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Wednesday, October 11, 2023

Multiple sexual misconduct allegations against a Middle East Studies professor arose in the 2000s.

15 years later, the department still feels the effects.

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On Oct. 12, 2022, an anonymous email was sent to the University of Michigan’s Department of Middle East Studies faculty listserv with the subject line, “Your Colleague the Rapist.” The letter, obtained by The Michigan Daily, was attributed to an anonymous graduate student in MES and described misconduct concerns regarding Yaron Eliav, associate professor of Rabbinic literature and Jewish history of late antiquity. “(Eliav) sexually harasses his students,” the letter read. “I am one of them.”

The letter claimed Eliav’s alleged misconduct was so widespread that neither Eliav nor anyone else would be able to discern the author. The Daily was not able to identify the author of this letter.

“Don’t fool yourselves: this is no one-off,” the letter read. “I am so far from alone in this experience that Yaron would have no idea which former student / colleague / woman around campus I actually am.”

The public accusations drew renewed attention within MES to Eliav’s previous history of sexual misconduct.

A Daily investigation found four allegations Eliav engaged in sexually inappropriate conduct with faculty and students in the early 2000s, including a 2008 case in which he was arrested for soliciting prostitution services from a U-M student. According to court documents obtained by The Daily, the University investigated all of these allegations against Eliav and claimed Eliav exhibited a pattern of misconduct between 2004 and 2008.

In an interview with The Daily, one of Eliav’s alleged victims described feeling a lack of institutional support when she brought allegations to U-M administrators that Eliav repeatedly harassed her. This source requested anonymity, citing fears of retaliation. In this article, she will be referred to as Laurie.

“I was completely on my own,” Laurie said. “I felt very manipulated by the institution.”

Several MES faculty members said they have raised concerns about the department’s climate over the last 15 years since the 2008 case became public, which they believe has suffered as a result of Eliav’s alleged misconduct.

These concerns have gone largely unaddressed by the University, these faculty alleged.

Two faculty members in MES described a culture of silence in the department, where attempts to discuss Eliav’s behavior were shut down by MES leadership due, in part, to fears of legal retaliation from Eliav.

This article is based on interviews with nine current and former faculty members and graduate students, as well as an extensive review of court records, emails and other documentation.

In an interview with The Daily, Eliav said he believes he has learned from his past conduct.

He pointed to a lack of recent formal complaints against him as evidence of his rehabilitation.

“I’m trying to change and have made major changes in my life,” Eliav said. “I have not done anything inappropriate for 17 years.”

The University’s Equity, Civil Rights and Title IX Office was investigating concerns within MES as recently as October 2021,

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according to emails obtained by The Daily. Laurie, who met with an investigator at the time, said ECRT was looking into a matter related to Eliav.

In an email to The Michigan Daily, University spokesperson Rick Fitzgerald wrote the University takes misconduct allegations seriously. He declined to comment on the specific allegations against Eliav, per U-M policy.

“The University of Michigan takes action to respond to every allegation of behaviors that are inconsistent with the policies of the University,” Fitzgerald wrote.

“There is a problem that needs to be addressed” In April of 2008, a U-M student filed a police report against Eliav after he solicited prostitution services from and allegedly physically assaulted her. Eliav was arrested and initially charged with a misdemeanor and assault and battery following the incident.

Reporting from 2008 indicates Eliav pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of using a computer to commit a crime and received 12 months probation. The assault and battery charges against Eliav were dropped in 2008, and the misdemeanor charge was dropped after the successful completion of his probation.

In his interview with The Daily, Eliav admitted that he hit the student during the incident.

“I engaged in something that I myself consider inappropriate,” he said. “During that engagement, another human being was hurt. I hurt her.”

The University tasked former LSA dean Terrence McDonald with pursuing disciplinary measures against Eliav following his arrest. In an interview with The Daily, McDonald explained the University’s 2008 investigation into Eliav’s conduct. McDonald said he knew about the initial assault and battery charges, but the University only had the power to enforce one violation of the University’s policy: Eliav’s use of a U-M computer to engage in illegal activities.

“A University machine had been used to (solicit prostitution services),” McDonald said. “That was the (only) ground on which the University could take action.”

Eliav signed an agreement for several disciplinary sanctions outlined in a 2008 letter from McDonald. He accepted that he couldn’t be nominated as a chair in any U-M programs for five years, and resigned from his committee positions and endowed professorship in the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies.

Eliav retained his academic rank as an associate professor of his department.

In the 2008 letter, McDonald referenced a separate misconduct complaint filed against Eliav in 2006 by an undergraduate employee in the Near Eastern Studies Department, which was renamed to Middle East Studies in 2018.

“This is the second time you have been involved in difficult matters of a similar type,” McDonald wrote. “The subject matter similarity of these two incidents is of very serious concern to me.”

As the prostitution case drew local media attention, concerns over Eliav’s conduct arose among faculty and students.

In 2009, multiple faculty members in Judaic Studies and the Frankel Center sent a letter to Deborah Dash Moore, their program’s director at the time, McDonald and Derek Collins, former associate dean of LSA. In the letter, the faculty members expressed fear for their safety

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when working with Eliav. The Daily obtained a draft of the letter.

It is unclear how many faculty members contributed to the letter.

“Many of us, particularly those of us who are women, simply do not believe that we can safely work with him,” the faculty members wrote. “We mean ‘safe’ literally.

We have good reason to believe that he has been physically violent toward others … We have fears that this will only escalate.”

The letter also expressed concerns that the unsafe environment created by Eliav’s alleged misconduct would impact the academic success of the department.

“If his behavior is allowed to continue … none of us will be able to attract graduate students to our programs,” the letter said.

Collins could not be reached for comment.

In an interview with The Daily, Dash Moore recalled the writers of the letter felt she wasn’t taking enough action to discipline Eliav.

But, Dash Moore said, she moved master’s students off of Eliav’s committees and reassigned students to different mentors to protect them from Eliav. She said she also removed Eliav from the Frankel Center entirely, though she didn’t have the authority to impose additional sanctions outside of what McDonald had outlined in his letter.

“I wanted to protect (students),” Dash Moore said. “I tried to do some things that I subsequently learned that I didn’t really have the power to do … Maybe I would have signed (the draft) letter if I hadn’t been director.”

Following Dash Moore’s disciplinary actions, Eliav filed a grievance within the University.

He temporarily regained his appointment in Judaic Studies in 2009, but Judaic faculty voted him out of the center in 2011.

“A pattern of inappropriate behavior” Eliav agreed to the disciplinary sanctions outlined by McDonald after the 2008 prostitution case.

But three years later, in April 2012, he filed a lawsuit against the University for breach of contract.

The Daily reviewed more than 1,000 pages of depositions, motions and other court proceedings from this lawsuit.

Eliav alleged the University

breached his sanctions contract when he was stripped of his membership in the Frankel Center, and that faculty of the Frankel Center had engaged in a “campaign designed to disparage” him by accusing him of sexually harassing U-M students.

His efforts backfired.

The University argued any damage to Eliav’s reputation came as a result of his own actions, revealing earlier concerns over his conduct with students and colleagues. They presented five separate misconduct allegations against Eliav, which had previously been investigated by the University, in an April 2013 motion for summary disposition in their favor.

The University described four instances in which Eliav “(exhibited) a pattern of inappropriate behavior with students and colleagues,” ranging from inappropriate touching of an undergraduate student to sexual propositions toward faculty members. The 2008 case was included in this pattern.

In one instance in the winter of 2004, Eliav allegedly professed romantic feelings to a research assistant.

“The research assistant replied, ‘aren’t you married,’ to which (Eliav) responded, ‘aren’t you?’ ” the motion read.

This research assistant reported the incident to U-M administrators in 2009. She wasn’t comfortable asking Eliav for a letter of recommendation after the incident transpired, the University’s motion said.

Eliav told The Daily he does not view his conduct in this instance as inappropriate.

“Opening up and saying you have feelings for someone is not the easiest thing to do,” Eliav said.

“I’m actually very proud of how I acted there.”

The University’s motion also detailed the 2006 allegation mentioned in McDonald’s letter to Eliav. In June of that year, Eliav allegedly invited an undergraduate student into his office to help him unpack some books.

“While assisting (Eliav), the student reported that he touched her inappropriately on her shoulder and buttocks, and pressed his body against hers,” the motion read. “She further alleged

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that (Eliav) made comments to solicit sex.”

The University said they mandated Eliav receive sexual harassment training after the student reported this allegation to U-M administrators. This training was conducted by Anthony Walesby, former senior director of the Office of Institutional Equity (now the ECRT), according to McDonald’s sanctions letter to Eliav.

Eliav denied that any physical contact with the student was intentional or sexual in nature.

In a sworn deposition given in March 2013, Dash Moore recounted a 2009 meeting in which faculty discussed Eliav’s alleged misconduct.

“Did that allegation come up during that meeting, that Professor Eliav was some kind of problem in the classroom with his students?”

Eliav’s lawyer, Marian Faupel, asked Dash Moore.

“At that meeting there were several people who spoke of Professor Eliav as a sexual harasser of them personally,” Dash Moore said.

“There’s something rotten here” One allegation that arose during the course of the lawsuit came from Laurie, a faculty member who worked with Eliav in the 2000s.

Certain details of Laurie’s experiences with Eliav and court documentation have been omitted to preserve her anonymity.

In a sworn statement provided to the court, Laurie alleged Eliav sexually harassed her on three separate occasions in the early 2000s. She described instances in which Eliav made sexual comments and overt advances toward her. A colleague of Laurie’s, who worked at the University at the time of the alleged harassment, told The Daily that Laurie informed them of these events soon after they occurred.

Laurie was a junior faculty member at the time of this alleged harassment. She told The Daily she feared how her career might be impacted if she filed a complaint against Eliav, an accomplished male professor at the University.

In 2008, Laurie reached out to Walesby, the OIE investigator who had conducted Eliav’s sexual harassment training in 2006. She

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wanted to gauge what his response would be to a potential complaint against Eliav. The Daily obtained email correspondence between Laurie and Walesby, which confirmed this meeting occurred. “ ‘What would you do if I told you this?’ ” Laurie recalled asking Walesby. “My biggest concern was retaliation, so I essentially told the story of what had happened, but (as if it was) a friend of mine.”

According to Laurie, Walesby revealed to her that the University had conducted previous investigations into Eliav’s conduct.

But, Walesby told her, OIE couldn’t establish a pattern of misconduct because they did not find that Eliav violated U-M policy in these previous cases.

In an interview with The Daily, Title IX attorney Laura L. Dunn said the University can, in fact, use previous formal complaints to constitute a pattern of misconduct, according to U-M and U.S. Department of Education policy.

In Laurie’s case, the previous 2006 complaint and the other complaints Walesby allegedly mentioned could have been used to support her claims if she had filed an official complaint.

But Walesby did not inform Laurie of this aspect of the policy, she told The Daily. She would be on her own if she chose to pursue a formal complaint against Eliav. “(Walesby said) ‘The only way I can protect you is if there’s a pattern,’ ” Laurie said. “And he knew there was a pattern … there’s something rotten here.”

Laurie later learned about the 2006 complaint against Eliav made by an undergraduate student, and realized it could have supported her own allegations.

“I eventually found out about (the 2006 complaint) and I was so fucking angry,” Laurie said.

“It really felt like he lied to me and sabotaged my ability to make a (formal) complaint … He was basically trying to make me go away.”

“Actions (were not) followed by consequences” Eliav’s lawsuit against the University concluded in 2014 when the court found no cause of action and ruled in favor of the University.

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News

2 — Wednesday, October 11, 2023

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

CAMPUS LIFE

UMich gifts nearly 2000 banned books to students Students lined up on Diag for the Hatcher Graduate Library’s three-day Banned Books Giveaway

MALENY CRESPO Daily Staff Reporter

For the past two days, there has been a line wrapped around the Diag and up the steps of the Hatcher Graduate Library for the Banned Books Giveaway. The University of Michigan library received a grant from the LSA Arts Initiative to gift nearly 2,000 banned books to U-M students over the span of three days. The Banned Books Giveaway is a part of the University’s Arts & Resistance theme semester and coincides with the nationally recognized Banned Books Week.

Some of the titles being given away include “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” “Milk and Honey” and “The 1619 Project,” all of which have been banned in various libraries and schools around the country. As of 2022, Michigan is one of the top 10 states with the largest number of different books that have been challenged and banned.

Alan Piñon, director of communication and marketing for U-M libraries, said in an interview with The Michigan Daily that all of the titles that the library picked for the event have been banned in a school or library somewhere in Michigan. He said the library has been excited by the positive response to the giveaway from students, faculty and staff, as evidenced by the long line.

“The issue (of book banning) is everywhere,” Piñon said. “But this

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(event) is trying to pull the focus locally so that people understand how this is impacting us. (Book banning) is impacting students in schools and public libraries every day here in Michigan.”

LSA freshman Claire Young attended the event and said she noticed recurring themes of marginalized LGBTQ+, race, gender and religious identities contained in many of the banned books. She said the giveaway raises awareness of what books are being challenged, why they are coming under attack and how to prevent their banning.

“There’s lots of stories of queer people and minority groups, and it’s unfortunate that that’s what’s

being banned,” Young said. “(The giveaway) can really help people be aware of what’s in the books and why they’re being banned and why they should not be banned.”

Business sophomore Vandhana Purushothaman also attended the giveaway and said she believes that everyone should be able to read works about diverse perspectives.

“A lot of my favorite books are banned in different places across the world,” Purushothaman said. “I think it’s cool that (the University) is promoting this. I think that regardless of how I may agree with the viewpoints of people, just because you silence their voices doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.”

