2022-02-16

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Wednesday, February 16, 2022

Ann Arbor, Michigan

UMich hires executive search firm to aid presidential search, asks for community input ‘‘U’ employs Isaacson, Miller to assist in examining candidates, making recommendations KRISTINA ZHENG, GEORGE WEYKAMP & KAITLYN LUCKOFF Managing News Editor, Daily News Editors

It’s official: the University of Michigan is searching for its new president.

University regents Sarah Hubbard (R) and Denise Ilitch (D), co-chairs of the Presidential Search Committee, shared in an email to the campus community Tuesday afternoon that the new Presidential Search Committee will meet for the first time later this week.

The committee will consist of the eight regents and members of the campus community including students, faculty and alumni from all three U-M campuses and Michigan Medicine. Throughout February, the regents will solicit feedback from community members through virtual learning sessions and an online survey for people unable to attend.

“The leader of the nation’s top public research university is one of the most prominent and influential positions in all of higher education,”

Hubbard and Ilitch wrote. “The committee’s work will rely on the university community’s insight into the challenges and opportunities that may face our university and its new president in the coming decade, as well as the personal characteristics and experiences needed to lead the university at this moment in time.”

Hubbard and Ilitch said the Presidential Search Committee will be working closely with the regents and an executive search firm to make recommendations and review candidates before the full Board of Regents elects the next University president.

“To protect candidate privacy and encourage the greatest number of well-qualified candidates to apply, the committee will keep candidate names confidential,” Hubbard and Ilitch wrote.

To assist with recruiting and examining candidates, the regents have hired John Isaacson and John Muckle from the executive search firm Isaacson, Miller. Hubbard and Ilitch wrote that the firm specializes in recruiting leaders for organizations and conducts more than 350 senior-level executive

University Provost Susan Collins named CEO of Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

The outgoing administrator and former dean will officially step down May 15 KAITLYN LUCKOFF Daily News Editor

University of Michigan Provost Susan Collins has been named the next president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, according to a press release Wednesday from the University Record. She is expected to begin on July 1, 2022.

“It is an honor and an inspiration to serve as the Boston Fed’s next president,” Collins said in the release.

“Throughout my career, I have been driven by a commitment to leveraging research, education and public service to improve lives.”

The role of the provost includes oversight over the University’s 19 schools and colleges in Ann Arbor.

Additionally, the provost also serves as chief academic officer and chief budget officer.

Collins was appointed as University Provost in January 2020 and planned to step down this June. With her new appointment, she now will leave this role on May 15. Collins initially replaced former Provost Martin Philbert after he was placed on administrative leave following multiple allegations of sexual misconduct. Collins also previously held the position of Dean of the Ford School of Public Policy and was also an economics and public policy professor.

Interim University President Mary Sue Coleman also announced in the University Record press release that she will now end provost search efforts started last fall and appoint an interim provost, according to the press release.

Coleman shared that this decision was in collaboration with the Board of Regents.

DOMINICK SOKOTOFF/Daily

searches each year. Over the past 38 years, the firm has conducted more than 7,300 searches, according to Hubbard and Ilitch.

Forty-five percent of the firm’s searches resulted in hiring women and 25% resulted in hiring people of color, Hubbard and Ilitch added.

In a statement to The Michigan Daily, University spokesman Rick Fitzgerald shared that the Board of Regents hopes to have the next University President elected by this summer.

“The Board of Regents and the

Presidential Search Committee are looking at both internal and external candidates to identify candidates best suited to lead the University of Michigan at this moment in time,” Fitzgerald wrote.

Additionally, Fitzgerald said Interim University President Mary Sue Coleman’s contract is still being finalized and that Coleman has agreed to serve until the new president takes office.

Members of the committee include Lecturers’ Employee Organization President Kirsten

Herold, Colleen Conway, former chair of the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs and other faculty and students from across all three University campuses.

The search for a new president comes after the Board of Regents fired former University President Mark Schlissel on Jan. 15 for engaging in an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate.

Though Schlissel will no longer serve as University President, he was offered a contract to return to

CAMPUS LIFE

Diversity in fashion: NOIR, SHEI host runway at UMMA Sartorial elegance on full display as magazines showcase locally designed attire NIRALI PATEL & IRENA LI

Daily Staff Reporters

As New York Fashion Week geared up in the heart of Manhattan, the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) hosted a sartorial revue of its own Friday night.

In collaboration with SHEI Magazine — a student-run fashion and pop culture magazine, NOiR Runway Fashion — a fashion organization dedicated to diversity and community service — and Runway of Dreams, the UMMA debuted its series of “Feel Good Friday” events with a fashion show and clothing swap on Friday night.

Dubbed “Feel Good Fashion,” the night kicked off with a social hour where attendees could mingle, take photos and sit by the red carpet. Upstairs, NOiR models were scattered throughout the gallery, standing stoically alongside the exhibits’ various paintings and sculptures for guests to view.

A red carpet featured prominently accentuated by

dancing pink and blue lights, as DJs from Maize Collective, a studentrun art and music community, queued music. Standing opposite the red carpet were several racks of clothing where guests could drop off unwanted clothes and “refresh (their) style” by swapping old garments for new ones.

LSA senior Krista Albertins, UMMA programs assistant and co-leader of the UMMA Student Engagement Council, said in an interview with The Michigan Daily the museum wanted to bring fashion to the campus community.

“We were trying to think of what would be something that we could do that is interactive with (regard to) clothing,” Albertins said. “(We) decided to do a clothing swap where people can bring clothes and take clothes with them, and feel like they’re participating in fashion as well.”

After the social hour, the Runway of Dreams Foundation held a runway show featuring models from nonprofit organization Best Buddies and the Michigan Special Olympics Figure Skating Team. Runway of Dreams aims to empower people with disabilities and support accessible

and adaptive fashion for all.

LSA senior Tori Weingarten is on the executive board of Runway of Dreams, which holds “adaptive runway shows” worldwide, including a show at the University of Michigan every year.

“We have our annual fashion show that supports adaptive fashion for kids with disabilities,” Weingarten said. “It’s awesome to see all seven of our models rocking (this) Zappos clothing , and it’s just such a special event.”

To close the night, SHEI Magazine and NOiR held a joint runway show, sending dozens of models down the red carpet, decked out in attire from local and student designers. In addition to the Feel Good Fashion show, NOiR holds an annual Spring Fashion Show and chooses one charitable cause to support. This year’s show will take place on March 19 at the Michigan Union, and will raise funds for Freedom House Detroit, an organization providing temporary housing and resources to people fleeing persecution and seeking asylum.

Business junior Jalen Gu, vice president of NOiR, said the purpose of the event was to

promote philanthropic fashion and celebrate unity.

“We’re about supporting charitable causes and doing all these other great things that have to do with (what) art has to do with,” Gu said. “So I think that’s one thing, this isn’t just fashion, this isn’t just a runway, it’s a celebration of all these other things.”

LSA senior Nadia Bailey, model coordinator for the UMMA runway show, said she strove for a diverse set of models. She said the theme of the show, “You Are Here,” was meant to celebrate socialization following the pandemic. Bailey ensured models’ posing and style on the catwalk reflected the theme.

“I made it a priority to make sure that I chose a diverse range of models of all different shapes, sizes and ethnic backgrounds,” Bailey said. “And then I also have to come up with the scenes that they’re going to be placed in, the songs of the scenes, and also teach the models how to walk up and down the runway as.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

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Read more at MichiganDaily.com

campus this fall as a professor in the microbiology and molecular, cellular, and developmental biology departments.

Nominations and applications for the University President may be submitted directly to the firm and will remain confidential.

Daily News Editors Kaitlyn Luckoff and George Weykamp can be reached at kluckoff@umich.edu and gweykamp@umich.edu. Managing News Editor Kristina Zheng can be reached at krizheng@umich.edu.

Washtenaw County to no longer require masks in K-12 schools starting Feb. 28 Face coverings still recommended indoors, required on public transportation KRISTINA ZHENG & KATE WEILAND Managing News Editor, Daily News Editor

The Washtenaw County Health Department announced Friday morning COVID-19 health orders — related to indoor masking as well as isolation and quarantine guidelines — for K-12 schools will be lifted effective Feb. 28.

Masking will remain strongly recommended in schools after the orders are lifted and will be required on public transportation, including school buses, under federal orders. Students who test positive or are in close contact with someone who tests positive after Feb. 28 must not attend school under the Michigan Public Health Code and existing administrative rules.

Jimena Loveluck, WCHD health officer, said in a press release the masking and quarantine and isolation health orders were implemented at the height of the pandemic to help maintain in-person learning, but said current conditions warrant more flexibility in the COVID-19 policies.

“Local health orders have been necessary during the pandemic, and these orders have helped protect in-person learning, critical health care capacity, and overall health,” Loveluck said. “We are in a different place now. We can offer more flexibility while we continue to provide appropriate guidance and work with our local schools to protect health, prevent spread, and maintain in-person learning as safely as possible.”

Washtenaw County is one of nine counties in the state of Michigan to lessen COVID-19 mandates for public schools, according to The Detroit Free Press.

Oakland County announced Friday they would lift their mask mandate for public schools on Feb. 18 and Ingham County announced Thursday their emergency health order will cease on Feb. 19.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

A model representing the Runway of Dreams Foundation walks down the red carpet Friday evening at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

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INDEX

Vol. CXXX, No. 66 ©2022 The Michigan Daily

NEWS............................ 3 ARTS...................4 STATEMENT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

MIC......................11 OPINION...................13 SPORTS.....................15

News

2 — Wednesday, February 16, 2022

GOVERNMENT

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

NEWS

Whitmer grants $76.3 City Council approves bridge million for Michigan widening near U-M hospital Project greenlit despite protests over colleges and universities pedestrian safety, environmental impact Coronavirus funding allows state to boost contributions to higher education ASHNA MEHRA Daily Staff Reporter

Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D) presented a $74.1 billion election-year budget plan Wednesday to support Michigan and “invest in the success of our future” In the bill, Whitmer suggested one-time funding increases of 5% for all public Michigan universities and community colleges, totaling to $76.3 million. The bill also includes a 5% ongoing funding increase, which is another $76.3 million of continued funding for operations.

This money, plus $200 million more, will be used for everyday campus use such as technology, infrastructure, maintenance and equipment.

For other community colleges in Michigan, the budget will award a $16.2 million onetime increase and $16.2 million ongoing funding. This is a significant increase from the stagnant budget that has not changed in the past few years.

The plan will also provide $1 billion for K-12 funding. This funding will be used for the creation of infrastructure and modernization of buildings. Each district will be awarded $170 million annually for other future projects.

“It would make gamechanging investments in every student, in every district, fund school construction and mental health at a historic scale, and retain hundreds of thousands of school staff,” Whitmer said in a press release obtained by the Michigan Daily. “The budget makes schools safer, helps every

student be a better student, helps every teacher be a great teacher, and helps our kids be kids.”

Whitmer also said she is putting an emphasis on mental health with this bill and plans to support teachers more financially by providing bonuses of $11,000 for school employees who stay in their jobs through 2025.

In addition to students, Whitmer’s budget is set-up to offer tax relief for senior citizens and low-wage workers.

According to her plan, the government would start with a 25% tax reduction for citizens 65 years of age and higher.

As time goes on, she hopes to increase the reductions and decrease the age requirement, overall saving taxpayers about $1,000 a year.

Whitmer has set aside $88 million towards the Unemployment Insurance System, following suggestions from her predecessor, Governor Rick Snyder (R).

According to her press release, Whitmer’s budget recommendation “puts Michiganders first and delivers on the issues that matter most to Michigan families.”

Whitmer’s entire budget is a 10.4% increase from her previously-proposed plan early last year. According to the U.S. News, the extra money has come from federal payments to state governments in response to COVID-19, and high tax revenue.

The extra money will go to a variety of different funds, from dental services to psychiatric facilities to water quality.

Daily Staff Reporter Ashna Mehra can be reached at ashmehra@umich.edu

AUDREY CLAYTON Daily Staff Reporter Ann Arbor City Council met Tuesday night to approve an amendment to a resolution proposing changes to East Medical Center Drive Bridge near the University of Michigan Medical Center.

