Many students have had their first couple of weeks of college here at UMBC, and with so many Welcome Week events around campus, it is hard to feel left out of the loop. UMBC has always prided itself on “the diversity of experience, background, and thought represented by our campus community” and there is no one event that better sums this up than Pangea.

Created by a group of five UMBC students three years ago, Pangea has grown to be a staple of Welcome Week festivities and for involvement and inclusion on campus. It provides a space for cultural student organizations to showcase what they do during the year and even recruit new members.

“Pangea is really important because it raises awareness of all the cultural organizations on campus early on in the year for those who may not know about them,” said Ian Kibria, a sophomore Asian studies and music double major.

Many different cultural groups performed on the UC Ballroom stage on Friday, from the Black Student Union and Filipino American Student Association, to Gurl (who represented the South Asian Student Association) and the African Student Association. Each act was followed by encouraging applause and loud cheers.

It was a night full of dancing, food and loud conversation that gave life to UMBC’s statement of pride in diversity. Each cultural group had something interesting and characteristic to offer, which kept toes tapping and spirits high throughout the showcase.

“I wanted to see the diversity and different cultures represented in UMBC, and I got just that,” said Abigail Kennedy, a freshman bioinformatics and computational biology major. Along with Kennedy and the incoming freshman class this fall, many sophomores and upperclassmen came to cheer on their friends and show support for the cultural groups on campus.

It is so important for every UMBC student to feel comfortable and to feel a sense of belonging on campus, no matter their background or where they are from. With events like Pangea that allow this flourishing, it is no mystery why it has become so beloved by the student body and unlikely to ever go away.

Seniors Carly Socha and Summer Mills, two of the founders of both Pangea and the UMBC Cultural Showcase Board, spoke at the conclusion of the night. They encouraged the UMBC community to continue this culture of acceptance and diversity by applying for positions on the CSB and to help keep this engaging event returning to campus.

It is up to the students of UMBC to keep the values of acceptance and community alive on and off campus. This is no easy feat, yet it is clear that the many cultural student organizations of Pangea and the UMBC community will continue fostering a sense of belonging for all students in the many years to come.

Emily Danforth released her only book to date in 2012, a coming of age novel inspired by her own coming of age in the American Midwest. Four years later, filmmaker Desiree Akhvan began collaborating with producer Cecilia Fruguiele to create a screen adaptation of the novel. “The Miseducation of Cameron Post,” winner of the 2018 Sundance Grand Jury Prize, centers on the experiences of teenager Cameron (Chloë Grace Moretz) when her evangelical aunt sends her to a gay conversion therapy camp.

The story starts off with Cameron’s prom night, which spirals when she is caught making out with another girl in the backseat of a car. Cameron finds herself trapped at God’s Promise, a conversion camp. She attends group therapy sessions with several other gay teens, led by self-proclaimed convert, Reverend Rick (John Gallagher Jr.), and God’s Promise founder, Dr. Lydia Marsh (Jennifer Ehle).

The emotionally abusive relationships between Dr. Marsh and her young clients is contrasted with the relationships that Reverend Rick builds with them. The uncertainty of Gallagher’s character suggests that he may be doubtful about his role in the conversion camp, as well as his personal relationship with religion and homosexuality.

Consistent through the film is Cameron’s own hesitancy to conform to the ideals at God’s Promise. In a fashion similar to Natasha Lyonne in the 1999 conversion drama, “But I’m a Cheerleader,” Cameron finds refuge in getting to know her peers at the camp. She becomes close friends with outsiders Adam (Forrest Goodluck) and Jane (Sasha Lane), and together the trio takes hikes into the Montana wilderness to smoke Jane’s homegrown.

Under Dr. Marsh’s practice, the teens would mark a drawing of an iceberg with the points that they believed to have led to their time at God’s Promise. Cameron’s inability to pinpoint why being gay is wrong leads her to read the icebergs of the other teens at the camp. Through Cameron’s curiosity, we see how the other kids came to arrive at God’s Promise, as well as how they each perceive themselves in the intersection between their religion and queerness.

“Everyone’s there for a different reason and everyone’s reacted [sic] to the situation differently,” said Akhvan about the ensemble teen cast. “The story was like a hybrid of high school coming-of-age, rehabilitation and boarding school film. It was a very rich environment for our characters.”

The teens at the camp share a mutual bitterness towards the parents and caretakers who sent them to God’s Promise. The individual attention paid to the details of each character makes it easy to connect with them, but this also makes it all the more difficult to see them struggle at God’s Promise.

Adam and Jane seem to help Cameron become more comfortable being herself, but the characters show unwavering confidence in their identities throughout the movie. Their characters do not add much to the story; they rather serve as quick comfort for Cameron after tough scenes. At the height of the movie, Cameron, Adam, and Jane plot to escape from the camp. The escape is incredibly simple which begs the question, why had Adam and Jane not tried to escape prior to Cameron’s arrival to God’s Promise? They were basically able to walk right out the door.

This fuzzy final note gives us no inclination to whether the teens have a destination, nor if they have anything planned past their anticlimactic exit. The movie’s flat storyline is somewhat redeemed by the interesting lens of the teen characters and the dynamic cast. “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” manages to put a different spin on the outsider trope commonly used in coming of age dramas. “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” is currently screening at The Parkway in Baltimore.

the Peace Corps Office of University Programs is accepting applications for fall 2018 semester interns. Please feel free to post this opportunity as appropriate or send directly to interested students. Attached please find:

 

·       The intern position description for the Office of University Programs

·       The general Peace Corps internship application form

o   The Office of University Programs falls under the Office of Volunteer Recruitment and Selection on this form.