Piñon said he believes all forms

of literature are tied to resistance.

He said reading gives insight into issues in the world and ways to find just solutions. According to Piñon, students can contribute to positive change in the world around them by seeking out diverse literature or sharing their own stories.

“Each one of these stories, poems and graphic novels all tell a story,” Piñon said. “Look to literature, read it, understand it and then go and find a way to tell your story because it does make an impact on people when they’re reading about things that they can identify with. It helps them be brave and go forward and do that for the next generation. Read and then go and write and tell your story.”

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SPORTS

Two student athletes tied to homophobic graffiti at JRC The students vandalized the Jewish Resource Center in August, though the center will not press charges LIZA CUSHNIR

Daily Sports Editor

Editor’s Note: This story was updated Oct. 4 at 11:01 p.m. to include information from police records obtained Oct. 4 through the Freedom of Information Act. This information includes the names of attorneys, descriptions of surveillance videos and when the case was closed by the Ann Arbor Police Department.

Content warning: mentions of homophobia and antisemitism.

Two Michigan studentathletes have been tied to an incident of homophobic vandalism outside of the Jewish Resource Center on Aug. 22, according to sources familiar with the matter who spoke with The Michigan Daily.

Johnny Druskinis, a sophomore who was removed from the Michigan hockey team’s roster late last week, and Megan Minturn, a sophomore on the Michigan women’s lacrosse team, have been tied to the incident.

The Daily independently confirmed Druskinis’ and Minturn’s identities.

University spokesperson Rick Fitzgerald confirmed Druskinis’ removal.

“While we can confirm that Johnny Druskinis has been removed from the hockey team roster for violating team rules, federal law precludes us from discussing student information without the written permission of the student,” Fitzgerald said.

A Michigan hockey spokesperson did not comment on the nature of Druskinis’ removal from the team, including declining further comment when directly asked if Druskinis’ removal was related to the vandalism. A Michigan women’s lacrosse team spokesperson did not respond to The Daily’s inquiry about Minturn’s status within the program. The spokesperson did respond to an earlier inquiry about Minturn’s roster status, saying that they are not aware of the 2024 roster yet and are therefore unable to comment on its details.

In surveillance video of the incident released by the Ann Arbor Police Department on Aug. 25, two individuals were seen spray painting the JRC walkway at around 5 p.m.

Police records which The Daily obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request described the full video. A report filed Aug. 24 describes a “large

group of people” that walked past the JRC. Two men left the group to take a photograph in the front yard of the JRC before leaving. A man who watched the photograph occur then walked up to the sidewalk with a spray paint can in his hand. “(The man) then bends over, and spray paints the homophobic slur and the male genitals,” the report read. “While he is doing so a female leaves the group and walks back to him. She watches him paint the graffiti then she takes the can and moves closer toward hill and spray paints the letters on the sidewalk.”

According to an Oct. 3 media release from AAPD, the man seen in the video spray painted male genitalia and a homophobic slur, while the woman in the video spray painted her initials afterward, which is supported by the obtained police records. Both the release and the police records contain images of the graffiti.

The obtained records include an additional image of the graffiti that was not provided in the Oct. 3 release. The release also includes a statement that AAPD will not respond to further requests for comment. Police records indicate that on Sept.

7, AAPD determined it would

close the case because the “case will be handled between the two parties.”

Sources who spoke with The Daily described the incident and actions identically to AAPD’s October release and named Druskinis as the man in the video and Minturn as the woman.

The JRC declined to press charges against the two studentathletes. Rabbi Mendy Klahr of the JRC shared that the JRC was informed, through lawyers for the students, that the pair wanted to meet with the JRC. According to Klahr, by the time the students met with the JRC, Michigan had already been made aware of the incident. The Daily was unable to confirm the nature and timing of Michigan’s response.

In police records obtained

by The Daily, attorney Ryan Ramsayer is listed as the legal representative for the man who participated in the vandalism, while Mark J. Kriger was listed as representative for the other individual. The Daily called each attorney’s office Wednesday evening and left a message requesting comment. Neither attorney had returned the call as of the latest update to this story.

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News

Wednesday, October 11, 2023 — 3

GOVERNMENT

Michigan legislators introduce bills to amend juvenile justice system

A package of 20 bills presented to the Michigan legislature last month tackles juvenile justice system reform ABIGAIL VANDERMOLEN Daily Staff Reporter

Michigan House members introduced a package of 20 bills in May intended to amend Michigan’s juvenile justice system. This package was then presented to the Michigan legislature last month. The bills are the result of work done by the Task Force on Juvenile Justice Reform, formed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2021, after staff members at a juvenile detention center in Kalamazoo assaulted and killed a 16-year-old.

The bills include statewide reforms such as using evidencebased risk assessments when deciding whether to detain youth as well as an elimination of most fees and fines associated with the system and funding incentives that would encourage county courts to use community-based treatments rather than detention.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced her support for the package of bills in a Sept. 20 press release, saying she believes juvenile court cases should prioritize the well-being of involved youth.

“As prosecutors, when tackling the fate of juvenile offenders, the priority should most often focus on rehabilitation, and this package of bills will set the State on the right path to support that effort,” Nessel said. “Building a support network that can offer Michigan youth the highest likelihood of finding a stable life outside of the criminal justice system is a priority of mine, and I’m grateful the legislature is addressing this need.”

Kimberly Thomas, a member of Whitmer’s task force and director of U-M Juvenile Justice Clinic,

said the task force investigated issues with the current juvenile system, including a lack of statewide consistency in judgements.

“I think it became clearer what some of the big problems were,” Thomas said. “There was a real lack of statewide structure. There’s a real lack of standards. There’s a lot of sort of justice by geography, so depending on where you lived, the system was very different and looked very different and came to different results.”

In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Jason Smith, director of the Michigan Center for Youth Justice, said while individual counties in the state have different strengths and weaknesses, he sees the inconsistencies between courts in different areas as one of the biggest systemic issues statewide.

“I think that one of the largest issues that we’ve seen in Michigan’s juvenile justice system is the concept of justice by geography,” Smith said. “Michigan’s juvenile justice system is county-based, so a lot of the decisions around how the local juvenile justice system at the local county or court level operates … really can vary county by county.

A young person’s experience in the juvenile justice system can really vary depending on where they live.”

According to Thomas, a challenge the task force faced while evaluating the system was a lack of consistent data reporting across counties, making it harder to properly assess issues, though a non-profit organization called Council of State Governments tried to help ensure the group had access to the most complete data possible.

“The task force really benefited from the nonprofit called Council of State Governments because they

had data people who went and got more information than we’ve had from a bunch of different county courts,” Thomas said. “Our county courts have individual data, which is kept in more or less inconsistent ways, and so they were able to really get a better snapshot on what’s happening statewide than had previously been available.”

The bills propose using evidencebased assessments to determine whether juvenile criminals should be detained, or if at-home, community-based interventions would be a better alternative.

According to Thomas, unnecessarily putting youth through the juvenile justice system can be harmful to their future and may increase the chance that they will be a repeat offender in the future.

“If they’re low risk, we really should divert them because the research shows that basically, not entering them in the juvenile court system is better for them than entering them into the juvenile court system,” Thomas said. “It actually increases their chance of recidivating to be in the formal court system.”

The bills also propose using state funding to incentivize communitybased interventions. In Michigan, the Child Care Fund is the primary statewide source of funding for costs related to the juvenile justice system. Smith explained that in the current system, local counties cover costs — including those related to treatment, probation and detention — upfront, and the CCF later reimburses them for 50% of their spending. In the plan outlined in the new bills, the CCF would reimburse counties for 75% of costs related to community-based solutions that keep youth in their homes rather

Design by Claire Jeon than send them to detention centers.

Smith said the bill offers both economic and social incentives for the state.

“It’s cheaper for the state to reimburse community-based care at 75% than out-of-home (care) at 50% and (it) also yields better outcomes,” Smith said. “It allows out-of-home placements, long-term residential care and even detention beds to be saved and utilized only for kids who really need it. So it ultimately improves the quality of care that those kids get, too.”

Currently, youth need to be formally charged with a crime in order for counties to be able to use CCF funding to provide services for them. Under the new bills, CCF dollars could be used before any

charges are pressed.

Smith said this change means families who are worried their child may become involved in the juvenile court system, can access support services before youth are arrested.

“We’ve heard time and time again from families who’ve said that they’ve been given the advice to just ‘get your kid involved with the juvenile justice system, no matter the charge because he or she (or) they will finally get the services that they need,’” Smith said. “The hope is to allow young people to access similar services to address their needs without having to be involved with the formal legal system.”

Patrick Pullis, co-president of the University’s Undergraduate Political Science Association and

president of Michigan Political Consulting, wrote in an email to The Daily that he thinks the bills are necessary improvements to the current juvenile court system, but he hopes to see legislation that would prevent juvenile crimes from happening in the first place.

“Specifically when it comes to HB 4633/SB 0427, I think these bills would do a lot to get children in the juvenile justice system the mental health care that they require,” Pullis wrote. “However, I do think it’s important to note what’s not covered in these bills. I think it would’ve been valuable to consider a bill that establishes some sort of program aimed at crime prevention.”

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PUBLIC SAFET Y

Annual DPSS report shows uptick in reported sex crimes UMich DPSS 2023 Security and Fire Report found an upward trend in reported sex crimes since 2020 EMMA SPRING

Daily Staff Reporter Content warning: Mentions of sexual assault and misconduct.

The University of Michigan’s Division of Public Safety and Security released its 2023 Security and Fire Safety Report over the weekend. This comprehensive report includes statistics on various types of crimes that have occurred on campus in the past year. According to the report, since 2020, there has been an upward trend in the number of crimes reported to DPSS, prompting community members to weigh in and provide their perspectives on campus security.

Campus rape statistics were at 57 reports in 2022, 28 of which included new allegations against former U-M physician Robert

Anderson regarding assault that occurred several years prior.

Anderson perpetrated decades of sexual abuse against athletes at the University dating back to the 1970s, with new cases still being reported to authorities. The other 29 non-Anderson-related rape cases reported in 2022 mark an increase from 17 in 2021. Stalking and sexual assault reports also increased this past year from 131 reports of sexual assault in 2021 to 145 in 2022, and from 34 reports of stalking in 2021 to 57 in 2022.

Courtney Banks, student senior leader of University Students Against Rape, said those numbers may be lower than the actual number of sex crimes happening on campus. She emphasized the underreporting of sexual violence, which can make statistics like these somewhat unreliable.

“When it comes to numbers in terms of the DPSS reports, I’m always hesitant to say that it necessarily indicates an increase in cases,” Banks said.

“A lot of cases of sexual violence go unreported. It’s hard to always look at those numbers in a way that accounts for both an increase in rate of reporting or an increase in rate of cases.”

In an email to The Michigan Daily, Anne Huhman, director of the University’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center, wrote the surge in reporting sex crimes may be related to heightened awareness and conversations about sexual violence on campus and within the community.

“Improving how we prevent and address sexual and genderbased misconduct in our community remains a foremost

priority at U-M,” Huhman wrote. “An increase in reports of assault could possibly indicate that we are doing a better job of creating an environment where survivors feel like they can come forward and reach out for support.”

Banks also said the publicity of the Anderson cases may have encouraged more survivors to feel as though they should make reports and that those reports will be taken seriously.

“The Anderson cases sort of changed the way people talked about this,” Banks said.

“If people want to report, they should feel comfortable when doing so. That hasn’t always been the case for survivors.”

In an email to The Daily, Melissa Overton, DPSS deputy chief of police, wrote that crime rates have fluctuated nationally

since the start of the pandemic in 2020.

“Both domestic assaults and dating violence have fluctuated since the pandemic,” Overton wrote. “The American Journal on Emergency Medicine reports that national statistics for domestic assaults increased during the height of COVID-19.

We have experienced the same with a slight decrease since campus activity and services resumed.”

On campus, hate crimes rose from three reported in 2021 to seven in 2022, including those with homophobic, antisemitic and xenophobic sentiments.

Overton wrote that hate crimes decreased on campus during the pandemic. She wrote that the current numbers are more consistent with the rate of hate crimes reported to DPSS prior to

2020. The Daily was not able to confirm the nature or specfics of the reported hate crimes.

“While we experienced a decrease in hate crimes during COVID-19, current numbers are consistent with what we experienced before the pandemic,” Overton said. “Of the seven hate crimes reported in 2022, bias motivations were race, sexuality and religion, with no acts of physical violence associated with reported hate crimes since 2019, when there were two incidents.”

The report also revealed that there were 16 fires in 2022, with all but two being unintentional, including an incident involving a stuffed animal igniting in a microwave. Theft also saw an increase over the past year from 278 reports of theft in 2021 to 434 in 2022.

JUST LAUNCHED

Our New Strategic Plan for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion The DEI 2.0 Strategic Plan was created through the input of thousands of U-M students, faculty and staff. Together, we’ll use this plan to guide our continuing work in creating a more diverse, equitable and inclusive campus.

Read the Plan at: report.dei.umich.edu

Arts

4 — Wednesday, October 11, 2023

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

‘The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We’ proves there’s nothing Mitski can’t do, even cowboy cosplay NINA SMITH

Daily Arts Writer

Mitski has earned the right to experiment — not that she’s ever waited for permission. The singer-songwriter’s acclaimed 11-year career spans not only time but genre, covering ground from the piano-heavy indie rock of her 2012 debut, Lush, to 2018’s disco-inflected Be the Cowboy to the synthy wasteland of her penultimate installment, Laurel Hell. Just over a year later, Mitski returns with The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, where she tries her hand at one of the few sounds she’s thus far left untouched: country.