The council previously approved a resolution in October 2021 to establish a services agreement with DLZ Michigan, an architectural and engineering consulting firm, to widen the bridge, a four-lane road over the Amtrak Michigan line and the main route to the University of Michigan Medical Center.

University officials have previously told City Council they are interested in adding another lane for automobile traffic, which would reduce the west sidewalk from 10 1/2 feet to eight feet wide. According to Michael Rein, the University’s director of community relations, the reduction in width of the west sidewalk was designed to promote safer bicycle traffic.

“That reduction from 10 1/2 to eight feet was by design to promote traffic on the east side — safer bicycle traffic, safer non-motorized traffic,” Rein said.

Rackham student Bethany Beekly told the council during public commentary that the proposed design would make the bridge more dangerous for bicycle and pedestrian traffic, as well as threaten Ann Arbor’s goals to decrease carbon emissions and cut vehicle miles traveled in half.

“As it currently stands … the bridge widening proposal is inadequate on pedestrian and cyclist safety and also counterproductive for our climate goals,” Beekly said. “Trying to solve congestion issues by increasing car capacity is a strategy that we’ve known for decades to be counterproductive.”

Councilmember Erica Briggs, D-Ward 5, proposed an amendment asking the council to encourage the city administrator to proceed with

efforts to rehabilitate the bridge without widening it if an agreement cannot be made with the University to expand sidewalks on either side of the road.

Briggs expressed that if this amendment was not passed, she would be in favor of simply rehabilitating the bridge rather than widening it.

“It’s important to note that the city’s plans do not call for widening this bridge,” Briggs said. “Our (Capital Improvement Plan) called for rehabilitation. City staff has expressed no concerns with simply rehabilitating the bridge and not widening. The desire to widen this infrastructure has come from the University of Michigan.”

Councilmember Jen Eyer, D-Ward 4, expressed her support for the amendment, emphasizingthesafetyconcerns.

“A vote against this amendment is a vote to make this situation more dangerous,” Eyer said.

Ultimately, Briggs’ proposed amendment failed 5-6 with councilmembers Eyer, Briggs, Jeff Hayner, D-Ward 1, Linh Song, D-Ward 2, and Julie Grand, D-Ward 3, voting in favor.

Briggs noted that the proposed changes would make the sidewalk on the west side narrower, noting the dangers this would cause to cyclists and pedestrians.

“There are more cyclists on the western side of that intersection than on the eastern side, and that’s for a reason,” Briggs said. “(Cyclists are) trying to avoid the dangerous conditions that are along Fuller and Glen and regardless of what the University suggests, people are taking West Medical Center Drive because it’s safer. They could reroute in the future … we could ask that of them. Or we could ask the University to pay to do this project properly.”

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

GOVERNMENT

‘Tampon tax’ officially ends Whitmer removes sales tax on all feminine hygiene products in the state KATE WEILAND Daily News Editor

The State of Michigan’s 6% sales tax on tampons and other menstrual goods officially ended Thursday. A bipartisan bill removing the tax, which is applied to “luxury goods,” went into effect 90 days after Governor Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich., signed it into law. The bill is applicable to tampons, panty liners, menstrual cups, sanitary napkins and other products connected with the menstrual cycle.

This bill comes after other states including California, New York and Connecticut

passed bills eliminating the tax on menstrual products.

Currently, 27 states continue to levy a sales tax on feminine hygiene products.

The average menstruating Michigander uses about 17,000 pads or tampons, which can add up to $4,800 in just sales tax, according to Whitmer’s press release.

In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Whitmer said this bill has been in the works for 10 years.

“I’m thrilled because we know that the purchase of these essential items is not discretionary,” Whitmer said.

“It’s an absolute essential need, and when we tax it,

we disproportionately hurt women and girls in Michigan, and that’s why it’s so important that we eliminate this tax: so anyone who menstruates in the state of Michigan now will not have to pay this additional burden.”

Period Equity, a nonprofit founded by women, has led a nationwide movement in repealing the “tampon tax.”

In 2016, the organization filed a lawsuit against the State of Michigan, alleging the state’s tax was unconstitutional because it discriminated on the basis of sex.

This bill is part of a greater effort to make menstrual products more accessible.

In November, Ann Arbor became the first city in the country to require free sanitary products in public restrooms for menstruating individuals.

Whitmer said this bill will improve the quality of life for menstruating individuals across the state.

“People spend thousands of dollars (on menstrual products) over the course of a lifetime,” Whitmer said. “This is a meaningful improvement in terms of the bottom line for people like my daughters and me, all of us who menstruate.”

Daily News Editor Kate Weiland can be reached at kmwblue@umich.edu

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Wednesday, February 16, 2022 — 3

ACADEMICS

SAT goes digital, reignites debate over standardized testing College Board shortens admissions exam after virtual shift, alters math and reading sections

Daily Staff Reporter

The College Board announced major changes to the SAT on Jan. 25, including a move to a digital format as well as changes to the general structure of the test — a move that has reignited debates over the future standardized testing in college admissions.

LSA sophomore Alex Nguyen, LSA representative for Central Student Government, said he acknowledged that he had advantages when taking standardized tests due to his economic background that disadvantaged groups might not be able to afford.

“I’m lucky to be able to go to these ACT/SAT prep courses,” Nguyen said. “I (took the SAT) twice and I could go back and retake it as many times as I want(ed) …. It would cost hundreds of hundreds of dollars.

But I was able to do that.”

The SAT currently offers fee waivers for 11th and 12th grade students of low-income backgrounds in the U.S. In 2019, the SAT also began offering “adversity scores” in order to acknowledge a student’s overall disadvantage level to help college admission officers contextualize candidates’ socioeconomic circumstances.

Additionally, the College

Board has changed the reading and math sections, and the overall test will be shortened.

Previously, the test took about three hours to complete and the new updates will set two hours for the test with more time allocated per question. As a result of these changes, the scores are expected to be released in days instead of weeks or months.

Priscilla Rodriguez, vice president of College Readiness Assessments at the College Board, wrote in a press release these changes are designed to make the overall testing experience better for all students in today’s changing college admissions times.

“The digital SAT will be easier to take, easier to give, and more relevant,” Rodriguez wrote in the release.

Rodriguez wrote in the release that the updates resulted from recent educational trends and developments.

“We’re not simply putting the current SAT on a digital platform — we’re taking full advantage of what delivering an assessment digitally makes possible,” Rodriguez wrote.

“With input from educators and students, we are adapting to ensure we continue to meet their evolving needs.”

University of Michigan spokeswoman Kim Broekhuizen told The Michigan Daily in an email that the University is

still unaware of what impact this could have on their admissions process.

“We are aware of the recent announcement from the College Board. The new SAT test will not be available until 2023 for international students, and 2024 for domestic students,” Broekhuizen wrote. “We will use this time to learn more about the proposed changes and timeline from the College Board to determine what, if any impact, it will have on our process.”

FairTest, an organization leading the U.S. test optional movement, found 1,815 colleges and universities currently either practice test-optional or test-blind admissions, a 70% increase from the only 1,070 institutions that did so before the pandemic.

Broekhuizen wrote the University has been flexible for the past two admission cycles due to the pandemic, and that ultimately, the University is Design by Ruby Lewis

EMMA MOORE

NEWS

5 bills to watch in the Michigan state legislature this month

still committed to a more comprehensive approach despite changes with standardized testing requirements.

“The University of Michigan is committed to holistic application review and testing is just one of many factors in our process,” Broekhuizen wrote.

“Holistic review includes consideration of a student’s record including courses, grades and grade trend, essays, extracurricular activities, recommendation letters, and standardized test scores, if provided.”

As one of the top institutions in the country, Nguyen said, the University should lead the path away from standardized testing like other top colleges.

“I believe we really are the leaders, in which we need to start going in that direction of some of the best schools in the nation,” Nguyen said.

Nguyen said the College Board and other standardized testing organizations are busi-

nesses who profit off wealthy families trying to get their students into good schools.

“I mean, it is a business, College Board and the ACT, ” Nguyen said. “And I think Michigan just kind of plays into it.”

LSA freshman Alan Zhang said the SAT is something all students have in common when applying to college.

“I think it’s extremely (important) to have just a benchmark of comparison,” Zhang said. “People come from widely different backgrounds and the SAT is the one factor that will be common.”

Zhang said the SAT could be used to compare and differentiate two people from similar socioeconomic backgrounds by using their standardized test scores.

“Let’s say you have two different individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds. But one of them has a significantly higher SAT score, right?” Zhang said.

“With the SAT, you can see who’s most prepared properly for the rigors of a higher University.”

The new changes to the SAT were designed to address some of the inequalities associated with the test, according to The College Board Press Release.

The changes will make it so schools have more flexibility in providing a free weekday test during school instead of requiring students to adhere to the strict schedule set by the

college board like before.

Research done by Public Policy Professor Susan Dynarski found that when Michigan made the ACT a requirement for all high school juniors in 2007, the percent of students who took the test rose from 54% to 99%. Before this requirement, only 35% of low income students were taking the test due to a lack of access to testing centers, fees for the test, internet access to sign up for the test, and transportation to the test.

The research found that by making universal school day testing available to all high school Michigan students, more low-income students went to and graduated from four-year universities. According to the research, the new changes to the SAT are intended to hopefully make universal school day testing more accessible to all students.

Rodriguez said the changes to the SAT are about allowing students, no matter their background, access to higher education and opportunities.

“The SAT allows every student regardless of where they go to high school to be seen,” Rodriguez wrote. “And to access opportunities that will shape their lives and careers.”

Daily Staff Reporter Emma Moore can be reached at emmmoo@umich.edu.

DESIGN BY RUBY LEWIS/Daily

NEWS

February slate includes distracted driving law, sentencing reform IRENA LI

Daily Staff Reporter

or signed into law by the Michigan state throughout the past month. publishes a compilation of bills in the Michigan state legislature for students aware of.

1. Stricter distracted driving laws Status: Passed by the House On Jan. 25, the Michigan House of Representatives passed H.B. 4277 – 4279, a three-bill package that would qualify any phone usage as distracted driving. If signed into law, the bills would expand the definition of distracted driving to include any activity with a mobile device that involves the usage of one or more hands. Currently, Michigan law only explicitly outlaws texting while driving.

State Rep. Mari Manoogian, D-Birmingham, introduced the first bill in the package and co-sponsored the other two. After working for years to reduce distracted driving, Manoogian shared her excitement when the House passed all three bills in a tweet.

“Honored to share that we passed legislation that would modernize Michigan’s distracted driving laws,” Manoogian wrote. “This legislation serves as both a way to encourage better behavior from drivers and allows our law enforcement to keep those who are driving distracted in check.”

In a speech on the House floor, Manoogian mentioned Mitchel Kiefer, who was killed in an automobile accident caused by a distracted driver in 2016.

“What better way to honor Mitchel’s life and legacy than to work to

ensure that no other family feels the pain that his family … has felt every day since his passing?” Manoogian said.

The first bill passed the House in a vote of 75-26 and the other two passed 76-25, all with bipartisan support.

After passing out of the House, the bills were referred to the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee.

2. Eliminating life without parole for juveniles Status: Introduced in the Senate S.B. 848 – 851 seek to abolish life sentences without parole for crimes committed by individuals under the age of 18 in Michigan. This legislation would instead designate a maximum prison sentence of 60 years, with the possibility for parole review after 10 years in prison.

Currently, 25 other states and the District of Columbia have banned juvenile life without parole. In the 2012 Miller v. Alabama case, the Supreme Court ruled that juvenile life sentences without the possibility of parole were unconstitutional. Despite the ruling, some states, including Michigan, retain the possibility of juvenile life without parole in their state laws. Over 360 juveniles in Michigan are currently serving life without parole, the second highest number in any U.S. state.

State Sen. Jeff Irwin, D-Ann Arbor, introduced S.B. 848 on Jan. 27 and co-sponsored the other three bills. In a Jan. 31 press release, Irwin said Michigan state law needs to be amended to be in line with the Miller v. Alabama ruling.

“Now that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that our harsh laws

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

U-M programs work to address racially restrictive covenants in Washtenaw County

JOSE BRENES/Daily

Two law professors lead efforts to develop maps of potential de facto discrimination RILEY HODDER Daily Staff Reporter

Since presenting their research in January 2021, Michigan Law professor Michael Steinberg and Taubman professor Robert Goodspeed have been working to remove racially restrictive covenants — policies which bar people of color from owning certain homes — from Washtenaw County title deeds.