 

Please have interested students submit their application materials to internships@peacecorps.gov and copy universityprograms@peacecorps.gov.

John Rennie Short
Professor, School of Public Policy, UMBC

As we enter the traditional, post-Labor Day sprint in the campaign season, voters may want to consider how much their vote really counts. In the United States, the difference between the popular will and political representation is growing and some votes count more than others.

When voters wield unequal power, that is a problem for democracy.

I’m a social scientist and public policy scholar who studies sources of stress in the U.S. political system. Here are three sources of a growing deficit of democracy.

The Senate

In the U.S. Senate, some voters count more than others.

This began in the earliest days of the Republic when each state, despite differing population size, was allocated two senators.

At the time of the First Congress in 1789, the population of the largest and smallest state, respectively Virginia and Delaware was 110,936 and 11,783. Those counts only include include free white males over 16, because that’s who got to vote at the time. Virginia had roughly nine times the population of Delaware.

But by the time of the 2016 presidential election, the population of the most and least populous states, California and Wyoming, was respectively 39,254,503 and 585,501. The most populous state had 67 times the population of the least populous state.

This system puts disproportionate influence in the hands of small states. Long-term senators from small states can amass seniority that bestows enormous power beyond their demographic significance.

The current leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, represents Kentucky – a state with a total population of only just over 4 million. And while the U.S. population of 325 million is 72 percent white and 13 percent foreign-born, Kentucky is 89 percent white with only 3 percent foreign-born.

More than a quarter of the entire U.S. population lives in just 10 metropolitan areas across only 16 states. Yet Senate representation still reflects the political realities of the largely rural 18th century, when population was spread more evenly throughout the country, rather than the demographic realities of the metropolitan 21st century.The opinions of the metropolitan majority on such issues as gun control, abortion rights or immigration policy are often overruled in the Senate by the preferences of voters in small, rural states.

To be sure, the U.S. was never designed as a direct democracy but as a republic, where multiple sources of governmental power were to be a check on power. But is it democratic when one of the other branches of government, the Supreme Court, can be appointed by a majority of senators who represent a minority of the U.S. population?

The House

Seats in the House of Representatives are, unlike the Senate, allocated on the basis of population, but since the 1960s Democratic voters are pooling into dense areas. That lessens their overall effectiveness as they tend to win big in a few districts while Republicans have a wider national spread.

The current system of winner-takes-all elections – where even the narrowest of winners is the people’s only representative – gives the Republicans an advantage over Democrats.

And that does not factor in partisan gerrymandering, which is the manipulation of voting boundaries to engineer specific political outcomes.

The U.S. Constitution requires each state to establish new congressional districts every 10 years to reflect the population changes measured by the census.

This congressional redistricting is freighted with partisan political interests. Take the case of Utah. The results of the 2010 Census revealed enough population increase in that state to justify increasing the number of congressional districts from three to four.

The Republicans control the Utah state legislature and thus the redistricting.

The Utah Republicans’ redistricting created gerrymandered districts that favored GOP voters. That neutered voters in the more Democratic-leaning Salt Lake City, and in the 2016 congressional election Republicans won just 66 percent of all votes but still swept all four congressional seats. The Democrats picked up over a third of all votes in the state but won no congressional seats.

Gerrymandering also occurred in Democratic-controlled Maryland, where the post-2010 redistricting packed Republican voters into a few districts.

Over a third of all votes cast in the state in the 2016 congressional races were for Republican Party candidates but Republicans won only one out of eight districts.

According to a 2017 Associated Press analysis, current gerrymandering favors Republicans across the country. Gerrymandered districts produce safe seats and lock politicians into political postures that promote ideological purity and party loyalty over bipartisan negotiation.

Primary voters in gerrymandered districts thus count more than the general voting public.

The Electoral College

The president is elected by the Electoral College. There are 538 electors with each state allocated one each for their congressional representatives and senators. California has 55 and Wyoming has three.

All the electors in a state are pledged to the presidential candidate with the majority of votes. Only Maine and Nebraska allow proportional representation. A successful campaign needs to get over 270 Electoral College votes.

After 1888, when Republican Benjamin Harrison won the Electoral College 233 to 168 but lost the popular vote, the system worked well. The popular vote and the Electoral College were in sync for over a century.

However, in both 2000 and 2016, a candidate won the presidency without obtaining a majority of popular votes. If presidents were elected by a simple and obvious popular vote we would have had President Albert Gore and President Hillary Clinton.

The Electoral College overvalues voters in key swing states such as Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and devalues voters in other states.

By not reflecting the popular vote, the Electoral College does not transmit the will of the people. Instead, I believe it is starting to undermine it.

The system is also vulnerable to manipulation. There is mounting evidence that Russian operatives concentrated their cybertactics in 2016 in states where key Electoral College votes were in play.

This suggests that the Electoral College is now identified as a weak point by our enemies.

While there is much talk about the fiscal deficit or the infrastructure deficit, less attention is paid to the mounting democratic deficit. The more undemocratic tendencies of the U.S. electoral system are growing stronger.

The U.S. system faces this deficit because, while all voters get to exercise political choice, only some get to exercise real political power.

* * * * *

John Rennie Short, Professor, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Header photo by Parker Johnson on Unsplash

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.