The aesthetics of the American West are back in this season (see Tiktok’s Coastal Cowgirl). But Mitski, ever the nonconformist, turns this trend on its head, using a folksy country sound and wide-openspace imagery to illuminate the album’s central theme: loneliness. In Land’s 11 tracks, most of which fall short of three minutes, Mitski attacks this fundamental solitude from all angles — lamenting it, disputing it, making peace with it after all.

“Bug Like an Angel” is a soft start, as Mitski openers go.

Intimate guitar strumming gives way to a deep, resonant vocal chorus that comes in without warning, mirroring lyrics that are at once jaded and pious: “When I’m bent over wishin’ it was over / Makin’ all variety of vows I’ll never keep / I try to remember the wrath of the devil / Was also given him

by God.” On what Mitski describes as her “most American album,” these religious themes crop up like tumbleweeds. “Heaven,”

an old-fashioned country waltz, is a rare moment of happiness and companionship that Mitski describes in divine terms, singing, “As I sip on the rest of the coffee you left / A kiss left of you / Heaven.” But even then Mitski cannot absolve herself of wild, Western isolation, adding at the end of the song, “Something set free / Is runnin’ through the night / And the dark awaits us / All around the corner.” The Wild West manifests even more explicitly on the eerie alt-rock “Buffalo Replaced,” this time among images of environmental destruction: “Freight train stampedin’ through my backyard / It’ll run across the plains like the new buffalo replaced.”

Throughout the album, Mitski’s lyricism is stunning, albeit simple at times. On “My Love Mine All Mine,” a smooth and jazzy piano ballad plays alongside a steel guitar as Mitski croons a tranquil refrain: “Nothing in the world belongs to me / But my love, mine, all mine, all mine.”

Moments of peace on Land are few and far between, and those that do come up are always tinged with a sense of doom.

Immediately following “My Love Mine All Mine” is “The Frost,” an upbeat, twangy track that could almost be Kenny Rogers if you looked at it from far away. Mitski is no longer pleased to be the sole owner of anything, singing, “With no one, no one to share the memory / Of frost out the window / This morning after you’re gone / And the house is mine alone.”

Indeed, the ending of a relationship seems to be one source of Mitski’s loneliness. On “Star,” shimmering synths and a steadily escalating bassline send us hurtling into a desolate

This image is the official album artwork for The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We.

darkness as Mitski begs to keep the memory of a love affair alive, singing, “You know I’d always been alone / ‘Til you taught me / To live for somebody.” “I’m Your Man,” a dark, Alex G-esque indie folk track, finds Mitski feeling undeserving of her lover.

“You believe me like a god / I destroy you like I am” changes to “You believe me like a god / I betray you like a man,” before a lawless choir of dogs barking, birds chirping and vocals that belong in a Wes Anderson movie score overtake the outro. It’s the kind of songwriting that stops you in your tracks, a weapon Mitski has always possessed

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but, admirably, never overused.

Though the image of the lonesome cowboy is far from new to the cultural lexicon, Mitski proves she is far from cliche with tracks like the orchestral, drum-driven “The Deal” and “I Don’t Like My Mind,” a song with a classic country sound but completely, almost ridiculously unpredictable lyrics, including “And on an inconvenient Christmas, I eat a cake / A whole cake, all for me.” “When Memories Snow” is another standout, its harsh piano chords, tense strings and clashing drums threatening to drown out Mitski’s voice as she

ruminates on anxiety and fame: “And if I break / Could I go on break? / Be back in my room / Writin’ speeches in my head / Listenin’ to the thousand hands / That clap for me in the dark.”

Remarkably, Land ends on a hopeful note with “I Love Me After You.” Though the closing track’s instrumental is doomy and rhythmic, with a breakdown into distorted guitars and a long, buzzing outro, the lyrics hint at an acceptance of this chaos: “Let the darkness see me / Streets are mine, the night is mine / All my own / How I love me after you / King of all the land.” We shouldn’t be surprised — Mitski

is a master of the unexpected.

Though much of the album is apprehensive and self-critical, “I Love Me After You” turns around and writes a love letter to the loneliness, choosing to see it instead as a freedom.

Though Land bears little sonic resemblance to the distilled indie rock or spacey synths of Mitski’s past work, it is chock full of the brave, sensitive lyricism and risk-taking experimentation that have always set her apart. Mitski is an artist for whom each album is a self-contained work of art, and Land is but another entry in a discography of masterpieces.

‘Happiness Falls’ is a work of art ANNABEL CURRAN Senior Arts Editor

Upon hearing news of some faroff tragedy — heartbreaking but seemingly impossible, completely removed from our own plane of existence — our instinctual reactions vary. Most of us feel pity and empathy for those unknown on what may be the worst day of their lives. We sigh and shake our heads at the unfairness of it all.

Often we’ll murmur some iteration of “I can’t even imagine,” unable to picture something so terrible ever befalling us or our loved ones. We finish reading the news, listening to the story, watching the video and move on, while any echo of what we just learned flees from our memories.

For many of us, these kinds of life-altering events are an impossibility. For Mia Parkson, that unspeakable, unimaginable thing became her reality.

“We didn’t call the police right away,” she tells us on the first page of Angie Kim’s “Happiness Falls,” the day her father went missing on a typical Tuesday morning in a Virginia suburb. Her family — mother Hannah, twin brother John and little brother Eugene — went through the motions of their daily routine without anticipating what would come next: a normal morning for a slightly abnormal family. Or, as Mia calls them, “indubitably, inherently atypical.”

At the crux of this atypicality is 14-year-old Eugene, the nexus of the novel and the driving force that propels the story forward. Dually diagnosed with autism and a rare genetic disorder called mosaic Angelman syndrome, Eugene struggles with motor control and communication, unable to read, write or talk. He saw what happened to his father that morning but is unable to tell a soul.

Whatever happened to his dad and whatever message or cry for help Eugene may want to express is trapped inside him, leaving his family, and the reader, clinging to his every word unspoken, desperate to find a way to unravel the truth as a seemingly innocent, though atypical, family is thrown into turmoil and scrutiny.

“Happiness Falls” is not just a mystery novel or a whodunnit.

Nor is it a prototypical, Norman

Rockwell depiction of a nuclear family. As always in her writing, Kim goes beyond tropes. Each character is carefully crafted — their thoughts, feelings and interpersonal relationships are raw and deeply relatable. With each chapter, Kim peels back the layers of this atypical family, making us love them, relate to them and fear for them more and more with every word.

The plot of Kim’s last novel, “Miracle Creek,” featured a murder trial of grand proportions, a tragedy that gained national attention. “Happiness Falls” is more personal, contained to one family in one town. This closeknit intimacy packs an emotional punch.

Perhaps the strongest and most compelling aspect of “Happiness Falls” is the complexity of the narrator, Mia. As the older sibling of a special-needs child, Mia can’t help but feel like a permanent afterthought to her family, forever expected to be independent and self-assured.

Her resentments, fears, insecurities and deep, earthshattering love for her family and her little brother seep out of every word of her narration as she takes readers back to stories from her childhood in Korea, stories of growing up an outsider in both her Korean community and her American one and stories of deep familial wounds. As a narrator and as a person, Mia is nothing if not rational, a logical overthinker to a fault. Thorough in her narration, Mia walks us through every possibility, and it is almost impossible to separate her thoughts, memories and theories from our own. We are swept up in her anxious ramblings, footnotes and asides, and as she begins to question and doubt her family, we question and doubt alongside her.

Mia’s narration throws readers into the thick of the plot, keeping us hooked on her every thought, word and theory.

Through Mia, we uncover both the secrets and mysteries of the case and those of her family.

While some novels with thriller or mystery elements get swept up in delusions of grandeur — dramatic revelations of monumental secrets, plot twists that teeter on the edge of unbelievable and impossible — Kim keeps it beautifully simple.

The bits and pieces of this family’s life are perfectly believable, so frighteningly logical that it worries us. Would my loved one keep that secret? Could this ever happen to me? While we may groan in dismay or cry out in frustration at these characters’ decisions and the secrets they keep, we can’t help but understand their reasoning. We wonder: Would I do the same if that were me?

Throughout the tantalizing progression of “Happiness Falls,” you remain on the edge of your seat, heart pounding in your chest as you turn the pages with shaking hands, terrified of what revelations could lie on the next page. The art of crafting this supernova of a novel lies in Kim’s skill at building the fragile family dynamic between her central cast of characters and in her careful, light-handed manipulation of the readers. The novel builds slowly but surely, and Kim works hard to lead us astray, twisting our perspectives and playing off of our preconceived notions and predilections.

You will fear the worst, hope for the best and breathe a sigh of relief all in the span of a single chapter before being thrown back into the fray. Kim takes us not only through the ups and downs of the novel, but through a labyrinth of deeper societal themes and analyses that challenge our presumptions and prejudices. While leading us through this beautiful, riveting story, Kim gently pokes and prods at our beliefs and biases with each chapter, deconstructing our views on language, communication, happiness and intelligence.

“Happiness Falls” may be about a family and a disappearance, but this is Eugene’s story, whether or not he can tell it himself.

At the heart of this delicate narrative-weaving is Eugene. Our perception of Eugene as both a character and a human clouds our judgment, shapes our predictions of the novel’s end and prods us with questions. If you were to look at Eugene, what would you see? Would you see a child, unable to communicate, read or write, deserving of pity? Would you see a teenager, capable of outbursts and anger like any other child?

Read more at michigandaily.com

Arts

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Wednesday, October 11, 2023 — 5

Daily Arts Runs a Marathon: Post-race reflections from the runners DAILY ARTS WRITERS This fall, three relay teams of four Daily Arts staffers trained for and ran the Probility Ann Arbor Marathon. We have written about our past experiences with running, how we prepared for the marathon, what we looked forward to and what we were afraid of. Now, postmarathon, we reflect on the joys and the difficulties of race day.

Ava It didn’t hit me that I was running five and a half miles this morning until Erin rounded the corner at Gallup Park and handed me the relay bib. To say I was unprepared for the marathon relay would be an understatement.

My training was almost nonexistent, so my one goal was to finish my leg of the race. And I did it! It didn’t go as smoothly as I would have liked: My legs chafed far too much, I threw up in my mouth after chugging a cup of yellow Gatorade and Saarthak and I got lost at the end of our leg, so we accidentally ran more than necessary. But I loved the Ann Arbor views and cheering on my teammates. I loved watching a group of determined individuals run up the Arb hill and noticing the sigh of relief as runners crossed the finish line. Nothing beats feeling invincible after achieving a goal.

Erin I run because it’s a necessity, but I also run for moments. Preinjury, these moments came often — little goals, new routes, little doses of excitement, success and pride, most of which I celebrated quietly by myself, perhaps by spending the rest of the day horizontally. While recovering my foot, I couldn’t chase after

these moments as much. Today, I ran the first leg of the Ann Arbor Marathon. Getting to run first was the one self-serving thing I allowed myself as the person coordinating the relay with the Arts runners. When I finished my leg of the race, struggled to unclip the belt, handed it off to Ava while she dropped the apple she’d been waiting to eat into my sweaty hand and wished her luck, it felt like the kind of little accomplishment I used to get more often from running. When I saw my friends finish the leg and brought them cups full of too-little water — those are the moments I want to run for.

Having completed the marathon without pain, I give myself permission to start seeking these moments again.

The moments I took for granted as recently as this spring. Months ago, I plotted loops ranging from nine to 15 miles around Ann Arbor. I never got to run them before my foot, ankle and shin turned against me. But I can visualize the moment when I see my house a block away after completing that 15-mile loop. I can already sense that joy. Months ago, my girlfriend called me in the morning, unplanned, trying to tell me that she loved me, and ended up telling me she wanted to bring me orange slices when I one day trained for a marathon. I said orange slices were an insufficient post-run snack. But I can picture that moment too, and I want it. I can’t ruin that for myself. Which I guess is all to say I’ll keep trying to slam my feet into the ground in the least detrimental way I can.

Graciela I don’t run competitively. Or at all. I signed up for the marathon relay on a whim because I happened to be running very, very

slowly on the treadmill on the day in July when Erin sent a message asking if anyone was interested in running the marathon. I naively thought signing up would be a good idea.

If I’m being completely honest, I trained very poorly for this marathon, and I was definitely not ready for today. When my alarm went off at 6 a.m., I seriously considered texting Erin that I was sorry but I wasn’t going to be able to make it to the race.

Alas, I forced myself to get up, get dressed and run the five and a half miles.

The only things keeping me motivated were the fact that my running pace perfectly lines up with Olivia Rodrigo’s “love is embarrassing” and that Reneé Noe contacted me through Instagram DM two days ago because someone sent her my pre-marathon article. I’m pretty sure that after Katelyn passed me the bib, I questioned my entire existence over a hundred times as I tried to get through the final leg of the marathon before my legs gave up on me. Ironically, the runner’s high kicked in right as I was crossing the finish line, so I decided to go ice skating at Yost Ice Arena after the marathon was over. Now my legs hurt a lot. I think it’s safe to say I’ll be sleeping soundly tonight.

Hunter I’m writing this as I sit in the school bus that’s supposed to take me back to the finish line.

I never thought I’d sit in one of these crappy seats again after I graduated high school, but here I am. I never thought I’d run this far after graduating high school either, but again, here I am. There are a couple of swans swimming in the Huron River, the band in Gallup Park is playing

Design by Sara Fang

“Moondance” by Van Morrison, we’re heading to Frank’s for breakfast after the race — this is the best I’ve felt in a while.

Jack As I listened to the triumphant horn call from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony and looked around to see a pastoral green landscape, a serene and rustic corner of Ann Arbor I had never before set foot in during my threeplus years here, I felt, for the first time, the significance of what I had been working toward for the past several months.

