2023-03-15

Hundreds of students, faculty and community members at the University of Michigan gathered in the Hill Auditorium Tuesday afternoon to officially inaugurate and install University President Santa Ono into office. Delegates and representatives from nearly 50 other universities also attended the ceremony.

University Provost Laurie McCauley opened the ceremony, welcoming Ono and commending him for his work thus far at the University. McCauley also described Ono’s ability to match the present needs of the University.

“During every major chapter in history … our presidents have been responsible for asking the fundamental question: how can the University of Michigan contribute to the public good in this moment?” McCauley said. “Today I’m so proud to say, without a doubt, that we have found someone worthy to ask and answer that fundamental question.”

Victor J. Dzau, president of the United States National Academy of Medicine, spoke after McCauley and mentioned that Ono is the first Asian-American president in the University’s history, going on to describe Ono’s ability to connect with a community.

“(Ono) is driven by his mission and values, which allowed him to persevere through challenges and provide steady compassionate guidance through difficult times,” Dzau said.

Allen Liu, associate professor of mechanical engineering and chair of the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs, welcomed Ono on behalf of the University faculty and expressed his hopes for a fruitful partnership between the faculty and Ono.

“I’m confident that under Ono’s leadership we will grow and prosper as an institution,” Liu said. “On behalf of the faculty, I will once again give my warmest welcome to Ono, and we look forward to having a positive and collaborative relationship with Ono for many years to come.”

Michigan Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist welcomed Ono on behalf of the state of Michigan and spoke about the University — his alma mater — and its value as a place of empowerment for its students.

“The University of Michigan is nothing if not a place where people come to respond to cynicism with sincerity and despair with determination,” Gilchrist said. “That embodies who we are as Michiganders: bold problem solvers who are not afraid to think outside of every box.”

Hanna Holborn Gray, former president of the University of Chicago, spoke about the challenges that come with working in higher education, which she said she believes Ono will face during his presidency.

“The world of higher education is struggling, today, with a widespread sense of crisis, a time of questioning and sharp conflict over the quality and constant performance of its institutions, of doubt as to whether higher education is doing its job, uncertainty as to what that job should be and how it should be

accomplished,” Gray said. Gray went on to express her confidence in Ono’s ability to face the challenges she described. “You understand the current problems very well, and you will confront them, as you have always done, with determination, openness, with patience and courage, consulting widely and wisely to reach solutions that will command respect,” Gray said.

Professor Earl Lewis, director and founder of the U-M Center for Social Solutions, spoke in a video message played in the auditorium about the importance of service in the role of a university president. Lewis also urged the students, faculty and staff to work with Ono to enact change.

“Today, I call on the University of Michigan community to engage, to challenge when called for, to support when necessary, to advance

always, to care deeply and to believe in the power of this great institution to transform lives, and thereby the world,” Lewis said.

The speeches were interspersed with performances from U-M professors, students and Ono’s brother. Following the speeches, Paul Brown, chair of the Board of Regents, formally installed Ono as U-M president.

Ono went on to address the

audience, giving thanks to the leadership, faculty, staff and students of the University, as well as those who spoke at the ceremony and his family.

“Thank you again, all of you, for this opportunity and for your faith in me,” Ono said. “It is a singular honor and privilege to be inaugurated today to serve as the University of Michigan’s 15th president.”

About 600 University of Michigan students, faculty and community members gathered in the Rackham Auditorium Wednesday evening to hear from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and CNN news anchor Chris Wallace about the intersection of politics and media. The event was hosted by Wallace House Center for Journalists, Ford School of Public Policy and U-M Democracy & Debate as part of the ongoing Democracy in Crisis series which hosts conversations with journalists and public servants to discuss the role of the press in protecting democracy.

University President Santa Ono opened the event by emphasizing the importance of civil discourse on political issues, specifically highlighting the role of the media in this realm.

“In today’s stifling atmosphere of political tribalism and partisanship, it is so much more essential that we make

every effort to safeguard our democracy through education, civic engagement and wellinformed debate,” Ono said.

“And journalism, especially tough, fair-minded journalists such as Chris Wallace, have essential roles in this continuous work of informing, challenging and revealing.”

Wallace began the conversation by asking Whitmer how she plans to reduce gun violence and ensure students feel safe at Michigan state schools and colleges, especially in the

wake of the mass shooting at Michigan State University that left three students dead and five in critical condition. Whitmer said various gun reform bills making their way through the state legislature right now are critical first steps in preventing future mass shootings, but are not the entire solution.

“It is maddening that in this country — only in the U.S. — the number one killer of young people is guns,” Whitmer said.

Members of the Graduate Employees’ Organization gathered to protest on the Diag Tuesday afternoon, directly in the path of the planned procession route for the inauguration of University President Santa Ono. The protest occurred the day after GEO announced the filing of an unfair labor practice charge against the University of Michigan.

During the protest, GEO members toted signs demanding a living wage for graduate workers and circled the block “M” at the center of the Diag. The protesters also shouted chants in support of GEO’s demands.

“Three percent won’t pay the rent,” the protestors chanted. “Cut tuition, not our wages.”

In an interview with The Michigan Daily, GEO president Jared Eno spoke on the ongoing contract negotiations between GEO and the University.

“HR has suggested that (graduate workers) take an effective pay cut,” Eno said. “The March 1 deadline for a tentative

contract agreement has passed over the break, and HR does not seem to have taken that seriously. (Affording rent, housing and medication) are serious problems that grad workers need to work with the administration to solve and folks are fed up with a lack of serious engagement from HR at the negotiation table. That’s why folks are out here.”

Eno said GEO chose to protest on the Diag during the academic procession to maximize the visibility of their cause.

“Grad workers are not able to ignore not being able to pay for rent, food, medication,” Eno said. “And that means the folks in the University (can’t) ignore it either.”

LSA junior Connor Zahler told The Daily he thinks GEO chose an effective time and place to hold their protest and he supports their demands.

“I think (the protest is) an effective way to get attention on (GEO) and to get attention to their demands,” Zahler said. “I respect what they’re doing. I think that the demands are pretty understandable.”

University spokesperson Kim Broekhuizen wrote in an email

to The Daily that the University is committed to negotiating a fair contract and is awaiting a response from GEO about their compensation offer.

“The university remains committed to negotiating a strong, fair, and forward-looking contract agreement with our GSIs and GSSAs,” Broekhuizen wrote. “Our negotiators patiently await the union’s response to the compensation offer the university proposed nearly a month ago.”

During the installation ceremony following the procession, Paul Brown, chair of the U-M Board of Regents, remarked on the protests outside, saying the presence of both the GEO members and the Michigan Marching Band as the procession entered Hill Auditorium captured the essence of the University.

“When (the Regents) were walking in, Regent (Jordan) Acker turned to me and said ‘The Michigan Marching Band playing The Victors next to students protesting, if that isn’t Michigan, I don’t know what is,’” Brown said. “And it is. That was great, and that’s one of the things that makes this University so great.”

The Graduate Employee’s Organization holds protest along procession route for the inauguration of University President Santa Ono

GEO files charges against the University

The Graduate Employee’s Organization files charges against the University of Michigan for unfair labor practices

In a press release published Monday on their website, the Graduate Employees’ Organization announced they have filed unfair labor practice charges against the University of Michigan. GEO is claiming that the University has failed to bargain in good faith during their ongoing contract negotiations. GEO is also alleging that the University has failed to provide information on benefits and workplace safety during negotiations, which employers are legally obligated to do under Michigan State Law.

According to the press release, GEO and the University had agreed they would have a tentative 20232026 contract agreement by March 1, as outlined in Article XXVI of their previous contract. According to that contract, if a new contract is not negotiated by the end of the day on May 1, the 2020-2023 contract will continue to be in effect.

March 1 passed over Spring Break, with GEO claiming that the University “made no serious effort to honor” their agreed upon deadline for a tentative contract. In the press release, GEO also detailed their distaste for other actions taken by the University during contract negotiations, including considering

the use of a state mediator, which GEO claimed was highly unusual. GEO expressed their disappointment with other regulations related to the negotiation process which restricted the number of GEO members allowed in the bargaining sessions and availability of virtual options to view the negotiations.

“(The University) spent the first two months of bargaining attempting to shut grad workers out of their own contract negotiations, taking the highly unusual step of calling in a state mediator before (the University) had passed or responded to a single substantive proposal,” the release said.

In an email to The Michigan Daily, University Spokesperson Kim Broekhuizen claimed that GEO’s allegations related to the unfair labor practice charges are unfounded.

“It is disappointing that GEO has chosen to take this step as the University has and will continue to negotiate in good faith to achieve a fair contract,” Broekhuizen said.

In the press release, GEO President Jared Eno claimed the University was stalling negotiations rather than working with the union in good faith to improve the conditions of graduate students.

“Instead of working collaboratively to solve problems, the University has undermined and stalled negotiations for months, going so far as to break the law,” Eno

wrote. “Meanwhile, grad workers are selling their plasma, skipping meals, waiting inordinate amounts of time for gender-affirming care and struggling to escape abusive supervisors. Enough is enough. It’s time for the University to take these contract negotiations seriously and provide grad workers with a fair contract.”

Broekhuizen emphasized that the University continues to be committed to negotiating with GEO and settling on an equitable contract.

“The University’s focus remains at the bargaining table, where the University is committed to working through all issues pertaining to wages, hours and working conditions of GSIs’ and GSSAs’ employment,” Broekhuizen said. “This includes

the University’s latest compensation offer, which was presented to GEO on Feb. 10, and to which GEO has not yet responded.”

In their current bargaining platform, GEO is asking for an increased wage of $38,537 per year, the elimination of copay for mental health care and the establishment of an unarmed community response team on campus. GEO has been negotiating with the University since November, during which they have demonstrated on campus multiple times to garner support for their cause. There is currently an open letter with over 500 signatures from campus organizations and individuals, all voicing their support of GEO’s platform.

Ann Arbor developers address city plans for more sustainable buildings

Ann Arbor city officials and developers discuss the process and obstacles of implementing the city’s sustainable building goals

In 2020, Ann Arbor kicked off a 10-year journey to a carbon neutral future. The ambition was encapsulated in a 138-page carbon neutrality plan which addressed high-emission sectors ranging from electric grid changes to transportation initiatives to residential constructions. Buildings account for the largest output of greenhouse gasses locally and in 2020, residential buildings alone accounted for more than onefourth of the overall greenhouse gas emissions in Ann Arbor.

In line with the plan’s third strategy to achieve carbon neutrality, the plan proposes that all new constructions from 2022 to 2030 have net-zero carbon emissions, meaning new properties should only use electric energy and should be able to generate their own renewable energy on-site. More than two years into the plan, where does Ann Arbor currently stand with respect to its transformative vision?

In an email to The Michigan Daily, Brett Lenart, planning manager at the Ann Arbor Planning Commission, wrote that only a

small fraction of the buildings that have been planned or built since 2020 are conforming to the city’s sustainability goals.

“I know of one net-zero building proposed, two approved developments that require/ have committed to some level of electrification and a handful of other projects that have identified electrification as a goal, but it is not required,” Lenart wrote.

The Daily spoke to developers and city officials about the progresses and obstacles underlying Ann Arbor’s efficient building commitment.

Process improvements that enable cost-saving sustainable construction

In small- and middle-scale housing developments, some local developers are leading the way for sustainable initiatives.

In particular, two proposed projects have garnered attention from Ann Arbor residents over the past couple of months. One of them is a quadplex, which has been called the most sustainable building in Ann Arbor and even the world.

The quadplex is a new apartment building which is slated for construction in the Ann Arbor Old Fourth Ward neighborhood on North

Division Street, and is designed to generate more energy on-site than it consumes. The development’s sustainability feats earned it the title of a “passive house,” or a building that is voluntarily energy efficient.

The other project is a 79-unit apartment building which will be built on North Maple Street and relies solely on electric energy and geothermal heating — with 15% of the units being priced at a more affordable cost, the building might just be the perfect recipe for Ann Arbor’s sustainability and affordability goals.

For many developers, sustainability can be hard to achieve because of the high price tag often associated with environmentallyfriendly features like built-in renewable energy generation. According to the Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, 55% of the energy U.S. households consume is used to power heating and cooling systems. While heat pumps are more sustainable than traditional heating and cooling systems, it could also cost more to install them.

Doug Selby, the long-time Ann Arbor developer and co-founder of Meadowlark Builders behind the Old Fourth Ward quadplex,

told The Daily in an interview that efficient building envelope design — architectural models which prevent heat-loss to the outside environment and insulates the interior of the house by balancing internal and external environmental forces — could allow sustainable heating systems to be deployed in less costly ways. In general, better insulation means that less heat or air-conditioned air is lost to the outside environment.

“What do we do to make all the energy that we need to run this building on site?” Selby said. “The first thing I need to do is bring the energy consumption of this building way, way down. If you are building a low-energy building envelope, it offers the opportunity to redesign an HVAC system that uses a lot less ductwork and the equipment needs to be a lot smaller in capacity.”

Jeff Wilkerson, a local developer who leads the development of the North Maple project, said he also placed high value on constructing buildings with the envelope design. He said the reduced cost of energy has allowed him to plan for more affordable units in the building while upholding his commitment to full-electrification.

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Presidential inauguration hosts symposium on DEI, climate change

The University hosted keynote speakers and student organizations during the Inauguration Symposium

The University of Michigan held a symposium as part of University President Santa Ono’s inauguration ceremony Tuesday morning.

The Inauguration Symposium was preceded by a student poster session, two keynote speakers and discussions with a faculty panel.

The symposium opened with a poster session featuring student projects on either of the symposium topics, including “intersection of race and the identity of U-M” and “fighting climate change.” A panel of judges evaluated the posters at the symposium and awarded at least five from each topic with up to $5,000 to fund the student’s projects.

U-M Flint sophomore Alexandra

Barto and freshman Marwa

Hammami traveled to Ann Arbor for the symposium to present their poster “A walk through history,” an original walkthrough experience that would highlight diversity on campus. The pair told The Michigan Daily they wanted to attend the session to increase recognition for the U-M Flint campus.

“The University of Michigan-Flint (campus) is very underestimated,” Hammami said. “Each campus is rich with its history and how it started.”

LSA senior Thea Bultman attended the poster session representing Wolverine Support Network, a student-run organization centered on student mental health.

WSN’s poster proposed a forum where non-traditional students can voice their opinions on campus mental health resources. The University announced plans to expand student mental health resources through Uwill an outside mental health service on Monday.

Bultman told The Daily she sees this announcement as a good step for the University to take.

“I think it’s really great that they’re leaning into (Uwill),” Bultman said.

“(We want to) make sure that with CAPS’s capacity, students can still get the support they need.”

Rackham students Katherine Geraghty and Diana Martinez presented their plan for reclaiming land on the Inglewood oil field in Los Angeles, which was created as a part of a project for the School of Environment and Sustainability.

Martinez told The Daily the pair chose to bring the project to the postering session due to its range of applications.

“This project will be an initiative that will serve not only (Los Angeles),” Martinez said. “It would be more of a broad thing. With the guidelines we’re developing, it can be applied anywhere.”

Rackham student Henry Valachovic attended the poster session as a representative of Michigan Marine Energy, a new organization focused on wave energy, and presented plans for a wave energy solution in Alaska.

Valachovic told The Daily he wants to promote the use of wave energy

as an alternative to fossil fuels in Alaska.

“Over half of all wave energy potential in the U.S. is in the southern coast of Alaska,” Valachovic said. “Right now, (Alaska) relies pretty much solely on diesel energy, one of the highest carbon types of energy.”

U-M alum Frank H. Wu, president of Queens College in New York, was the event’s first keynote speaker and gave a talk titled “The University

and its Community: Past, Present and Future.” While discussing the University’s past, Wu spoke about the impact that white flight, the migration of the white middle class to the suburbs, had on the city of Detroit, which had allowed bluecollar automotive workers to retire with a pension only prior to the migration.

“Suburban sprawl soon crossed 8 Mile Road and that network of

interstate highways enabled families to empty out neighborhoods even as those highways divided some neighborhoods,” Wu said. “There (was) hope again, though, that the artisans and farmers (would return) and even the rebuilding of the magnificent train station downtown.”

The first panel was moderated by Corie Pauling, president and CEO of the U-M Alumni Association.

While discussing the future of the University, Pauling spoke on the incoming Generation Alpha, or children born after 2010.

“(Generation Alpha) is used to a world of extremes, whether we’re talking about weather, whether we’re talking about the extreme prevalence of school shootings,” Pauling said. “They are used to education without books. They learn from screens. And lastly, they are completely dedicated to saving the planet.”

The second keynote speaker was Janet Napolitano, former secretary of Homeland Security. Her session, titled “Working Together to Tackle the Climate Crisis,” focused on the steps universities can take to combat climate change. When Napolitano was president of the University of California, she introduced a plan for the university to obtain a carbon neutrality plan for 2025.

