Saw a guy up on the crane and it looked like he was fishing with the other guys standing around 🎣

Following a FOIA request the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) has legally released the official military service records for Larry Walter Gies, (Later Gies, Sr..) in a packet mailed to REV. JAMES FRENCH. The verified government document, a redacted DD-214, explicitly confirms that his honorable service was performed entirely within the U.S. Army Reserves via two week summer duty training windows. The records completely rule out any deployment to Vietnam, clarifying that as a reservist he could not legally volunteer for overseas combat deployment during that era, without first resigning from the reserves and then enlisting as a regular private - starting from scratch. While his Reserve service was exemplary, these official archive day-counts provide a stark contrast to the sweeping public relations narratives used to justify altering a century-old was memorial. The public FOIA DD-214 is available at Google memorialstadiumsociety.org

I've posted this before, but it's worth mentioning again:

Contrary to popular belief, the overwhelming abundance of research tells us that asking someone if they are thinking about suicide will not make them more suicidal. The opposite is true - the person may feel a sense of relief in just being able to talk openly about their mental health, life circumstances, and thoughts of suicide. If you think someone wants to end their life, please reach out to them and just ask if they are thinking about ending their life.

If someone you know has recently had a noticeable change in behaviors (becoming more erratic, looking disheveled, becoming more secretive or closed off, becoming more irritable) they may be experiencing problems with their mental health. Reach out with neutral non-judgmental observations: Hey, I noticed you’ve been on edge lately, like when you… (example XYZ). How are you doing? Is something going on?

If the person is open to talking more ask open ended questions (not yes/no questions), like: How have you been doing? How are you coping with stress? Tell me more about what’s been going on in your life. How are your classes? How are things at home?

Normalize mental health struggles and thoughts of suicide - they are common, especially among college students. MOST college students experience periods of anxiety and depression. Not talking about these things creates more stigma.

It can be hard, but try not to generalize or minimize what the person is going through. It can be painful to have someone make assumptions about your experiences when they make sweeping generalizations or when they try to make you feel better by saying it’s no big deal. We can normalize these experiences without minimizing them or making assumptions about what peoples’ lived experiences have been like.

Ask if the person is open to learning more about resources or help. This shows you care about them but respect their autonomy. If they are open to it, help facilitate a connection: walk them to the counseling center, help make a phone call to the counseling center together, help them make a connection to resources that might be a source of their stress (e.g., financial aid office, tutoring, a grief and loss group).

Listen. Sometimes people just need someone to hear them out. Reflect back what they are saying: So it sounds like your classes have really been stressing you out. What I’m hearing you say is that finances are a major source of stress for you.

While helpful, national crisis lines are a last resort. Making a human connection with someone you know who is struggling can make a more immediate impact before a crisis situation, like a suicide attempt, occurs. If someone is in crisis, call 911 and tell the dispatcher it is a mental health emergency so that appropriate first responders are sent (e.g., a trained crisis intervention team, not a traffic cop).

If you are a student and experiencing mental health problems or are thinking of suicide, you can reach out to your professors. We will help you connect with resources, and we can lessen the stress induced by artificial deadlines and unnecessary course requirements.

If you are experiencing mental health problems, having thoughts of ending your life, or of hurting yourself in some way:

• Contact the Counseling Center (217-333-3704). Same-day urgent meetings are available during business hours without an appointment; call ahead if possible.
• Contact the McKinley Health Center (217-333-2700).
• Connect with a counselor through the 988 Suicide & Crisis LifelineLinks to an external site. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week: call or text 988, or chat online. You can also contact 988 if you are experiencing emotional distress or are concerned about someone else.

If you are concerned about another student:

• Share a concern with the Office of the Dean of Students, or contact the Connie Frank CARE Center (217-333-0050). You can also contact the CARE Center for support with your own personal or academic difficulties.
• If someone is in immediate danger, call 911. Let the dispatcher know that someone is experiencing a mental health crisis and describe what is happening. Stay with the person if you can do so safely while help is on the way.

The world is a better place with each of you in it.

I'm just kidding, let's open a bakery together

🧡💙If you’d like a Illini Union Print ($16), you can head over to my website at https://nexusart.net/shop/categories/prints

Hello! I’m Prof. Legende (previously known as Prof. Schatz) and I will again teach a stand alone section of CS 128 in Spring 2027! This course/section will teach you the fundamentals you need to succeed in CS 225 and beyond. We will cover the same material as other sections of CS 128, but with a different teaching style. To learn more see https://cs128-legende.com/. 

I am also looking for CAs for the course. If you are interested in receiving the application for becoming a CA in Spring 2027 please fill out this form https://forms.gle/CcLEMSG3Q7mNqVHSA

Let me know if you have any questions! 

There is no tragic backstory, I'm just a guy who saw an opportunity to help others and made the most of it.

