The Jungle meets Brutalism: my first newspaper profile piece

[Gregory Pratt]

So, I've been too busy to come around lately, as I'm sure a lot of you have noticed. (And some of you have celebrated! )

 

But, one of the many things I've been busy with of late is work at my school newspaper, where I was recently named News Editor. I just finished a long profile piece about the recent student elections at UIC and the subsequent disqualification of nine candidates, all of whom ran as members of the same political party, and asked NSS if I could post it here. He said, Sure.

 

So, I thought I'd share it. The one thing I'd say by way of introduction is this: The title explains itself once you read it, unless you don't know that the UIC campus is built in an architectural style known as "Brutalism." So, with that said, the rest is, I think, self-explanatory.

 

Please let me know if you have any thoughts or criticisms of my article or anything else. You can see it here.

 

I know there are a few fans -- for lack of a better term -- of my writing here, and I like sharing the things I write.

 

The jungle meets Brutalism

How the UIC elections were won and lost

By: Gregory Pratt

Posted: 5/4/09

 

On Apr. 16, the UIC election for Undergraduate Student Government ended. A student organization functioning as a political party called Students for Better Government emerged victorious with the most votes across the board. One week later, all nine SBG candidates were disqualified, including the winners of the three executive board positions (student trustee, president, and vice president).

 

This is a story of the events leading up to these days and through them. It is an account of friendships dissolved in the crossfire of dueling ambitions, about the clash of high ideals and electoral strategy, about candidates who achieve great success and lose it overnight.

 

Joel Ebert never believed he would become the student member to the Board of Trustees, and it seems he was right. Despite winning 1,200 votes, 43 percent of all cast for trustee, he will be on the outside of student government looking in next semester, where he started.

 

Ebert, 24, is a wanderer who barely graduated high school and spent several years of his life driving around the country playing music. He began writing for The Chicago Flame in 2007, his freshman year, working his way up to news editor. There he covered corruption in USG, which did not endear him to the student government.

 

Ebert ran for trustee with the support of Students for Better Government, and was arguably the face of the group. SBG was immediately controversial in student government circles due to the fact that its president is Christopher Olson, another Flame reporter and editor who ran for student trustee last year and lost. Critics of SBG claim Olson is a puppet-master trying to avenge his loss through his friends. (At one point, negative fliers were posted around the campus which featured several SBG personalities, Olson prominent among them, and the phrase "UIC's Next Top Model" derisively plastered over.)

 

Olson claims more benevolent motivations.

 

"It's fun to see political struggle where once there was none. It's nice to see it happen. It's better than the old races where [one candidate] ran unopposed [for president] two years in a row," said Olson.

 

Bernard Mariano was SBG's candidate for president. Mariano grew up in a house with Philipino Catholics and Pakistani Muslims, and is heavily involved with student groups on campus, including an organization founded by Ebert called SPEAK dedicated to discussion of taboo social and political issues.

 

Mariano was intrigued by the idea of non-USG members running for office and approached Ebert about being a candidate because "I'd heard that USG didn't do much this semester, and I thought that I could do a better job, what with the reports with what they were doing. I ran because there was a job to be done and USG wasn't doing it."

 

Of the SBG candidates who ran for executive office he is the least controversial and most well-liked.

 

The SBG candidate for vice president was Sean Murray, third-year philosophy major who has written for The Chicago Flame in the past. He ran as a member of SBG "because it's worthless to try and get something done if you're forced to work with people you can't work with. The better working relationship you have with somebody, the more efficiently things will get done. I've got experience working with most of the students of SBG."

 

For Assembly, SBG ran six candidates: Heather Kaufman, Bernadette Casaclang, Cecilia Real, Sara Agate, Danielle Schubert and Geoff Berkheimer. They were the leading vote-getters for the Student Assembly, in that order, and they would all be disqualified.

 

Dan Zavorotny, Damian Wolak and Kevin Lee are members of a fraternity on campus and decided to run for trustee, president, and vice president together. In an eerie bit of foreshadowing, they only had one flier which read "The Only Choice for UIC." Though these candidates would all finish in second place, they would ascend to the positions to which other candidates were elected once the SBG slate was disqualified.

