4 May 2024

College football: Tommies expecting to spring pass game

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Early in St. Thomas’ spring football game on Saturday at O’Shaughnessy Stadium, quarterback Tak Tateoka connected with wide receiver Colin Chase on a long touchdown pass in the left corner of the end zone.

It proved to be the highlight of the day. It also could be a precursor to what lies ahead for the Tommies’ offense. Coach Glenn Caruso’s offenses have always relied heavily on running the ball, but indications are he is ready to open things up.

On the day of the running of the Kentucky Derby, Caruso used a horse racing analogy when speaking about the talents of his top two quarterbacks — starter Tateoka and Michael Rostberg. When you’re working with thoroughbreds, Caruso said …

Specifically, he’s determined to let them throw the ball down the field. The shift in philosophy is the result of the improvement both freshman quarterbacks have made under newly hired offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Caleb Corrill.

“I call plays — I’m pretty good at it,” Caruso said. “I don’t pretend to be a quarterback guru; that’s not in my wheelhouse. Caleb has been able to get them to a point — until today we didn’t throw a single interception in a team setting all spring. That’s 15 practices.

“Both of those guys have grown leaps and bounds through the tutelage of coach Corrill.”

Rostberg did not play Saturday due to an undisclosed reason. The Tommies also were without No. 3 quarterback Amari Powell, who has missed the entire spring due to injury. Tateola is the clear starter.

“He’s playing like a third-year player,” Caruso said, “and he has been here nine months.”

Tateoka sustained a broken right fibula in Week 7 against Drake and missed the remainder of the season. He said he’s completely recovered and used the winter to add 15 pounds to his 6-foot-3 frame and now weighs 210. Rostberg is listed at 6-4, 222.

Caruso will continue to use designed quarterback runs as a weapon, but perhaps not as frequently.

“Coach Corrill brings in great pass game ideas,” Tateoka said. “I’m excited to get to toss the ball around more.”

Caruso used the word “ecstatic” when describing what he has seen from Tateoka and Rostberg.

“You should take a huge jump when you’re in your freshman year,” Caruso said. “The biggest opportunity for growth is always going to be in your first spring, but these guys have gotten faster, stronger. The game has slowed down for them.”

On defense, the Tommies’ biggest challenge has been finding replacements for two key starters, inside linebackers Tommy Shelstad and Jack Mohler.

“They’re not only your insider backers, they’re your signal callers, they’re sort of the core and the heartbeat,” Caruso said. “We weren’t able to play everyone that we wanted to (on Saturday), but they will be fine by next week.

“But that’s why you need spring ball — so the David Ayenis, the Nick Flaskamps, the Ryan Severs can get those reps.”

Caruso said safety and cornerback depth are two areas he hopes to solidify in fall camp. Both positions include two starters, and Tommies defensive coordinator Wallie Kuchinski likes to play a lot of players throughout the defense.

“I can’t honestly say the guy who is in the third spot at every one of our defensive positions is playing like a one,” Caruso said. “You don’t always answer all of your questions in spring ball, because your 28 new recruits aren’t here yet.”

4 May 2024

Jonathan Zimmerman: It’s ‘academic freedom’ when you agree but not when you don’t?

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April 17 was a dark day for academic freedom in the United States. Columbia University President Nemat Shafik told a congressional hearing that some statements heard during recent protests — such as “from the river to the sea” — might be punished by the school. She also named several professors who were under investigation for allegedly antisemitic comments.

College faculty around the country were quick to condemn the hearing, which conjured the worst images of the Joseph McCarthy era: snoopy conservative lawmakers questioning scared university officials about who said what to whom and why. According to Irene Mulvey, national president of the American Association of University Professors, Shafik “threw academic freedom and Columbia University faculty under the bus.”

That’s true, and it’s frightening. But the professors under fire at Columbia have criticized Israel, echoing the dominant view on campus. It’s a lot harder to defend the faculty members who dissent from the received wisdom. And if we throw them under the bus, too, academic freedom will die.

Consider Carole Hooven, the Harvard University biologist who was pushed out of her teaching position after she told a Fox News television show in 2021 that sex was binary. Hooven took pains to emphasize that gender could take any number of forms, and that everyone — of every gender — deserved respect. But sex, she said, was different: male or female.

