Position: No
Argued by Angelica Gutierrez

I love Christmas, so my stance on this is probably incredibly distorted. Not only do I love Christmas, I specifically love how kitschy Christmas – and other holidays – have become. I live for tackiness.

I think that playing Christmas carols as soon as it is 12:01 a.m. Nov. 1 engenders that lovely spirit of tackiness. I think, more specifically, that this spirit of tackiness is a kind of earnest and impatient childish glee. One is excited for Christmas because it is an opportunity to celebrate something which embodies warmth, gratitude and good cheer. 

In other words, I support radio stations over-saturating their radio waves with the sickeningly cloying Christmas music. I want to hear Mariah Carey’s famous whistle notes piercing my ear drums at top volume the second I put one foot in a patch of snow. I can’t get enough of Christmas music – I want to be consumed by it. 

I imagine that my ardent passion for the spirit of Christmas past to haunt and heckle me at all hours is something which seems bizarre to those that lack Christmas cheer. I understand that not everyone can be as virtuously Christmas-y as I am. Some of us are rather grinch-like. 

What is to be done, when those who are virtuously Christmas-y encounter those who lack the capacity for happiness and joy? All persons, even if they are humbugs, deserve basic respect. I am willing to compromise on my love of Christmas music – there are such things as headphones. 

But where I will not compromise is on my insistence that radio stations, grocery stores and other public venues have a fundamental right to bombard listeners with Christmas music at all times. It’s Christmas time, baby. There’s no getting away from it until the very end of December.  

Position: Yes
Argued by Catherine Dema

On Nov. 1, I awoke to resounding commandments from all around. I could barely open my phone or walk through the PLC without hearing the following assertion – expressed with pure, unadulterated confidence: “Halloween is over, so it’s Christmas now.” 

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love Christmas. Or, more accurately, I love the Christmas and holiday season. The season inspires nostalgia like nothing else can. Celebrating Christmas rejuvenates my very soul.

However, I think the way in which one celebrates the holiday season is inherently personal because of its nostalgia. Everyone means something different when they say they love Christmas, and everyone experiences the season differently.

As such, I have absolutely no issue with people starting to listen to Christmas music whenever they so choose. Nov. 1, before Thanksgiving, even Aug. 25 – I truly do not care. Yet, this year especially, people who like to begin celebrating early have a tendency to force those around them to begin celebrating. If they don’t, they’re called a Scrooge. You either advocate for Christmas beginning immediately after Halloween or you have no joy in your life and no valid opinions.

This imposing of the holiday season on me not only annoys me, but it makes me feel as though I’m losing my connection to a time I genuinely love. Part of what I love about the holiday season is that it is fleeting. Because the season is short, I know I must take advantage of it. I savor it. 

The more Christmas is drawn out, the more – to me, personally – all my favorite things about the season come to feel meaningless. Especially as someone who didn’t celebrate a typical Christmas or holiday season at home last year – and after the mess of a year 2020 has been – I desperately need this holiday season. And I need it to be special. I need it to inspire the comforting nostalgia I crave. 

I know that this year will likely look different already. I will not be able to gather with family and friends in the way I have in the past. Thus, the extension of the holiday season to earlier and earlier makes me feel that in addition to potentially missing the best parts of Christmas, I may lose affection for the more stereotypical, shared aspects of the season. 

I love Christmas music. I love the decorations. I love the specialty drinks. I love the food. But I love all these things because they feel special. They feel fleeting. They’re also made better by following fall and Thanksgiving traditions. 

When people declare that the holiday season has officially begun in early November – honestly the fact I’m writing this Nov. 10 bewilders me – I feel they’re skipping over the ritualistic process which makes the holiday season even better. But, again, others celebrating how they like is not a problem to me. 

I’m far more concerned that people play music around me, call me a Scrooge and incessantly talk about Christmas. I feel as though the way I love the holidays is being denied. Even more so, I’m losing the ability to celebrate in the way I want or the way I’ll need to in order to recover from this year. 

I want people to celebrate the holiday season however they like and do whatever they need to cling to some semblance of joy. But please do not impose your form of celebration on me because it’s not making me appreciate the season any more. It’s making me desperately fear that my favorite season, and the way I love it, has already been corrupted for me. 

Go ahead, listen to Christmas music. Put up your decorations. Write your letters to Santa. But please be wary of forcing others to. Just as many people need to start celebrating as early as possible to get through 2020, others need the season to stay just as special and fleeting.

When I was younger, I went through a period of my life where I would wake up feeling more or less like garbage every day. My head constantly hurt, and I would frequently be unable to see out of my right eye because of the aura of my headaches. Not surprisingly, I was always tired, irritated, nauseous and had no appetite. 