Steinberg and Goodspeed are currently developing maps that lay out the racially restrictive covenants in Washtenaw County, pursuing legal action to repeal these covenants and expanding their program to discover places of potential de facto discrimination — which may not be explicitly written in

law, but happens in practice — in Washtenaw County.

As of Jan. 28, Steinberg and Goodspeed have identified 66 subdivisions in Ann Arbor that contain discriminatory language against people of color within their title deeds. In 1948, the racially restrictive covenants were banned from being enforced, but Steinberg and Goodspeed say the continued existence of these covenants illustrate the prevalence of institutionalized racism.

In their study, Steinberg and Goodspeed concluded that the presence of these covenants can make PoC homeowners feel unwelcome in their own community and exist as a reminder of institutional racism that still persists today.

Ann Arbor resident Jeffrey Hamilton

said he felt disappointed by the racially restrictive covenants, despite saying how Ann Arbor is considered a more progressive city.

“I feel honestly offended and very, very let down, but not surprised,” Hamilton said. “The funny thing is, being in Ann Arbor, we were often given the idea that Ann Arbor is a cut above when it comes to these types of covenants …

When you look at Ann Arbor, as progressive as it is, it kind of sets you back.”

Hamilton also added that by continuing to have these racially restrictive covenants in place, the city is still upholding institutionalized racism.

“This shows me that there’s still some

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ANN ARBOR

Ann Arbor asks public for advice on distributing $24 million in federal funding City looks to citizens to dole out money given for COVID-19 mitigation

AUDREY CLAYTON Daily Staff Reporter

On March 11, 2021, President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act to mitigate the economic effects of the COVID19 pandemic by allocating funding to local governments.

Nearly a year later, Ann Arbor is

deciding what to do with the $24.1 million it received in ARPA funding.

City Councilmember Kathy Griswold, D-Ward 2, spoke to The Michigan Daily about her spending priorities.

“I really want to focus on the people who have been the most impacted by the pandemic, and that would be the marginalized community as well as essential workers,” Griswold said.

Griswold said new programs to help the homeless would help ameliorate the impacts of the pandemic.

“We forget that in Ann Arbor, which is a very wealthy community, we have people sleeping in their cars, and that is not acceptable and we need to address that,” Griswold said. “So that would be my first priority.”

The City Council has also been

taking public suggestions into consideration for reallocating the ARPA funding.

“Staff came up with an initial list based on what was already in the council pipeline,” Griswold said.

“But as one constituent said, those seem like pet projects rather than ways to help people recover from the pandemic.”

Councilmember Jeff Hayner,

D-Ward 1, said in an email to The Daily he is concerned that the process was not considering enough input from the community “I feel that the process has been very internal-facing and has not taken into account many good ideas presented from the public,” Hayner wrote.

He said the original deadline for project ideas, which was set for

early Dec. 2021, allowed the City Council to avoid hearing public input. According to Hayner, he introduced Resolution R-21-396 to push the deadline for project ideas back to March 2022 to incorporate more voices from the Ann Arbor community.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Arts

4 — Wednesday, February 16, 2022

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

It’s time to talk about the Schlissel memes LAINE BROTHERTON Digital Culture Beat Editor

When your university’s president is put on blast for f lirting through the proverbial family iPad, you don’t just brush it off.

It’s time to talk about the Schlissel memes. They take many forms: a Yik Yak post, a cheeky affirmation, a spray paint installment in the Diag.

Instead of an outpouring of disappointment or grief, students are resorting to humor, which is easy enough to understand, as joking is the simplest way to cope with shame, a fact further amplified by the absurdity of the situation.

We reached out to a number of Schlissel memers on Instagram for a look into the motivations of the students indulging in the tomfoolery.

If you have a pulse and you own a cell phone, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. @umich_incellectuals, best described as a U-M-specific reimagining of the vastly popular meme page @on_a _ downward_ spiral, kicked off the memes with a series of text posts. The earliest read “WE JUST LOST THE SCHLUSSY” over a portrait of a grinning Schlissel. Another said “who else up lonelying their ms.”

My personal favorite from the account was an edited photo of Schlissel’s twitter with a blacked out profile picture and “Gone. Don’t text me or hmu” in the bio. @umichcapsbabes, which popped up fairly recently, jumped on the train with a similar slew of memes. Their most popular, with over 200 likes, poked fun at the famed YouTube apolog y format, titled “my truth” with Schlis-

sel in the thumbnail. Another meme read “me leaving Pizza House with 10 extra calzones up my ass” over a cheery-faced Schlissel. @umichaffirmations, known by almost 12,000 followers for their cleverly specific affirmation-based U-M memes, made a carousel post of memes catered towards Schlissel.

Some include, “I WILL NOT Send Raunchy Messages From My Work Email,” “WHAT IF WE MISSED OUR CONNECTION

opinion.” The account’s second admin seemed to agree: “The way memes came almost immediately after his firing were kind of ref lective of like the almost comedic relationship that’s been existing between schlissel and the student body for nearly 2 years.”

The admin from @umichcapsbabes had some thoughts about the meaning of the memes: “What makes them funny is that someone took time out of their day to make an edit for the bursley baits

Design by Tamara Turner

IN PARIS” and “I Will Not Be Lured In With The Promise Of A Knish.”

What got to me about @incellectuals and the other pages was how fast they responded to the news and how they decided to go about it — for some reason, their immediate reaction to reading those 118 emails was to make memes.

When asked about the use of memes as a response, one of the @umich_incellectuals admins responded over Instagram DMs: “I think the memes were inevitable, the fuck them kids memes were already all over campus, we made a few too and like rightly so everyone already had a pretty low

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loop for absolutely no reason.

Mark Schlissel is a grown man who’s probably at home very concerned about his public image and everyone else is just like yeahhh it makes sense that he’s a calzone man.” @umichaffirmations’s admin ties up the issue with a nihilistic bow: “The fact that our university president is having an affair is an absolutely absurd and unfortunate situation. But so is living through a massive pandemic.

So is the fact that we have single-digit weather. We can either live life accepting the bad things, or cope with them via humor.” While I personally don’t enjoy accepting these

things with complacency, I struggle to find a better alternative. But maybe I’m looking at it the wrong way.

Yes, it’s funny — I will never get tired of “lonely m”— but what exactly is the joke here?

That our No. 1 ranked University, with its illustrious Board of Regents and its $17 billion endowment, was spearheaded by someone incompetent enough to send hotel receipts to Individual 1 over his University email? That our president, our emblem, likes his calzones with extra mushrooms and his salads topped with cherries? The latter is not so incriminating, but his behavior towards Jon Vaughn is. Far worse than a string of silly emails is the impotent response to the Robert Anderson case and, most importantly, its survivors — Schlissel disgraced this institution long before Communications.pdf was in the picture. In fact, many might agree that his firing in and of itself is hypocritical.

There are jokes, but as the first @umich_incellectuals admin says, “At first I thought he’d been fired over the Anderson case, which would have been ideal because his conduct over that has been disgraceful and a huge dark cloud over the university.”

Maybe Schlissel will return to the comfort of his tenure as a professor. Maybe some rightfully vindictive MCDB majors will heckle him to embarrassment during office hours, or maybe he will retreat into his 401(k)-padded cave and never be heard from again. There’s also the possibility that Mary Sue Coleman won’t do a better job. At the very least, the idea that our frustrations might become a tangible force is reassuring.

16,2022 2022 Release Date: Wednesday, February 9,

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‘Daughter of the Moon Goddess’ has pining lovers and dragons ELIZABETH YOON Daily Arts Writer

The first installment of Sue Lynn Tan’s duology, “Daughter of the Moon Goddess,” remains engrossing until the final page.

It is the perfect book to accompany a hot pot of tea and a steady stream of snacks — you will read it in one sitting, I promise. Tan’s novel, straightforward in its literary offerings, delivers on all fronts: adventure, romance and xianxia (Chinese mythology/fantasy) genre elements. The novel “Daughter of the Moon Goddess” diverges from the growing body of Asian fantasy series by covering heavenly immortals rather than the archetypal mortal protagonist. The bulk of the novel is set on the Celestial Plane, away from earthly squabbles. So yes, for anyone familiar with Chinese art history and iconography, the immortal characters do ride clouds in “Daughter of the Moon Goddess.”

As the title declares, the main character is Xingyin, a daughter born of the Moon’s union with a legendary human archer. However, because the governing celestial beings have punished and mandated that the Moon Goddess remain solitary, Xingyin’s existence must be kept secret.

Thus, when celestial agents come to investigate the Moon’s palace, Xingyin is forced to leave her mother’s side and is spirited away in the dead of night. Away from home for the first time, Xingyin assumes a new identity in a major Celestial city, where she comes into the orbit of the prince

of the realm, accompanying him to his lessons and to his military practice. As befitting her parentage, Xingyin’s fantastic skill with the bow helps her quickly start attracting recognition. The first half of the book opens with the promise of upward mobility and ambition fulfilled.

However, as the novel progresses, the overall messaging becomes murkier. Tan spins a story in which skill and talent do not necessarily make for a good life and abiding by the oppressive whims of a celestial monarchy does not ensure long-term security. Xingyin moves through the book attempting to create a stable life for herself, but she is effectively the fantastical equivalent of an undocumented citizen in this celestial realm. The threat of exposure hangs over Xingyin.

If she ever were to reveal her parentage, she and her mother would be horribly punished.

I got too much joy from reading this book. Beyond the novel’s plot, what I liked the most was how it dwelled on and indulged in jealousy and love. The novel was not afraid to portray pining lovers, miserable in their separation.

While similar books might induce headaches in their portrayals of yearning, “Daughter of the Moon Goddess” elicited sympathy — in part because the pining lovers (their reunion, their separation) embodied bigger issues facing the protagonist. Xingyin, through romance and friendship, takes ownership of her skill and, eventually, her own identity and parentage.

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‘The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window’ is just as confusing as its title JESSICA CURNEY Daily Arts Writer

Now, who doesn’t love psychological thrillers?

How about psychological thrillers with a little bit of satire?

Netf lix’s original series “The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window” is exactly that. At least, that’s what it’s supposed to be.

The show’s protagonist Anna is played by the beautifully gifted Kristen Bell (“Do, Re & Mi”). After struggling with a divorce and the unexpected death of her daughter, Anna spends most of her time sitting in a chair drinking colossal amounts of wine while looking out her front window. But her interest is piqued when a hot new neighbor and single father, Neil (Tom Riley, “The Nevers”), and his daughter Emma (Samsara Leela Yett, “Don’t Look Up”) move in right across the street. After spending some one-on-one time with Neil, Anna truly thinks this connection is something. However, it quickly fizzles when Neil’s f light attendant girlfriend Lisa (Shelley Hennig, “Mythic Quest”) shows up at his house for a few days. Back to the window Anna goes until, in a jarring turn of events, she witnesses Lisa’s gruesome murder. Or does she?

The trailer frames the show as something serious and thrilling that plays within its mystery and suspense tropes.

Yet, you can’t help but realize that the plot looks a bit out of place and is a tad bit cringey.

But that’s for good reason: The show is a parody of both the Netf lix thriller, “The Woman in the Window,” and the film “The Girl on the Train.” Unfortunately, it does a terrible job of doing so.

Granted, there are some funny moments that attempt to demonstrate its dark comedy, like Anna appearing to be so terrified of the rain touching her skin that she literally succumbs to it in the most dramatic way. Or, take the infinite amount of chicken casserole Anna makes every night, only for it to repeatedly burn her hands or be dropped and shattered, and then appear again the next night.

Regardless, the show struggles to fig ure out its genre.

There’s no way to tell it is a parody unless you’re familiar with the films it ridicules, nor does it present itself as a comedy, and then ultimately loses itself in its assumed genre of dark tragedy. However, it does hook the audience, making it a binge-able show, but viewers are only clicking to the next episode to find out more about Anna’s character and what she witnessed.

Overlooking the failed attempt at portraying itself as a parody, the show gives a true insight into the process of grieving a loved one. It doesn’t hold back when representing what it means to heal yourself, and how hard that can be. Anna’s character is clearly struggling with not only the loss of her daughter but the pain of a divorce, which explains her off-the-wall personality. It truly establishes a sense of empathy for Anna’s character which gives this show a semblance of realism that some satirical psychological thrillers lack.