For a moment, it felt like I was the Napoleonic hero of Beethoven’s middle-period symphonic landmark.

But as I emerged from the woods onto the Dixboro Road bridge and saw runners beneath me running in all directions along the zig-zagged path, as if in an M. C. Escher design brought to life, the painful reality began to set in

that I still had, like, three miles to go. When the symphony’s last movement reached its dramatic conclusion, I developed an insatiable appetite for finality, a hunger that could not be quelled by the truly vile packet of orange energy goo I painfully guzzled down mid-race. As I listened to the violins furiously bow their way through Bach’s third Brandenburg Concerto, I ran with a similar level of furor. Even though I didn’t perfectly time the end of my music selections with the end of my relay leg — I missed by an agonizing 50 seconds — I felt fulfilled when I ripped off my relay tag and watched my teammate blaze the path ahead (for Chris Evans).

Joshua I ran the fourth leg of the marathon, the last five and a half miles. By the time my feet hit the ground, marathoners had already run twenty miles, already taken

35,000 steps.

I felt like an imposter.

As I passed by a pair of chads, seated on lawn chairs by Mitchell Field, I heard them talk about me: “That guy is booking it!” one of them said.

“No, he’s just running the relay,” said the other. I cannot say that he was wrong.

When I crossed the finish line, the announcer screamed Erin Evans’s name. I guess I really was an imposter.

Katelyn I woke up at six this morning extremely groggy after accidentally staying up past midnight watching “Saw” movies.

My first emotion was self-doubt, kicking myself for not sleeping properly (although “Saw” rocks).

I doused my face with cold water about 12 times before leaving my apartment.

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Your favorite book is a TV show now Sudoku Syndication

SERENA IRANI

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Daily Arts Writer

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tefpmbo WHISPER “When I was a boy, we lived along the Huron River.”

For my 12th birthday, I had a strange cake. It was chocolate with buttercream frosting, with a decorative layer of fondant on top that split the cake into four factions.

One quadrant had a crinkled hat and a broom, another had little cerulean waves and a trident, another had a Mockingjay and an arrow and — can you tell where I’m going with this? It was 2014. Young Adult book-to-movie adaptations were all the rage. Tumblr was at its peak. Reading was unironically cool. Not-like-other-girls “it girl” Shailene Woodley was booked and busy. It was a fun and weird time of fandom to have lived through as a middle schooler, and it’s even weirder to look back on it now.

In case my cake didn’t say enough, there were two central aspects of this era: mega-popular YA book series and their film counterparts.

The theatrical release of the movies stirred up a lot of secondwave hype around the books, which is why it was nearly impossible to get a copy of “The Hunger Games” at my middle school library for years. From “Twilight” to “Harry Potter” to every John Green novel, the system of book-to-movie adaptations was tried and true. Books have been the source of popular films for decades, but this specific era felt rare in the sheer force of its digital and societal impact. With no shortage of material to work with or teen audiences to entertain, these adaptations were low risk and high reward, and everyone wanted a piece of that pie of potential.

That’s not to say that all of these movies were incredible.

For instance, “The Mortal Instruments” film from

2013 exists. As do the second installments of the Divergent trilogy and the Percy Jackson movies that author Rick Riordan referred to as “my life’s work going through a meat grinder.”

At some point, the creative juices had to start trickling out. Tumblr was dying. Woodley couldn’t save an 11% Rotten Tomato score no matter how hard she tried.

But around the late 2010s, something short of miraculous happened. In moving away from the blockbuster flops, a new era was ushered in — only this time, it would be on the small screen.

All of a sudden, TV entered the fold of YA book-to-screen adaptations in a way that it never had before. There were predecessors, of course, with hit teen shows like “Gossip Girl,” “The Vampire Diaries” or “Pretty Little Liars.” But unlike the Tumblr era, their respective source material remained in relative obscurity even as the shows became massively popular. In fact, I’d argue that most casual fans of any of those shows likely weren’t even aware that they were based on book series from the ’90s or ’00s. What made the Tumblr era special was the resurgence of interest in actually reading the books that inspired that year’s most anticipated film release of 14-year-olds nationwide.

There’s no definitive date that this change occurred, but the closest I can pinpoint it to is 2016, the year Reese Witherspoon founded her media company, Hello Sunshine.

Admittedly, her target audience is middleaged white women, but her joint effort of starting a book club and then proceeding to adapt a lot of these books to screen initiated a familiar phenomenon of paralleled consumption of popular books and subsequent screen adaptations.

Read more at michigandaily.com

“Alligators were not known in these parts.”

Design by Hannah Willingham

MiC

6 — Wednesday, October 11, 2023

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Revolution in construction JOSEPH FISHER MiC Columnist

In a quiet courtyard nestled deep within Jerusalem’s bustling Muslim Quarter, I sat down to call my mother. My flight back to America would leave the following day, with a nine-hour layover in Rome. Europe haunted me all summer as I traveled through Asia’s graveyards of Western exploits. As I left Asia for the colonial core, I was at a loss for what to do in the city that defined the West’s image of empire for millennia. And so, after not knowing where else to turn, I called my mom.

My mother is a devout Christian first, an artist a close second. It was not too surprising that she suggested I spend the few hours I had in Italy at the Vatican. Beneath the mighty Palestinian Cedars, I listened to my mom muse over the masterpieces of Christianity’s holy city in Europe. She told me it was the first museum that made her cry. For her, there was no way that Michelangelo’s marvels were made by mere man alone; the splendor and the craft had to be the work of the divine.

After I hung up the phone, I sat surrounded by the silence of the courtyard. This was not the first time my Mom had told me her story about crying at the Vatican, but it was the first time I had finally understood what she had experienced, at least a little. My mind drifted back two months and an entire continent away.

Hanoi was a city that welcomed me immediately with a warm embrace. A crowded sleeper bus dropped me off at 5:30 in the morning, and I was greeted by a scene of paradise.

The golden sunbeams danced along the tree-lined streets of the Old City, aromas of roasting coffee beans and fresh baguettes lingered in the air as morning

bikers cycled past. This was not a paradise of God; this city was forged by the flames of man.

Constructed heaven, noun.

I came up with the idea on my morning commute to class in Downtown Cairo. There’s a feeling I have come to know that I had never been able to describe.

Our planet is blessed with these urban centers that overflow with life, and with every breath they scream with vitality in the face of the endless void. Beirut’s cliffside avenues tell the story of the city’s survival through wars of foreign destruction. México’s murals give a physical form to the revolutionary ideas that built the city from the ashes of the colonial tragedies. Algiers is a living testament to a dream thought near impossible 60 years ago. Across continents and eras their residents are proud, armed with the knowledge that they built the cities that people muse for brick by brick. They fought to protect these cities, bullet by bullet. They lived through hellish horrors treaty by treaty. Gun by gun. Occupation by occupation. Martyr by martyr.

In the face of global networks of imperial domination, they have meticulously crafted projects of liberation. They have taught the world that the supposed concrete permanence of colonial systems are mere façades to be shaken off and destroyed. In their place, new flowers bloom.

After getting turned away from Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum for not having long pants and stopping at a no-name café for the best cup of coffee of my life, I meandered towards a yellow palace hidden by the city’s characteristic curtains of greenery. Peeking out from the lush forests of Hanoi’s old city is the marigold-colored complex of the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum. I’ve recently come to love art museums, especially entranced by those filled with contemporary art.

Design by Arunika Shee

I always tell people it’s my toxic trait. In between the all too common cacophonies of splashes and squiggles, I fall in love with pieces of art crafted in our recent past that tell familiar stories, something so close to our lives that you can feel the reverberations of the artist’s story through his paint strokes.

Even though I had done my cursory research into the museum via a Google search and a travel blog review, I was practically flying blind.

After making my way through Vietnam’s centuries of porcelain craft in the museum’s basement exhibit, I emerged back to the surface and walked through the sun-lit halls of the main exhibition space. Suddenly, I stopped dead in my tracks. I was surrounded by works of art from the Vietnamese revolution, vignettes from every aspect of life under siege, life at war and

life at home. Each work of art was a puzzle piece that fit together to illustrate the soul of the nation.

Charcoal sketches of young boys setting up defensive positions outside of their villages. Oil paintings of farm workers and guerrilla fighters sat around a bonfire embroiled in political debates. Bombs depicted as chaotic globs of paint raining down on rural fields. Tapestries of women revolutionaries making their way through thick bamboo forests under the cover of the night. Woodblock prints of Ho Chi Minh sitting behind his desk, endlessly scribbling into his notebook. Paintings of mothers holding their children tight after they received the news of their father’s death.

Around a corner, a sculpture of a family sobbing in a deep embrace, rejoicing the victory of their nation, their mother waving a red banner.

In the last room, there was a massive painting crafted almost entirely in muted green and slate blue tones. The painting depicted a cadre of guerrilla revolutionaries as they made their way through the deep Vietnamese jungle late at night.

Only their shadows were visible, reflecting against the moon in the river they were traversing.

All of a sudden, a mother and her child walked up beside me. The mother took her daughter by her hand and began to explain the stories wrapped up in the brush strokes of the masterpiece before us. Never in my life had I wished more that I spoke Vietnamese.

After a few minutes, the mother starts crying, and her daughter hugs her leg.

I had to walk out of the room so they wouldn’t see I was crying too. Never in my life had I seen the sacrifice, determination and soul of a people on full

display. Vietnam was not freed; they freed themselves. In the face of genocide at the hands of a French imperial project, a Japanese invasion of their homeland and the American war machine — who wished the whole country would just burn — the Vietnamese people united under the bold, endlessly distant dream of freedom from colonial shackles. Through their artists, I saw how the entire nation banded together to translate their dream into their reality, completely on their own terms.

This was to me what the Vatican is to my mother, but it was the works of man that brought me to tears.

I thought back to my people.

How distant in the future is our own freedom? Most days, I have to wake up and squint to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

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Not another essay about cut fruit!

MEI LANTING MiC Columnist

If you’ve ever hand-peeled 40 full-size navel oranges in an hour and a half, you know what I’m talking about.

I’m 17 and working at a summer camp in my hometown. The free lunches that the city provides for the kids regularly include these huge navel oranges — the students’ only fresh fruit or vegetable. The oranges are so big that the 5 and 6 year olds can’t even fit their hands all the way around, and the skin is so tough that the middle schoolers have no desire to waste their precious lunchtime peeling it.

That first day, I remember seeing the kids beginning to pile

untouched oranges in the middle of their lunch tables. I hate seeing the untouched oranges, and I want to show the kids that I care. I think of what my mom would do for me, and so I turn, on instinct, to the nearest camper and ask her if she wants me to peel her orange for her. She says yes, and so it begins.

Things I learned that summer: The first puncture of my fingernail into the first orange of the day is always satisfying: clean break through the rind, sharp smell of citrus. I then slip my thumb under the peel and start to carve away, taking as much of the bitter white skin away as I can because I remember how much I hated it as a kid. When lucky, I can hit a stride, cresting half of the peel off with a single twist.

After the first few oranges, the sugary juice starts to stick to my skin. After the first dozen, my wrists start getting sore. I take orange after orange, peels falling into a pile next to me, pulp caked under my fingernails, sour-sharp juice finding the smallest cuts in my skin and stinging for the rest of the hour.

It’s worth it, though, to feel the satisfaction of an indignity — however small — dealt with.

Because, really, the program, developed specifically for feeding children, couldn’t have found a supplier for clementines or mandarins or tangerines instead?

It’s worth it, for the spiteful pride that despite the city shortstaffing us and underpaying us and shoving us in a gym without

air conditioning, we’re still able to run things so well that I have the free time to peel fruit. It’s worth it, most of all, to see the kids’ delight when I hand them their oranges.

I’m 13, or 7, or 22 and doing homework, or sitting at the kitchen counter or visiting my mom for the first time in a month, and she’s cutting me an orange.

You might know the rest of that story: the Taiwanese tradition of fruit for dessert, of parents treating their children and hosts treating their guests with plates of perfectly cut fruit. You might also know how this image of the long-suffering immigrant parent, silently bringing a plate of fruit to their American-born child after an argument, has been immortalized and valorized and made cliché

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through internet memes and TikTok videos and essay after essay after essay after essay after essay after essay.

It’s even been commodified – you can go to Redbubble and purchase this sticker (available for $4.03!) that proclaims “I LOVE YOU = I CUT FRUIT FOR YOU.” Growing up in southwest Michigan, the only other Taiwanese kids I knew were the other students in my piano studio, and my older cousins, who I saw once a year. Beyond this, the only other connection I had to my Taiwanese identity was the faceless comment sections of social media pages like Subtle Asian Traits. In pages like this, I clung to these memes and essays as an affirmation of my Taiwanese identity, but their message got twisted.

The joke in most of the memes, and the emotional core in most of these essays, is the significance of food being offered in lieu of a verbal or explicit apology from a parent to their child. This was exactly how my relationship with my mom operated. I hated it, so I assumed that everyone else hated it. I assumed that the mememakers and essay-writers were as unsatisfied as I was and that the joking and the poetic essays were a mass cover-up for the pain that we were all feeling. I interpreted it all as a glorification of tough love, an insistence that we shouldn’t ever need hugs or apologies or verbal “I love you’s,” and that if I did, it meant that I was rejecting my culture. I assumed that we were saving face in front of a white audience and fighting back against the Tiger Mom stereotype, and I assumed that I needed to keep my

head down and play along for the good of the community. I thought, Okay, suck it up. If a plate of fruit is good enough for everyone else, it should be good enough for you.