This period of my life lasted a year. No matter how many painkillers I took, or how long I slept, my malaise had seemed to become a part of me. I began to learn how to cohabitate with it – how much time I could spend at the computer before my headache intensified from the blue light, etc., etc. 

While I was very acutely aware of the symptoms of my era of headaches, I could not have told you what had caused them. I didn’t even know whether my problem was really just headaches –  sometimes my head merely felt cotton-y, but my nausea was extreme. It was rather distressing. I tried to do my daily routine as strictly as possible, and still, the odd symptoms persisted. 

It turns out that my problem was chronic migraines. I had to go to a number of doctors and explain my disparate symptoms before one of them referred me to a neurologist, who promptly gave me this diagnosis. 

Finally, I had a name for the malaise. No longer was I like a feudal peasant plagued by some unknown demon. The problem then was what caused these migraines? Nothing in my life had changed significantly from one year to the next. I was living life as I normally did – or so I thought. 

My neurologist gave me some pretty sound advice – keep a log of any bad symptoms, in conjunction with what you did that day which may have potentially caused problems. Over time, you will amass a great body of data about the degree of pain, the location of the pain and the potential causes of the pain, such that you will eventually be able to narrow down precisely what the problem is. 

For me, the problem was stress. In hindsight, it was very obvious that my problem was stress. I was going through one of the most difficult years of my life. While I was keeping it together mentally, my body was rebelling against me, so to speak. I had become so alienated from my somatic experience that I would have been unable to pinpoint the cause of my “disparate” ailments had I not engaged in this systematic logging of my symptoms and the possible causes of them. 

I was too busy managing other things to pay attention to my body, and it was only when things became unbearable and I needed to be medicated that I finally decided that enough was enough. 

I’d say that, given the current political climate of our country, and the ongoing pandemic, most of us are pretty stressed out. I’d venture to say that we are so stressed out, we frequently forget to pay attention to the ways we feel, and what causes us to feel certain ways. We just accept that we feel bad and hope that it goes away because as college students, we do not particularly have time to entertain everyday maladies. 

I’d like to suggest that this mentality is fundamentally destructive of one’s health in the long-run, and that, in fact, because of this ongoing pandemic, it is even more crucial for us to learn to understand our body and its responses to external stimuli. 

This sounds like quite a chore. Where are we to find time and energy to closely monitor ourselves so that we can come to a better understanding of the ways in which our body functions? And anyway, we are not doctors, so the understanding we are going to come to is going to be necessarily limited. 

I capitulate to the second objection. It is quite true that most of us have little to no medical understanding, and, as such, our knowledge about potential causes for aches and pains is limited. We cannot accurately self-diagnose – and even if we were doctors, doctors cannot accurately self-diagnose either anyway. However, that does not mean that we cannot come to at least understand, at a very basic level, what the most likely cause of a pain could be. 

In fact, I would argue that as the embodied individual, we are in the best position to understand what could potentially have a direct negative effect on us. My neurologist could not have trailed me around all day and indicated to me my pain levels at different times. This is a practical impossibility and I am the only person who knows whether or not I am in pain. 

If I start to pay some minor attention to my symptoms – if I take one moment to sit down and think about potential variations in my day – I can usually come up with a pretty good idea of what happened. 

For example, one day I had a sore throat. By taking 10 minutes to think about my day and any potential changes to my routine or my environment, I realized that my sore throat had been caused by a change in the humidity. It was getting cold at William Jewell College, and that means that the air supports fewer water molecules, and my throat dried out. I remedied this by drinking extra water, and no more dry throat!

This introspection is made all the more easy by the plethora of apps created for the purposes of tracking your daily health. For my migraines, for example, I frequently used MigraineBuddy to analyze my headaches. 

I could have freaked out about my sore throat and determined that I had COVID-19 or perhaps throat cancer. But such fears would have been rather excessive. 

Still, one can quickly see the importance of being aware of one’s body during this pandemic. Say I had woken up with a sore throat and had just ignored it and went about my day. Perhaps the cause of my sore throat, which I would have discovered had I taken a moment to deliberate, was because I had come in contact with some new individuals on campus who were mask-less. I could have then taken the necessary precautions to ensure that I did not come in contact with anyone else and potentially spread disease. 

Thus, I suggest to everyone on campus – do not ignore your body! Aches and pains do not materialize out of thin air, nor do they always magically go away. It is important that we take time to be mindful of our bodies. Otherwise, we risk long-term damage and, in this pandemic, perhaps an increased rate of contagion. 

On Sept. 25, in a letter to the William Jewell College community, the new chair of the Board of Trustees, Bill Gautreaux, announced the results of the Board’s comprehensive evaluation of Dr. Elizabeth MacLeod Walls, president of the College. The email also stated ways in which the comprehensive evaluation feeds into initiatives prompted by a five-year Strategic Financial Plan.

