New Student Edition / 2021-09-01

ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY YEARS OF EDITORIAL FREEDOM Wednesday, September 1, 2021

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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Here’s the biggest news out of the University of Michigan this summer

On top of changing COVID-19 situation, administration grappled with Anderson abuse, building names, carbon neutrality CALDER LEWIS & JARED DOUGALL Daily News Editor & Daily Staff Reporter

It’s been an eventful summer at the University of Michigan. While the pandemic remains front of mind, the University has also dealt with the fallout from a massive sexual assault tragedy, grappled with buildings named after prominent figures with problematic actions, committed to carbon neutrality and more.

If you’ve been away from the news for the summer, here’s what you need to know.

April 27: President’s advisory committee recommends renaming Yost Ice Arena After numerous requests from community members, The President’s Advisory Committee on University History released a report that recommended the University remove Fielding H. Yost’s name from Yost Ice Arena. Yost was the University’s head football coach from 1901-1923; the University’s athletic director from 1925-1926; and led the Michigan football team to ten Big 10 conference titles and six national championships from 1921-41.

During Yost’s tenure as athletic director, he infamously benched Willis Ward, the second Black U-M football player and the 1933 Big Ten Athlete of the Year, for a game against Georgia Tech after Georgia refused to play if a Black player was allowed on the field. The Advisory Committee specifically cites this incident in their case for removing Yost’s name from the arena.

The committee received hundreds of community comments on the report.

University President Mark Schlissel said he will renew the conversation during the fall semester.

May 11: Report finds 37 years of abuse by U-M doctor, alleges top U-M officials including football coach Bo Schembechler knew A class action complaint was filed on May 20 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan against the University of Michigan for its handling of allegations of sexual assault against deceased University doctor Robert E. Anderson.

The law firm WilmerHale, which was hired by the University to conduct the investigation into these allegations, concluded in its May 11 report that there was “no doubt” that the hundreds of complaints against Anderson were credible.

WilmerHale’s report also recommended steps to improve the University’s practices around sexual and gender-based misconduct.

The class action complaint seeks a court order that will require the University to carry out major reforms surrounding the school’s best-practice policies and procedures related to sexual and gender-based abuse on campus. The University has made a motion to dismiss the case.

On June 11, Matt Schembechler, the son of former Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler, in addition to former players Gilvanni Johnson and Daniel Kwiatkowski, alleged in a press conference that Bo Schembechler was aware that Anderson sexually assaulted studentathletes.

The claims sparked widespread debate on campus about renaming Schembechler Hall and removing Schembechler’s statue on campus.

May 20: Schlissel, Regents commit to decades-long carbon neutrality plan At the Board of Regents meeting in May, Schlissel announced a commitment to becoming carbon neutrality by 2040 across the three U-M campuses after years of community activism. The announcement came two years after the President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality was formed to draft recommendations and seek community feedback on achieving this goal.

The plan aims to eliminate Scope 1 emissions, which derive directly from the University’s operations, by 2040. The University committed to achieving carbon neutrality for Scope 2 emissions, which come from the purchase of power off-campus, by 2025.

Defined goals for achieving carbon neutrality for Scope 3 emissions, which are any emissions indirectly related to the University, will also be laid out by 2025.

June 3: Weiser retains its name

Hall

DOMINICK SOKOTOFF/Daily While the pandemic remains front of mind, the University has also dealt with the fallout from a massive sexual assault tragedy, grappled with buildings named after prominent figures with problematic actions, committed to carbon neutrality and more.

when he labeled Michigan’s top officeholders — three Democratic women — as “witches” and joked about political assassination.

Soon after, Weiser was censured by the Board and removed from committees, though he remains on the Board.

June 17: University brief ly lifts mask requirement for fully vaccinated individuals For nearly two months this summer, fully vaccinated individuals were not required to wear masks in most indoor campus spaces.

The University had reported single-digit COVID-19 cases in each of the previous six weeks. The move came the same day Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced an end to all statewide mask and capacity restrictions as Michigan saw its lowest case numbers since the pandemic began.

June 17: Board of Regents expands the Go Blue Guarantee to the After a petition to University of Michigan’s rename Weiser Hall gained Flint and Dearborn hundreds of signatures campuses from members of the physics and astronomy After years of activism departments, Schlissel from cross-campus groups decided to not recommend such as One University, renaming the building. the University expanded Weiser Hall is named for its signature financial aid Ronald Weiser, U-M regent program to the Flint and and chair of the Michigan Dearborn campuses. The Republican Party, as well Go Blue Guarantee is a as his wife Eileen Weiser. free-tuition scholarship In April, Michigan for in-state students whose community members family income is less than known as the Network for $65,000 annually, which is Ongoing Reconsideration the state’s median income. of Our Nomenclature The expansion was (NORON) voiced their not without controversy, displeasure with the hall’s as some protested the namesake by hosting a requirement that incoming mock “renaming,” calling students at Flint and the building the “Weiser Dearborn earn an 3.5 Center for Voter Supression, incoming GPA to receive Political Assassination and the scholarship — a Witch Burning.” requirement not in place The name derived from on the Ann Arbor campus. a remark Weiser made at a University officials March 25 North Oakland responded that nearly all Republican Club meeting, Ann Arbor campus students

enter with higher than a 3.5 archivists and curators GPA due to the Ann Arbor join LEO with bargaining admissions process, so a status GPA requirement is not necessary.

Librarians, archivists and curators were formally July 15: Office of recognized as a bargaining Institutional Equity unit within the Lecturers rebranded as Equity, Civil Employee Organization, Rights and Title IX office the University’s main union in attempt to overhaul of non-tenure-track faculty culture around sexual on all three campuses. misconduct The new unit is called LEO-GLAM, which stands Faced with scrutiny for for galleries, libraries, high-profile mishandling archives and museums, to of sexual misconduct reflect the environments in cases in recent years, which most LACs work.

Schlissel announced that the University would July 30: Schlissel create a new unit known announces vaccine as the Equity, Civil Rights requirement for all and Title IX Office to students, faculty and replace the Office of staff Institutional Equity. ECRT will handle the same cases As the Delta variant as OIE, but will focus on spread across the country providing more “support after an early summer and prevention” measures, COVID-19 lull, the Schlissel said.

University announced it Though the office was would require all students, rebranded, it will continue faculty and staff to be to be led by Tamiko fully vaccinated for the Strickman, the associate fall semester. The policy vice president and director grants limited medical of OIE who faced scrutiny and religious exemptions, over alleged mishandling in addition to deferrals for cases of student sexual students to get vaccinated assault and racism during right away once they arrive her time at the University on campus. of Nebraksa-Lincoln.

The requirement The University also was well-received, as attempted to reform the community members said culture around responding it alleviated confusion to misconduct, including over different policies protecting those who for vaccinated and report misconduct from unvaccinated students. retaliation; prohibiting The campus community supervisors from has a higher vaccination attempting to initiate a rate than the surrounding relationship with those area — 92% of students they supervise; and and 75% of employees are outlining plans to improve fully vaccinated, compared how potential outside hires to 67% of eligible residents and candidates for board- in Washtenaw County — approved appointments are but rates are much lower vetted. among University staff The University also than students and faculty. established a large Title IX advisory group composed Aug. 9: Indoor mask of students, faculty and mandate reinstated with staff that will provide exception for residence input on matters related to halls sexual and gender-based misconduct policy and After Washtenaw County prevention.

COVID-19 transmission July 18: Librarians, rose to levels at which

the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends indoor masking, the University reinstated its mask mandate regardless of vaccination status. Though student vaccination rates had surpassed the 75% benchmark originally set to allow unmasking in classrooms, the policy change means students will need to wear a mask indoors for the foreseeable future.

A large exception is for students living in residence halls, who will be able to go unmasked on their floors.

Masks are encouraged, but not required, at large outdoor gatherings such as football games.

Aug. 9: Lecturers’ Employee Organization quits their contract, threatening a strike After negotiations stalled, University lecturers announced that LEO would quit their contract with the University due to pay inequities for lecturers on the Flint and Dearborn campuses. Though LEO’s previous contract with the University already lapsed on April 20, the union has spent the last several months attempting to negotiate the terms of a new contract before the start of the fall semester.

This decision means a large portion of faculty instructors could possibly go on strike on Sept. 8, just before the second week of school. It would mark the second straight year of strikes to begin the fall term, as the Graduate Employees’ Organization striked for nine days in September 2020 to protest the University’s pandemic response.

Daily News Editor Calder Lewis and Daily Staff Reporter Jared Dougall can be reached at calderll@ umich.edu and jdougall@ umich.edu.

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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Wednesday, September 1, 2021 — 3

From The Daily’s interview with U-M’s president:

Campus life this fall ‘much closer’ to 2019 than 2020

Potential lecturers’ strike would ‘represent a failure’

Schlissel talks preparations, predictions for this semester LEO union can vote to take labor action beginning Sept. 8 CALDER LEWIS & CLAIRE HAO Daily News Editor & Editor-in-Chief

The Michigan Daily sat down with University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel Aug. 25 to discuss preparations for the fall semester amid the ongoing pandemic. This interview has been edited for clarity.

Mark Schlissel: Students are coming back, we’re planning to have now 93% of our classes being taught in person and the residence halls are nearly full. We’ve had very good success and uptake on our vaccination requirements. We’re up to 91% of students on the Ann Arbor campus — and I think that continues to go up — and 87% of faculty and then looking at 72% of staff have already completed their vaccination requirement.

Those rates are much higher than the surrounding community, and it really puts us in strong shape to have the kind of semester that we’re all trying to have.

That has to be balanced against concern around this Delta variant that certainly can infect vaccinated people. Thankfully it doesn’t make them ill enough to require hospitalization, and you almost never see severe illness in a vaccinated person, but we have to continue to be vigilant.

Overall, the message is it’s a pretty exciting time of the year at the University, and it’s a very different feel.

The Michigan Daily: At the end of last semester, you said that the best case scenario for fall was having a vast majority of campus vaccinated, and the worst case a variant forcing more mitigation measures.

Considering both played out to some extent, what should students expect campus life to be like this semester? For example, should student organizations or individual students host large meetings, shows, tailgates or parties?

MS: I think life on campus is going to be much closer to 2019 than it will be to 2020 in the fall. We are having the residence halls running at essentially full occupancy; we put aside some rooms in case we need to do quarantine, but basically the residence halls are up and running again. You don’t have to mask inside the residence halls. Everyone has to be vaccinated in the residence halls, and the very tiny number of students that aren’t for medical or religious reasons will be masked. All of the lounges in the residence halls will be open, the dining halls will be open, so that part of the student experience — the lived experience — will be much closer to normal.

Student orgs will be free to meet. We’ll have

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at least in the beginning of the year a masking requirement regardless of your vaccination status if you’re operating indoors.

Outdoors, it’s up to you, though I would still advise people in big crowds outdoors to wear a mask, to be prudent regardless of whether they’re vaccinated, but it won’t be a requirement at this stage. So life will be much more like what you recall, what brings joy to students.

TMD: Given some of the Delta variant concerns, the fact that cases are still rising, how optimistic are you that classes will stay in person, that athletic events will have full fan capacity and that students in residence halls will be housed there the entire school year?

MS: My crystal ball has a big crack in it. The ability to predict a novel once-in-a-lifetime event is tough. I think we’re very well-positioned to make it all the way through this semester without the kinds of interventions that we had to impose last year, but we have to continue to be vigilant.

For example, we’ll still require folks who are unvaccinated to be tested weekly for COVID, and if the levels of COVID increase, we’ll test more frequently than that. We’re Read more at MichiganDaily.com

CALDER LEWIS & CLAIRE HAO Daily News Editor & Editor-in-Chief

The Michigan Daily sat down with University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel Aug. 25 to discuss a potential lecturers’ strike, calls to rename campus buildings, Schlissel’s football season prediction and more.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

The Michigan Daily: The Lecturers’ Employee Organization quit their contract with the University earlier this month, meaning a large portion of faculty instructors could go on strike the second week of school. What is the likelihood of a LEO strike?

Mark Schlissel: It’s up to LEO. I really don’t believe that a strike is necessary.

I think a strike represents a failure. It represents the failure of both parties to diligently negotiate in good faith with one another with the shared intention of arriving at a fair contract.

So if there’s a strike, we failed. I’m very hopeful that there won’t be, but that’s really in LEO’s hands.

The University made a recent salary offer. LEO told us the most important issue to them was starting salaries, particularly in Flint and in Dearborn where they had been

quite low. With the last contract, the starting salaries went up quite a bit, and the University just last week offered increases to lecturers’ starting minimums between 16% and 17% increase. 16% and 17%, that’s a pretty fair amount all at once, as well as across-the-board annual increases. There’s a negotiating session today.

The University is ready to negotiate every single day, and we remain committed to continuing to bargain to come to a fair resolution.

A strike would cause tremendous harm to students. Lecturers are critical colleagues in delivering the Michigan curriculum. They’re a great part of our educational experience.

They’re our colleagues, they’re our friends, they’re our neighbors. We would really love to find an amicable way to move forward and treat everybody fairly and not really cause the challenge and the chaos of a strike at the beginning of the semester. Last fall was a rocky semester. We’d really love to give our students the gift of a Michigan education instead of this labor strife.

We’ve called upon a state mediator who’s been working with us. We also petitioned the state for a fact finder — that’s the next step after mediation where someone comes in and determines facts on both

sides and then proposes a way forward. We’re committed to that process.

TMD: What did you learn from last fall’s Graduate Employees’ Union strike as you prepare for the potential of a similar one?

MS: I think one of the common lessons of the whole pandemic is that communication is really important, and having open lines of communication, so that we don’t just think we understand a group or a person’s situation — we actually ask them about it. And what we’ve been doing in the many months since last academic year is really meeting with GEO regularly, absent a crisis, on often on a weekly basis, to work on shared issues of concern to try to head things off at the pass before they get to the stage of provoking frustration and anger that might lead to some kind of work action.

So that’s what we have learned from GEO last year, and we continue to work on it optimistically in partnership to avoid the same kind of thing moving forward. The GEO has been very supportive of vaccination efforts, for example, and masking indoors and the like. Efforts to keep people safe have been quite collaborative.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

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4 — Wednesday, September 1, 2021

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Incoming tenants at The One ask for half off rent, free parking after construction delays push back move-in with days’ notice

Luxury student housing complex offering residents temporary housing, stipends, as they wait up to weeks to occupy units ALEX HARRING Daily Staff Reporter

Incoming residents of The One Ann Arbor, a new, student-oriented luxury housing complex, are calling for 50% off rent and free parking after construction delays pushed their move-in dates up to weeks behind what was promised in their leases.

Approximately 175 residents, many of whom are University of Michigan students, signed onto an open letter sent to The One management on Aug. 23. The letter writers demanded the return of a $275 “no-hassle” fee and a new utility management system, in addition to 50% off rent and free parking for the entirety of the lease.

The One Ann Arbor, which charges between $945 and $1805 a month per tenant, has been under construction for the past year with the intention of opening for the 2020-2021 school year.

“We have been lied to, misled, manipulated, and treated inhumanely,” the tenants wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The Michigan Daily.

The One began publicizing itself to students during the 20192020 school year, when they stationed employees at tables around campus and offered students gifts like free smoothies to garner interest in the housing complex.

Using phrases like

“you’ve never lived like this!”, the company advertised itself as a luxury alternative to other off-campus housing.

The complex also hired ambassadors, many of whom were University students, to promote The One on their social media platforms.

The letter writers said they are frustrated with the delays in construction and safety certifications on their townhouses, arguing they signed leases months ago with the expectation that the move-in date would be honored.

Many future tenants were notified Aug. 19 — just days before the expected move-in date of Aug. 24 — that their housing was not ready, according to emails from The One management reviewed by The Daily.

Tenants were given three options: receive temporary housing from The One in addition to $50 per day; arrange their own housing and receive $100 per day; or terminate their leases.

Trinitas Ventures, the Indiana-based parent company of The One, wrote in a statement to The Daily that they are “deeply disappointed” by the occupancy delays and sympathize with residents and their parents.

“We are parents, too,” the statement read. “We are doing everything in our power to provide solutions for our residents to minimize the impact on the start of their school year. We are offering hotel

rooms, daily stipends, rent prorations and rent waivers as well as increased shuttle service during the temporary hotel stays— and ultimately, if that is insufficient, the option to terminate the lease. For all of those that stick with us, we look forward to serving them well.”

In the letter, the tenants said they were caught off guard by the lastminute change after being repeatedly reassured that the complex would be ready on time. The tenants also wrote that these delays upended expensive travel arrangements, making the already stressful experience of moving even worse.

“These actions are inexcusable,” the tenants wrote. “An unforeseen delay is one thing; a complete and utter failure to communicate with the residents, or show them the simple respect of giving them what they paid for, is malicious and intentional.”

The letter states The One management reportedly encouraged tenants to secure their own housing or “stay with a friend,” which they found irresponsible given the ongoing COVID19 pandemic. They also felt frustrated after being told “to pack less” when they asked for storage units to store their belongings.

The tenants said the hotels designated by The One as temporary housing until they can move in are in Canton and Livonia, making getting to class difficult. While tenants

ALLISON ENGKVIST/Daily Incoming tenants at The One sent management a list of demands after move-in was posponed up to weeks.

heard about the possibility of shuttles from the hotels to campus, they said the plans lacked clarity.

On Aug. 23, tenants were asked to sign an addendum in return for temporary housing arrangements, a copy of which was reviewed by The Daily, in part asking them to absolve The One and its parent company from any wrongdoing. Tenants said they felt this aspect of the addendum limited their ability to pursue legal recourse.

“Essentially, students had 24 hours to decide if they were going to accept The One’s new addendum, which released them of liability, or be homeless,”

the letter reads.

Some tenants noted that they signed “under duress,” meaning they were forced or coerced, but the online signature platform didn’t allow them to specify their signature as so.

These tenants said their demands will help mitigate the “mental anguish” they face during the weeks leading up to move-in, a process made even more stressful by this year’s return to in-person learning.

The first of the expected move-in dates falls three days after classes begin for the fall semester on Monday, Aug. 30. Writers of the letter who are not staying in a hotel said

they have had to scramble to find housing while also coordinating with instructors in the event they cannot be in Ann Arbor for the start of classes.

“All in all, the actions taken by The One are negligent, dishonest, and inhumane,” the tenants wrote. “Their lack of communication has imminent consequences, such as homelessness and food insecurity, for students who have already paid their first month’s rent.”

Daily Staff Reporter Alex Harring can be reached at harring@umich.edu.

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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

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6 — Wednesday, September 1, 2021

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Summer semester in South Korea draws mixed reviews as study abroad opens for 2021-22 school year

Students to travel to Germany, Iceland, the United Kingdom and South Korea for six programs this fall MARTHA LEWAND Daily Staff Reporter

LSA senior Tiffani Ihrke was supposed to return home from the South Korea trial study abroad program in early August with fellow students.

Instead, frontline workers dressed in hazmat suits picked Ihrke up and rushed her to a treatment facility in Seoul after she tested positive for COVID-19 just a couple of days before her flight back to the U.S. Ihrke had been a part of the Yonsei International Summer School (YISS) program for the Spring/Summer 2021 term.