“As we’ve now discovered, however, achieving true carbon neutrality is virtually impossible without purchasing carbon offsets and carbon offsets themselves are nearly impossible to measure,” Napolitano said. “So we need to be real about this.”

Napolitano also spoke on the importance of universities in combating climate change due to their ability to make rapid changes as large institutions.

“Universities can take risks in ways small businesses can’t,” Napolitano said. “(The students) want to say ‘I’m going to try this new mode of operation.’”

UMich campus expresses support for extended winter break

The University of Michigan Board of Regents voted last month to extend Winter Break for the 2023-2024 academic year by one week to promote student and staff mental health. Since the University announced the change to the academic calendar, students and staff alike have expressed their support of the policy.

In accordance with the new policy, the winter 2024 term will begin on Jan. 10 and final examinations will start on Apr. 25 and end on May 2. Commencement activities will move from the end of April to May 3-5.

In a University Record article, University Provost Laurie McCauley said the idea to lengthen Winter Break came as a result of suggestions from U-M community members.

“The feedback we’ve heard from students, faculty and staff around well-being gave us pause and led us to wonder if there was more we could do with the academic calendar to address these concerns,” McCauley said.

In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Dr. Robert Ernst, chief health officer and executive director of University Health Services, said he was indirectly involved with the process to extend the break between semesters. Ernst serves on the Well-Being Collective, an organization of administrative groups seeking to improve the well-

being and mental health of students on campus. Ernst said a working group within the Collective that focuses on examining University policies helped suggest the extended Winter Break to administration.

“I thought (it) was really great that the executive leadership and the academic affairs partners, who have been really strong in this Wellbeing Collective work, reconsidered the policy and decided to make a move,” he said. “(The policy) will really reduce the stress for many as (students and faculty are) trying (to) restart for the winter semester next year.”

LSA senior Noah Zimmerman, Central Student Government president, told The Daily that he, alongside LSA senior Jackie Hillman, CSG Vice President, advocated for a longer Winter Break to support student mental health in meetings with U-M administration.

Zimmerman said he and Hillman are in full support of the change to lengthen the break between semesters.

“This has really been something that (CSG has) talked about with the provost and especially with (former University President Mary Sue Coleman) right before she left,” Zimmerman said. “I think it really gives students the opportunity to relax more (and) get prepared.”

Zimmerman said he had heard positive support for the suggestion to lengthen Winter Break from mental health focused student organizations. Because the announcement for the

new policy came just before Spring Break, Zimmerman said he has not not yet received direct student feedback about the new change.

According to Zimmerman, CSG officers regularly meet with student organizations which focus on mental health to discuss how to support students on campus and collaborate on ideas for how to address mental health concerns. Among these student groups is Wolverine Support Network, a club dedicated to mental health advocacy and facilitating free peer-to-peer support groups.

LSA senior Izzy Steinberg serves as WSN’s executive director and as a member of the Well-being Collective. Steinberg spoke with The Daily about the positive community response for extending Winter Break, “(Extending Winter Break is) something that felt like it didn’t even need to be said,” Steinberg said. “It was just a change that I think lots of students on campus want.”

Though Steinberg will graduate this year, she highlighted how the change will be beneficial for returning and incoming students.

“I can imagine that having like an extra week with my family and my friends at home would just be really nice to do things that are positive for my mental health and well-being like spending time with loved ones,” Steinberg said.

On Monday, the Department of Student Life announced that the University will now provide six free mental health counseling sessions to students every year they are enrolled.

The new program is a part of the University’s partnership with Uwill, a teletherapy service connected with mental health care providers across the country.

Anthropology lecturer Leigh Stuckey also spoke with The Daily about her support for the academic calendar change. As a parent of two kids who attend public school and preschool school in Ann Arbor, Stuckey said returning to work at the University after Winter Break a week before her children go back to school presented many difficulties. Stuckey said she is looking forward to

the extended break so she can evade these difficulties.

“Starting off the semester with a full week when I don’t have childcare for my children, but need to be not only preparing for my classes, but teaching them has been a really challenging thing over the past few years,” Stuckey said. “I’m really excited to see that change particularly to accommodate the really difficult work-life balance of being a parent and being a faculty member.”

Rackham student Sangita Saha, an international student from India,

told The Daily she agrees with Stuckey that making Winter Break longer will allow students and staff to spend more time with their families. Because Winter Break was previously only two weeks, Saha said she had not considered traveling home to India.

“With starting at least a week later there is an opportunity to consider going back home to family, which is important for me, so important in making sure that I’m in the right frame of mind to work energized and my mental health is okay,” Saha said.

Artist Holly Bass hosts leads workshop on activism and joy

at the Ford School of Public Policy, opened the event by explaining how public policy can be used to advance racial equity within organizations and communities.

Around 50 participants virtually joined The Center for Racial Justice’s virtual workshop to learn from multidisciplinary artist Holly Bass Thursday afternoon. The discussion was part of the Racial Practice in Workshop series called “Activating joy with Holly Bass: Creative practices for authentic community building”. Bass led attendees over zoom in an interactive discussion through artistic activities to spark conversations on the intersection between activism and joy.

Dominique Adams-Santos, a senior research fellow and lecturer

“We recognize the power of public policy to bolster or undercut our life opportunities and we see policy analysis as a critical tool for us to measure, reflect, and historically examine and help us define the way forward,” AdamsSantos said.

Bass then spoke on the workshop’s mission, emphasizing the importance of enjoying and finding joy in activism and policy work.

“We can start infusing joyful practices into the work we do now,

whether we’re students, whether we are in the workplace,” Bass said.

“That’s kind of the mission and intent of today’s session,” Bass said.

Bass started her activities by asking the audience to “flood” the chat of the Zoom call with descriptions of things that brought them joy in the past five days.

The attendees wrote a range of responses, from nice conversations with co-workers to seeing the sunshine. Audience members were then asked to act out their response with a small on screen gesture. Bass then prompted the audience members to create a dance with their gestures, resulting in movements like hugging an imaginary cat and stretching.

For the second activity, Bass asked audience members to discuss and define a list of words and phrases, including “activism”, “organizing” and “culture-shift work”. Bass defined “culture-shift work” as the work of expanding interconnectedness over time between different individuals and defined activism as a publicoriented and highly visible activity.

“(When) you think about protests and marches, (activism) brings awareness of an issue to a larger public and galvanizes support,” Bass said. “It draws the media and public attention.”

After learning about each word, Bass asked attendees to draw their own versions of each phrase or

word on a piece of paper and share what they came up with. Bass then divided the audience members into small groups to create poems describing the phrases through the five senses. The words and phrases discussed included “joy”, “justice”, “culture shift” and “a better world”. One group wrote about joy, describing it as feeling like warm sunshine on skin.

In an interview with The Michigan Daily after the event, Rackham student Kayla Guillory, who currently studies integrative design and public policy, said she enjoyed how the event was structured as a workshop and involved artistic approaches to the subject.

“Getting to attend some more workshop-feeling events is nice,” Guillory said. “I like to absorb information and think about trying to translate things in my own practice of policy and design.” Guillory also expressed appreciation for Bass’s perspective as an artist and how joy can be integrated into policy and activism work.

“We don’t often associate (policy work and activism) with maybe the idea of joy, or at least I don’t,” Guillory said. “So thinking about how that can be integrated is both a new and exciting notion … and something that hopefully changes the way that the work is sometimes framed.”

Taylor Swift has been widely hailed as one of the greatest songwriters of her generation. Not only are her songs catchy and meaningful, but they almost always tell an incredible, lively story. In particular, the songs that describe beautiful relationships and heart-wrenching breakups reach a level of storytelling that is difficult to find elsewhere. And because these songs tell such descriptive stories, it’s only natural that fans might apply the songs to other circumstances — other characters, other couples, other stories. With The Swiftie Project series, Swifties within Daily Arts break down every romantic Taylor Swift song from every released album and match them to fictional couples. The second part in this series contains songs from the re-recorded version of Swift’s sophomore album: Fearless (Taylor’s Version). Most songs from this album have been included, although “The Best Day” has been omitted, due to its more personal, non-romantic story. Furthermore, her song for “Hannah Montana: The Movie,” “Crazier,” has been added to this list, due to its place in her discography timeline.

Warning: Spoilers for various TV shows, movies and books are included in the following article.

“Fearless” — Jane Villanueva and Rafael Solano, “Jane the Virgin” I’m not usually this way but / You pull me in and I’m a little more brave Ah, friends. There is no better word than “fearless” to describe Jane (Gina Rodriguez, “Someone Great”) and Rafael’s (Justin Baldoni, “Con Man”) rollercoaster of a relationship. Their love story is a complicated one — this is a telenovela, after all. Jane was accidentally inseminated with Rafael’s sperm, they briefly dated and got caught in a vicious cycle of unrequited love while co-parenting, before finally ending

The Swiftie Project Part Two: Fearless

up together. Even when they weren’t together, Rafael was always in Jane’s corner when she needed him. It all stemmed from the first time they met, when Rafael told Jane to “be brave” and go after her dream of being a writer. The road to their happily ever after was not without struggle: Being a parent isn’t easy, each person has their own traumas to work through and falling in love can be terrifying. But watching the pair play different roles in each other’s lives gave us new insights into how they lived out that bravery. Sometimes the only way to overcome your fears is to dive headfirst.

“Fifteen” — Ricky Bowen and Nini Salazar-Roberts, “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series”

Back then I swore I was gonna marry him someday / But I realized some bigger dreams of mine

In the first scene of “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series,” Nini (Olivia Rodrigo, “Bizaardvark”) tells Ricky (Joshua Bassett, “Stuck in the Middle”) she loves him, and he … runs out of the room. Ah, young love at its finest.

An aptly named song, “Fifteen,” is about a specific type of teenage romance, the kind where everything feels so new and exciting that you swear it’ll last forever — the naivete of thinking every person you kiss is the person you’ll spend the rest of your life with. For Nini and Ricky, an inopportune “I love you” was earth-shattering enough to incite their breakup, “cause when you’re 15 and somebody tells you they love you / you’re gonna believe them.”

They thought they were an endall-be-all relationship because it was all they’d ever known. Several breakups and makeups later (it’s high school), Nini realizes that even though her relationship with Ricky was once everything she wanted, it is okay to want more. No longer the starry-eyed 15-year-old we first met, she leaves Ricky to pursue

her dreams of becoming a singersongwriter because sometimes (most times), your first love isn’t meant to last beyond high school; you just “didn’t know it at 15.”

“Love Story” — Gnomeo and Juliet, “Gnomeo & Juliet”

This love is difficult, but it’s real / Don’t be afraid, we’ll make it out of this mess

“Love Story” is one of Swift’s most iconic songs, so we had to pair it with an equally iconic movie: “Gnomeo & Juliet,” a version of “Romeo and Juliet” featuring gnomes. Despite the goofiness of an alternate universe where “RIP” stands for “rest in pieces,” as pointed out by Gnomeo’s (James McAvoy, “X-Men: First Class”) mother, Lady Bluebury (Maggie Smith, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2”), this animated retelling brings its own charm by fully embracing the backdrop of being snarky clay fixtures in two neighboring gardens, while still maintaining the rivalry and general plot of the original play. Gnomeo and Juliet’s (Emily Blunt, “The Girl on the Train”) love story thus proceeds in the same way as the original. Even though they meet while both racing to snatch an orchid rather than at a party, they fall in love at first sight. From there, they continue to meet up. It’s exactly as Swift sings, “So I sneak out to the garden to see you / We keep quiet ‘cause we’re dead if they knew.” Amid the fighting between the Montague gnomes — the Blues — and the Capulet gnomes — the Reds — when Juliet gets stuck and is about to be crushed by a lawnmower, Gnomeo refuses to leave her. They don’t actually end up dying, but this is enough for Lady Bluebury and Juliet’s father, Lord Redbrick (Michael Caine, “Youth”), to stop their feud. Unlike the original, and what the statue version of Shakespeare (Patrick Stewart, “X-Men”) predicted would happen, Gnomeo and Juliet

get their happily ever after ending when Juliet “pick(s) out a white dress” and “just say(s) ‘yes.’ ”

“Hey Stephen” — Louisa Clark and Sam Fielding “After You” Hey Stephen, boy, you might have me believing / I don’t always have to be alone

Most people who watch “Me Before You” are left with the story’s bittersweet ending. What’s more, most people who read the book resort to crying, watching the film adaptation, crying some more and refusing to read the rest of the trilogy because they’re too heartbroken. I’m here to let those people know what they’re missing out on. In “After You,” the sequel to “Me Before You,” Louisa is inconsolable. Meeting the love of your life and losing them all in the span of six months would take a toll on anyone, and it certainly takes a toll on Louisa after she loses Will (Sam Claflin, “Love, Rosie”). That is, until she has an accident that forces her to return home to her family and leads her to meet Sam Fielding, a charming paramedic who just might be able

to understand this new version of Louisa. Sam, convinced that she is destined for a life of loneliness, makes his way into Louisa’s life when she needs it most, making her feel seen and that she doesn’t always have to be alone — just as Stephen did for Swift.

“White Horse” — Meredith Grey and Derek Shepherd, “Grey’s Anatomy” Maybe I was naive, got lost in your eyes / And never really had a chance Meredith (Ellen Pompeo, “Friends”) and Derek’s (Patrick Dempsey, “Can’t Buy Me Love”) relationship was one of the most beloved relationships of “Grey’s Anatomy.” For 11 seasons, fans watched as Meredith and Derek fell in love, had a few children and became a badass doctor duo. What started out as a one-night stand turned into an iconic love story, and boy was it messy during the first few seasons. In the beginning, there was this weird power dynamic between the two — Meredith was Derek’s intern when they met. Then, we learned that Derek was married to Addison Montgomery (Kate Walsh, “Emily in Paris”) while dating Meredith throughout season one. In season two, Meredith begged Derek to choose her over Addison by saying, “Pick me. Choose me. Love me”

— a moment that Pompeo herself was “horrified” by. “White Horse” vocalizes the realization that the great love you thought you had with a person won’t happen. It’s kind of heartbreaking, and I think that captures Meredith and Derek’s relationship well, especially considering how it ultimately ended. Derek was certainly Meredith’s knight in shining armor throughout their time together, literally saving her from drowning at one point. But as Arizona Robbins (Jessica Capshaw, “Holidate”) once said, “Derek was epic for her. They were the great love story. I mean, that girl’s heart beat for Derek Shepherd” — what else can I say?

“You Belong With Me” — Rosie Dunne and Alex Stewart, “Love, Rosie”

If you could see that I’m the one / Who understands you / Been here all along Romance, especially fictional romance, is nothing without the friends-to-lovers trope. If you couldn’t tell by that intensely charged statement, I’m a big friends-to-lovers gal, and “Love, Rosie” is my favorite friends-tolovers movie. Rosie (Lily Collins, “Emily in Paris”) and Alex (Sam Claflin, “Me Before You”) have been best friends since childhood, believing their relationship is purely platonic. When they reach high school, these feelings start to seem like something more. They decide to overtly ignore the shift in feelings they’re both experiencing, even if the jealousy they feel when they see each other with their respective romantic partners is painfully evident. The intensity of their miscommunication reaches the point where they just keep missing each other, even though they both know they belong together but are reluctant to admit it. Both of their inner monologues sound like Swift’s iconic, quintessential song “You Belong With Me,” reflecting the pain of knowing someone else is your soulmate but being unsure how to communicate it.

“Breathe” — Marianne and Héloïse, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”

Music starts playin’ like the end of a sad movie

“Breathe” perfectly captures the gut-wrenching end to Marianne (Noémie Merlant, “Tár”) and

Héloïse’s (Adèle Haenel, “Love at First Fight”) relationship in “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” which I recommend watching before reading this blurb to save yourself from spoilers. The two women, though desperately in love, cannot stay together for numerous reasons (primarily because the film is set in 18th-century France), and while Swift likely did not intend for “Breathe” to capture the pain of a mutually unwanted (lesbian) breakup, the song nails it. The lyric “Music starts playin’ like the end of a sad movie,” practically represents the film in a single line — if you know, you know — though other lyrics are uncannily spot on as well: “And we know it’s never simple / Never easy / Never a clean break, no one here to save me.” The end of their relationship is devastating, and there’s nothing either of them can do about it. They can never see each other again, let alone save each other from their fates. All they’ll have left of each other is a song, a memory stored deep inside of them that only emerges when the music swells.