Overall, this show has no identity. It can be a parody, a dark comedy, a thriller — honestly, it is whatever you want it to be. But one thing is for sure: “The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window” is just as confusing as its title.

Arts

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Wednesday, February 16, 2022 — 5

‘Ants from Up There’ pleasantly concludes the first era of Black Country, New Road JACK MOESER Daily Arts Writer

There aren’t many bands that can successfully combine a traditional rock instrumentation with saxophone, violin and acoustic piano, but Black Country, New Road have made a name for themselves precisely by forging those elements into a truly one-of-a-kind sound. Last year, the band teased their potential with their debut album For the First Time, a chaotic and noisy work that combined sprawling compositions, mesmerizing instrumentals and gritty vocal performances into a mind-bending, futuristic rock piece. It’s difficult for any band to follow

up on an album as over-the-top as their previous one, but with their latest release, Ants from Up There, Black Country, New Road diversifies their sound without compromising what makes them one of the most fresh and unique rock bands today.

The instrumental prowess that has always been central to Black Country, New Road’s identity is once again on full display on Ants from Up There, even as the band plays with different musical textures across the album’s 10 tracks. The noisiness that defined their debut record is still present in some songs on Ants, such as “Haldern” and “Basketball Shoes,” which feature all of the band members playing at once. However, the

band also finds new ways of making a powerful sound without simply relying on thick instrumentation. The nine-minute song “Snow Globes” has one of the most intense climaxes on the entire album thanks to Charlie Wayne’s ridiculous drumming, which swells up to eventually drown out the delicate repeating musical ideas in the saxophone, piano and violin.

Just as the band has evolved their ability to be loud and hectic, they also show songwriting growth. There are songs where this is obvious, like “Mark’s Theme,” a beautiful instrumental featuring an emotional saxophone solo and piano accompaniment. But most of the time, the revamped songwriting

is more subtle. By avoiding the abrasive sounds they previously embraced, the band is able to create pleasant, accessible songs that are still engaging. One example of this is “The Place Where He Inserted the Blade,” a seven-minute track influenced by late-career Bob Dylan that has more than enough variety to stay engaging — but not too much where that it undermines the song’s strong sense of harmonic direction.

For as many new directions Black Country, New Road take that pay off, the album’s biggest weakness is that it’s a little too safe most of the time, particularly compared to their groundbreaking debut. The klezmer melodies and irregular rhythms

In an ideal world, ‘The Fallout’ wouldn’t exist.

In our world, it has to.

Content warning: gun violence and school shootings I still remember the exact date: March 16, 2019, when my friends and I were studying in the Hatcher Graduate Library. It was a Saturday, the day before St. Patrick’s Day. I remember this because on our way there we’d passed fraternity houses filled with students celebrating “St. Fratty’s Day.” We’d talked about leaving the library and getting something to eat at South Quad, but any thoughts of tendies or soft serve left our minds as we started seeing the messages sent to org group chats: There was an active shooter in Mason Hall.

I had gotten the first text, but I waited to tell everyone else about it until they had also gotten one (something that they relentlessly tease me about now). But the truth is that I was in a strange state of denial, a clouded sense that it couldn’t be real, or maybe a sliver of desire that if I pretended I hadn’t seen the text, it wouldn’t be true. But soon enough, there were more texts from more sources, and the problem became something I couldn’t ignore.

We all packed up our stuff. We were on the fourth floor, so we started climbing stairs — up to the eighth floor, since we figured that the higher up we were, the safer we would be. The eighth floor is small, mostly offices and a hallway, with

blankly at our makeshift laptop chargerdefensive measure and escorted us out.

In a post-Columbine world, grade schools all have lockdown drills — safetybased plans for handling an active shooter or suspicious person or any other kind of active threat. I have distinct memories of sitting stock-still in my classroom in elementary school, with the lights off and a couple dozen students clustered in a shadowy corner, away from the windows.

The worst part was when the principal and other admin would come by and rattle the doorknobs, checking to make sure they’d been locked. Still, there was always a gasp in the room, and I would lock eyes with some of my classmates long enough to know that we were all thinking the same thing: that maybe it was an intruder, and that the drill was no longer a drill but had morphed into reality. It was terrifying to think that you were next.

Throughout my thirteen years in the public school system, there were moments that brushed against the idea of a real school shooting. Group reading time in first grade turned into an impromptu lockdown when a man a few streets over began threatening to kill himself with his firearm. There was a football game my freshman year of high school when our principal came on the loudspeaker before the game had started to announce that a nearby high school had experienced a school shooting earlier that day. When I was a senior, my high school had three bomb or gun threats within two weeks, all hoaxes, but overwhelming enough that the district canceled high school

two entrances. My friend had a thick belt that we used to keep one door locked, and we latched the other one with the power duo of a bolt and a laptop charger tied around a bar sticking out of the frame.

Other people in the building had the same idea. People started joining us pretty soon after we’d arrived. I saw two girls I knew from an org we were in; I never talked to them about it later. In total, there were probably 25-30 people crammed into that little hallway, leaning against the walls, staring out the windows.

We listened to the police scanner, heard them speculate about suspects and apprehend them. We gasped as they heard them talk about a suspect heading towards the UGLi. (I later heard stories about people holed up in the basement of the UGLi who were hiding behind tables, listening to the police scanner and thinking that that was the moment they were going to die.) Some kid tried to pick the lock to get into one of the offices in the hopes that we could hide in there, where it was less exposed. People around me were calling their parents, their boyfriends and other loved ones, staying on the line while we waited.

I’ll spare you the tension, because the truth was that there was no shooter. A group of people had popped balloons in a Mason classroom that, muffled and distant, sounded like gunshots. But we had no way of knowing that. We were up in that hallway for about 45 minutes, listening to the scanner, waiting for something to happen. We heard officers on the scanner checking every floor of Hatcher before they finally made their way up to us. They knocked on the door, stared

classes for a day in the hopes that everything would reset.

But for the most part, school shootings were something that happened Somewhere Else. It was the tragic thing you saw on the news, the thing that made people gasp and then say, “This time things will change.” Every high school’s name has an effect, but it’s an effect that seems to fade with time, until we forget.

It always felt like everything went back to normal immediately after the moment of silence had ended — not because it wasn’t tragic, but because it was routine. These were not my schools, not in my hometowns; the victims were not my friends, or my neighbors, or my teachers. We, the mostly unaffected, could move on as if nothing had changed.

The week after the “shooting” on campus, I found myself getting into strange conversations with people about what had happened. I started to realize that my experience was somewhat unique compared to the wider university community: It was a Saturday, and there were maybe a thousand people in buildings around the Diag. To most people, they could forget about the incident as soon as the weekend passed; for me, it stuck with me for weeks at the front of my mind. “Hi, I’m Kari Anderson, I’m a freshman, and my fun fact is that I sort of thought I was going to die in Hatcher last month.”

Because things are different when you’re the one who is affected. Even if the “shooting” itself was fake, the fear was absolutely real. That hour I spent on the top floor of Hatcher, sitting on the hallway floor and listening to the police scanner, was a blur of emotion, but the main

KARI ANDERSON Daily Arts Writer

Design by Lindsay Farb

one I remember was uncertainty — both “what’s going to happen?” and “what am I supposed to do now?” My friends and I, and the rest of the people hiding on the top floor of Hatcher, were escorted down the elevator by officers holding the largest guns I’ve ever seen in my life. We walked out of Hatcher that day and headed off campus to a friend’s apartment. Later that day, I went back to my dorm and ate cake that my RA gave me. We stood in the tiny kitchen eating cake and talking about how balloons could cause so much damage.

Because that was the thing I kept getting stuck on. The shots were never verified by DPSS. No one sent out any security alerts. All of the communication was done through students frantically texting friends and org group chats. The word traveled about an active shooter in Mason Hall, and so the students who were on campus that day, the post-Columbine generation, acted accordingly. None of us — the students on campus, the people attending the vigil on the Diag that day, the officers making their way through every single building on campus — questioned whether it was real.

25 years ago, school shootings weren’t even a thought. Now they’re an expectation.

It’s been almost three years since that moment. Most of the students at Michigan don’t remember that it happened, and even fewer who were actually there are still on campus. People don’t mention it often, if at all. Enough time has passed that we can joke about it. But for me, there’s still a part of my Michigan experience that will always be stuck with the time that I sat in Hatcher for 45 minutes and contemplated my own mortality while a team of law enforcement officers scoured every single building on the Diag.

In all of my close calls, it was the closest I’ve ever come to a school shooting. And it wasn’t even real. We walked away from that moment shaken up, alive and deeply confused. Theoretically, it was just about the best case scenario. But I can’t help but think of the kind of place we’re living in. We all instantly jumped to the worst possible conclusions because that’s life in the United States: the only place where school shootings are the expectation.

That’s where “The Fallout” comes in — a 2021 South by Southwest Film Festival entry that was just given widespread streaming access on HBO Max. The film tackles the issue of school shootings head-on with unflinching clarity. Many critics are focusing on “The Fallout” as a definitive Gen Z movie — not just because of the way that the characters speak and interact with cell phones but because of how they see the world. We are one of the first generations where school shootings are not an unthinkable scenario but a potentially real threat. Kids in the United States grow up going to school with metal detectors, security guards, lockdown drills and the ever-present hope that their high school won’t be the next one trending in the news. *** The beginning of “The Fallout” is a normal school day. Vada (Jenna Ortega, “Scream”), the main character, brushes her teeth, squabbles with her sister Amelia (Lumi Pollack, feature debut), and drives to school with her best friend Nick (Will Ropp, “The Way Back”). Vada happens to be in the bathroom with Mia Reed (Maddie Ziegler, “The Book of Henry”), a near stranger who she goes to school with. Then they hear shots, then screams, and they rush to hide in the stall.

The entire shooting is over before the 10-minute-mark of the film, shown only through what Vada and Mia hear in the bathroom. The rest of the film is devoted to what happens once the coast is clear — because what do you do next when things aren’t life-or-death anymore, but you’re still stuck in the trauma of thinking you were going to die?

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the band mastered on For the First Time are teased on the album’s very short intro track, but after that, they are seldom present as the band tends towards standard Western harmonies and rhythmic patterns.

Many fans will probably prefer this album for that reason, but even if For the First Time was uncomfortable to listen to at times, its moments of irregularity served as points of interest that feel missing on new goodbut-not-great tracks like “Chaos Space Marine” and “Good Will Hunting.” The album is generally at its best when it’s pushing musical boundaries, even just on the short, dissonant outro to “Haldern,” which serves as an audible reminder of the cost of

the band’s new, safer style.

Ants from Up There is a bittersweet album: Just days before it was released, Black Country, New Road vocalist Isaac Wood announced his departure from the group. Wood’s distinctive vocals and lyricism were integral to the band’s innovative sound; replacing his impact will be impossible. With Wood’s departure, Ants from Up There serves as the end of an era for the band, a brief time that will be remembered fondly thanks to this album and its predecessor. Whatever the future holds for the individual musicians of Black Country, New Road, this album shows that each of them is oozing with musical talent, and their futures are bright.

Process over product: A preview of the student-run production of ‘Dogfight’ NICOLE APPIANI

Daily Arts Contributor

Ba sed on t he 1991 f ilm of t he sa me na me, “ Dog f ig ht ,” t he 201 2 musica l, wa s a n in st a nt success.

Or ig inat ing a s a n Of f-Broadway produc t ion , t he hea r t-w rench ing show ha s now been per for med across t he world a nd t ra n slated into va r ious la ng uages. A lt houg h Music, Theat re & Da nce a lu m n i Benj Pa sek a nd Just in Paul cra f ted t he music a nd ly r ics for “ Dog-

Business Graduate st udent , noted t hat “ It ha s been a pr ior it y to focus on t he process at t he foref ront a nd let t i ng t he produc t follow. A pro cess t hat ha s a ll t he element s li ke DEI work , li ke int imac y coordinat ion , ma k ing su re t hat ever y tea m member feels suppor ted t hat w ill ult imately create a g reat process.”