It was the first study abroad program to take place at the University of Michigan since all were suspended in March 2020 due to the pandemic.

Despite testing positive at the end of the program, Ihrke said she sincerely enjoyed her time in South Korea.

She attributed her positive experience to living offcampus due to both financial reasons and the desire to experience more of South Korean society.

“I personally learned so much about myself, and I gained so much insight about different cultures and the different ways that the pandemic is being handled in different areas,” Ihrke said.

Once her 10-day quarantine is finished, Ihrke can request confirmation of her recovery from the local center of public health and reenter the U.S. with documentation confirming her recovery starting Aug. 21.

Ihrke was fully vaccinated when she tested positive for

the virus, as the University has required all students participating in on- and off-campus programs — including study abroad — to be vaccinated.

For now, Ihrke is in quarantine at the treatment facility with a governmentassigned random roommate who also tested positive and is dealing with the downsides of studying abroad during a pandemic.

“I’ve been very well taken care of, and I’m really fortunate that the Korean government is so accommodating for COVID specifically, but it’s definitely been a headache, to say the least,” Ihrke told The Daily while in the Seoul National University Treatment Center.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently classifies South Korea as a “Level 2: Moderate” out of a scale from “Level unknown” to “Level 4: Very High” in terms of COVID-19 risk. Both new daily infections and deaths have increased since June, and roughly 21% of the country is fully vaccinated.

Business junior Gabriella Jakubczak, another student who participated in the program but lived on campus at YISS, said physically being in South Korea was “better than anything else I would have done this summer.”

But as rising COVID-19 cases in the country led to YISS’s and South Korea’s increasingly stricter social distancing rules, Jakubczak began to realize how much the pandemic still inevitably impacted the program.

“Eventually you could

only go out in pairs after 6 p.m,” Jakubczak said. “They shut down all the street food in Korea, which is insane, considering how much that’s a part of their culture and how prevalent that is within the city. It was like walking in an empty Times Square; you’d just see storefronts empty.”

Jakubczak said if she knew how bad the COVID19 situation was going to be earlier in the year, she probably would’ve opted to complete the program online from the U.S. instead.

According to Jakubczak, studying abroad amidst the pandemic also sometimes led to miscommunication from CGIS staff about program details like dates for certain activities.

“I think the problem is there was an increased demand for support and responsiveness that we needed because it was a COVID program (during the pandemic),” Jakubczak said.

CGIS Director Michael Jordan said he has yet to send out surveys and receive feedback from students who were in South Korea. He told The Daily that CGIS often communicated with students in the program, and he asked for “flexibility” and “patience” from students when traveling abroad given the current circumstances of the pandemic.

Jordan said CGIS has been communicating “quite frequently” with students in the South Korea program especially because it was the office’s first ongoing program in a year.

“Information has been

and continues to change very frequently under these circumstances, so I can imagine it could get confusing,” Jordan said. “But again, it is a situation that’s changing on a daily basis, so we definitely require our partners’ and the students’ patience and flexibility, because this virus and the pandemic just keep throwing curveballs at us.”

Looking ahead to the fall Six programs will be running this fall semester in South Korea, Germany, Iceland and the United Kingdom, including a different program in Yonsei.

Jordan said CGIS had to cancel numerous programs for both the fall and winter semesters after evaluating the status of the pandemic in various countries.

“We’ve worked for years to expand the options for our students’ interest among our students and destinations outside of Western Europe,” Jordan said. “But at this point in time, those are the countries that are letting Americans in and that meet the University’s criteria for health and safety during a pandemic.”

Some of the criteria include infection rates and vaccination rates among that country or city’s population, quality of the country’s healthcare system and potential overuse of that country’s healthcare system

by U-M students.

“Even though our students are vaccinated they could still transmit the virus, so it seems unethical to be sending

them into unvaccinated countries,” Jordan said. “If the local medical system is already being overtaxed by the pandemic, then obviously we don’t want to exacerbate that.”

LSA junior Jorge Blanes will be studying in Germany this fall to earn credit for his double major in International Studies and German.

Though he admitted that potential lockdowns and risk of being sent back to the U.S. were “daunting,” Blanes said he considers the pros of meeting new people and venturing into a new country worth the challenges. He said studying abroad this fall is the best time academically for him to do so.

“It’s basically a risk-reward thing, and the rewards seem to outweigh the risks right now,” Blanes said. “They won’t really let the program happen unless they see that we’re going to be, for the most part, safe.”

LSA junior Garrett Ashlock also contemplated the benefits and drawbacks of studying abroad and ultimately chose to enroll in a program at University of Cambridge Pembroke College in the fall. Feeling like his time was running out in addition to being accepted into his “dream school” of Cambridge, Ashlock said he felt it was necessary to seize the opportunity.

“Ultimately, it came down to the fact that this was basically going to be my only chance to study abroad that I had left, and this was such a great program and one that is very selective to get into,” Ashlock said. “So

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after weighing the options, even though there are some inherent risks with traveling abroad during the pandemic, I thought it was still the best thing to do.”

Though Ashlock is fully vaccinated, he said he remains worried about potentially contracting the virus. However, he said he is grateful CGIS and the University are able to support him if he must navigate a foreign system.

“I think the amount of effort that Michigan puts into sending students abroad, and the amount of resources that they have, helps me feel a lot better about going somewhere, especially in the middle of a pandemic,” Ashlock said.

After the challenges she faced during the program in South Korea, Jakubczak said she is debating whether or not to follow through with another study abroad program planned for the winter semester.

“It’s very isolating in a way that you already know what COVID feels like in the United States,” Jakubczak said. “Now imagine you have no friends, you have no family support and maybe now you have a language barrier, depending on where you’re going. So now you’re really truly alone. I was supposed to go on a study abroad program to Madrid in the winter semester this year, and I’m wondering whether or not I want to go through that again.”

Daily Staff Reporter Martha Lewand can be reached at mlewand@umich.edu.

News

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Ross professor goes viral dancing as potato in Zoom review session

M-36 Coffee Roasters opens at old South U. Espresso Royale location

New cafe owned & operated by former ER employees

Student’s TikTok has 20 million views, 4.7 million likes EVAN DELORENZO Daily Staff Reporter

It’s not always business as usual when it comes to assistant professor Ryan Ball’s graduate accounting class.

In August, an anythingbut-conventional Zoom review session kicked off with a blaring rendition of Michael Buffer’s “Let’s Get Ready to Rumble!” and a stock image of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business on screen. Students, confused yet intrigued, danced along to the music not knowing what exactly was to come.

Then, in an entrance nothing short of spudtacular, Ball, with the screen name Dr. Po Tato, suddenly emerged as a floating potato with sparklers and a birthday hat, dancing around the Zoom screen.

After watching the entire sequence unfold, Business graduate student Amelia Charamand-Quelas told The Michigan Daily she wanted to share the spectacle with her family in Argentina.

“The primary way (my family and I) communicate because of the time differences is we just send each other WhatsApps, YouTube videos and TikTok videos,” Charamand-Quelas said.

“I just posted on (TikTok) for my four followers, who were all pretty much family members, to see.”

The next morning, Charamand-Quelas awoke to find that her video,

originally intended for family and friends, became a viral hit on TikTok with hundreds of thousands of views. Not expecting the video to go viral overnight, Charamand-Quelas had not previously asked Ball for permission to post the clip, so she quickly deleted it.

“My initial thought was, ‘Oh, I’m getting kicked out of the (Master of Management program),’” Charamand-Quelas said. “I knew I needed to contact the professor and let him know this happened.”

Despite fearing the worst, Charamand-Quelas said Ball asked her to repost the TikTok for his children to see. Soon after being re-uploaded, the TikTok went viral again, rapidly drawing in 20 million views and 4.7 million likes.

As the viral video found its way into nearly every U-M student’s direct messages, For You Page and Facebook group, the entire U-M community shared the joy of watching a professor dance around as a potato.

For Ball, humor plays a key role in his instruction, and he said his potato prank was just another way of keeping his students engaged — especially over Zoom.

“I think with any class, particularly virtually, you reach a certain point where you can just tell people are fatigued,” Ball said. “And I think that that occurs in person as well, but I would do other stuff, tell stories, whatever, just to capture their attention … I don’t plan it. It just feels right.”

When Business junior Alysse Armstrong first saw the TikTok, she said her reaction was like most users’.

“Initially, I was surprised by the whole thing,” Armstrong said. “But I appreciate that professors are making an effort to make Zoom classes more enjoyable and fun even though we’ve all been doing them for so long.”

Brands across the globe even joined in on the fun, with the official Zoom TikTok account commenting, “They just won at Zoom.”

The video’s response was so overwhelmingly positive that Charamand-Quelas worked alongside Ball and posted a follow-up video, which, not to her surprise, outperformed the original with 26.1 million views and 5.9 million likes.

“I had hoped that it would (perform better) just because I knew it was such a good video,” CharamandQuelas said.

In part two of the spud saga, Dr. Po Tato checks in on his “family members” who, to his absolute horror, have all been baked.

Afterward, Ball “gets serious” and moves into his exam review session, still as a floating potato.

Among the most-liked comments on this second video is one from the official account of “The Office” that says, “Truly such Michael Scott energy.”

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Wednesday, September 1, 2021 — 7

BECCA MAHON/Daily M-36 Coffee Roasters brings back many old Espresso royale staples.

GEORGE WEYKAMP & SCARLETT BICKERTON Daily Staff Reporters

M-36 Coffee Roasters opened a new cafe Aug. 16, filling both the vacant storefront and coffee void on South University Avenue left after Espresso Royale closed in June 2020 due to pandemic hardships.

M-36 owners Ken Pargulski and Lisa Tuveson were both Espresso Royale employees. They started their business after purchasing Espresso Royale’s coffee roaster last June. “(After Espresso Royale closed), my immediate thought was that I wanted to keep doing what I do,” Pargulski said. “I really love coffee roasting, I really love coffee, and Lisa and I have had a long working history and a lot of experience. I just wanted to keep going.”

M-36 Coffee Roasters can be found at 1101 South

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University Ave. Their hours Monday-Friday are 7 a.m.-6 p.m. and Saturday-Sunday from 8 a.m.-6 p.m.

After buying the roaster, Pargulski and Tuveson said their initial goal was to continue selling their coffee to grocery stores and other remaining Espresso Royale locations in UrbanaChampaign, Ill. When the opportunity came to lease the old Espresso Royale location, Pargulski said they were excited to return to their roots.

“We started really thinking about it … (and said) this is a good opportunity,” Pargulski said. “I mean we miss(ed) having that presence directly in Ann Arbor, and this was an opportunity to do it.”

Tuveson said the cafe’s atmosphere is diverse and inclusive, catering to both Ann Arbor residents and University of Michigan students.

“There has always been a

mix of ages, types of people, demographic, anything at all of our cafes … we’re pretty laid back people and we welcome everybody,” Tuveson said.

Tuveson said that many old Espresso Royale staples, such as the pumpkin chocolate chip bread, vegan zucchini bread and almond raspberry scones will be returning to the M-36 menu.

For Ann Arbor resident Sofia Csazar, the return of a coffee shop to the old Espresso Royale location is a welcome surprise. Csaszar said she frequented Espresso Royale and is happy she can get her favorite coffee beverages from the new location.

“I used to really miss the Espresso Royale that used to be here, but I’m really very happy with (M-36),” Csazar said.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Sports

SPORTS

8 — Wednesday, September 1, 2021

After underwhelming 2020, Michigan’s defense looks to start anew JARED GREENSPAN Daily Sports Editor

The way Donovan Jeter sees it, last year’s seasonopening demolition of thenNo. 21 Minnesota was the worst thing to happen to the Michigan football team.

“We were feeling ourselves a little too much,” the fifth-year defensive tackle recounted on Tuesday, ten months later and two weeks into Michigan’s 2021 fall camp. “All the players were on social media. I don’t wanna say, ‘took our foot off the gas,’ like we weren’t preparing hard, (but) we started feeling ourselves too much.

In college football, you can’t do that. It doesn’t matter who you play.”

The Wolverines learned that the hard way last year, slogging through a calamitous 2-4 campaign and reaching the nadir of the Jim Harbaugh era. By the time a COVID-19 outbreak brought the season to a merciless close, the victory over Minnesota seemed like a mirage.

Michigan’s defense played a significant role in the Wolverines’ demise. As a collective unit, it bottomed out as the third-worst defense in

the Big Ten, sinking Michigan’s season along with it.

Those struggles induced an offseason overhaul. Out went defensive coordinator Don Brown, replaced by Mike Macdonald. In came a new scheme and an array of new philosophies.

“Coming from last year, we really didn’t have too much to really show our true talents,” Michigan safety Daxton Hill said. “Now I feel like we have more freedom, a lot more tools to work from, whether it’s our talent or the coaches’ calls. That comes with more abilities, more freedom to the ball, not being one dimensional.”

While players are confident that Macdonald’s system will pay dividends, the early reviews come with an asterisk. Fall camp discourse is often fallacious, with the season looming as the true barometer of a team’s success. No one knows that better than Jeter.

A 4-star prospect out of high school, Jeter has been met with lofty expectations since he first arrived in Ann Arbor. And yet, four years into his Michigan career, his production has been subpar.

Last week, Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh noted that Jeter is in the midst of his

“best month, best offseason” as a Wolverine. Entering his fifth and perhaps final year in the program, Jeter recognizes that it’s time to make good on Harbaugh’s words.

“The compliments from Coach (Harbaugh) are always nice, but dude, I’ve been getting compliments since like 2019,” Jeter said. “… I don’t want to say it doesn’t mean nothing because that comes off wrong. But I just really got to go and show it on Saturdays in the Big House.”

That holds true for the whole unit. If Michigan is going to out-perform its preseason expectations, the defense will surely be at the forefront of the revitalization.

And that starts with a fresh mindset, as much as anything.

“Don’t rest on what you did yesterday,” Jeter said. “When you go to sleep and wake up, what you did yesterday does not matter — it doesn’t matter if you had a great day, terrible day, doesn’t matter. You can’t go back and change it or fix it.

“We’ve all been preaching to, every day, find something to get better at. Every day, get a step closer to where you want to get to.”

ALEC COHEN/Daily The Wolverines’ lackluster defense was a major contributor to their historic 2-4 season, though, a new defensive coordinator may right the ship this year.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Big Ten, Pac-12, ACC form inter-conference alliance BRENDAN ROOSE Daily Sports Editor

In a summer of upheaval for college football, yet another development threatens to fundamentally change the structure of the sport.

The Big Ten, Pac-12 and ACC announced Tuesday that they are joining forces in an inter-conference “alliance,” intended to both counter the SEC’s expansion into a 16-team superconference and reinforce “shared values” among the three conferences.

“I’m a big believer in expanding the College Football Playoff,” Warren said.

“But also, I’m a big believer in being methodical and doing our homework. …

We need to think through the length of the season, health and wellness issues — not only physical but also mental — primarily the academics, how does this affect final exams.”

The three conferences will also work together to confront the challenges of changing name, image and likeness (NIL) legislation brought about by the Supreme Court decision in National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston. As

MILES MACKLIN/Daily Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren announced an alliance between the PAC-12, ACC and Big Ten for future collaboration within college sports.

“I think we have to keep in mind what brought us to this day — what brought us all to college athletics — and that is the student athletes,” Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren said. “We need to make sure we have shared values, we keep academics first, we keep our integrity and honor and collaboration together,” The alliance includes a scheduling partnership in football and men’s and women’s basketball which, according to ACC commissioner Jim Phillips, will “elevate the national profile of all of our teams by playing from coast to coast with college fans across the country as the beneficiaries.” While the specifics of the partnership remain unclear, the existing ACC-Big Ten Challenge in men’s and women’s basketball could serve as a baseline model for what interconference competition will look like.

Crucially, the scheduling alliance in football comes alongside a round of College Football Playoff (CFP) expansion, which in turn could remove disincentives against scheduling tough non-conference opponents. In June, a sub-group of the CFP management committee proposed a 12-team playoff format to supplant the existing fourteam model. All three commissioners expressed support for the expansion but also emphasized the challenges that come with it.

of now, there is little NCAA guidance or rules regarding NIL. If the three conferences have similar priorities, the alliance could help them coordinate in the creation of league-wide guidance.

“These matters, while challenging, also present once-in-a-generation opportunities for the leaders in college sports to reevaluate long-standing ways of conducting our business,” Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff said. “ … Despite the shifting landscape, there are some critical constants among many in college athletics, and specifically among every one of the 41 member institutions in our three conferences.”

Still, the agreement between the three conferences is just that: an agreement. There is no signed contract laying out expectations, nor is there a specific timeline to the plans laid out by the alliance. Another round of unexpected conference realignment or a drastic shift in TV deals could, in theory, send the whole alliance up in smoke.

The commissioners don’t see that happening.

“It’s about trust,” Phillips said. “…

We’ve looked each other in the eye, we’ve made an agreement. We have great confidence and faith, our board charis have looked each other in the eye and have committed to the same level of support and connection to one another, our athletic directors have done that.”

Michigan athletes finish Tokyo Olympics with 11 medals MAX WADLEY Daily Sports Writer

After a strong showing in the first half of the Olympics, more Wolverine athletes will be returning from Tokyo with some new hardware.

A Canadian gold medal highlights the showcase of Michigan athletic performance as current junior Jayde Riviere and former Wolverine Shelina Zadorsky (2010 – 2013) helped their soccer team defeat Sweden in a game that was decided by penalty kicks.

Riviere played 27 minutes in extra time as a defender while Zadorsky only logged less than a minute in match time. Zadorsky won a bronze medal at the

2016 Rio games, while this is Riviere’s first Olympic medal. Additionally, it is also the first time a Canadian women’s soccer team has brought gold back to the North American country.

In addition to the two soccer medals, graduate student wrestler Myles Amine will be bringing a bronze medal to San Marino. Amine was one of the flag bearers for the small country and is the first individual male Olympic medalist in the nation’s history.

Thanks to a late takedown, Amine became the second Michigan wrestler to ever win an Olympic medal, and is the first freestyle wrestling medalist to emerge from the program.

Ultimately, the Wolverines won 11 medals: 3 gold, 5 silver, and 3 bronze. Swimmer Maggie MacNeil contributed most to that total after leaving Tokyo with three medals (1 gold, 1 silver, 1 bronze). In addition to MacNeil, former swimmer Siobhán Haughey won two silver medals and former swimmer Catie DeLoof won a bronze. Softball player Amanda Chidester and graduate assistant diving coach Michael Hixon both won silver medals as well.

With its 11 total medals, Michigan would have tied for 18th with the Czech Republic in the total medal standings, proving that the Wolverine athletic dominance of the past was no different for these Olympic games.

MADELINE HINKLEY/Daily Michigan wrestler Myles Amine won a bronze medal in freestyle wrestling.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Sports

Wednesday, September 1, 2021 — 9

SportsMonday: After passing of son, Be Better; foundation strives to fill gap in care KENT SCHWARTZ Managing Sports Editor

I’m sitting in a car, the windows down. A nice lake breeze and the beach a few feet away remind me of home. When the phone rings, I take a deep breath. My high school physics teacher is calling.

