguing that the word pioneer could be broadly applied as people that are the first to do something, and those in favor of changing the mascot arguing that it was impossible to separate the pioneer from America’s past abuses of indigenous groups. 

Many in attendance, including alumni Seth Wyatt, argued that it was difficult to use a pioneer as a Transylvania mascot without idealizing America’s westward expansion, as Transylvania was the first university west of the Allegheny mountains and was very purposefully built on indigenous land, as well as the existence of the old pioneer logo. The majority of people in the room agreed that the old logo, as well as the idealization of manifest destiny in general, was inappropriate and that changing the athletic mascot to Raf the bat was the correct decision. Some argued even further that having a bat in the athletic logo and the Transylvania mascot not matching it didn’t make sense, and that the university should fully commit to a bat mascot. 

This is not the first time the question of the Transylvania mascot has been discussed. In March of 2016, Transylvania announced a vote to decide between two new mascots to replace the pioneer logo, a horse named Cassius and a bear named Boone. The move was met with significant pushback by alumni who wished to keep the pioneer logo, and neither choice was able to gain a majority of votes. The logo would later be changed to Raf the bat in 2017, which remains the athletic mascot to this day. 

There has been no word from the Transylvania administration that they plan to change the mascot anytime soon. 

Despite likely not leading to any definitive action, the founder of Transy Speaks was proud of the discussion that the organization was able to facilitate. He said, “higher education is all about thinking critically and being willing to challenge your own views and assumptions, and that’s what Transy Speaks is here to promote.”