It’s not finals week yet, but the stress of every looming assignment is weighing everyone down and eating away at our sanity. This week, I’ve compiled a chill playlist full of relaxing vibes that will hopefully help you get through the stress of everything happening at once! As for arts events, this week is packed full of music recitals and concerts as well as a TEDxWomen talk happening this evening!
Friday, November 30th @5pm-9pm, MFA Carrick Theater
Transylvania will be hosting a TEDxWomen event with several notable women in the Transy and Lexington community, as well as Transy alumni. This event aims to explore independent thinking and what it means to be open-minded in today’s diverse world, as well as civility on college campuses. Some of the speakers will include Bianca Spriggs who is a poet and professor from University of Ohio and a Transy alum, Rebecca Blankenship who is a Transy student and News Editor for The Rambler, Nada Shalash, who is a Palestinian student at the University of Kentucky and is involved in Muslim-American empowerment, and Emanuelle Sippy who is a Henry Clay High School sophomore and member of the board of the Prichard Committee Student Voice Team.
Sunday, December 2nd @3pm, MFA Haggin Auditorium
The Central Kentucky Concert Band will present their annual concert! You can find out more about the renowned band here!
Sunday, December 2nd @5pm, MFA Coleman Hall
The Transylvania Jazz Band will be having their end-of-semester concert, so go support your fellow musicians and listen to some fabulous jazz music!
Tuesday, December 4th @12:30pm, MFA Carrick Theater
Students in the music program here at Transy will be performing one song from their repertoire in the General Student Recital, round two! Come out and support your fellow music students!
Thursday, December 6th @12:30pm, MFA Carrick Theater
Students in the music program here at Transy will be performing for the last round of General Student Recitals!
The hometown Kentucky Wildcats kicked off their senior day on windy Saturday afternoon against the Middle Tennessee Blue Raiders. After a hot start to the season, the Wildcats have cooled off suffering back-to-back losses at the hands of SEC foes, Georgia and Tennessee. The Kentucky team looked to make their fans and seniors proud against the Blue Raiders.
The Wildcat seniors stepped up in a big way for the Wildcats in their game this past weekend. On defense, Seniors safety Mike Edwards and outside linebacker Josh Allen were all over the field combining for 28 tackles, two sacks, a forced fumble, and an interception. Edwards started the game with a 66 yard interception return for a touchdown. He followed that with forcing a fumble on the next drive to give the Wildcats some early momentum.
Josh Allen had two sacks in the fourth quarter to notch two Kentucky records which were most career sacks and most sacks in a single season. His season total is up to 13 and his impact defensively is a huge key to the team’s success this season.
Offensively, the Wildcats continued their success running the ball with Junior running back Benny Snell rushing for 116 yards with a pair of touchdowns. His physical play broke down the Middle Tennessee defense consistently breaking tackles and looking like a dominant force on the field. The crowd grew consistently more excited every time he touched the ball.
Senior tight end CJ Conrad also found success against the Blue Raiders by catching a touchdown off a highlight reel throw on the run from sophomore quarterback Terry Wilson. UK secured the victory 34-23 improving their record to 9-3 which is the best record at the 11-game mark this program has had since 1984.
Next week the Wildcats are looking to conclude their regular season with a win against the Louisville Cardinals, who have struggled mightily this season. Saturday, they fell to the North Carolina State Wolfpack at home 52-10. They are currently on an 8-game losing streak going into this game, vastly underperforming to their expectations going into the season.
The loss of their Heisman winning quarterback Lamar Jackson has really affected the Cardinals’ play this year. Going into Saturday, they fired their long tenured head coach Bobby Petrino due to their poor performance. They have not won a single conference game this year, after looking very competitive in their conference the past three seasons with Jackson leading the charge.
However, this rivalry is known for being a very even series. Last year, the Cardinals stomped the Wildcats 44-17 at Kroger Field. The year prior to last, Kentucky won a highly contested game in Louisville upsetting the Cardinals in front of their home crowd. The Cardinals do have two weapons at the wide receiver position in senior Jaylen Smith and redshirt sophomore Dez Fitzpatrick that are looking to breakout in their season finale.
