| Summary: | theconcordian.org • October 13, 2016 THE CONCORDIAN 3 BY EMELY KRANSVIK ekransvi@cord.edu Concordia’s Young Americans for Liberty chapter is looking to start discussions and engagement among students, and are making themselves known on campus through their active presence. According to their webpage, YAL is the largest and fastest-growing pro-liberty or-ganization on American college campuses. There are more than 750 YAL chapters and 250,000 youth activists nationwide. According to senior Liam Nuhring, YAL is open to anyone who is interested. “You can have any sort of value system, you can have any sort of personal beliefs,” Nuhring said. “YAL is dedicated to personal freedom and liberty and doing what’s best for the future of our country.” According to Nuhring, he found that his belief system and values line up more to what is represented by YAL than any other organi-zation, and got involved shortly after the Con-cordia YAL chapter was official. The YAL chapter at Concordia was started in the spring of 2015, by former student Bjorn Altenburg and senior Ian Lane. Lane discovered YAL after he joined Cam-pus Republicans his sophomore year, on the premise that he would be promised a free trip to a conference in Washington D.C. At the conference there was an organiza-tion, Young Americans for Liberty. “I come from a background that’s more socially liberal and fiscally conservative, so I identify with the republicans only for the eco-nomic issues, not for social issues,” Lane said. “When I found out there was a nationally rec-ognized organization that has the social lib-eral aspect and the fiscal conservative aspect, I was sold.” Lane looked into YAL’s website to find out if there was an active chapter at Concordia, and it turned out that a chapter was in the works, meaning somebody had applied to start a chapter. That person was Altenburg, and so Lane teamed up with him. Today Lane works as a state chair for the organization, working to recruit people to start chapters at different colleges and universities in Minnesota. Shortly after the Concordia chapter was started up, current president for the group Kaila Juntunen got involved. “Ian [Lane] actually approached me after him and Bjorn [Altenburg] started drafting a constitution for YAL in spring of 2015, so I was involved in their first couple of initial meetings when we were just talking about be-coming a chapter,” Juntunen said. The chapter held an election last spring, and Juntunen started taking over presidential duties this summer. She started leading meet-ings at the beginning of the semester. “As president my main responsibility is to be the face of the chapter here, gather people to come in, and make sure that it’s the envi-ronment that we want it to be,” Juntunen said. According to Juntunen, other duties in-clude planning meetings, recruiting people to work at tabling events, engaging with people and promoting the events that they do. “I think that YAL and the libertarian move-ment create a good middle ground for open dialogue in politics, which I think we defi-nitely need,” Juntunen said. “This year a lot of people have been interested in what we’re say-ing. Maybe that’s because of the two unpopu-lar [presidential] candidates,” Juntunen said. According to Juntunen, the discussions often take place in the Atrium, when curious students stop by. Tabling at Concordia gener-ally means sitting behind a table and handing out free candy. YAL representatives will try to step in front of you when you’re walking and say “Hey, what do you think about this?” Jun-tunen said. According to Juntunen, this “in-your-face” strategy has worked well for YAL National, but they are trying to pull back a little bit at Concordia, especially with the provocative statements. “We don’t have to necessarily degrade other things to build up our movement,” Jun-tunen said. According to Juntunen, this is why the chapter seeks to take away “the big govern-ment sucks” type of statements, and instead advocate for their values while also encourag-ing discussion. “I think the one thing that people don’t re-alize is how much we appreciate critical dis-course,” Juntunen said. “We don’t want to just come here and have a bunch of liberty lovers talking about all the issues that we totally agree on.” Nationally, YAL started in 2008, following the youth campaign for Ron Paul. Ron Paul was a republican who ran for president and lost to John McCain in 2008 and again to Mitt Romney in 2012. According to Lane, Paul was running the principles of promoting individual freedom and liberty. There was a large youth move-ment that followed Paul, and the youth di-rector for his campaign decided to turn that movement into an organization, Young Amer-icans for Liberty. According to Lane, the organization stands for free minds, free markets, civil liberties, and being able to do whatever you want -- so long as you don’t harm anyone else. “We want the individual to be in control of their life, rather than the government to be in control of their life,” Lane said. This year, one of the main causes that the group will be pushing at Concordia is free speech and the idea of open dialogue, as well as rights to carry self-defense tools. The group arranges trips to conferences, and can lead to internship and job opportunities. Lane said he has heard a number of mixed opinions of the organization at Concordia in the past, but does not know how the group is perceived today. “I know that in the past that we’ve been received as an abrasive group that is very ‘in-your- face,’ questioning the status quo and what not,” Lane said. “I’d encourage anybody who reads this article to come out to our meet-ings and see for themselves, rather than hav-ing that false impression.” According to Juntunen, the chapter has people that are registered and pay dues to YAL National, but also people that aren’t. Juntunen said that there are about 10 active and really dedicated members, and a lot more that have shown interest in the group. For more information, Concordia YAL is the Facebook page for Concordia’s chapter or yaliberty.org is their national web-site. YAL joins campus political groups in time for election BY LAUREN WILSON