Also at the meeting, five other clubs regained their line budget statuses after being defunded for not holding any events during the fall semester. They will be able to reapply for funding next week.

The Meteorology Club, Animated Perspectives, and the Kumdo Club met with the USG Budget Committee this week to discuss what they needed for their budgets and the findings were presented to the Senate.

“We brought them all roughly up to where they were to begin with,” said Treasurer Thomas Kirnbauer of the budgets. The Meteorology Club gained $40 after the review.

Senator David Adams objected to this, saying that he was uncomfortable rewarding the clubs for not following the rules, even if it was only with $40.

“More than 80 percent of our clubs were able to follow the rules,” he said. The majority of the Senate agreed with him and voted to amend each of the budget appropriations so that they met 95 percent of their original funding.

William Verity, the president of the Meteorology Club, wasn’t satisfied with the result. “They completely just killed our chances for attending the North Eastern Storm Conference in March,” he said, “which would have been an awesome opportunity for our new members to learn more from the people presenting their work and to also make contacts, possibly for future jobs.”

Although no legislation has been passed yet, senators have indicated that all clubs seeking to regain their line budget status and funding this semester will be treated in the same way. Senator Max Gunther suggested that the precedent should be written into law.

Senators Ryann Williams and David Szeszler advocated for a case-by-case approach, but they were outvoted on two separate occasions.

According to Verity, that would have been a better approach. In mid-March, a member of the Meteorology Club’s e-board was impeached. Though a replacement was found, the club couldn’t spend any money until the changes had been made official in the USG.

“It wasn’t until November 30 that I received an email saying that they had our officer list and it would be updated within 24 hours. That did not occur until the second week of December.”

With such little time left in the semester, the club was unable to host any events.

Kirnbauer recognized this problem and senators were asked to vote to reconsider the cut to the Meteorology Club’s budget. The vote did not carry.

In addition to club funding issues, the senate also discussed the following:

Kia Valkonen was confirmed as the Supervisor of Tutors and Matthew Merensky as the Student Liaison. Merensky will be, among other things, responsible for pairing students with tutors.

Senator Anna Lubitz wrote a resolution criticizing the administration for its changes to the Stony Brook Academic Calendar, but a vote on the resolution was postponed until next week. According to the calendar, students will not get off for Rosh Hashanah next year. The resolution, a copy of which was provided at the meeting, comes out against both the decision and the lack of student input the administration  sought in making it. At the suggestion of Vice President of Academic Affairs Adil Hussain, the bill was not passed this week in an effort to allow USG representatives more time to talk to the administration.

The club budgeting season is just around the corner. Expect a more deliberate budgeting process and an improved Allocate this time around.

The new clubs on SCC funding are the American Red Cross, the Golf Club, Hairitage, the Photography Club, and the Stony Brook Pre-Vet Society.

The Super Bowl is between two teams: the New York Giants and the New England Patriots. New York is a state in America but New England is not—that’s a region. I’m not sure why they can’t settle on one state. However, the Giants typically play in New Jersey, so perhaps they should switch to a regional team name. Contrarily, the Giants are in fact, not giants, but regular humans. Some of them are quite tall, but I believe being a giant also requires wielding a club and trying to kill demigods. The Patriots could be patriotic. That’s their own personal choice and it’s difficult to judge someone based on their appearance. This is especially so when their bodies are covered in ceremonial armor and are physically hurting others for sport.

These teams have played each other before in recent history, so many believe this match may be round two. In their previous encounter, the Giants were victorious, but the Patriots didn’t commit ritual suicide to save their honor. That’s not part of the culture of this sport, apparently.

Many watch the Super Bowl strictly for the advertisements. They watch the sport for the opportunity to not watch the sport and have products sold to them. Perhaps watching grass grow will become a new activity for them as well.

During one of the long breaks when they were not smashing their bodies into each other, a woman that appeared to be the queen of an ancient civilization arrived. Everyone watched in silence as the queen sang and wooed many men with her mating dance. There was a woman named Nicki Minaj who was very beautiful. Hit me up, Nicki and we’ll get sushi with my meal points. At the end of her courting ritual a pillar of light consumed the matriarch and left the words “world peace” burning on the field.

In this bout the two teams seemed to be quite evenly matched. A curious thing to me is that the fat men sumo wrestling did not suffer from heart attacks due to their sudden movements. The Giants were victorious over the Patriots, with much jubilation from my neighbors. The queen’s champion was chosen to be Eli Manning. He was the man on the Giants responsible for throwing the ball to the other men on his team.

If this sounds enjoyable, it’s a shame you have to wait several months to start watching, as you missed the finale. If this doesn’t sound enjoyable, hockey is currently in season.

“In six days, every living cell on Planet Earth will be dead. You have one chance.” The words are displayed on a black screen in a plain, white font.

Pilgrim exists within the confines of a graphically retro-laden 15-minute flash game called One Chance. Independent UK studio Awkward Silence Games released it in December of 2010, yet it still worms its way into indie game conversations because the title is no joke. As soon as one clicks play, the website, flash game haven Newgrounds.com in this case, logs your IP address, preventing one from ever starting over on that same computer.

The game’s buttons are limited; you move with the arrow keys and interact with the space bar. You play through six days approaching the end of the world, where various choices determine how you spend John’s final moments and subsequently how those choices affect those around you. After all, the short, four-line description of the game begins with, “One Chance is a game about choices and dealing with them.”