“Tell Me Why” — Eric Miller and Bela Malhotra, “The Sex Lives of College Girls”

You took a swing, I took it hard / And down here from the ground, I see who you are

As a viewer, I was passionately rooting for Bela (Amrit Kaur, “The D Cut”) and Eric’s (Mekki Leeper, “Two Joysticks and a Couch”) new relationship. I’m a sucker for an enemies-to-lovers arc, and I thought they had hilarious banter. Bela, however, broke my heart as well as Eric’s when her insecurities led her to cheat on him. She was in the midst of shadowing a professional comedian and — desperate for him to like her — slept with him in the hopes of earning an internship. Not only that, but when Eric approached her about it, she attempted to lie and gaslight him into thinking she didn’t cheat, adding salt to the wound. This is just one of many times throughout the show that Bela has shown everyone how much maturing she has left to do. She pushes away nearly everyone who cares about her because she fails to see how her actions harm others until it’s too late — hence why Swift’s “Tell Me Why” perfectly encapsulates this series of events from Eric’s point of view. He opened himself up to Bela and trusted her with his feelings, only for her to turn around and stomp on them, revealing to him and everyone else who she really is. I’m rarely one to side with the man in relationship drama, but I’m team Eric all the way. Bela has some serious cleaning up to do.

“You’re Not Sorry” — Ross Geller and Rachel Green, “Friends”

I’ve been giving out chances, and all you do is let me down.

I don’t think Ross (David Schwimmer, “Six Days, Seven Nights”) was sorry. I watched “Friends” on repeat throughout high school, the feeling of loss when the six friends walk away from the camera at the end inevitably forcing me back to the beginning every time. Had all the characters been like Ross, I would have been glad to see them go. Swift sings, “You can tell me that you’re sorry / But I don’t believe you, baby,” and Rachel (Jennifer Aniston, “Murder Mystery”) shouldn’t believe him. Ross’s insistence that the two were “on a break” from their relationship just hours before he slept with another woman, which he refuses to admit was wrong, is reason enough to dislike him. Swift sings, “Now you’re asking me to listen.”

Design by Abby Schreck

As time presses on, the definition of “newness” begins to blur: What is the distinction between art that is truly new

and art that has not yet been experienced by a particular observer? In the 21st century, it sometimes feels like there is no distinction at all. Thanks to the internet, there is more art available at the click of a button than any human could

experience in a single lifetime; there will always be something out there that is new to you. Art is, by nature, derivative, built on the trends that came before it, meaning that the evolution of art often happens too slowly to truly recognize.

But, despite the seemingly limitless amount of new and old art, and despite the persistence of artistic trends which obfuscate the age of a work of art, there’s something special about old art that has somehow withstood the test of

time and still has its presence widely felt in modern times: retro art. We can’t go back in time and engage directly with the past, but we can engage with the art that previous generations left behind for us.

The Retro B-Side is a place to

celebrate that art: the classics that stand and hold years and decades later, the hidden gems buried by the sands of time, the art we lovingly accept from our parents and their art we lesslovingly reject outright.

Let the ’80s die ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’: a retrospective ode to Fleetwood Mac

tioning itself politically as anti-consumerist as possible.

“Your taste in music is very retro, I’m impressed!” my father said as we drove our way across the East Coast of the United States on a 10-day long road trip two summers ago. I had assumed control over the aux, queuing an endless number of songs by iconic ’70s rock band Fleetwood Mac. Little did my dad know that the new fixation I had developed with classic ’70s rock had emerged after I had partaken the challenge of reading 10 books during our road trip and had stumbled upon Taylor Jenkins Reid’s “Daisy Jones & The Six.”

I’d been breezing through most of the books I was reading on the trip, not because I was particularly enjoying them all, but because I wanted to advance on my yearly Goodreads goal. That vicious cycle suddenly came to a halt when I picked up “Daisy Jones & The Six.” The novel recounts the story of fictional legendary ’70s rock band Daisy Jones & The Six. It tells readers how they came to be, details the highs and lows of their musical career and how their rise to fame led to their inevitable break-up. The novel is written in

interview format, which makes it interesting yet simple to read. It’s also categorized as a historical fiction novel, given that the band is loosely inspired on Fleetwood Mac’s history, both musically and personally.

When I started reading the novel, I had no idea that it had taken inspiration from Fleetwood Mac. I initially bought a copy because I had just read another novel by Reid and was enamored by her writing style and the unique stories she creates for her readers.

But as I read on, I felt like the fictional band’s story echoed that of another iconic band that was known for its outstanding musical career as well as its tumultuous

personal relationships. After lengthy and profound analysis, I concluded that Fleetwood Mac had inspired Reid while writing “Daisy Jones & The Six,” and once I searched for a confirmation to my theories, I discovered that I was correct.

Now, two years after reading the novel for the first time, the songs that comprise the fictional band’s hit album Aurora have been released, anticipating the upcoming TV adaptation. I have thus begun establishing comparisons between the released songs and some of my favorite Fleetwood Mac tunes.

In 1977, punk rock was on the verge of an explosion in popularity in the United States. The music industry took note, already in a position to capitalize on the passion behind punk despite not fully understanding it. But even if industry executives thought the punk movement could be a huge moneymaker, they prepared for punk to fail. As music critic Robert Christgau for The Village Voice wrote of music industry executives, “they know … that the rock audience is as put off by the rough, the extreme, and the unfamiliar as they are. This rock audience is the one the execs created — more passive and cautious than that of a decade ago not just because kids have changed, although they have, but because it is now dominated statistically by different, and more passive, kids.” If this new, harsher, riskier music was going to fail — and it did about as quickly as it came to be in the late ’70s — it was not the listeners who were to blame, it was the big-money interests in the industry who had trained listeners not to engage with art outside of their comfort zone. Listeners were no longer trained to view this music as art at all, but rather as a product to be consumed. And so punk failed, for a number of reasons, but not least of which was that it was an art form posi-

It’s no surprise that the lifespan of punk rock coincided with the moment the American left had an opportunity to push back and reclaim the power it gained in the 1960s. Coming out of the Nixon/ Watergate era of conservatism, a struggling American economy meant that the door was open for the country’s left wing to cement itself as the leading political faction. But Jimmy Carter’s administration did little to stymie the country’s economic distress, and America shifted even further to the right with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The Reagan Revolution sparked a wave of individualism and consumerism that, coupled with an eventually recovering economy, meant that

there was more money to be made and more money to be spent by the average American, and people wanted more. “Greed is good,” as Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas, “Ant-Man”) says in “Wall Street.” This was American culture in the 1980s: one obsessed with money and products over all else. This is a culture that does not lend itself to the creation of great art. Great art takes risks, it tries to push its medium forward, tries to do something new and bold. Sometimes great art does become incredibly financially successful — e.g. the music of The Beatles, the films of Steven Spielberg — but these works are not typically radical. They do new things while playing into popular sensibilities.

JACK MOESER Senior Arts Editor

MITCHEL GREEN Daily Arts Writer

GRACIELA BATLLE CESTERO Daily Arts Writer

Design by Emily Schwartz

Design by Francie Ahrens

Only some of my sisters are dead; I wear their clothes. I remember them in the red canvas skirt I wore today, in the denim jacket that’s almost a bathrobe and almost too long, in the windbreaker patterned with Time Magazine covers. If I have met these sisters, I am not aware of it. Their clothing is washed, stains scrubbed out, worn or loose threads replaced with new, strong ones and knotted to keep their hems intact by the time I find it on a rack in a vintage store, slotted between others that aren’t my style or wouldn’t fit me.

Why is vintage clothing special to me? I told myself I would stop buying fast fashion at the end of high school, but proceeded to slip up whenever I saw something through a store window and immediately went from thinking it was cute to thinking I couldn’t live without it. I still guiltily returned to the Urban Outfitters website at the end of stressful days. In the past year, this has stopped happening. I enter a traditional clothing store and find nothing I like. Everything feels sort of false, like it’s not really clothing at all but pieces of flimsy, unworn materials that I worry would cause me to lose all sense of identity should I put them on.

When clothing feels like it could fall apart at any moment, I worry that life and wear will destroy it; when I know there are hundreds

Only some of my sisters are dead

of identical copies of that piece of clothing, I worry that I can’t give it a distinguishable meaning before its seams break or its frail threads rip.

When I look through a vintage store, the clothing already has an identity. It often has lived decades longer than I have. I can trust it not to fall apart. Even if it is not one of a kind, its path has diverged so much from any copies that it feels unique anyway. Fingerprints stay in clothing; the DNA of people who made and wore it remains in the fibers. There is care sewn into it, from the original maker, the vintage store owners who rescued it from death in a landfill and the previous owners, who cared for the clothing before it got to me. Those owners are the sisters I mention. We have not met, but we share the same clothing, we care for the same clothing and the life of that clothing binds our lives together. Vintage clothing is not immortal; no clothing is. But it is less mortal than I am. Wearing something that I will likely outlive makes me uneasy. Receding into the vintage denim coat that drops to my ankles, my mortality is extended by its enclosure in something that will live on. My life merges with those who have worn it before and will wear it after me.

I like things to outlive me. Maybe I want to avoid dealing with loss and would prefer everything to stick around at least until I’m gone. If you read “clothing” and “sisterhood” and were waiting for me to mention

“The Sisterhood of the Traveling

Pants,” I will. I read this book and the next three in the series in middle school, when I had to walk to the library after school and stay there until my mom finished working and could retrieve me. I sat in one of the chairs in the library’s minuscule “teen” section and read, noted my place and returned to my book the next day. I never checked a book out. The four friends (“sisters”) between whom the pants travel agree that they shouldn’t be able to fit in the same pair of jeans. I assume this magic is not present in the vintage clothes I wear. I can only picture their previous owners by the fact that they fit into something that also fits me. They are outlines, at best. Maybe I know their waist measurements, but not their height. Perhaps we have similar genetics in some way, giving us similar bodies, perhaps we molded our bodies into similar shapes of our own accord or perhaps we don’t look similar at all — maybe one sister bought something too small, another too large. Sisterhood is a form of immortality, or at least prolonged mortality. By sisterhood, I mean connection and friendship. Sisterhoods don’t have to be founded in material objects, but these can help with that mortality. They inherently involve sharing things — ourselves, our lives, our jokes, our flaws. Tying people together via a more durable, stable material object can create something less tenuous. I have been involved in several “sisterhoods” of traveling objects.

I bought the book “Kiki Man Ray” by Mark Braude and told my friends they would all have to read it — the sisterhood of the traveling “Kiki Man Ray.” Other film writers and I went to The Getup Vintage on State Street and I saw a Beatles shirt hanging high on the wall, white with colorful squares across it. It cost more than $100, too much for even me to justify spending on a T-shirt. What if we all bought it? We could share it. (Well, I could technically own it and lend it to other writers if they so desired).

“Sisterhood of the traveling Beatles shirt,” texted one writer. One sister.

“Exactly.” I bought the softest pair of jeans that I own at Malofta Vintage, a vintage store in Kerrytown. The jeans are so well-worn that the waistband is fuzzy in places. The measurement listed on the tag would have been too small for me, but because they seem to have been some previous owner’s favorite jeans, they fit comfortably. The sisterhood of vintage clothing is not necessarily a way to have my presence or body remembered, but a way of being remembered by sharing something, some part of myself and my life, intertwined with those of others. There is — or there

was — someone out there with not just the same favorite brand or style of jeans, but the same pair of jeans as me. Clothing can be a box. It is created with limits of fabric and thread, and I must find the clothing that can properly contain me in particular. I like fitting into things. Clothing. The red skirt. And friendships. Communities. Sisterhoods. I like to create them using shared objects because of those objects’ immortality — that feeling that there is a way of making space for myself in the world.

What happened to rock stars?

When I think of retro, I think of my parents.

I think of photos of them when my brother and I were just kids, wearing complimentary ’80s color block windbreakers (my brother and I were born in the ’90s and 2000s, but my parents have always been old school). I think about the film, television and music my parents showed me growing up — the same stuff they grew up on, just 8,000 miles away in Rangpur, Bangladesh, instead of Louisville, Ky. There’s a lot that gets lost in translation when you’re born so far from where your parents are from, but “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” Rabindranath Tagore and Boney M. spoke with perfect clarity.

There’s just something about the wild charm of the Sundance Kid and the groovy beats of “Daddy Cool” that inspires the imagination,

even about the people you’ve spent every day of your life with. They provide new (and by new I mean old) versions of my parents that had faded behind the mirage of family dinners and car rides to soccer practice. I no longer saw my mom as the woman that wouldn’t let me leave the house without breakfast no matter the circumstances or my dad as the man that sneezed loud enough to wake me up from the other side of the apartment — I saw them young, free of responsibility and of the wear of the years. I imagined my teenage dad jumping out of his seat when shots rang from his favorite outlaw’s gun. I imagined my mom singing and dancing in her childhood bedroom. Like a serum of immortality or portal through time, experiencing my parents’ favorite things and finding that they sparked joy in me too revived a part of them I thought was long gone. And it made me wonder what I will pass on to my future kids — what my serum is.

What proverbial torch will I pass on when I finally become retro?

What struck me is how comprehensively the world had changed from one generation to the next, and how much it will continue to change until I one day show my kids, I don’t know, The Strokes or something. I felt unequipped to process the passage of time as it applies to myself. And as I do with all things too big to process on my own, I turned to art.

I watched films about getting older (“The Fabelmans”), I watched films about being a parent (“Aftersun”), I watched films about dying (“Steel Magnolias”). I watched films about being old and reflecting on being young (“Titanic”). I watched films about being young while actually being old (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”). I listened to old songs about getting old (“When I’m SixtyFour”) and new songs about being young (“Young, Wild & Free”). Some of it was helpful (“Ida”), some of it less so (“P.S. I Love You”). In the end, the only conclusive result from my research was a headache.

I called my parents.

“Remember when we used to watch westerns on the weekends?”

I mused.

“What, like ‘Butch Cassidy?’ ” my dad replied, immediately.

“Yeah,” I laughed. “Like that.”

“What about it?” my dad responded.

I paused for a minute, unsure how to proceed. Until finally:

“Want to watch it when I come home next weekend?”

Suddenly, there wasn’t much else to research.

The title of “rock star” is attached with a narrative — the debaucherous, drug-fueled lifestyle, the charisma and swagger, the epic struggles of defying the system and “making it big” — summed up nicely by the “sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll” motto.

But today, that quality is stripped away. Rock music’s sparkling deities have been perverted — not by age or by degradation of talent, but by the internet’s mystique-destroying powers. Household names from the gilded era of rock ‘n’ roll have Twitter accounts now. We see them without stage makeup and the mystery is gone. Many of them are abandoning the ineffable coolness they once possessed: Slash of Guns ‘N’ Roses squeezes out the “Sweet Child O’ Mine” riff in a Capital One ad, Elton John adds absolutely nothing as a guest star in a mediocre spy comedy, Julian Casablancas of The Strokes reposts TikToks to his Instagram.

None of these people are the otherworldly, glamorous, inhuman monuments they used to be. None of them are cool anymore. It’s unfair — cruel, maybe — to knock down these figures for just being seen as regular people. But it would be disappointing to accept that rock stars were always uncool, to reject the mythology that enraptured entire generations.

Take the British punk movement of the ’70s — Sex Pistols, the Clash, Buzzcocks — which was first

defined by its delinquent, foulmouthed response to economic injustices and categorical rejection of “The Establishment.” The rhetoric struck a resonant frequency with younger demographics — one struggling for authenticity, desperate to physically distance themselves from the adult world. Music was so closely aligned with societal discontent that political figures became enemies, and their vilification summoned militias of spiky-haired, leather-clad teenagers to join the counterculture. The attitude is seen slightly later in the Margaret Thatcher-tinted gloom of The Smiths, Elvis Costello and others.

]Roughly a decade later, The Beatles’ 1968 song “Back In The U.S.S.R.” made its way to the generation that saw the collapse of the Soviet Union — as a totem of Western ideology, the band was even credited for preparing the Eastern Bloc youth for a new life.

Listening to Western rock music was an ideological practice, a way to participate in counterculture. Following the Soviet Union’s collapse, Czechoslovakian dissident-turned-President Václav Havel fostered friendships with The Rolling Stones and Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground. Rock stars weren’t just musicians; they had developed a verve of resistance and dynamism.

To a lesser magnitude, rock stars have at the very least been known for their unique artistic presence — bands like The Strokes still carried forward the ideology set by their forefathers. The Strokes made waves for the stylish arrogance and post-punk influences that constituted their indisputable coolness. Their public presence was just as important as their music in granting them the rock star quality.

I had a Pinterest board when I was 13 titled “Retro Quotes” — which, if the name didn’t make it obvious, was full of quotes from classic Hollywood stars like Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor. It’s worth noting that I had never seen any of their movies at the time, but the words attributed to these women spoke to my younger self. Their quotes became my words to live by: “If you cant’t handle me at my worst, then you don’t deserve me at my best.” “Happy girls are the prettiest girls.” “Pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick and pull yourself together.” These women exuded femininity and elegance years after passing, through something as simple as a low-quality social media post.

As I’ve grown older and become more appreciative of my identity as a woman, I still try to live by their words in a way. I’m lucky enough to have people in my

life who love me at my worst. I feel much more confident about myself when I’m happy. I don’t usually wear lipstick, but at least I can legally drink now. Where my so-called relationship with these women has changed, however, is that I’ve become more aware of how much popular culture has aestheticized them. I’ve read books that were clearly based on Taylor’s many marriages; Hepburn’s iconic black dress in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” frequently ends up on DIY Halloween costume lists; Monroe remains a popular subject in movies (for better or for worse). I began to see that the reasons we consider these women iconic are only a small part of their lives. It seems to me that society has blurred the line between legacy and reality, and I want to understand exactly what that means.

