Police Visit Response

Emily Bedenkop

March 12, 2013

An expectation of privacy is key in determining what is acceptable, said Amherst Police Department Detective Jamie Reardon during his talk Monday with Mary Carey’s Journalism 300 class. Reardon, who spoke with students at the Amherst Police Department, explained his police interactions with the press and how it is to work in area with a high concentration of college students.

In public places there can be no expectation or enforcement of privacy, Reardon said when asked him about cell phone cameras. Videotaping arrests is a frequent occurrence, and is completely legal as long as the person with the camera is a safe distance away from the scene and not interfering. “I expect to get videotaped,” said Reardon.

Videotapes can also be used as either direct evidence or background information for an investigation; “It’s one of the best sources of information that we have. There’s no expectation of privacy, and it’s free,” said Reardon of the APD’s reliance on social media, particularly videos posted to YouTube and photos on Facebook.

When asked about “Blarney Blowout,” the St. Patrick’s Day-themed party that took place Saturday at the Amherst Townhouses, Reardon spoke about the ways the APD attempts to prepare for similar events that are sure to require police presence. Extra staffing, coordination with colleges and landlords in the area, and working with state and university police forces are all tactics employed by the APD. Additionally, officers often speak with house owners before large parties occur to warn them of potential consequences.

Preparation efforts and even the calls that bring police to a scene can never be complete, however. Even with his 13 years of experience at the APD, Reardon said: “We never know what we’re getting into, it’s never perfect.”

An expectation of privacy extends to the information released by the APD to members of the press. Once a suspect is arraigned in court, their arrest is public information and can be released and published as such.

Victim information is a different story, though, said Reardon, citing concerns about victim safety, the possibility of retaliation, and prejudicing a jury. Releasing information about warrants is also unusual, as it could affect an investigation or potentially lead to the harming of informants.

“I’ll give you what I can, but I can’t give you everything,” Reardon said with regard to what information is released by the APD. 

Press meetings every weekday allow for a controlled release of information by the APD that is accurate, not in violation of privacy laws, and released for legitimate reasons like asking the community to aid in an identification, said Reardon.

Ultimately, said Reardon, much of his decisions come down to a mixture of common sense the over 80 APD policies. Questioning the students about how they would react in certain situations, as well as by answering their questions, helped students to get a better grasp of Reardon’s role and responsibilities in the APD. 

Split Second Decisions

Eleanor Harte
March 11, 2013

Working in a college town can't be easy for police officers, but Amherst Police Detective Jamie Reardon told Mary Carey's Journalism 300 students on Monday that the most important thing to keep in mind is common sense. The 13 students gathered in the Amherst Police Department to hear Reardon talk about his duties as a police officer, how he interacts with members of the press, and how the Amherst Police Department deals with college students.

The department has over 80 policies for dealing with situations that may occur, and the officers are responsible for knowing all of them.

Reardon explained how the officers dealt with the "Blarney Blowout", a large St. Patrick's Day themed gathering that occurred at the Townhouse Apartments in Amherst on Saturday. He referenced two videos of the event that are circulating the internet. "There's no expectation of privacy when you're in a public place," Reardon said, adding that he's filmed all the time. The Amherst Police Department's press release of the event says that there were over 1,500 students gathered in the quad area. The police made six arrests. "Our main interest is in public safety." Reardon said. "We wanted people to disperse from the area."

"When talking to the press we have to protect people's constitutional rights," Reardon said, "and we don't release someone's name until they're brought before the court and arraigned." After that, the information of arrests is public knowledge. However, ordinary citizens don't get to know everything. "We don't like to release information that's going to put anyone in danger or compromise our investigation," he said. In addition, the department has a policy of only releasing information when they're sure it's accurate.

Victim information is almost always kept confidential. "We don't name victims of crimes, especially for retaliation reasons," Reardon said. "We would hardly ever release the victim's name. I'd be hard pressed to think of a good reason to do so."

