UA In the News — Nov. 18-20

Million Dollar Band seeks donations through crowdfunding
Gears of Biz – Nov. 18
The University of Alabama has created an online crowdfunding drive, and the Million Dollar Band is its first project. Today the university launched UA Crowdfunding, described as an online fundraising platform. Projects will run about 30 days and allow donors to support different projects on campus. Managed by the Office of Annual Giving, UA Crowdfunding “will build support for projects that might otherwise go without funding,” the university said in a statement. Campaigns will be created and run by academic departments, student groups and others beginning next spring.
Birmingham Business Journal – Nov. 18
AL.com – Nov. 17
Tuscaloosa News – Nov. 20

Fashion for Life show displays UA student designers’ work
Tuscaloosa News – Nov. 19
The 2017 Fashion for Life show at the Ferguson Center at the University of Alabama was held Sunday, Nov. 19, 2017. The event showcased the work of 14 student fashion designers in UA’s College of Human Environmental Sciences. The show benefited METAvivor, an organization promoting metastatic breast cancer awareness and research.

Nearly 500,000 pounds of food donated in Beat ‘Bama Food Drive
Opelika-Auburn News – Nov. 19
After a total of more than 490,000 pounds of food was counted, it was clear who the real winners of this year’s Beat Bama Food Drive were: the people for whom the drive has helped for more than two decades. But a contest is a contest and while Auburn, represented by the East Alabama Food Bank, collected a total of 232,544 pounds of canned food, they  trailed Alabama’s 260,453 pounds, represented by the West Alabama Food Bank.

University Place Elementary students learn about world cultures
Tuscaloosa News – Nov. 18
Wearing traditional Chinese garb and a panda hat, Jing Li stood Friday in the middle of a circle of intrigued students from University Place Elementary School. As the students watched, Li began to spin, kick and softly move across the floor, performing different martial art forms, such as tai chi and changquan. In the midst of her performance, Li stopped. “You want to see more?” Li asked. “Yeah,” the group shouted with excitement. Li’s performance was one part of a showcase at the school Friday morning that included representatives from 16 different countries to commemorate International Education Week. The showcase, which was organized between the school and the English Language Institute at the University of Alabama, was called “World Friends Day” and included people explaining their cultures and what makes their country unique.

The Crimson White receives national award
Alabama Political Reporter – Nov. 20
Last week, the college newspaper of the University of Alabama, The Crimson White, received another award to add to its extensive list garnered over the paper’s 124 year history. The College Media Association named The Crimson White the national Four-Year Weekly Newspaper of the Year recently at the Pinnacle Awards competition in Dallas, TX. According to its website, The Pinnacle Awards honors the best college media organizations and individual work in the country. The editor-in-chief for The Crimson White, Elizabeth Elkin, said she knew they were finalists for the award, but was ecstatic when they won.

ROTC talks wins, losses, prepares for competitions
Crimson White – Nov. 20
Combining values of the Capstone Creed and the U.S. Army, members of The University of Alabama Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) are consistently striving for excellence. They have achieved high scores in the classroom, and now they look to do the same at their competitions.  Fresh off finishing 2nd place in the State Ranger Challenge Competition last month, the Army ROTC is getting ready to compete in 6th Brigade Ranger Challenge in January.  Ten schools competed in the State Ranger challenge, which was comprised of eight different tests including a physical test, written test, weapon assembly, zodiac boat training, tactical combat, casualty care, chemical tasks, rope bridges and patrolling lanes. The University of Alabama finished first in four of eight categories: written, physical fitness – averaging ten points higher than any other school in the competition – weapon assembly, and total ruck-march time.

Adapted athletics director earns honor
Tuscaloosa News – Nov. 17
The director and co-founder of the University of Alabama’s adapted athletics program has earned one of the most prestigious awards bestowed by the school. Brent Hardin will receive the Frederick Moody Blackmon-Sarah McCorkle Moody Outstanding Professor Award on Friday during a ceremony at the President’s Mansion. According to a news release, the award is based on a specific accomplishment that is innovative, creative, useful or captures the imagination.

THEATER REVIEW: Cast, crew generate hilarity, hysteria
Tuscaloosa News – Nov. 19
Dianne Teague. Dianne Teague. Dianne Teague.
If saying her name three times would magically make her appear in every show from here on out, consider that an incantation. It’s tempting to review “August: Osage County,” the searing production of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer-winning dark comic-drama at the University of Alabama Department of Theatre and Dance, simply by saying “Dianne Teague is in it.” What else do you need to know? But that would be unfair to director Stacy Alley, who’s tempered this three-hour-long melange down to a raw, terrorizing edge that can cut deceptively paper-thin or slice right through the torso. She’s found and brought out, with cast and crew, the hilarity and hysteria, the punches and punchlines, the peaks of hope and the journey-to-the-center-of-the earth pits.

Alt-right meets ‘alt-tech’: White supremacist finds alternative sources for patronage
Keene (New Hampshire) Sentinel – Nov. 19
At Virginia’s Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail, he’s inmate 631424. But outside jail walls, Keene white supremacist Christopher Cantwell has enough of a following to raise more than $28,000 on an alternative crowdfunding platform and about $460 per month on a subscription-based website that hosts alt-right causes. Cantwell has 40 monthly supporters and about 430 one-time donors between the two sites. . . . George Hawley, assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and author of a book about the alt-right, said the rally in Charlottesville changed the way white supremacists such as Cantwell raise money for their causes. Before the march, white nationalists raised money using the online payment processing platform PayPal and the crowdfunding site GoFundMe, among other websites. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog reported last August that Cantwell raised money on PayPal for his podcast, Radical Agenda.