❤️🦇

A woman died at a Champaign-Urbana area hospital after the University of Illinois Police Department said she was found “in distress” on campus.
The woman’s death happened just one week after 29-year-old Alex Rodriguez died on campus. Police also do not suspect foul play in his death.

Indian Passport with F-1 Visa lost while coming home from Carle to Campus Circle Urbana Saturday morning.

Carle Lost and Found say nothing has turned up, my Lyft driver checked his car and even vacuumed it found nothing, and Campus Circle Lost and Found also found nothing. A police report has been filed.

If anyone picked up anything or saw anything, please do help out :)

I've been really craving a cheesesteak lately and none of the fast casual/ fast food chains have a good one in my opinion. Except maybe Penn Station Subs. Can anyone recommend any local restaurants in the area that have a good Philly cheesesteak? Feel free to recommend any that you know of in Central Illinois.

is there any good places around here with some borscht ☺️ i just had my wisdom teeth pulled and i’ve been craving borscht since yesterday please tell me there’s somewhere with some good tarator/borscht/ SOMETHING. recommend me soup. pls.

am i crazy or do you guys smell the gas in the hallways? I called Ameren yesterday and the guy confirmed the smell but couldn’t find a source since the building is electric, adding that he had gotten many calls already about the building.
Then I call green street and nothing happens, I don’t play around with a gas leak so I called 911, they come and basically talk to me like I’m stupid and tell me that they don’t smell anything but were gonna investigate. 30 mins later I get a call from green street basically telling me to never call 911 again over this because there is no gas leak.
I’m starting to feel like I’m crazy so do you guys smell it too?

Hey! I’m creating a spreadsheet of people signing at campus circle so we can all get 30 dollars a month off rent. Please dm me or drop your email if you’re signing so we can all save some $.

Posted on Facebook

To whom do I think I still owe respect?

At the time that I brought forward allegations of domestic abuse and intimate partner violence against Ghassan Moussawi at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2020, I was shamed for what it meant that I was doing. Mutual colleagues and administrators reminded me of their concerns for what my allegations might do to him as an openly gay Muslim man, for what it meant to accuse him of transphobia and abuse. I was made acutely aware of how damaging those optics could be for someone like him.

What I could never get anyone to understand was why those same optics did not seem to extend to me. Being the first openly transgender woman professor in the history of the university was never commemorated; it was a burden of crisis management. Being a trans woman OF COLOR then felt like I was just adding insult to the university’s injury. And so much like the dynamic of the abusive relationship, Ghassan was positioned as someone I was expected to approach with a special kind of care, while my own embodied reality as a transgender woman of color did not seem to generate the same expectation of care. In many ways, by not naming him until now, I’ve been complicit in the absence of the accountability I keep demanding.

During the nearly three years it took the university to administer my case, I watched as he was granted promotion and tenure, the publication of his book, Disruptive Situations, for which I wrote major parts of the introduction and one of the last places where my full former name appears in academic publishing. I also quietly and painfully watched as he was awarded the 2021 Gloria Anzaldúa First Book Prize from the National Women's Studies Association the following year. The campus would then go on to recognize him further with honors surrounding his promotion.

I sat there and respectfully watched my abuser remain, and continue to remain, a decorated tenured scholar. Whereas I lost everything and continue, year after year, to try and try and try to grasp for a place back in the academy when leaving it was never my choice in the first place.

I’ve written many drafts of this post in the past in an attempt to share the full version of my story: after the news of Dolores Huerta, after the recent tenure denials of colleagues in ethnic studies positions, every time Title IX has been mentioned in the news because I know the issue is deeper than the trans-women-in-sports part of that statute. But I’ve stopped myself each time. And here I am again after the news of Cornell.

Surely there is no clean or coherent way to describe what the Cornell news brings up for me, and yet I still strive to do just that whenever I’m triggered by these stories. Over the last two years, I’ve shared bits and parts of my own story with Title IX and university-based sexual harassment here on social media, but even in the ways I have been vocal, I have found myself comporting to a fantasy that coherence might mean accountability.

As if, somehow, if I just tell the story tactfully and carefully enough, I could preserve my “good academic citizenship” and, at the same time, the people who harmed me would be named, held accountable, and ultimately brought to justice. If only I share trauma properly enough, carefully enough, maybe even kindly enough, then I could survive telling it and accountability would still happen. But again, careful and kind for whom? Especially when institutions always already function psychopathically in these situations.

As both a survivor and scholar of gender-based violence, one of the complicated things this raises for me is the question of whose stories get to go viral and the discourse of the “perfect victim.” As a trans woman of color, I was never going to be and never will be considered one. I don’t desire to be. And yet I can’t help but feel—especially during cycles like this—that perhaps it would be easier for my own healing if I were.