On day one, I see off my wife and daughter and read the morning’s newspaper, with my picture on the front page and the announcement of cancer’s cure is decorated with hope. When I arrive at work, the mood is high, elated even, and I am presented with my first choice – skip work or stay at the lab to run more tests. I forgo staying at the lab to grab a drink with co-workers.

The following morning my wife alerts me that the phone has been ringing non-stop, and that day’s newspaper confirms the air of anxiety – my company’s cancer treatment has deadly, and viral, side effects. The lab is an antithetical disaster-scene compared with the day before, and I am gently forced to explore the roof of the building, where an overwhelmingly guilty co-worker commits suicide by jumping off the roof.

The next day I refuse to leave work to see my family and instead stay in the lab searching for a cure, but this appears to result in my wife’s depression; she refuses to get out of bed the next morning. My daughter stands upset and confused in the living room, ignorant to our shared fate. But I must go to the lab again.

My barrage of seemingly horrible choices must mean that I have resigned John Pilgrim to a chaotic and immoral end. When given the option, I decide to cheat on my wife with a co-worker, only to come home late that night to discover she has committed suicide as well. I am finding it difficult to determine whether I am making these choices because I know the game is granting me this freedom to be explored, or because I have a subconscious desire to subject these virtual people to the consequences of deplorable decisions. I find myself grinning at the idea of robbing these characters of any relatable realism and indulging in the fantasy of a post-apocalyptic world that has turned morality upside down.

In my final days, I take my daughter with me to work instead of opting for the park, and our skin turns from a shade of peach to a grim gray. I start walking slower. On my final day, the singular glimmer of hope—in fiction a cure, but in reality just a clever arrangement of cause and effect correctly executed by the player—fades into nothingness. I leave my daughter, apparently too weak to keep moving, at the front door of the lab. I head up to the roof where I am to my utter disbelief given the option, “Give up.” The choice is jarring, both for its concrete admission of suicide and the eerie likeness it has to the spontaneity one might feel when staring a meaningless existence in the face.

I hit the space bar, and John Pilgrim spreads his arms out wide and falls to his death. Now every time I attempt to play One Chance on my laptop, I see snow falling on an empty rooftop. No matter how elementary the game is, or how extreme its choices are, it hits home one clear and simple fact that most video games today are trying to convey: in life, your choices stay with you.

The Emergence of Morality

he evolution from choice making in video games to questioning the morality of players is not an entirely new development. It has been manifesting itself both on large and small scales over the last decade, in games with preexisting divisions, like 2003’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and its already iconic light and dark sides, or in games that were marketed entirely on the option to be “good” or “bad,” the first of which many consider to be Lionhead Studios’ Fable, released in 2004.

But what is integral to the relevance and breadth of the video game is not the fact that the medium has been treading this territory; rather, equipped with such narrative, visual and emotional devices, games can now say something wholly unique about us as moral, choice-making individuals, and push us to question what it is we truly play for and who we are in that context.

Even further, the matter of how and why the fastest-growing entertainment medium of all time has achieved such a reflexive, complex relationship with consumers is an equally important question. Video games sit near the peak of media, with an industry valued at roughly $18.6 billion dollars in 2010 in the U.S. alone according to the NPD Group, Inc. Their roles in the lives of not just youths, but entertainment consumers of all ages and locales, now play an central role in the development of pop culture and how our relationship with that culture develops us.

“These games have attempted through their realism to try to usurp some of the basic ways that we negotiate the world around us, and that happens to be through choice making,” says Raiford Guins, an associate professor of digital cultural studies at Stony Brook University who specializes in video game history and preservation.

Coming in at a neck-bending height and donning the casual attire of an off-season track runner, Guins doesn’t appear, at first glance, to be the person you’d expect to lecture students on video games or discussing the philosophical elements of the medium. But one look at his office, with shelves of decades-old games and Grand Theft Auto posters plastered to its walls, and his off-the-cuff mention of his upcoming book, an academic analysis of video game preservation, shatters nearly every misconception.

For Guins, the development of choice and the incorporation of morality-based game mechanics is due in part to a series of foundational leaps in video game development and players’ demands for sophistication, both of which worked in tandem toward the evolution of the medium.

“As the options became more sophisticated, our choices grew in their density. In a lot of early games, the choice was basically to hit the fire button, to hit the fire button effectively, to defeat a boss, to go up in level…” he says. “So as games gave us more opportunities to inhabit their worlds in different ways, that’s when choice became one of the key aspects of gameplay.”

This generalized development, this increase in sophistication, comes in two flavors: that of the moral development variety and that of the character development variety. The intrinsic relationship between inhabiting a character and being responsible for the actions you make as that character grew from a number of factors now seen as momentous influences to modern video games.

“If we go back to Dungeons & Dragons, when one rolls up their character, one chooses a certain kind of moral classification—neutral, lawful evil, chaotic good,” Guins explains, using the term “roll up” to mean the physical rolling of the now iconic twelve-sided die. “When you choose that kind of categorization for your character, there are certain rules in the game that mean your character can act accordingly. So a lawful evil player can only do certain things, a chaotic good player can only act in certain ways.”

Being chaotically good or lawfully evil is, in a simplified and elementary way, a personality structure. This ability to choose and classify, alongside the fact that such a choice has lasting consequences, is at the very heart of moral decision-making. The person you are, your personality, manifests itself in the choices you make, which then reflect back upon you.