Almost a year ago her son, Ian Miskelley, passed away. Ian swam at Michigan for two years and won four state championships in high school.

Ian struggled his whole life with anxiety and depression, familiarizing the family with the mental health system of both West Michigan and the University of Michigan. At the University, Ian had the help of the athletic department and his family to make sure he got the care he needed, but the same can’t be said for his time in West Michigan.

So, soon after he passed, Jill and Steve Miskelley founded

Be Better;, a nonprofit based in Holland, Mich., that focuses on two different aspects of mental health.

“We wanted to do something in Ian’s name, we just weren’t sure what it was gonna be,” Jill Miskelley told The Daily. “Then the more I thought about it, talked about it, we wanted to focus on the treatment side of mental health, not so much the awareness.”

Be Better; graphic courtesy of Miskelley family.

The first area of focus is based around building communities for teenagers, young adults and grieving parents via a network of support groups.

“We want this to be a place for kids to hang out because a lot of

kids we talk to — I know for Ian it was the same — was he had his friends, his team, but it was also really good to have a group of friends that knew what he was talking about,” Jill Miskelley said. “That could understand what it’s like to have real bad anxiety, depression, borderline personality. Somebody else that he didn’t feel like he was constantly burdening his roommates or his best friends. We’re trying to make a community like that and a safe place for everybody to be.”

These support groups are going to be led by counselors from Mosaic counseling, an outpatient therapy group based out of Grand Haven, Mich. For now, the groups will be confined to 15 people due to space constraints, but as the foundation’s ultimate goal means having its own building, those sizes seem bound to grow.

While the support groups will be a way for people to discuss their problems, they also offer

an avenue for counselors to lend their support. Should they see someone struggling with their problems, the counselors may work with the individual to find more care.

The second area of mental health treatment that Be Better; is focusing on is to connect the aspects of treatment. Rather than being a game of telephone where a prospective patient is passed from one service to another, Be Better; aims to put one in touch with the help they need.

“Steve (Miskelley) calls it ‘one-stop shopping.’ You walk in and we got you, we can get you through the whole system,” Jill Miskelley said. “Even if that means we call the Ottawa County Crisis Line, because we’re also in contact with them, and then they come and get you or we bring you to the hospital.

Or we get ahold of an inpatient or outpatient service, or we get ahold of a different counselor or therapist because maybe yours isn’t working. You know what

Ian Miskelley’s family is hoping to raise awareness for mental health through Be Better;. Photo courtesy of Jill Miskelley.

I mean? We want to pull all the resources.”

This area of service offers a glimpse of what they want Be Better; to be, a place where therapy, support and navigation can all occur as one cohesive unit. The Miskelley’s envision a service where a student can take an afternoon off class and get walk-in therapy or family members can show up and ask questions about how to support their children.

West Michigan is a very reserved place, particularly in Holland — mental healthcare there is hard to figure out and even if you get a referral from a hospital, it can be difficult to get an appointment. And while

more focus than ever is on mental health, the familiarity and maneuverability of the system lags behind.

At the University, it can be difficult to find help, too. Even with CAPS and a network of resources, navigating them can be difficult. A nonprofit like Be Better; is attempting to take the stress out of a stressful process.

When a student has to ask for help, they’ll be greeted with open arms and a single point of contact. In a community as large as Michigan’s, a service like that can prove the difference between a positive and negative experience.

For Michigan’s defense, it’s a summer of progress BRENDAN ROOSE Daily Sports Editor

There’s not much new to say about Michigan’s 2020 defense.

The numbers tell the story: 12th in the Big Ten and 89th in the country in total defense; 13th and 96th in passing defense. Put simply, the Wolverines weren’t good enough, especially defending the pass.

For new defensive backs coach Steve Clinkscale, though, what’s past is past.

“It wasn’t that (the players) didn’t want to talk about it,” Clinkscale said to reporters Thursday. “I didn’t want to talk about it. I just really feel like, if coach (Jim Harbaugh) is going

to hire all these coaches, let’s be real, he wants a different mindset. He wants a different attitude, a different approach.”

It seems he got what he wanted.

When the dust settled from all the offseason reshuffling, his staff consisted of six new coaches, and the average age plummeted from 46 to 37. One presumed goal of that shift was to reinvigorate Michigan’s recruiting department, and it’s already partially paid off with the continued commitment of Will Johnson, a five-star cornerback from the class of 2022.

But on the defensive side of the ball, the youthful coaching staff is targeted at the existing players, too. The Wolverines’

defensive struggles in 2020 were just as much schematic as they were personnel issues.

The hope is that the young coaches will bring more creative schemes that play to the strengths of the current team and don’t leave first-year starting corners without help. More specifically, that means passing downs should feature less one-deep man-to-man packages and more zone and patternmatching looks.

“As a defense, you can’t show the same things,” fifth-year senior safety Brad Hawkins said. “You can’t show the same pressures and things like that, so you gotta disguise, you gotta rotate. That’s what we’ve been doing, working on in camp, just showing different looks. If

we’re in Cover 2, show Cover 4, or things like that.”

Still, those changes take time. A team that’s been playing defense one way for five years can’t just flip a switch and start playing another way.

Defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald, for his part, joined the program in January, so he had some opportunity to introduce the team to his ideas during spring ball. Clinkscale, though, wasn’t hired until May. Even with an entire summer of studying, a team can’t truly learn a new system without reps, so any concepts he wanted to bring in have had to wait until fall camp.

Even so, it helps to return some experience to the secondary. Seniors Gemon Green

and Vincent Gray — who struggled in one-on-one coverage last season — seem likely to spend significant time at corner again in 2021. However, junior DJ Turner could also challenge for snaps on the outside.

Clinkscale also said that junior safety Daxton Hill has rotated between secondary positions in practice. If he takes more snaps as a nickel corner instead of as a deep safety, he should be in a better position to leverage the athleticism that earned him five stars coming out of high school.

“I think the guys are excited about it, because they see how it’s all coming together,” Clinkscale said. “I think in

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the spring, they just wanted to create a foundation. … And now that we have that baseline understanding, we’re starting to be more creative, and the players are really excited about it.”

Nobody can be sure what that translates to in the immediate term. After last season, it was clear that things needed to change on defense, and obviously, doubts over Harbaugh’s longevity at Michigan have crept in. His gamble with assistant coaches this offseason could determine which way that question goes.

“I don’t think he gets the credit he deserves,” Clinkscale said. “So we’re gonna go out there and prove people wrong.”

Sports

10 — Wednesday, September 1, 2021

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Power, Beniers and Johnson all returning for sophomore seasons BRENDAN ROOSE Daily Sports Editor

Michigan’s national championship hopes just became much more achievable.

Alongside defenseman Owen Power — who was earlier this week already reported to be returning to Ann Arbor — forwards Kent Johnson and Matty Beniers will come back for their sophomore seasons, the team announced on Twitter. The return of all three means that the Wolverines will have the first, second, and fifth overall

picks in the 2021 NHL Draft as sophomores, as well as the No. 4 and No. 24 picks in defenseman Luke Hughes and forward Matthew Samoskevich coming in as freshmen.

Sophomore and junior forwards Brendan Brisson and Johnny Beecher — who were selected in the first round of the 2020 and 2019 NHL Drafts, respectively — bring the total number of first-round picks on Michigan’s roster to seven. To put that number into perspective, just 12 former first-round picks were playing on any college hockey team last season.

The return of Power, Beniers and Johnson also means a return of a large portion of the Wolverines’ scoring, as the trio combined for 22 of the team’s 91 goals and 45 of its 165 assists last season.

Even more, Johnson and Beniers often played on a line together, putting up plus-minuses of +15 and +21, respectively. Power, for his part, was on Michigan’s top defensive pairing with then-junior Nick Blankenburg last season, earning a plus-minus of +20.

“Got a really good group coming back, a lot of good

players,” Beniers said July 1, when the three were still mulling over the decision to stay or go.

“We’re gonna get a real run at a national title, I think, and I definitely want to win a Big Ten championship. (Defenseman Owen Power) is kind of leaning towards coming back, so that’d be fun if he came back and we got kind of the whole crew back together and gave it another go.”

That crew is back together now. Whether the national championship dreams come true is another question.

MADELINE HINKLEY/Daily Sophomore defenseman Owen powers is among a plethora of first rounders to return to Michigan ahead of next season.

Nikhai Hill-Green emerging as key cog in Michigan defense JARED GREENSPAN Daily Sports Editor

“We’re trying to get our best players to match their best players,” linebackers coach George Helow said on Thursday. “Who’s your best blitzers? Who’s your best man-to-man guy?

to provide relief to guys and get your best 11 out on the field at the same time.”

Perhaps no player has reaped the benefits of Michigan’s revamped system more than Nikhai Hill-

in as the starter on the weak side, flanking fifthyear senior Josh Ross.

“He’s earned the right to start,” Helow said. “Does everything you ask him to do. He’s very coach-

Early returns seem to be positive for the Michigan football team’s new-look defense, and an unheralded linebacker is at the forefront of the unit’s success.

In a team scrimmage last Wednesday, the Wolverines’ defense allegedly dominated, spurring senior receiver Ronnie Bell to proclaim that the offense “got (their) butts kicked.”

Whether that’s more of an indictment of the Michigan offense than it is a fair assessment of the defense remains to be seen. But for now, in the anonymity of Schembechler Hall, the Wolverines appear confident in the 3-4 base scheme implemented by ALEC COHEN/Daily new defensive coordinator Michigan’s defense could get a boost in 2021 from sophomore linebacker Nikhai Hill-Green.

Mike Macdonald, a stark shift from the speed-heavy system that Don Brown ran Who’s your best run-stopGreen. On the heels of a able. He’s playing with his during his five seasons in pers? Hopefully, you have strong fall camp, the sopho- hands, downhill and has a Ann Arbor. enough packages to be able more linebacker is penciled good understanding of the

defense and what we’re trying to do.”

Hill-Green was a non-factor as a freshman last season, appearing in just three games on special teams.

The former 3-star recruit tackled the offseason with the goal of becoming a consistent contributor. Those offseason efforts induced what Hill-Green recently referred to as the best camp in his 12-year football career, spanning from peewee to college.

“I really just put my all into this time and really to myself,” Hill-Green said earlier in August. “Really just bet on myself. I put everything into my nutrition, my film study and just being all-in for this team.

That is really the biggest difference. I take this so seriously because I just want success for my team.

That’s my ultimate goal.”

Hill-Green’s growth certainly comes at a fortuitous time for the Wolverines.

Beyond Ross, Michigan has

little depth at linebacker, especially with freshman Junior Colson missing time in camp with injury.

Last year, then-junior linebacker Michael Barrett started as the viper, a hybrid linebacker/safety position. Yet with Macdonald’s schemes supplanting Brown’s, the Wolverines scrapped the viper in favor of a more traditional two middle linebacker set — opening up an opportunity for Hill-Green. While Barrett deals with the learning curve, Hill-Green is seeing his off-the-field efforts validated on the gridiron.

In Saturday’s season-opener against Western Michigan, the Wolverines will, at last, be able to showcase any defensive improvements.

For Hill-Green, it presents a chance to further cement a grip on his new role.

“I’m just hoping to build on it,” Hill-Green said.

“Everyone feels good. The energy is high and I feel good.”

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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Wednesday, September 1, 2021 — 11

Olympic tradition includes Wolverines from across the globe CONNOR EAREGOOD Daily Sports Writer

Ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, The Michigan Daily takes a look at Michigan’s olympic athletes and their performances at the Games, both past and present. The data takes a deep dive into what countries Wolverines hail from, what sports they perform best in and how they stack up against their Big Ten rivals.

Michigan students perform in the highest arenas of college sports. They’re also no strangers to shouldering the dreams of their countries at the Olympics.

After Friday’s opening ceremony, 29 Michigan athletes will look to join Olympic heavyweights like Michael Phelps, Gustavo Borges and the duo of Meryl Davis and Charlie White in bringing Olympic glory to both their countries and their university.

Since 1900, 243 Michigan students, future students, and alumni have competed at the Olympics. The number of Wolverines at each Olympiad has grown over time, and 38% of them have medaled.

While the majority of those competitors hail from the United States and Canada, Michigan students have represented 32 nations at the Games. Wolverines from every continent but Antarctica have competed in an Olympiad.

Some Michigan Olympians hail from nations as far apart as Nigeria and Bangladesh, while many come from European nations like the United Kingdom, Ireland, Austria and Hungary. Seven athletes have represented Scandinavian countries including Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

This year, Wolverines from 12 different countries will carry their nations’ Olympic aspirations, including wrestlers Myles Amine (San Marino)

and Stevan Micic (Serbia).

Both are the first Michigan students to represent their respective countries at the Games, and both will be coached by Wolverines coach Sean Bormet at the Games.

Bormet will not be the only current Michigan coach in Tokyo, as swim coach Mike Bottom, diving coach Mike Hilde and men’s gymnastics coach Jordan Gaarenstroom will hope to guide their athletes to top performances. They will coach athletes from Yemen, the United States and Nigeria, respectively.

In total, Michigan athletes have won 73 gold medals — and Americans have earned most of them. The only non-American gold medal winner was Australian John Davies in the 1952 200-meter breaststroke.

Davies set an Olympic record in the event, something Wolverine athletes have done 21 times.

Twelve of those broken records belonged to Phelps, who attended Michigan but did not compete in NCAA swimming. The most decorated Olympian in history still holds seven of those records, and he earned 23 gold medals in his illustrious career.

Former shot put record holder Ralph Rose earned the second most medals among the Michigan community, a more reachable six over three Games.

Borges, swimmer Peter Vanderkaay, kayaker Greg Barton and track star Archie Hahn have each earned four Olympic medals. Borges represented Brazil, while the rest competed for Team USA. While the athletes headed to Tokyo might not challenge for such acclaim just yet, some Wolverines headed to the games dominated in their sports while on campus, including Canadian soccer player Jayde Riviere, Canadian swimmer Maggie MacNeil, and German basketball player

Graphic by Zach Breger, Eric Lau / The Michigan Daily U-M Olympians across the globe: Olympians associated with the University have competed for 32 countries.

Moritz Wagner, the first Michigan Olympian from his country.

Swimming, diving and track and field have been the bread and butter of Michigan Olympians.

Eighty Wolverines have competed in swimming, 20 have dived and 67 have performed in track and field events.Michigan’s first Olympians — John McLean, Howard Hayes, Charles Dvorak and Charlie Leiblee — all competed in track and field for the United States.

Some of these athletes come from South America.

Five Peruvians competed in swimming and diving events, but none were able to medal. Guyanese sprinter Adam Harris competed in 2008’s Beijing Games, while two Brazlians have earned four medals in swimming.

From Asia, two of three Wolverine Olympians competed in swimming or diving. The other was Bangladeshi gymnast Syque Caesar. This year, Siobhan Haughey and Jamie Yeung will add Hong Kong to that list as they compete in swimming.

Outside of those popular events, Michigan athletes have participated in the more unique competitions across Olympic history.

American decathlete Ken Doherty captured bronze in 1928, while Eeles Landstrom competed in the event for Finland in 1952.

Five-time All-American Steve Bastien will be the first Michigan athlete to compete in the decathlon in 69 years at this year’s games. He qualified for the event with one of the best athletic displays of his career, setting person-

al bests in seven of the 10 events. Now he shifts his focus to breaking those records again on a much more intense stage in Tokyo.

Some Wolverines will appear in their first Olympiad this month. Michigan’s record for most Olympics belongs to Turkish swimmer Derya Buyukuncu, who competed six times from 1992 to 2012 but was unable to earn a medal.

He was the first Wolverine from Turkey to compete at the Olympics.

Despite the plethora of Michigan athletes in the Olympics, the Paralympics have only recently seen Wolverines compete.

Jerome Singleton competed in 2008 and 2012, earning silver and gold track medals for the United States at his first Olympiad. Zach Burns won a sil-

ver medal in rowing at the 2016 Rio Olympics. NonAmericans from Michigan have not competed at the Paralympics yet.

Andy Potts, an Olympic triathlete who placed 22nd for Team USA in 2004, will compete as a guide for American paratriathlete Kyle Coon. After beating dominant paratriathlete Aaron Schneidies for the first time earlier this year, Coon and Potts could claim gold medals at the end of their event.

When the opening ceremonies conclude, Michigan will see its students, coaches and alumni pursue their Olympic dreams for nations scattered all across the Earth. They will join a long list of Wolverines to participate in the games, and some will likely add to the 160 medals they have accumulated.

Back line powers Wolverines to victory over Central Michigan CONNOR EAREGOOD Daily Sports Writer

With a Central Michigan forward streaking toward the goal, senior defender Sydney Shepherd found herself in a jam. Shepherd paced just a few inches behind the attacker, who saw nothing but open grass

Nino, Shepherd made her move. She swept toward the ball, pushing around the attacker to break up the play.

The only chance the Chippewas could muster was snuffed out. The ensuing free kick was easily saved by Nino, and the No. 18 Michigan women’s soccer team won 1-0.

Much of this came from maneuvering around attacking players. Whether they boxed them out or shook them off with fancy footwork, the trio would give the Chippewas just one or two touches before winning it back and lobbing the ball to an open Wolverine midfielder.

Michigan didn’t force

BECCA MAHON/Daily Senior defender Sydney Shepherd helped anchor a staunch Michigan defense on Sunday.

ahead and eight minutes left in the game.

As the forward prepared to fire a shot past senior goalkeeper Izzy

From the start of the game, the backline of Shepherd, senior Janiece Joyner and junior Jayde Riviere controlled the pitch.

the play, however, choosing to keep possession and rotate back. These came often, as the Wolverines’ speed kept Central Michi-

gan playing from catch up.

“I think the backline was really cohesive the entire game,” Shepherd said. “But I can give a lot of credit to the holding mids and the midfield that dropped back and played a big role in staying tucked and together defensively.

We’ve really been working on staying together as a unit in training, so I think it all kind of came through this weekend.”

That teamwork led to a 26-1 shot-attempt disparity. However, communication seemed to fall apart deeper in the offensive zone. Multiple times, Michigan attackers found an overwhelming chance but ran offside, squandering the opportunity. This even caused a goal to be disallowed late in the second half.

Part of that came from the very root of their style: aggressive play. With multiple Wolverines swarming the goal, there were more players to manage.

Michigan struggled to find a solution to break them down throughout the game.

Other problems surfaced when the Wolverines took longer passes. With more time to track the ball, the Chippewas broke up many passes to deep midfielders, putting more weight on Michigan’s defenders.

While they handled this with no panic, substitutions came quickly and often to keep them from wearing out, and to put the pressure on Central Michigan.

With so much possession time, the Wolverines remained frustrated as

the game continued, and Chippewas’s goalkeeper Allison Lapoint gobbled up shot after shot. She single-handedly kept the game within reach.

Early in the second half, fifth-year midfielder Nicki Hernandez faced Lapoint one-on-one, with yards of open net on both sides. She shot across, and finally, Lapoint couldn’t get there in time. A tinny clang rang through the stadium as the ball bounced off of the goalpost and was cleared

by Central Michigan. Hernandez put her hands to her head. She would eventually break through with

the game’s only goal on a quick pass from junior forward Lily Farkas in the 63rd minute.