It became very easy to romanticize the strained relationship between me and my mom. I could make it all so poetic: the fights, the arguments, the crying, the plate of orange cubes afterwards. I thought: If this is the price of belonging, I’m happy to pay it. I didn’t know how to demystify the gap that came from my mom being raised in a highcontext culture in Taiwan, trying to communicate with her child raised in a low-context culture in the United States. I didn’t know that some of the creators of those memes and essays understood that gap but were truly content with how their parents showed them love. I was stuck wallowing in disappointment, waxing poetic about how we would never understand each other, and how I was so strong for surviving on scraps of affection, never expressing what I actually wanted.

In trying to connect with the other Taiwanese and Chinese kids that I knew, I got smug satisfaction from our ritual oneupping: who was taking the most AP classes, who was running on the least amount of sleep, who was performing on the lowest number of practice hours. We coped with suffering by presenting it as success: No one cared if you played well at the piano recital, but if you revealed afterwards that you were doing it on three hours of sleep and hadn’t practiced regularly for a month? You were a legend.

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STATEMENT

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Wednesday, October 11, 2023 — 7

Don’t let the archive become a death sentence

Design by Matthew Prock

LUCY DEL DEO

Statement Correspondent

On the third floor of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, tucked away in the very back corner, stands the Hall of Reptiles and Amphibians. Its large wooden cases spring up in two columns down the middle of the hall, boxed in by taxidermied crocodiles.

Walking through the door frame feels like stepping 40 years back in time — the lighting is sepia toned, the room painted in varying shades of tan and muted green and no flashing screens with interactive prompts wink enticingly at you.

As a result, visitors tend to walk straight through the reptiles toward the modern and polished Sharks exhibit, not even sparing a glance at the Galapagos tortoise or the Komodo dragons — if they even come this way at all.

But directly across from the door to the Sharks corridor is

my all-time favorite exhibit that the museum has ever offered: a hyper-realistic scene of two leatherback sea turtles nesting on the beach. Their dappled turquoise skin and ridged shells are blanketed in sand, a scene that has always caught my eye. As a toddler, I would watch intensely as the plastic seagrass seemed to magically wave in the nonexistent salty breeze, blowing in with it memories of kites lost to the wind and drip castles built on the shore. Every time it was raining or snowing or just too hot to go outside, my babysitter would park my stroller in the temperaturecontrolled hall of the museum.

I would run immediately to the sea turtles, reaching my face and hands as close to the glass as humanly possible without actually touching it. To touch it, see, would be to break the spell, to reduce it to a plastic reconstruction rather than a snapshot in time.

When my brother and I were in elementary school, our parents would often bring us along on my

dad’s work trips involving gallery and museum openings. As an adult, it’s easy to appreciate the many wonderful works of art we saw and museums we had access to, but back then, my brother and I preferred to play tag, roping the other kids at the work events into our antics. We would hide behind sculptures as our parents perused the works on display, peeking wide-eyed out from behind a curtain until we inevitably made direct eye contact with a disapproving adult and fell into fits of giggles. All this is to say that I essentially grew up in museums in the same way that one might grow up in national parks or on a farm. Though I never got bored of their grandeur, the sheer wealth of knowledge that they held within their expansive walls, I am still completely enthralled by museums.

This past summer, I had the opportunity to return to AMNH through an internship called the Museum Education and Employment Program,

affectionately known as MEEP. I, along with a group of 27 other college students, spent the summer learning the ins and outs of the museum, creating research projects about dioramas of our choice and facilitating conversations with visitors. I will probably never have a better job.

Next door to the MEEP home base, AMNH was running a different youth program for four young women who were members of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, a federallyrecognized Indigenous tribe in Western Oregon. We were briefly introduced to these women while they spent two weeks at AMNH learning about and interacting with Tomanowos, also known as the Willamette Meteorite.

The Willamette Meteorite has maintained its prime position in the Hall of the Universe since the hall’s opening in 2000, but the meteorite has been on display at AMNH since 1906. Encircled by stainless steel that has always reminded me of Saturn’s rings

is 15 tons of iron ore, supported by steel beams that reach down into the depths of the museum’s foundation. The largest meteorite ever found in the US, Tomanowos is dark, hulking and entirely otherworldly, even when compared to other meteorites — only 600 out of the 25,000 known meteorites on Earth are like the Willamette meteorite and possess an iron and nickel core of an early planet that veered too close to the Sun. It has no known impact crater.

Scientists believe that Tomanowos arrived on Earth during the last Ice Age, when glaciers and ice sheets covered Canada. When the Earth thawed and the ice sheets melted, massive floods raced through Northern America, picking up anything in their paths. As a result, Tomanowas, which had landed on one of the former glaciers, was transported to the Upper Willamette Valley: the ancestral homeland of the Clackamas people, where it embedded itself

into the earth. The Clackamas revered Tomanowos as a representative of the Sky People, their deities, and would venerate the meteorite and interact with it regularly. To the Clackamas, Tomanowos is a divine, living being that represents the union of the sky, water and earth: he came from the sky, collected rainwater in his crevices, and lived in the earth. They used the water in his fissures to bless their arrows, create binding contracts and perform many ceremonies and rituals.

As the Clackamas and other indigenous groups in Portland were driven off their lands by American westward expansion, white settlers laid claim to the meteorite and the land that it was on. In 1905, the Willamette meteorite was purchased from the Oregon Iron and Steel company, and then eventually donated to AMNH, removing Tomanowos from its people and resting place.

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Waiting around to die: What I mean when I say I’m from the South JOSHUA NICHOLSON

Statement Part-Time Writer “Where are you from?”

When I meet new people, it’s one of the most common — if not the first — question that I’m asked. It’s a question brought up in icebreakers and used by professors to remember who I am in relation to others. When I first met my girlfriend’s friends, squeezing between them during the second half of a hot football game, out of breath from rushing to make it on time, this was the first question they asked me.

“Virginia Beach,” I answered.

Usually, that’s where the conversation ends. However, for me, the interaction leads to deeper questions about what my response really means. What does it mean for me to be from Virginia Beach?

From Virginia more generally, and the South even more broadly?

Having struggled with this question since arriving at the University of Michigan, I’ve worked to unpack what it means, at least for me, to be from the South, particularly in a country which regularly belittles the region. For instance, the Southern accent and the Southern

hillbilly are often the butt of jokes.

Rather than have constructive conversations about the region, many non-Southerners simply laugh off the South as absurd and unworthy of greater conversation. I wonder where I fit into the equation — where I identify with the place I grew up. Is it enough for me to enjoy homemade cornbread and 12-hour smoked pork butts? Is it enough for me to enjoy bluegrass and Southern folk music? I am forced to wonder if these more superficial cultural elements can really allow me to connect to the idea of being from the South, especially when I lack the accent — a distinguishing feature.

Despite growing up in Virginia Beach and spending a few years of my childhood in Georgia, I’ve never developed a hearty accent native to the region. Whether that’s because Virginia Beach is a diverse city or because I adopted the language of people I watched online, I speak with a comparatively neutral, standard American accent. This isn’t to say that I don’t occasionally draw out my A’s or swallow certain words, but the distinguishing characteristic of where I’m from is conspicuously absent from my dayto-day life.

The disconnect between how I sound and where I’m from evokes

a sense of imposter syndrome. No, I don’t sound like I’m from the South, but I speak the language. I use “y’all,” with all its grammatical rules, and drop the “g” in -ing endings. Despite formal education, I use the occasional “ain’t” and “gonna.” But, while incorporating these words into my everyday conversation, I wonder if I’m imposing the lingo on myself. In my search for a connection to the South, could I just be forcing myself to talk a specific way? If I don’t sound Southern, why am I speaking the dialect in the first place?

Arriving at college, I felt out of place amongst a population of mostly Midwesterners. Even my fellow out-of-state students were more often than not from California, Chicago or New York.

This feeling was what led me to try and hone in on my own identity as a Southerner. I found connection in bluegrass, blues and folk music — not for the notation, though the music sounds lovely, but for the unique storytelling embedded within the songs. They follow a rich tradition of Southern literature and storytelling. The novels of Faulkner, Lee and Hurston are examples of stories that encapsulate the gothic characteristics of Southern life.

The music of Johnny Cash and

Robert Cray, alongside work from modern artists like Tyler Childers and Christone Ingram, laments the feeling of hopelessness and loss across the region.

One such song, Townes Van Zandt’s 1968 “Waiting Around to Die,” resonates deeply with me — not out of any personal connection to the subject matter, but out of an understanding for what the story represents. The narrator, a poor man from the South, sings of the troubles in his life, all of which eventually lead to prison and addiction. In the song, alcoholism and addiction are seen as reliefs from the struggle of life in the American South, a region beset by the highest rates of poverty in the country. While I can’t relate to the experience of living in extreme poverty, I find meaning in the way that the song’s title and message speaks to a broader truth of the South. With all the great victories the United States has claimed in its young history — morally, politically and economically — the South has remained somewhat separate from those successes. It was destroyed from the start by a system of racebased chattel slavery, physically devastated by a Civil War, just as the Union’s cause was, and then kept in perpetual stagnation

by underdevelopment, racial segregation and manipulation by national groups hoping to maintain that stagnation. Even when the region has appeared to be catching up to the rest of the country, another crisis, like the Great Recession, sends the economy and society back into a tailspin. On many metrics, the South is falling behind the rest of the country. The Deep South ranks lowest for social mobility; poor children become poor adults. Eleven Southern states have life expectancies below the national average, and eight of the top 10 states affected by obesity and heart disease mortality are in the South. For many, seeing no demonstrable improvement in their economic or social condition, being from the South is like waiting around to die.

Of the 10 states with the highest levels of poverty, eight of them are in the South. These trends have remained the same since 1980, with Mississippi and Louisiana having an average poverty rate of 21.3% and 19.95% over the past 40 years, compared to the average poverty rates of Wisconsin and New Hampshire, which averaged 9.92% and 6.87% over that same span of time. Despite 40 years of political control by

the same Southern conservatives from both parties, the South has seen no noticeable shift in prosperity. Despite an increase in manufacturing jobs, the South, as a whole, remains politically hostile to unions and any hint of social policies designed to alleviate abject poverty, driven in part by a political culture which rewards incendiary culture war issues more than policy solutions.

With these statistics and ideals in mind, being from the South means being the child of a deteriorated and failing society.

Part of this failure, however, also comes from the Southern legacy of slavery and racial discrimination. I cannot talk about what it means to be from the South without acknowledging my inheritance of a society that enacted a centuries-long cultural genocide against enslaved Africans and their descendants — a society which still fails to grapple with that history.

Despite what some white Southerners or progressives might think, the general perception by people living in the South is that race relations are getting worse, not better, with time.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

8 — Wednesday, October 11, 2023

STATEMENT

michigandaily.com — The Michigan Daily

The secret to Chinese cooking

Darrin Zhou stirs mapo tofu, one of many dishes he cooked for guests Friday, September 29.

Jeremy Weine/Daily

DARRIN ZHOU

Statement Correspondent

Zhou peruses the shelves of Way 1 Supermarket.

Jeremy Weine/Daily

Zhou serves his guests.

Jeremy Weine/Daily

I will break it down this way: odor molecules make their way high into your nose, stimulating olfactory sensory neurons and sending electrical impulses directly to your limbic system — that’s the distinction between smell and all other senses. All the rest interact with the thalamus, the brain’s sensory relay, but smell attaches to the limbic system: the hypothalamus, the hippocampus and the amygdala, systems that elicit fear, instinct, vigor. These are primalities that we tend to lose in a routine society until some event comes and unearths how we felt as a child again, and we realize how wrong we have been living. Smell.

There’s a distinct smell within an Asian market. It hits me as soon as I enter, all at once, paralyzing, and I can almost taste it, which makes sense— because taste is really just smell, and food molecules make their way retronasally into your nose. Try it: Pinch your nose while eating, and see how much less you can taste. But I remember what I am here for again and I ask the butcher: A pound of beef brisket for a beef brisket and white radish soup. It’s Mid-Autumn festival, and I want to cook an authentic Chinese dinner with mooncakes (which one of my editors affectionately calls moon pies), pork ribs, stir-fried bok choy and no crabs, because nowhere in Ann Arbor are there hardshell crabs, despite their importance to this holiday.

I go down the shopping list: Píxiàn broad bean paste, pork heart, Sìchuān peppercorns and whatever else arrests the eye. Bell pepper to pair with the pork heart and jujube for the table. The Chinese cook in this way; recipes work in fluidity, adjusting to the tastes of the chef.

There is no quantitative method, no teaspoons or pounds or minutes — just a splash of rice vinegar here, add enough salt after the meat has browned and so on. Americans try to find discipline in their meals, clinging to a golden, city-upon-ahill visage of cuisine as it should be, eternal, holding on to the dying breaths of empire.

Now I cook like my dad, who tells me he learned how to cook by “figuring out what he liked and making food until he got there.”

Maybe that’s all Chinese cuisine is: a distinctive set of flavor profiles and all the ingredients needed to get there. This is one way of looking at it — but Miranda Brown, professor of Chinese studies at the University of Michigan, has another. She goes into a Dim Sum restaurant and

sees custard tarts, curry noodles; she sees pourover coffee in Beijing and borscht in Shanghai and beef and potatoes and tomatoes and everything, everywhere, the whole world’s cuisine in this country. There are flavors here that we would mock a white man for thinking is Chinese, until it is.

“My view is that foods change,” she said. “If you take a Shanghainese recipe and move it to Hong Kong, it tastes different. They put oyster sauce in places that I wouldn’t expect oyster sauce to be if I were in Shanghai.”

“Do you think that heritage should be something that we hold, try and treat like heirlooms that you preserve and keep from changing?