A modern game often praised for its significant steps in the incorporation of complex morality, and one Guins cites regularly, is Fallout 3, a Bethesda Game Studios title released in 2008 to widespread critical acclaim.

“You’re literally born into the game,” Guins says, and his exclamation is not tainted with a single hint of overstatement. The beginning of the game allows the player to choose their character’s name, race and gender while he or she lies in the mother’s womb. Players can then develop their character’s core attributes through narrative devices, like reading a children’s book titled You’re SPECIAL to determine favored character traits like intelligence and charisma, and then taking an aptitude test at age 16 to single out core features of your character.

The game reaches a complexity of rare proportions when the player is let loose on a post-apocalyptic world at age 18, where no law exists beyond the player’s personal code and need to survive. When you find your first city, the decimated Megaton inhabited by citizens who worship a dormant nuclear bomb, you also approach one of the game’s oft-cited moral conundrums: detonate the bomb and wipe out the city or choose to live among its people. The decision holds such emotional magnitude that the choice was removed from the game’s Japanese version for sensitivity reasons.

Fallout 3’s moral complexity, enabled primarily through the flexibility of your character, is a far cry from the video game characters of decades past, and a polarizing example of how character development has been at the crux of morality-based video games.

After all, the earliest games involved a confined space inhabited by a character defined by its action. There was no choice other than to play the game or not, and nothing beyond that except to play the game well or poorly.

“You’re playing a creature, like Pac-Man or a human representation, the cartoony Mario,” Guins explains. “You don’t really have, in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, any control over the customization factor. Basically you’re playing either a vehicle or a being—you can’t change what that person looks like, what its name is, what color your tank happens to be or your car happens to be.”

The shift from occupying a preexisting form or character that has been developed associated with actions to being able to control those actions in a form designed by the player gave new context to what you did in video games. “As more options are made available in terms of supporting choice, we follow up by wanting to have more choice in the context of being a player in that game,” Guins says.

He cites games like the narratively shallow yet developmentally influential BMX and urban brawling titles of the ‘90s, games that let you customize your rider or fighter for no other reason besides pure entertainment, as contributing titles in the evolution of the video game character. Today, titles like Fallout 3, and the colossally successful Mass Effect and Elder Scrolls series, have thousands of customizable options that don’t simply please an aesthetic need, but go even deeper. They materialize in our characters’ personalities, and affect interactions throughout the games’ entirety, including dialogue and narrative endings.

“We actually live in our games today,” Guins says, sitting back in his chair and matter-of-factly admitting the grip video games are capable of exerting. “When I come across a new game… I’m going to lose track of time, I’m going to lose track of myself.

“I think the more you’re brought into the game, if you’re asked to spend hours and hours in these games, we need to have things to do. And part of allowing us to spend time and to give us things to do, is to allow us to have a certain sense of agency in these spaces. Not just reacting to events, but actually being able to contemplate where, when and how we respond to certain events.”

A Second Chance

sit down in front of a new computer with a pang of guilt in my chest. The idea of playing One Chance a second time feels like artistic betrayal, as if the horrible choices I forced cancer researcher John Pilgrim to endure on my initial play-through were less real, less devastating. But for the sake of exploring the game’s depth, I press on.

This time around, I will be a family man above all else. I cycle through what I now recognize as necessities; my co-worker throws himself off the roof following the realization of our cancer treatment, and I cannot stop him. But I only go to the lab when necessary and opt to stay home with my family at every possible opportunity, resigning myself to a gentle and inevitable end in the company of those I care about most.

With only two days left, I am forced to the lab by way of the game’s ever-apparent invisible hand in the form of my pleading co-workers still placing their hope for humanity in a potential cure. But once I arrive, an enraged man blames me for the virus and thrusts forward with a knife. I manage to wrestle it from his hands, but cannot prevent him fleeing.

When I arrive home that night, my house is empty of light and sound. Blood seeps from my wife’s corpse in the living room, and my daughter lies lifeless in her bedroom. I enter the house’s final room to discover that the assailant from the lab, the murderer of my family, has hung himself. I go to work on my final day, and spend my last breathing moments slipping away on the floor of the laboratory.

I sit and stare at John Pilgrim’s corpse and contemplate this alternative, yet equally grisly, end and the increasingly morally ambiguous undercurrent One Chance is channeling. I am beginning to question whether I, as John Pilgrim, really am tasked with trying to find a cure, and how I could do so without letting my wife spiral toward depression.

The In-Game “You”

hen Chris Ferguson, a psychologist for the American Psychological Association, conducted a comprehensive study on the effects of violent video games on youths in June 2010, the results were not surprising. Video games, even the most violent, had no harmful effects on players beyond the aggravation of preexisting tendencies like hostility and an inability to control anger. Ferguson even compared them to peanut butter—reasonable and harmless for nearly everyone who eats it, given that average people don’t eat themselves to death.

But Ferguson admits that psychology hasn’t caught up to the complexity of the modern video game. “Because we’ve been so stuck on this issue on just violent content, we really haven’t asked sophisticated questions like, ‘Is all violent content the same?’” he says.

His question is one of many residing at the core of morality-based games because it seeks to question more than the barebones motives for our actions in these virtual worlds; it’s making us evaluate not just why we choose to act, say, violently or immoral in a situation, but also what that decision and the pattern it belongs to says about us as players.