“I think we just need to get some better timing, timing within our movement, speed of our passes,” Michigan coach Jennifer Klein said. “I think we’ll clean a lot of that up. The ideas are right, and now it’s just making sure we can get the execution.”

Michigan entered Sunday’s game with an expectation to win the game handily. While the defense performed like a brick wall, the offense couldn’t find the same rhythm.

Sports

12 — Wednesday, September 1, 2021

Gattis, Wolverines look to build run game in the trenches BRENDAN ROOSE Daily Sports Editor

For the Michigan football program, the start of fall camp in 2021 carries a different tone than it has in years past.

The general mood, of course, remains the same: optimistic. With the blank slate of a new season comes new visions and new possibilities. The shortcomings of the previous campaign are distant enough in the past — and the threat of Ohio State distant enough in the future — to believe they’ve been potentially fixed enough for the Wolverines to take a step forward in the new year.

But for 2021, that step forward comes from unfamiliar territory. Whereas in Harbaugh’s previous campaigns, Michigan hoped to finally bridge the gap with the nation’s elite (and, to an extent, some level of success felt certain), the vast disappointment of 2020 means this season’s fall camp carries more tempered expectations.

Whether or not the coaches want to admit it, the Wolverines aren’t destined for a conference title in 2021. Mostly, they’ll just be looking to compete.

A lot of that improvement will have to start in the run game. Last season, Michigan mustered just 131.5 rushing yards per game, good for 95th in the country and 11th in the Big Ten. Even worse, the Wolverines put up those numbers with a running-back room that was, by all accounts, fairly deep.

From there, the run game becomes a question of coaching and offensive line play.

“I think we were productive at times,” offensive coordinator Josh Gattis said. “The issue is, we didn’t run the ball enough. …

We just had two or three games where we had under 20 carries a game, and so your numbers, comparatively, when you look at them at the end of the season, they’re gonna be low.”

Gattis is correct that there were two games in 2020 — against Indiana and Wisconsin — where Michigan ran the ball fewer than 20 times. But looking at the numbers, choosing to throw the ball more at the time made sense, as the Wolverines averaged 0.7 and 2.5 yards per carry against the Hoosiers and Badgers, respectively. They finished both of those games with under 50 yards on the ground, but even if they had run it more, that wouldn’t

have made any difference in the offense’s success.

Realistically, growth will have to come on the offensive line, and although there’s a decent amount of depth in that position group, the most talented players remain young and unproven. Some, like current sophomore Zak Zinter, whom Gattis has anointed as potentially being Michigan’s best offensive player, were thrown into the fire last season after injuries derailed the starting lineup, while others, like junior Trente Jones, have yet to see significant playing time. Their development will be crucial to any growth in the run game in 2021.

“Our depth at the offensive line position, I think that’s a strength,” Gattis said. “… We feel like we’ve got almost eight guys that can compete for a starting job, and obviously we’ve got some high-level players there.”

There’s also, of course, Sherrone Moore’s move to coaching the offensive line. His predecessor — Ed Warinner, now the rungame coordinator at Florida Atlantic — was generally well-respected in college football as a skilled tactician, so Moore does have some pretty big shoes to fill. Still, at just 35 years old and as a former offensive lineman himself, he brings a different perspective to his unit that could help with player development.

“I think the younger guys really appreciate it,” fifth-year senior offensive lineman Andrew Stueber said in March. “It’s become a more open-room environment, you can ask a lot more questions, and he knows from experience, too. I think also the older guys are liking the new kind of energy and vibe he’s bringing to the room, the practice field, and just his overall energy.”

Whether that translates into success, though, is yet to be seen. Even if the Wolverines aren’t expected to compete for a national championship in 2021, the run game cannot remain stagnant. That could be complicated by injuries and youth on the offensive line, but sooner or later, that unit will need to find something that works.

“The 2020 offense is gonna look different than the 2021 offense,” Gattis said.

“Because you have to shape that to the identity of your team.”

One way or another, that identity will be forged in the trenches.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Michigan makes statement in Big Ten/ACC Challenge sweep CONNOR EAREGOOD Daily Sports Writer

Following last season’s heartbreaking overtime loss in the National Championship Game to North Carolina, the No. 2 Michigan field hockey team entered this weekend’s Big Ten/ACC Challenge with a chip on its shoulder.

This time, the matchup against the Tarheels would end differently.

Strong defense and precise goalkeeping put the Wolverines in the driver’s seat for much of its 3-2 victory over No. 1 North Carolina on Friday. That same aggressive defense helped Michigan blank No. 11 Wake Forest 2-0 on Sunday.

Against the Tarheels, familiar foes felt each other out as the game began, and it seemed like both teams waited for an opportunity to strike. Michigan found one first when freshman midfielder Alana Richardson chipped in a rebound from senior forward Tina D’Anjolell shortly before the first period expired.

D’Anjolell added her own tally around ten minutes later, and she notched a goal and an assist against the Demon Deacons on Sunday.

However, it wasn’t just her ability to score that helped her team capture difficult wins.

“She’s very fast, and she’s a senior so she’s very experienced,” Michigan coach Marcia Pankratz said. “…

She set the tone on defense because she can close them down, which helps our defense create turnovers.”

Much of D’Anjolell’s success came from overwhelming opponents with quick passes and unpredictable footwork. Each time a defender shifted their positioning and prepared to stymy a Michigan threat, she — and the rest of the team — changed on the fly to create shots. Time after time, opposing defenders came up with no answer.

This game plan originated largely from Michigan’s energy. The Wolverines used speed and aggression to control the game, frustrating

opposing forwards.

“Our team embraces that type of play,” Pankratz said. “… We know if we get the other team’s head down, that they’re not going to be able to perform the tactics that they want because we put them under so much pressure.”

Early on, the defense was able to keep up with opposing threats and get the ball out of their zone. But, by the third and fourth quarters, North Carolina and Wake Forest maintained possession for longer, stretching out Michigan’s defenders and looking for seams in tight coverage.

The Wolverines started falling a step behind attackers and struggled to make clean exits from their 25-yard zone.

goals-against in half. “… Even if the ball does get through the forward line, I know I can trust my midfielders enough for them to step up,” D’Anjolell said.

“And then we can counterattack and score the goals that we need.”

Perhaps the greatest indicator of this was Michigan’s containment of two-time NFHCA National Player of the Year Erin Matson. The forward scored two goals in last year’s championship game — including the game winner. This time around, the defense stopped her from putting a shot on net.

For the opponents who managed to squeeze off shots, senior goalkeeper Anna Spieker stood like a brick wall, challenging forwards as

ALEC COHEN/Daily The Michigan Field Hockey team avenged last year’s championship game loss to North Carolina, one of two wins this weekend.

Michigan had to lean on the depth of its defenders to overcome this, shifting to a more reserved style against later possessions. Junior midfielder Nina Apoola and sophomore back Serena Brimacombe both used their positioning to slash the angles that opposing forwards could choose.

This overall defensive structure complemented transitions back to the Wolverines’ normal, aggressive play. As the team collapsed into tighter zones, both the Tarheels’ and Demon Deacons’ explosive offenses came up empty-handed on chance after chance, and the Wolverines started playing tighter coverage as the opponents tired.

This wasn’t just the Wolverines showing off their offseason training; this showed targeted growth of their defensive capabilities. They scored the same amount of goals this time against North Carolina as they did last season, but they slashed their

they came into her zone all weekend.

This brazen strategy forced many high shots that soared over the net.

Michigan’s performance wasn’t all perfection, as the Tarheels were able to score goals by pinning the Wolverines twice and pouncing on minor positioning mistakes, including a close call as time expired against North Carolina.

These proved to be the exception, not the rule. Momentum swayed back toward the Wolverines after each goal, and a loss seemed surprisingly out of the question against two of the best teams in the country.

For Michigan, this weekend wasn’t about proving it can handle the nation’s best, nor was it about simply establishing a good start to the season. It was about proving that the Wolverines were a new team on both sides of the field.

And Michigan’s performance shouted that message.

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MiC

Thursday, August 5, 2021 — 13

MICHIGAN in COLOR Confessions of a washed-up Black swimmer JASMIN LEE MiC Columnist

me how to have fun even in States, but even then, I saw myself in Neal: a mixed-race difficult situations. athlete who aspired to greatI met my closest friends, Dur- ness. Since I also come from ga and Eva, at the community a mixed-race background, swim team. During practices, Neal was my swimming idol we would encourage each and I wanted to break reother to go faster and complain about how sore we were afterward. We declared ourselves the “Mermaid Sisters” and would practice our backflips in the water as if we were magical — no one could tell us otherwise.

Stepping up on the block, I wait for the whistle that commands my body to get in a diving position. Next to the five other swimmers lined up on the blocks, I curl my toes and squeeze my hands on the edge of the block when I hear the second whistle. Go. I push off in a horizontal dive into the water and immediately start dolphin kicking to the surface. As my head comes out of the water, I re- In the water, I was both alize something is missing: weightless and powerful all at once as I glided through my swim cap. the water and barely broke I’ve loved the water since I the surface to reach the othwas a kid. My dad threw me er side. And I only wanted to in the pool when I was nine get better. I never felt lonely months old and suddenly, I or the slightest out of place, could float. When I am sub- because I was surrounded by merged in the water, it feels my closest friends and swim like time stops. It comforts coach, who were all people of me to be surrounded by color. Although most people water, knowing that it was I practiced with looked like there to support me even if I me, this was not the case outside of my community team. couldn’t support myself.

I was 12 when I decided to start swimming competitively, and that’s where I met my first swim coach: Kwame.

When we were too slow to get in the water, Kwame would yell “SPARTA!” and kick us in the pool. When I fell asleep doing dryland workouts, he poured a bucket of water on me to wake me up. He always made us play soccer because it would help us with our kicking skills — although sometimes I think Kwame just wanted to play soccer.

Kwame not only taught me how to swim all 4 strokes — freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke and butterfly — but most importantly, he taught

Whenever I told my Black friends in high school that I was on the swim team, they would respond with something along the lines of, “Girl, I could never! I don’t even know how to swim, and I don’t want to mess up my hair.” As a young BIPOC swimmer, I was looking for role models to follow in swimming — a field dominated by white athletes in America — and that’s when I looked to social media. Instagram had introduced me to Lia Neal years before she became the first AfricanAmerican and Asian-American swimmer to compete in the Olympics for the United

How can I extend an olive branch?

MARIAM ODEH MiC Columnist

Palestine. The Holy Land. An ancient motherland, where every nook and cranny possesses a piece of sacred history. Home of the olive tree: a renowned symbol of peace and tranquility yet trampled in the face of oppression. A centuries-old fruit bearer, ripped from its roots, as though it holds no weight, no meaning.

I’ve been lucky enough to be allowed entry into my beautiful homeland four times before. I was very young the first time and didn’t know much, but I could see the guns and tanks everywhere we went

and hear the innocent children as they screamed at soldiers to put them down.

After crossing the Allenby bridge at the Jordanian border and waiting for over a day at military checkpoints in the occupied West Bank with nausea sweeping over me through the countless bumpy bus rides, we had finally arrived at my grandparents’ house in the small village of Kifl Haris. They immediately greeted me: my sitti with her warm embrace, and my sido lifting me up into the air while screams of joy escaped me, my fatigue superseded by the excitement of seeing my estranged family. When he finally put me down, the sound of a small

cords just like her. At the same time, I learned about Stanford University swimming commit Simone Manuel, who would go on to be the first African American woman to win an Olympic gold medal in swimming. Seeing Neal and Manuel succeed in swimming made me believe I could, too, thrive as a competitive swimmer.

with a tough coach who was me for missing even one set known for molding champi- despite not knowing my limion swimmers. tations. “Why didn’t you go?” they had said. “Everyone else Joining this new team was is making the set, why aren’t a wake-up call for me in the you?” This unhelpful critiswimming world. I swam cism and more like it felt like year-round, so when high personal attacks on my work school season was over, the ethic as an athlete. As a reclub season began. Even sult, I pushed myself past my though I was able to score limits to make the interval points for my high school times — even when I would team, I never ranked high be so behind that I had no

breaks in between sets — in hopes that I would get faster.

After a couple of years of swimming with Kwame, I realized swim practices were not challenging me as much as I wanted. If I wanted to get faster, I needed to make a change. As I entered high school, I decided to join a competitive club swim team

enough on my club team to even compete for points. All the swimmers were considerably faster than me and I was always delegated to the last lane, the slow lane.

These swimmers had started swimming as early as five years old and their parents spent the extra time and money on private coaching and the best training equipment on the market. I was years late to the game and I qualified for free lunch in my school district, which did not always make the most nutritional meals for high-intensity swimming. Any time I tried to rest, the main coach — an old white man — and assistant coaches would scold

kitten drew me near the back of the house. In an attempt to follow the soft purrs, I stumbled upon their colorful garden, pervaded by plants I did not know the names of.

Treading through the greens with careful steps, the leaves of the fruits and flowers brushed over the back of my hand, tickling me as though they longed for the presence of a child among them. Using one of the purple plastic chairs lying on the back deck, I stood to reach grape vines hanging above me and climbed trees to pluck sweet figs and bitter pomegranates. My arms overflowing with fruit and with a kitten in tow, I emerged 15 minutes later with the biggest smile plastered onto my face. Seeing how much I adored their garden, my grandparents were excited to introduce me to their eminent glory: their olive tree groves. After freshening up, we all piled into my grandpa’s 10-yearold Volkswagen that rattled at every turn. As we drove the short distance together, I was awestruck by the majestic mountains that crowned the landscape and the palm trees that lined the streets.

Children played soccer with a makeshift ball while soldiers strapped with AK-47s loomed in the background.

As we approached our destination, I nearly jumped out of the moving car as I got a glimpse of what awaited me.

The beautiful earthy green field was filled with olive trees standing tall, laden with olives and stretching beyond the corners of my eyes. Waving at me in the breeze, they begged me to climb up their strong limbs and pluck their olives gently. For the second time that day, I was completely blown away by the scene that surrounded me.

As I ran towards the first tree I laid eyes on, standing on my tiptoes to reach the tall branches, my sido hauled me up on his shoulders. While I struggled to grab as many as I could, my sido grabbed my wrist and set me back down.

He explained why we don’t pick olives one by one — there are simply too many of them on each tree. Instead, with his instruction, we spread out a few white cloth sheets underneath the tree. As my sido beat the olive tree with his wooden cane, the sheetcovered ground beneath us quickly filled with black and green olives. While I sorted through the ripe black olives and put away the firm green ones that still had to be cured, the olives gleamed under the scorching sun. I suddenly wondered if my an-

cestors also experienced this feeling of inner peace at this very spot while they sorted through olives like me.

Ultimately, this effort backfired on my mental and physical health. I ended up having a panic attack every time I went to practice and, in order to prioritize my wellbeing, I had to quit the competitive team and join a team that was less rigorous. However, the cost of this club was much more than I could afford. I ended up working for this club as a swim instructor in order to afford the cost to practice with the team, but the work-life balance was not ideal. I was so tired most days I could barely muster up the energy to go to prac-

While we worked, my sido told me stories about the history of the land: ancient prophets who roamed the lush fields centuries ago, the religious significance of the monotheistic faiths associated with the region and the Crusades that were fought

“

How can I remain silent when an apartheid power is actively profiting off of the conquest of my land? How can I be asked to “understand both sides” when a colonizer still denies me access to the land my ancestors called home less than 73 years ago?

Mariam Odeh, MiC Columnist

tice after a full day of school and work.

In high school, I was swimming almost 20 hours a week during the season, which included daily 5 a.m. practices, dryland workouts and weekend practices. After my high school swim season finished, I would have swim practice for three hours every day after school and on the weekends when there weren’t swim meets. I tried to love swimming in its competitive form, I really did. But while swimming used to be an activity associated with joy, friendships and community, it now brought about memories of panic attacks, asthma attacks, several muscle injuries and regret. And, amid all the emotional and physical labor, my swim cap would never stay on my head.

When I put my hair into a bun, a regular-sized swim cap would stretch to its limits and then slide off the more time I spent in the water. After one lap, I would often have to readjust my cap or dive to the bottom of the pool to retrieve it. Once, at a swim meet, I was swimming the 100-yard butterfly — a very difficult race — and my swim cap slid off my head.

All of my hair fell out onto my back and weighed me down as I desperately tried to reach the other side of the pool. As this became a regular occurrence, everyone would joke about swim caps not being able to stay on my head. My new coach even jokingly told me that I should get my cap “stapled to my head” so it would stop falling off. I tried everything from using fewer hair products to buying an extra-large swim cap — which broke as soon as I put it on — but nothing seemed to work. not far from where we were standing. His face was overtaken with a childlike marvel when describing the spiritual aura surrounding the Al-Aqsa mosque and golden Dome of Rock, but the light in his eyes dimmed when he mentioned the Gaza Strip, which was still under complete siege. This meant that little kids like me had restricted access to clean water to wash their favorite shirts or take baths with their toys. They were forbidden from getting too close to the beach, even on a bright summer day. They were denied usage of electricity to watch TV as their family shared breakfast or stay up late to play computer games. They were barred from traveling for vacations or leaving Gaza to visit family. They were stripped of the opportunity to grow up and attend college or carry dreams for their future. As I listened to my sido in silence, blood rushed to my head and tears welled up in my eyes. I gripped each olive harder, afraid that they would fall out of my trembling hands and smash on the ground. How could the world remain silent as children suffered under such brutal conditions?

MiC

14 — Thursday, August 5, 2021

Intersectional

feminism

is real and alive “Dear Susan Muaddi Darraj, My name is Reem Hassan, and I am a first-year undergraduate student at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. I identify as a Muslim Palestinian American woman, and I am currently studying on a pre-law track with hopes of majoring in public policy and minoring in Arab and Muslim American Studies. I was first introduced to your piece “It’s Not an Oxymoron” during my first semester in university, where I took an introductory course to women’s and gender studies (WGS). To say the least, I found myself absolutely astounded by your work. Having registered for the course on a whim and expecting to only mildly relate to the material, I was shocked to be so completely moved by our first reading. I

explicitly remember feeling as though you had taken my thoughts on the intersection of my Arab identity on my feminist experience straight out of my head and put it on paper. I felt heard. Your short piece had the ability to influence my work for the rest of that semester and inspired me to take my understanding to new and deeper levels and enroll in our Arab American Feminists course this semester. Upon interacting with your piece yet again this semester, I was reminded of why it had such an impact on me, and how deeply I resonate with your story.”

This is an excerpt taken from one of the first “Feminist Love Letters” I wrote last semester while taking an Arab American Feminists course with Professor Charlotte Karem Albrecht — an

REEM HASSAN MiC Columnist

absolute icon in the WGS department. We were asked to address a “love letter” to one of the authors we had read in class, both celebrating and critiquing their work. I was immediately drawn to write to Susan Muaddi Darraj, who authored “It’s Not an Oxymoron: The Search for an Arab Feminism.” **** Although I have always considered my feminist awakening as something deeply personal, I have come to learn that many other Arab American women empower themselves in a similar experience. It is an experience where we constantly question the grounds upon which we are allowed to call ourselves feminists, where we never feel as though we are allowed to call ourselves

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

such a phrase because of western impositions onto the definition of feminism, and where we live an experience that we never feel like we have the right to articulate.