Two teams that have had completely opposite seasons look to finish strong by beating their in-state rivals. Kentucky gets to look forward to a bowl game following this season, while Louisville’s season will end Saturday regardless of the result. This game will be aired on ESPN2 at 7:00 this Saturday and should be an entertaining game to watch for fans of either Louisville or Kentucky.
With the looming pension issues that Kentucky is dealing with, we decided to ask some Transy education students about the effect that this topic will have on their decision to teach as well as what impact they believe that this issue will have on public education around the state.
To give some background on Kentucky’s pension system, currently the pensions of Kentucky’s public workers are underfunded due to the money that was in the pension system being used to make up for budget shortfalls. According to Louisville’s Courier Journal, as of August 2017 the pension system is underfunded by $39 billion dollars between the pension fund as well as the retiree healthcare fund.
Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin has been opposed to raising taxes in order to make up for this deficit, and proposed a restructuring of the current pension system in order to reduce the amount that the state will need to pay out in the future. This means that teachers that have currently paid in under the old system will be having the terms of their pensions changed and pensions for incoming teachers will look very different from that of teachers of the past.
According to the students interviewed, this change to the pension program will not affect their decision though. Senior education major Rebecca Facktor said, “No one teaches for the money.” This was echoed by junior education student Maggie Wallace, who said, “I’m doing this because I’m passionate about it.”
While issues surrounding the pension may not scare these two off, they can see why it could prevent others from pursuing teaching as a career. Wallace said, “Teachers already don’t get paid a lot, the pension is something that helps to make up for that. If the pension isn’t there, I can’t see a whole lot of incentives to teach.”
It appears that the pension may not be a major concern to these individuals, but the lack of a pension is something that they believe will prevent others from getting into the profession. This could have dire consequences for public education in the state, which already ranks near the bottom of all states.
It’s officially the time of year when turkey season is upon us. Whether you’re having ham, turkey, fried chicken, or a vegetarian Thanksgiving, it’s a holiday full of family, giving thanks, and FOOD….lots of food (including the leftovers that seem to last for days). I’ve created a playlist that’s perfect for your Thanksgiving parties and family get-togethers that will get you in the holiday mood and ready to feast.
As for arts events this week, everything is winding down for the Thanksgiving holiday aside from a couple of campus events!
Friday, November 16th @5pm-8pm, Lexington Galleries
Transy’s Morlan Gallery will be participating as one of the 40-plus locations taking part in the Lexington Gallery Hop! The event is free and will take place from 5pm-8pm! You can find a full guide to the event here.
Friday, November 16th @7:30pm, MFA Haggin Auditorium
This exciting recital will feature talented student conductors, so go support your fellow music students!
Monday, November 19th @7:30pm, MFA Carrick Theater
The 23rd Annual Concerto/Aria Competition is a special event presented by Trany’s music program where students will perform their original works and compete for cash awards which will be awarded to the top three winners, with the overall winner receiving an invitation to perform their work with either the University Chamber Orchestra or Concert Band! Come watch this exciting competition take place in Carrick!
Dr. Susan Weinstein, who is a MaCurdy Distinguished Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University, visited Transy’s campus on Thursday to give a talk about civility on college campuses and bringing people together through spoken word poetry.
Dr. Weinstein was introduced by Dr. Scott Whiddon who thanked Professor Zoé Strecker for putting together the Creative Lecture Series. The massive turnout in Cowgill, mostly led by students, called for chairs to be brought in from other rooms, and some students still had to stand in the doorway of the lecture room to listen. As Dr. Weinstein spoke, it was not hard to tell she was enthusiastic about her speech.
After discussing how poetry can create a space for dialogue, Dr. Weinstein transitioned into a discussion of how civility can impede the sort of honest dialogue that her research has found to occur in these spaces and how we can bring civility to a college campus. She talked about slam poetry as a way of introducing people into other experiences like poetry workshops and even slam poetry competitions, and that the experience of poetry is a social one.
The social element of slam and spoken word poetry allows an opportunity for feedback and camaraderie as well as dialogue. Spoken-word and slam poetry also help to foster an atmosphere for learning and growing through collaboration, making them an important, artistic element for every campus.
