UC Davis Dining Commons (DC) recently implemented a new rule that will only allow students with meal plans to have 10 guest swipes. This means that those students can only swipe in 10 additional guests a quarter. The rule will limit the sense of community that sharing swipes has created in the past among freshmen and upperclassmen, while also limiting the ways in which students can use the swipes they have already purchased.

An officer of Student Development said one reason for the new policy is to prevent freshmen from feeling pressured to use their swipes to let in big groups of people from extracurricular activities they are involved in. This was specifically listed as an issue among athletes and students participating in Greek Life who may feel that they have to swipe in their whole team or multiple members of their sorority or fraternity.

In our experiences and based on what we’ve seen with others, the act of swiping in a group does not result from feeling pressured, but from wanting to create community or friendship. Swiping in a friend can help those two students bond, or allow a freshman to show appreciation to an upperclassman for a being mentor. In most cases, freshmen are happy to swipe in the people that participate in groups with them.

Buying and selling swipes to other students was another act that led to this rule. In previous years, there has been a Facebook group that students with meal plans could post on, offering to sell swipes to anyone who wants to eat at the DC for a reduced cost. Last year, many upperclassmen bought swipes from freshmen for $2 or $3, instead of paying the $12 it costs to enter the DC without a meal plan. While freshmen were making a small profit from this, they had already paid for the meal plan. This is why it should not really matter whether they sold their swipes or used them. Also, freshmen often don’t realize how many swipes they will need, resulting in too many swipes than they know what to do with. Selling their unused swipes is a way to redeem them for cash.

Another issue associated with swiping students in is the rush of meals that DC cooks have to prepare at the end of the quarter or year, right when students decide they need to use all of their swipes before the meal plans change. However, it is completely possible that the DC will still face this problem without unregulated guest swipes. When freshmen realize that they have too many swipes left at the end of the year, they will want to use them. This will lead to going to the DC more often than they did all year, and that will again lead to the overload of demand for meals that was the problem with unlimited guest swipes.

One way students can redeem their unused swipes is by trading in their remaining swipes at the end of the year for $3 in Aggie Cash per swipe or by donating their swipes to a Swipe Out Hunger Fund, which helps feed students throughout Yolo County. Both of these options have also been available in previous years, but they were not advertised, which has meant that students do not get a full value for the swipes that they already purchased. If these options go unadvertised again, many freshmen who purchased meal plans will not use their swipes, trade them in, or donate them. will not redeem their unused swipes.

The fact that Aggie Cash is no longer valid at off-campus venues means that students who redeem their swipes for Aggie Cash have fewer options compared to years past. Gaining $3 in cash from a swipe sold on the Facebook group would remove this restriction, since that money can be used anywhere. The lack of places with which students can use Aggie Cash shows that this option is not as viable as selling a swipe for cash would be.

Students are left with limited options when they are given a finite amount of swipes to use every quarter, and having only 10 guest swipes is detrimental to the sense of community that students who swipe their friends into DC have been able to form in the past. When students buy a meal plan, they should be able to use those swipes however they want to, whether they are swiping themselves in, a friend in, or their entire family in. Ultimately this rule will not benefit students who have bought meal plans, and it may not fix the issues that the DC aims to resolve.

If you thought this column was going to be about the movie Mean Girls, I’m so sorry to have to tell you that it’s not. But please, before you leave to re-watch clips of what is probably the best teen movie ever made, I have a proposition for you: Find me a place where I can comfortably shop for gender-neutral clothing. Seriously. I dare you. I’ll even buy you the limited edition director’s cut of Mean Girls if you succeed. (I’m kidding. Probably all I can afford to give you is a high five.)

In all seriousness, the struggle to find clothes that aren’t exclusively made for women or men is extremely difficult. Sure, American Apparel has a few items that are labeled “unisex,” but you can’t deny the fact that their store is divided into two distinct sections solely devoted to men and women.

Virtually every other clothing store you might find yourself in is also divided by gender. Why is this? When did we, as a society, decide that it was necessary to ascribe girls to wear dresses and boys to wear to baggy jeans? And what does this do to the people who are gender confused or gender neutral or gender anything else that falls outside the spectrum of masculine and feminine?

The division of gender is probably most prevalent in where we do (and don’t) shop. From the moment we enter a clothing store, we make a decision: Are we a boy or are we a girl? Most of us, however, probably don’t even realize that we’re making this decision. That is because we’ve been either a girl or a boy all our lives and therefore it’s only natural that we shop in the section that’s assigned to us. Right?