The department has press meetings every weekday morning, and when they have a legitimate reason to ask media for help, such as when they need to find someone, they will ask media for help finding the person. "If we have their picture, we can send that to the media and ask them to release it with a 'Have you seen this person?' That's if we have a reason to do so, if we know the person did something," Reardon explained. "There has to be a reason that we do things."

The department brings in extra staff when they know big events are going to be happen that might require police presence. "We coordinate with the university police, we talk to landlords, we sometimes go to apartments and warn the residents that we will arrest them if something happens," Reardon said. When big events like the Blarney Blowout occur, the department often tows the cars in the area if they belong to people partying. "We get drunk drivers off the street before they get in their cars." 

UMass Professor Sut Jhally integrates research interests into passionate, subversive teaching

Emily Bedenkop
March 11, 2013

Sut Jhally leans onto the lectern, delivering a lecture on “Media, Public Relations & Propaganda” with the ease and presence of a well-seasoned professor. He has spent the entirety of the hour-long class, recorded for online education, pacing back and forth at the front of the room with no lack of hand gestures to accompany his talk. Jhally’s voice fills the room as he looks around at his students, who are silent with the exception of a few quickly stifled coughs.

Jhally’s accent is a testament to his British roots, though he was born and lived in Kenya until he was six. The way various identities mix within Jhally himself helped him to realize the fluid nature of identity, said Jhally, and in combination with his university experiences prompted him to study how identity can be affected by its environment.

The way Jhally’s interests and work at the Media Education Foundation, of which he is founder and executive director, are incorporated into his career at UMass lends passion to his teaching.

Before coming to UMass in 1985, Jhally completed graduate degrees in Sociology and Communications in Canada, and taught for a year in New Hampshire. “My background is fragmented. I’ve always been, I wouldn’t say an outsider, but someone who didn’t fit in directly,” said Jhally in a recent interview at the MEF in Northampton, Mass. “When you’re not inside [the culture], you think about the culture you’re in in a different way.”

In the lecture recordings, Jhally wears a blue V-neck tee, looking as comfortable in front of his projected slides as he might relaxing at home. His glasses are tucked into the collar of his shirt, and his thin gray hair drifts across his shoulders as he motions towards the advertisements and commercials reproduced on the screen behind him.

“I’ve always thought there was a very strong relationship between what I taught and the way I taught and what I was interested in and the kinds of research I was doing. I never think of myself as a teacher or a researcher, it’s so integrated, it’s a total experience for me,” Jhally said.

For Jhally, online classes are similar to teaching in large lecture classes; in both settings, he said, the only students a professor really gets to know are those that attend office hours or seek to connect on an out-of-class basis. Both platforms give him the chance to teach as many students as possible, one of his goals as a professor; “Over the last five years, I know I can say for a fact: I’ve taught the most students,” Jhally said.

Jhally first became interested in the relationship between media culture and identity as an undergraduate student at York University in England in 1974. The multidisciplinary studies of Stuart Hall and his colleagues at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham helped to shape Jhally’s academic interests from the start of his college career.

The videos he produces through the MEF cater to young students and are designed to be used in high school and college classrooms, according to an interview with Jhally on the MEF website. The MEF works to make complicated subject matter more understandable with its videos: “We think these issues are too important to be left just to a discussion by experts,” said Jhally. There is no division between his research and the undergraduate courses he teaches on similar subjects, which range from gender and race to health and politics.

The most renowned of Jhally’s films is “Dreamworlds: Desire/Sex/Power in Music Video,” produced in 1990. This video challenges young students in particular to examine the music culture they are surrounded in by analyzing the glamorized sexism in music videos, according to the MEF website.

The most jarring part of this film is that the music of the videos is replaced with Jhally’s narration and analysis: “The challenge, then, for something like “Dreamworlds” is making sure people do not get lost in the seductive power of the images, and to make the images problematic, to take familiar images and make them strange so that they can be seen at a critical distance in new ways,” Jhally said a 2005 interview with Lynn Comella and Jeremy Earp.