You can listen to her full interview with News Editor Rebecca Blankenship here.
Kentucky’s First Annual Book Festival kicked off in Lexington on November 12. This event is a expansion of the Kentucky Book Fair, a two-day event, and is aimed to acknowledge the diverse authors and works of literature throughout our state.
The first event is called New Kentucky Poetry and Prose, and it was held at 6:30 PM at the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning. Four hand-picked authors were given the opportunity to read an excerpt from newly published pieces of work. Two novelists and two poets were featured, one of whom was Jeremy Paden, a professor of Spanish at Transylvania University.
Dr. Paden began his allotted time by explaining where the idea for his poetry book, prison recipes, came from: while earning his Ph.D in Latin American Literature, he met two people who had been detained for political reasons in Argentina and Chile.
A story he’d heard influenced a poem about how Argentinian detainees made a dulce de leche dish with white bread and caramel made over a hot plate. The poem bounced back and forth between enjoying the treat at home and making do while imprisoned, and discussed how eating two different versions of the same food evokes two different feelings.
The majority of his poems were either influenced by recipes made during Argentinian and Chilean detainment or by a Latin American folk singer he compared to Bob Dylan.
The last poem he read was a poem by Juan Gelman, translated by himself. This poet was exiled from Argentina after opposing the government at the time, and his son and pregnant daughter-in-law were taken by the Argentinian police. He wrote poetry about his son’s inevitable death as a result, but has been searching for his granddaughter for over two decades.
The 2018 Kentucky Book Festival will continue until November 17. An event will be held every day. Its schedule can be found on the Kentucky Humanities Council’s website.
The weather has cooled and the peach baskets are out, signaling that the dawn of basketball season is upon us.
Transylvania Men’s basketball team stands for National Anthem before first game of the season. Photo by Aaron Bell
On November 9th, Transylvania, led by head coach Brian Lane, hosted the Mount Union Raiders at the Beck center. The contest began at 7:00 pm and also saw the Transylvania cheerleaders and dance team perform.
The first half featured scrappy play from Mount Union. The strategy was simple, apply as much pressure to Transylvania as possible in order to force turnovers. The full court pressure did bother Transy and created 12 turnovers however, playing with so much aggression also resulted in 16 personal fouls for Mount Union.
With so many stoppages in play, the half became very stagnant and drawn out, and saw 22 free throws attempted. 17 of those were for Transylvania; however, foul shooting was far from accurate for the Pioneers as they delivered just 9 makes from the charity stripe in the first half. Mount Union also began to realize a lead when first year forward Diallo Niamke was inserted into the contest and used his strength and left handed finishing ability to score 12 first half points, all of which came in the paint or from the free throw line.
Transylvania was able keep the first half tight and overcome the lack of free throw makes thanks to forcing 11 turnovers themselves and netting 4 of their 8 three point attempts. Solid team play on the offensive end was courtesy of senior point guard Cooper Theobold. At the break he had dished out 5 assists to go along with 7 points. This kept Transylvania within an arm’s reach of Mount Union, trailing 40 to 36 at the half.
The adjustments were obvious in the second half for Transylvania, as the break provided Coach Lane an opportunity to address how to effectively neutralize the full court pressure of Mount Union, limit Transylvania’s turnovers, and contain Diallo Niamke in the paint. All three were done effectively as the Pioneers turned the ball over just 5 times and limited Niamke to 6 points in the second half. Theobold continued his strong performance, scoring when needed but using quick, intelligent passes to defeat the chaotic Raider defense.
However, the momentum of the contest shifted Transylvania’s way when Sophomore guard Devin Twenty entered the contest with 11:45 left to play. After some back and forth scoring from both sides, Twenty used his speed and scrappiness to score 5 points, gain 2 steals, and a rebound on consecutive plays. This burst of net positives for Transy gave the Pioneers their first lead in the second where they never looked back and began the year strong with a 74-66 win.
