ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF EDITORIAL FREEDOM Tuesday, October 13, 2015
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ADMINISTRATION
Fall 2015 enrollment shows more diverse class HALEY MCLAUGHLIN/Daily
Art & Design professor Carol Jacobsen speaks on a panel titled “Incarcerated Women: A Conversation About Realities” at the School of Social Work on Monday. The discussion precedes a larger conversation which will culminate with a public lecture by Piper Kerman, author of the memoir “Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison,” scheduled for 5p.m. today at Rackham Auditorium.
Panel hosts discussion on women and incarceration Event aims to provide context for upcoming OITNB creator’s lecture By CHARLOTTE JENKINS Daily Staff Reporter
The University of Michigan Institute for Research on Women and Gender held a panel discussion Monday
titled “Incarcerated Women: A Conversation About Realities.” The event was held in part to provide context for Tuesday’s campus lecture by Piper Kerman, author of “Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison.” Kerman’s memoir was the inspiration for the Netflix series adaptation, “Orange is the New Black.” Members of the panel discussed the variety of challenges unique to female inmates. Some panelists
emphasized the abuses that incarcerated women experience are precisely because of their gender. According to panelist and Law Prof. Amanda Alexander, a Soros Justice Fellow in the Child Advocacy Law Clinic and the Detroit Center for Family Advocacy, incarcerated women often face losing parental rights over their children, and said the average sentence length for a parent in Michigan is three to four years.
Alexander also discussed the negligible rights afforded to inmates who give birth during their sentence. She said, in Michigan, women who give birth in prison have very little access to prenatal care and are only allotted 24 hours to spend with their newborn in the hospital after delivery. Additionally, some other states allow incarcerated women to pump breast milk for their children, but Michigan does not. See PANEL, Page 3
Percentage of minorities in firstyear cohort is the highest since 2005 By ALLANA AKHTAR and LARA MOEHLMAN Daily Staff Reporters
The percentage of underrepresented minorities in this year’s freshman class is the highest since 2005, according to enrollment figures released by the University early Monday morning. Underrepresented minority students represent 12.8 percent of the 2015 freshman class, a 2.8-percent increase over last fall’s entering cohort. Minority students accounted for 13.8 percent of the incoming class in 2005, the year before Michigan voters banned the use of affirmative action in the admissions process. The percentage of Black, Hispanic and Native American students all increased over last year. The undergraduate student body and overall students
BOOK REVIEW
CITY COUNCIL
Interesting but tedious new Smith memoir ‘M Train’ can be beautiful, meandering and exasperating
By GIANCARLO BUONOMO Daily Arts Writer
Patti Smith is really cool. She’s also funny, extraordinarily wellread and well-traveled, multitalented and palpably kind and compassionate. She’s the kind of M Train person you want to nurse a cup of Patti Smith coffee with for hours and hours, Alfred A. Knopf talking about everything on $25 your mind, and things you didn’t even realize were. Smith is best known as a musician — her 1975 album Horses is considered a watershed in the development of punk rock, among many other popular records and singles. In recent years, she has also received acclaim as a writer, winning the National Book Award for “Just Kids,” a memoir of her passionate, tumultuous relationship with the acclaimed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and their life together in the bohemian art scene of 1970s New York. And, this past week, she released a new book, the enigmatically titled “M Train.”