Marilyn Monroe is primarily remembered for either her moviestar status or her downward spiral at the early end of her life. Or, at least, I had only ever heard her discussed this way. I knew

the basics: She was blonde and beautiful. She starred in movies like “The Seven Year Itch” and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” She may or may not have had an affair with John F. Kennedy. She died of a drug overdose at only 36 years old. But Monroe was obviously a more well-rounded individual beyond being a beautiful but troubled actress. Just while doing research for this article, I learned that she had a difficult childhood, was in and out of several foster homes and experienced sexual abuse during that time. She wasn’t even a natural blonde. She started her own production company, which some say aided the collapse of the studio system. Yes, she struggled with addiction, but also suffered from several mental health conditions and possibly even endometriosis.

But the piece of information I was most surprised to learn was that she disliked playing a “dumb blonde” or “sex roles” — which happened often. Her most famous movies were marketed using her sex appeal, and that exploitation

of her image is one of the biggest things I still see happening to her today. The Michigan Theater screened “Some Like It Hot” for Valentine’s Day, and I can attest that several people in the theater either giggled or whistled almost every time Monroe was on screen. Typecasting unfortunately still happens in the entertainment industry, but Monroe was at more of a disadvantage considering her contract originally kept her from choosing her own projects. She did eventually earn that right after a year-long fight with 20th Century Fox, as well as the opportunity to show off more of her range, but this knowledge makes her cemented status as a bombshell all the more frustrating. She was much more talented and bright than people gave her credit for, and yet I still don’t see enough conversation about her outside of her appearance.

Elizabeth Taylor was considered one of the first modern celebrities. Starring in movies like “Cleopatra,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “Father of the Bride,”

she, like Monroe, had several of her films promoted using her sex appeal. Due to sensationalized rumors, public attention was frequently drawn to her personal life. Taylor hated her fame. She felt that the films she received the most acclaim for cut scenes that displayed the core of her characters, disliked how much control the studio had over her

and found it hard to be viewed as herself rather than the roles she played.

Still, Taylor recognized that she had been given a platform, which she used to drive her philanthropic efforts. She was one of the first celebrities to take part in HIV/ AIDS activism, helping to found

Design by Leah Hoogterp

The weight we carry: college journalism’s untold grief

The first time I ever had to carry grief that did not belong to me was the day I began to report on survivors of former University of Michigan Athletics doctor Robert Anderson. Over a span of 37 years, more than 950 victims reported thousands of incidents of sexual abuse and misconduct at the hands of Anderson, remaining as likely the most sexual abuse allegations against a single person in United States history.

There is an untold grief in reporting this kind of trauma, in reporting the tragedies that affect our schools and communities — the people we love and know — and what they ultimately leave behind. In time, even grief that does not belong to us has a way of becoming our own.

College journalists are especially vulnerable to the weight of reporting. The world sees them as too young to understand the heaviness of grief or to report on the shootings that fracture their campuses, the homicides that destroy their student bodies, the bomb threats and sexual abuse scandals that define the way they reckon with

themselves. But oftentimes, long after national news outlets have left, when press conferences become a rarity and towns begin to quiet again, student journalists and student-run newspapers become the last to remain, to understand, to painstakingly cover all that happens in between. And at a cost few are ever willing to make. What becomes of college journalists in the face of collective grief? What does it mean to grieve, to process, to become angry, to be in pain, to know joy and love and healing as a journalist first, and as a student last?

I’ve spent the past month researching college newspapers across the country, and more importantly, college newspapers that found themselves at the forefront of national tragedies — those that have had to contend with what it meant to no longer feel safe in your own libraries, classrooms, newsrooms and homes. Over the past few weeks, I spoke to Ava MacBlane, Editor in Chief of The Cavalier Daily at the University of Virginia; Haadiya Tariq, Editor in Chief of The Argonaut at The University of Idaho; and Jasper Smith, Editor in Chief of The Hilltop at Howard University. These are their stories. This is the weight they carry.

The Cavalier Daily, The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.

The Cavalier Daily — The CD or The Cav, for short — is the University of Virginia’s independently-run student newspaper. It employs approximately 400 staffers and is led by Editor in Chief Ava MacBlane. The Cavalier Daily’s offices are located in the basement of Newcomb Hall, a student center that also houses the campus’s main dining hall. Staff sometimes take long naps on a couch chock-full of Squishmallows. A life-size cut-out of Will Ferrell sits in an odd corner, and there are lopsided frames of old newspapers from decades ago hung on the walls. Meetings are held in an area fondly dubbed “The Office” and on Fridays, when the production schedule is pleasantly light, the Copy staffers spend hours at one of the few empty tables gossiping about the day’s latest happenings. The newsroom here is well-loved. It’s the kind of place people visit just because they can.

On Sunday, Nov. 13, 2022, University of Virginia students and football team members Devin Chandler, D’Sean Perry and Lavel Davis Jr. died after a gunman opened fire on a bus returning from a University of Virginia class trip

to Washington, D.C. Two other students were wounded. A shelterin-place warning issued a campuswide “Run, Hide, Fight” alert that lasted well into the next morning. Students spent the whole night cramped into libraries and a variety of campus and academic buildings, trapped in an uncomfortable state of limbo and a terribly unsettling cloud of fear, in search of a reason why.

MacBlane, who was the Managing Editor of The Cavalier Daily at the time, spent the entirety of the next 72 hours following the shooting, on the ground reporting. She missed meals and sleep, and much of her grief was experienced as a journalist first. Reporting on her community became one of the only ways she carried her grief, or rather, the only way her job as a student journalist allowed her to. “You want to feel connected to people and to your community, but you can’t because you’re still the media,” MacBlane told me. There is a heaviness that comes with reporting on fellow peers who left the world so violently, a halfremoved kind of grieving. While it became the sole responsibility of MacBlane and The Cavalier Daily to print the victims’

names, their hometowns, what they studied, the lovely, wonderful tiny things that made them who they were, there is also the realization that the journalists are students, too. They might have run into the victims of the shooting somewhere in line at a coffee shop or in the library, or the victims might have picked up a copy of The Cavalier Daily, because Devin Chandler, D’Sean Perry and Lavel Davis Jr. were here as fellow students, and now after a senseless act of violence, they no longer were.

The Cavalier Daily’s news team fell apart after the shooting. MacBlane, former Editor in Chief Eva Surovell and members of the Senior team carried the brunt of reporting, spending hours in the newsroom, often until dark fell.

“I don’t really know, there’s nothing you can really say,” MacBlane confided. “You don’t know how to report when three people at your school die.” Past alumni brought cookies and pizza to the newsroom, and staffers gathered together. They all had been consumed by a terrifying act of violence that fractured their school and changed the University of Virginia as they knew it, but at least they had each other.

After the shooting, MacBlane took photos for hours on end. She captured pictures of people leaving flowers, of people painting the Beta Bridge — a campus staple — and mostly, of collective grief and healing in action. But still, MacBlane felt out of place, like she was intruding on something she couldn’t entirely be a part of.

“The processing of my grief was done behind a camera. I still didn’t really feel like a student.” MacBlane said. “I called my mom a few days later, and it was the first time I really cried.”

While The Cavalier Daily aimed to cover the shooting with great care, affording students the choice to reflect on the shooting if they so wished, national media did not. Journalists from outside outlets covered the shooting aggressively, zeroing in on any student they could find for a comment. And as the days passed, as quickly as they had arrived, they left, leaving a campus so deeply attempting to recover. “You just have to keep going,” Macblane said. “When the big media trucks leave, when The Washington Post leaves, it is us, the student-run and local small newspapers that pick up the pieces left behind.”

SARAH AKAABOUNE Statement Deputy Editor

Jeremy Weine/DAILY

Anna Fuder/DAILY

Alum Becca Mahon/Daily

Anna Fuder/Daily

The Argonaut, The University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho

The Argonaut is The University of Idaho’s studentrun newspaper. It is home to approximately 25 staffers and led by Editor in Chief Haadiya Tariq. Its offices are located on the third floor of the Bruce M. Pitman Center, and on late production nights, tables are usually cluttered with dummy layout pages, junk food wrappers and cans of emptied energy drinks. The newsroom is warm and bright and sometimes staffers project the Super Bowl or Christmas movies on any empty wall they can find during the holidays.

On Sunday, Nov. 13, 2022, University of Idaho students Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle, Ethan Chapin and Madison Mogen were violently murdered in their offcampus residence, spurring a weeks-long investigation that captivated the country. Within one day of the homicides, rumors about how a man dressed in black had killed four students began swirling on Yik Yak, an anonymous messaging app. That was the nature of a school like The University of Idaho; it was the way things were. Moscow was the special sort of place where everyone seemed to know everyone else, and everything in one way or another was intrinsically connected. The Argonaut was one of the first news sources at the house where the homicides had occurred. Tariq lived just down the road from it, and one of her staffers knew the victims personally. Soon, the house on 1122 King Road became something no one could ever seem to get away from. It was profoundly unforgettable, nestled one minute away from Greek Row and on particularly clear days, visible through the pine trees from campus. The first press conference, held at the Moscow Police Department’s offices, was bursting at the seams, the room far too small and ill-prepared to accommodate the journalists that had flown in to report on the homicides. It had been seven years since Moscow last recorded a homicide; the town had always been a quiet one and generations of families had loved the land and called it home.

Tariq didn’t attend her classes for the entire week. “My academics were completely on pause, the rest of my life on pause,” she said. “I just spent

that whole week reporting … it’s more intimate too when you’re a student and you know the people who know (the victims) them. You can’t escape it, it becomes the whole thing you’re doing.”

Nearly half of the student body did not return to campus after Thanksgiving break.

Things were different after the homicides; emptier and hollower. One afternoon, when Tariq tried to conduct street interviews, students were uncharacteristically hostile.

“You know even though I’m here as a student and a journalist, they just see the journalist part” Tariq said. “And that was really difficult to deal with.”

From the day the homicides occurred through the end of the term, Tariq spent most of her time reporting. It wore her down, in the way that attempting to understand and carry the entire grief of a community does, and it was something that even seasoned journalists with careers spanning decades could never truly understand.

“One thing I remember; when we had the indoor memorial for the victims, I decided not to go, we had other reporters covering it, but I just could not be there.” she said. “I never in a million years would have thought that I would cover something this big. I thought the pandemic would have been the huge defining moment of my college journalism experience. You really only experience something like this once in your career as a journalist, and it’s usually not when you’re only 21.”

Last December, the Moscow Police Department finally apprehended and charged a suspect with the murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle, Ethan Chapin and Madison Mogen. Coverage of the homicides, theories of why someone could have possibly committed such a crime, who the victims were — and the way they lived and loved — soon bled into coverage of the ensuing trial. But for now, Moscow is still in mourning, and The Argonaut is still here.

“We will continue covering the trial, it’s something we care about a lot,” Tariq said. “We can fill the gaps that national media can’t address. They’re gone, they’re not here anymore, they’re not on the ground in Moscow anymore. They’ll be back for the trial, but not for what’s going to happen in between. We’re going to be here. They’re not.”

The Hilltop, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

The Hilltop is Howard University’s student-run newspaper. Co-founded by Zora Neale Hurston and Louis Eugene King in 1924, it employs 57 staffers, led by Editor in Chief Jasper Smith. The Hilltop is one of a kind and it stands today as the first and only daily newspaper at a Historically Black College or University in the country. And after months of halted production and delays due to the pandemic, The Hilltop has just begun to live again. Staff have started to trickle back into the newsroom for more than just meetings, late-night editing and last minute production. And more than anything else, it’s clear that The Hilltop has always been the sort of newsroom that will forever change your life, if you let it. There is so much

joy in leading The Hilltop. Homecoming, one of Howard’s most beautiful and celebrated traditions, has always been an honor for journalists to cover — and Smith has a soft spot for The Hilltop’s special front page layouts each year.

On Aug. 26th, 2022 for the second time in 48 hours, Howard University received its eighth bomb threat of the year. Students evacuated from Howard Plaza East and West Towers, two on-campus residence dorms, in the early hours of morning. JD, one of The Hilltop’s reporters and at the time, was in the towers and called Smith immediately. At 3 a.m., their first instinct was to discuss the reporting process. After all, this wasn’t the first time either one of them had had to cover a bomb threat, and it seemed like they had almost implicitly solidified the most efficient routine to secure as many interviews and photographs as possible.

“It wasn’t until after we had finished reporting that I stopped to ask myself and JD … wait are you okay? Am I okay?” Smith said. “We’re just students too.” The repeated bomb threats had come to define the way they reported on these kinds of things, and the weight of what they had been truly asked to carry.

To report for The Hilltop, to become the voice of one of the illustrious institutions in the country, and various communities in Washington, D.C. is to also sometimes reckon with days of repeated traumatic events. In the span of

the same week, on the last day of Black History Month, Howard University received yet another bomb threat, and a student committed suicide. Reporting, for Smith, became a means of coping, of understanding and reconciliation. And perhaps the only means that her job could ever give her. Yet, there never seemed to be enough room to carry every ounce of grief.

“Your universities are kind of like your playground, and in turn you get almost desensitized, it only hits you all at once after the reporting is done,” Smith said.

“Journalism is a very thankless job, people don’t pay attention to the byline. You’re not doing it for you,” Smith said. “It just affirms the love I have for what I do and that what I’m doing is so much bigger than me. You can’t ever quit because there’s so much that depends on us working together.”

***

There is love in college journalism, love in late nights spent in the newsroom, in the special sort of rush that comes with a byline, in creating something that is meant to outlive so many of us long after we have gone. But there is also grief too, and in time, it has become an unavoidable condition of what it means to be a journalist. Reporting on tragedy and trauma, the pain and anger, the love and loss that define the communities we serve, sometimes becomes the only feasible means of grieving, and mostly, the inevitable weight we carry.

Students evacuate to Banneker South parking lot following a bomb threat to Howard Plaza Towers. JD Jean-Jacques/The Hilltop.

The ribbon cutting ceremony at the 7th annual Lavender Reception, celebrating the Howard LGBTQ+ community. Alexia Godinez-Thompson/The Hilltop.

A memorial sign reads, “Forever a Vandal, Xana Kernolde.” Daniel V. Ramirez/The Argonaut

A Moscow police officer stands in the doorway of the residence where the homicides occurred. Daniel V. Ramirez/The Argonaut

The Argonaut, Dec. 22, 2022 paper.

A journey to reclaiming my identity: Rediscovering my Mexican roots

JACQUELINE AGUIAR MiC Columnist

From a young age, I always felt ashamed of my native tongue and heritage. It all came from a whirl of feeling physically insecure and verbally lost. Every morning, as the sun peeked through my window, I hid away the rich language my parents had gifted me since birth. I locked it in a mental vault, fearing the disapproving glances and wrinkled noses of my classmates. At school, my appearance was different than most because of my darker complexion, and going home wasn’t always my savior because it was difficult to emotionally connect with my family due to my lack of Spanish proficiency.

In my mind’s eye, I picture a small, innocent version of myself — a 7-year-old girl with dark brown pigtails, round brown eyes framed by glasses — sitting nervously in a classroom in the heart of Middleville, Mich. My friends only knew English. In fact, I cannot remember a single person who was bilingual. Snack time became my greatest enemy because anytime I sat down to enjoy my Chips Ahoy cookies, little kids would ask me, “How do you say cat in Spanish?” or “How do you say my name in Spanish?” I felt like a token to them since they never cared to understand who I was as an individual. I felt isolated and wondered if I would ever fit in.

Going home every night, I felt the same sense of isolation. As we gathered around the dinner table, I felt like a stranger in my own skin. It wasn’t my physical appearance that set me apart from my parents, but my inability to express myself fluently in the language of my ancestors. At the dinner table, as I ate my home-cooked rice and beans with corn tortillas, I lacked words. My mom would ask me, “How was school? What did you learn?” but I was mute. Not because I didn’t want to speak, but because I couldn’t

find the perfect words in Spanish to formulate my thoughts concisely. I simply responded with, “Bien Ma,” because creating a sentence in Spanish was an obstacle I could never tackle. Every day felt like a loss, a constant reminder of my lack of identity and fulfillment. My parents had instilled in me a deep sense of Mexican pride, but it always seemed to fade away the moment I stepped into a public setting. I never felt truly connected to my roots, and the idea of calling myself Mexican felt foreign, despite growing up hearing about our Hispanic heritage. But then, something changed. I was fortunate enough to visit my parents’ birthplace — Jalisco, Mexico. It is where Tequila originated,

and the music is always perfectly intensified to match the atmosphere. Mexico’s vibrant streets overflow with the pulsating rhythm of joy, with the sounds and scents weaving together to create a symphony of celebration that cannot be found anywhere else on earth. When I arrived in Jalisco, the first thing my grandma did was take me to a dance show. The atmosphere was different in Mexico because I wasn’t surrounded by American customs. The air wasn’t tainted with the smell of hot dogs and hamburgers; instead, it smelled like spice and warmth. I stood on the sidewalk, devouring my paleta. Sticky, sugary liquid dripped down my arm as Hispanic women danced throughout the street. Their dresses

soared through the air, radiating intensified colors of contentment, joy and celebration. The women’s dresses — long, flowing and adorned with ruffles — billowed out around them as they spun and twirled, releasing a gust of air that carried with it the unmistakable aroma of spicy Mexican cuisine and the feeling of utter freedom.