In all truth, “Middle Eastern” (in quotations because the phrase is a colonial invention that I am not exactly fond of ) or Arab women are not exactly regarded as the token feminist figures in the western lens. We are forced to carry a stereotyped reputation of arranged marriages, housework, oppression, being forced to cover up and countless other baseless tags and labels. And beyond this, even after I have finally come to understand what feminism really entailed, it was something that was treated with so much animosity by the people around me. In high school, boys amped up their “women belong in the kitchen” jokes and poked fun at the girls who identified as feminists for being “crazy.”

Girls who were not interested in saying anything else only laughed with them. I remember watching in disgust and confusion as girls at my school — some of whom were even my friends — would proudly announce that they don’t consider themselves feminists just so that they’d be applauded by the boys. I could not fathom why they chose to view feminism as a surface-level ideology, fixating on buzzwords like “manhating” and “wage gap” while overlooking the societal benefits from the overarching goals of women’s liberation.

defy the values or the practices that I was raised upon — it actually gave them a name.

I grew up in a household where my sisters and I were encouraged to shoot for the stars and be ambitious with our goals, to defy gendered career expectations and to never give in to socially constructed gender roles. Both of my parents worked full time and distributed chores among themselves equally. I grew up watching my dad cook and clean and my brothers being given equal responsibility in maintaining the home. The contradictory attitudes that I encountered while coming to terms with my feminist identity motivated me to take Introduction to Women’s Studies upon starting at the University of Michigan.

While much of the class was introducing and giving names to basic concepts like intersectionality, patriarchy and male-gaze, I noticed a vast difference between the backgrounds of the students who were enrolled in the course and how that influenced the ways in which they absorbed and comprehended the course material. I found myself engaged in productive conversation with students of color more than I did with the white students in the course. During the weekly discussion sections where we would share individual interpretations of the readings based on our own experience, I was shocked by how uninformed many of my white, straight, financially priviOn the other hand, I realized leged, cisgender classmates that feminism came so natu- were about the struggles that rally to me because it did not marginalized communities

One of the most important themes that Susan touches upon in her writing — also reiterated throughout almost every lesson of my WGS classes — is the role that white western feminism plays in aiding the misunderstanding of women who are not white, Western, cisgender, financially privileged or straight. White western feminism is a one-dimensional ideology that fails to regard the ways in which a person’s intersecting identities influence their feminist experience. It applies the same European/U.S.-centric critiques to populations and cultures all over the world, failing to account for different cultural practices and traditions in the fight for gender equality. In the words of Susan, it places an emphasis on the experience of “liberated, assertive Western women with voices” while depicting women from the global south as women who are in need of liberation from their oppressive societies.

2021/22

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confront without reflecting on their own privileges. And while I would never deny the fact that objectively, being a woman in itself is a marginalized identity that suffers from patriarchal oppression, for me and other women of color, it is our intersecting identities that really amplify the impacts of being a woman. The yearning to have conversations with more people who understood how my intersectionality impacted my feminist experience prompted me to enroll in an upper-level Arab American Feminism course during my second semester.

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As soon as you walk in, Moon Cafe comforts you. The walls are painted yellow and purple, clashing with the blackand-white checkerboard floor. Large-framed, abstract art prints hang on the walls, and the entire stretch of a mantel piece is lined with small figurines. The eclectic interior reminds me of the yummy hole-in-the-wall eateries my friends and I frequented during our high school years back at home and immediately assuages those requisite nerves I feel as a newcomer to the journalism scene.

Choe is in his early 60s and, despite his gray hair, looks much younger than his years.

On the afternoon that I walk into his shop, he wears wire glasses, a yellow University of Michigan hoodie (like the true Michigan dad he is) with a few sauce stains, comfy sweatpants and padded slides with Puma socks.

He’s dressed, in other words,

I’m caught off guard when Choe begins the interview by throwing me the first question: he wants to know what my position at The Michigan Daily is. I tell him I’m a Senior MiC Editor, and he nods and replies that his daughter, Gina, also used to hold a Senior Editor position at The Daily during her undergraduate years. In our brief conversation, he mentions his children’s academic achievements several times. I can tell by the way he casually namedrops “neuroscience at

and calls out to the kitchen: “Yeobo? Spicy pork!” (Yeobo is a pet name, roughly translated from Korean to “darling” or “honey.”) Later, she calls him dangshin — another sweet term of endearment — when they’re working in the kitchen together. While trying to put into words what it’s like to work with his wife, he chuckles and says, “I cannot think of any bad things.

Just wake up early in the morning, eat together — we always eat together … there’s no special meaning, we’re just married … and then we spend time together. That’s it.” The restaurant is a twoperson operation. Last year, they employed a couple U-M students part-time, but now, since business is slower than usual, it’s just Choe and his wife, Yoon, running the cafe.

In addition to frozen yogurt, Moon Cafe serves Korean food, which according to Choe, is simply “healthy food… It’s homemade, like Mom’s cooking.” There are, however, many other Korean restaurants in Ann Arbor. When I ask Choe what makes his restaurant different from the others, I expect him to tell me that he has some special recipe passed down from his ancestors or even that he also serves frozen yogurt — which is so delicious that it’s a valid point, in my opinion. But instead, he refuses to justify my quesChoe and Yoon, along with tion with an answer, out of

Princeton” that he speaks of their son and daughter, imhis son and daughter fondly migrated to America from and often.

South Korea nearly 15 years ago and eventually settled in Much of Choe’s identity is, in Ann Arbor, Mich. During his many ways, tied to his role as career, Choe worked in the a father and husband. Short- automotive industry for 32 ly into our conversation, years. (His engineering backChoe takes a phone order ground shows in the way he

solidarity with the other Korean spots on campus. “Korean food is Korean food. I respect the restaurants… we work all together,” he says.

Poetry and technicality: Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb” ELIZABETH SCHRINER MiC Columnist

At President Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021, 22-year-old Amanda Gorman delivered an original poem, “The Hill We Climb.” The Los Angeles resident and Harvard College graduate made history as the youngest known inaugural poet, sparking admiration and conversation in the following weeks.

Her poem isn’t without criticism, however. Some people have taken to the comment sections in newspapers like The Hill to demean her values with matters of technicality. Check out Reddit’s r/ Poetry subreddit, a place to share and discuss published poetry, and you’ll find similar sentiments. One user said, “The meter is all over the place. The wordplay is inane.

It’s full of patriotic platitudes and contains nothing new or surprising. It wouldn’t inspire anyone at any time except Americans, today.”

So, I am inclined to ask, what makes a good poem? The structure? Its impact? I’ve heard various people commend the artist yet criticize the poem for things such as “clichés” and “frustrating meter.” Additionally, others have praised “The Hill We Climb” for its messages and

pacing but question whether it is “technically strong.” Regardless, I think that there is great merit in the work as a piece of art. Art and creativity can be important tools for inspiring people, and Gorman utilized them to do just that. A Forbes article says, “Gorman has produced poetry and studied sociology, so

sonally, I hear rhythms and repetitions that remind me of the musical “Hamilton.”

There are two references to the musical within the poem, in addition to commentary on current events. The significance? Gorman is purposeful in her words and presentation. The accessibility of her piece, though indiffer-

Yassmine El-Rewini/Daily

in combining complex social science into an art form, she has developed a unique offering in both fields.” I’d have to agree.

Journalists, teachers and YouTubers alike have begun analyzing Gorman’s piece, noting references to the Bible and other poets’ work. Per-

ent to the poem’s technicality, is, bluntly put, incredible.

There is still value that can be measured in the conciseness of words and density of thought within it, but the poem’s reach to general audiences should be considered invaluable. The feelings it evoked in countless people, even if only for a moment,

have been monumental ( just check out the positivity related to #AmandaGorman on Twitter). Gorman’s position as an inaugural poet gave her a platform to deliver a message in a moving way, reaching those who previously wouldn’t have given poetry a second thought. I think this is one area that she succeeds, not just in her poem, but in her empowering execution.

In her delivery, Gorman’s presence exudes strength, but her words also reflect pain. Poignant lines remind young Americans — not unlike Gorman — that our work is not done. We must strive for progress in a society that is fast-paced and continuously evolving. Accommodating changing times also means acknowledging the dark that remains. In doing so, and in the words of Gorman herself in “The Hill We Climb,” perhaps we might “raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.” What exactly does it mean “to forge a union with purpose?”

Can love truly “become our legacy?” Will the poem that implores such affirmations be remembered and recited for years to come? has to tell. If anything, the call for light and unity is one that we needed.

an ti-c ap

of

When I sat down with Moon Choe, owner and operator of Moon Cafe, a Korean restaurant and frozen yogurt shop on State Street, for a 40-minute interview, I’ll admit I expected something of a sob story: a few cliché sentiments about being down on his luck and needing students to stop by so he can pay the bills. What I got instead was a chance to gain new insights on laissez-faire parenting, the subtle racism that is a hallmark of the immigrant experience and the private joys he is able to embrace from the COVID-19 pandemic, among other topics of discussion. Choe is full of surprising wisdom, which he dishes out freely, sans condescension.

for a long shift at the restaurant. Choe is thoughtful and very eloquent. Though he gestures for me to take a seat at the booth in front of him, he never quite settles into the bench facing me. Instead, he hovers by it, always ready to take a call or hand a customer their order.

ca re

JESSICA KWON MiC Columnist

e

entialit s s y e

of

Moon Cafe and kindness during COVID-19

tends to speak in exact figures, precise times and percentages.) When he retired a couple years back, he decided he wanted to take on “fresh and new” work. “My (children) grew up here in Ann Arbor … so it is our town,” he tells me. He decided to open a frozen yogurt shop to meet new students, and he calls this new job a different type of “good stress.”

Thursday, August 5, 2021 — 15

Th

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f l se italist

YOON KIM MiC Columnist

Growing up as a first-generation Korean American in the Korean church, I was taught to think of others first: take care of the younger ones in our community, be on standby to help my parents whenever needed, don’t start eating until the eldest at the table takes the first bite.

In my family, love was often, and almost always, sacrificial. And while I am incredibly grateful for my background and recognize the character and values it has instilled in me, I think it also gradually conditioned me to disregard myself and my own needs. I quietly taught myself I never needed to be at the center. Seeking help was unnecessary, self-indulgence was never the answer and the extent of my daily productivity was a measure of my internal strength. I grew up never allowing myself to be “that person” who needed to take a day off at work or gratify their whims, and I remember thinking as a child that the last thing I should even do was ask my mom to buy me a candy bar or some other trinket displayed on the sides of the cashier line.

So when the term “self-care” resurfaced in popular media several years ago, I naturally scoffed and brushed it aside as just a trend for the privileged — those who could afford to splurge on Lush bath bombs, essential oil diffusers or ten-step skincare routines. In my mind, self-care was just another way for rich people to make excuses for themselves, and to be honest, I regarded it as an activity only white people participated in because I had only seen it as such. But especially after attending the teach-in hosted by United Asian American Organizations (UAAO) for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month on March 31 about burnout and anti-capitalist self-care, I have come to understand that self-care is not for the privileged but, in fact, for all — and it is especially for the marginalized, for those who cannot afford to think twice about their self-preservation.

As explained in UAAO’s presentation, though self-care has been commodified into a ten-million dollar industry

by U.S. capitalism, the origins of self-care actually stem from anti-capitalist roots in the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 70s. fulness techniques like yoga and meditation while in prison. For these organizers, often Black queer women, the idea of maintaining their health and preserving their existence was not only a means of survival but an act of political warfare.

Design by Sarah Chung/Daily Self-care quickly became community care, a term illustrated by Deanna Zandt that describes larger methods of maintaining the health and safety of one’s community and collectively resisting the oppressive nature of our capitalist society.

In 1972, the Black Community Survival Conference held in Oakland, Ca. provided resources about the Party’s free community-service programs, such as healthcare clinics, local transportation and free breakfast programs that became a means of survival and support against the harassment and violence inflicted upon Black people by the police and federal government. In a whitedominated, capitalist society where leaders, institutions and systems failed to protect and fulfill their needs, active self-care translated to caring for one’s community in a way that would ultimately lead to structural change.

While I used to roll my eyes at the phrase “self-care” and only throw the term around lightly, I realized the weight of what true self-care for me meant when I could no longer afford to dismiss it— when I physically could not breathe under the immeasurable distress caused by the reality of our society.

When I heard about the Atlanta shootings on March 16, I needed to stop whatever I was working on and do something, anything, that would offer me some semblance of solace and healing.

That night, my roommates and I had a long discussion about the news and talked for several hours. All of us were at a loss of words and still processing what had happened, and I think we all knew we needed to simply be together in that space.

In the days following the shooting, as more news sources started revealing the names of the victims and social media exploded with threads of who and what was responsible and which organizations to support, the weight of what had happened continued to steadily creep into my being. I had an online interview for a summer internship scheduled two days after the event, and I remember the coordinator reaching out to the applicants the morning of March 17 to give us the option to reschedule in case we were not in the right headspace for an interview. While I genuinely appreciated the email and recognized that it would be helpful for many, I told her I was fine. I could handle it, I thought to myself. There was no need for the hassle of altering this other person’s schedule for my own convenience.

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Statement

Thursday, August 5, 2021 — 17

STATEMENT way, where I don’t start to enjoy them until they are about to end. Yet unfortunately, this cycle continually repeats itself. It’s a sad truth that applies to more than just cover art happens to match books: In life, people tend to my cute little purple lamp. not enjoy things until they are over.

When I am finally compelled to pick the book up, it takes The problem is that people a significant amount of time are constantly projecting into for me to focus on the first the future and ruminating few pages. I often have to in the past. We have all beread them over twice. Five come victims of the attention or six pages in, I flip forward economy, one where so much to see when the chapter will available information and end. 10 more pages! I can stimuli has created a huge at-

Book seduction, meditation and other processes SAMANTHA COLE Statement Correspondent

This morning I woke up with big plans: Go for a long walk, catch up on “The Daily” podcast episodes from The New York Times, fold my sweatshirt pile, call my dad, finish a finance problem set, write an essay, draft this piece. At the crack of dawn (10 a.m.), I stepped into my Ugg slippers, stumbled down two flights of stairs in an oversized grey T-shirt and Monsters Inc. fluffy pants and landed in the kitchen. I was compelled to walk outside and check the weather immediately after being blinded by the sunlight shining through the window. To my surprise, I was greeted with a gentle warm-ish breeze, one that felt unfamiliar after a chilling Ann Arbor winter.

I inhaled the welcoming air with a deep breath. And then I did it again. And again.

I closed my eyes. I felt calm. I felt peaceful. The sun melted away my exhaustion.

After what felt like a moment of tranquility, my long list of morning plans suddenly came flooding back into my mind. I pivoted my feet towards the door, but something kept me in place as I tried to reenter the kitchen.

I fed the urge to turn back to the sun, close my eyes and begin to breathe slowly again. I couldn’t help but smile. I was resisting the urge to move, to do, to achieve. I was standing alone in a t-shirt on my Joe’s Pizza box-covered back porch, and I felt more alive than I had in weeks.

If 2020 has shown us anything, it is that we never truly know what to expect in life.

And while this uncertainty naturally leads to feelings of stress and anxiety, it also gives us space to practice being comfortable with the unknown. This so-called “space” that I am referring to has been a contentious topic throughout the pandemic.

For example, the alleged in-

crease in “time” we now have to find new hobbies or to relax has been taken advantage of by educators and CEOS alike, over-assigning and over-expecting from their students and employees. The faux luxury of time that the pandemic has brought on has led to intense burnout and dangerously busy schedules.

But it is possible to take back the time that has been stolen away from us by back-toback Zoom meetings and the pressure to master crocheting with all the freedom we have. Instead of asking whatifs, we can focus on what we do know — what is right in front of us. We can strive to be what my therapist calls process-oriented, rather than results-oriented.

I like to joke that I-94 and I-80 are my second homes.

I’ve spent thousands of miles on them, miles that trade scenery for ease — hop on and drive, no directions needed. The “check engine” light on the dashboard of my old car kept me company, a constant presence lingering in the corner of my vision.

It was accompanied by a symphony of other warning lights who came and went as they pleased. My brain felt a lot like that dashboard: internal problems and topics I didn’t understand simmering away under layers of metal and avoidance.

“It’s when the lights aren’t

A tweet I recently read said, “I feel like I’m constantly worrying about the next part of my life without realizing that I’m right in the middle of what I used to look forward to.” By obsessing over everything but the reality in front of us, we are depriving ourselves of life. Life should not (only) be a past experience or a future plan — it should be the now.

I first noticed this distinction as I reflected on my reading habits. I always have a particularly difficult time starting a new book. My selection process is unnecessarily long and usually leads to option paralysis, where there are so many choices that I ultimately end up with nothing.

There are simply too many books in the world and so little time. This may explain why walking into Barnes & Noble is simultaneously exciting and sickening. Same with The Salvation Army. I digress.

But if I do decide to embark on an intimate endeavor with literature, my new and carefully selected read often sits on my bedside table, lonely, waiting to be touched.

Sometimes I tease the book by picking it up, but this is usually just to show a friend what I am “currently reading.” And all-too-often, I’ll emit the familiar line: “Yeah I’m really only on page four — haha. So I have nothing to report about it yet.”

Take a deep breath right now.

Where are you? Who are you with? How do you feel? Why are you reading this?

Maggie Wiebe/Daily do this, I think to cheer myself on. I continue reading with the goal of finishing a chapter. I read with a results mindset.

Flash forward a few weeks and I am sitting upright in my bed at 3 a.m., my book propped up against my knees. Now, I turn the pages with less haste and more hesitation. I am attached to And I likely won’t for several the characters and lost in months. Right now, this book the words on the page. I read is the New York Times best- with a process mindset. seller “Where The Crawdad Sings” by Delia Owens. Its I try not to read books this

Becoming Alice ANNIE KLUSENDORF Statement Correspondent

by the urge towards constant the piano. Spontaneous singproductivity. alongs. The salty taste of tears.

“What I’m suggesting is that we take a protective stance We lose a lot when we are not toward ourselves, each other, in the present. and whatever is left of what makes us human,” Odell Before her tragic accident writes. “I’m suggesting that in 2012, in her essay “Opwe protect our spaces and our posite of Loneliness,” Matime for non-instrumental, rina Keegan wrote, “The best noncommercial activity and years of our lives are not bethought, for maintenance, for hind us. They’re part of us care, for conviviality. And I’m and they are set for repetisuggesting that we fiercely tion as we grow up and move protect our human animality to New York and away from against all technologies that New York and wish we did actively ignore and disdain or didn’t live in New York … of course there are things we wish we’d done: our readings, that boy across the hall.

We’re our own hardest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down.”

flashing that something’s actually wrong,” I’d profess to nervous passengers with a laugh. “She runs just fine.”