Ferguson has his own opinions from the great lengths of time spent studying video game playing and constructing comprehensive surveys. “I think it would come down to trying to understand the different motivations people have for playing video games,” he admits. Ferguson himself tends to play the good guy. “I can never quite bring myself to be a jerk. I’m always trying to save the princess and do the right thing.”

Johnny Enea, a student at Long Island University and avid gamer, says that he cannot help but choose what he believes to be morally right in the context of a virtual dilemma. Bioshock, a 2007 first-person shooter so narratively complex that it successfully imagined an underwater dystopia run by Ayn Rand objectivism, asked players whether or not they would sacrifice the life of young girls in exchange for sucking a vital source of energy from their bodies. Enea discovered that he in fact could not. “I tried to insert myself in that situation, and found myself unable to compromise my moral principles, even if it is a virtual simulation of a fictional universe,” he said. “It seems kind of laughable, but I find myself often unable to commit a misdeed in those kinds of games as I don’t want my actions to reflect badly upon myself.”

“In most games that I play, I’m like a white knight,” admits Ian Schafer, a sophomore at Stony Brook University. “It’s kind of a compulsion. It will benefit you in a gameplay sense, like people will like you and you’ll be able to buy things for cheaper in the game and things like that, but it’s also the satisfaction of saving people…a hero-complex kind of thing.” Schafer played Fable, one of the first games to be massively marketed as hinging on a “good or evil” system, as good as he could possible could be, achieving 100 percent on the meter that aggregates your actions by the end of the game.

But as with any duality, there is always the other side. “What I think is interesting is that games reveal certain modes of behavior that we may not exhibit in our everyday lives, or anywhere else,” Guins says of the polarity.

Roman Levant, a senior at Stony Brook University, played Fable entirely differently. “I was a monster, people would just run screaming from me lest they be killed or their wives taken. I did monstrous things, unspeakable things,” Levant says with a laugh. “The reason being the escapism. I understand this is a game. I understand that there are no real-life consequences. I find that the behavior in video games is much, much different than in a real, social environment.”

Ferguson reinforces this notion that games are a way of exploring different sides of our personalities. “It serves as an exploration of our dark side, and it may be a very safe environment to explore this dark side,” he says.

Levant, and millions of other gamers, is proof that video games cannot force you to act realistically. If the power to choose whether or not one plays a game according to ones real-life moral codes always lies with the player, then a video game, no matter how complex the story is or how deep the tree of choice-making grows, will always be a playground of varying levels of seriousness.

“I think it’s really dangerous to say that we always perform morally in games in the way that we perform morally out of games,” Guins says. “I think these games allow us to occupy their spaces in radically different ways. And because we’re being asked to fork out 60 something dollars, we can approach these games through a plethora of different personalities.”

But some games, reared by developers with multiple iterations of a series to build upon, have discovered that a strong narrative may be the key to evoking realistic, strong and emotional connections to not just the plot of a game, but the characters and the actions associated with them. If a game can engross you to a never-before-seen level, then the sophistication of the player’s mentality could potentially rise to that of the game.

Tom Bissell, a pioneer in philosophical game critique and author of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, describes the significance of a series called Mass Effect in a late chapter of his book. The merits of the series’ first two installments (the third is set for a Spring 2012 release) go on and on, from its high-production voice acting and groundbreaking physics engine to its inter-stellar travel and oceans-deep dialogue system.

But perhaps the series’ most compelling feature, and the one that sets Mass Effect into a class of its own with respect to video game morality, is that every decision you make as the main character in Mass Effect’s first installment carries over into the second by way of reading your saved file across titles. “It actually makes thing matter,” Lavanet says bluntly of Mass Effect, illustrating how the series crafted an entirely new sense of gravity when in came to choice making.

Bissell explains that although he knew his decisions would carry over, he made his central character, a male or female human (you get to choose) named Commander Shepherd, an undeniably immoral being with the intent of experimentation in mind. He would be as rude as possible in conversations, and always explore the extent of his freedom when making choice in an action context. But he had a revelation of sorts when he discovered that the game’s engrossing narrative and complex morality system ignited something new within him as a player.

“These games become equally compelling when they force you to edge of some drawn, real-life line of intellectual or moral obligation that, to your mild astonishment, you find you cannot step across even in what is, essentially, a digital dollhouse for adults,” Bissell writes. He is referring to a moment when he refused to let his character purchase a permit for an AI character that would effectively let it preach publicly about religion. “Other mediums may depict necessary (or foolhardy) breaches of such lines, or their foolhardy (or necessary) protection, but only games actually push you to the line’s edge and make you live with fictional consequences of your choice.”

Even Guins, who openly questions the idea of choice in games with unavoidably limited options and sees the idea of morality as pragmatic and possibly nothing else, admits to moments of transcendence. While playing Fallout 3, when Guins’ sidekick Faux died, he says he stumbled into a moment of profound loss.

“I realized what made that game fun for me was my partnership with this kind of AI character,” he says. “The conversations that Faux and I would have, the way that we would strategically plan our attacks against other super mutants, or to solve certain problems in the game—as soon as I lost that, the game didn’t have the same meaning to me.”

This type of transcendence—this emotional connection rooted in the difference between life and death, right and wrong, and everything in between—is the very reason video games are no longer questionably art, but artistic reflections of ourselves, our societies and the way we occupy, maneuver and make sense of those environments.

Bissell, in a gut-wrenchingly personal chapter of his book that was subsequently excerpted in The Guardian in March 2010, parallels his relationships with cocaine and the completely unhinged, morally ambiguous Grand Theft Auto IV, coming to the realization that “maybe all that a game can do is point at the person who is playing it, and maybe this has to be enough.”