That’s just the problem: most people stick with the genders that are assigned to them at birth. They never consider the idea that not all facets of that gender are true for them. If you’re a girl, for example, have you ever been shopping in the men’s section? (I mean other than for your dad or your boyfriend or some other male-identifying person.) If you haven’t, you’re missing out on some majorly comfy T-shirts. And have you checked out the pants? So many pockets!

But, maybe men’s clothes aren’t your style. I totally get that. It’s understandable that many women are perfectly happy with the clothing choices available to them. And the same goes for men. However, even if you are comfortable with your options, not everybody is comfortable with theirs.

Also, you can’t deny the fact that some people don’t have any options available to them. When clothing stores divide themselves into two separate sections for men and women, they are completely forgetting about (or completely ignoring) the tons of other identities that simply don’t fit into either of those categories.

There is a whole spectrum that dismantles the notion of a gender binary, which is a social dichotomy that restricts gender to rigid ideals of masculinity and femininity. Think of this spectrum as a rainbow: rainbows don’t have just two colors, right? That would be so lame! Rainbows have tons of colors with tons of different shades. Some colors are dark and some are light. Some like to be referred to as Sir and others as Ma’am, and, well — you get the picture.

The fact that shopping malls are so diligent in making only two sections available to only two genders is completely irrational. It obliterates the whole beautiful rainbow spectrum metaphor thing that I just blew your mind with.

It also instills in us archaic notions of overly-simplistic gender binaries which lead to all sorts of problems like sexism, homophobia, transphobia and other issues that are generally tied to gender. By forcing everyone to abide by a rule that they essentially have no control over, people’s gender identities become mutilated at best, or completely erased at worst.

So the next time you go shopping, I challenge you to ask yourself: are you a boy or are you a girl?  Maybe you’ll find the answer easy, but maybe not. Or maybe you won’t have an answer at all. Either way, I can almost guarantee that you’ll find yourself posed with only two options that are considered valid in the eyes of the clothing store.
If you’d like to dismantle heteropatriarchy or participate in other fun and wholesome activities, contact Chelsea Spiller at ctspiller@ucdavis.edu.

I came to college to learn. I’m interested in many subjects and have been fortunate throughout my life to enjoy the benefits of top quality public education. But learning, when done right, is never easy, and is often hindered by varying circumstances, policies and individuals.

Calvin, from the popular comic, Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, lives the woes of modern education and displays intelligent cynicism on the matter — an intelligence distinct from the poor test grades he receives. Calvin and Hobbes can help us understand issues concerning education in a comical way (because I’ll be damned if I make this column another homework assignment).

This column will address the discrepancy between self-education and institutional education. The strip above illustrates the problem in a simple manner: boy feels he’s learned enough, teacher says no, boy sits back down.

Institutional education (which sounds bad, I know) exists in part to provide resources and professional guidance to students. It presupposes that the teachers know more than the student and that the student will benefit from time in their company. Often, teachers do know more. But sometimes, they do not, and these circumstances can be difficult: a professor has spent their lives invested in academia, and you?— you’re a pompous eighteen-year-old, who doesn’t have credentials. Still, the closed-minded professor is no myth.

Compromise has always been the best method for centering two opposites. Discussion forums provide compromise in our higher institutions. An active exchange of ideas benefits everybody, but in primary and secondary education, discussion is often squelched. Participation rates are low and participation grades often have the effect of doling out an easy 10 to 20 percent of a student’s grade. Even the boy as quiet as a mouse in the back corner scrapes up a couple points.

The participation in the classroom only slightly improves in college, a phenomenon which I believe can be explained by the fact that most students find a niche in college and want to talk about what interests them. Still, I’ve been in a 500-student lecture where not one person was brave enough to ask a question (including me — “I had no question”).

The irony here is that smaller classes find more people talking up — at UC Davis, these classes are called discussions. A classroom is cozier than a lecture hall. These classes are often held weekly, taught by a teaching assistant and go on for an hour. Let me ask: Why? I came to college to learn; if the compromise in learning is discussion, why does the institution give us such little time in the tight-knit classroom, when there should really be more?

The solution might be an academic Freaky Friday of sorts, which would involve the professor leading discussion (where their expanded knowledge would be more required than in lecture) and the TA going over the basics in lectures that occur once or twice a week.