Kench a lso sha red t hat a s t he show ha s “scenes a nd moment s of a ssault . I saw t he produc t ion a s a n oppor t u n it y to create a la rger dialog ue on a ssault .” Accordingly, she helped to br ing a Sex ua l A ssault

Pictures provided by Jack Zeile

f ig ht ,” it ha s never been per for med at t he Un iversit y of M ich ig a n u nt il now. “ Dog f ig ht ” follows t he stor y of Cor pora l Eddie Birdlace, a Ma r ine who ha s just one f ree n ig ht before being deployed to Sout hea st A sia .

To pa ss t he t ime, Eddie a nd h is best f r iends, Bola nd a nd Ber nstein , compete to see who ca n f ind t he “ugliest ” woma n to br ing to a pa r t y (a .k .a dog f ig ht) where she w ill be judged on her appea ra nce.

When Eddie meet s Rose Fen ny, however, h is perspect ive on t h is deg rading g a me — a nd on love — sh if t s. In a n in-person inter v iew w it h The M ich ig a n Da ily, musica l direc tor A nd rew G erace, a Music, Theat re & Da nce a nd LSA sen ior, ca lled “ Dog f ig ht ” “a stor y of love a nd loss a nd ter r ible er ror a nd redempt ion .”

Even t hose who k now t he show “ w ill leave t he t heat re su r pr ised” ag reed G erace a nd Direc tor Jules Ga rber, a Music, Theat re & Da nce a nd LSA sen ior. “ If you just k now t he music, it sou nds li ke it w ill be a happy stor y.

But when you add t he tex t it is a lot heav ier,” sa id G erace.

On why “ Dog f ig ht ” wa s selec ted to be per for med now, G erace, who is major ing in polit ica l science, expla ined t hat “The Viet na m Wa r a nd t he conf lic t in A fg ha n ist a n had si m ila r len ses. I saw compa rison photos of t he U. S. m ilit a r y leav ing Viet na m nex t to t he U. S. m ilit a r y leav ing A fg ha n ist a n . For me, it felt li ke a n appropr iate t ime to recon sider how we v iew wa r, conf lict a nd t he U. S. m ilit a r y.”

In an ef for t to respec t “ Dog f ig ht ”’s heav y mater ia l a nd develop a n ef fec t ive piece, t he producers employed a ma nt ra of “process over produc t .” The creat ive tea m worked to approach t he show w it h a DEI-focused a nd commu n it y- ca re approach — ser v ing a s a n exa mple for a ll st udent s who work w it h heav y a r t ist ic mater ia l.

Work ing w it h a DEI Coordinator helped ac tors come to “la ng uage ag reement s” about problemat ic lines t heir cha rac ters say to en su re com for t on t he ac tors’ beha lf. A s st ated by G erace, “ Dog f ig ht ’’’s tex t is in herent ly f lawed … t here a re t h ing s not accept able in 2022 t hat were accept able in 201 2.”

Producer A llie Kench , a n Eng ineer ing g raduate a nd cu r rent

Prevent ion a nd Awa reness Center (SA PAC) work shop ca lled “ M ich ig a n Men” on ha r m f ul ma sculinit y to t he ca st a nd tea m . SA PAC ag reed to modif y t he work shop so t hat t he tea m could t a l k about “ bot h (t he ca st a nd tea m s’) expe r iences (reg a rding ma sculin it y) at M ich ig a n … but a lso t he cha rac ters, t he content of t he show a nd t he stor y. It wa s t wofold” sa id Kench .

When a sked what dif ferent iates t h is version of “ Dog f ig ht ” f rom ot hers, Ga rber sha red t hat “ Being a non-bina r y person leading a n incredibly ma le- dom inated ca st … br ing s a lot to (t he) show a nd ma kes it a va st ly dif ferent produc t ion .”

F u r t her, t hey sa id t he creat ive tea m wa s “ma k ing a n intent iona l choice to have dif ferent interpret at ion s of t he cha rac ters t ha n people nor ma lly see presented.” In t heir direc t ing, t hey made cer t a in to dev iate f rom t he version of Rose t hat is of ten “copy a nd pa sted in most produc t ion s.” F u r t her, Ga rber sa id “ It ’s dif ferent watch ing a 28-yea r- old play a boy going to wa r t ha n watch ing k ids bet ween 18-22 , t he age t hese k ids (in t he show) were goi ng to wa r. You rea lize t hey a re k ids … t hat t hey were sending k ids to wa r. Th is ma kes it ha rd to watch , but it adds somet h ing you don’t get in (a ll product ion s of ‘ Dog f ig ht .’)”

Cha lleng ing t he ways in wh ich “ Dog f ig ht ” is of ten per for med wh ile ma int a in ing a st au nch comm it ment to d ra mat u rg y, t h is produc t ion is su re to be excit ing, tea r-jerk ing a nd mea n ing f ul. A bold explorat ion of ma sculin it y a nd wa r, t h is st udent-r u n product ion “ Dog f ig ht ” is a test a ment to how g reat a r t ca n be made t h roug h a t houg ht f ul process. “ Dog f ig ht ” w ill be per for med at t he A r t hu r M iller Theat re on Feb. 11 a nd 1 2 at 8 p.m . a nd Feb. 13 at 2 p.m . A ll ad m ission is f ree a nd seat ing w ill be f illed on a f irstcome-f irst-ser ve ba sis. Those hop ing to see t he show a re adv ised to get t here ea rly! Audience members should be awa re of t he sen sit ive a nd potent ia lly t r ig ger ing subject mat ter of t he piece. “ Dog f ig ht ,” in pa r t icula r, g rapples w it h t hemes of ma sculi n it y, a ssault a nd racism .

Arts

6 — Wednesday, February 16, 2022

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Six romances to read this Valentine’s Day ISABELLA KASSA & AVA SEAMAN Daily Arts Writers

Are you a hopeless romantic who is always reading about all things love?

Whether you’re single or in a relationship this Valentine’s Day, the Daily Book Review has you covered. Some of these books are fantasy, while others are contemporary romances that deserve all the hype. With a wide variety of romances and tropes galore, here are six books we think you’ll love.

“Love and Other Words” by Christina Lauren “Love and Other Words” by best friends and co-writing duo that go by the pen name “Christina Lauren” will not only bring you to tears but will restore your faith in the friends-to-lovers trope.

Macy Sorensen is the woman with a plan. All she needs to do is focus on her job, marry her older (and financially stable) fiancé and, most importantly, shove the mere thought of Elliot Petropoulos to the back of her mind. Her plan goes perfectly fine until she runs into him for the first time in 10 years.

After Macy’s mother died, her father bought a summer house outside of San Francisco where she spent all her weekends and summers growing up — with Elliot. Forever holed up reading and discussing words together, the two formed a seemingly everlasting friendship. When their friendship turned into something more, it wasn’t long until everything was ruined in just one night.

Told in dual timelines — starting from the moment Macy and Elliot meet as teenagers to when they meet again as adults — “Love and Other Words” is a heartwarming story of second chances, first love and loss. As we root for Macy and Elliot to find their way back to each other, we too are left yearning for love that can withstand the test of time.

— Ava Seaman, Daily Arts Writer “Take a Hint, Dani Brown” by Talia Hibbert “Take a Hint, Dani Brown” by Talia Hibbert tells the story of how one woman who doesn’t believe in romance finds herself in a fake relationship with her friend from work after they accidentally go viral.

As a PhD student, Danika Brown is a focused, career-driven woman. She has no time for relationships, especially after the way things ended with her last girlfriend. Besides, she’d rather have

something casual with no commitment required. Ex-rugby player Zafir Ansari works as a security guard at Dani’s university. Although he has a brooding exterior, he is a hopeless romantic who just wants his own happily-ever-after. His heart, however, has been guarded ever since an accident that left his family devastated.

Dani and Zaf are just friends, but after Zaf heroically saves Dani during a fire drill and the rescue is captured on video, the two go viral. With everyone — including the universe — encouraging them to make it official as #DrRugbae, they start to fake-date. Zaf needs the publicity for his children’s sports charity, and Dani could certainly benefit from the friendswith-benefits situation they agree upon.

What do they have to lose?

This hilarious and sexy contemporary romance explores the idea of vulnerability in relationships while also tackling heavier topics like anxiety and grieving the death of loved ones. Filled with diverse and loveable characters, “Take a Hint, Dani Brown” is the rom-com you won’t want to put down.

— Ava Seaman, Daily Arts Writer “It Happened One Summer” by Tessa Bailey “It Happened One Summer” by Tessa Bailey is perfect for anyone looking for a fun and spicy romance in the vein of “Schitt’s Creek.”

Piper Bellinger is a Los Angeles socialite known for her partying and short-lived relationships. After her latest adventure goes awry and she ends up behind bars, her stepfather puts his foot down. He sends Piper and her sister Hannah away for the summer to learn some responsibility in a small fishermen’s town where their late father grew up. When the sisters arrive, they meet the local fishing boat captain, Brendan Taggart, who doesn’t take a liking to the newcomers but can’t seem to stay away from Piper.

Brendan is too grumpy for her, and Piper is too spoiled for him — they are the perfect match.

As Piper finds herself living in a mouseinfested apartment above their father’s old dive bar, she sets out to restore the bar to its former glory and prove to everyone around her, especially Brendan, that she’s capable of making something of herself.

“It Happened One Summer” is a worthwhile summer romance sprinkled with authentic self-discovery and characters with chemistry that dance across the

page.

— Ava Seaman, Daily Arts Writer “Five Tuesdays In Winter” by Lily King (TW: sexual assault) Lily King’s fifth novel is just as enam-

King’s ability to leave the reader hopeful, not only for the characters, but for humanity itself.

— Isabella Kassa, Daily Arts Writer “Carry On” by Rainbow Rowell For fans of Harry Potter, “Carry On” by

interesting enough, what really shines through is the relationship between Simon and Baz, which is every bit as romantic as a good enemies-to-lovers trope should be.

— Isabella Kassa, Daily Arts Writer

oring and well-delivered as her previous work and perfect for anyone hoping to read about love but also loss, grief and trials.

“Five Tuesdays In Winter” features 10 short stories all focusing on different characters who are written with immense care and complexity. Among other enthralling characters, the reader learns about a bookseller who tries to love again, a mother-daughter pair working through a loss and a woman pulled in two different directions when it comes to her love life. “Five Tuesdays In Winter” doesn’t just cover romantic love — though there’s plenty of that — but rather looks at desire and the need for love at all costs, whether platonic, familial or unrequited.

This book isn’t an easy read — far from it. Some of the stories are difficult to read as the characters are overcoming the sometimes violent events of their past and present. However, what shines through is

Rainbow Rowell is the romance that J.K. Rowling never gave her readers.

Simon Snow is the “chosen one” returning to wizarding school for his last year. While everyone is hoping Simon can save their world from the evil Insidious Humdrum, Simon is upset because he just went through a breakup and his vampire roommate Baz, who he claims is his “nemesis,” has been absent for the first two months of the school year, much to Simon’s dismay. The story really begins when Baz makes his entrance and joins forces with Simon to help defeat evil — all while the pair become “friends” and eventually, more than that.

If any of that sounds familiar, you’ve probably read Harry Potter. While “Carry On” can stand alone just fine, it is bettered with some background knowledge because it’s essentially well-written fanfiction — superior to anything you could ever find on Wattpad. While the plot is

“The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue”

by V.E. Schwab “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue” stands out not only as a solid addition to the fantasy fiction genre but also as a love story worthy of the hype it has received.

Told in flashbacks between early 1700s France and present-day NYC, “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue” spans many different historical events and time periods.

When Addie LaRue is forced into a marriage she doesn’t want, she makes a deal with the god of the night that will allow her to escape the nuptials and give her all the time and freedom she desires, on the condition that no person will ever remember her — until someone does.

“The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue” is a testament to the power and intimacy of truly being known by another person and is a perfect read for someone seeking an epic love story with plot to back it up.

— Isabella Kassa, Daily Arts Writer

Design by Sarah Chung

Marketing films the ‘Spidey’ Way

RUSHABH SHAH Daily Arts Writer

Writer’s Note: Spoilers for “Spider-Man: No Way Home” ahead.

Today, it is hard to imagine a blockbuster movie hitting the big screen without an extensive promotional campaign. From interviews to ad spots to teasers and trailers, production houses make sure that going into the weekend of its release, everybody is talking about their movie. Having said that, until not too long ago, films didn’t consider an extensive promotional campaign a priority, much less a crucial part of their success.