Of course, she didn’t. My car, referred to by friends as “the Deathbox,” eventually ended up in the shop, a mechanic instructing my parents to never let me drive it again.

“The frame’s rusted out,” the mechanic told them. “If she gets hit, the car will basically disintegrate.”

Turns out, an inadvertent car crash is what happens when you bushwack through life on someone else’s rules.

I’d had warning lights simmering in my body for years, finally coming into themselves during my first years

of college. My warning lights looked like nervous shots of Svedka in my dark kitchen while my boyfriend drove to my house, my first time looming, unspoken, between us. It’s easier when you’re drunk, obviously. And more fun. Or, later, anxiety attacks on the cold concrete floor of my workplace, my body pulled to the ground by guilt and shame after hooking up with a longtime male friend.

Or a journal page, folded away from even my closest friends, where I’d written, “I feel as if sex is something I owe to my partner — I’m not doing it against my will, but I don’t understand how it’s supposed to make me feel.”

Or finishing a movie next to a boyfriend, wondering how long I could watch the screensaver camera pan over the Sahara before we’d have to go to bed. I felt defective.

tention deficit. Hustle porn, or the fetishization of overworking oneself, is another force driving people away from focusing on the process.

And of course, our capitalistic attitudes don’t help us deter our attention away from results. Even mindfulness, the antithesis of capitalism, has been exploited for profit.

In her book “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” Jenny Odell discusses how the very essence of what makes us human has become threatened I shook during every physical interaction, a small but noticeable tremble, and I told partners to ignore it.

And ignore it, we did. Following my friend’s examples, I tried everything to fix this part of me. I pined after a friend for two years, went on an almost-blind date that turned into a six-month relationship, even initiated a friends with benefits situation during my semester abroad (trying everything doesn’t quite lend itself to originality). Each was manageable — which isn’t the same as enjoyable.

I thought casual hookups would be empowering — in a society that profits off women’s sexualization through advertising but punishes them for taking

the body, the bodies of other beings, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit.”

Odell preaches something that is essential, especially during a pandemic: We must do everything in our power to focus on our humanity and appreciate what comes with it rather than fighting for what we cannot always control. I live for an extra hour of laughter at the dinner table. The sweet sound and serenity of Jimi Hendrix on the highway. The passion with which my sister plays ownership of their bodies through sex work, casual dating and hookup culture makes more sense. Women don’t need a relationship, which deems sex appropriate and private, to enjoy themselves. I’ll shout from the rooftops about sex positivity, and actually have, but it wasn’t helping me get anywhere. ***

The practice of being process-oriented rather than results-oriented takes intentionality. Resisting forces such as the attention economy and the pressure to work hard means not only seeing the problem but developing the strength to fight powerful tendencies: Don’t constantly check your phone in the car, gaze out the window; Don’t fill your weeks with too many tasks, welcome what each day brings. To focus on the process means to find success in everything (F you capitalism!) — learning from failure, accepting an unproductive day, appreciating the little things (as demonstrated by Big Mouth’s Gratitoad).

Over time I have discovered habits and hobbies that keep me grounded, thoughtful and intentional.

I never had a successful relationship in high school, and I find it perplexing that some people start college with zero relationship experience and others come convinced they’d already found their life partner. What an odd world to enter: By age and education level college students are mostly on the same page, but emotionally, we’re all over the map.

Statement

18 — Thursday, August 5, 2021

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Town or gown: the two sides of Ann Arbor LANE KIZZIAH Statement Correspondent

Painting the rock at the corner of Hill Street and Washtenaw Avenue is much more than just a longstanding campus tradition.

In 1953, Michigan students and their Michigan State counterparts began vandalizing each other’s campuses with paint the week before a rivalry football game, a tradition that escalated to student arrests and suspensions.

While the vandalism subsided on campus, the Spartans tried to get the final word, painting “M.S.U.” on the side of a limestone boulder in an Ann Arbor park sometime in the late 1950s. The tradition of “Painting the Rock” persists at both schools today. Almost every time I drive down Washtenaw, the Rock looks different after a new student group or sports team has covered it with everything from “Go Blue”s to students’ names to political slogans.

But the Rock had a life long before the 1950s. If you were to scrape off the hundreds — maybe thousands — of layers of paint, you’d find a copper plaque depicting the stone’s original purpose: “To George Washington this memorial erected in celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of his birth, 1932.”

For years after the painting began, there was a push to preserve the monument’s integrity with a sign erected as recently as the 1970s begging people not to paint the

memorial, but the tradition sidewalk. was too cemented in campus culture to be shut down.

According to the women in both cases, they were unable For at least some residents in to get their concerns heard. the area, the Rock represents a lot more harm than good. “(Residents) resent (the Despite its co-optation by the University’s) entitlement,” University community, the Lauren said. “Where (the Rock sits in George Wash- students are) a transient ington Park, on city property. population, they don’t have For Lauren (whose name has a sense of placemaking bebeen changed due to her fear cause this isn’t their permaof retribution to her business nent home. And the Univerby University clients), a born sity sort of allows that for and raised Ann Arbor resi- their brand, and they don’t dent, the rock is the perfect have a sense of collaboradepiction of the University’s tion.” relationship to the broader community.

Colin Smith, Parks and Recreation Services Manager for Lauren expressed her frus- the City of Ann Arbor, gets tration to me in a recent occasional complaints about phone call. She’s one of sev- the park, mostly when paint eral local residents who have gets on the sidewalk or becomplained about the litter- yond. He said his department ing of paint buckets or con- has to maintain the park at cerns of toxins getting into least twice a year, which he the gutter. In 2016, Nehama estimates costs about $500Glogower, another resident, $750 per visit when accountwrote an article for the Ann ing for the materials needed Arbor Observer about her to repaint the sidewalk and experience slipping in wet the labor. However, Michael paint on the surrounding Rein, U-M director of community relations, said he has never heard complaints about the Rock.

What is remarkable about the history of tension between the University and the town is how seldom it is addressed. Ann Arbor is constantly ranked among the top college towns in the country and is considered one of the University’s biggest assets.

The school is so intertwined with the surrounding area — geographically, culturally and economically — that town and gown problems can seem nonexistent.

Ann Arbor was founded in 1824 by John Allen and Elisha W. Rumsey. The two men headed west from Detroit in January of that year and reached what is now present-day Ann Arbor by early February. The pair purchased a collective 2.6 square kilometers of land for $800 (what would be about $22,000 today) and opened up the Washtenaw Coffee House, the town’s first structure. Ann Arbor — named in honor of Rumsey and Allen’s wives, both named Ann — started to expand as an agricultural trading center.

The University of Michigan, which had been founded in Detroit in 1817, relocated to Ann Arbor in 1839 while both school and town were in their infancy. Less than 20 years after its founding, the city had a population of 2,000, a courthouse, a jail, a bank, four churches and two mills. The University was even smaller. During its first year in the new town, the University had just seven students and two professors.

Now, the city’s population stands at over 120,000, and the school’s total enrollment is over 44,700. Michigan and Ann Arbor have grown, simultaneously, but not necessarily together.

are independent schools.

Each has their own school board that generally supervises the university’s actions and controls its finances.

The governing bodies of Michigan’s three flagship institutions — the University of Michigan, Michigan State and Wayne State — are given almost complete autonomy over the universities’ operations. This has a number of implications, one being that the University isn’t bound by the Ann Arbor local government in nearly any form — it doesn’t pay taxes or follow the same zoning regulations — which, naturally, can cause some town and gown problems.

While most state constitutions give state legislatures power to provide for higher education, Michigan is one of the few that mentions specific institutions and enumerates specific forms of governance and autonomy. Most states’ public higher education systems are controlled by a governing board, while Michigan’s 15 universities

“The University doesn’t need to follow any of our rules,” Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor said. “They don’t follow our zoning; they don’t follow our planning. And, of course, they have the resources to do what they want when they want to do it.”

The perfect example of this dynamic is the 27-foot-tall, 48-foot-wide billboard between Michigan Stadium and the Crisler Center. The huge electronic sign was put up in 2013 much to the dismay of permanent residents.

At the time, then-City Councilmember Taylor urged the University to take it down, arguing that it was a distraction to drivers. Former University President Mary Sue Coleman responded by saying that it is the responsibility of the driver to not be distracted.

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“They did not mean me when they said disabled” Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome sarily. (hEDS), shared her experience with this reality in an It is easier for a doctor’s unThey tell me I look so email to The Michigan Daily. conscious biases to play a healthy. They tell me I’m greater role in their evaluajust so young. They just can- “Because I do not look visibly tion and course of treatment, not believe it. They ask me if disabled, many people often particularly when conditions I’m really sick, like am I re- assume that I’m not a are not visible to a doctor, ally sure? They ask me if I’ve actually received a diagnosis.

They tell me it’s in my head, that it’s psychosomatic. They tell me it’s part of being a woman.

MARISA WRIGHT Statement Correspondent

are harmed by doctors who dismiss their concerns and improperly treat them: ProPublica reports that “a black woman is 22 percent more likely to die from heart disease than a white woman, 71 percent more likely to perish from cervical cancer, but 243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy- or childbirth-related causes.” Doctors’ bias against fat people and queer people also leads to worse health outcomes.

Thursday, August 5, 2021 — 19 For my own primary condition endometriosis, patients typically face a diagnostic delay of seven to 10 years from the onset of disease. In my case, a doctor misdiagnosed me with appendicitis — for which I underwent an appendectomy — seven years before I received my proper diagnosis of endo. For those seven years, my pain was untreated and the progression of the disease continued.

Aside from any symptoms, the reality of living with an invisible condition is that people — doctors, family, friends, professors, coworkers and so on — simply won’t believe you. They will label you as overdramatic, tell you that you’re just lazy or call you a liar.

LSA senior Cheyanne Killin, who has multiple chronic illnesses stemming from a rare genetic connective tissue disorder called hypermobile

Eileen Kelly/Daily tually sick, or, worse, that I’m actually only mildly sick and exaggerating my conditions for personal gain and/or malicious intent,” Killin wrote.

which is the case for 96% of the nearly 133 million Americans with at least one chronic illness. In this way, a doctor’s biases about one’s identities can stand in the way of propIn medical settings, this kind er treatment. of disbelief can have extreme consequences. Proper di- Doctors are less likely to agnosis and treatment are believe and properly treat predicated by a doctor tak- women’s pain than men’s. ing their patient’s concerns Doctors also undertreat and description of symptoms Black Americans’ pain relaseriously. When they don’t, tive to white Americans. patients can suffer unneces- Black women in particular

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“Especially if you initially go in for painful periods, you are often dismissed because you know, periods are supposed to be painful or whatever,” she told me in a Zoom interview.

DeLuca described the impact this dismissal had on her.

“And then you’re sort of hit with that wall and then you can’t say anything else,”DeLuca said. “When you are immediately dismissed I shut down, I feel like I sort of I can’t say anything else because you know they’re not going to listen and so, then you try it again with another doctor and you get the same experience.”

There are so many things people tell me about my own body. If they’re not telling me, they’re second-guessing the information and descriptions I share.

Me disclosing an illness or disability that is invisible, which is to say it is not observable or evident in any readily apparent sense, often leads to these kinds of reactions. Without the ability to observe my condition, many people question or refuse to believe its validity.

in trying to receive a proper diagnosis and having doctors dismiss her pain as a woman.

Killin has felt this acutely While part of this diagnostic when treated by male physi- delay is due to doctors’ lack cians. of training on conditions that are traditionally associated “I was often told that I was with the female reproductive just anxious, stressed, or system, it is also certainly pregnant,” Killin wrote. “If caused in part by doctors those were negated, like a who dismiss their patient’s negative pregnancy test, I pain as “part of being a womwas just shown the door an.” without options or treatment. I’ve been sick since Art & Design senior Anna October 2017, and I am just DeLuca, who has endometrinow finding out exactly what osis and chronic migraines, is going on with my body.” shared a similar experience

In addition to complicating diagnosis and treatment in medical contexts, the pervasiveness of disbelief of invisible conditions affects issues of access to resources for chronically ill and disabled people, including government benefits and accommodations at school or work. At the University of Michigan, the laborious process required to prove a need for accommodations through the Services for Students with Disabilities office can leave a lot of students out.

DeLuca explained how the form SSD requires to request accommodations is “so long” and requires that your doctor complete most of it.

Statement

20 — Thursday, August 5, 2021

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

How women student athletes navigate college life ing to the women’s games, having to prove yourself while the men do not and the to look good This March, outcry arose pressure afduring the NCAA March Madness tournament when Sedona Prince, a forward for the Oregon Ducks women’s basketball team, posted a TikTok comparing her team’s weight room to that of their male counterparts. The men’s weight The Michigan women’s room was an exgymnastics team celebrates pansive gym full of winning the Big Ten Championmachines, equipment ships in 2019. and free weights. The women’s weight room was t e r a single rack of dumbbells sweating for 90 minutes and yoga mats. The NCAA claimed it was a space issue, straight, for instance. I wonbut the TikTok clearly shows dered, then, how these realithat the women’s area had ties play out on the collegiate ample room for a full gym. level, where one’s sport is And while the internet ex- not a hobby but a job in ploded in discourse and de- the public eye. bate, many women athletes Studentexpressed that these dispari- athties are nothing new.

MAGDALENA MIHAYLOVA Statement Correspondent

Indeed, this controversy is a reflection of a greater issue in sports and in society overall.

Women athletes, and especially women athletes of color, are not only paid less for the same or better work, but they are denied equal economic resources and facilities, do not receive fair marketing and coverage and suffer stereotyping, sexualization and discrimination.

Despite the passage of Title IX in 1972, women athletes today — at the club, high school, collegiate and professional levels — face substantial roadblocks to true equality. And while the University of Michigan does a good job supporting its student athletes who are women, the institution of sport overall is still skewed to support men and their success.

As a woman who grew up playing competitive soccer, I am well aware of the social disparities that occur on and off the field — less fans com-

I spoke with seven women from six different sports — track & field and cross country, gymnastics, rowing, field hockey, softball and lacrosse — in the hopes of learning about their experiences as women student athletes at the University.

As a non-studentathlete, I have witnessed within myself, and among other peers who don’t play college sports, a tendency to make assumptions or stereotypes about student-athletes, especially with gendered, racial and sport-specific lenses. And while these seven women graciously allowed me a look into their academic, athletic and personal lives with common themes linking their experiences, this article is merely a glance into the di-

The Michigan women’s field hockey team celebrates a win after a game with Northwestern.

letes are already under a lot of pressure from having to balance schoolwork, games and practice, so how do their differing identities — like which sport they play, their gender, race and socio-economic status — and the intersectionality of these identities impact their ability to thrive in athletics and academics, as well as their self-esteem, identity

Closure letter and months later, I was living much closer to my mom and my sister Sydney’s Graduation looms on the ho- family, which I liked because rizon. For every college stu- I could visit them any time I dent, the idea of graduating wanted. college holds a bittersweet flavor, caught between the I look back on the clueless satisfaction of accomplish- 18-year-old from the midment and the sadness of dle of nowhere in Northern goodbyes. For some, it holds California, who was overmore of one than the other. whelmed by the University’s It is sometimes hard to tell size and the sheer number of which is stronger. Some- people during her first few weeks of class. I remember times, the bitterness wins. how excited she was to wake At 21 years old, I’ve been a up to snow on the ground. college student for five years That girl could never have and have been at the Univer- imagined that her path sity of Michigan for three would bring her this far or of them. I took courses at a to this particular place. That community college for two her senior year would be years in my childhood state spent shut away in an apartof California before trans- ment off-campus. That by ferring to the University. My now she would have accommom encouraged me to apply plished and lost so much. since her and my stepfather’s resident status would trans- It was only three weeks into fer to me. One acceptance this winter semester that I RACHEL MCKIMMY Statement Correspondent

and worldview?

“I’m always hesitant to paint that experience as a monolith,” Armstrong said. “It differs if they’re a Black student or a student of color.

Or if they’re a student of color, and they’re female and they’re an athlete playing what is considered a ‘masculine type sport.’ So there’s a multiplicity of identities that are at play when you look at those two buckets of being a student and being an athlete.”

Indeed, identity impacts experience; even so, there are the typical obstacles most women athletes face every day. Sexist comments.

Body image issues. Social and political engagement. Viewership disparities.

These are encountered in the classroom or while competing; women athletes suffer many of the common grievances of the patriarchy and those that come with their sport.

“They’re trying to deal with a lot,” Armstrong s a i d .

“They ’re trying to be students, they’re trying to be athletes and they’re trying to be citizens … citizens of the campus, citizens of the community, citizens of the world. So that’s a lot to ask of a person to do and to do it successfully and impactfully.”

verse, And yet, just as they do on complex in- their field, court, track or stitution of sport. floor — they push through, they persevere.

Dr. Ketra Armstrong, professor of Sport Management and “Athletes, particularly, director of Diversity, Equity they’re high performing,” & Inclusion for the School of Armstrong said. “They’re Kinesiology, touched on the resilient, first and foremost, idea of a universal student- let’s not forget that. They’re athlete experience during a resilient.”

Zoom interview. ***

received a phone call from my sister that our mom had passed away. She lived only 25 minutes away from me, but I hadn’t risked hugging her in over a month because of the risk of coronavirus contagion. She lived alone, having separated from my stepfather a couple of years ago. The only hint I got that something was wrong was that she wasn’t responding to my texts. I didn’t know she was gone until almost 24 hours after it happened. She was only 57 years old.

Her funeral was simple. We wore masks and social distanced. We ordered a bouquet of flowers in her favorite color, purple, looking as much like a bouquet of wildflowers she would have picked herself as we could make it. I played her favorite music and put together a long slideshow of photos of her, even though she never liked having her picture taken. We felt we needed some event to celebrate her life, to mark the fact that she was gone even

though we couldn’t believe it, couldn’t accept it. Closure was the idea, but we felt and still feel no closure.

I mark every accomplishment now in my mind on a calendar of months since she was alive. My first column in The Michigan Daily

The University of Michigan has 13 men’s and 14 women’s varsity sports, but if you’re not an avid sports fan, you are probably only familiar with two: men’s football and men’s basketball. Indeed, these teams

games are more exciting), but they have to fight for equal representation in marketing and media. The NCAA was criticized this year not only for the weight room fiasco but also because of its March Madness Twitter account.

Its bio reads: “The official NCAA March Madness destination for all things Division I NCAA Men’s Bas-

ketb a l l .”

It seems Members of the Michigan women’s unfair to softball team pose for a photo in the claim that Law Quad. “just not enough a r e people like watchcentral to our ing women’s sports” when campus spirit and iden- there’s barely a mention of tity: The fall football season the women’s tournament builds a sense of camara- — how are you supposed to derie even for those who get new fans if people aren’t barely watch the games, and aware of the games? the March Madness tournament is another excuse to It’s a phenomenon that LSA get drunk and excited over a fifth-year senior Nadine maize-colored jersey. Much Stewart, a lacrosse player of these sports’ popularity studying Biopsychology, comes from American cul- Cognition and Neuroscience, ture and tradition, as well described to me over a Zoom as the history of the athletic call. Stewart explained how program, but it is sustained the University’s women’s through powerful market- lacrosse games are not ing and resourcing — which televised; rather, they are is possible, considering these streamed on Big Ten Netsports are the major drivers work Plus, which requires a of revenue for the University. paid subscription.