 

To my regret they declined to speak with me after agreeing to do so. Wolak had written me, "I cannot wait to share all my experiences with you," but when our interview date came, he met me and said, "I know I said I would interview with you, but in light of what's happened I don't want to answer any of your questions."

 

Zavorotny told me over the phone that he couldn't speak with me. Kevin Lee simply canceled our appointment.

 

Zachariah Wiedeman, 28, ran for president with vice Laura Swetin as his vice presidential running-mate. She dropped out because she could not afford to quit her position as a resident advisor if she won. Wiedeman was left to run alone. He was an Air Force serviceman who received an early honorable discharge and is now completing his BA.

 

During the campaign Wiedeman said that "the only reason I'm [running] is because I genuinely care about this school, and I figure my senior year, this is a good way to give back before I graduate."

 

Despite finishing a distant third in his race Wiedeman would become a key figure in the story of this election as the main figure pushing for the disqualification of the Students for Better Government.

 

Saad Jamil, freshman, ran a solo campaign for vice president and finished third in the closest race. He ran without formal ties to any other candidate. Elias Pittos is the current student trustee, and he holds the dubious distinction of receiving the least votes of any candidate for any position this year, due to his focusing on school and trustee work over campaigning. He was, however, elected to the student Senate.

 

Roshina Khan was the third-place finisher in the race for trustee. She ran an extremely visible campaign, buying adspace in SCE as well as "Java Jackets" bearing her likeness for the coffee cups sold by Café Descartes as well as posting attractive full-color posters all across the University. Of all the candidates for trustee she claimed the most student government experience, having previously been a chief of staff under the student trustee, James Winters.

 

Khan takes pride in the fact that nobody filed any complaints against her at the end of the race, and finds solace in the fact that she is not "involved with the disqualification and appeals process. I ran my race, did it with integrity and honesty, and once it was done, I got back with going to classes and taking care of my responsibilities. I didn't stay involved and try to drag it out like other people are."

 

Analyzing an election to determine why any candidate won and lost is a complicated task, and that is at once true and false about this one. It is clear why SBG won the most votes across the board: they were the most organized, had the most student volunteers and the heaviest presence on campus. It is considerably less clear how and why the student election results were overturned.

 

This year's campaigns for office led to bad blood across the board between several different people, but the defining rivalry of this campaign is that of Wiedeman and the Olson-Ebert tandem, even though Olson was not a candidate and Wiedeman was not running against Ebert. It began early when Wiedeman approached Olson and asked him to "stay neutral in the election" for the presidency, claiming he did not want to have friction with his friend (he had volunteered for Olson's campaign for Trustee, and had been a member of Olson's student group Rationalists and Free-Thinkers).

 

Wiedeman further expressed his concern that Olson's idea of a campaign is to destroy his opponents and win at all costs, to which Olson responded that elections are "definitely about winning and beating somebody, because the guy in second place doesn't get to do what he wants to do." To illustrate this he shared a parable with Wiedeman:

 

"Two guys are camping in the heart of Africa. They see a lion approaching. The first guy just starts lacing up his shoes. Second guy is freaking out. What are you doing? Why are you [screwing around] with your shoes? He says, Look, I don't have to outrun the lion. I just have to outrun you."

 

Wiedeman interpreted this as a threat, as Olson promising to feed him "to the lion," and thus began the feud. Early in the campaign, Wiedeman had his Facebook account mysteriously suspended by Facebook and thus lost control of a group he'd created, "Revenge of the Nerd." Olson swooped in, took it over and advertised for SBG. He eventually returned it, but before that happened, Olson received a Facebook message from Wiedeman's father titled "Corruption in Illinois." Wiedeman himself, using a Facebook account he set up for his dog (Starbuck Wiedeman), wrote Olson's girlfriend a message in the third-person informing her that Olson had stolen his group; when she sent him a polite brushoff, he replied that Olson was "on the verge of getting suspended f[rom] UIC and possibly police charges" while adding, "The boy is out of control."