That all changed in 1975 when the marketing team at “Jaws” released a poster that would reverberate around the world for years. At the time, “Jaws” looked like it was going to be an expensive disaster, with the movie taking 159 days to shoot, almost three times longer than what was planned, and its protagonist, a robot shark, barely working. In order to rescue what seemed like a lost cause, Universal, the production house behind “Jaws,” poured over $1.8 million into the film’s marketing cam-

paign — an amount that took its production budget up to $9 million, more than any other movie released that year. The result: It went on to become the first American movie in history to cross the $7 million mark, paving the pathway for how production houses market their movies to this day.

On Jan. 17, exactly one month after its release, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” beat “Avengers: Infinity War” to become the fifth-highest grossing movie in the U.S. box office, making more than $650 million. As of Feb. 3, it sits fourth on the list of highest grossing films in the U.S., making over $730 million. Presumably, those $730 million will go a long way towards making up for the reported $202 million spent

by Marvel on the film’s marketing. Although it is commonplace for movies to use the wide range of social media sites at their disposal for promotional purposes, the latest installment in Peter Parker’s misadventures pulled out all the stops, raising the question: How much marketing is too much marketing?

The answer varies from one situation to the next, but the marketing campaign for “No Way Home” most definitely split opinions before its release.

Between the movie’s Twitter and Instagram, the Official Daily Bugle TikTok and the countless interviews, trailers and promo videos posted

by Sony and Marvel, fans were treated to a barrage of content in the weeks leading up to the film. In the 40 days before its worldwide release, the movie’s Instagram made 59 posts, and has made a further 63 since, averaging roughly three posts every two days. Even online communities far removed from the world of comic book movies found the likes of Tom Holland and Zendaya popping up on their screens, with the duo making appearances at the Ballon d’Or (aka the Oscars of the soccer world) and even interviewing players from Tom Holland’s favorite soccer team. Spidey fan or not, if you were on the internet in the month leading up to the movie, at the very least you heard about it.

There is an argument to be made that such an extensive, in-your-face promotional campaign could discourage some viewers from avoiding them and potentially even the movie entirely. Prior to watching the film, LSA sophomore Arjun Arora said, “I haven’t seen any of the trailers. I don’t know any-

thing … and I actually like that.”

Nevertheless, Marvel and Sony were well aware of who made up the majority of their fanbase: the comic book community.

A community that thrives on speculation, ardent fans of the webslinger and the Marvel Cinematic Universe welcomed the barrage of posters and movie footage Marvel and Sony sent their way. From YouTube to TikTok, the internet was rife with theories and predictions as fans looked into every frame and charted out every possibility to such an extent that the online community became pseudo marketing officials themselves.

What added to all of the excitement were the leaks — an eventuality Marvel and Sony, with all their experience over the years, knew was inevitable.

However, the spoilers might have worked to their advantage this time around. People weren’t complaining about the amount of promotional content being released, because with every piece of content that did not confirm their rumors and suspicions, the anticipation grew.

For example, although Alfred Molina’s (“The Da Vinci Code”) return as Doc Ock had been leaked months before any real marketing had begun, Marvel

and Sony were still able to capitalize on it. Between this leak and the release of the movie’s first trailer, fan speculation regarding the return of not only Doc Ock, but a litany of old Spiderman villains, was sky-high.

“No Way Home” obliged, and, with said trailer, confirmed all the rumors floating around, resulting in the most successful

ing campaign needs to be as inyour-face as “No Way Home” was, and not every marketing campaign requires the use of social media. However, Marvel and Sony showed just how beneficial it can be to a movie’s success, commercially and in terms of popularity. Not only that, they wproved that if your campaign is well planned, bombarding fans

This image is from the official website for “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing.

opening 24 hours a trailer has ever had. It was the perfect way to kickstart a marketing campaign that would remain flawless from start to finish.

Yes, a set of innovative posters would do the trick. Even in today’s time, not every market-

with promotional content isn’t all that bad an idea, especially when theorizing is one of their favorite pastimes. Peter Parker may be “Public Enemy No. 1” in the Spiderverse, but in the real world, the headlines were loving him.

‘Murderville’ is comedy gold MAXWELL LEE Daily Arts Writer

Murder mysteries have been a popular genre in the mainstream for a long time. From the first Sherlock Holmes book, “A Study in Scarlet,” to the hit film “Knives Out,” the archetype of the story remains consistent: someone is murdered, an investigation ensues with hints pointing toward the true culprit and then a final gathering with all the suspects convenes and a murderer is declared. There may be a couple unexpected elements in the story, but mostly they follow this outline. Netflix’s new show, “Murderville” is

no exception. However, it has its own twist: improvisation.

The show drops the audience in an old-style police station, with homicide detective and main character Terry Seattle, played by Will Arnett (“Bojack Horseman”). Seattle opens with a grizzled-detective monologue, alluding to classic openings for the genre. However, in the third shot, the audience sees he is driving a pickup-style Camaro, and from then on it’s obvious this is not your normal murder mystery. Seattle’s internal soliloquy is then interrupted by the police chief (Haneefah Wood, “Nurse Jackie”) to briefly discuss the aftermath of her and Seattle’s divorce. Arnett is abso-

lutely fantastic in his role. He is quick-witted with his one-liners and joke setups, especially during his satires of internal dialogues and classic police banter.

He is able to play out any scene to get some laughs, but the main draw of the show is the wide variety of celebrity guest stars.

There are a total of six celebrity guest stars, one for each episode released, including Conan O’Brien, Marshawn Lynch, Kumail Nanjiani, Annie Murphy, Sharon Stone and Ken Jeong. This isn’t a completely new idea — iconic series like “Scooby-Doo” also featured a number of guest stars ‘playing themselves,’ but the most interesting part about this show is

that the guest stars have to completely improvise every line.

The audience gets a wide range of experiences from each guest star. O’Brien, famous for his comedic talk show, was a great opening for the show. It was obvious that he had experience on television and knew how to follow an improvised scene, but surprisingly it was legendary retired Seattle Seahawks running back Lynch who stole the show. He was absolutely hysterical, throwing out quip after quip and keeping pace with the scene.

Knowing that it was improvisation made it even more humorous because it seemed like he was just being himself. Additionally, Arnett’s over-the-top

acting next to the cool and calm Lynch made each scene a joy to watch.

Sometimes, the hilarity and absurdity of the show gets to the actors, and the audience is able to see them break character. The first time it happened, as Terry Seattle covered his mouth to hide his laughter in a serious scene, I thought it was an editing mistake. However, as the show went on, it became a regular occurrence, with some characters laughing out loud and having to restart their sentences. This is similar to blooper reels on sitcoms, which can often be funnier than the actual show.

If you are looking for a grimy,

hard detective show like “Sherlock,” this is not the show for you. While there are definitely aspects of classic murder mysteries, like searching to find clues left by the murderer, it’s much more light-hearted, due in part to the show’s improvisational nature. It is important to note that the entire show is not improvised; there are set backgrounds and scenes, and some jokes were a little too perfect. Also, some episodes were funnier than others, with the guest stars ranging from mildly humorous to making me laugh out loud. Still, “Murderville” is a genuinely hilarious show overall, and you should go watch it right now.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

The Michigan Daily

Wednesday, February 16, 2022 — 7

Cheesy White Bean-Tomato Bake By Ali Slagle

Normalize one-pan everything.

University of Michigan students now have access to New York Times Cooking — which means your normal food routine just became anything but.

Activate your free Cooking subscription.

8 — Wednesday, February 16, 2022

ANONYMOUS CONTRIBUTOR TW: Sexual Assault, Stalking, Sexual Harassment, Rape Dear U-M Housing, You called my being stalked, threatened and sexually harrased by my residents a “personal matter.” It is not. It is a hazard and a direct result of the unsafe job you hired me for.

I am “Alice” from the Daily’s recent investigation about U-M Housing and ResStaff safety. Here is my full story. *** I am truly amazed I didn’t become another “College girl raped and murdered” headline that year — the year I was a 19 year old “Traditional Resident Advisor (RA)” in a freshman residence hall on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus.

My entire first year as an RA, I lived in constant fear because five of my male residents were harassing and stalking me. They memorized my schedule and followed me around campus. They threatened to break me. They cornered and harassed my friend. And after I reported the incidents, it only got worse. I caught the five men watching me while I slept in my bedroom because U-M Housing refused to put locks on all doors to my room. They discussed raping me while standing directly outside my door. They switched into one of my classes to continue stalking me. And one night, I caught them under my window taking pictures of me. The entire time, I was ignored by the Division of Public Safety and Security, lied to by my Hall Director and pushed aside by U-M Housing administrators.

It began on the second day of classes. I overheard my name spoken by five of my male residents living directly across the hall from me. They laughed and started talking about how excited they were to “break her.”

It took me a second to realize they were talking about breaking me.

The air caught in my throat. What?

‘Break me’ how? I wanted to believe that the comment was innocent but their tone of voice said otherwise.

I tried to voice my concerns about the comment to the other RAs, but they didn’t think the men were being serious about it.

The following day, the ringleader of the five men came by my room because he needed information from the first floor meeting that he missed.

As his RA, I had to act like everything was fine, totally normal. That is always your job as an RA: provide help for whatever the resident needs.

After all, every resident is a customer to the University. We treated them as such, with politeness and unwavering hospitality.

After I filled him in on what he missed, he started gloating about how nervous people became around him due to his tall, large stature. He said he loved seeing how nervous they were around him. He said ‘people’ but it was obvious to me that he meant women.

I saw the group of five men in places outside the dorm every day, which, on a campus of almost 50,000 students, is weird. It started innocently enough, saying ‘hi’ to them outside Mason Hall or South Quad.

Then, their presence became a pattern. I noticed at least three of them during many passing periods when I came out of my lecture halls, or sitting a few tables down anytime I was eating in any of the seven main dining halls on campus.

I became increasingly nervous everywhere on campus and started spending most of my time in the dorm community center — every residence hall’s mail and package room — surrounded by the other RAs. Last year, RAs stopped working at community centers, thanks to hiring more Community Center Assistants (CCA). The RA contract (the Letter of Appointment) was updated accordingly for this school year.

The other RAs would text me when the five men were in the community center looking for me, which happened multiple times each week.

After a few weeks, I started getting creepy notes in messy handwriting on my door. The notes included poems, private details about my life and lines professing love for me.

Some were signed by the residents, some weren’t.

I dreaded returning to my room because I would have to walk past the

STATEMENT

men’s doors — if they saw me, then I had to engage in nice conversation as they purposely said things to make me uncomfortable. Afterward, I would hear them saying “fuck her,” “nice ass,” or “oooh I’d like to tap that.” I don’t know if they knew I could hear them, but it stung either way.

One evening, I was preparing to go out with friends, doing my hair and nails in the bathroom, when the ringleader knocked on my door. The loud knock startled me; I burnt my thumb on the curling iron. After a few moments of pause, he proceeded to bang on the door with what seemed like all his strength, and screamed down the hall in his frustration. I waited until I knew he was gone before running to my friends at the bus stop.

The next morning, I complained to Eric, one of my closest RA friends, about the previous night’s incident.

He advised me to update my boss (our hall director) about the situation, which I had been doing any time something new occurred with the five men.

—

DPSS that this was an issue. Instead, the two of them agreed to have the officer talk to the ringleader and ask him to stop harassing me, because his behavior was “scaring me.”

Months later, I found out that all DPSS did was have a two-minute long phone call with the ringleader.

Apparently — according to their report — the ringleader was very apologetic.

DPSS and my hall director arranged for the ringleader to apologize to me in my room. Alone. I had done everything in my power to avoid being alone with him again, and now I had to let him into my private room because “he’d changed.”

Unsurprising to me, his apology was wholly insincere, it lasted less than a minute and he sounded more amused than apologetic — I felt violated that he came into my room again.

Later that day, I heard the five men laughing about me being so scared I called DPSS. Their conversation made it clear that my decision had validated their goal of scaring me and they thought it was hilarious.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

From stalking to harassment: when a noise made me freeze — the five men were walking into my suitemate’s room. I bolted from the bathroom, and my guy friend took that moment to grab me and kiss me.