lwilson4@cord.edu For the first time in its history, Con-cordia has an oficial Pre-Law Society to complement the highly successful academic program. The student orga-nization, whose constitution was writ-ten up by seniors Liam Nuhring and Ian Lane, had its first meeting on Sept. 28 of this year. “Our hope for the club is to foster a community for pre-law students on campus to gather together to talk about ideas and to have some more opportunities as far as hands-on learning goes with job shadowing op-portunities,” Nuhring said. According to Director of Alumni Relations Eric Johnson, this new stu-dent organization is an opportunity to provide pre-law students with more law school preparation than ever be-fore. “We did a good job with the admis-sions- counseling sort of part of it, but what I thought we could do more of is sort of the mentoring, coaching about what kind of lawyer do you want to be? Do you want to be a lawyer at all? Let me expand your mind about the kinds there are because you might think there’s only one kind of lawyer but there are a hundred kinds and a hun-dred different ways to express your vocation in law,” Johnson said. According to the Chair of the Po-litical Science Department and Pre- Law Advisor Dr. Michael Bath, part of helping to prepare these students for law school includes giving students the chance to connect with Cobber alumni who have law degrees. “One of the things that we’re do-ing that I think could be really cool and beneficial for the students is we’re partnering with the career center and alumni relations to ofer some shad-owing opportunities for students,” Bath said. “We’re reaching out to a lot of alumni who have law degrees and use their law degrees to develop some opportunities for students to see them at work and kind of get a sense of how the law works and how their law de-gree could work if they choose to take that route.” With 30 out of 31 seniors being ac-cepted into law school in the last five years, Concordia’s pre-law program has a stunning track record. With this new society, Nuhring, Johnson and Bath all hope to bring more aware-ness to the program and maybe attract students who aren’t aware of the pos-sibilities that a law degree has to offer. “We want to continue what we do well and also broaden our oferings for students who have an interest in the law,” Bath said. Students establish new pre-law society MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Researchers have transplanted embryos originating from the bison herd at Yellowstone Na-tional Park into female bison in Minne-sota in hopes of increasing the genetic diversity of herds in the state and help-ing to restore America’s official mam-mal to the landscape. While Yellowstone bison are prized because they’re free of domestic cattle genes, experts say using them in breed-ing programs is dificult because they carry a contagious disease called brucel-losis, which causes spontaneous abor-tions in pregnant cattle. Other efforts at spreading the genes of Yellowstone bison have focused on using animals de-scended from the park’s herd that have been certified as disease free. Trans-planting embryos uses in-vitro fertiliza-tion to get around the problem. Colorado State University animal re-production professor Jennifer Barfield and other researchers last month im-planted embryos in four female bison at the Minnesota Zoo. Veterinarians will conduct ultrasound tests in the com-ing months to see if the animals became pregnant. If all goes well, they’ll give birth to baby bison in the spring. The four females are part of a larger “conservation herd” managed by the zoo and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, which also includes bison at Minneopa State Park and Blue Mounds State Park that are largely free of cattle genes. The herd would benefit greatly from Yellowstone genetics, of-ficials said, but securing a sexually ma-ture Yellowstone bull to breed conven-tionally has been impossible because they can’t be moved out of the park. “It will also demonstrate that we can use reproductive technologies to move the Yellowstone genetics outside of the park without the threat of spreading the disease brucellosis, which has implica-tions for bison conservation on a broad-er scale,” Barfield said. Tens of millions of bison once roamed the Great Plains but were hunt-ed to near extinction in the late 1800s. About 30,000 wild bison now roam the country. Yellowstone has the larg-est population so its genetics are highly diverse. While commercial bison herds now number more than 300,000, many of those animals and other wild bison are bison-cattle hybrids to varying de-grees. Government, tribal and zoo ef-forts seek to restore the animals’ origi-nal genetics. This isn’t the first time embryo transfers have been used to improve the genetics of bison herds. Barfield also led transplants that resulted in a calf with pure Yellowstone bloodlines at New York’s Bronx Zoo in 2012. For both zoos she took eggs from female bison that had been culled from the Yellowstone herd and fertilized them with sperm from males in Colorado State’s herd. And she has produced several other calves at the university via embryo transfers and ar-tificial insemination. She’s also waiting for ultrasound results to see if other re-cent transfers worked at Colorado State and the Bronx Zoo. But the process is still “an experi-mental procedure at best,” cautioned Keith Aune, bison program director for the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the Bronx Zoo. The tech-nique produced only one calf in about 25 tries at the Bronx Zoo, he said, but the field of bison research is young and the approach may become more suc-cessful with more development. Aune, who’s not directly involved in the Minnesota project, said Barfield’s work fits well into the bigger picture of bison conservation. He said the To-ronto Zoo is also experimenting with embryo transplants in a northern sub-species called the wood bison. He said the Bronx Zoo plans to import several bison with pure Yellowstone roots from a disease-free herd next month if it gets the necessary permits. Researchers spread prized bison genes
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