As I watched the women dance, I noticed something: their hair. It was like mine. I was suddenly reminded of the feeling of not fitting in throughout my elementary classes because I spent many nights looking in the mirror, wishing I had the perfect blonde locks. However, it was different here. My eyes couldn’t believe what they saw. Women danced in

An imagined yesterday

I’ve always considered myself to be a sentimental person. I must have been 6 or 7 years old when I started scrapbooking, and my construction paper, painted purple with an Elmer’s glue stick, became a canvas for the materialization of my memories. I became obsessed with assigning a tangible object to every memory because I thought it would help me stop my happiest moments from fading into vague recollections. I have held on to every birthday card I’ve received and the envelopes they came in. I like to look at the way my name was written on each envelope.

It’s spelled incorrectly on some, and the “y”s in my name are replaced with “i”s that are dotted with little hearts. My name is lettered beautifully on others, and sometimes my friends would write one of the nicknames they had for me in between small parentheses.

Every time I browse through my piles of envelopes, and gift cards I already spent, I can see myself sitting in my living room at my 8th birthday party.

My friends are all surrounding me, and my sister is standing over us, looking through a green disposable camera. I’m unwrapping a gift that appears to be some sort of book. It turns out to be a baby blue photo album, embroidered with orange songbirds and white

vines. I can see where everyone is sitting around me, and as I feel the cold February breeze rushing through from the crack under the door, it’s like I’m turning 8 again. It’s 2012 and I’m surrounded by my friends and family, seeing the world through my turquoise wireframe glasses. I never want the moment to end.

I find myself flipping through that baby blue album very often. It holds all the photos my sister printed from the stack of disposable cameras she ran through that day. Beside each photo slot, I wrote “My birthday party (8 years old)!!!”

With each page, my handwriting gets a little sloppier, and the 8s start looking more like ampersands. I love that I can

see what my handwriting was like then, and picture myself sitting beside my sister as she filled the photo slots and I captioned each one with a wooden pencil. For the longest time, the memories I collected sparked joy in me. I was amused by the things my younger self thought were important to hold on to, and impressed by my ability to capture my emotions in writing from such a young age.

But as I grew older, these memories became deeply influenced by my relationships with other people, which couldn’t be reduced to a simple keepsake.

I was no longer capturing the simple joys of a birthday party. My once intelligible emotions of happiness and sadness became entangled with the bitterness of grief and transience of joy. Feelings of love and hatred were layered with my newfound understanding of envy and desire. I was trying to eternalize my relationships with people, as though a person can be strapped down to a place and time and compressed in between sheets of paper. I would lay all of the things I collected of a person beside each other — everything they had given me, or anything I had saved that reminded me of the time I spent with them. I expected my mind to go rushing back to a time when we were together, rewinding past all the time we spent apart. I expected to feel how I felt when I was around them, in the same way I was able to revisit the thrill of my 8th birthday through a stack of envelopes. I wanted to feel magically entrenched by

perfectly, but I realized that it was beside the point. Mexico opened my eyes to the beauty of my heritage.

We shared a common first language. A language I once feared to liberate because of the stares I might attract. A language that I couldn’t fluently vocalize. It was the power of these women that showed me the beauty of the Spanish language and my Mexican heritage.

their thick crocheted dresses. They carried confidence, pride and power. They twirled the fabric in circles, like they wore the rainbow. And these women were like me. We both had brown eyes, dark hair and tan skin. Here, I actually fit in: not only visually, but verbally. We shared a common first language. A language I once feared to liberate because of the stares I might attract. A language that I couldn’t fluently vocalize. It was the power of these women that showed me the beauty of the Spanish language and my Mexican heritage.

Traveling to Mexico was a dream come true for me. I spent the whole two weeks only speaking Spanish, and I didn’t care if it did not sound fluent. I could never roll my “r”s

I shouldn’t be afraid because my roots are like the sturdy roots of a young sapling, breaking through the hard soil and reaching towards the sun, determined to grow strong and tall despite the obstacles in their path. They are like the pioneers who set out into the unknown, with nothing but their courage and their dreams to guide them, forging a route towards a new life in a foreign land. When I came back to the United States, I was empowered to accept my difference. For once, I felt more confident than ever. It didn’t matter if I stood out in the yearbook or spoke a different language because the differences made me unique. My individuality is like a brilliant splash of color on a blank canvas, transforming the mundane into something extraordinary. So to the little kids I grew up with during snack time, I will proudly tell you how to say cat in Spanish.

the bliss of experiencing love for the first time. But instead, I was met with this wistful desire, making it abundantly clear to me that remembering isn’t enough. My memories lacked the rawness of human connection. There was nothing I could do to capture the blissful naivety of falling in love for the first time, and there was no way for me to materialize an enchanting memory of a person that no longer exists in such a way.

none of these things amount to a person. There is no number of memories I could collect or moments I could rebuild to capture a human connection. I can’t staticize a person, or rebuild a relationship based merely on what I remember of the past.

Acoss pages of unfinished smash journals, diaries and albums, I have mistakenly extended my understanding of the temporality of experiences to that of people. I tried to assign people to places and those places to points in time. I would recall a feeling and try to chase it until I lost sight of what it was I was longing for. I kept trying to reinvent a person I once knew through a collection of memories: a receipt from an ice cream trip, a handwritten letter, a printed polaroid photo signed with our initials. But

The happiness I feel when I look through my baby blue photo album doesn’t exist when I revisit my more recent memories. As I flip through journal pages and sort through memory boxes I’ve assembled over the last few years, I find the visual recollections of my memories clouded with a sense of longing, as my once blissful attempt to be sentimental is now tainted by inability to move on. My inability to grasp the largely intangible concept of human connection has cost me to lose sight of what my original intent was in saving all of these keepsakes. At 8 years old I wasn’t trying to create an avenue for myself to continue revisiting the past. I captured memories through words, photographs and small mementos because of how much I valued the present moment. I tried making each moment last forever because I found contentment in being present, unaffected by what has passed and what is yet to come. Over the years, I lost sight of what it means to be present. I became so heavily entrenched in a nostalgic, imagined yesterday that I found myself constantly grappling with the passage of time, and I lost sight of the here and now.

In an effort to escape this elusive past that I have trapped myself in, I am learning to succumb to the fleetingness of moments. I am grounding myself in present connections, memories and expectations. I’m learning to find closure in the passage of time and no longer trying to revive things that are gone.

JACQUELINE AGUIAR/MiC

dreams.”

I was trying to eternalize my relationships with people, as though a person can be strapped down to a place and time and compressed in between sheets of paper.

Op-Ed: Good Friday, 1981

Content warning: mentions of gun violence.

On the morning of April 17, 1981 — Good Friday — I awoke in my dorm room to the clanging of the fire alarm at the un-student-like hour of 6 a.m. Like most college students, I scoffed at the interruption. I wasn’t prepared to pull myself from a morning’s sleep, so I listened for footsteps or slamming doors out in the hallway, as if my fellow students’ behavior was ever any sort of barometer for emergency preparedness. I reluctantly tumbled out of the lofted bed and peered down the hallway. Not a soul heading for the exits. Everyone was asleep like I should have been. All indications of a false alarm.

I tried to get back to sleep. Finals were just weeks away and I knew rest would be in short supply. I’m sure I was still awake when I heard the sirens squealing outside.

I was a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Michigan. I still hadn’t settled on a major. I lived in Bursley Residence Hall on North Campus, a bus ride from Central Campus. North Campus was in its infancy in 1981 as the University started relocating all the engineering, art and architecture programs from Central Campus. North Campus at that time was a bucolic environment, with tree-lined walking paths and gentle hills for winter traying (sledding on lunch trays). Removed from the more frenetic Ann Arbor campus area, North Campus was an oasis of sorts.

I had planned to stay most of the weekend in Ann Arbor even though it was Easter. I planned to be home for Sunday dinner, but I cherished whatever uninterrupted study time I could get, especially in the quietude of this near-pastoral setting.

As the sirens’ roars grew thunderous, I pulled aside the stiff residence hall room curtains. Our room’s window faced the circular drive that ran past Bursley’s main entrance. The firetrucks, police cars and ambulances were all parked along the oval strip. What a massive false alarm, I thought.

I saw police and medical responders going in and out of Bursley’s front doors. A stretcher with an unidentified person was being whisked toward an ambulance. The IV bag shook in the transport. Another identical white gurney, unknown occupant, hurried out into another ambulance.

By now, there was stirring in our dorm hallway. As I watched the scene below, someone joined me at the window. Pointing toward the departing ambulances, he said, “One of them is our Doug.”

Over that nearly completed school year, my awareness of gun violence had surged. This current swelling of interest was the result of a flurry of shootings of celebrated and famous people.

In December 1980, John Lennon was gunned down in front of his New York City home by a fan asking for an autograph.

A scroll ran across the bottom of our hand-me-down TV set that night while we watched Monday Night Football: Ex-Beatle Dead. 40 years old.

On March 30, 1981, another

Weaponized incompetence is deeper than a TikTok trend

crazed person fired several rounds at President Ronald Reagan. The president’s communications chief sustained severe and lifelong head trauma. A valiant Secret Service agent took another bullet. The last slug ricocheted and struck Reagan as he was being rushed from the mayhem into his limousine. In the emergency room, doctors found the bullet precariously close to Reagan’s heart.

I was pasted to the activity around the residence hall’s front entrance. In time, a man exited, escorted by two policemen. The handcuffed man was hastened toward an awaiting police cruiser, and then he was gone too. At some point, the emergency vehicles departed and peaceful Bursley life had the illusion of normalcy, though we all knew at that instant our college experience had been profoundly altered.

Then on May 13, 1981, a Turkish assassin fired four bullets from a Browning Hi-Power semiautomatic pistol at Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square. All four bullets entered the Pope as he greeted the faithful from his Popemobile. Though gravely wounded, the Pope would recover and eventually forgive his assailant in his prison cell.

It didn’t take long for word to bolt throughout the dorm that two students had been shot in another wing of Bursley. The assailant tossed Molotov cocktails from his room onto the floor’s hallway, igniting the carpet which necessitated the fire alarm. As the students hurried from their rooms, hindered by the smoke and chaos, the assailant came back out of his room with a sawed-off shotgun and fired into the cloudy hallway.

The students I saw leaving Bursley on stretchers were undergoing surgery. One victim was our hallway’s resident advisor, Doug, who left his room to locate the source of the alarm, as required by dorm protocol. He was a senior and was set to graduate in a few weeks. The other, a freshman, was acting as the assigned fire marshal for his floor, tasked with ensuring his hallmates’ safety.

It didn’t seem long before we learned that Doug and the freshman had died.

Disbelief became chaos as students dashed about trying to get assurances to frantic parents. Apparently, the local news limited their coverage to a developing story of an early morning shooting at Bursley Hall on the University of Michigan’s North Campus. I finally reached my mom. TVs and radios throughout the dorm were loudly blasting news reports.

Soon, news trucks and reporters interrupted the quiet of North Campus. The University immediately committed counseling services to us affected students. I can no longer remember the exact details of what I did for the remainder of that day. I called my mom back and pleaded with her to pick me up that afternoon — as soon as possible. The sudden attention to our tiny community was unsettling. Go home for the weekend, study for finals there and be coddled by parents in my old cocoon.

That summer was spent back home working as a custodian at our local church. I cleaned, stripped and waxed all the classrooms in the church’s grade school — the same school I had attended not all that long ago. I

took great pleasure in telling my old grade school teachers about my college experiences as they dashed in and out of the building throughout the summer.

I found solace in this little school, where so much of me had been formed and molded. It had been such a nurturing period in my life, with all the exhilarating exploration and innocent wonderment that comes with learning — virtuous in itself.

At some point that summer, I sat in my old bedroom with my new Corona electric typewriter I bought so I could type my college papers, and I banged out my thoughts on this last school year. I sent my little essay to our weekly community newspaper. My short piece recounted the various shootings — Reagan, Pope John Paul II and my two dormmates — and its impact on a 20-yearold student not yet fully launched into life. The paper published it in their editorial section and titled it something like “Mom, Apple Pie and Guns.” My new vision of the American Dream — my new understanding of myself. Seemingly.

Eventually, the gunman was prosecuted and sentenced. It was a week-long trial. The assailant was in his senior year. I didn’t know him and had never seen him before. Apparently, the night before the shooting, he was frantically finishing a key paper for one of his classes, only to miss the filing deadline by moments.

The charged man raised the insanity defense, mimicking John Hinckley’s successful defense in his trial for the attempted assassination of President Reagan. The defense failed and he was sentenced to life in prison.

I wonder what the gunman thinks about in prison, what he thinks of guns now. My fear of guns relates back to my early childhood. After playing “war” with fake guns and knives, I was often left trembling, consumed with images of death much too vivid for any 10-yearold child. In reality, my personal exposure to guns was makebelieve: comic book gun violence in movies and on TV. The real warzone was in Detroit and other inner cities, not the safe and comfortable suburb where I grew up. I was irrationally agitated by guns if I gave them any real thought. I did nothing about it, though I suspected my fears exceeded those of people I knew. I avoided guns and any place where they likely prevailed. And that was the extent of it — both my trepidation and my desire that guns be less prevalent.

Graduating after two more uneventful years, I went on with my life. I went to law school and took a job at a major company where I practiced law for more than 30 years and retired to begin the next chapter of my life. During my adult life, I wasn’t oblivious to the escalating number of mass shootings and the resulting polarization of the country on gun control. I watched the litany of shooting rampages across the nation. I saw the Parkland students stand up for sane gun laws. I witnessed the Newtown massacre. I even read the inevitable articles for or against gun control that follow every mass shooting. I was aware of the NRA’s increased political clout and media influence.

JAMIE MURRAY Opinion Columnist

TikTok trends come and go, but one that I can’t stop thinking about is “weaponized incompetence.” The template for this trend is quite simple: Show how poorly tasks are done when the person expected to do them is simply incompetent. These videos are usually meant to shame the person targeted by the video, or for the creator to get some consolation from the internet. However, I find this less important than the presence of weaponized incompetence beyond my For You page. It saturates our lives, yet we rarely seem to recognize its many forms.

Essentially, this is the mindset of someone weaponizing their incompetence: “If I do a bad job, then no one will ask me to do it again.” It’s not ignorance, and it’s not incapability: It is a purposeful unwillingness to try. It is TikToks of women asking their partners to do a household chore or task, only to be met with such poor results that they end up doing it themselves. And when it comes to doing the task again, they won’t want to ask their partners.

This isn’t just a TikTok phenomenon, either. Women ages 15 and older end up doing an average of two more hours of housework daily than men in the same age category. This additional work goes unnoticed in many cases — 59% of women say that they end up doing the majority of the household work but only 34% of men agree that their partner does more work. In

heterosexual partnerships, this disparity must only be widened by men who leverage weaponized incompetence to thrust the least desirable tasks onto their partners.

Considering how weaponized incompetence works within heterosexual couples is usually where thinking about the subject begins and ends. However, it’s much more widespread.

Acknowledgment of this mindset existed long before any TikTok trend. A Wall Street Journal article dating back to 2007 coined the term “strategic incompetence,” describing it as an “art” and “skill” that can be used in the office for tasks that someone doesn’t want to do. The article suggests that this behavior is ingrained in us at birth. As children, we pretend not to know how to do chores when our parents ask us; as adults, we continue this behavior.

Even though the article, in comparison to TikTok, takes a more positive view of weaponized incompetence, the fundamental premise remains.

Weaponized incompetence could be considered a universal experience. Plenty of us have experienced the shortfalls of other people’s incompetence.

Exhibit A: The sighs and groans that fill a room when a professor brings up a group project. The sadly all-too-common situation is where one group member falls short, and the other members have to work harder to complete the project, only for all the members to receive the same grade.

It’s a frustrating task, working

Design by Kim Ly

with someone that chooses to not do the work, or even worse, they do the work so poorly that someone has to fix it for them. Other students are forced to fill in the gaps left by those who purposefully choose to slack off with the hopes of banking on the competence of their group mates.

Weaponized incompetence doesn’t end with simple tasks — it also damages our politics. People in positions of power are able to claim ignorance or dismiss the complexities of problems that they don’t want to discuss or fix.