It was gross. He reeked of alcohol.

I tried to push him away, but he grabbed me and kissed me harder.

I could hear the five men laughing with my suitemate, less than fifteen feet from me.

I couldn’t make a sound. I hadn’t been able to lock my bathroom door and feared the five men entering my room and joining if they heard what was happening.

My friend raped me that night.

I tried to tell him to stop but he just smirked. I stopped fighting him after

majority of the female ones and many male ones told me they had been harassed or assaulted by the end of their time on the job. Residents’ fathers flirt with you. Residents’ mothers yell at you. Residents ask you out, turn you into an object and, in my case, stalk and harass you.

At no point do RAs receive training on what to do about any of this. If you try to tell your hall director, the first thing they say is that if you cannot handle it, maybe the job isn’t right for you — they constantly refer to the waitlist of people who want to be RAs and would happily take your spot.

RAs were able to force changes during the Fall 2020 ResStaff strike because there was no waitlist.

My experience as a former RA

A few hours later, Eric called me.

According to him, he was walking to the bus stop when the five men cornered him against a car in the parking lot and interrogated him.

They would not let Eric leave until he said where I was.

I immediately went to my boss — I wanted to report to DPSS what was occurring. I wanted to stop the five men, specifically the ringleader. I didn’t have a specific punishment in mind, I just wanted DPSS to get the men to stop threatening my friends and stalking me.

I was wary of working with DPSS. Officers had already ignored my concerns during duty rounds, and they had talked down to me when I had called for help with a multipleresident conflict. They were also rude — practically ignoring me and always grumbling — any time I called about weed odors in the hallways.

In this instance, I figured the situation with the five men had gotten so bad that even DPSS couldn’t avoid helping me. I thought the meeting would take a while — I had emailed my professor telling him I would miss class. I told my friends I would be late to dinner.

An older male DPSS officer met me and my boss (the hall director) in the main office of the dorm. The officer was constantly checking his watch; it was obvious he wanted the meeting to be over before it had even started.

The meeting took maybe ten minutes total, and the officer spoke with increasing skepticism as I shared my story and showed him texts, video recordings of the five men, pictures with timestamps and the physical notes that were left on my door.

The DPSS officer didn’t seem to think most of my information was relevant. At the end of the meeting, the officer looked at me like I just wasted his time and said, “Honey, it sounds like they have a little crush on you. Why don’t you just confront [the five men]?” I found out later, after reading a copy of the report, that he neglected to put some of the information I told him into the DPSS report.

After this meeting, I shut down.

My hall director had failed to stand up for me or try to help convince

*** The dorm I lived in had an odd room layout. There were two access points in each dorm room: one door with a keypad lock from the hallway and one door from the bathroom with no lock.

My dorm room and the dorm room next to mine were connected by a bathroom (Jack and Jill style) but there were no locks on either side of either bathroom door. The resident that I shared the bathroom with — and anyone in her room — had full access to my room through the bathroom.

For the privacy of the resident I shared a bathroom with, I always kept my door to our shared bathroom closed. A few days after the ringleader apologized, I woke up from a nap to see both bathroom doors open. The five men were hanging out in my suitemate’s room. I got up and shut the bathroom door as they giggled.

I spent the night on the floor of another RA’s room.

The lack of locks was an ongoing issue for RAs in this dorm, as many of us have woken up to a resident in our room or later found out that a resident snuck into our room without our knowledge —I know of three other RAs that year who had this problem.

When we brought our concerns to our hall director, we were told locks would be a “fire hazard.” We were asked not to bring it up again.

We went to the U-M Housing administration and asked if they could help. Without a pause, their only response was, “Sorry to hear you feel that way.”

I fashioned a lock for the bathroom door out of pipes, a bike lock cable and a refrigerator magnet. It looked ridiculous but it worked. I put a screwdriver under my pillow before I went to bed each night. Jeans with a belt became my pajamas. I barely slept. *** One night, a friend of mine texted me, unprompted. He was at a party, wanted to hang for a bit and get a ride back to his place. I obliged. Once we got back to my dorm, I went to the bathroom and he started asking weird questions about my dating life and sexual history.

The questions made me nervous.

I was about to change the subject

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he was inside me. I gave up, I guess.

There wasn’t anything I could do.

I didn’t want him to get any satisfaction so I closed my eyes as they welled with tears, determined not to let a single one fully form. I let my mind dissolve into the pain. I dissociated.

When he pulled up his pants, he kissed me on my forehead and asked for a ride home. His voice was muffled, fuzzy. I have no idea what else he said to me — I just got up and drove him home.

I broke down the second I got back to my dorm room. My chest felt like it had collapsed as I heaved and sobbed.

Eventually I got up, took a shower and convinced myself I was fine.

The next morning I went to CVS for Plan B. RAs are individuals with reporting obligations about sexual assault. We report to the hall director if something happens. The person who we work with every day, live in the same building with and who is in charge of us is the person we are contractually bound to report our episodes of sexual assault to.

This is something I have never understood. How can you make a rule stating that after one of the most devastating things happens to someone, you strip them of their final decision: who they tell?

I was fully aware that by talking to my superior, I would lose the little bit of power I had left over my body.

My closest friends were the RAs in my building. They would have to report to our boss if I told them. I knew I couldn’t talk to my friends until I was ready to relive that night with my boss, who I distrusted immensely, and U-M Housing administrators, who would get a copy of the report my boss would write. *** I have held too many RAs, sobbing uncontrollably because their hall directors, DPSS and U-M Housing administrators won’t take their safety seriously.

RA training modules, delivered via Canvas, centered around keeping the residents safe and the University from having to assume liability.

Training pertaining to RA safety was slim to none.

I worked with many RAs by the end of my time in U-M Housing. The

Nobody wanted to be an RA during the pandemic. Therefore, RAs were no longer expendable. For the first time, ResStaff could not be dismissed. *** When December began, my panic attacks about the rape got worse. I realized I needed support from my closest friends, the RAs. I went to the hall director’s office and asked a few hypothetical questions about what would happen if I reported the sexual assault of an RA. My boss said that I could simply issue the report, that my name could be left off the report, that the report would be a hard copy and not in the electronic system. It could be vague.

And wholly anonymous.

Because of those answers, I decided to tell my boss about the rape. Sitting on a folding chair in the oddly colorful office, I felt incredibly nauseous. I eyed the trash can.

After I finished my story, my hall director paused, typed on the computer, and turned around.

“Oh whoops,” they said. “I made a mistake. Actually, your name will have to be on the report, it’ll be in the online system and I need a bit more information from you.”

I sat in silence for a few moments. I felt the panic rise in my chest.

Before I could reply, my boss said, “So, what was his name? And, what type of rape was it? Vaginal penetration with a penis? Or anal?

Was it just fingers?”

I couldn’t speak. I felt my eyes getting red. I bit my tongue until I tasted blood.

“No.” I said. “I was sexually assaulted, that’s what you can put in the report. I’m not telling you any more. I’m not telling you who he was or how. And I am not talking to anyone else, especially DPSS.” I walked out, my eyes welling with tears as I grappled with the reality that I’d just exchanged the most vulnerable piece of information about myself with my boss.

I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to force RAs to report their own sexual assaults to their bosses. It was the most demeaning exchange I’ve ever endured. *** My issues with the five men only persisted. They used nicknames to talk about me without sounding like

they were referring to me. Many nights when I was sleeping on my dorm room floor, I would hear them outside my door, commenting on my body while looking at the pictures of me on the bulletin board. On nights when the boys were talking about me and I could escape my room, I would crash in another RA’s room. We would watch Scooby Doo, or learn chords on the guitar.

In the winter semester, on the day before the University’s drop/add course deadline, I got to one of my classes and immediately recognized two new faces in the room. Two of the five men were sitting a few rows behind my normal seat. I knew this was no coincidence — they were freshmen in a lecture that did not even remotely coincide with their majors.

I sat down and saw their faces reflected on my laptop screen.

They were watching me. I do not remember anything from that course except running for the exit every time it ended.

Midway through February, I had just gotten back to my room and was getting ready for bed when the five men stomped through the back stairwell. They were talking about me, using a nickname inspired by an event I had led in the dorm.

As they passed my door, the ringleader asked the others, “Wouldn’t you want to rape [her] if you could?” The men burst out laughing. They walked into their room talking about how much they wanted to rape me.

The world became fuzzy. My vision blacked out. I called one of the RAs, Leroy, and he came to my room.

I couldn’t breathe. I was shaking so hard that Leroy had to grab me so I wouldn’t collapse. Leroy spent the night in my room on the floor, but even then I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t know what to do.

Previously, I had followed the rules and reported what happened, just like U-M Housing told me to.

It only made things worse. I kept debating whether I should resort back to my hall director or DPSS. The memory of how little the DPSS officer had cared about my last report was still prevalent in my mind. And my hall director had handled me being raped so poorly.

Instead, my main group of RA friends decided to rotate walking me to my room each night so I wouldn’t be alone in my hall after dark. This lasted until the end of the year. *** When I think back on that year, I remember how my teeth were constantly chattering and my legs were always bouncing from anxiety — but I kept smiling. I wanted to be the best RA possible, even with everything happening.

Honestly, I think I did a good job.

Being an RA is demanding but I lived up to the challenge. My residents had problems, from depression to chronic illnesses, and I always tried to be there for them.

I had residents sleeping in my room during insect infestations. I got take-out meals for sick residents, got groups of residents together who were struggling and planned outings for them, walked residents to University Health Services or Counseling and Psychological Services, pulled countless allnighters helping residents through personal problems, responded to their messages at all hours and answered their questions and concerns.

My bulletin boards and door decorations were praised by U-M Housing administrators. I planned small celebrations for residents when they hit a big milestone: birthdays, half-birthdays (for summer birthdays), job/internship successes and passing hard classes.

Even though I did want to do my best for my residents, I also didn’t have a choice. As an RA, U-M housing can dismiss you at any moment, beginning or middle or end of the year, and you only have 48 hours to clear out your room and find a new place to live.

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STATEMENT

Bimbofication is a revolutionary act MARTHA STARKEL Statement Columnist

Have you seen the bimbofication meme?

In most iterations, it depicts a woman in plain clothes holding a book and quizzically flipping through its pages. She then begins to stretch the book farther away from herself, and over time, becoming more scantily clad, drops the volume on the ground. Long blonde tresses, fuck-me shoes and a pink bodycon mini dress adorn her bodacious, fake-tanned figure. This transformation is bimbofication. A woman turning her back on scholarly material, on knowledge, on cognizance, is bimbofication.

If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s a popular image of it:

*** When I think back to my first encounters with the word “feminism,” I think of the 19th Amendment that gave all women — in practice, only white women — the right to vote in America. This was my first encounter with the fact that women have been marginalized throughout history and that there was, and still is, an ongoing fight for liberation.

Feminism has evolved in many ways since its first wave at the end of the 19th century, when it centered around the role of women in a rapidly industrializing world.

Though it was first created to uplift only white, wealthy women, there are now waves of feminism that include, and even focus on, sex workers, trans women and women of color. In the fight toward total and equitable women’s liberation, we still have a long way to go. And unfortunately, misconstruing the term “feminism” has led to many setbacks in the furthering of women’s equality around the world.

In recent history, feminism hasn’t exactly centered on uplifting all women of all walks of life. Baby boomers sought to advance the rights of women through corporate means.

“Breaking the glass ceiling,” so to speak, was understood to be the ultimate achievement of a woman in a man’s world, hustling in corporate America alongside her male colleagues.

This so-called feminist rhetoric, in turn, demeaned women who chose to be stayat-home moms and women who never had

access to a high-powered career in the first place. Intersections of race, class, sexuality and other identities were cast to the wayside as women with privilege were empowered to rise to the top of the Fortune 500. Think: rich white woman in a power suit, Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In.” This iteration of feminism was completely blind to realities of inaccessibility, systemic racism and inequitable opportunities, and it remained complicit in the very systems that generate sexism: capitalism, the patriarchy and so on.