Though Transy showed huge team play with an outstanding 10 players putting points on the board, Cooper Theobald was the statistical leader of the contest with 24 points, 11 rebounds, and 5 assists. Reserve Will Sivillis also showed solid play scoring an efficient 8 points. For Mount Union, it was their bench play who did the heavy lifting combining for 48 of the team’s 66 points. Despite his slow second half, reserve forward Diallo Niamke led the Raiders with 18 points and an efficient 8 for 11 shooting.
Transylvania will next travel to Emory Henry on Tuesday, November 13 at 9pm. While we will have to wait until December 1 to see the Pioneers at the Beck Center again, you can view the games live here.
Emily Goodman, curator of “Something Pretty” at Morlan Gallery, welcomed viewers to her art talk on Thursday evening. Student grumblings about having to attend the talk as a requirement for class subsided as soon as Dr. Goodman flashed a strangely ethereal beach scene on the wall and asked, “Is this pretty?”
She explained that the word is liberally applied to the work of female artists, and denotes superficiality and temporality. The show was born out of the idea that sometimes, art is just pretty. And that’s okay. However, Dr. Goodman did mention that her focus on the political nature of art is still prevalent in “Something Pretty,” as many of the pieces are social commentaries. The word is diminutive for artists like Justin Favela, whose piñata paper pieces reject cultural romanticization, and Tiffany Calvert, whose glitched flowers beg to be viewed separately from the gender of their creator.
So, what else is pretty? According to the internet, the word is perfectly suited to demure blonde women. Dr. Goodman put a photograph of Carrie Underwood next to La Giaconda, or theMona Lisa, and asked why one was beautiful and the other, merely pretty. Beauty is eternal, or close to it. It conveys depth and importance. Pretty has no meaning beyond its two syllables and fades with time.
Dr. Goodman said that women do not feel they are able to make pretty art because it will be reduced by a patriarchal world. The pressure to create pieces of substance, pieces worthy of the term “beautiful” is almost exclusively forced onto women. This is no recent phenomenon. Dr. Goodman unpacked the Hierarchy of Genres, a system installed by the Royal Academy as a way to rank the importance of art.
Naturally, women were excluded from the first two tiers — history painting and portraiture — because they required studying male anatomy. They were sequestered to the realm of still life, a genre full of pretty flowers.
History has been relatively unkind to women and minorities, and it is easy to lament the art that never was, simply because the hands that might have created it were too different or too pretty to matter. Easy to lament, but harder to change. “Something Pretty” is a reminder that this change is not impossible, even if it is aesthetically pleasing.
Dr. Susan Weinstein, Associate Professor of English and MacCurdy Distinguished Professor at Louisiana State University, came to campus this week to present a talk on privilege and power and their manifestations in the world of spoken word poetry.
We discuss the history of poetry, the new poets Dr. Weinstein loves and hates, and the ways spoken word is making room for stories from outside the dominant culture.
The centennial of the end of World War I is reminding Americans of a conflict that is rarely mentioned these days.
In Hungary, for example, World War I is often remembered for the Treaty of Trianon, a peace treaty that ended Hungarian involvement in the war and cost Hungary two-thirds of its territory. The treaty continues to be a source of outrage for Hungarian nationalists.
In the United States, by contrast, the war is primarily remembered in a positive light. President Woodrow Wilson intervened on the side of the victors, using idealistic language about making the world “safe for democracy.” The United States lost relatively few soldiers in comparison to other nations.
As a professor of social studies education, I’ve noticed that the way in which “the war to end war” is taught in American classrooms has a lot to do with what we think it means to be an American today.
As one of the first wars fought on a truly global scale, World War I is taught in two different courses, with two different missions: U.S. history courses and world history courses. Two versions of World War I emerge in these two courses – and they tell us as much about the present as they do about the past.
WWI: National history
In an academic sense, history is not simply the past, but the tools we use to study it – it is the process of historical inquiry. Over the course of the discipline’s development, the study of history became deeply entangled with the study of nations. It became “partitioned”: American history, French history, Chinese history.
This way of dividing the past reinforces ideas of who a people are and what they stand for. In the U.S., our national historical narrative has often been taught to schoolchildren as one where more and more Americans gain more and more rights and opportunities. The goal of teaching American history has long been the creation of citizens who are loyal to this narrative and are willing to take action to support it.