Within a few short days, the outrage machine kicked into high gear. The director of a diversity and inclusion task force in Hooven’s department tweeted that her remarks about sex were “transphobic and hateful.” Graduate students refused to serve as teaching assistants for her popular lecture course about hormones and behavior, which was canceled. So was Hooven.

She walked around campus with her head down, lest someone recognize her as “the ‘transphobe’ from whom students needed to be protected,” she wrote.

And nobody with any administrative authority at Harvard spoke out in her defense. Not the chair of her department. Not the head of the local AAUP chapter. And not Claudine Gay, who was the dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the time and later became president of the university.

The issue came up during Gay’s own fateful congressional testimony in December, before she lost her job as well. “In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?” Rep. Tim Walberg from Michigan asked her.

In reply, Gay said that Harvard supports “constructive dialogue, even on the most complex and divisive issues.” But the biology of sex is a complex and divisive issue, and Gay did not protect Hooven’s right to dialogue about it. Nor did most Harvard faculty members, who sat on their hands while Hooven got pilloried.

Nobody questioned the scholarly chops of Hooven, who published a much-admired book on the science of testosterone. Instead, they said she had made trans people feel unwelcome and unsafe. She had to go.

If Hooven had denounced Israel as a colonialist and apartheid state — like several of the targeted Columbia professors did — would faculty members have stood by while she got pushed out, on the grounds that she made Jewish students feel unsafe? Of course not. Instead, we would have risen up to defend her academic freedom.

That’s what Columbia historian Christopher Brown did recently in a powerful campus speech that went viral. When Shafik told the congressional hearing that she would investigate the anti-Israel professors, Brown argued, she sacrificed academic independence to the whims of politics.

“There were members of Congress who wanted to decide who should be disciplined on this institution and how much, what should be taught, how it should be taught, who should teach, what academic department should exist and which should not, who should lose their leadership positions, who should be promoted, who should be fired,” Brown warned. “Those are academic questions; those are not congressional questions.”

Brown also condemned Shafik for calling in the police at Columbia, where they arrested more than 100 protesters.

But after the semester ends and the protests wane, the question of academic freedom will remain. And we can’t protect it from prying politicians if we’re playing politics with it ourselves.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools,” which was published in a 20th-anniversary edition by University of Chicago Press. He wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.

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4 May 2024

Review: Minnesota Dance Theatre program is more a celebration than a goodbye

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These look to be dark days for dance in the Twin Cities.

While every branch of the performing arts is struggling to get back on its feet post-COVID, dance is experiencing more of a crisis than most. One study said that balance sheets and audiences are down 75% from 2019 for American dance companies, so perhaps this winter’s news should have been unsurprising.

In January, it was announced that the art form’s local capitol, the Cowles Center, would close the area’s foremost performance space devoted to dance, the Goodale Theater, at the end of March. Then the dean of Twin Cities dance troupes – the 62-year-old Minnesota Dance Theatre founded by the legendary Loyce Houlton – said that it would “pause” from performing in May to concentrate exclusively on its educational offerings.

So it’s best not to think of the Minnesota Dance Theatre presentation currently gracing the stage of the West Bank’s grand old Southern Theater as a goodbye to a storied local arts institution that’s older than the Guthrie. Instead, head to the Southern and celebrate what terrific talent we have in our midst.

That’s the overarching impression left with me by Friday’s opening night performance. Featuring three world premieres and the local debut of a 2021 piece, it was an evening full of imaginative art, the modern dance works served with ample dashes of classical ballet’s graceful movement vocabulary. Executed with maximum expressiveness by 10 dancers, it felt less like a sad farewell than an inspiring reminder of what this art form can do for your soul.

Such epiphanies may arise while experiencing choreographer Zachary Tuazon’s “Animi de Gaia,” a five-part piece set to solo piano works by Frederic Chopin. Opening with the blaze of “Ignis (Fire),” which found nine dancers swirling about the stage, and closing with the solemn quartet, “Mors (Death),” the work was most breathtakingly beautiful in Sasha Hayden Zitofsky and Ken Shiozawa’s pas de deux, “Aqua (Water).”

But no piece captured the emotions of the moment more eloquently than “Premonition of this Present Moment,” a piece by Javan Mngrezzo that expressed struggle, liberation and several steps between them. Beginning with six dancers seemingly pushing on the expansive brick wall at the back of the Southern stage, it was a ballet/modern dance mix with a sense of ancient ritual driven in part by the music of Rey & Kjavik and yMusic.