Or is it something that you’re willing to look at like people, which is that we expect each generation to be different, right? Genetically, culturally? attitudinally? So why wouldn’t food be like generations of human beings?”

Is it sacrilegious to say Panda Express is Chinese food?

Authenticity is dead — long live postmodernism.

True, Panda Express does not taste like the Chinese food I grew up with. It suits a Western palate — it’s sweet and sour and saucy in the way that Americans have come to love, in the ways the Chinese don’t recognize, but food is adaptable in this way. It isn’t like the rest of culture, a Bach or a Chopin or a Mozart, which pretends itself to be immutable. Food is a product of us and where we are, shifting to the needs of a geospatially and temporally located people.

It is also true that in this transmutation, we lose parts of ourselves that we hold dear. This is why so many of the Chinese are angry at the Panda-Expressian meaning of Chinese food. It’s why many of us, despite growing up in America and breathing in America and loving in America and crying in America and having a part of ourselves inevitably shaped, changed by America, still see a country that is willing to let us go when we aren’t useful enough.

And, like Panda Express, we become trapped in this limbo, feeling like we have to constantly justify ourselves just to exist. It’s why we feel like a failure going to the University of Michigan rather than some Ivy League. It’s why we cry in grocery stores. It’s why there are some things that we cannot ever tell our parents, because we are American in the ways they have always wanted to be, in ways they don’t understand. I don’t know how to deal with this grief. I think that Panda Express, even if I don’t want it to, tastes good.

Because of this, I cook emotionally, like a painter filling in all the details after everyone else has gone to bed.

There comes a certain point when I am cooking, I realize, that I begin to let go of much of the outside world.

It is of my opinion that a good cook comes to rely on their senses in this way — when recipes and words and really, much of modern language, stops being semantic. When all you have to communicate with is how firm the tofu feels, the salinity of your hóngshāoròu, the way a stir-fry smells.

When I taste a soup and know it needs just a dash more of white pepper and maybe more salt, my intuitions are not spellbound to some higher cultural order, but to my tastes and my sensibilities. I set the water on the stove: icy, cool, cold, lukewarm, tepid, hot, balmy, blistering, boiling, until I lose my reflection in the water, until I am vulnerable, and into the soup pot goes the chopped up pieces of myself.

Slowly I begin to stop thinking about acidity and spice and instead, into the soup pot goes all the ways that I have been loved and cared for and taught how to exist.

Chinese food falls apart and recombines itself like this, merging its cosmopolitan psychosis together until it is reborn, and if you are someone who has continuously had to mend the broken pieces of yourself back together, you know that no one is really ever that proud of you for being okay: Congratulations, this is how normal people are, how normal people exist, all the time. It is never the fault of your friends, because they are perfectly kind and empathetic people, it is just that vision and hearing and language all necessitate going through the thalamus, and in that, an unnameable understanding is lost; in that you lose yourself to the world.

I cook for others because there is something that lost in the translation of literature — there is cultural context lost for things like music or theatre or fine art or architecture.

But in food there doesn’t need to be, we taste what we taste. In food there is only tremendous care; I am finely mincing the ginger and I am scumming the blood out of the broth: I am leading a child to be born, I am loving, I am leading those dishes to exist in this broken world. And you eat, and in a way you are holding my hand, and in a way you have now always seen me.

And, in an effort to remember again, the last dish I cook is tomato stir-fried egg, perhaps the first dish that my father taught me how to make. I haven’t had tomato stir-fried egg in a long time, despite knowing the recipe like the back of my hand.

My parents never make it for me anymore — I’m in college, so it feels too unceremonious to cook now for the short time we still have each other, but maybe I’ll ask them to

make it for me again before they die.

Maybe it’ll escape my mind, in the way that those things tend to, and I’ll wish I did.

I remember my dad first began teaching the dish to me. I was an inquisitive child, and I would always stand watching in the kitchen before he one day pulled me in. He would say, in this slow voice, “First, you have to scramble the eggs and set them aside. Then add the tomatoes in the pan, let the tomatoes break apart and if it needs more liquid, pour in chicken broth. But the tomatoes, by themselves, don’t taste ‘tomato’ enough — there’s a secret.”

Heinz ketchup. The secret is Heinz ketchup. I asked my dad about its inclusion recently and he said no, they never did it that way when he grew up in Beihali — we only do that here. I think I’ve been too harsh on him, and maybe he is also American in ways that I do not recognize, in a way I desperately crave.

I cook the dish now, and I feel the ghost of my childhood creeping up into the kitchen, just like I always did. He looks up at me, bent over the stove with my bleach-blonde hair, and something in him is frightened, but curious. He always has questions, the bugger, like Why? Does it hurt to bleach your hair? How was your first kiss? Have you had it? Are you happy? Do you like your friends? Are you happy? Are you ever going to feel like you’ve found home in America?

Are you ever going to be happy?

And before I can answer, the door opens, ajar, and the first guests have arrived.

The dishes are set, and once everyone arrives, the designated photographer, a curious man from Brooklyn, treats the affair like an art critique. “First, everyone list what you taste, what you see. No evaluations, no ‘this is good,’ just plain sensory details.”

“Spicy,” someone chimes in.

“Nutty.”

“A lot of warm colors.”

“Fragrant.”

“Now,” he states, “you can ask the artist questions.”

Someone says, “What do you taste?”

“I don’t taste much,” I say. It’s not particularly spicy, less than I would have liked, and I don’t taste history or cultural heritage. I don’t taste something like the cultural revolution. I don’t taste the names of the presidents, I don’t taste 64, I don’t taste the crowds at the 2008 Olympics or the streets I walked to school on everyday or the poems I had to memorize. I taste myself, on an airplane, before anything bad ever happened to me, looking out into the deepest, darkest blue that I will ever see. I stare, and nothing bad has ever happened to me, and I stare.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Opinion

Wednesday, October 11, 2023 — 9

Stop asking what I’m doing after graduation JAMIE MURRAY Opinion Columnist

A Help build U-M’s future — Attend an Open House

Join Vision 2034 and Campus Plan 2050 at an upcoming open house to preview the U-M of the future! View planning scenarios for campus land use and share your thoughts on how they connect to the university’s strategic vision.

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month ago, no one was asking me about my plans after graduation.

Now, it’s the topic of nearly every passing conversation. It seems as if starting my senior year sparked everyone’s captivated interest in what I’ll be doing in eight months. People have suddenly become curious about my life and what I will do with all of the opportunities laid out in front of me. For the first time in my life, my path forward isn’t clear and set for me to follow. The chance to do anything I’ve ever wanted is within arms reach, but what if I don’t know what that is? Of course, most people mean well with their questions, but that doesn’t make the answer any easier to give.

Others take a more cutting approach, and the conversation turns into, “What could anybody do with a political science degree?” Just about nothing, in their minds. An interrogation about my employability unfolds.

It’s not just political science, though. Unfortunately, plenty of social science degrees are seen as “useless.” Sure, the top earning careers for 25- to 29-yearolds with bachelor’s degrees are in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and all the other types of engineering.

And yes, liberal arts and humanities bottom out the list, making only about half the median salary of the electrical engineer. But it shouldn’t matter to others how much money a student will make after they graduate, especially when that amount doesn’t affect them.

I’d like to think that this salary-focused mentality is not ill-intentioned. Possibly, it stems from the anxieties of unemployment, debt and inflation that older generations lived through during the Great Recession. These are genuine

concerns, especially in a postpandemic world. Or, maybe they simply don’t know what the social sciences or humanities are.

Even so, people shouldn’t have to defend their education to anyone.

As my colleague here at The Michigan Daily wrote, “There is no such thing as a ‘useless’ major.”

I don’t know what I’ll do after May 2024. My final days in school seem so far away and yet quickly approaching. So whenever someone asks the ill-fated question of what I’m planning to do after graduation, I reply very politely that I’m not sure yet. What I want to say is how that question makes me want to lie down with the lights off, curled in a ball, willing some sort of answer to just come to me.

I’m not alone in that sentiment.

In a study by the American College Health Association, researchers found that 72.8% of students reported moderate to severe psychological distress, with 36.1% reporting problems related to their careers. Posing this question puts more pressure on students who are already struggling with mental health issues, often surrounding the very topic they’re being probed about.

I’ve even been asked what my parents think about my choice of degree. As a firstgeneration college student, that question feels silly to me. Most of my family doesn’t know what political science means or what it entails. What they do know is that I’m graduating from one of the top public universities in the country, and I’ll be just fine.

However, not every parent is so easily convinced. There are some who have invested a lot of time, money and even more money, on their children’s education.

So of course, they want to know what exactly their student has in mind for after graduation.

There has been a rise in parental expectations and criticisms in recent years, according to a study done by the American

Psychological Association, which is linked to rising perfectionism in college students. This just adds to the possible psychological distress that college students are enduring.

However, parents could have the ultimate goal of encouraging their children to figure out future plans. But being pressured about the future doesn’t cause people to immediately open up Indeed and start the search. Especially as more than 80% of college students are guilty of procrastinating aversive tasks. While parental questioning of their kids’ futures is understandable, the drawbacks are not justified.

I must also note that having so many options, seemingly too many options, is a privilege that not everyone can enjoy. Most people don’t get the opportunity to get an education at a top university like the University of Michigan, with an 18% acceptance rate and tuition and fees totaling more than $17,000 (and over triple that for out-ofstate students), or don’t have the luxury of going to university and choosing what they want to study.

Low-income students can’t afford tuition at most colleges, public and private. While I think that everyone deserves the chance to follow their dreams, not every person actually gets the chance to do so. I am thankful for the circumstances that have been granted to me, but acknowledging them doesn’t make it any easier, or any less scary, to choose what exactly my path will be.

So, please stop asking students what their plans are for after they graduate, especially so far in advance that not everyone knows the answer. And if they do, let them tell you what they’re planning on doing. Or, ask them what interests them in their field of study, what their dreams are or what is something they’re proud to have achieved during their time at university.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

UAW should proceed cautiously to protect the future of American autoworkers NIKHIL SHARMA Opinion Columnist

T

he ongoing United Autoworkers strike has captivated the nation, constituting a reckoning in the fight between organized labor and big business. With the country’s most powerful leaders weighing in and President Joe Biden joining the picket line, negotiations couldn’t be tenser. Though the storied union has struck often in the past, the current strike is historic in its scope, with the UAW seeking 36% wage growth over four years, restoration of cost of living adjustments, a fourday work week and defined benefit pensions. In addition to their bolder demands, the union has also undertaken a novel picketing strategy by striking simultaneously against all Big Three automakers for the first time in history.

This historic fight has produced a delicate situation for company and union leadership, with both looking to address valid concerns over wage growth while also adapting to meet the current paradigm shift toward offshore manufacturing, electric vehicles and inevitable job loss from automation. Though union membership deserves a chance to participate in booming profits through moderate wage growth, continuing to take a hardline stance against automakers could do more long-term harm than good to UAW members and the local Michigan economy.

By lowering research and development spending on electric vehicles and squeezing profits from the Big Three, meeting the UAW’s demands could hurt American manufacturing. In particular, substantially increasing labor prices could cause the nation to fall behind foreign competition, pressuring companies to outsource labor to reduce costs and delaying solutions to unavoidable technological unemployment.

Since 2008, Detroit automakers

have lost global market share to foreign competitors, causing dozens of car plants to shutter, often devastating local economies.

Though American automakers have made a remarkable comeback after an almost $81 billion bailout in 2008 that rescued General Motors and Chrysler from bankruptcy, many of their vehicles still lag behind foreign cars in reliability and safety. While American companies may seem destined to take the backseat behind companies like Toyota, the current shift toward electric vehicles presents a tremendous opportunity to regain international scale and cement the future of American auto manufacturing.

By pouring billions into electric vehicle research, American automakers can reverse the trend of decline and secure long-term auto manufacturing job growth in the country. To accomplish this, companies should aim to run leaner operations geared toward consolidating gas-powered car product lines, which would allow them to dedicate more resources toward electrification.

Unfortunately, the needs of UAW workers run contrary to these business objectives. At a time when companies should be lowering production of less profitable vehicles to go all in on electric vehicles, it makes little financial sense to vastly expand benefits for unnecessary workers. The UAW should continue pushing for moderate wage increases to meet recent inflation, but they should understand that winning their sought-after 36% wage bump could trade short-term gains for reduced long-term jobs.

Beyond supporting long-term investment in electric vehicles, UAW negotiators should be cautious to prevent the outsourcing of manufacturing. U.S. assembly line autoworkers earn an average $28 an hour, a figure that makes American manufacturing costprohibitive when compared to

countries like Mexico, where workers are often paid under $5 an hour. Though American companies have demonstrated a willingness to pay higher labor costs to manufacture vehicles in the U.S., significantly increasing an already high cost of labor could force the shutdown of more American factories. By lowering their wage demands and introducing provisions that require companies to build specific product lines in American plants, the UAW could better protect existing assembly line jobs from shipping overseas.

Finally, the UAW should adapt its demands to reflect the unfortunate reality of job loss across the industry. Over the past several decades, the Rust Belt has been decimated by factory closures, with entire towns of workers laid off in short order. With little opportunity to retrain or pursue further education before facilities shutter, many manufacturers are left with bleak prospects after losing their jobs. Though the UAW should fight to keep as many plants open as possible, extending the lifespans of failing factories isn’t always realistic. To take a proactive approach toward this goal, the union should work to extract concessions from automakers to allow workers at plants with planned closures to receive subsidized job retraining, education stipends and generous severance packages that enable them to get back on their feet.