Bissell’s realization strikes at the heart of the topic: that video games, no matter how violent they can be, or how narratively complex or simplified they are, or how openly they explore morality, do in fact illustrate facets of our personality in a way no other medium can. But the important thing to keep in mind is that while they do force us to hold a mirror to our sub-conscious, they also let us bend that reflection to our will.

In games, we are who we want to be, depending on the circumstance, contingent on the context and with as much real-world truth as we see fit. These expansive boundaries make the modern video game more a dynamic, moving snapshot of how we think, react to and evaluate a near-endless amount of situations and ideas. It also explains why it’s a medium that will keep continuously evolving as long as entertainment exists.

The Significance of Choice

begin my final play through of One Chance with a mission: I will find a cure. Not only do I feel like I am robbing the game of its creative capacity, but I am also running out of computers to use. I’m told of YouTube videos depicting the different endings, or of ways to get around the one-play mechanism by using other websites or clearing my browser’s cache. I ignore the workarounds for the sheer fact of maintaining what little integrity the game has allowed me to maintain and simply hop on my last available computer.

I decide to spend every possible moment I can at the lab, and go through the motions of the first few days. I am not fazed by the suicide, but still reminded of how starkly it arrested the tone and overall feel of the entire game the first time I played. I come to what I now recognize as a pivotal mid-game decision: to spend time with my family or stay at the lab now that the humanity-ending virus has spread. I must keep working.

My wife’s suicide comes as no surprise. Maybe it’s integral to the path of finding a cure. Maybe she, in the limited and shallow scope of the game’s plot, cannot handle the potential of human extinction, no matter what her husband does. John Pilgrim is starting to remind me of the empty shell you fill in Fallout 3, or Commander Shepard of Mass Effect who will live or die by the end of the series’ second installment depending on your choices.

Guins’ voice rings in my ears. “In the case of the game, if I choose the wrong option, my character may die.” I take my daughter to work with me on the final day, with the now-familiar gaunt filling my face. In the lab, I suddenly fill a needle with liquid and stick myself in the arm. The color returns to my face. Out in the hallway, I administer the cure to my daughter. The game ends with me sitting quietly on a bench in the park with my daughter.

The room defines the station itself: edgy and eclectic—a personality that has made WUSB widely popular on campus and off.

But despite that popularity, the station is struggling. This year the Undergraduate Student Government cut WUSB’s finances by roughly $9,000, from a budget of $72,000 last year to the station’s current one of $63,000. As recently as the 2009-2010 academic year, WUSB received over $80,000, making the cuts over the past two years total about $25,000.

Davanelos, WUSB’s program director, says the cuts are detrimental to the station’s operations.

“They affect us in a whole slew of ways,” he says. “We already run on a shoestring. Cutting our funding prevents us from doing our job.”

WUSB’s budget is used to pay bills—a $1,000 monthly Verizon phone bill and a $4,500 monthly lease on a transmitter tower. Additionally, the station pays satellite fees and a fee to run its Integrated Service Digital Network line, which is used to broadcast to other stations. And because WUSB uses old equipment, including a 1967 analog board, repairs are frequent and costly, Davanelos says. He adds that deejays sometimes use their own money to replace damaged equipment.

Because WUSB does not advertise, it holds donation drives. Years ago it would receive as much as $55,000 in donations from listeners across the country. But with the slumping economy, Davanelos says, donations have dropped to around $22,000. The station used to put those donated funds towards updating equipment, but now the money is only used to pay the bills the station’s budget cannot cover.

But WUSB is not the only student media group at Stony Brook with a shrinking budget. USG cut about $66,000 from the seven funded student-run media outlets this year. Isobel Breheny-Schafer, Assistant Director for Student Media, says that for the past three years funding to student media groups has dwindled significantly, and many groups have faced problems with USG. In the 2010-2011 academic year, the Statesman, which also relies on advertising revenue, lost almost all of its funding, forcing the paper to limit its publishing from twice a week to once a week. SBU-TV, the campus-wide television station, saw its budget freeze last spring after USG took it over to refurbish it.

Breheny-Schafer says she is worried about whether or not this trend will continue.

“My concern is, if this keeps happening, then there will be no more campus journalism,” she says. “They won’t be able to cover as much campus news.”

Student media groups use their budgets differently than other funded clubs and organizations. Rather than using funds to host events or pay for trips, they use theirs strictly for operational purposes. Print publications such as the Statesman and The Press pay for camera equipment, office supplies and layout software along with printing fees every time they publish. Even online publications have to pay for domain space as well as camera equipment and office supplies.

Broadcast media groups, however, normally require higher budgets because their equipment is more expensive and they are required to pay additional fees in order to broadcast.

USG Treasurer Thomas Kirnbauer says USG did not specifically target student media outlets when forming this year’s budget.

“We do not cut clubs/organizations based on the service they provide to the campus,” he says. “Therefore, to say we are doing so or to ask if media groups will get their budget cut further is completely under false pretenses.”

But many of Breheny-Schafer’s concerns stretch beyond the funding of student media. Many of the groups’ memberships, including SBU-TV, are increasing, but budget cuts mean fewer resources will be available to students so they all can participate and voice their concerns on campus.