The company’s interim artistic director, Elayna Waxse, collaborated with the dancers to create “Don’t Forget You Are Precious.” Perhaps it was Emily Pitts’ arresting solo in a pseudo-nightgown that lent the impression that we were in something of a dream scene, the other dancers products of her subconscious. Zitofsky emerged as the messenger of unbounded exultation, the other five dancers embracing that spirit to a concluding rocker by Duluth-based band Low. And kudos to Jesse Cogswell’s very inventive lighting design.

Nia-Amina Minor’s “And yet here we are” was at its best when at its most unfettered, the dancers matching the high-energy feel of Makaya McCraven’s jazz. It underlined the evening’s overriding impression that there’s nothing quite like being in a room with an extraordinarily talented group of dancers expressing themselves through the prism of a gifted choreographer’s vision.

Minnesota Dance Theatre

When: 2 p.m. Sunday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. next Sunday

Where: Southern Theater, 1420 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis

Tickets: $32-$20, available at southerntheater.org

Capsule: An inspiring reminder of what dance can do.

Rob Hubbard can be reached at wordhub@yahoo.com.

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4 May 2024

St. Paul Chamber Orchestra: Kyu-Young Kim to step down as artistic director as musicians criticize ‘non-collaborative’ management

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St. Paul Chamber Orchestra musicians, including principal violinist Kyu-Young Kim, at right, perform in June 2021 at Bravo! Vail in Colorado. Instead of employing a conductor, as is traditional at many other orchestras, SPCO is led by playing musicians. (Photo courtesy Tomas Cohen / SPCO)

Kyu-Young Kim, the well-respected artistic director and principal violin of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, is stepping down as the group’s musical leader, effective when the current season ends in early June. He’ll remain principal violinist.

Kim had held the role since 2016.

“We appreciate his remarkable contributions over the years as Artistic Director and we are grateful he has chosen to remain with the Orchestra,” an SPCO spokesperson said via email. During Kim’s tenure, the SPCO has hired 16 new musicians and nine artistic partners, earned a Grammy Award, performed around the country and commissioned many original orchestral works through its Sandbox Residency.

The musicians’ union, however, painted the decision as less-than-mutual, saying in a statement that Kim’s resignation as artistic director was “the culmination of years of harmful and non-collaborative decisions” by SPCO management.

Specifically, the musicians criticized a move earlier this year to reduce the orchestra’s number of overall concerts performed and eliminate three venues — in Arden Hills, Stillwater and Wayzata — from its Neighborhood Series around the Twin Cities metro area. This will bring the orchestra’s 2024-25 schedule down from over 130 concerts per season to 82.

These decisions “have damaged the legacy and promise of a world-class chamber orchestra,” the musicians’ group wrote.

Kyu-Young Kim holds his violin. Kim took over as artistic director in 2016. (Photo: Courtesy of the SPCO)

Kim could not be reached for comment Saturday. An SPCO spokesperson declined to address the musicians’ specific criticisms as relating to Kim’s departure.

When orchestra leaders announced the schedule reduction in February, the goal was “ensure that the SPCO remains financially healthy and able to provide our community with a world-class orchestra for years to come,” leaders wrote on the orchestra’s website at the time.

As of last year, SPCO ticket revenue was about 30 percent lower than it had been before the pandemic, but the organization continues to be financially viable: The SPCO ended its 2022-23 fiscal year with an operating surplus of about $77,000 and $4.54 million in its “rainy day fund,” making it the 28th out of the past 30 years with a balanced budget.

As for what comes next: “The SPCO will work across the organization to determine the next steps for artistic leadership while remaining committed to the SPCO’s distinctive musician-led artistic model,” the orchestra’s leaders said in a statement.

SPCO musicians’ collective bargaining contract is set to expire this summer.

Whereas many other orchestras are led by a conductor, the SPCO is fairly unique in being creatively driven by a playing member of the orchestra. The group frequently performs with either a guest conductor or none at all.

Kim, who took over as artistic director in January 2016, has been affiliated with the SPCO for several decades. From 2000 to 2005, he served as associate concertmaster; an early review in the Pioneer Press praised him as a “secure and elegant player.”

Then, after several years in New York City with the Daedalus Quartet, which he helped found, he returned to St. Paul as principal second violin in 2011. And in 2013, following the SPCO’s highly publicized six-month contract lockout, he ultimately reversed his acceptance of a role with the New York Philharmonic to stay in St. Paul.

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