 

Wiedeman expressed regret to me over this incident and said that he had overstepped his bounds but just wanted to get his group back.

 

Over the course of the race Wiedeman would tell numerous people, this author included, that Olson and Ebert were personally trying to "destroy him" and not just defeat him. At one point, after a student complained that Wiedeman was sending her numerous e-mails a day (Wiedeman denies this), Wiedeman sent out an e-mail to his friends asking "Do you think Joel and Chris are spoofing me?" This led Olson to write the Dean of Students assigned to the USG elections, William Rodriguez, complaining that "Wiedeman has been sending out e-mails containing false information about me, and now he is inciting others to harass me as well […] I would appreciate it if you would ask him to stop; people are starting to post lewd things on my Facebook account faster than I can delete them."

 

Wiedeman, Olson and Ebert would take each other before Rodriguez on a number of occasions throughout the campaign.

 

A curious dynamic emerged during the campaign as several groups popped up across the Internet attacking SBG. First there were websites such as UICSBG.com, which originally featured photoshopped pictures of the candidates mocking them but would eventually link to an article Ebert wrote for the Flame mocking U.S. Congressman Ron Paul.

 

Wiedeman initially denied being involved with UICSBG.com but eventually wrote a convoluted confession on his blog saying that he had not been "100 percent forthcoming about everything I knew and what my role in this site's creation was," which more or less meant that he owned the website, knew a friend of his was using it to attack SBG, but did not know until much later who that person was or why. He claims that a friend of his from Kentucky, who has access to the numerous accounts owned by Wiedeman, learned of Ebert's Ron Paul criticism and decided to mock him. (Ron Paul's fanbase is fiercely loyal and more than a little reminiscent of Japanese soldiers who spent their entire lives in the jungles of the Pacific Islands not knowing that the war with America was over.)

 

In addition to this satirical site there were other examples of candidates being mocked over the Internet. An incumbent USG Assembly member posted a scathing and hilarious video of a younger sibling mocking SBG's slogans, such as "When we found ourselves we found each other,"

 

In addition, several Facebook groups sprung up throughout the campaign, such as Students for Boasting and Grandstanding and UIC Students against the Election of Joel Ebert and his SBG cronies, with which no candidate has known involvement but which contributed to the tense atmosphere that had been present in this race from the beginning.

 

It was in this atmosphere that each candidate went about the process of soliciting votes on the election days. Most of the candidates simply walked around campus knocking on dorms, meeting students and passing out fliers, but Olson had the idea of renting out the quad so that SBG could hold an election rally and increase voter turnout. There they played music, gave away ice cream, Red Bull and other goodies while exhorting people to vote. When it was over they played "We Are the Champions" and celebrated with the gusto of great conquerors. The euphoria did not last long.

 

At UIC, there is a group of five anonymous students who, in conjunction with Dean Rodriguez, form the Election Planning Committee. It is their job to hear complaints about the fairness of the election, and although these people more or less control the fate of any candidate who is brought before them their identities are unknown to the student body as a whole. Rodriguez says this is deliberately so, an attempt to keep the EPC private to avoid their being lobbied or harassed by candidates and maintain the integrity of the process.

 

Twenty complaints were filed with the EPC, mostly by Wiedeman and Dan Zavorotny, and 14 were heard at the hearings, which were held on Apr. 22. The hearings went from 5:30 p.m. to 2 a.m.; no minutes were taken, no notes were shared with the public, and the EPC ruled the next day that five of the complaints would be upheld and every SBG candidate would be disqualified. The EPC did not release any statement as to why or how they made their determination that rules were broken and that that necessitated the nullification of the election results.

 

Murray said, "What we've seen are the results of one person's desperate attempt to retain relevancy. It seems that student representatives are chosen more by a questionable bureaucracy than by the votes of the actual students."

 

Dean Rodriguez dismisses concerns about the legitimacy of the process and said, "As the responsible administrator I saw no problems and can assure everyone it was fair."

 

He defends the decision to take no notes by saying that he was following procedure and doing things the way they have always been done.