Despite the headlines about critical race theory in recent years, seven in 10 Americans don’t know what critical race theory is. The same study found that 52% of Americans support teaching the legacy of racism in schools, compared to the 27% of Americans who support critical race theory being taught in schools. To fully understand the legacy of racism today, it’s necessary to learn about systemic racism. You can’t have one without the other. Weaponized incompetence in these situations persists when people vehemently oppose something they don’t even care to understand.

To admit that critical race theory should be taught in schools would be to admit that white privilege prevails within the legal system and policies. This is something that most Republicans don’t want to do, in order to keep legitimacy in the racial system established.

Hence, they claim ignorance of the privilege they hold.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Sex won’t solve your loneliness

AUDRA WOEHLE Opinion Columnist

Even as we inch further away from the apex of the COVID-19 pandemic, the effects of isolation are ever present. While its toll on our physical health has been at the forefront of our minds, this pandemic’s most profound and lasting effects are on our mental health.

Before COVID-19 hit, loneliness was already a problem that had been exacerbated by technology and social media. The solution to all of this? More sex, at least according to Magdalene J. Taylor, author of “Many Such Cases,” who explained her thinking in a recent op-ed for The New York Times. If you’ve ever wondered what George Michael’s 1987 song “I Want Your Sex” (parts one and two, of course) would look like as an op-ed, this would be it, right down to the lyrics “Sex is natural, sex is good; not everybody does it, but everybody should.”

Taylor’s assessment of the loneliness epidemic is no doubt correct that the solution is social connection, but misguided in tendering sex as the solution. The argument is flimsy, maintaining that people are lonely because they struggle to find sexual partners, and the resolution to this issue, she concludes, is to… have more sex? Akin to “If you’re depressed, just be happy,” sex is the logically inconsistent solution to a moral panic over sexlessness that Taylor amplifies then backtracks.

What’s most telling about the piece, however, is the fact that sex is conflated with intimacy. While, yes, there can often be overlap between the two, they

are certainly not synonymous: Sex can be either intimate or non-intimate, and intimacy itself can encompass a whole host of other ways of connection and is incredibly varied from individual to individual.

For one, sex is not an inherent good, but a neutral act with benefits and consequences. While the benefits of sex that Taylor points out, such as reducing stress and lowering blood pressure, are real, sex also comes with its own set of cons, such as STIs and, as various comments on the op-ed point out, unwanted pregnancies in a post-Roe America where even contraception is threatened. To argue as Taylor does — that “Sex is intrinsic to a society built on social connection” — is to fall into the naturalistic fallacy, to believe that what is natural is inherently good or right.

As we know, sex is not always a meaningful connection for some, whether it’s a one-time feeling or related to one’s sexual orientation.

Sex can even be a defense against emotional intimacy: Erotic transference is a phenomenon that occurs especially in therapeutic spaces, describing how patients often feel amorous attraction to their provider in resistance to the weight of bearing intimate fears and anxieties.

By intertwining sex and intimacy and speaking to a sexual naturalistic fallacy, Taylor’s piece becomes an example of the compulsory sexuality rampant in contemporary culture. Born from the term “compulsory heterosexuality,” referring to the assumption that a heterosexual relationship is the default, compulsory sexuality refers to the assumption that every person

experiences sexual attraction and desire, that anyone uninterested in sex is missing out on something that is, as Taylor puts it, “one of humanity’s most essential pleasures.”

This idea that desire for sex is what normal people feel — and that sex is a supreme form of pleasure — devalues acts of intimacy that aren’t sex (as well as relationships that aren’t sexual.) It not only excludes people who are uninterested in sex as a means of connection, but limits the types of intimacy we can find in relationships of all kinds. With friends and family, intimacy can mean devoting time to similar interests or meaningful conversation. Even with partners, intimacy need not be limited to sex when it can span from the physical to the non-physical, from cuddling to quality time. To restrict intimacy to sex alone means dwindling all the possible connections you can discover.

There are solutions aplenty to our loneliness epidemic. With a loss of connection to local institutions due to the pandemic and other larger factors at play, many have lost connection to others as well as a sense of purpose. By focusing on rebuilding these institutions to create thriving communities, lonely individuals can find themselves with a whole host of options for social connection in their everyday lives.

At the individual level, don’t limit yourself to the possibilities of who might play a meaningful role in your life. Have safe, consensual sex if you’d like, regardless of whether or not you’re looking for romance or social connection.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

From The Daily: UMich needs to capitalize on mental health resource improvements

The combined effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, academic pressure and socio-political stresses have created an environment wherein college students are often left feeling anxious, sad and hopeless. There is a greater need than ever for wellequipped therapy services for students, but, unfortunately, services at the University of Michigan are behind the curve. Counseling and Psychological Services, the campus agency that provides a range of mental health services and information to students, faces substantial barriers in terms of funding and capabilities.

On Feb. 15, in an open letter to Martino Harmon, the University’s vice president for student life, CAPS staff provided a glimpse at the problems they face in their line of work, from uncompetitive salaries to rising turnover rates. These problems limit their capacity to work, which is to provide an essential service to U-M students who depend on their assistance for a variety of reasons. A stable staff, sustainable income and a high-functioning professional environment are necessary for the mental health services on campus to flourish, which must be provided by the University. University President Santa Ono should dedicate his administration to the betterment of CAPS services and cultivate an environment that values the mental wellbeing of all students, faculty and staff.

Nationwide, mental health practitioners have seen a significant increase in demand for services. In the same vein, on college campuses, practitioners have also seen major increases in demand for care, even prior to the pandemic, but this increased demand has not typically resulted in increased funding for campus mental health services. Harmon has stated his support for improving mental health, and helped launch a student mental health committee to outline a “broad institutional approach.” This is not the first time that CAPS has publicized its significantly increased demand, either; in 2016, CAPS director Dr. Todd Sevig noted a 20% increase in students requesting services for the fall semester in 2015. CAPS does not need to be absorbed by another service, such as University Health Service; rather, the University needs to bolster CAPS’s ability to fulfill its present scope of service. In its current form, students often have to wait for several weeks to get a consultation for services from CAPS — especially during peak periods in the fall semester.

Increases in the budget allocated to CAPS outpaced inflation in all years except in fiscal years 2019-2020 and 2020-2021. In 2019-2020, CAPS experienced a 21% decrease in funding, while in 2020-2021, the unit received no budget increase

whatsoever. CAPS is budgeted for under the Vice President of Student Life office, which received a minuscule budget increase of 0.2% in 2020-2021.

Although CAPS’s budget for the current fiscal year increased the amount they have to spend by 13%, this has not been enough to meet industry standards or student demand. Salaries at CAPS are uncompetitive with peer institutions. A 2022 site visit by the International Accreditation of Counseling Services noted a “significant concern” that professional staff salaries are below similar positions at other universities and local and regional offices. In order to best retain quality staff members and to compensate for the difficult heavy caseloads they face in their roles, mental healthcare providers must be adequately paid.

When tragedy strikes for students, CAPS is often the University’s first recommendation. In the wake of the Michigan State University tragedy, the first email from the University of Michigan’s Office of the President listed CAPS, the Faculty and Staff Counseling and Consultation Office, and the Michigan Medicine Office of Counseling and Workplace Resilience under support resources. During devastating and stressful events that impact students, CAPS is treated as a catch-all for short-term support. By increasing funding to CAPS to provide for staff needs, and therefore provide for current students, CAPS may become an even more sought-after resource when it is made more reliable. In order to decrease the pressures put on CAPS, and increase the available resources, students must be directed to other services already available to them, which — despite being left unmentioned in email sign-offs — are accessible through U-M health websites.

Under “Resources for Stress and Mental Health” from UHS, CAPS is only one resource of many. To name a few, MiTalk provides online tools for students to manage stress and mental health; CampusMindWorks promotes post-mental health diagnosis information and resources with a searchable database; the University Psychological Clinic, while not paid for by student tuition, acts as a therapy and testing center; and Wellness Coaching supports student well-being in many aspects of students’ lives, from substance use to sexual health. Through the LSA Newnan Advising Center and the University Career Center, academically centered support is also an option for students. In addition to these U-M tools, there are also student organizations that offer community and mental health support, like Active Minds, PULSE and Wolverine Support Network.

CAPS cannot efficiently and proactively exist as an allencompassing office for mental health and student struggles, particularly when it is not meant to be used for long-term support. On average, students

seeking services from CAPS attend 3.5 sessions, though it is unclear if one of these sessions counts as the required initial consultation. After five sessions, it is much less likely for students to receive continued counseling from CAPS: when students’ needs are “beyond CAPS’s scope of practice,” or past the individual session limit, referrals to therapists and health care outside of the University are provided, though not consistently. An optional standardized referral process could aid interested students in finding reliable help after CAPS, as well as increase the organization’s reliability and the overall long-term health of students.

This Editorial Board is optimistic about the University’s recent decision to partner with Uwill, a teletherapy service. In a Daily news article, the U-M Public Affairs department stated that reviews from 450 pilot program participants were positive; as Uwill is opened up to the whole campus, we hope that CAPS and Uwill are better able to absorb student demand. However, even if this development may lead to a better mental health situation on campus, it does not substitute for responding to CAPS’s needs. The University should still meet with CAPS and determine a competitive salary increase.

A tuition-supported service made available after CAPS sessions would also be helpful for students. They could be matched to a stable and reliable mental health clinician that fits their specific needs without the concern of high therapy costs stopping them. While plenty of students seek only the short-term counseling promised by CAPS, referrals to longer-term care should be made consistently. Alongside referrals, the University should better advertise low-cost, longterm possibilities outside of CAPS that would serve the interested student population. CAPS cannot be the only student resource listed at the end of an email, nor should it be the only option for U-M students, for the benefit of both CAPS employees and the students that CAPS services.

CAPS is too often the only option for U-M students seeking counseling, but it should not be. For students without expendable resources to search for therapy services, and for those who do not want their guardians notified that their insurance is being used for therapy, CAPS is likely the best option. Given the centrality of CAPS in many students’ pursuit of therapy services, we cannot diminish the importance of funding this campus unit and supporting its clinicians. Even if CAPS cannot provide students with long-term support, the program should be allotted the resources to be effective in the short term. CAPS would not only be able to better support students by providing a first step in therapy services, but it would also serve as a more effective referral point for more long-term therapy options.

RUSHABH SHAH Opinion Columnist

You don’t know how to talk to your international friend. There are three categories of students at the University of Michigan: in-state, out-ofstate and international. Of the 51,225 students who attended the University in 2022, a little less than one-fifth were international. So, chances are you’re going to come across some sooner rather than later — and I’m here to tell you that, for the most part, your natural instincts when you do are wrong. Numerous studies, such as one published in 2016 by two PhD students at Iowa State University, have highlighted the alienation that international students feel compared to their American counterparts. As an international student myself, there have been numerous occasions where I have felt that I simply do not belong — be it in a classroom, a meeting or an auditorium. Unfortunately, this is a feeling I’m certain many, perhaps too many, can relate to.

I do not believe that this feeling of isolation for international students is the result of any intentional thoughts and actions. It is not that students and faculty from the United States are out to get us. If anything, I have found

Debates on the Diag Big celebration

that the opposite is true: Many will go above and beyond to make me feel welcome. But the issue isn’t about feeling unwelcome — it is about feeling like I don’t belong. It’s a feeling that manifests itself in even the tiniest of interactions.

The first mistake happens when, after introductions, they respond with, “Oh I also know a person named Rohan (i.e. another Indian name). Do you know Rohan?” Such a statement not only goes a long way towards making the other person feel like they are being put in a box but also makes it harder for you to identify them in the future; it’s not their name that you’ll remember, just the fact that they reminded you of your other ethnic friend.

The second mistake that many make is a bit more subtle but, trust me, we notice it. It’s the reaction people give when we adhere to our stereotypes. For example, when I reveal that I, an Indian, am a computer science major, there is a sense of “of course, that’s what I expected.” I understand that some of these microaggressions are not administered with any malicious intent, but their effects are certainly felt.

The most infuriating thing, however, is the tokenistic way in which international students can be spoken about. Tokenism in various sectors of society is a widely discussed subject.

American TV shows, for example, have often been criticized for including only one or two members from a minority community and calling that inclusion, despite often making those characters onedimensional — often nothing more than a hodgepodge of stereotypes. However, this phenomenon is not limited to TV shows. I find that international students are viewed and talked about in a similar sense on campus — as if their value comes primarily from the diversity they bring.

An example of this would be when you tell me, upon realizing that I am Indian, that your best friend or your roommate is also Indian, followed by “They taught me how to make ‘insert Indian food’.” While that is a cool thing for me to know, I don’t think your natural instinct when I ask you about your American roommate is to first tell me what cooking technique they taught you. That is what needs to change — this natural instinct to reduce an individual to what their culture can bring to the table rather than what they as an individual can.

I’m not saying that there needs to be large-scale, institutional changes. I can appreciate that it is a mammoth task for students and faculty to, at all times, cater their actions to every potential international student group.

Iwas frustrated and saddened to see the recent opinion piece in The Michigan Daily about “Michigan Math.” As a current Graduate Student Instructor in the Math Department who has taught MATH 115 and is currently teaching MATH 116, I would like to try to address some of the points made in this article. Many of us in the Math Department would have been happy to talk to the author, and I’m disappointed that they didn’t reach out to hear from us.

The author focused on the idea that math courses at the University of Michigan follow a

M

The opener introduced himself at our University of Michigan stand-up club, Amateur Hour, and told his first joke. The audience was rowdy. The venue didn’t have enough seats for everyone. People were standing, drinking from pitchers and talking among themselves. I ran through my set in my head, nervous but prepared. I stepped up to the microphone when my time came and started with crowd work.

Letter to the Editor: ‘It’s time to stop dreading “Michigan Math”’ misses the mark

“flipped classroom” model, and pointed to a meta-study that found little benefit to flipped classrooms. While MATH 115 instructors indeed expect students to read the textbook before class, the intention is not that this takes the place of all direct instruction during class. We are told to give small lectures during class to explain key ideas, clear up points of confusion and provide extra examples. Since every MATH 115 course relies on the course lecture content, it is debatable whether the MATH 115 setup even qualifies as a flipped classroom. Further, asking students to read outside of class and to answer a few questions before class is a standard practice across many subjects (imagine an English class

where you didn’t have to read outside of class).

The Hechinger Report cited by the author finds that the success of a flipped classroom relies on what actually happens during class. The University’s introductory math program is rare in higher math education because it actually tries to put in place decades-worth of research, much of it from U-M scholars. The research shows that doing group work for the majority of class time is not only better for the learning of all students, but also provides even stronger educational gains for women, non-binary folks and students of Color. While I agree that flipping a classroom does not necessarily lead to better learning on its own, the research is definitive

that using class time to have students work collaboratively to solve problems with the support of an instructor will lead to higher quality, more equitable education.

The author referred several times to the idea that students have to teach themselves outside of class, implying that the time spent in class working on problems is not “teaching.” This is problematic for a number of reasons — chiefly because an effective teacher employs numerous pedagogical strategies, not just lecturing, and they are all part of teaching. This denigration of teaching, which is present in many spaces throughout education in general, can have a multitude of harmful effects, many of which are

contributing to the low pay and poor working conditions that characterize the profession in many different institutions.

Personally, I think this comes from a lack of understanding of all that goes into teaching — it is not just lecturing.

Where I did find common ground with the author was in their frustration that math GSIs receive little training before they are sent in to teach MATH 115. You might be stunned, as I was, to learn that your MATH 115 instructor generally has one week of training before they arrive in your classroom. We receive a small amount of additional training throughout our five to six years here in the form of course meetings, but these tend to focus more on logistics than pedagogy. I think

it is important to note that, from speaking to colleagues from doctoral programs at more than 25 peer institutions, this amount of training is standard, and so your math lecturers and even your math professors don’t have any more training than us.

The author is calling for a major overhaul of a program that serves tens of thousands of students, is driven by the work of hundreds of GSIs and lecturers and is rooted in the research of hundreds of wellregarded scholars. I would encourage the author to solicit information from sources other than a few fellow students and a single research study. Certainly there is work to do, but let’s not waste time pointing in random unhelpful directions.

I hoped for a few answers from the front row. The entire room erupted — and didn’t stop. It was related to my questions at first, but quickly devolved into random chitchat.

I tried to regain control of the situation, but the microphone and speakers were too quiet. So I waited, stiff and awkward, until their attention returned.

Comedy is a difficult art form, maybe the most difficult. When it works, the audience doesn’t think twice. They walk into the club expecting to laugh and leave with their expectations met. It works because they paid for it. But when it fails, it

fails hard, and the audience is quicker to rage than sympathy. I’ve failed hard, and more than once, so take it from me: The comedian is always angrier than the audience after a bad show. You gave up one night to hear their material; they gave up months trying to write it. We need slack to operate. Comedy is based on poking in all the wrong places in all the right ways to get laughs. When we don’t get laughs, it can feel like we’re just jabbing where it hurts for no apparent reason. But we’re not. Writing jokes is a process — they crash and burn more often than they land.