WEATHER TOMORROW
HI: 60 LO: 38
If you’ve read “Just Kids,” or decide to read “M Train,” you’ll know what I meant in the first paragraph. Smith’s writing is a stream of passionate consciousness. Take this passage from “Just Kids”: “There were days, rainy gray days, when the streets of Brooklyn were worthy of a photograph, every window the lens of a leica. We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night until, exhausted, we fell into bed. We lay in each other’s arms, still awkward but happy, exchanging breathless kisses into sleep.” “Just Kids” worked because it had that Mapplethorpe relationship as a narrative baseline, off of which Smith could riff. You could forgive her occasionally vatic prose and erratic scene setting, because the book still told a specific, heartfelt story. “M Train,” heartfelt and passionate as it is, suffers from a lack of specificity. It’s a meandering lecture of a book, often interesting, sometimes beautiful, but also tedious and exasperating. “M Train” is seemingly structured as a series of dreams, reflections and flashbacks that Smith has while sitting in her favorite Greenwich Village café, which she attends every morning for a sacrament of black coffee, bread and olive oil. These vignettes trigger further ones, and they others, until you’ve moved with See SMITH, Page 3
saw less drastic increases in diversity. The percentage of Black undergraduate students increased by .15 percent and the percentage of Black students overall increased by .19 percent. Total enrollment this fall stands at 43,651, an increase of .06 percent (26 students) from last year’s overall enrollment. Undergraduate enrollment, however, decreased by 83 students, marking a .3-percent decrease. Meanwhile, the number of graduate and professional students on campus increased by .7 percent (109 students). The freshman class decreased by more than 400 students since last year, representing the smallest incoming class size since 2008, when the class size was 5,783 students. Last year, University Provost Martha Pollack outlined a plan to curb over-enrollment after the University enrolled 500 more students than intended for the freshman class. “We have been over-enrolling every year for the past five years and we have to stop this,” Pollack said at a September 2014 Board of Regents meeting. “I’m See ENROLLMENT, Page 3
Search for Ann Arbor city admin. underway Council hires firm to conduct national hunt for replacement RYAN MCLOUGHLIN/Daily
University Provost Martha Pollack discusses the University’s transition to Canvas and preparations for the March Faculty Governance Conference at a SACUA meeting at the Fleming Administration Building on Monday.
SACUA protests release of course evaluation data Pending Senate Assembly vote could persuade provost to delay
By GENEVIEVE HUMMER Daily Staff Reporter
Faculty concern over the impending release of course evaluation data has caused University Provost Martha Pollack to reconsider the current timeline for such a release. During her comments at Monday’s SACUA meeting, Pollack said she would be willing to reconsider the release date, pending a vote at the Senate Assembly meeting later this month. “If the Senate Assembly votes no, I am happy to slow it down,
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but I generally need this group to meet with (Central Student Government) and (Rackham Student Government) and talk with them,” Pollack said. “This all came up because the students asked for it at least three years ago now.” Pollack has formed a committee to create a new tool, in place of the current course evaluation, to better meet the needs of faculty and students. She invited SACUA to appoint a member to the committee, which will also include members from student government and evaluation experts at the University. At a Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs meeting last month, Engineering Prof. James Holloway, the vice provost for global and engaged education, announced that course evaluation data could
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be published as soon as this semester. The decision provoked pushback from faculty governance, which criticized the administration for constructing a plan without extensive faculty consultation. “It has not been debated at SACUA and it has not been debated at Senate Assembly, and so we feel like there hasn’t been enough broad consultation because this is something that affects everyone, faculty and students,” said Comparative Literature Prof. Silke-Maria Weineck, SACUA’s chair, at the time. Weineck said another committee with faculty input will need to be formed to determine the best way to release the data — an issue that she noted is separate from what type of instrument See SACUA, Page 3
Vol. CXXIV, No. 9 ©2015 The Michigan Daily michigandaily.com
By ISOBEL FUTTER Daily Staff Reporter
The search is underway for Ann Arbor’s next city administrator. The Ann Arbor City Council voted last week to authorize the Council Administration Committee to serve as a fiveperson search party for a new city administrator. Steve Powers, the current city administrator, announced plans in August to leave the post for a new job as city manager in Salem, Ore. He is set to depart in November. “It’s a larger community than Ann Arbor and a professional opportunity that will help me in my professional development,” Powers said in an interview with The Michigan Daily. “It’s a larger organization, with more responsibilities and opportunities to help a community and help a council accomplish its policy goals and policy agenda.” Powers said he has enjoyed working with Ann Arbor’s city staff and council. “I’ve been here a little over four years, and it’s gone by See CITY, Page 3
NEWS.........................2 OPINION.....................4 ARTS.........................5
SPORTS..................7 SUDOKU.....................2 CLASSIFIEDS...............6