The NCAA’s model, which has shifted from providing “Some people obviously holistic academic and athlet- don’t have (BTN Plus), so ic opportunities to optimiz- they can’t watch, so we can’t ing profit, has led to the cuts really get a huge following,” of many D1 athletic programs Stewart said. and hindered the growth of already existing ones.

The Michigan women’s lacrosse team motivating each For women’s athletics, this other before a game. model can be an even deeper This lack of proper representhreat, as retaining popu- tation is also visible in the larity and viewership has sports media. In one study proven difficult for these of sports news in Southern teams in the past. Not only California, it was found that do women athletes have to while women and girls make break through patriarchal up 40% of all athletes, they stereotypes about who sport received only about 4% of is for (traditionally, men) and news coverage. which sports are “better” to watch (i.e. claims that men’s Since then, I published my first article in a non-student publication and I won a Hopwood Undergraduate Nonfiction Award: the outcome of efforts she witnessed but of which never got to see the rewards. On the one hand, I can’t imagine having done any more or better in my un-

me how proud of me she was.

I still haven’t taken any graduation pictures.

This chapter has a bitter ending for a lot of people, with not a lot of closure. I know this is not the senior year any of us imagined, distanced

Eileen Kelly/Daily this semester was spread out on her coffee table when we went to her house to begin packing her things. She had said she planned to frame it.

from friends and family and dergraduate career.

But on the other side of that, normal life.

I thought that I would be taking graduation pictures with her now. She would be telling

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Opinion

Thursday, August 5, 2021 — 21

OPINION OLIVIA MOURADIAN Daily Opinion Writer

When asked about my strengths, my default answers are writing and “people skills.” What do I mean by “people skills?” While definitions vary, I would define them as the communicative tools used to connect with another person. I put them in quotations because these tools carry different meanings for different people.

Similar to the blurry distinction between a good writer and a great writer, there is not a universal metric by which someone can be pinpointed as “great with people” versus “good with people.” This blurriness continues to create doubt in my abilities. It is easy for me to say I’m not actually a good writer and, instead, say my professors have just graded my work easily. As it is almost impossible to measure human connection, it is also easy for me to say that I’m not actually good with people. With these doubts, which are exacerbated by societal pressures to validate skills through quantifying their value, I often find myself scrambling to explain how these immeasurable skills are actually my strengths.

Alec Cohen/Daily

of this, we have mistakenly come to equate measurability — more specifically, quantifiability — to value. And considering the management system of many universities, our society’s general marginalization of soft skills can be traced back to the way our education system pits studies that rely more on soft skills against ones that emphasize The idea of constantly doubt- hard skills. ing my strongest abilities is both contradictory and limit- Recently, responsibility-cening. However, the two skills tered management (a univerI am best at both happen to sity budgeting system under be subjective and therefore which each department has more easily belittled than autonomy over its revenue more objective skills. Com- and expenditures) has bepared to experience with come the budgeting model Photoshop, Javascript or of choice for many academstatistical modeling, experi- ic institutions. Under this ence with people or writing model, large classes — which sounds obvious and self-ag- are more profitable — are grandizing. With skills that prioritized over smaller, disare less quantifiable, it be- cussion-based classes, which comes easier to assume that typically happen to be classes the majority of people have that are centered around soft the same capabilities with skills. Operating as busithese skills because distinc- nesses, universities further tions between different pro- devalue subjective skills and ficiencies in them are less the discussion-based classabsolute. es that go along with these

abilities are still valued by American companies, with 61% claiming that skills like communication and problem solving are the most valued in prospective hires. In a study conducted by Boston College, Harvard University and the University of Michigan, soft skills training was found to increase worker productivity by 12%. With this additional productivity and subsequent increase in retention rates, the training produced a 256% net return on investment after nine months.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner believes the skills gap associated with soft skills is the widest in the United States.

It is undeniable: There is ample evidence to support the argument that soft skills are valuable and capitalistically productive. Even so, justifying the importance of soft skills using statistics — quantifiable numbers — on why these skills are valuable in the workplace perpetuates and perhaps even validates our society’s obsession with numbers and hard facts.

skills because they are not The last few years have wit- as fiscally advantageous for When researching why soft nessed an increased emphaskills are important, the vast

From The Daily: Acknowledging Angell — we need a comprehensive U-M history lesson THE MICHIGAN DAILY EDITORIAL BOARD

In the coming weeks, select students in the College of Literature, Science & the Arts will receive an email congratulating them for being named James B. Angell Scholars. The award, named for the University of Michigan’s third president, celebrates any LSA student who receives an “A” record for two consecutive terms at the University. While we wish to offer congratulations

for these students’ diligent dedication to their studies, it is also critical to learn about the award’s namesake.

While Angell’s legacy is complex — and potentially problematic — it is unlikely that more than a small percentage of the students that walk through the doors of Angell Hall are aware of this legacy.

Amid a nationwide reckoning with the memorialization of controversial historical figures, the University must also partake in increasing our

efforts to thoroughly understand the leaders we choose to highlight on campus, including Angell. Angell served as University President from 1871 to 1909. During his 38 year tenure as president, the University’s enrollment more than tripled. He was adamant that education be accessible to all, not just for the elite. To this point, he emphasized the admission of first-generation college students; in 1880, fewer than one in four students had parents with a college degree.

your perspective. More generally, communication allows you to both set and maintain expectations for yourself and others. While proficiencies in different soft skills are clearly economically profitable, more importantly, they are personally fulfilling and socially valuable. Soft skills enable us to be empathetic and self-aware members of society without losing our analytical side — that is priceless.

Black students should feel safe going to the library SIERRA ÉLISE HANSEN Daily Columnist

hired by the National Football League, only to have his job offer rescinded due to his criminal record, despite his University of Michigan degree and letters of recommendation from his professors. Gordon was stopped because he was Black, and that a confluence of biases which permeate through both policing practices and society caused his life to be upended. My rage is directed at not only the racist systems held in place by entities such as DPSS that have severely impacted his life, but also with the administration here at the University.

On the night of April 11, 2019, Columbia University student Alexander McNabb entered a library on Barnard University’s campus. Students at Columbia — with which Barnard is affiliated — are permitted to freely access and use Barnard’s campus buildings and resources. Despite having done nothing at all to indicate himself as a threat of any kind, McNabb was stopped by campus police and physically restrained. A Barnard student captured the encounter, which many described as an incidence of Although Gordon was proracial profiling because the moted to impressive posischool library’s ID policy tions within the University

‘‘

While University leadership would likely respond to thse allegations by asserting that U-M has a rich history of activism and stands with marginalized groups on campus, it has clearly shown the multitude of ways it doesn’t prioritize the well-being of our community’s most vulnerable.

‘‘

majority of articles are centered around soft skills’ importance in the workplace.

However, the true power of soft skills lies in their unavoidable and fundamental presence in our daily lives. Self-awareness allows you to recognize your own sis on science, technology, strengths, fears, insecuriengineering and math educaties and priorities — and also tion and careers, a decline of those of the people around humanities majors that rely you. The ability to negotiate more on soft skills and the enables you to effectively and resulting employability fears Despite this prioritization respectfully voice your opinassociated with this decline. of hard skills, these “soft” ions without losing sight of Somewhere in the midst

Your skills don’t need to be quantifiable to be valuable

them. However, what is valuable to a business and what is valuable to society should not and cannot be viewed as equivalent to each other. The mere fact that classes centered on soft skills are not as profitable to universities as classes centered on hard skills does not mean soft skills themselves are not as beneficial to society as hard skills are.

Sierra Élise Hansen, Columnist

after 11 p.m. is unevenly en- and continued to be an honor This is not to say that soft forced. McNabb is Black, and roll student even after his inskills are more important he wasn’t bothering anyone. carceration, the school arguthan hard skills. This is simably created yet another perply to say that they are also Toward the end of the vid- manent barrier to students important — and not at the eo, one of the five campus with a prison record. On Feb. expense of more measurable security officers that con- 1, 2019, the University impleskills. As a society, we seem vened around McNabb for mented SPG 601.38, which to have manufactured a scar- no apparent reason can be requires faculty, staff, stucity mindset around the skills seen wandering off with dent employees, volunteers we deem valuable. With all McNabb’s ID, imploring and visiting scholars to reof the multifaceted merits McNabb to come outside port all felony charges, even of both hard and soft skills, with him. The ID clearly if not convicted, to the Unithere is no need to depreciate identified McNabb as a Co- versity. one set of skills for the sake lumbia student. Clearly and of another set of skills with understandably distressed, Instead of removing possible completely unrelated assets he can be heard asking, “You instruments for discriminatand uses. Instead, we should saw my ID, what else do you ing against individuals such take different kinds of skills need to see?” as Gordon, based on preconfor what they are: differceived notions held about ent kinds of skills, each with While this might seem like a criminality that can have an one-off occurrence at anoth- indelible, lifelong influence their own nuanced worth. er institution that can be ex- on someone’s interactions Angell also oversaw the first plained as an unfortunate in- with society, the University female students to join the cident where mistakes have has created another. FurUniversity at the beginning been made, it very clearly ther, there is no evidence to of his term in 1870 and 1871 isn’t. Due to the demands suggest that criminal history and later became a vocal sup- of the Graduate Employees’ information in general adOrganization demands — in missions decisions improves porter of co-education. particular its call to cut the public safety.

Angell saw education as a University of Michigan’s public service and greatly ex- funding to its Department of Seeing the University step in panded resources for faculty Public Safety and Security in to assist a smart and ambiresearch to this end. Under half — stories about students tious alum and enable him his leadership, the number of color at U-M experienc- to thrive in the long-term, of departments on campus ing horrifying treatment by rather than only promoting grew from three to seven and DPSS have been surfacing. him to positions of visibility the number of professors One in particular, that of Jus- in service of Diversity, Equity went from 35 to 250. Histori- tin Gordon, is beyond appall- and Inclusion in the shortan James Tobin asserted that ing. He was held in limbo, term would be the right thing it was Angell who supported in a jail cell, as punishment to do. The University has not the University in becoming for going to the campus gym done the latter, but they did the leading public university without his ID. do the former while Gordon in the country. was still a student, even after His entire life has been his incarceration. stained by that injustice.

For example, Gordon was

Opinion

22 — Thursday, August 5, 2021

President Schlissel: Are you the President of U-M or the President of U-M Ann Arbor?

JACOB LEDERMAN, LIZ ROHAN, DANIELLE HELD and BENNETT WALLING Daily Opinion Contributors

Two weeks ago, University President Mark Schlissel used an evaluative survey sent to all governing faculty at the University of Michigan to ask whether they supported expanding the Go Blue Guarantee for the University’s Flint and Dearborn campuses. The survey question framed the program’s expansion as a trade-off with academic excellence and salary growth on the Ann Arbor campus. The question’s elitist connotations raised eyebrows, a bit of disbelief and understandable outrage among many campus groups.

Schlissel offered a tepid apology a few weeks later, though not in a full or public fashion. Perhaps he hoped to leave this issue behind him — yet another episode in a list of controversies that include being forced to remove his provost for sexual misconduct, overseeing a controversial COVID-19 response that many felt lacked transparency and receiving an unprecedented vote of no confidence from the 2020 Faculty Senate.

But this incident also reveals a deeper problem, both with President Schlissel and the current structure of the University: There remains a flagrant disregard for fulfilling

the role of a public institu- make the greatest impact on President Schlissel clearly tion and serving the people the families and students of does not see the three camof the state of Michigan. our state and nation. puses in this light. He has fought tooth-and-nail against President Schlissel was edu- The Flint and Dearborn cam- expanding programs like the cated and spent his career at puses instruct half of the Uni- Go Blue Guarantee. He has elite institutions, from Princeton University to Brown University to the University of California, Berkeley. Unlike his role at the University of Michigan, Schlissel’s leadership at these institutions did not carry the responsibility of developing regional, comprehensive campuses that support large numbers of working-class students.

Schlissel’s lack of experience, and clear lack of interest, in the missions and strengths of these campuses has compromised his ability to lead.

Sadly, President Schlissel seems ignorant of this — often willfully so. His administration misrepresented the goals of the One University campaign, claiming that it wants to “merge” the campuses. One University does not believe the mission of the Flint and Dearborn campuses is the same as the Ann Arbor campus. In fact, it is precisely the divergent missions of our campuses that make the University of Michigan stronger and positions us to

The University of Michigan Board of Regents have voted to discontinue investments with companies that are linked to fossil fuels.

Alec Cohen/Daily versity of Michigan’s in-state students. Close to 40% of University of Michigan-Flint and University of MichiganDearborn students are lower-income and therefore Pell Grant eligible, while almost half of Ann Arbor’s students come from the top 10% of earners. This means the Flint and Dearborn campuses are

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due to financial pressures, blatantly act like the chanceltaking away opportunities lor of the Ann Arbor campus, from these students. rather than the president of all three campuses — only His position has become in- invoking his role as president creasingly untenable and out to justify austerity on the of step with the views of fac- Flint and Dearborn campusulty, staff and students from es in the name of a distant, across the University. It is better future. also equally out of step with burgeoning support within A truly great university deour broader society for a serves a president who can more equitable higher edu- use “both-and” thinking, not cation system. “either-or.” We can marshal

In an era rightfully attuned to racial and class inequalities, Schlissel’s treatment of the Flint and Dearborn campuses undermines the institution’s commitment to justice and equity.

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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

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resisted extending other resources that would help many University of Michigan-Flint and University of Michigan-Dearborn students overcome the layered inequalities that they face on their educational journeys.

And he has stood by as these campuses have cut music and foreign language programs

At University of MichiganFlint and University of Michigan-Dearborn, students, staff and faculty think of President Schlissel as their president too. They want him to succeed, and they want him to want them to succeed.

This is why it has been so disappointing to watch him

our resources in a manner that cultivates and enhances Ann Arbor’s distinct research mission while supporting the crucial work taking place at the Flint and Dearborn campuses.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Opinion

The normalization of frat parties in Fraternity & Sorority life LIZZY PEPPERCORN Daily Opinion Writer

Since the University of Michigan welcomed its students back to campus for the 2020 fall semester, many students have felt torn between risking exposure to COVID-19 and remaining isolated.

Even when people make the choice to stay in, some still risk exposure if those they live with attend large indoor gatherings with no masks or distancing. The COVID-19 pandemic has complicated social pressures from friends, tensions with roommates and the natural desire to socialize. Amid these complications, Fraternity & Sorority Life’s life’s tight-knit, socially competitive community intensifies groupthink and places undue social pressure on members.

In order to better understand the experience and decisionmaking of FSL members, I interviewed three members whose approaches to socialization vary greatly: one sorority member, whom I will call Rachel, who is not going to fraternity parties; one sorority member, whom I will call Julia, who is going to parties at different fraternities; and one fraternity member, whom I will call Zach, who is attending his own fraternity’s parties.

48 hour period before they start showing symptoms.

This means that frequent testing and symptomchecking are not effective measures for preventing an outbreak in indoor settings. According to those interviewed, many fraternities are currently holding under-the-radar mixers with multiple different sororities weekly. It only takes one person at one party to spark the spread of COVID-19 into multiple houses in just one week.

All three FSL members told me that one of the greatest factors driving their social decisions is a fear of missing out. They said fellow members often talk about the parties and social events they attend, and not attending parties can make members feel they are missing out on important chapter bonding.

“It seems like everyone I live with has accepted that getting COVID-19 is inevitable and are just partying while they can,” Rachel said. “Everyone I talk to says that since other people in the house are, there is no point in not going. It’s hard because I feel like everyone is getting closer and making these memories together, but I have to remind myself that close, real friendships are rarely formed at parties.”

The members I interviewed seem to count the risk of catching COVID-19 as analogous to other risks that young people take, like drinking or smoking. However, the disease’s high transmission rate means that if one person in a living community adopts the risk, they raise the risk factor for their entire community. Members of FSL

Thursday, August 5, 2021 — 23

who entered the school year planning on social distancing said they now feel burdened by the risk of COVID-19 exposure but without the upside of getting to socialize.

However, this creates a dangerous feedback loop wherein people put themselves at risk based on the notion that they are missing out. They go out, making more people feel like the odd one out for not doing so, and then they contribute to the culture of partying with little regard for the greater im-

plications on the Univer- symptom checking prosity community. vide a sense of security.

However, there is still Julia, who regularly at- high inaccuracy in testtends indoor parties at ing, especially the rapid fraternities, explains that testing that many in FSL while she does not be- are opting to take, and the lieve fraternities are safe average incubation period to visit, her “frat guy for an infected person friends are getting tested with COVID-19 is 4-5 regularly and being super days. This means that an open and honest, so I feel infected individual could safe in those specific situ- test negative, continue ations.” to socialize with multiple circles of friends and Fraternity party attendees spread the disease. may feel relatively unconcerned about transmitting Infected individuals are COVID-19, as testing and most contagious in the 24-

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Elle Jimenez, President of the University of Michigan’s Panhellenic Association, commented that “The Panhellenic and IFC Executive boards … decided together that it would be in the best interest of our immediate Panhellenic and IFC communities, as well as the University of Michigan community, and the surrounding community of Ann Arbor to keep our social moratorium in place from March 11, 2020,” and that “The Panhellenic Association at the University of Michigan actively discourages attending gatherings that violate the current Washtenaw County Health Department public health order.”

Opinion

24 — Thursday, August 5, 2021

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com In the largest football stadium in the country, there is a delineation between those who purchase tickets as alumni or current students to fill the stands and those who purchase tickets out of personal interest, with no formal school attachment. Remember when fans were seen hoisting up a banner reading “Pardon our arrogance” in the stands throughout the early 2000s? Both teams reacted adversely. Filling seats and selling tickets has become stigmatized by those wearing both green and white as well as maize and blue, creating rivalry in the stands.

Pardon our arrogance JULIA VERKLAN MALONEY Daily Opinion Writer

If you were born in the state of Michigan, you likely entered this world with designated colors: green and white or maize and blue. Whether or not you grew into these colors and attended the corresponding university is where intrastate enmity arises. This is because the notoriety attached to your colors and logos extends beyond just being a fan — in-state collegiate allegiance produces predetermined archetypes that are rooted in things deeper than football banter.

Specifically, these archetypes view arrogance as a formally earned trait for those with an acceptance letter, and school pride as a mindless obsession for those without.

With the University of Michigan Athletic Department announcing the return of a college football season with spectators, the in-state rivalry between the University of Michigan and Michigan State University is bound to reignite with a year’s worth of restrained animosity emerging beneath face masks and between six feet of distance.

Regardless of your family’s membership in one of the largest living alumni bases in the world, adversaries located in East Lansing demand clarification of one’s connection to the University, validating your logo and overall

Design by Madison Grosvenor tolerability in the stands.

In their terms and perhaps even in ours, you are either an “academic Wolverine” allowed to exclaim “Go blue!” or a so-called “Walmart Wolverine” that is groundlessly affiliated.