 

Students for Better Government submitted an appeal to the Election Appeals Committee on Apr. 24 and are waiting to hear from them. They allege that their due process rights were violated and that nothing in the complaints about them merits disqualification. Wiedeman, for his part, defends the process as being fair and legitimate. "What reasons need to be given? Everyone in the hearings saw the evidence on both sides. Isn't the EPC's decision made based on their judgements of the evidence?" He says he had no vendetta against anyone, but believed that the rules were broken, SBG cheated and deserved to be punished as a result.

 

Wiedeman said, "I just did due diligence when I saw something wrong."

 

© Copyright 2009 Chicago Flame

[Gregory Pratt]

The double-post was indeliberate. Can someone please delete the other thread?

[bmags]

Pratt ~

 

It was thoroughly reported.

 

My criticisms are as follows:

• It takes far too long to begin. For instance:

"Joel Ebert never believed he would become the student member to the Board of Trustees, and it seems he was right. Despite winning 1,200 votes, 43 percent of all cast for trustee, he will be on the outside of student government looking in next semester, where he started."

And the next four paragraphs would work much better lower down. Though in your lede you give us some basic information about them being disqualified, that info would be much more effective once knowing what in fact took place.

 

I'd imagine that the nut of this story is not that the members were disqualified. I get the impression that this has already been reported. Rather, the point of this story is all the questionable events leading UP to the disqualification that had yet to be reported on. In that, I believe your lede should change to more resemble that.

 

For my tastes, I don't believe your transparency in how the new administration (the fraternity ones) hadn't gotten back to you should go anywhere but the bottom. We had not yet learned all the foul play that had happened, so it doesn't make sense in the middle why they should avoid you.

 

-------

 

So in conclusion, it was well written. I quite envy you in that it is clear you have the ability to write like you speak. Busting through that shell is the hardest thing I've faced. My criticisms are mostly placement and editing. The first half of the story is a lot of tell, and the second half is showing. Perhaps a more narrative flow of weaving in and out of past actions and quotes from the players of the consequences could work as well.

 

But the most important part: the reporting and voice : you nailed.

[Heads22]

I agree, that it takes a really long time to develop. I know it's a different style for a profile piece.

 

What sort of placement did it have in the paper?

[bmags]

Here's some of my writing, Gregory, if you're interested.

Profiles:

http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/...jeannine-craig/

http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/...real-candidate/

Most recent:

http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/...-power-schools/

 

Wouldn't mind your input! (didn't mean to hijack)

[StrangeSox]

Agree with bmags. It bogs down in the middle with a lot of biographical information about who's who, but it was still a good read.

[Heads22]

It read more like something in a magazine, to be honest. Newspapers are all about that inverted pyramid. I know this leans more towards feature writing and stuff like that, but that's a pretty intense read. It was good, though.

[BobDylan]

Pratt ~

 

It was thoroughly reported.

 

My criticisms are as follows:

• It takes far too long to begin. For instance:

"Joel Ebert never believed he would become the student member to the Board of Trustees, and it seems he was right. Despite winning 1,200 votes, 43 percent of all cast for trustee, he will be on the outside of student government looking in next semester, where he started."

And the next four paragraphs would work much better lower down. Though in your lede you give us some basic information about them being disqualified, that info would be much more effective once knowing what in fact took place.

 

I'd imagine that the nut of this story is not that the members were disqualified. I get the impression that this has already been reported. Rather, the point of this story is all the questionable events leading UP to the disqualification that had yet to be reported on. In that, I believe your lede should change to more resemble that.

 

For my tastes, I don't believe your transparency in how the new administration (the fraternity ones) hadn't gotten back to you should go anywhere but the bottom. We had not yet learned all the foul play that had happened, so it doesn't make sense in the middle why they should avoid you.

 

What he said. This isn't a question of whether you can write or not. It's clear you can. This is only a question of structure, and what the story is representing.

[Gregory Pratt]

thoughts coming soon bmags --

 

and congrats on graduating, if I read correctly somewhere on these parts.