Dianne Williamson: Let’s not wait to be better
Worchester (Mass.) Telegram – Nov. 19
And despite condemnations from leaders in his own party, many of that state’s faithful continue to support Moore, with one state GOP official famously likening him to Joseph. Yes, that Joseph. The husband of Mary. “I’m … bothered,” wrote William S. Brewbaker III, a law professor at the University of Alabama, in The New York Times, “by what Mr. Moore’s popularity says about the sorry state of evangelical Christianity.”

Why The Supreme Court Should Step Into This California Gun Waiting Period Case
The Federalist – Nov. 19
After the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), it was up to circuit courts to explore the metes and bounds of that right and develop a consensus. Reality, though, couldn’t be further from this ideal.  . . . Matthew Larosiere is a student at the University of Alabama School of Law, pursuing a simultaneous J.D. and LL.M in taxation. Matthew is a Young Voices Advocate.
 
Gone away to college, but I took Memphis with me
Memphis Commercial-Appeal – Nov. 19
I wanted to get away from Memphis when I went to college. Growing up, I saw injustice everywhere here and wanted to put as much space as possible between me and the Mississippi River. Fortunately, in my last years of high school I was given the chance to inspect our city more closely, to work from the inside looking out rather than from the outside looking in. . . . Emma Mansberg graduated in May 2017 from St. Mary’s Episcopal School. She is a freshman in the Blount Scholars Program and the University Fellows Experience at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa.

Many Christian conservatives are backing Roy Moore
Associated Press – Nov. 19
Alabama’s Christian conservatives see Roy Moore as their champion. He has battled federal judges and castigated liberals, big government, gun control, Muslims, homosexuality and anything else that doesn’t fit the evangelical mold. The Republican Senate candidate has long stood with them, and now, as he faces accusations of sexual impropriety including the molestation of a 14-year-old girl, they are standing with him. . . . But the closest any of Alabama’s previous populist politicians might have come to the current allegations against Moore might have been those made against Gov. Jim Folsom in the 40s, said retired University of Alabama historian William H. Stewart. “Kissing Jim” was alleged to have had a son out of wedlock and was known for kissing women on the campaign trail. “But we haven’t had any instances of a candidate dating or making sexual overtures to a girl as young as 14,” said Stewart.
San Mateo (California) Daily Journal – Nov. 19

UA, ALDOT install driving data devices in Tuscaloosa
Crimson White – Nov. 19
Technology is moving faster today than it ever has. Phones recognize the faces of their owners, artificial intelligence serves as a household assistant, and steps are being taken to make self-driving cars a reality. The Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) and The University of Alabama are working together to install devices that will collect road and traffic data to make driving safer and more efficient for Alabamians.  To collect data, the two groups will install devices at major roads and intersections in the Tuscaloosa and Northport areas. These new traffic devices are called Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) units. “Their job is to gather information that allows greater interaction between vehicles and traffic signals to communicate information like road conditions or changing signals,” said John McWilliams, public information officer for ALDOT.

For Republicans in upscale Alabama suburbs, Roy Moore presents a conundrum
Baltimore Sun – Nov. 18
Roy Moore, the 70-year-old former chief justice of Alabama, was not Ellen Tipton’s ideal candidate for the U.S. Senate. . . . “While Trump had no problem carrying Alabama, I think Roy Moore has crossed a line, and even Republicans who reluctantly voted for Trump see this differently,” said Richard Fording, a political science professor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. “It’s hard to deny that he’s creepy.”
Los Angeles Times – Nov. 18

Blaming the media is tried and true political strategy in Alabama
Gears of Biz – Nov. 18
For the past week, as media from around the world swarmed the Roy Moore scandal, a question arose again and again.  . . . Moore has called The Washington Post’s piece an “intentional act” to discredit him. At the University of Alabama, however, associate journalism professor Chris Roberts believes that the Post team did a “pretty solid reporting job.” “We talk in my reporting classes that if you are going to take on something big, you have to kill it,” said Roberts. “You cannot wound it. People will complain about it. But I think they came close to killing the bear. They got it. They didn’t pay sources. They got people on the record.”

How other countries can help us understand America’s mass shooting crisis
Nashville Public Radio – Nov. 17
When Devin Kelley entered the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on Nov. 5 and shot and killed 26 people, it became the 308th mass shooting of 2017 in the United States. It came four weeks after the Las Vegas shooting, when Stephen Paddock killed 59 people from a 32nd-floor hotel room above an open-air country music concert. . . . It’s the high rate of gun ownership, says University of Alabama criminology professor Adam Lankford, that is directly correlated with America’s mass shooting problem. “It’s not that we have higher homicide rates,” Lankford says. “It’s not about wealth. It’s not about urbanization. It’s not about suicide rates. The difference between us and other countries that explains why we have more of these attacks was firearm ownership rate. We have almost double the firearm ownership rate of any other country.”
Pittsburgh Post Gazette – Nov. 18
 
The Scott Frost rumors may get even bigger and hotter
Omaha World-Herald – Nov. 19
So it’s Friday night and The World-Herald crew is enjoying some pan-fried chicken at Jerome Bettis’ downtown Pittsburgh restaurant when Bleacher Report writer Lars Anderson’s tweet about Nebraska’s proposed deal to Scott Frost hits social media.  . . . Anderson doubled down on his tweet Saturday. He worked for Sports Illustrated for 20 years. He’s a University of Alabama journalism professor. He played a key role in making the recent, harrowing Lawrence Phillips documentary on Showtime. He’s a Lincoln native.