The “academic Wolverine” is portrayed as an elitist, making many think the acronym A² stands for “arrogant asshole” in place of Ann Arbor.

The University, in the eye of the “academic,” is a public Ivy with a beautiful campus situated in a bustling city, livened with the thrill of D-I athletics and Midwest tailgating. Such sentiment causes a possessive connection to Ann Arbor for the “academic,” making an acceptance letter an implied entry permit for those wishing to take pictures in front of campus buildings or cheer

at sports games. Academic Wolverines scored above the national average on the ACT test and will both implicitly and explicitly tell you about it, legitimizing their place at the University and cementing themselves amongst the legacy of Victors.

Ann Arbor has once again been ranked the best college town in America and the University has maintained its place as the top public university in the United States for five straight years. Is that elitist for us to constantly bring up? The University is no exception to statistic and rank-heavy marketing strategies that create a sense of elitism within students, as demonstrated by the promotional brochures which declare us “Leaders and the Best,” not “Leaders and the Humble.”

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With a 23% acceptance rate, the school pride that the “academic” feels is earned.

However, our exclusive admission rate is the reason that there are not enough block M acceptance letters to go around, forcing many to purchase such school pride through season tickets or branded t-shirts. This desire for school acceptance goes beyond admission into the Ann Arbor classroom, for access to a prestigious education is not equally distributable and attainable in both financial and societal aspects.

Because of this, the “Walmart Wolverine” archetype was developed by Spartans and exacerbated by the “academic.” Often defined as a Michigan fan who has no formal affiliation to the University, the “Walmart Wolverine” gener-

ally lacks a college education, tends to have a low-paying job and therefore resorts to buying affordable Michigan gear from Walmart. The “Walmart Wolverine” is dedicated to the sports program and the Big House on a greater level than the “academic” and will recite historical successes of the football team in extensive detail and with heightened enthusiasm.

With no U-M diploma, the “Walmart Wolverine” is socialized to be looked at solely as a mindless fan by Spartans and contrasts clearly with the “academic,” and has not earned the right to brag of the University’s athletic successes and academic prestige. Implying that arrogance is confined and acceptable only to those who pay U-M tuition is in itself arrogant.

These archetypes should be dismantled, considering they stray from the intent of the University and the tenets upon which it was founded.

In the words of former University President James B. Angell, Michigan was founded and shaped to be “an uncommon education for the common man” and woman. “‘Have an aristocracy of birth if you will,” he said, “or of riches, if you wish, but give our plain boys from the log cabins a chance to develop their minds with the best learning and we fear nothing from your aristocracy.’”

The two extremes of the Wolverine archetypes reveal a sense of bitter resentment that is instilled by our instate rivals to rid the University of inclusivity it has fiercely sought to foster. We cannot accept and foster this sentiment that diminishes our mission statement.

Arts

ARTS

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Thursday, August 5, 2021, — 25

The Daily goes to the Academy Awards KARI ANDERSON, SABRIYA IMAMI, and ROSS LONDON Daily Arts Writers

Few events are as exciting or significant to a film writer as the Oscars. Normally, the event offers the chance to meet with talented actors and filmmakers during a celebration of some of the year’s biggest films. Yet in a year filled with delays and accommodations, it’s no surprise that things didn’t quite look the same at this year’s Academy Awards. The typical January date, along with the usual timeline for eligible films, was postponed by three months. The setting was, for lack of a better word, intimate: Rather than inviting all of Hollywood’s elite, the ceremony was made up of nominees, presenters and plus-ones only, held in Los Angeles’s Union Station with nominees clustered around small tables, as well as satellite locations around the world. The event was regulated by COVID-19 protocols determined by a team of epidemiologists (most of whom Oscars producer Steven Soderbergh had met during the creation of his film “Contagion”). And, unlike in normal years, press were not allowed into the in-person backstage area, but instead brought into a Zoom meeting — Michigan Daily writers newly amongst them.

Despite Zoom snafus and awkward silences, being at this year’s Academy Awards was an incredible chance to view the inner workings of the Academy and the press — an experience that we truly appreciated and enjoyed. For one thing, watching a live feed of the event without being subjected to ads was nice; for another, it was an honor to be present for some of the inspiring words from winners that only the press got to hear and cherish. So even as we were frantically switching between the ceremony and the “backstage” interviews — truly, catching the tail end of Glenn Close shaking her booty while switching back from an interview about production design was unexpected — it was certainly an experience to remember. Here are some of our favorite moments from the night. For a full list of winners, click here.

tertainment industry, is celebrating its 100th year in 2021. MPTF also operates a number of health and senior centers in Los Angeles exclusively for those in the industry. The award was accepted

by Bob Beitcher, current president and CEO of MPTF, who said in his remarks, “We really and truly take care of our own.”

Tyler Perry, the producer, director and star of the “Madea” films, was awarded for his philanthropic work, which includes picking up seniors’ grocery bills, paying Rayshard Brooks’ funeral expenses and opening Camp Quarantine to keep Tyler Perry Studios employees working during the pandemic. Perry gave a moving acceptance speech, encouraging his audience to “refuse

dedicated the win to “anyone who had the faith and the courage to hold on to the goodness in themselves, and to hold on to the goodness in each other, no matter how difficult it is to do that.”

Speaking to the press backstage, Zhao’s message was clear: “It’s pretty fabulous to be a woman in 2021.”

Daniel Kaluuya’s charm and passion After winning Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Black Panther Chairman Fred Hampton in “Judas and the Black Messiah,” Daniel Kaluuya’s acceptance speech touched on many different topics with breathless excitement. He shouted out costar LaKeith Stanfield (who was also nominated in the category) and praised the

Every word Youn Yuh-jung said

circumstances didn’t mean that these Oscars were all that surprising. The sweep for “Nomadland” was expected, with the exception of Best Actress in a Leading Role, which really could have gone to anyone. The one surprise that the Oscars held, the one upset that people will be talking about for years to come, was Sir Anthony Hopkins’s win in the Actor in a Leading Role category.

It’s not that his performance was weak or undeserving by any means; in fact, many believed he was most worthy of the win. It was just surprising that Chadwick Boseman (may he rest in peace) didn’t win the posthumous Academy Award everyone thought he would.

As the crass, convivial grandmother Soon-ja in “Minari,” Youn Yuh-jung never failed to switch between laughout-loud wit and heartwarming sentiments with ease. At Sunday’s Academy Awards, she did the same, accepting the award for Best Supporting Actress with humility and humor alike. She opened her speech on a light note: “As you know, I’m from Korea and actually my name is Yuh-jung Youn, and most of European people call me Yuh-Youn and some of them call me Yuh-jung. But tonight, you are all forgiven.”

Her joking forgiveness was accompanied by a lovely thank you to “Minari” director Lee Isaac Chung and the Whether Chadwick Boseother “Minari” actors: “We man was more deserving of

“Soul”’s success, Peter Docter responded very emphatically: “Sleep. A lot of sleep.”

“I have had a group dinner with Kathryn Bigelow, and definitely fangirled big time,” Chloé Zhao admitted, revealing that she did have a connection to the only other female Best Director award winner.

“To begin with, (“Another Round”) was a celebration of alcohol,” Thomas Vinterberg stated, which fits the film’s title.

Emerald Fennell confessed that the making of “Promising Young Woman” stemmed from her hope “to make something … that people would want to go and see even if it’s about something difficult and troubling … and you would talk about it afterwards.”

For Pippa Erhlich, “My Octopus Teacher” provided a “unique opportunity to tell a story about love and respect and awe between human beings and the natural world.”

“Oh, there’s absolutely going to be an EGOT in my future hopefully,” H.E.R. confidently disclosed after winning an Oscar on Sunday night along with her Grammy earlier on in the year.

Krislam Chin (The Academy) hate.” He said that he is dedicating the award to those who “stand in the middle,” adding, “that’s where healing happens. That’s where conversation happens. That’s where change happens.”

Everything’s Coming Up Nomadland

Nomadland was the most awarded film at this year’s Oscars, winning in three of its six nominated categories, including Best Picture. Critics and bettors were fairly certain that Nomadland would win, and The Daily predicted it too. There’s something about that sweeping yet subtle narrative and grand imagery of the American landscape that was sure to win the hearts of the Recognizing those who are Academy’s voters. Frances giving back in Hollywood McDormand produced and starred in Nomadland, so The Academy awarded two she took the stage twice, also Jean Hersholt Humanitarian winning for Best Actress in a Awards this year, with one Leading Role. going to the Motion Picture and Television Fund and an- At the end of the group Best other to Hollywood super- Picture acceptance speech, star Tyler Perry. MPTF and McDormand paid tribute by Perry join the likes of Frank howling at the moon to NoSinatra, Audrey Hepburn madland production sound and Oprah Winfrey as the mixer Michael Wolf Snyder, 40th and 41st winners of the who recently died at age 35. award, which is named for a Chloé Zhao won the Oscar Danish-born actor, philan- for Best Directing as the secthropist and one-time MPTF ond woman and first woman president. MPTF, a mutual of color recognized with this aid organization for the en- award. In her remarks, she

Black Panther Party for their work in the Black community: “They showed us (the) power of union, the power of unity, that when they play divide and conquer, we say unite and ascend.” He finished his speech with a candid and now viral declaration of his conception, but more delightful were the words that came after: “So I’m so happy to be alive, so I’m going to celebrate that tonight, do you know what I’m saying?”

became a family,” she said.

the Best Actor win than Anthony Hopkins is up for debate; the events of the night just made the whole thing more confusing. When the Best Picture award was presented prior to the Best Actress and Best Actor award, most people assumed that the Academy was saving Best Actor for last to have some sort of tribute for Boseman.

Instead, a shocked audience heard Hopkins’s name called … and the night was over.

Having expected to lose in his category, Anthony Hopkins didn’t attend the show on Sunday, choosing to stay at home amidst the pandemic and what he believed to be a sure loss. The lackluster ending to Hollywood’s biggest night seemed fitting for the year Hollywood has had.

With so many film releases put on hold and so much chaos in the entertainment industry over the past year or so, to have the Oscars end with no Best Actor speech and a major controversy in the category actually seemed right, in a very strange, very wrong way. Here’s hoping the 94th Academy Awards fare better than this year’s.

In the media center, Youn didn’t stop providing some of the best responses of the night. When answering a question about the importance of new stories, Youn spoke about the need to tell stories without the need to delineate and categorize people. “Even (a) rainbow has seven colors,” she said, following up this beautiful sentiment with another: “We have the same warm heart …

It’s an opportunity for us to There’s no denying that the share in the story together.” man is charismatic. Backstage, the charm only contin- After a long and successued as he talked to the press. ful career in Korea, it was He spoke more about the in- gratifying to watch Youn fluence of Fred Hampton and receive recognition for her the positive impact that “Ju- performance, but it was even das” will hopefully have on more wonderful to watch those who watch it: “The fact her charmingly and humbly that I continue to stand on work her way through press this stage is because of what questions. At one point she he did. I think it’s just that, joked that she blacked out that the legacy will continue. for a moment when presentIt will continue, and people er Brad Pitt called her name will want to engage with the for the award. “I’m still not story and the film and the myself,” she told us with a man.” His passion for the smile. “So don’t ask me too story and the role was pal- many questions, please.” pable and really wonderful to see. During an event after the Anthony Hopkins and Chadwick Boseman main ceremony, Kaluuya said it frankly: “I just do work I Some of our other favorbelieve in.” Kaluuya’s per- There were many unusual ite quotes from this year’s sonality and positivity made aspects of this year’s Oscars, Oscars: him a particularly bright spot from its small crowd to its limited choice in films to After being asked what his in this year’s event. nominate, but these strange next project would be after

50 years into her career, Yuh-jung Youn announced, “I don’t believe in competition, especially in our field, because we are comparing different movie(s), different war(s).”

Thrilled with her win in the Makeup and Hairstyling category, Mia Neal summarized her feelings about the night: “Listen. I never got married.

I didn’t go to prom. (This is it) all rolled up in one.”

Tyler Perry’s mother was with him during his winner’s speech; later on in the night, he said, “I could feel (my mother) in the moment (of my speech). I could feel her.

Any time I’m up there, I’m carrying her with me in all she went through and all we went through together.”

A final note Though the film industry has faced many challenges in the pandemic, the decision to invite press to the Oscars via Zoom actually made the event more inclusive. The Academy was able to welcome 400+ individual press members from a giant range of outlets to join their “Virtual Media Center.” Although we had sent in our applications earlier this month, we had no idea that we would actually be accepted. This accreditation offered us the first chance in The Daily’s history to watch the Oscars not just as viewers, but as press.

26 — Thursday, August 5, 2021

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Arts

Six Black-authored books to read next

Thursday, August 5, 2021 — 27

captivated by this coming-of- justice, criminal justice, pubage story — it’s a poetic ren- lic health and safety. dition of an essential tale.

“Homie” by Danez Smith Recommended by Daily Arts Writer Lilly Pearce

ELIZABETH YOON, TRINA PAL, LILLY PEARCE and BRENNA GOSS

“Sag Harbor” by Colson Whitehead Recommended by Daily Arts Writer Trina Pal “Sag Harbor” isn’t Colson Whitehead’s most wellknown novel. “The Underground Railroad” or “The Nickel Boys” would take those titles. Yet, the light charm of “Sag Harbor” makes it my favorite among all of Whitehead’s books.

“Dread Nation” by Justina Ireland Recommended by Daily Book Review Beat Editor Elizabeth Yoon “Dread Nation,” by Justina Ireland seamlessly incorporates zombies into U.S. history, spinning a believably complex, exciting and honest story of two girls caught in an absurd reality. While the U.S. is divided fighting the Civil War, the zombie apocalypse begins. To address the growing number of deaths, the U.S. drafts the “Native and Negro Reeducation Act” to train children as bodyguards for the wealthy. Beyond being a fantastically addictive read, Ireland tackles complex identity issues with great asexual and bisexual representation.

Daily Book Review Beat Editor, Daily Arts Writer, Daily Arts Writer, Daily Arts Contributor The Ann Arbor District Library is a magical place. In fact, any local library, bookstore or streetside lending library is likely to have the best, most authentic book recommendations. The Daily’s Book Review writers certainly think so — so, in the same spirit of small city book recommendations, we offer our small list of books

by Black writers that might have slipped past the New York Times Best Sellers list.

Some of these books are non-fiction, others are literary fiction and some are poetry collections and fantasy.

Please peruse our small list for your next spring read. — Elizabeth Yoon, TMD Book Review Editor

and held close. “Homie” is a profound work of love that Smith easily achieves with their unparalleled language and craft.

Design by Meghana Tummala “Sag Harbor” follows a group of Black teenagers at their summer retreat in Sag Harbor, Long Island, adjacent to the wealthy, predominantlywhite East Hamptons. The plot is lighthearted and airy, but Whitehead’s writing is razor-sharp. Most of all, the novel is just plain funny. Read “Sag Harbor” this spring for a glimpse of Whitehead’s more comedic but no less adept work.

debut novel is a heartbreaking novel told from the perspective of Makeda, a young, adopted, Black girl who struggles with her identity.

It’s an important story that tackles racism and mental illness, while also exploring the complex and powerful relationships between families and friends. Lockington incorporates several styles of writing — prose, poetry and letters — that create layered dynamics between the “For Black Girls Like Me” characters and helps demonby Mariama J. Lockington strate the complexity of disRecommended by Daily Arts covering who you are. While Writer Lilly Pearce targeted toward young readMariama J. Lockington’s ers, people of all ages will be

“Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement” Recommended by Daily Arts Contributor Brenna Goss “Beyond Survival” is a collection of essays by a variety of organizers, activists and authors of color that lays out the steps we must take to replace punitive mass incarceration with community-based transformative and restorative justice practices. It’s an incredibly important read for anyone interested in racial

“Homie” is Danez Smith’s latest collection of poems, a radiant array of themes that involve remarkable explorations of friendship and grief to thunderous examinations of the violence and xenophobia that infect our nation. Within these themes lie other corporeal narratives that touch on race, queerness and illness. Smith crafts beautiful intersects between their poems that result in a perfect constellation of poetry. It’s the kind of book meant to be read again and again, shared among friends

“A Song of Wraiths and Ruin” by Roseanne A. Brown Recommended by Daily Arts Contributor Brenna Goss Roseanne A. Brown’s novel is a wonderful YA book filled with magic, myth, tragedy and redemption. Both of the main characters are captivating in their own right and even more so together — even though they’re both trying to kill each other. Brown created a beautifully written narrative filled with West African folklore, adventure and a thrilling battle of wits.

It will keep you glued to the page until the very end.

The great enigma of Trisha Paytas LANIE BROTHERTON Daily Arts Writer

To a generation whose years of crucial brain development were spent watching Filthy Frank bake hair into a cake, Shane Dawson attempt to be

ing beauty-related content on her channel “blndsundoll4mj.” Outside of her YouTube channel, Paytas appeared on several television shows and music videos, including an episode of TLC’s “My Strange Addiction” in

ous videos, it was not hard to tell that these titles were written with viewers’ reactions in mind; Trisha Paytas was self-aware at this point, she got so many views that it didn’t matter.

LEARNING THAT

TRANSCENDS

BORDERS This image comes from the Youtube video “Trisha & Ethan Do Oddly Satisfying Trends - Frenemies #30,” posted by H3 Podcast From this point on, Paytas’s steady catalog of beauty tips and fashion hauls was interrupted by more and more of these jolting, off-topic rants until her “normal” videos were few and far between.

Paytas could be praised for her savviness: She supplied some good old-fashioned not-safe-for-work shock value and, like clockwork, she When Paytas started diver- always got enough attention sifying her YouTube content to keep going with vast moin the early 2010s, things got mentum. even more interesting. She began “trolling” viewers in The turbulent landscape of 2013, appearing to dumb her- the internet doesn’t let popself down with videos like ular things stay popular for “Why I’m Voting for Mitt long. To stay popular forevRomney,” “Why Women er, Trisha Paytas had to find Can’t Be Funny” and “Do new ways to entertain.

Dogs Even Have Brains?” AfIn the beginning, Paytas ter glimpsing her somewhat was relatively tame, posttypical personality in previfunny and gamers celebrate bloodshed and gore on the physics-based biking game Happy Wheels, the word “absurd” has lost its meaning. One can only be shocked

by YouTube’s absolute worst so many times; however, the blonde-haired, vivacious Trisha Paytas continues to amuse even the most jaded of audiences. While creators on YouTube almost always fade into irrelevance, the monolith that is Trisha Paytas has yet to crumble, clinging onto popularity via her unpredictable style of content and extensive history of controversies long after her start in 2007.

which she confesses her selftanning obsession and an appearance in Eminem’s 2009 music video for “We Made You.” Her humble beginnings were unremarkable. Her character — if she had one — was that of another early2000s California bimbo donning blonde hair and orangetinted skin.

II.UMICH.EDU/PICS

28 — Thursday, August 5, 2021

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Michigan Online: In-demand courses on demand Michigan Online is your gateway to free online courses taught by innovative U-M faculty and partners. Level up with online classes to supplement your coursework, master fundamental concepts or discover new passions.

Learn more about Michigan Online and our courses at

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