Thursday, July 19, 2018
ONE-HUNDRED-TWENTY SEVEN YEARS OF EDITORIAL FREEDOM
inside
Administration
NEWS
LEO approves new contract
Nurses rally Thousands of U-M nurses picket for safer staffing and a better contract
Three-year agreement raises pay across U-M campuses
>> SEE PAGE 2
OPINION
Interrupting death
By GRACE KAY
Part two of Julia Montag’s look at the opioid crisis through the lens of higher education >> SEE PAGE 4
Summer Managing News Editor
ARTS
COURTESY OF IBRAHEEM MALIK
Sacha Baron Cohen returns “Who is America?” is an inconsistent show of his talents >> SEE PAGE 6
MICHIGAN IN COLOR
The conundrums of white guilt “I have always wondered what it would be like if I were white”
>> SEE PAGE 9
SPORTS
Beilein extends contract Michigan coach John Beilein gets a contract extension until 2022-23. >> SEE PAGE 12
INDEX Vol. CXXVII, No. 125 © 2018 The Michigan Daily michigandaily.com
NEWS .................................... 2 OPINION ............................... 4 ARTS/NEWS......................... 6 MiC......................................... 9 SPORTS................................ 10
michigandaily.com
U-M Hyperloop to race in Elon Musk’s competition Team will test high-speed pod on 1-mile SpaceX track By ALICE TRACEY Summer Daily News Editor
Michigan Hyperloop, a team of University of Michigan students designing a pod that can travel at nearly 300 miles per hour, will be traveling to Hawthorne, California to participate in a July 22 competition hosted by SpaceX founder Elon Musk. The team will race its pod along SpaceX’s Hypertube, a mile-long, 6 footdiameter, nearly vacuumized track, competing against 17 other universities from across the globe. Michigan Hyperloop is the only team from the state of Michigan racing this year. Musk founded the Hyperloop Pod Competition in 2015 with the goal of encouraging young engineers to think creatively
about high-speed, futuristic transportation. According to Michael Umbriac, Michigan Hyperloop faculty advisor, SpaceX envisions eventually using Hyperloop pods to shuttle passengers and cargo. In fact, Hyperloop One, a company co-founded in 2012 by Silicon Valley investor Shervin Pishevar and former SpaceX engineer Brogan BamBrogan after a conversation with Musk, is currently mapping potential routes domestically and abroad. “The ultimate goal is to have a pod that travels about 700 miles per hour from city to city,” Umbriac said. “One of the ideas that was proposed was a pod that can make the trip from Detroit to Chicago in 30 minutes.” Project team lead Sam Elwell, an Engineering junior, said SpaceX required participating teams to consider the potential future applications of their designs. “The competition started as a way to foster the technological
development of it (high-speed pods), so it is inherently embedded in all of the teams competing to keep the end game of making this a reality in mind when designing,” Elwell wrote in an email interview with The Daily. “For that reason, there is a portion of our final design package that is required to discuss how our vehicle could be scaled to a full scale vehicle that could actually be implemented someday.” The first two Hypertube competitions occurred in January and August 2017. The University competed on a joint team with Cornell University, Harvey Mudd College, Northeastern University, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Princeton University in January, then competed individually in August. At the competition, Hyperloop pods are judged solely on speed, and starting this year, all designs must be self-propelled along the track. There is no prize other than recognition.
Read more at MichiganDaily.com
After three days of electronic balloting and five membership events spread out across the three campuses outlining the new contract, the Lecturers’ Employee Organization voted to ratify a new labor agreement with the University on July 13. Ninety eight percent of LEO members voted in favor of the new contract which will raise wages, improve healthcare and boost job security for lecturers across the three campuses. The contract was reached and presented to the union members for a vote following months of negotiations and numerous bargaining sessions with the University. LEO represents a union of more than 1,700 lecturers who collectively teach tens of thousands of students at the Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint campuses. “This agreement is a result of months of hard work at the bargaining table – and much more,” LEO Vice President Kirsten Herold, a lecturer at the U-M School of Public Health and manager of the LEO bargaining team, said in LEO’s official statement. “We organized. We marched. We rallied. We lobbied. And we built a coalition that includes students, tenure-track faculty, union members on and off the campus, elected officials and community allies.” LEO’s previous contract expired on May 29. Since the beginning of the last academic year, LEO has been pushing for higher wages, improved healthcare and greater equity of resources across the three U-M campuses. See LEO, Page 8