At one of my first-ever open mics, I remember trying a new bit about infant mortality. It felt like trudging knee deep through mud, just trying to reach the end before the crowd could start booing. A few shows later, I repurposed the punchline. The crowd was hanging on every word, their laughs growing louder after each sentence. It was like magic. We’ve got to love the magic more than we hate the mud, or the magic dies. And it is dying. Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special “The Closer” is perhaps the best example

of this trend. The roughly hour-long set provoked outrage, in part because of Chappelle’s statement that “Gender is a fact.” In July 2022, a Minneapolis comedy club canceled a scheduled Chappelle performance over the controversy. When the show was moved to a different location, protesters harassed fans waiting outside the new theater, even throwing eggs at them, Chappelle said.

Comedy requires thick skin to watch, particularly if you are watching Chappelle’s brand. That’s why it’s voluntary. Turn off the TV, don’t click on the special — but don’t get in the way of a good joke. Let nothing be off-limits or too offensive to talk about. Comedy needs freedom to flourish, and right now, that freedom is shriveling.

Many of America’s largest companies take on humor in their anti-harassment policies. From Amazon to Apple to Google, jokes in the workplace are becoming increasingly less acceptable.

In 2018, a CareerBuilder survey found that 54% of employers had decided not to hire someone after looking into their social media footprint. Now, even jokes made before getting the job are under scrutiny, and the implications for aspiring comedians like me are clear.

A few months ago, I went to a meeting of my stand-up club with a new one-liner I had written (that I won’t repeat here). I tried it out — and the other members laughed. But they were uncomfortable. I asked for feedback, and someone said something to the effect of, “it’s funny, it’s really funny. But what if someone records it? Do you want a future employer to hear that?”

He was right — in today’s political environment, I wouldn’t want what I said heard out in the open. That’s the problem. Those performing comedy need

a welcoming environment to succeed, not one that throws eggs or ruins careers. Instead, we’re coming up on the fiveyear anniversary of Kevin Hart being forced out as host of the Oscars over a gay joke, and the one-year anniversary of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock over a joke about his wife.

Some comedians are truly mean-spirited and full of malicious intent. The people I’ve discussed are not. Cruelty has no place in comedy. But more obstruction is not the answer — it results in good comics like Chappelle, Hart and Rock being unfairly condemned. We can fight hateful jokes by refusing to watch those who spew them when they perform at a club, rather than shutting down the clubs themselves.

A liberated stage means hearing things you don’t necessarily like, but it also means a liberated audience. The freedom of a comedian to say anything guarantees the freedom of the crowd to hear anything — uncurated by the establishment or mob. That’s what America needs right now. Comedy shows us things about ourselves and our world in a way no other art can. It cuts deep through the veneer of our culture and society, but when done right, we’re too busy laughing to feel the blade.

I’ll never forget sitting in bed one night, shortly after the end of the COVID-19 lockdowns, watching a clip of Jon Stewart talking about the origins of the pandemic. I had been feeling down, confused and angry about everything that had happened. I felt as though the media had over-politicized the issue until I didn’t know what to believe. And then I listened as Stewart picked it all apart, everything he said making sense, and my emotions improved.

The world is a dark and dishonest place, in dire need of comedy. We cannot destroy it, especially now, with all the good material the last several years have given us.

JACK BRADY Opinion Columnist

You can never escape the

Design by Sara Fang

Design by Evelyn Mousigian

Don’t cancel comedy, it’s too important

greatest gift is unanswered prayers’: Inside Tracy Smith’s journey to Michigan

Joshua Brown: Give Tracy Smith time, patience to build program amid earlyseason struggles

The start of Michigan baseball coach Tracy Smith’s tenure has not gone as anticipated by some, opening to a 6-9 record. And he would be the first to admit it, calling its home-opener loss on March 8 to a 2-8 Oakland team “embarrassing.”

But this isn’t really Smith’s squad. With multiple players transferring away from the program, MLB Draft picks and injuries that have thinned the roster, he was dealt the equivalent of a seven-deuce Texas Holdem hand for this season.

To attempt to fill these voids, Smith had to scramble late in the transfer portal, acquiring graduate shortstop Cody Jefferis from San Diego and junior catcher Gabe Sotres from Michigan State. But these temporary fixes cannot fully compensate for the Wolverines’ overarching deficiencies.

Nonetheless, Smith is trying, and that should count for something. With such a depleted roster, there is only so much a first-year coach can do.

high-ceiling recruits in future years.

As Smith molds the program in his image, the bones of it have already been in place through the strong culture he inherited despite the many positional weak spots the Wolverines have. That’s even showing up in their newest faces

After an illustrious coaching career, Tracy Smith has finally made his way to the Michigan baseball team.

But for Smith, a career in baseball almost never happened.

“I fancied myself a basketball guy first,” Smith told The Daily. “Basketball was my first love, (but) I happened to be a little bit better at baseball. I couldn’t shoot.”

Smith was so serious about basketball that he considered playing at St. Joe’s, an NCAA Division II program. In the end, his baseball ties from Kentland, Ind. pointed him in a different direction and Smith committed to Miami University of Ohio.

Due to the intense baseball culture in Kentland — a town that produced three MLB players throughout Smith’s childhood — Smith was able to develop his talents in that environment.

“I was very fortunate,” Smith said. “There (were) three little dinky towns that fed into the high school, and within that area, we played legion baseball. The coaching back then was really good. There was a gentleman named Tater Blankenship. … He was my little league coach all the way through.”

Working with Blankenship proved beneficial for Smith. Blankenship’s demanding style of coaching enabled him to develop the fundamentals of the game in his early teen years. And as Smith continued to grow up, it became clear that he was more than just a gifted little league baseball player.

Smith took the next step of his baseball career at South Newton High School, where he was coached by Denny Stitz. According to Stitz, it was clear that Smith was athletically gifted — and not just at baseball.

“When he got into high school, he was (part of) a very talented group of kids,” Stitz told The Daily. “He was recognized in the region as being one of the best athletes because he could do a lot. … But in baseball, he excelled. He had tools (and) was probably the best pure baseball athlete I had while I was at South Newton.”

In high school, Smith played all four years at the varsity level, winning three sectional championships in the process. Stitz credits Smith’s success as much to his skill as to his work ethic.

At South Newton, Stitz also coached Smith on the basketball team, and he preferred a roster that was well-conditioned. So Stitz and Smith’s father told him that if he wanted to play basketball, he’d have to run for the school’s cross-country team additionally. And that’s exactly what Smith did, becoming one of the best runners on the team in the process.

“When he put his mind to something, the athletic talent was there,” Stitz said. “As far as his mind would take you, that’s how far he could go.”

After high school, Smith’s strong mindset moved on to Miami — but not because of baseball.

Smith was so unsure of his future aspirations that he didn’t sign with the RedHawks program until after his senior year of high school. Again, baseball was something he was good at, but he didn’t see it in his future.

Instead, Smith aimed to work in the classroom and earned a teaching degree at Miami. Smith prioritized having fun while playing baseball, combining his work ethic with his upbeat personality.

“(Playing baseball) was going to pay for a little bit of the education,” Smith said. “… I had no plans or aspirations at that time of being a coach.”

For the RedHawks, Smith played a morale-boosting role while being one of their best allaround athletes, making comical home videos in which he used dummies to enact himself falling off of the stadium’s walls.

“Tracy was a bit of a livewire,” Smith’s college teammate Tim Naehring told The Daily. “(But) he was probably the best pure athlete on our entire team.”

With his pure athleticism also came a competitive fire. Smith played all over the field for the betterment of his team. He also had the unique ability to take a step back from his own individual play, examining what changes he could make to facilitate Miami’s success. That skill is one of many that has translated to his managerial career more than 30 years later.

“I remember Tracy telling me right from the beginning, ‘Hey, all the stories from college, these guys are hearing none of that today,’ ” Naehring said. “… Tracy did have a side of him where he had a lot of fun and probably learned his coaching style from what he knows he was capable of as a college athlete.”

But despite his success at the collegiate level, he never thought baseball could be a career.

That all changed when he was drafted by the Chicago Cubs in the 1987 and 1988 MLB Draft. Baseball now looked like it could be a legitimate career option, and after college, Smith reported to spring training with the Cubs.

But it came with a cost. While playing for Chicago, Smith missed the birth of his first child.

He realized that his familial obligations outweighed his love for baseball, so Smith retired in 1990. Baseball was once again on the back burner.

“I hung it up to go raise a family,” Smith said. “(I wanted to) go get a master’s degree. And that kind of started the … coaching path.”

After hanging up his cleats, Smith interviewed to be an administrator at Miami University Middletown, but got a rejection letter. However, that ‘no’ turned out to be his greatest blessing.

“I was devastated,” Smith said. “But I say it’s like that Garth Brooks song, sometimes God’s greatest gift is unanswered prayers. And so I started coaching.”

Coaching was a job that Smith immediately excelled at. After starting his career at Miami University Middletown, the same school that rejected him in an administrative role, Smith

became head coach of Miami five years later. Eventually, he made his way to Indiana, where he got a taste of Big Ten action, winning the conference tournament in 2008. In the 2013 season, Smith won the NCBWA National Coach of the Year award, once again leading the Hoosiers to a Big Ten championship and advancing the program to its first College World Series in its history.

Smith eventually left Indiana, coaching at Arizona State for seven seasons and leading the Sun Devils to a 201-155 record before being fired.

And after Arizona State in 2021, Smith was unsure if he’d return to coaching. Then, Michigan called.

And Ann Arbor wasn’t new to him.

While at Miami, Smith had his first run-in with Michigan, playing the Wolverines numerous times in his four-year college career. Smith competed against numerous Michigan legends and coaches, such as Jim Abbott and Bud Middaugh.

When he arrived in Ann Arbor, seeing those names gave him a sense of comfort in the unfamiliar environment of Ray Fisher Stadium.

“I don’t want to say it’s surreal, but it’s kind of neat,” Smith said. “To be connected to this place as someone who’s played a lot of names I see on the walls. … That’s kind of fun.”

Now, he takes over the reigns as the program’s head coach, leading the team in front of those walls everyday.

“When I was at (Arizona State) and my sabbatical was forced upon me, I swore I would never come back (to the Midwest),” Smith said with a chuckle. “… Everybody was like ‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ (and) I said, ‘Well, it’s Michigan.’ ” And because of the Wolverine program he played against in his collegiate career, Smith has always had a soft spot for Michigan, even going as far as to call himself a ‘Michigan man.’

“Culture and whatever (former coach Erik Bakich’s) staff did, and just the department in general, has been fantastic,” Smith said. “Now we’re gonna put our own touches on this thing in terms of recruiting … but zero complaints in terms of just the quality of human beings, the things that we’ve walked into and the focusing on baseball.”

While his personal touches remains to be seen, Smith knows he’s the man for the role in righting the ship for the Wolverines after a tumultuous offseason. His coaching experience and work ethic show that he possesses all the tools for success. And after living a life making the most of unanswered prayers, Smith could excel in inheriting a roster full of question marks. Whether the Wolverines can replicate his vision is unknown, but after a life of unpredictability, Michigan making a resurgence under Smith would be just another egg in his basket.

“I think it’s been well documented,” Smith said at Michigan Media Day Feb. 9. “A little bit of shortness to the roster piece that happened there. … We may ask you if you’ve not played this position, ‘Hey you might do it this year,’ or you haven’t pitched since high school, ‘Guess what, you might have to give us some innings this year.’ ” Utilizing position players like third baseman and Mitch Voit as pitchers in order to fill a Wolverines staff that had a 7.00 ERA last year, and has only managed a 6.10 ERA so far this season, is a microcosm of the strenuous climb Smith was faced with upon taking the job in Ann Arbor. This is despite taking over a program that won the Big Ten Championship last year and was a few outs away from the NCAA Super Regionals.

Yet with so many challenges, Smith hasn’t been afraid to combat them. He just needs time to do so. And everyone should give him that time.

So how should the 2023 Michigan baseball team be evaluated?

Smith was hired by Michigan on July 3, well after the 2022 recruiting cycle ended. Following former coach Erik Bakich to Clemson, shortstop and captain Riley Bertram and right-hander Willie Weiss transferred to the Tigers. Michigan also lost three key players to the draft, including outfielder Clark Elliott. This left senior catcher Jimmy Obertop, who briefly entered the transfer portal before withdrawing, as the intended centerpiece of Smith’s lineup card for this season. But then he suffered an elbow in fall practice, which has kept him out of competition so far and will likely continue to do so until the end of March at the earliest. Even when he returns, he will only be able to be the designated hitter given the nature of his injury.

The limited pitching depth has loomed large, as Smith inherited just two returning pitchers that threw over 70 innings last season in junior lefthander Connor O’Halloran and junior right-hander Chase Allen. Yet two solid starters cannot last any team, let alone Michigan, for an entire weekend series.

“When you got Connor O’Halloran and Chase Allen on the mound that aren’t walking guys and pitching in the zone and being aggressive, that’s the difference,” Smith said after Michigan’s 9-4 loss to UCLA. “So we’re not giving free bases, which we gave a ton of free bases the last couple of games. That’s the difference.”

To make up the difference, among many more, Smith will need time to recruit to bring in talent that can blossom over time within the program. And his experience before coming to Michigan should help with that.

After his departure from Arizona State, where he took the Sun Devils to four regional appearances, Smith became CEO of Diamond Allegiance, an organization that works to improve the travel ball system. Smith can utilize those relationships with younger athletes to recruit in future years. But that takes time.

“I’ve recruited my entire life through the travel ball organizations,” Smith said. “But through this company that I was the CEO of last year, I was interacting daily with all the top leaders and top organizations of all the top travel ball clubs all around the country. So now when I’m back in coaching it’s given me unbelievable access and relationships that I didn’t have two years ago.”

Building these relationships over the past two years can be pivotal for Smith at a school like Michigan, where luring talent to the colder temperatures provides an additional layer of difficulty. But the Wolverines have already seen flashes of young potential in freshman center fielder Greg Pace Jr. in addition to Voit. With time, these centerpieces can be building blocks for Smith if he can match them with

“Obviously I’m gonna help the team as much as possible, whatever that is,” Voit said at Michigan Media Day. “At the end of the day stats are stats, but wins are wins and I’m trying to get as many wins as possible for this team.”

And that culture has already been on display. Smith publicly called the team out after striking out 13 times against Golden Grizzlies pitchers, questioning “if it bothers us.” Instead of wilting, Michigan showed mettle in two resilient wins against UAB the following weekend.

In the second game against the Blazers, Voit pitched 3.2 scoreless innings and posted two RBI, including the game-winning sacrifice fly in the bottom of the eighth inning, to earn himself his first collegiate win as a pitcher.

Keeping the team motivated amid a six-game losing streak is what coaches are there for, and these games showed that the Wolverines are still buying into what the new coaching staff is selling.

If the team stays in lockstep with Smith and the coaching staff, Michigan baseball’s upside can grow in the future as Smith is able to further leverage his background in the travel ball landscape to procure prospects on the recruiting trail.

Successful talent development and a unified team culture translate to winning baseball. But the talent for the Wolverines isn’t there yet, so don’t expect a repeat of last year’s Big Ten Championship run. Rather, evaluate this season on if Michigan continues to fight hard throughout the season and show flashes of youthful upside if their roster deficiencies further compound and put them out of Big Ten contention. For Smith to stay on schedule in building back up the program, the Wolverines have to stick together.

The Michigan baseball program, which was a game away from a national championship less than four years ago, has the puzzle pieces spilled out on the table to eventually become an annual Big Ten Championship and NCAA Tournament contender once again.

‘Sometimes God’s

COLE MARTIN Daily Sports Writer

RILEY NIEBOER/Daily

JOSHUA BROWN

Women’s SportsWednesday: What Women’s Month means to me

In observance of Women’s History Month, The Daily’s sports section is launching its sixth annual series aimed at telling the stories of female athletes, coaches and teams at the University of Michigan, from the perspective of female sports writers on staff. Daily Sports Editor Lily Israel continues the series with this story. I was always the only girl.

The only girl playing football during elementary school at recess.

The only girl on my 4th-grade flag football team. The only girl leaving Hebrew school on Sunday to go to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers games. The only girl in my 9th-grade fantasy football league. The only girl watching the Super Bowl for the game and not the halftime show.

When I came to Michigan, I was scared, timid and slightly embarrassed that the first thing I wanted to do in college was join the sports section of the newspaper. But immediately all my fears went away. Because up until that moment, I always felt isolated.

WOMEN’S GOLF

Alone among my friends in my desire to do nothing but watch football on the weekends. Alone in my passion for my beloved Buccaneers. Alone in watching sports all day. In that first moment at the newspaper, as I looked around to see the smattering of other girls in The Daily’s weekly sports meeting, I knew I found my place. And that’s what Women’s Month means to me. Knowing that I belong in the sports world as a woman; knowing that I can share that passion and experience with everyone around me; knowing that I am wholeheartedly supported by all the women here, but also all the men, who look up to me and uplift me in all I do.