The assistant director says she is also concerned about the new financial bylaws, which became effective last semester. Section 118, Subsection 6 of the legislation states that every club and organization must host at least one event on campus each semester that is entirely or partly funded by the Student Activity Fee. In January, the Asian American Journal lost its budget of at least $2,800; on USG’s website Kirnbauer writes that this occurred because the group violated the bylaw. While Breheny-Schafer worries about how this will affect other student media, Kirnbauer says AAJ lost its funding because it didn’t spend any money at all.

“I interpreted the rule very, very loosely,” he says. “As long as the media groups spent some amount of money, I didn’t consider it a violation of the rules.”

But perhaps the most questionable of USG’s actions concerning student media, and the one that troubles Breheny-Schafer, is its acquisition of SBU-TV. Last spring, after SBU-TV allocated for more equipment so it could stream some of its content digitally, USG found that the station’s service was outdated. The organization passed the Reformation of SBU Television Act, acquiring the station and freezing its budget so it could not operate. The act states that USG will restructure the station, but SBU-TV President Andy Mavra says there’s been little process.

“As far as I know there has been little effort by USG in terms of trying to restructure SBU-TV,” Mavra says. “And if there have been efforts they have all been done without discussing it with the currently existing members of the club. As far as I know USG has not used our studios for anything productive or in favor of other students since they kicked us out.”

Mavra, a cinema and cultural studies major, says that any progress with the station’s reformation is thanks to members of SBU-TV. Although the station is technically still recognized as a club and still holds meetings, it has no definitive meeting space, useable budget or access to its equipment. Mavra says more people have expressed interest in helping it regain activity.

“From the time our studios got closed down SBU-TV has made it clear that we are open to the idea of change and want to work with USG to help turn SBU-TV into the more open, student-friendly organization they claimed they wanted,” he says, “But in the year that has passed little to no effort has been done to achieve that.”

“We understand that money is being cut from most clubs, especially in the media department, but our main goal is to simply get the use of our studio and already-owned equipment back,” he adds.

USG President Mark Maloof could not be reached for a comment.

Breheny-Schaefer and Davanelos, say the way USG handles Stony Brook’s student media needs to change. Both agree that USG is potentially preventing students from developing crucial job skills. Many Stony Brook alumni have gone obtained jobs at well-known, respected news media outlets because of their involvement with student-run media organizations. Scott Higham, once a writer for The Press long before the School of Journalism was established, is now a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The Washington Post. Shivana Harriram, the current news director at WUSB, got a job with News 12 because the station knew of the news pieces she aired.

“College is supposed to be a sandbox,” Davanelos says. “It’s supposed to provide you with real-world tools. Stuff like these budget cuts are totally [preventing that].”

The program director suggests that USG may not understand how crucial funding is to the way student media groups operate. “They’re completely ignorant,” Davanelos says. “If they weren’t ignorant, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

“We provide a valuable service,” he continues, “They’re completely preventing that.”

Students and faculty members were greeted by a mini multicultural fair in the back of SAC Ballroom A, prior to presentations. Many of the displays related to African-American culture in some aspect. Presenters included Caribbean Students Organization, African-American Brotherhood and Minorities in Medicine. They also offered presenters from different Greek life organizations, such as Zeta Phi Beta and Delta Sigma Theta. Both sororities are a part of the Divine Nine, an honorable title dedicated to the first nine multi-cultural Greek life organizations in the nation.

Secretary of the African Students Union, Folasade Ajibade offered information on her club’s activities, which vary from political and cultural discussions to their very popular King of Africa/Queen of the Motherland pageants. Beauty contests aside, the club also coordinates charitable events geared towards needy nations, specifically in Africa.

The spectators eventually gathered and observed quietly as the opening ceremony began. President Samuel L. Stanley offered his words which slightly resembled a history lesson, but allowed viewers to understand the importance of February and African American history in particular. Although some joke that February had been chosen to represent black history because it is the shortest month of the year, it is also rich in past events that have shaped African-American culture. On February 3, 1870, Congress passed the 15^th Amendment which had given (limited) rights for African-American to vote. February 23 marks the birthday of W. E. B. Du Bois, co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. February also marks a few morbid events for the African American community, such as Malcolm X’s death on the 21 in 1965.

Cheryl Chambers, Associate Dean for Multicultural Affairs and Co-Chair of the Black History Month Committee helped set up much of the event. This program marks her 22nd year honoring black history with Stony Brook. This year’s opening ceremony featured guest speaker Andrez S. Carberry, a successful alumnus of Stony Brook University and lawyer who has worked with the Pajama Program, a New York City based charity.

“To me, Black History Month is not only about the past, it is now,” he said, commanding the attention of the spectators with a strong voice and faint Jamaican accent. He gave a brief description of his days at Stony Brook and strongly advised students to remain as active as he had been as a student. “Serve because you want to do something for others,” he said. He showed concern with the decline of African American enrollment at Stony Brook, noting that black make up less than 6% of the undergraduate population. “I know more black men are headed to prison than to college,” but he strongly advised the audience to act as teachers and to spread the word of education so others may embrace it as he had done.

But perhaps the most united moment of the ceremony was during the singing of the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The diverse audience of blacks, Latinos, Asians and students of other ethnicities had all been able to sing along to the lyrics of the song as they had appeared on the screen, “Out from the gloomy past, ‘til now we stand, free at last.”