The images of the video were certainly problematic. Though it was initially only distributed for educational purposes within the UMass Communications and Women’s Studies Departments, MTV Network’s legal department soon contacted Jhally with a cease-and-desist letter and the threat of a lawsuit for copyright violation. Though MTV did not pursue its legal case, the coverage “Dreamworlds” received “became a catalyst for Jhally’s future successes by increasing sales,” according to a MEF-produced factsheet about “Dreamworlds 3,” the most recent installment in the series.

The threat of a lawsuit also pushed Jhally to found the MEF. At the time, Jhally said UMass encouraged him to quiet his bolder opinions and publications. The university was implicated in MTV’s claim both because it employed Jhally and because the film was founded in his teaching. Rather than “essentially shutting up,” Jhally said he used media attention to draw attention to his film and make a publicized statement about academic freedom, free expression, and copyright laws.

The decision to create the MEF did not strain Jhally’s relationship with the university, however, and the foundation is now fully incorporated into his life: “What I do at UMass and what I do at MEF is not a job, it’s what I do. Friendships and other things happen around that, but that’s not what really drives me. And I don’t make that separation between, this life over here, and that life over there.”

“Dreamworlds” exemplifies the integration of Jhally’ research and productions with his teaching. The narration of the original installment is a succinct compilation of his classroom lectures, and most of the clips had been originally used in Jhally’s media criticism-oriented classes. According to the MEF factsheet, classroom responses to the film helped revise it into the 55-minute final production, which incorporates images from more than 160 music videos.

Ana Reyes, who graduated from UMass in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in communications, interned with the MEF the summer after taking a class with Jhally. Though it was a large lecture, her experience with the class helped her to decide on her major: “I wanted to take more classes like it,” said Reyes. Jhally’s lectures included “subversive things I’d never heard before. It was absolutely riveting.”

Reyes’ most memorable experience with Jhally was an in-class illustration of the power of symbols. Everyone in the large class was instructed first to draw a picture of the American flag on a piece of notebook paper, and then to write the words “American flag.” When Jhally asked students to crumple and step on the words, most did so without hesitation. Asking the same for the picture of the flag, however, was “met with a really loud silence,” said Reyes. “There was just this sense that it felt wrong.”

The power of symbols penetrates most aspects of society, says Jhally, who chooses to focus on media and advertising in many of his productions. Reyes said her work with the MEF was to review a “real collage of images” ranging from commercials to print ads to billboards. In doing so, Reyes was ultimately helping to choose what would be featured in the MEF film on college binge drinking, “Spin the Bottle: Sex, Lies & Alcohol.”

Jhally’s classes are popular, something he attributes to a mixture of teaching crowd-drawing topics like advertising and gender and his evident passion for teaching. Jhally checksRateMyProfessors.com occasionally when bored, and finds a broad variety of student-submitted reviews on the website. Students’ comments ranged from “This class really opened my eyes” to simply “Sut Jhally lectures are wild.” One student said, “He just preaches his own views,” while another said, “Very biased, but well informed in his subjectivity.”

Jhally is not at all upset by the occasional negative comments, though. Said Jhally, “Good teaching should disturb you. If everyone likes and agrees with you then you’re doing something wrong.” 

Grad student follows in his father's footsteps

Eleanor Harte

March 11, 2013

As students trickle in for a political science class, a short man dressed in dark jeans and a light blue button-down shirt stands at the head of the room, greeting each of the thirty students with a smile. He asks a student what he thought of the last English Premier League soccer game, another their views on the situation with North Korea. He starts class exactly on time, warming up the room with a joke and then jumping into the material for the day. He fields questions from students with ease, as if he’s been doing it for years. To the contrary, this is his first semester teaching a class.

Sam Fayyaz comes from a long line of academics. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all university professors, so it’s no wonder that Fayyaz is in the process of becoming one too. An Iranian-American who grew up and attended college in Madison, Wisc., Fayyaz is a Ph.D candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. This semester he is teaching a class on the history of modern Iran and another on professional development. Speaking of the experience, Fayyaz, who is in his early thirties, said that “when teaching is at its highest highs, when I feel like everyone’s getting it, it’s great. When it goes really well I love it. But most of the time I'm just trying not to mess up. A lot of the time I'm just hoping I'm making sense.”