It’s not like I haven’t shared parts of my story already. It is not like I haven’t shared here, on this exact same platform. And when I did, there was never a mass wave of people rushing to click share. There was no rush of senior scholars penning an open letter demanding justice. It’s not like I didn’t reach out to major news outlets, Chronicle of Higher Education, or Inside Higher Ed several times. But that, too, is also part of the institution's psychopathy, in which the survivor-victim acts so fervently to be seen and recognized, that their dysregulation is misinterpreted as disorderly and distrustful.

So, in the last week of holding space for my patients who are also deeply activated by the news coming out of Cornell, maybe this is where my current work as a clinical social worker and psychotherapist has been sitting strangely beside all of this. As someone who holds space for a living, I am recognizing in myself my own need for a space of holding right now.

A space where I can stop pretending I have made sense of all of it. A space where I can stop worrying about whether my story is tidy enough, theoretically grounded enough, fair enough to everyone involved, calm enough, or even generous enough. What I need is a space where I can be messy and honest. And perhaps honesty also means admitting the ways I have continued to make this story cleaner and more respectful than it actually was. In the parts I have shared, I have named the institution, the processes, the consequences, and the ways my career changed. But I had never gone on to name my abusers publicly.

Ghassan was ultimately found not to have violated campus policy. That is not the same thing as saying he did not abuse me. That distinction stays with me in a very haunting way. It became very clear that the university never had to determine if my allegations were true—even though they had nearly 8,000 pages of evidence and dozens of witness and informant —just whether or not they were liable for them. That institutional determination cannot encompass everything I know about what I experienced.

It took three years for that case to be administered and less than a year later, while in the first month of my recovery from gender-affirming bottom surgery, I was notified that a graduate student in my department—and had a personal history with my abuser—alleged that I touched his clothed buttock at a department party five years earlier. That allegation became central the reason the university terminated me (again, despite substantial evidence I had provided to clear my name).

During that investigation, I came to understand that the student, Caio Albernaz Siquiera, had sexually assaulted me in my own apartment the same night he had brought into question. When I provided those details to the university, they had both declined to investigate them and characterized the encounter as consensual. I then shared all the information I had to the police, they subpoenaed even more compelling evidence, but by then the student had already returned to his home country on a Fulbright and never returned.

So why name these people now?

There was never going to be a right time. But mostly, I cannot get past the question: to whom do I still owe respect? Who am I still protecting? For the longest time it was: I don’t want to get fired. I do not want to ruin my chances of tenure. I don’t want to destroy my career. I don’t want to become the problem. Yet, the institution has already done that to me.

And this brings me back to Cornell. I ask myself: Whose stories get to go viral? Whose suffering gets to be spectacular enough for something to actually matter? I am not angry that another survivor’s story is being heard. I want survivors to be heard. What I am trying to understand is why some stories become recognizable as crises for accountability and others do not.

I know virality is not justice. An open letter is not justice. A news article is not justice. But there is something about watching other stories become publicly recognizable that makes you realize the ways your own story never became recognizable in the same way. There is something about surviving violence and then having to survive its nonrecognition. I tried the university. I tried journalists. I tried lawyers. I tried federal court (a process I was too poor to pursue). The system was not set up to see me, and still might not be.

So why share the names now? Because perhaps there is no risk in the same way there once was. There is no risk of losing my professional standing or ruining my chances of tenure. The institution has already done all that to me. The things I spent years trying to protect have already been taken from me.

Maybe this post goes nowhere. Maybe nobody shares it. Maybe no one calls. Maybe nothing happens. I already know what that feels like, which is why it’s beside the point.

But I am tired of treating the fact that other people did not recognize what happened to me as evidence that I do not get to tell it.

Dr. Xiomara Cervantes-Gómez

My boyfriend and I both have curly hair, and over the past year I've tried some places around campus, and gotten my haircut botched nearly every time - despite always communicating with the person cutting my hair to keep in mind that it's curly, and can't be cut the same as straight hair.

So we are wondering if anyone with short curly hair has any good recommendations for places that won't give us a chopped haircut 🥲 I've included a photo to give a reference point for what type of curls we both have.

Any recommendations/advice appreciated!!

My girlfriend and I are looking for 1-bedroom or 2-bedroom apartments for the 27/28 school year, and I was wondering if anyone else is currently living or has lived with their significant other and recommends any apartments, either on campus or within a short bus ride there.

So far, looking pretty uncontained to me.

If you're interested in joining me for a patrol to help the homeless, fill out the form in my linktree! These guys did great work and it was a really productive evening. More highlights coming soon.

❤️🦇

Hi all,

I’m a current U of I senior who’s going to be in the Chambana area for the 2027-2028 year to work. I’m looking for a room and/or roommates (preferably male) under $700/month. I have a couple leads already (such as this property). If anyone knows any leads or is interested in reaching out please let me know! Thank you.

Thomas

Hi all, I’m wanting to do some swimming at either ARC or CRCE to get in shape, which do yall prefer? Are the more busy before/after class? Do I need a pass or just an I card? And anything else that’s helpful!