The university’s previous logo, consisting of rays and stars inside a trio of red, green and blue circles, was designed by legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser of “I love NY” fame. It was original, distinctive and, in a field where prestige is closely associated with age and tradition, exceptionally daring. In the entire Stony Brook brand there was nary a shield, a seal or a coat of arms to be found, eschewing design tropes that are ubiquitous in the branding of American universities.

Glaser’s design suggested that the university did not feel the need to try to disguise the fact that, as a public institution that was less than 50 years old when the logo was designed, no one was going to mistake Stony Brook for Harvard. It suggested a university prepared to embrace its youth and diversity and be something different, something unbound by the often-archaic conventions of American higher education, where every institution that isn’t a 400-year-old private university founded by Puritans seems to hope everyone will somehow miraculously believe it is.

The new logo, a red shield that retains a mutilated version of Glaser’s rays and stars – now reduced to a single star and a group of rays that, with their point of origin cropped out of the picture, seem to be shining from nowhere onto nothing – is derivative where its predecessor was daring. This hackneyed mash-up of that most ubiquitous of all university logos, the shield, with a pointlessly altered version of Glaser’s logo manages the astonishing feat of being trite and faddish at the same time. Retaining some of Glaser’s elements means no one is going to mistake the shield for that of Harvard or Yale or any other ancient and venerable institution, yet it lacks the freshness and modernity of his design. It is neither here nor there, the worst of all worlds.

Glaser doesn’t like the new logo, and rightfully so. Designers tend not to like it when other designers, especially lesser ones, mess with their work. Stony Brook took a design by one of the greatest graphic designers of the modern era and had it “tweaked” into near-unrecognizability by an ad agency from, of all places, Alabama. It’s rather like taking a building by a great architect and having it renovated by a company that specializes in designing Hilton Garden Inns (one of which will, of course, soon grace this campus). One suspects the architect in question wouldn’t have nice things to say. And in this case, he would be right.

But Glaser seems to know exactly what the university apparently found wrong with his design. In an interview with the Press he commented, “I have a feeling that in the academic community, there’s a reluctance to be overly assertive.” The old logo stood out. It didn’t look the logos of the universities Stony Brook’s administration now not so secretly wishes to be just like. The new logo may be a terrible piece of design, but it blends in among the vast array of other collegiate shields. That is, no doubt, exactly what the university wants: a logo that is indistinguishable from those of the rarefied institutions it so desperately envies.

It is no coincidence that Glaser was commissioned to design the old logo by his good friend Shirley Strum Kenny during her tenure as president of the university. Whatever one thought of Kenny’s decisions and management style – and she was certainly not without her critics, including at this paper – she was not one to shy away from taking chances. The new logo is likewise a perfect metaphor for the leadership of Kenny’s successor, Samuel Stanley.  Whereas Kenny was a visionary if controversial leader who was unafraid of risk, Stanley is a technocrat with a deep fondness for management consultants. He is not the sort of person one can imagine calling up his good friend the world-renowned designer to create a new logo.

But this is about far more than the contrasting personalities of two university presidents. Since he took office, Stanley has been an enthusiastic cheerleader for the gradual privatization of Stony Brook and public institutions in general. The new logo signifies this vision. Whereas the old logo said, “I’m different and I’m not ashamed of it,” the new one says, “I’m trying to pretend to be an expensive, exclusive private university, even though I’m not one and never will be.”

The new logo will no doubt serve Stony Brook well as it continues down the path of privatization, chasing prestige by jettisoning that which makes it unique and instead emulating its supposed betters instead. But it is also a perfect symbol of the opportunity forfeited by following that path: an opportunity to prove that a great university need not be defined by exclusivity and tradition, but can instead attain greatness by fostering inclusivity and innovation.

SBP: Would you rather have anal sex with a questionable hooker but she violently shits all over you after and pics of it leak on the internet or get the best blow jay ever but wake up on a deserted island with enough food to live out your life?

KH: Well, I, uh, damn nigga you comin’ at me like a bull that got its dick slapped. I’m gonna have to go with that first option. I’ve seen Castaway enough times to know that no bj is worth spending your life with a volleyball. Especially a male volleyball.

SBP: Do you like Larry David?

KH: Hell no, fuck that bleach nigga. Seinfeld wasn’t funny and Jerry’s haircut was always one lock away form being a mullet. Not a good look, dog.

SBP: Fuck you, Larry David is hilarious. We heard you’re going to star in the film, Think Like A Man. Do you hate your career?

KH: To quote the freshest musical collective this side of the Mississippi, “Cash rules everything around me.”

SBP: What’s your favorite animal?

KH: Oh you know it’s gotta be the dolphin! Jumping around, splashing, having fun and shit. And raping and murdering. Yeah. Not so much those last two things. If I was a dolphin, I’d be the shortest dolphin ever. The lady dolphins would be all like, “Kevin, come swim and shit. Get outta that reef.” I’d swim out and they’d see my short ass fins wiggling around and they’d just do some supersonic laughs.

SBP: How do you feel about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

KH: Why those niggas fighting? Look where you live. It’s all sand, everywhere. You ain’t growin’ no vegetables.

SBP: Do you eat that wonton soup?

KH: I get wonton crunk. Wonton soup is the soup of choice for the realest niggas. Thank you, Based God.

SBP: What’s your favorite scent from Yankee Candle?

KH: Oh, dog, it’s definitely Kiss from a Tulip in a Spring Mist. I’ve wooed so many chicks with that scent. Whenever my jokes fail, I fall back on that candle. And that’s pretty often, if you know what I mean (humps chair to clarify).