The contrast between discussion classes and lectures seems to echo the classic liberal arts college vs. research university argument, which is that professors have more time for students at liberal arts schools. But why should a research university be much different? To account for the large amount of discussion section, perhaps a professor should be required to host a third of discussion sessions, and do a lecture per week.

One could even argue for making office hours on an appointment only basis, given that all the students would be in direct contact with the professor through discussion. This contact, which would be conducive to research, would give the professor a large pool of students for finding potential research assistants. The whole process would be more involved, help mutual learning and would show how being more interactive with students will benefit the professors working at a research university.

I wonder what Calvin would think. He would probably shun any form of enclosed environment, preferring the great outdoors to any inkling of authority. Well, the unruly boy is only six years old; he has a lot of truths to learn. Though I find it hard not to sympathize with him given the stare-down he’s just received from that dastardly teacher.

To tell Eli that he needs an education, you can reach him at ekflesch@ucdavis.edu or tweet him @eliflesch.

Music is sound. It’s also a cultural, social, emotional and economical phenomenon. I want to explore them. Welcome to Tunespoon.

“Let’s turn this into a dance party.”

I was at a tUnE-yArDs concert last June, and front-woman Merrill Garbus prefaced dancy anti-vigilante anthem “Stop That Man” with the above command. It was Saturday night at San Francisco’s Fillmore, the city’s counterculture Mecca, and I was ready. Everything about her performance of the song played into the perfect go-wild atmosphere. The frenetic lights and kooky laser patterns, the relentless funky clackof a looping drum beat and everyone on stage jumping up and down like robots fueled by the energy of a quarter-note groove. It was fantastic. And then I saw around me:

People standing still. Well, not perfectly still, but it wasn’t the dance party she asked for. I do not call the minute baby-bobbing of knees a dance. I was thinking, “Why wouldn’t this audience comply with her? The money they paid surely should let them own this night.”

I saw Arcade Fire this summer, and from where my seats were, the anti-dance sickness was omnipresent. Everyone got up out of their seats, but wasn’t dancing. The tall baseball cap guy next to me even had his freakin’ arms crossed.

I wondered why people could not bring themselves to move. Especially to dance music. tUnE-yArDs is a musical project whose work sounds just as electric as their band name looks. It’s wild, caffeinated neo-tribal playground chants for manchildren. Arcade Fire is by comparison more refined, but the energy of the sheer size of the group is incomparably visceral. Both have musical and thematic inspiration from Haiti, taking special focus on Haitian folk dances. By filtering their influences through a North American indie rock kaleidoscope, they create new ways to move their audiences. The artists are more than doing their part. So why does it seem that audiences aren’t doing theirs?

It all depends on what a person does with music. Mothers lullaby children to dreamland. Souls singing in the pulpit uplift their spirits. EDM teens’ hearts race in anticipation in a beat-drop buildup. In its purest form, music is sound that induces physical change in a person. It helps you focus while studying for midterms, keeps your mind off the heavy breathing during a run, or can help you sleep. It can evoke a bad breakup from the past, or back to broadway to that musical you love. Music attaches to you, so consequently, it’s an incredibly private experience. Listening to music in public through headphones separates you from the outside world. So it is understandable that in a sweaty venue with other people, sharing this deeply individualized experience with strangers can be uncomfortable. Or maybe even embarrassing. You may even feel ashamed to express your appreciation.

But only you can own it. Treat it like was made for you alone to hear and embrace. This performance belongs to you just as much as everyone else. Even if you don’t know this song, or have never heard that piece before, you’re there with the artist, so let go, and make the most of the little time you have together. In this generation where people walking down the street will shoot a glare if you so much as whisper a song to yourself, you don’t have many opportunities to be enveloped in your love for sound. Those who eye you are jealous. They wish they had ownership of their experience as much as you do.

Of course, every venue is different. Watching Big-Name Pop Starlet at Insert-Sponsorship-Here Arena has a lot of teenage hormonal energy to feed off. At a metal fest, go ahead and start that violent, communal thrashing. A tiny venue in the middle of a car plaza may evoke more subdued reactions, but don’t let the quiet intimacy intimidate you — relax, absorb, applaud. At the Mondavi Center, be the first to give a standing ovation.

Do what you want, what you want with your body, because your music is absolutely yours, and no one can ever change that.

You can turn anything at all into a dance party by contacting STEVEN ILAGAN at smilagan@ucdavis.edu.