In anticipation of the fifth year of Dr. MacLeod Walls’ collegiate presidency, the Board of Trustees conducted an evaluation of the president. The evaluation was led by Susan Chambers and Gary Barnes and took place between March and May of 2020. The Board interviewed 150 individuals, including trustees, faculty, staff, students, Cabinet members, Alumni Board of Governors and civic leaders in Kansas City.

These interviews indicated to the Board that there is a general sentiment of approval of and support for Dr. MacLeod Walls’ leadership. Specifically, Dr. MacLeod Walls was commended for her ability to remain positive in light of rather unprecedented challenges during her presidency, such as those posed by COVID-19.

Furthermore, the president has worked to elevate the status of William Jewell College in Kansas City in an attempt to combat declining enrollment rates and revenue. The president has also urged that the college adopt the principles of engagement, diversity, and in particular, radical inclusivity so that we can create a better and more appealing educational institution.

The interviews with the aforementioned 150 individuals indicated that there are three areas in particular which nevertheless still require attention: the first is that we must grow our student population, the second is that we must grow our revenue and the third is that we must reduce our cost structure.

In order to address these three areas, the Board of Trustees, in conjunction with efforts from the president and from specialized task forces appointed by the president, have created three initiatives.

1. Intentional promotion of inclusivity in our critical thinking community.
   In an effort to attract a greater diversity of students, the College is actively providing resources to support minority students, staff and faculty. The College is also working to create a learning community that is inclusive. 
2. Creating a market-responsive arm of the College for the purposes of audience and revenue stream diversification.
   Jewell plans on creating a market-responsive arm of the College that will focus on analyzing the market trends in education, such that we can attract more students by offering incentives including high school course accreditations and scholarships. 
3. Enhanced pricing model.
   The College plans on creating a pricing model that more accurately reflects the cost of Jewell and which takes into consideration the needs of families of incoming students. 

These three initiatives are tied to a five-year Strategic Financial Plan that is currently being developed by Joe Garcia and the Strategic Financial Planning Committee. This committee was created to deal with practical financial situations by analyzing the College’s current and future expenses and investments.

As the new chair of the Board of Trustees, Gautreaux hopes to “transform William Jewell by fostering access, inclusivity, and life-changing opportunities,” stated the email.

The comprehensive report on MacLeod Walls is useful to the promotion of these goals, as they help the president and the Board to be in a better position to approach their shared vision of a more vibrant Jewell community.

On Oct. 30, Student Life issued an email announcing that attending non-course related extracurricular activities would be optional Nov. 3 in order to ensure that members of the William Jewell College community could have the ability to vote in the upcoming election.

The activities that were affected by this announcement include those related to athletics, music and theatre. Other leaders of co-curricular groups, such as clubs, honors societies and organizations, were also invited to participate in making attendance optional so as to help make voting accessible to its members.

On Nov. 2, Joseph Garcia, vice president for finance operations and chief operating officer, sent a follow-up email delineating an extension of the scope of Operation Safe Campus as it related to the election.

Operation Safe Campus is Jewell’s COVID-19 threat assessment matrix, which outlines the protocol that the college should take when dealing with cases of COVID-19.

Given the potential for disruption resulting from the election, the College has decided to implement additional security measures. The additional security measures are in response and an increased risk of external disruptions, both resulting from the spread of COVID-19 and extending into issues beyond the pandemic, including possibilities of civil unrest as a result of the election.

“To be clear, the College has not received intelligence of any outside threat to campus; rather, under the aegis of Operation Safe Campus, we are being proactive in mitigating risk by preparing for disruptions, should any occur,” stated the email.

The new guidelines and measures will be in effect before and directly after the election. The new guidelines and measures are as follows:

Avoid congregating in groups or interacting with outside groups: Operation Safe Campus only will continue to be successful if we follow our guidelines and mitigate the risk of viral spread on campus. 

Coordination with City Officials: Our Campus Safety Director [Landon Jones] remains in communication with his Liberty counterpart for situational awareness related to adverse reactions to election results. 

Extra Security Presence: William Jewell’s campus is private property. Additional security will be positioned at main entrance points to deter unauthorized gatherings that might spark any conflict on campus.  Buildings will be locked at 5:00 p.m. to prevent unauthorized access. 

Use of the Campus-wide Text Alert System: If necessary, the Campus Safety Director will use the text alert system to notify the campus community of any concerning or potentially threatening activity on campus. If you receive a text alert of this nature, stay indoors or off campus until the situation resolves.”

The College is urging students in particular to contact Campus Safety in the case of any threats, potential or actual, that could disturb the learning environment at Jewell. Individuals can also report suspicious activity using the college’s reporting form.