SBP: Where do you draw your inspiration for your jokes?

KH: McDonald’s Double Quarter Pounders, almost exclusively. Those burger patties are so fake. They’re like 40 percent beef, 60 percent jokes. Not many people know that. Mitch Hedberg knew that. And it killed him, ultimately.

SBP: So who do you hope will get the Republican nomination?

KH: Come on, man. Look at me! I’m obviously a big business, Romney type.

SBP: What does going ham mean?

KH: You know how sometimes you come home and you tired nigga and you wanna eat some ham? Nah I don’t know. It’s some rap shit. You know how rappers always be actin’ tough. I could never be a rapper. I’d be in a rap circle and say some stupid rhyme, “I’m the shortest, I’m like dynamite because…dynamite…it doesn’t come in large boxes.” And then some big ass man would just walk in, look at me, transform into the Megazord, hit me once with that big ass sword and banish me to the Netherworld.

SBP: What would you do if your son was at home crying all alone on the bedroom floor because he’s hungry and the only way to feed him is to sleep with a man for a little bit of money and his daddy’s gone somewhere smoking rock now in and out of lockdown?

KH: I know a girl who’s tough but sweet. She’s so fine, she can’t be beat. She’s got everything that I desire. Sets the summer sun on fire.

SB: Why did you request only one interview by someone from campus media

KH: Honestly—honestly, though—I was really hoping that the Stateman got the interview. I felt like they would ask really intelligent questions, like always. They’re good journalists over there. And I’m a completely unfunny jackass, so…

SBP: Как вы думаете, что капиталистические свиньи в Америке украсть заработная плата наших разночинцы товарищ?

KH: Я не думаю, что экономическое неравенство в Америкетакая же, как многие думают. Хайль Гитлер!

Last semester students were informed through SOLAR that the University was going to back-charge $37.50 for the fee, before redacting the fee a day later. Students taking 10 or more credits will be charged $75 annually. This year, the fee will only be implemented for the spring semester.

In a September 20th memorandum, Nancy Zimpher, SUNY’s chancellor, expressed that SUNY’s Board of Trustees had been in favor of charging new “broad-based fees,” including instructional cluster fees charged to students taking a related group of courses and the Academic Excellence and Success Fee.

According to the Stony Brook Graduate Student Organization Senate’s meeting minutes from October 11, Dr. Susan Dimonda, the Associate Dean and Director of Student Life, reported that a $75 fee per semester will be required to finance the costs of the recreation center. Although the $75 fee was voted for undergraduate students, no fee has been established for graduate students.

A requisition against the fee on the online petition site Change.org has received 2,233 signatures as of this writing. The stated goal by petitioner Jose Rivera is to reach 2,500 signatures. His original goal of 1,000 signatures was reached within a day.

Dennis N. Assanis, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, called the fee an “investment” in a letter to the students. In Stony Brook’s NYSUNY 2020 Challenge Grant, Stony Brook stated that the fee, along with tuition hikes, will allow the University to add 267 new faculty positions.

The plan, however, offered no timetable as to when these hirings will take place, which could mean students will be paying for benefits they may not be receiving.

The school is balancing its attempts to strengthen the university academically while placating students with financial constraints. The school states that a portion of the academic excellence fee is to go towards TAP-eligible students, those whose family income is less than $75,000.

In the recent past, Stony Brook has increasingly relied on tuition as a source of revenue for the university. In the past 10 years, tuition revenue has increased 114 percent, while state support has increased just 4 percent. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, public school tuition as a whole has risen nearly 74 percent during the last 10 years.

The Bursar’s Office, which is in charge of student accounts, declined to comment. A spokesperson for the university did not respond to questions.

Three other flagship SUNY centers—Albany, Binghamton and Buffalo—along with the entire CUNY system, have implemented academic excellence fees for this semester as well.

On August 3, 2011, the CUNY Board of Trustees approved the tuition and fee structure for all CUNY campuses, effective fall 2011, which was met with much derision from students at Baruch College, where the vote was held. SUNY hasn’t been able to stage a protest on a similar level.

This comes at a time when President Obama has warned public universities not to raise tuition if they expect taxpayer support. “We are putting colleges on notice — you can’t assume that you’ll just jack up tuition every single year,” Obama said in a speech last Saturday at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “If you can’t stop tuition from going up, then the funding you get from taxpayers every year will go down.”

The memos, which featured University letterhead, stated that an overload of semen in shower drains was causing major clogs. Students were then asked to refrain from touchin’ on their wieners while in the shower and, by extension, to keep the major jack-sesh in their rooms.

Even though a quick internet search revealed that different versions of the memo have appeared in the dorms of at least 18 colleges around the country, including Dartmouth, Virginia Tech, Villanova and several other colleges way better than Stony Brook, we at the Press decided to investigate the sploogefest to find out if the letters contained a seed of truth, or were simply an ecstatic spasm of humor that resulted in a white glaze obscuring the facts. So it was with great gusto that we pumped Associate Director of Campus Residences Alan deVries, whose name was attached to the alleged notice, for a few spurts of information.

While he did thank us for our concern about unseemly amounts of man chowder congesting Mendelsohn Quad’s virgin pipes, our stiff line of questioning went limp when deVries told us that “this letter comes up every year at least once and…is clearly a hoax.” He penetrated the heart of the issue when he said that commenting on the letters for publication would “not be worth anyone’s effort.” Apparently, he must have thought we were just jerking him around.