By taking a more holistic approach to negotiations, the UAW can temporarily preserve highpaying jobs, while also laying the foundation for a strong American workforce in electric vehicle manufacturing and reducing hardship for laid-off workers across the industry. Though doing so may reduce the size of pay increases in the short term, it could prove critical to keeping auto jobs in America and protecting the middle class in Michigan.

Opinion

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Wednesday, October 11, 2023 — 10

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Talk to more strangers

The psychology behind the Donald ZACH AJLUNI

Opinion Columnist

A

s election season rolls around, more and more Americans are asking themselves the same dreaded question: Trump or Biden?

Painfully, our democratic system may serve us an all too familiar political matchup — one that the vast majority of Americans disapprove of. In addition to a highly exhausting news cycle, another election between President Joe Biden and twice impeached, four-times indicted former President Donald Trump should result in a strong win for the Democrats, right? Wrong.

Although Trump is facing high disapproval and all kinds of legal trouble, he continues to lead in Republican Party primary polls. In fact, most general election polls now show Trump and Biden neck and neck in a rematch. Why is that? Simply put, the former president (intentionally or not) elicits various psychological phenomena — including confirmation bias, belief perseverance and more — that secure him millions of loyal supporters.

With Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, the ultra-conservative wing of the Republican Party turned to the president for answers. Trump and his campaign responded with the Big Lie: voter fraud. Even though their claim of a stolen election has been repeatedly disproven, the president and his legal team continue to push it anyway. Subsequently, nearly 70% of Republican voters still believe the 2020 election was illegitimate, according to a recent CNN poll. To maintain this fantasy despite the clear reality, Trump and his supporters utilize misinformation, pushing misrepresented videos, articles and statistics that affirm their claims.

This creates a dangerous echo chamber fueled by confirmation bias, the tendency of people to seek out only information that favors their beliefs. According to Cindy Elmore, a professor at East Carolina University, people are more likely to believe what confirms their preferred views. This means that many right-wing pundits like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are quick to spread anything that can reinforce their narrative about the election. As a result of this flaw in human psychology, they continue to disseminate false information to other like-minded people, twisting anything for their political benefit and narrative.

Additionally, our political identities have a strong influence on what we choose to believe.

This is true for both sides of the aisle.

In an interview with Psychology Today, Jay Van Bavel, a professor of psychology at New York University, commented on the impact identity has on our beliefs. Van Bavel argues that conforming to our ideological identity can be more important than having evidence-based beliefs.

A perfect embodiment of this trait is Tucker Carlson’s leaked text messages regarding Donald Trump. Although Carlson is an avid advocate of the former president on air, his private messages have revealed his disdain for Trump, proving the reporter to be a mere performer.

This contrast between public and private support underscores the obligation many Republicans feel to endorse their party, beliefs and the person they voted for.

However, we have seen some prominent members of the GOP contradict this trend for the good of the country. Former U.S. Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois both committed political suicide as they defied Trump’s lies and

MAX FELDMAN Opinion Columnist

spoke out against his dangerous actions. The two were active members of the January 6th Select Committee, tasked with investigating the attack on the nation’s Capitol and Donald Trump’s involvement in it.

Being fierce critics of their party’s president and staunch defenders of American democracy made Cheney and Kinzinger pariahs in the GOP, and predictably, they both lost their seats in Congress. To most, sticking with their political identity — no matter how far one must go to maintain allegiance — is far more appealing than losing whatever power they may hold.

In more recent news, the former president’s criminal misconduct has come back to haunt him. For his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Trump is now facing two criminal indictments, one federal and one state. Through it all, Trump stands by his innocence and continues to argue he has done nothing illegal. Testimony from close advisors, however, proves Trump was made well aware his behavior was against the law. Former Attorney General Bill Barr, former Vice President Mike Pence, Brad Raffensperger, Georgia secretary of state, and many others informed the president that his claims were inaccurate and his actions reckless.

However, Trump was not swayed. He believes he had every legal right to head a criminal syndicate designed to secure him a second term, to pressure Pence into not certifying the 2020 election results and to undermine the integrity of our elections. Trump evokes the psychological tendency of belief perseverance, in which a person is unable to change their belief even when given contradictory information.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

“

Sonder n. the realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own.”

The guy selling newspapers on State Street, the students walking around you in the Diag, the random group sitting next to you in the Big House, the lowly Michigan Daily opinion columnists — each of them have their own lives, friends, hopes, dreams, worries and routines. Every stranger has a story. Every person is unique. And yet, when was the last time you went out of your way to speak to a stranger?

About a week ago, I received a cold email from a freshman student who had resonated with my article on planning.

He expressed his new desire to broaden his horizons and asked if I wanted to meet up for coffee to discuss my experiences here at the University of Michigan. This was someone I had never met before. I didn’t know his background or where he came from; I didn’t even know what he looked like. But when we sat down for coffee, it didn’t matter that he had been a total stranger only five minutes before.

The two of us talked for more than an hour about our lives, philosophy, entrepreneurship and whatever else we could think of. He even invited me to a professional event, and we made plans to meet again.

A short conversation and a cold email turned a complete stranger into a friend — something that never would have happened if I had been too afraid to meet someone new.

All the people you are now friends with were once unknown to you. You could’ve walked by any one of them on the street in the past and had no idea. Welcome week and club orientations don’t have to be the only times in

college when you put yourself out there and talk to someone new. There’s nothing stopping you from talking to someone on the street or in the Diag, except maybe for what people glaringly deem socially acceptable.

For years, our parents have drilled the idea of “stranger danger” into our heads: the notion that you should always exercise caution when dealing with people you don’t know.

Of course, this is important advice, but throughout life —

gain from conversations with strangers. We can also build our conversational skills and confidence. Think of talking to strangers as conversational practice that can make you more comfortable in social situations. The more you practice, the better you will become. Being able to go up to anyone and start a conversation is a vital skill, especially when you need to network or build professional relationships.

I’ve talked a lot about

How many other opportunities will you have in your life to be around this many intelligent and interesting people from all over the world?

and in college especially — we should be going out of our way to expand our social networks as much as we can. Meeting new people can provide us with valuable connections and relationships — new friends, mentors and romantic partners could be right around the corner if you take the chance with a stranger.

Furthermore, college offers up an unparalleled and unprecedented diversity of people, experiences and knowledge. How many other opportunities will you have in your life to be around this many intelligent and interesting people from all over the world? To that same end, there are people on this campus right now who are doing things you cannot even imagine. Students are starting organizations and businesses, conducting groundbreaking research, creating exceptional art and so much more. If you want to learn more about it, all you have to do is go up to someone new and ask.

Expanding your worldview is not the only thing we can

how talking to strangers can benefit you, but what about how you can benefit the stranger? In essence, the situation goes both ways. Not only that, but reaching out to someone new could also be an opportunity to do a small act of kindness. Helping someone in need or reaching out to someone who looks down can have a positive impact on you and the other person.

An interaction like this bolsters the strength of our community.

So, send that cold email, stop for that kid in the Diag or strike up a conversation with the person sitting next to you in discussion — what do you really have to lose? Sure, it might feel awkward at first, but if you tough it out, the possibilities can be endless.

Regardless of anything else, this experience will leave you struck by a moment of sonder — forced to ref lect on the stranger you’re talking to and to think a little deeper about all the intricate and complex people that make up the University.

DEI 2.0 Plan Information Session Wednesday, October 18 3–4:30 pm | Michigan League Ballroom Refreshments will be served.

U-M’s Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion invites you to a thought-provoking session on DEI 2.0. Learn about the 5-year strategic plan and engage around aspirations, objectives and the paths we can chart to create a campus where everyone feels welcomed and valued.

See the plan at: report.dei.umich.edu

RSVP to attend: myumi.ch/ez8rJ The session will also be livestreamed at diversity.umich.edu.

Sports SportsMonday: Michigan can take it easy, and that’s not a bad thing

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com FOOTBALL

PAUL NASR

Managing Sports Editor

I get it, you might be a little bored.

Week after week, you’re tuning into the No. 2 Michigan football team’s matchups and finding a no-contest snoozefest by the third quarter, or sooner. You might begin channel surfing for games coming down to the wire, or head out to enjoy the rest of your Saturday. Whatever it is, I know you don’t want the Wolverines playing close games against lowly opponents. Yet, you still wouldn’t mind Michigan playing tougher teams and bringing some excitement to your game days.

Sports are all about drama. Lastsecond touchdowns and overtime wins are what get fans on their feet. But when you lose interest in the Wolverines’ games because they’re up 20 or 30 points by the third quarter, you’re missing a key differentiator between Michigan and plenty of the other top teams: The Wolverines are kicking back and relaxing.

That doesn’t mean they’re tak-

ing it easy on their opponents, it’s actually quite the opposite.

By sprinting out to big leads in its last two games, Michigan has regularly allowed its starters to become spectators for the fourth quarter while its backups get to test out the Big Ten waters. On the sidelines they watch, they cheer — they do everything, except adding unneeded wear and tear to their bodies.

“It’s extremely beneficial for my body,” junior quarterback J.J. McCarthy said Saturday. “My ankle wasn’t feeling 100%, and just being able to rest in that time and just doing it week by week, it just shows a testament to how fast we’re starting and how well our defense is playing.”

That wasn’t McCarthy after an early-season non-conference game against a mid-major team. That was McCarhty after Michigan’s second Big Ten road game in a row. And say what you will about teams like Nebraska and Minnesota — Cornhuskers’ coach Matt Rhule hasn’t ruled the day just yet, and Golden Gophers’ coach P.J. Fleck’s boat hasn’t been rowing all too well this year. But being able to

Wednesday, October 11, 2023 — 11

rest in the last 15-plus minutes of a Power Five road game on back-toback weeks is no small feat.

That rest is keeping physical runners like McCarthy and junior running back Blake Corum fresh.

It’s helping a defense that’s been working through injuries all year, especially in the secondary, heal at its own pace with lower snap counts for players reentering the starting lineup.

The only drawback to the lack

LILA TURNER/Daily

ICE HOCKEY

Listening, learning and leading: Jacob Truscott’s road to captaincy LYS GOLDMAN

Daily Sports Editor

There’s just something about Jacob Truscott.

Ask his teammates, his coaches, his friends — sophomore defenseman Seamus Casey will tell you he’s “one of the best guys you’ll meet in hockey.” Michigan coach Brandon Naurato will tell you he’s “a special person on and off the ice.” Former Wolverines forward Thomas Bordeleau will tell you he’s “one of the best human beings I’ve ever been around.”

Ask Truscott, and he’ll talk about all the incredible people around him.

The senior defenseman and captain is rarely the loudest guy in the room. He’s not one to boast about his personal success, and his reserved demeanor can make him hard to fully understand with one conversation. He doesn’t often seek the spotlight.

But that’s exactly what makes him the type of person that his teammates, coaches and friends can’t speak enough about. He might not be the resident locker room hype man, nor the most outgoing personality at first encounter. But upon more careful consideration, you’ll notice that he listens. He notices, he remembers, he cares. He learns from those around him.

It’s what makes Truscott the epitome of a quiet leader. He sets an example, in part through incorporating qualities he adopted from others, while also letting his own character speak for itself.

And those around him have certainly noticed. *** Truscott always wanted to play hockey at Michigan. Growing up in Port Huron, about an hour and a half from Ann Arbor, he went to Michigan games and quickly began learning about the Wolverines’ culture.

The youngest of four children, Truscott and his two older brothers all took an interest in hockey. Lori Truscott, Jacob’s mom, recalls the boys constantly playing mini sticks in the basement or driveway — with Jacob often getting stuck at goalie in classic youngest brother fashion.

“Growing up as the youngest and also (playing) hockey kept him — I don’t want to say the big brothers did — but kept him humble,” Lori told The Michigan Daily. “He’s a very, very humble person. … You don’t want to get ahead of yourself and confidence is one thing, but don’t overthink, right? Here’s some-

JENNA HICKEY/Daily

thing maybe bigger than what you are. So I think the humbling and just his brothers’ leading (was a) good example.”

Learning from his siblings at home later translated into learning from his teammates, both on and off the ice.

Even before he earned the captain title, Jacob was a sponge. He recognized the little things that former Michigan forward Nolan Moyle spearheaded as captain last season.

Moyle took all the new players out to lunch, one-on-one, in an effort to learn more about them and provide support. When the team traveled, most players stuck with the same roommates throughout the season.

Moyle, however, requested to room with a new teammate every time.

“That’s something I want to implement this year is just get to know every single person, not only about hockey but get to know their family, stuff like that and kind of connect with them,” Jacob told The Daily. “Because at the end of the day, you want the closest team, and the closest team always wins.”

In building those relationships with younger players, peers and leaders before him, few characteristics are more valuable than Jacob’s ability to listen.

It might sound silly. Everyone knows how to listen, right? Maybe, but it’s not always that simple. In Jacob’s case, it comes down to really learning from the little things.

Bordeleau, now a center for the San Jose Sharks, met Truscott when they both began playing for the U.S. National Team Development Program in 2018. They quickly became friends, attending separate high schools but spending all their time at the rink together. Bordeleau even attributes part of his decision to play at Michigan to Truscott.

Entering their freshman year in 2020, the pair decided to move into a house — given the uncertainty of on-campus housing as a result of COVID-19 — with then-teammate Matty Beniers. Jacob and Bordeleau remained roommates for both Bordeleau’s two years in Ann Arbor, becoming even closer friends as they did almost everything together. “(Jacob is) a really good listener,” Bordeleau told The Daily. “Like that’s what I loved about our relationship. Sometimes I was more all over the place, and then he was more calm. He’s always been a good listener.”