Katie MacLeod, a sophomore political science major, is in the modern Iran class, and said of Fayyaz: “Even if he does not know every single little thing about Iran, he does a great job communicating what he does know and tries his best to answer all of our questions.”

Fayyaz has spent his academic career studying Iran, the country where his father grew up. "It weirded my dad out that I went to such great lengths to find out about his history and his country, since he's a science guy and I'm the exact opposite. I feel like he never really got me. But now it's whatever, he's accepted it,” said Fayyaz, waving his hand as if to suggest it no longer matters.

His father, a botany professor who himself was educated at the University of Wisconsin Madison before returning to Iran to teach at the University of Tehran. He brought his American wife and two-month-old Sam, and they stayed for nearly a year. “But then the Iran hostage crisis happened, and we were there for that, and it really freaked my mom out,” explains Fayyaz, speaking of their move back to America.

Since then, Fayyaz has traveled to Iran on his own multiple times to do research for his dissertation, which he is writing on the self-help and positive thinking movement that’s especially popular among middle-class Iranians and the ways it affects political movements.

“The state television of Iran was promoting books that were selling this idea that you’re responsible for your own happiness,” he said. "If that were the case, why would anyone join a labor union? Why would anyone join a movement to overthrow a tyrannical ruler? I don't buy it. It seems cynical. I argue that it reinforces authoritarianism, because how can you say that for a country that's in a bad place, a bad economy, the sanctions, all that stuff, how can you say that people's happiness is only dependent on themselves?"

Students feel that Fayyaz’s youth makes him relatable. MacLeod said, “He’s really cool and he likes comics and he rock climbs.” She feels having a professor who makes an effort to get to know his students as people, not just bodies in the room, like some other professors do, she said, makes a difference in class. Fayyaz, who has instructed his students to call him ‘Sam,’ jokes with his students and seems to get what they’re going through, MacLeod said.

Tanvir Faisal, a sophomore political science major, said he finds Fayyaz’s easygoing manner appealing both as a professor and as a person. “Show me someone, whether it be a student, faculty member, or whoever else, who claims he or she doesn’t like Sam, and I will show you a liar,” said Faisal.

Fayyaz’s time as the undergraduate advisor has allowed him to get to know the students in the Political Science department, and this has clearly worked to his advantage when it comes to building relationships with his students. On the first day of the semester, he already knew the majority of the 30 students in his History of Modern Iran course by name.

Fayyaz got his start in academia at the University of Maryland College Park, where he pursued his Masters Degree under the guidance of Professor Jillian Schwedler. When Schwedler accepted a job at UMass Amherst, she encouraged Fayyaz to check out their Ph.D program in Political Science. Fayyaz was intrigued by the faculty, and said that for a Ph.D, "who you work with is important. I liked what the faculty here was doing. The critical perspective in this department is different than at a lot of other universities. Here, people don't just ask the questions, but they ask why we're asking the questions."

Fayyaz transferred to UMass in 2008, and since then has held numerous teaching assistant positions, research assistantships, and now serves as the chief undergraduate advisor for the Political Science Department. Compared to teaching, he says that advising "is a lot more concrete, tangible. If you help a student find an internship or figure out a class plan, they're like ‘Thank you so much, you saved the day,’ stuff like that. With teaching, for anyone, I don't think that happens much. Advising has an immediate payoff. You feel like you matter more."

Outside of the university, Fayyaz, who resides in Northampton, is particularly passionate about soccer, where he roots for Barcelona and Arsenal, and on the side writes about soccer online. He is also a self-described music fanatic and he likes rock climbing and exploring Northampton.

Fayyaz loves working at the university. "Being in a university setting is infectious,” he said. “The faculty are the furniture. They're always here, and that's great. But then there's this regeneration of students, and they're so excited about being here, as they should be. There's so much going on, speakers and events and the whole thing of becoming an adult, figuring out who you are, even more than the curriculum and the classes, it's that other stuff that's important. That's what I miss about being in college."