Women’s Month in The Daily’s sports section was the child of women writers before me who also found their place in the newsroom and knew they wanted to share those joys. They wanted to highlight female athletes and coaches that otherwise wouldn’t get the spotlight. And they wanted to do it by uplifting other female writers — encouraging them to step outside their comfort zones, use their voic-

es and challenge the limits of what this industry was before them.

The beautiful thing about growing up a sports fan was that it always gave me an outlet. I never had nothing to do. There was always a game on or a new ESPN clip to watch. Sports was always there for me. I had my family to go to every Buccaneers game with, something I didn’t realize wasn’t a normal thing. I didn’t realize not every family prioritized going to football games over Hebrew school.

Sung sisters find their place in Michigan team dynamic

MACKENZIE MIELKE Daily Sports Writer

Golf is an individual sport, but it’s played in pairs with the Sung sisters.

Lauren and Sydney Sung are freshman twins, only the second set of twins ever to play on the Michigan women’s golf team. However, playing the sport together started long before their collegiate careers. It actually runs in the family. Their older sister, Katherine, currently plays for Dartmouth’s golf team. The group of sisters all began golfing together.

“We all basically started at the same time,” Sydney said. “Our dad really got into golf, I think in his college years probably. I think when we were five or six, we got taken to the range and just hit a bunch with our plastic clubs.”

Golf may not be the first sports parents throw their toddlers into. In fact, many start with games of tee-ball, watching their kids draw shapes in the dirt. It’s a similar story for the Sung sisters, both of them going through a multitude of sports before landing on the range.

“We started playing a bunch of sports growing up,” Lauren said. “We swam, we did volleyball, basketball, tennis and we even ski raced. We ended up coming down to a few sports that we thought we would have a future in, and it

ended up being golf.”

Going with golf indeed was the right decision. While attending Palo Alto High School, both sisters ranked among the top-25 golfers in the state of California. They only built on to their impressive record; neither lost a single match in their four years of league play. Those wins propelled Palo Alto to a state championship, team runner-up and two top-20 finishes for each of them at the state finals in 2019 and 2021. The sisters are teammates who have the history and scores to back up their dominance.

Despite their success as teammates, there is no way to erase that pure competitiveness and desire to beat your sibling. Even at the level of Divison I golf.

“I think it just motivates us really in the end,” Sydney said. “I think it’s been really beneficial and especially coming to Michigan with being on the same team. We’ve kinda had to learn how to sort of root for each other in a way, but golf is very individualized and we still have that competitive aspect. At some point, we have individual scores, and we’re trying to be better than each other.”

The duo didn’t exactly plan on experiencing their careers together, and even went through their recruitment process separately. With this process, they looked at the same coaches but wanted to be recruited independently. This then caused a recurring confusion when brought up to the sisters about whether or not they were even related, something they still laugh about now. For the benefit of the Wolverines, though, having this duo together as

But I guess religious experiences are different for everyone.

Growing up with sports was somewhat of a religious experience for me. It gave me something to root for. It was something that I couldn’t impact and something that didn’t need to impact my life, but at the same time, it was my world. Whether the Bucs won or lost each Sunday dictated my mood for the week. On weeks we won, which were few and far between when I was young, my dad would wake me up by asking, “Guess

what?” To which I would answer, “The Bucs won!” Starting off my day with the win in mind was all I needed to keep me going until the next game.

Playing sports was equally as important to me growing up.

Somehow, I fell in love with golf at a young age. For me, the most solitary sport of all made me feel seen. Being on a golf course made me feel at home.

As I grew older, though, I craved the support of a team. I ran track and played golf through middle school, but I wanted to be part of something larger than myself.

And, at its core, that’s what sports really is — being part of something greater than just yourself. So I joined the lacrosse team. Along with five of my best friends, playing for my school’s lacrosse team was the highlight of my high school experience. Playing on a team is an experience you can get nowhere else. You are held accountable for your actions, but you have an entire group of supportive women by your side every step of the way.

Lacrosse gave me some of my fondest memories. Early morning practices, late night bus rides

GRACE BEAL/Daily

teammates has a proven track record for success.

“We really made it a point to come to the decision on our own,” Sydney said. “It turned out for the better and it’s really awesome. Just having her down the hall in our dorm, it’s really nice.”

Having that type of support and comfort for a new chapter offers aid in that transition — especially with a team of just seven golfers where upperclassmen lead the way. Having that type of presence allows the Sung sisters to find space on the team.

In a sport like golf where an individual score is valued heavily, it might be harder to form team camaraderie that comes with most group sports. However, for the pair and the rest of the team, there is support for both the underclassmen and the team goals they want to achieve.

“We’ve had a lot of bonding moments,” Lauren said. “Just being able to share experience throughout our whole high school time and (the team’s) experience, learning about the things they have done for the last few years.”

This team environment is cultivating success for the sisters. Lauren shot a career-low 18-hole card of 67 at the Moon Invitational in February. In her collegiate debut in September, Sydney shot a 233 at the 54-hole Mercedes-Benz Collegiate. Their team as a whole has been performing at a high level of execution, and the Sung sisters have had to transition from the California weather to the irregular and unpredictable Michigan season.

“Having an offseason that we didn’t really have in California,” Lauren said. “It’s been pretty easy to specifically work on something and see it kind of progress and get better at that specific thing.”

after beating our rival for the first time, pregame jam sessions, helping friends through career altering injuries. Sports mimics life in that way. You go through the highest highs and the lowest lows all with the same people you would go to war for.

Sports have defined nearly every facet of my life. Because of how unique it is to be a woman so passionate about sports, it has come to represent me. I mark key moments in my life through memorable sports moments.

I remember the first Bucs playoff game, a crushing loss I witnessed in person. I remember when Dwight Howard returned to the Magic only to crush my heart and leave the next year, and I thought my whole childhood was over. I remember when Tom Brady came to the Bucs in 2020. Pandemic be damned I was over the moon, thinking for sure the world would end before he played for us. I remember when the Bucs won the Super Bowl in the midst of a pandemic, a bright light in one of the hardest years for everyone.

Execution leads Michigan to 7-3 victory over Ohio State in Big Ten semifinal

JOHN TONDORA Daily Sports Writer

The blueprint was always there. It was never a question of talent, or game plan.

It was always about the execution.

Disciplined, clean, five-on-five hockey. Capitalizing on opponents’ mistakes and playing the best even-strength game possible. It’s dangerously simple, but for the No. 4 Michigan hockey team (23-11-3 overall, 13-10-2 Big Ten), it made all the difference in its 7-3 Big Ten semifinal victory over No. 9 Ohio State (20-14-3, 11-11-2).

“I think our five-on-five game is one of the best in the country,” freshman forward Gavin Brindely said. “When we stay disciplined, we’re out of the box, (and) I think we’re a tough team to beat.”

The Wolverines have preached the necessity of their even-strength play all season. Yet, as the most penalized team in college hockey averaging nearly 18 penalty minutes per contest, Michigan rarely has the opportunity to showcase that skillset.

Nevertheless, thanks to zero penalty minutes and evidently clean play, the Wolverines couldn’t script a better first period if they drew it up themselves. Gifted a 1-0 lead by freshman forward Gavin Brindley 23 seconds into the game, Michigan came out with an energy that continuously overwhelmed the Buckeyes.

“We got pucks in, got pucks behind them, rim to the bottom on their (defense) a lot and just prevented us from turning the puck over in the neutral zone,” senior forward Nick Granowicz said. “… They couldn’t get as many opportunities as they did last time.”

Up 3-0 just 10 minutes into the frame, the Wolverines’ successful play was contagious. Finished checks, pucks dumped in deep and

five-foot passes all compounded toward controlling play well into the second period.

But what was perhaps most impressive: Michigan refrained from any penalties for more than 30 minutes — a nearly insurmountable task in previous contests. The Wolverines had preached the same keys to success all season. And they had finally begun to click.

That is, until a cross-checking penalty committed by sophomore defenseman Luke Hughes put Michigan wholly on the defensive for the first time all night.

Just 18 seconds later, a crosscrease tap-in by forward Jake Wise gave Ohio State life and cut the deficit to 3-1. In classic fashion, the only team that could beat the Wolverines was themselves. Throughout the entire night, when Michigan strayed away from its discipline — and thus five-on-five play — it opened the door for the Buckeyes.

“That was another point of emphasis this week — discipline,” Granowicz said. “Play between the whistles, don’t let them get in between our heads. Don’t take any extra penalties we don’t need to. We like our chances five-on-five.”

And while a 4-1 goal by freshman forward Adam Fantilli momentarily assuaged the damage, the Wolverines fell back into their old ways as an errant trip by sophomore forward Mark Estapa once again reopened the door for Ohio State, as it converted on the powerplay for a 4-2 score early in the third period.

Though it eventually pulled away, Michigan’s deviations from five-on-five play were the only moments that kept the Buckeyes from sinking.

SportsMonday: Where are the positives?

After Sunday’s NCAA Tournament bracket announcement, what we all already knew is official:

The Michigan men’s basketball team is a failure.

With no bid to the Big Dance, the Wolverines’ season is effectively over, with only a meaningless NIT playoff left on the horizon. Normally, now would be the point to look at the positive takeaways from the season and have optimism for the future.

So I sat, trying to pull positives out of the air like a magician searching for a rabbit. But the magic never came. I stuck my hand deeper into the hat, still, I was unable to conjure up any semblance of fur, rabbit or otherwise. The only thing I found was delusional justifications for Michigan’s misfortune, and forced narratives that didn’t really fit.

Coach Juwan Howard and the 2022-23 Wolverines have given Michigan fans nothing to celebrate and little to look forward to. There’s nothing concrete to hold on to, clinging only to hope.

Perhaps I seem cynical. Perhaps that’s true. But tell me: Where do I find positives in a team that failed to make the NCAA Tournament with a former Big Ten First-Team center and two potential NBA draft picks?

What do I look at and say, “I think the Wolverines are going to bounce back next year?”

Hunter Dickinson is a tired story. He’s good, but he wasn’t good enough this year to punch Michigan a ticket to the Big Dance. He promotes his podcast in post-game almost as much as he talks about his flailing team. Multiple times, he’s shown poor attitude on the court, sometimes getting yelled at by Howard. He’s undoubtedly talented, but he’s obviously not enough on his

own, and I’m not sure he’s the best player for the future of this program.

Even if you believe he is, there’s no guarantee he stays, with a possibility to transfer or test his professional basketball waters.

Speaking of professional aspirations, freshman wing Jett Howard is a lock to leave for the NBA. He’s a top-end scoring talent, and despite his obvious ineptitude on defense, is slotted as a lottery pick.

Then there’s the case of sophomore guard Kobe Bufkin. Bufkin is the bright spot in the Wolverines’ world of darkness. He improved all season, on offense and defense. In my opinion, he was the most important factor in Michigan’s limited success. He is being mocked in the first or second round of NBA drafts, and sometimes even as a lottery pick. If he gets a first-round guarantee from a team, I don’t see why he wouldn’t go. If Bufkin comes back, he would

be where a Michigan fan can find promise. Bufkin can elevate this team next year, and a return announcement from him would move the needle for me on my projection for next season’s squad — especially if he continues to develop.

The other two places I can clear off the debris and find players to affix my hope is with two freshmen,

“It kind of got goofy at the end of the second, or the beginning of the third where they were calling more penalties,” Michigan coach Brandon Naurato said. “But I thought our guys did a great job of being disciplined.”

The Wolverines did not play nearly as perfect a game in the third period. As the desperation of the waning minutes of Ohio State’s Big Ten Tournament run propelled it toward the chaos and disruption that earned it success thus far, the Buckeyes pressed on the gas. Ohio State kept it interesting, converting on a six-on-five goal courtesy of its own empty net for its final tally.

Yet as the puck slid across the goal line for two empty net goals that iced the game, Michigan won a resounding 7-3 contest to clinch a spot in next week’s Big Ten Championship game. Now, they’ll face Minnesota in the Twin Cities for the second season in a row, defending last season’s Big Ten Championship hanging in the balance.

An achievement that, despite the ups and downs of a regular season managed by a first-year interim head coach and an overwhelmingly youthful roster, was the culmination of a year’s worth of growth and development. In a game that played out in the style the Wolverines strove toward all year. They couldn’t have scripted it any better.

center Tarris Reed Jr. and guard Dug McDaniel. Both, especially the latter, developed throughout the season. They have promise and, maybe more importantly, show that Juwan can develop players.

But, on the other side of the coin, redshirt freshman forward Will Tschetter looks abysmal, junior forward Terrance Williams II regressed and there’s not much else to have confidence in as far as untested players go.

Michigan’s recruiting class isn’t much to gawk at either, ranking 40th in 247sports’ recruiting rankings with just two commits. There are no knights in shining armor coming to save the Wolverines.

Worst of all, it felt that Juwan lost his hold on his team this season. His players lacked effort and heart, even with their season on the line.

“When you notice in timeouts and you see some dejected, unhappy young men, and it’s the early part

where there’s maybe 10 minutes left or seven minutes left in the ballgame,” Juwan said after the Big Ten Tournament loss to Rutgers. “I think it’s my job as a leader to uplift (the players) and encourage them, because I saw the looks on their faces.”

That didn’t really happen. They looked depressed, and their oncourt effort reflected that. Throughout the entire season, Michigan failed to close out games, lacking the mental and physical toughness to get the results it wanted.

Last season’s team struggled with similar issues — issues that only worsened this season. That is the biggest glaring issue. Will that trend continue? Can Juwan fix that next year despite failing to do so this year?

I’d like to believe so, but there’s no proof that says he can.

ICE HOCKEY

MEN’S BASKETBALL

NICHOLAS STOLL Daily Sports Writer

/Courtesy of Sydney and Lauren Sung

Michigan heads to NIT for first time since 2007, earns No. 3 seed NOT IN TOURNAMENT

was hoping to hear on Selection Sunday, but it only has itself to blame.

laid out nicely if it strung together a couple wins.

Rutgers in the second round of the Big Ten Tournament.

our heads down. The guys in that locker room are special and they know how much this means.”

focusing on the opportunity ahead of it.

For the first time since 2015, the Michigan men’s basketball team will miss the Big Dance.

After a disappointing season filled with potential but a lack of follow through, the Wolverines missed the NCAA Tournament. Instead, they will participate in the National Invitational Tournament (NIT). Michigan earned a No. 3 seed in the Clemson region. It will kick off its postseason against Toledo on Tuesday at 7 p.m. in Crisler Center. The appearance is the first NIT bid for the Wolverines since 2007.

This likely isn’t what Michigan

“At the beginning of each season, we have goals,” junior guard Jace Howard said. “Yes, we did not reach them, but we have a chance to change that.

Some teams don’t have that chance. We do. We are still hungry.”

That hunger is something the Wolverines seemed to lack late in the season, though. Following their win over Wisconsin two weeks ago, making the NCAA Tournament seemed well within their sights.

With two road games remaining in the regular season and opportunities in the Big Ten Tournament as well, Michigan had a path to March Madness

But just like the Wolverines did all season, they squandered their chances. A double-overtime loss in Illinois, in which Michigan blew a seven-point lead in the first overtime, whisked one opportunity out of reach. Then an overtime loss to Indiana to end the regular season — after leading by 12 points midway through the second half — took away another.

The Wolverines entered their matchup against the Hoosiers with the chance to finish anywhere between a No. 2 seed and a No. 8 seed in the Big Ten.

Unfortunately for Michigan, everything that could go against its favor did, and the Wolverines ended up as the No. 8 seed, facing

Despite beating the Scarlet Knights earlier this season on the road — a notoriously tough environment for opposing teams — Michigan lacked any urgency on the neutral court of United Center and blew any chance of worming its way onto the right side of the bubble. After shooting 4-for-21 in the second half, the Wolverines fell to Rutgers, ending any hopes of turning their season around.

“We weren’t able to reach one of our goals and play in the NCAA Tournament; however, we have another chance to get out there,” junior center Hunter Dickinson said. “So many different things have happened to us this year, but we never put

Michigan had opportunity after opportunity to work themselves out of the hole it dug throughout the season.

And while the Wolverines have shown glimpses of growth — stringing together a couple three-game win streaks and losing in overtime instead of regulation — it wasn’t enough down the stretch.

On a three-game losing streak, Michigan will look to turn things around in the postseason. But it can’t do it in the NCAA Tournament this year. Instead the Wolverines have to do so in the subpar NIT.

Nonetheless, Michigan is still taking a positive outlook, and

“Being able to coach this team again means a great deal,” Michigan coach Juwan Howard said. “We get a chance to play for a championship. That means something. These guys have put their hearts and souls into this year despite all the adversity. This team has grown throughout the year, and we are looking forward to the opportunity to suit up and compete again.”

And that first opportunity comes this Tuesday against Toledo, when the Wolverines have a chance to get back into the win column. ANNA

LINDSAY BUDIN Daily Sports Writer Design by Lys Goldman