Bordeleau also explained that from the locker room to small group hangouts, Jacob was never the type of person to talk over anyone around him. Rather, he was the guy who

of competition from opponents is the lack of experience in late-game clutch situations, which proved to be a contributing issue to past losses, namely against TCU. There haven’t been any fourth quarter scaries, and there may not be any until November. Tune into the fourth quarter of the Wolverines’ game against Indiana next week, and you might see similar scenes to that of Minnesota: key players like McCarthy, Corum and

people didn’t always think was paying attention until he’d jump in and make a relevant comment — and they would realize he was listening the whole time.

Those tendencies might not always stand out by themselves, but the little things add up, and they make people feel heard. They make people feel valued, respected and appreciated. They make a great captain, too.

“He just really cares about what the other person has to say,” Bordeleau said. “He’s not just saying stuff. Everything you say, he’s gonna take it into consideration.

He’s always like that.”

That penchant for listening thoughtfully allows Jacob to form meaningful connections with those around him, creating a strong foundation for his leadership. It also fosters personal growth — in noticing the qualities of successful leaders around him, he’s become an even better one himself. *** Just over a year ago, Lori and Bill Truscott, Jacob’s dad, received a memorable phone call from their son. Jacob asked them to come to his baptism.

“We were blown away,” Lori said. “It was an amazing thing for him to decide while going to school, while playing hockey, while representing. And it was just something so meaningful and empowering.”

Lori explained that Jacob’s faith has grown tremendously over the past few years. He began hosting Bible study at his house, bringing in a small group of friends on a weekly basis and becoming a leader outside the realm of hockey — while also incorporating his faith into his identity on the ice.

According to Mike Pearson, Jacob’s strength and conditioning coach back home in Port Huron, Jacob writes “AO1” in Sharpie marker on the top and handle of all of his sticks — representing “Audience of One.” And in playing for an “Audience of One,” Truscott also built connections with those around him. As he led his Bible studies off the ice, he found new respect on it.

It helped him connect with older players he had known for a while, as well as new faces just joining his team — like former Michigan forward Adam Fantilli. “(Fantilli) told me how much he looked up to Jake, through even the Bible studies,” Lori said.

“That’s how I actually found out that Jake was leading them now, because Adam was just like, ‘He’s just so great.’ ” Fantilli is far from the only younger player who admires Jacob as a person, a leader and a player.

“He’s an unbelievable guy,” freshman forward Nick Moldenhauer said Sept. 30. “Just watching his habits day in and day out really just kind of makes me want to be like him and someone I want to look up to and someone I would want to work as hard as I possibly could for.”

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

graduate cornerback Mike Sainristil smiling on the sidelines with towels around their necks, chatting with teammates and hyping up their depth players who are still putting up points.

But if Michigan can gather those massive leads on the road, you should be able to trust them to hold their own in clutch situations, even with the lack of in-game experience. That doesn’t mean they’ll definitely emerge successful, but it’s better going into a difficult exam fresh and healthy than getting worn down with tests every other week.

“It’s amazing because (of) not necessarily the rest I get,” McCarthy said. “But it’s seeing those twos and threes get in there and really move the ball. So it’s just great seeing those guys that put in as much work as we do get out there to capitalize on opportunities.”

Fourth quarter bludgeonings help team chemistry. The Wolverines played almost their entire travel parties in the last two games, with 72 of 74 players taking the field at Nebraska and 73 of 74 at Minnesota. That strengthens Michigan from the top down and

bottom up.

Sure, nail-biting situations are fun to watch, especially when it involves two teams of equal caliber. But McCarthy and company are more than content to save those for later, and take it easy as long as they can.

“I’ll be fine sitting out the fourth quarter of every game if it comes down to that, for sure,” McCarthy said.

It probably won’t come down to that. Eventually, teams like No. 6 Penn State and No. 3 Ohio State are bound to give the Wolverines a full game’s work, and they’ll probably have the upper hand in lategame experience.

For example, the Buckeyes won a thriller at Notre Dame and were entertained by Maryland well into the second half this week, and they’ll also battle the Nittany Lions before either team makes it onto Michigan’s schedule.

That shouldn’t be to the Wolverines’ detriment. There’s nothing wrong with them keeping their fans a little bored.

Because teams like those will be battle tested, but Michigan will be battle rested.

ICE HOCKEY

Rekha Leonard: Michigan needs new stars to emerge from within

REKHA LEONARD

Last season, Adam Fantilli scored 30 goals for the Michigan hockey team. He led the country in points per game, goals per game and assists per game. He won the Hobey Baker

award.

That level of offense is nearly impossible to reproduce.

But the Wolverines have no choice but to reproduce it, because Fantilli moved on to the NHL after being drafted third overall by the Columbus Blue Jackets. With 2021 fourth-overall pick Luke Hughes also departing after last season to the New Jersey Devils, Michigan’s high-power core was depleted entering the offseason.

In recent years, the Wolverines have relied on star power. Their ability to recruit top talent like Fantilli and Hughes has led them to consecutive Big Ten Championship victories and back-to-back Frozen Fours. Totalling 10 firstround NHL draft picks on the roster within the last two years alone, Michigan has become accustomed to having heavyweights run the show.

But that concentration of talent the Wolverines have benefited from invites frequent turnover. Of those 10 first-rounders Michigan has rostered in the last two years, eight have left school early to go pro so far. The Wolverines refilled their lineup with an influx of skilled players, but the newcomers noticeably lack the level of stardom the previous classes possessed.

This season, there aren’t clear headliners bursting onto the scene to perform heroics and carry Michigan on their backs.

That’s exactly what the Wolverines will need, though. If they want to compete for championships, they have no choice but to develop stars from within.

The good news is that they have plenty of options.

By the end of last season, Michigan settled on its top two offensive lines. Fantilli, of course, was the centerpiece, so in removing him it’s easy to assume that the unit would crumble. But in fact, the foundation of the offense is still very much intact. Although Mackie Samoskevich also departed for the NHL, the other four top-six forwards returned and are prime candidates to take on an increased workload.

Sophomore forward Rutger McGroarty — one of the two remaining first round draft picks on the roster — already put up solid numbers last season with 18 goals and 29 assists. He and his fellow top-line winger, sophomore second-rounder Gavin Brindley, flew around the ice carving up the opposition last season. They were stars in their own right, but forced to live in Fantilli’s shadow. Now, they have to enter the limelight.

Joining them in Fantilli’s vacant top-line center position is sophomore Frank Nazar, who spent the majority of last year sidelined due to injury. Don’t expect him or any of the top line to put up Fantilli-like numbers by any means — that’s unrealistic.

But expect all of them to step up and produce — that’s realistic and a necessity.

A high draft pick is generally a good indication of talent, and McGroarty, Brindley and Nazar are no exception. But the NHL draft isn’t the end-all be-all when assessing a college hockey team.

The Wolverines have a number of high-ceiling players, drafted and not, who they must develop to take on bigger roles.

“It’s not that you win or don’t win with first rounders, but there’s a lot of guys that have talent that are undrafted or aren’t first rounders,” Michigan coach Brandon Naurato said Tuesday. “The narrative will change depending on how we do, but like I said, I’m really excited about this

group. I think we are deeper.”

Even as prominent figures start to emerge, the Wolverines will need to hone in on that proclaimed depth. Naurato took steps to shore up weak spots and plug holes in the offseason using the transfer portal, most notably adding a number of graduate transfers to round out his young team.

The transfer portal isn’t necessarily a breeding ground for the “superstar” type of player Michigan has been accustomed to recruiting, but it’s certainly a way to add depth and perhaps land a hidden gem or two. In addition to the valuable experience transfers bring, players that held the responsibility of being a top producer at their old school have the potential to open up their game and thrive on the Wolverines’ lower lines.

With transfers and freshmen comprising most of Michigan’s depth, there will certainly be a learning curve as they learn to play together. But they too must step up, albeit in a different form. For them, stepping up means contributing secondary scoring and creating chaos to wear down opponents. The more successful they are, the more they open the door for the likes of McGroarty, Brindley and Nazar to explode.

If your bottom line can fluster opposing defenses enough to hand over prime scoring opportunities to your top line, pucks tend to find the back of the net.

The Wolverines believe they have the necessary depth to create such disorder. But that won’t matter if they don’t have the scorers to make it count.

This year, no singular player will be waltzing in to take over the offense and carry Michigan to the finish line. Instead, that opportunity is there for the taking.

In order to succeed, Michigan needs its previously less-heralded players to step up and claim star-status for themselves.

JEREMY WEINE/Daily

Wednesday, October 11, 2023

SPORTS

WEDNESDAY

The Michigan Daily — 12

PICK 6 -0 Michigan’s defensive adjustments and a pair of pick sixes lead to 52-10 blowout in Minnesota

JOHN TONDORA Daily Sports Editor

M

INNEAPOLIS — It took Minnesota quarterback Athan Kaliakmanis just two plays to become well acquainted with Will Johnson and the No. 2 Michigan football team’s defense.

As the sophomore cornerback jumped an errant pass by Kaliakmanis and trotted into the endzone, the Golden Gophers’ tactical blunder represented the first in a long day that had only just begun.

Even as Minnesota made marginal gains on offense, the Wolverines were quick to adapt as their defensive resilience empowered their runaway performance. Against a Gophers (3-3 overall, 1-2 Big Ten) team creeping out of its slow offensive start, Michigan’s (6-0, 3-0) defensive adjustments left Minnesota on the losing end of a 52-10, scheming chess match in which they couldn’t register a point in the entire second half.

“It speaks for itself right there,” Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh

said. “We have not had any points scored against us in the third quarter. (Defensive coordinator Jesse Minter is) really good. I made it a point today at halftime to go spend time over there and watch him do that, and he was really good.”

Electing to avoid the middle third of the field early and often, Minnesota coach P.J. Fleck evidently watched his fair share of film on Minter’s defense. Utilizing the flats, Fleck’s play calling attempted to move the ball outside of the pocket and away from the Wolverines’ run-stuffing defensive tackles, including sophomore Mason Graham who returned from a two-game injury absence.

After Johnson’s pick-six put them down 7-0, it took three offensive drives for the Gophers to snag a first down — and it initially appeared as if Minnesota would pose no threat to the No. 2 Michigan football team.

However, as the Gophers’ slow, churning offense began to hit its rhythm, the Wolverines’ strong rushing defense began to falter. Minnesota utilized gapblocking schemes and stretch cutbacks, turning Michigan’s

interior strengths against it. As offensive line schemes pulled the Wolverines’ defensive lineman to one side of the field, Gophers running back Zach Evans nimbly cut back on his outside zone runs, stranding the big men on the wrong side of the hashes. Getting tricky, outside runs essentially flipped to the other side of the field mid play as Michigan found itself unintentionally running out of position.

Evans racked up 35 running yards on five attempts, and Minnesota’s rushing attack appeared to find secure footing.

Nailing a 54-yard field goal, the Gophers trailed 10-3.

“They gashed us a few times on the stretch,” defensive lineman Mason Graham said. “They were stretching us out, but when they run sideways like that, there’s gaps that open up as they run the play. So they were staying patient, finding the open gap, but we just started playing more sound defense.”

Minnesota’s success was short-lived. As Fleck moved one piece, Minter shifted another.

On the next offensive drive, the Wolverines’ defense came prepared, positioning linebackers closer to the line of scrimmage to play up against a cutback. Two rushes produced four total yards, and the drive ended in a threeand-out punt.

Fleck would not be deterred.

Sending his wideout rooks forward, the Gophers found their most successful play of the day.

With six seconds left in the first half, Kaliakmanis delivered a 35-yard strike to receiver Daniel Jackson for a touchdown against graduate cornerback Mike Sainristil. With linebackers and safeties up to protect the run, Sainristil was left on a lonely island as Minnesota moved closer to striking distance down 24-10.

“We weren’t in the right defense, really,” Harbaugh said. “Their field goal kicker could’ve made it from that distance and we let them take a shot to the endzone when we really should’ve been in a double cloud — three deep. At least a three deep and a five under would’ve been preferred.”

Cloud coverage, which has two safeties and a cornerback who play deep, intending to help guard a longer shot towards the end zone.

Instead, Sainristil found himself alone as the single safety on the play couldn’t recover in time to help. Meanwhile, ‘five under’ refers to the number of down defensive lineman to rush the quarterback and limit his time to throw further downfield.

Coming out of the break, Minter had enough of the stalemate.

Moving his bishops, he pushed his linebackers deeper from the line of scrimmage and into the flats. A happy medium, his safeties stayed in the box to cover the run, as linebackers remained out wide to protect any future Sainristil snafus. The Wolverines created comprehensive coverage that helped seal victory.

Coming out of the half, the Gophers punted on their first two offensive drives, before Minter finally put them in check.

Attempting to hit the left side of the field, Kaliakmanis watched another pass fall into the hands of a defensive back — this time sophomore Keon Sabb, who intercepted the Wolverines’

second pick-six of the day to put Michigan ahead 45-10. With the game already out of reach, Sabb’s signature play meant that the Wolverines’ defense had outscored Minnesota’s starting offense. “(Keon Sabb) had a great performance,” Johnson said. “He started the year out very strong, had a great camp. He’s been getting better every week and I think our class (is) really special overall,and we got a lot of guys that are going to just continue to grow, continue to get better and we’re all chasing greatness.”

Though it took only one quarter for Michigan to pull away, the Wolverines found success by continually erasing any of Minnesota’s offensive adjustments. As the clock hit triple zeros, Michigan’s defense had let up just 169 yards. In a defensive chess match on Saturday, the Wolverines always moved their pieces in lockstep with the Gophers.

By continually outmaneuvering Fleck’s moves, Michigan shook hands on an easy checkmate.

EMILY ALBERTS, LILA TURNER/Daily Design by Lys Goldman