When history is taught in this way, teachers and students can easily draw boundaries between “us” and “them.” There is a clear line between domestic and foreign policy. Some historians have criticized this view of the nation as a natural container for the events of the past.
When students are taught this nationalist view of the past, it’s possible to see the United States and its relationship to World War I in a particular light. Initially an outsider to World War I, the United States would join only when provoked by Germany. U.S. intervention was justified in terms of making the world safe for democracy. American demands for peace were largely based on altruistic motives.
When taught in this manner, World War I signals the arrival of the United States on the global stage – as defenders of democracy and agents for global peace.
World history is a relatively new area of study in the field of historical inquiry, gaining particular ground in the 1980s. Its addition to the curriculum of American schools is even more recent.
The world history curriculum has tended to focus on the ways in which economic, cultural and technological processes have led to increasingly close global interconnections. As a classic example, a study of the Silk Road reveals the ways in which goods (like horses), ideas (like Buddhism), plants (like bread wheat) and diseases (like plague) were spread across larger and larger areas of the globe.
World history curricula do not deny the importance of nations, but neither do they assume that nation-states are the primary actors on the historical stage. Rather, it is the processes themselves – trade, war, cultural diffusion – that often take center stage in the story. The line between “domestic” and “foreign” – “us” and “them” – is blurred in such examples.
When the work of world historians is incorporated into the school curriculum, the stated goal is most often global understanding. In the case of World War I, it’s possible to tell a story about increasing industrialism, imperialism and competition for global markets, as well as the deadly integration of new technologies into battle, such as tanks, airplanes, poison gas, submarines and machine guns.
In all of this, U.S. citizens are historical actors caught up in the same pressures and trends as everyone else across the globe.
The US school curriculum and World War I
These two trends within the field of historical inquiry are each reflected in the American school curriculum. In most states, both U.S. history and world history are required subjects. In this way, World War I becomes a fascinating case study of how the same event can be taught in different ways, for two different purposes.
To demonstrate this, I’ve pulled content standards from three large states, each from a different region of the United States – Michigan, California and Texas – to illustrate their treatment of World War I.
In U.S. history, the content standards of all three states place World War I within the rise of the United States as a world power. In all three sets of state standards, students are expected to learn about World War I in relationship to American expansion into such places as Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Hawaii. The ways in which the war challenged a tradition of avoiding foreign entanglements is given attention in each set of standards.
By contrast, the world history standards of all three states place World War I under its own heading, asking students to examine the war’s causes and consequences. All three sets of state standards reference large-scale historical processes as the causes of the war, including nationalism, imperialism and militarism. Sometimes the U.S. is mentioned, and sometimes it’s not.
And so, students are learning about World War I in two very different ways. In the more nationalistic U.S. history curriculum, the United States is the defender of global order and democracy. In the world history context, the United States is mentioned hardly at all, and impersonal global forces take center stage.
Whose history? Which America?
Scholars today continue to debate the wisdom of President Wilson’s moral diplomacy – that is, the moral and altruistic language (like making the world “safe for democracy”) that justified U.S. involvement in World War I. At the same time, a recent poll by the Pew Research Center has shown that the American public has deep concerns about the policy of promoting democracy abroad.
In an age when protectionism, isolationism and nationalism are seemingly on the rise, our country as a whole is questioning the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world.
This is the present-day context in which students are left to learn about the past – and, in particular, World War I. How might their study of this past shape their attitudes toward the present?
History teachers are therefore left with a dilemma: teach toward national or global citizenship? Is world history something that happened “over there,” or is it something that happens “right here,” too?
In my own view, it seems incomplete to teach just one of these conflicting views of World War I. Instead, I would recommend to history teachers that they explore competing perspectives of the past with their students.
How do Hungarians, for example, generally remember World War I? Or how about Germans? How about the Irish? Armenians? How do these perspectives compare to American memories? Where is fact and where is fiction?
Such a history class would encourage students to examine how the present and the past are connected – and might satisfy both nationalists and globalists alike.