Once this ideation of feminism was introduced to the internet, we were gifted with the #GIRLBOSS trend. This was the ‘glass ceiling feminism’ reparceled for millennial consumption. Still completely corporate, the #GIRLBOSS movement praised women for their economic output and disregarded the immense privilege of crafting a go-getter mindset in a high-level workplace. #GIRLBOSS was taken from the title of Sophia Amoruso’s autobiography, in which she tells the origin story of her fashion brand Nasty Gal. The term is deeply rooted in the notion of putting work above all else, and stopping at nothing to garner career success.

Nowadays, the term is insulting, often existing as a “personification of tokenism and unhealthy attitudes” in the workplace.

It is especially tone deaf when we recognize the barriers women of color and trans women face when entering corporate America. While #GIRLBOSS may have begun as an empowering appreciation of a woman’s financial independence, it oozes with the same lackluster ideals of the corporate feminism before it, reinforcing the value of women solely based on their contributions to the economy and overlooking the non-inclusive, ignorant notion that all women have a chance to succeed in the workplace.

Flash forward to one of feminism’s newest iterations now: full of post-irony with regard to the #GIRLBOSS era that came shortly before it. With the resurgence of Paris Hilton’s popularity in online culture, the pink aesthetic of the early 2000s has been combined with the workings of 21st-century feminism to birth bimbofication. The bimbofication meme became a way to cope with the emergence of a new form of passive feminism: dissociative feminism.

Dissociative feminism, a term coined by Emmeline Clein of Buzzfeed, refers to the use of deadpan, nihilistic humor to cope with reductive ideas of womanhood. It is a form of feminism with no real outcome or imprint. To rephrase, dissociative feminism

signifies an understanding that women will always remain marginalized. Instead of working to diminish sexism, a dissociative feminist would rather make fun of their marginalized condition and accept it as the only possible outcome.

In Clein’s article, she cites the British television series “Fleabag” as the catalyst of this moment in feminism. The dissociative feminist “medicates through sex, alcohol, and inflicting pain on others.” As a coping strategy, dissociative feminism captures the damsel in distress through a different perspective, wherein the damsel flocks to her distress.

The problem with this recent iteration of feminism is this: engaging in dissociative feminism means staying complicit in heteropatriarchal colonial institutions — like European beauty standards and the wage gap — and believing that the acknowledgement of women’s struggle is as good as taking action. The bimbofication process descends from this brand of feminism, retreating to the subservient, frivolous role that has been imposed on women for much of history. The oversexualization of the female body and the depiction of women as unintelligent — with the woman abandoning her book in favor of a pink clutch — is a harmful ploy to reinforce heteropatriarchy.

However, by overdoing this selfdegradation in an intentionally artificial way, bimbofication works beyond the passivity of dissociative feminism, with a subversion of the once-harmful stereotypes of women who love pink and are often halfclothed.

To self-bimbofy means not only feeding into gender norms, but also embracing and simultaneously subverting them. Yes, the stereotype of a dumb, curvy blonde woman is exhausted and degrading. But to look and act like this as a conscious choice is a form of resistance. If someone calls me a bimbo and I embrace it as a compliment, I am stripping the insult of its power. Choosing to be perceived like this is a revolutionary act against sexist rhetoric because it renders this language useless in keeping women down.

Bimbofication reflects this passive approach to feminism, but in a way that illustrates the complex humor-mechanisms that Gen Z uses to resist larger structures.

Instead of bottling up our experiences of sexism and letting them ruin our lives, bimbofication lets women show the world what it has wanted from us all along. To actively choose to play into the stereotypes

KAVYA UPPALAPATI Statement Columnist

Last week, while in a hurry to get to a meeting across campus, I was laser focused only on the quick cadence of my steps. However, as I passed by two people in conversation, my attention diverted to the sound of one of their voices. The man appeared to be South Asian, and his voice was rich, thick and saturated with my own father’s accent. Immediately, I felt a wave of comfort wash over me despite my continued mad steps toward my meeting place.

Since coming to the University of Michigan, a predominantly white institution, I have found myself missing the familiarity that comes from my parents’ Indian accents. Although I also attended a predominantly white high school, my home was a designated space for my family’s ethnic background to flourish. My parents’ distinct accents were synonymous with the warm and welcoming definition of ‘home’ they cultivated for me.

However, on campus, there is not a similar place for me to retreat to.

While nearly 15% of the University’s undergraduate population is international, with one of the biggest communities being Indian, I’ve observed a disconnect between native-born and international students. I

don’t see the two groups mixing often, and that might partially be because of the way people with ethnic accents are othered in ways extending far beyond campus. It’s a prejudice that is most clearly evident within popular media.

Indian characters in television are often comedically portrayed, with the punchline of the joke resting on their foreign accent.

Caricatured figures like Raj Koothrappali from “The Big Bang Theory,” Ravi Ross from “Jessie,” and Apu Nahasapeemapetilon from “The Simpsons” are all male, awkward and speak with a thick Indian accent. And, while their characters speak as though they are directly from South Asia — or rather a misconstrued, stereotypical version of South Asia — on television, each of the actors speak with an American accent in real life.

If you closed your eyes and listened purely to the sound of the actors’ voices, they would be indistinguishable from their white American counterparts. In fact, Apu was formally voiced by actor Hank Azaria: a white man with no connection to South Asian culture, who later stepped down from the role due to his perpetuation of harmful stereotypes.

Moreover, the vast majority of these male South Asian characters — at least those with an accent — tend to be socially inept.

They focus only on school, can’t find any

romantic partners, have limited numbers of friends, are painfully blunt and don’t understand any American idioms — all characteristics that make them the butt of jokes. Any time I am introduced to such a character on television, I hold my breath, waiting for the moment someone makes fun of the character’s mode of speaking.

Take, for example, this scene from “The Office.” The main character, Michael Scott, feigns an Indian accent while pretending to work at a convenience store — depicting a long-held television trope.

While mimicking the accent, Scott uses incomplete sentences to communicate, thus insinuating that all foreigners are poor English speakers and/or unable to hold conversation. Although this scene ultimately ends with an Indian-American slapping Scott, revealing the unacceptable nature of his mockery, the damage is done: reductive television stereotypes against South Asian men persist.

It is this harmful representation that makes me worried about others’ perceptions of my own family. My father speaks with a strong Indian accent, but he is a complex and interesting man. And, the fact that I feel the need to preface this assertion with “but” shows just how deeply rooted the stereotype is. My dad loves talking about history and politics, is a walking encyclopedia of idioms and gives exceptional advice. And yet, mainstream television never demonstrates these qualities. It only depicts the harmful, hyperbolic versions of South Asians — particularly South Asian men — that appeal to a white audience’s humor.

When speaking about Apu’s comedic contribution to “The Simpsons,” show co-producer and writer Dana Gould stated, “There are accents that by their nature to white Americans sound funny. Period.”

Americans are afforded the luxury of finding light-hearted humor in ethnic accents, while these jokes serve as the foundation on which America’s ethnicallytargeted bigotry is built. Long before I had the language to express such injustice, I experienced this bigotry in the forms of shame and otherness.

As a child, I would feel ashamed to

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of women is a post-ironic game. Women are told that we are dumb and useless. When we display these traits in a gratuitous way, it is a secret that only the bimbofied can understand.

Bimbofication is a profoundly subversive act that revolutionizes the idea of a woman’s choice. In it, we can choose to defy corporate feminism, which tells us that a woman’s purpose is to expand the economy as efficiently as her male counterpart does.

We can play dumb as a way of being less productive, because we understand that productivity is not everything.

Bimbofication is also a challenge to misogyny, which holds that women should dress modestly and be subservient to men. As a way of breaking these molds, bimbofication enables women to reclaim the degrading rhetoric characteristic of the patriarchy. Think of the boys who bullied you in elementary school, claiming that your pink clothes must denote your weakness and that you must be bad at math since you’re a girl.

Bimbofication is the post-ironic response to larger issues of misogyny and sexism, empowering women to let the world think of them as stupid and vain. Transposing onto reality, bimbofication takes the shape of many influencers on TikTok, Instagram and other social sites, namely, Chrissy Chlapecka.

Chrissy Chlapecka — a 21-year-old Barbie-like blonde from Chicago — is at the forefront of this movement. Across social media, she is an explosion of sparkles and pink. Most of her content focalizes her queer identity and being true to her own story, which she shares to her followers in her vocal-fried, nasally pitch. She also posts

South Asian accents: Comfort vs hate

Wednesday, February 16, 2022 — 9

silly videos that make sense only to those who’ve had hyper-feminized experiences, like getting an ear piercing at Claire’s.

Beyond her comedic presence, she is a source of positivity and confidence for her more than 4 million TikTok followers. In a recent interview with the Chicago Tribune, Chlapecka explains that her hope is to be an “older sister” for her viewers who, like herself, did not always hear messages of being unapologetic and genuine. This is the true power that bimbofication can harness.

However, like most internet offspring, the meme does not come without its faults. It is a white European approach to reclaiming one’s own body that reflects immense privilege, especially when the right to bodily autonomy has been stolen from many women around the world. And, not all women who may choose to partake in bimbofication feel safe doing so.

Moreover, when much of the bimbofication aesthetic originates from underground queer communities, the meme’s ‘camp’ approach could be interpreted as an appropriation of queer culture. Though somewhat hard to define, camp is mainly an appreciation for intentional artifice and fakeness, centering subjects that are, “deliciously over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek, in earnestness or in jest; they breathe parody and irony.” Historically, participating in the camp aestheitc has provided a, “way for queer people…to connect in solidarity and survive injustice with humor.”

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translate my father’s accented English to my non-accented English. Once while shopping in Walmart, my father and I spent 20 minutes wandering through the store, asking store associates where the flowers were. We were repeatedly directed to the baking aisle, where the flour was. When my father shook his head, explaining that what we were looking for wasn’t in the baking aisle, we were met only with shrugs and confused faces. It wasn’t until my 7-year-old self asked that we got the answer we were looking for.

The store associates’ confusion came from an innocent and genuine uncertainty of what my father was saying. But, despite living in the United States for my whole life, and despite my father’s American citizenship, I still feared that they viewed us as outsiders unworthy of our stay here. Their nonchalant attitude toward understanding what we wanted reinforced my idea that we were a mere nuisance.

I experienced this same worry throughout my childhood, scared that my friends’ wellspoken parents would judge my father for his way of speaking. Though I never experienced any bigotry from my friends or their families, I was concerned that my father’s stuttering or mispronunciation of words would categorize him as the cliche ‘awkward Indian.’ After all, all of the media I was consuming told me that Indians’ accents immediately reduce them to onedimensional, laugh-worthy characters.

During my brother’s college graduation, as my family and I watched my brother line up alongside his peers, we all felt sheer excitement. Seeing him before the stage on which he was about to receive his diploma, my dad proudly shouted his name — Akhil — to get his attention for a photograph. In response, a white graduate standing near parroted “Akhil! Akhil! Look here,” with an artificially thick and inaccurate Indian accent.

What was supposed to be a joyous and innocent moment quickly turned into one of shame and embarrassment. My father’s voice taught me multiplication tables at our kitchen table, guided me through the task of riding a bike and cheered for me during high school sports games. And now it was

being mocked in front of an entire crowd of people.

Despite the loving nature of his voice, my father’s accent is the recipient of vehement hate and prejudice — treatment that is wholly unjust and racially-motivated. As a culture, we’re socialized to celebrate British and Australian accents, touting them as sexy. The difference between these two groups of accents? One is native to predominantly white countries and the other is native to predominantly non-white countries.

This bias, like most other racial biases, stems from colonialism. British accents belonged to those of the ruling class and Indian accents belonged to the subordinated class. While these power structures may have dissipated on a formal level, the power imbalance remains, woven into our country’s socio-political fabric.

Social hierarchies, perpetuated by popular media, continue to treat ethnic minorities as second-class citizens. Or, in this case, as clowns that exist not as three-dimensional, dynamic American citizens but as the source of a cheap laugh.

Hearing the ethnic accent native to one’s motherland can feel like a warm embrace.

To others, it is a symbol of unwanted foreign encroachment. If mainstream television perpetuates the idea that all Indian men with accents are awkward or inherently the ‘other’, the viewers will internalize the message and believe it to be true.

While this was once a painful point for me — causing me to be ashamed of my Indian family’s mode of speaking — I have found so much value in the richness of the accent. It doesn’t have to just be an opportunity for people to target and express their prejudiced views. It is a reminder of home and family.

And, while I no longer feel the embarrassment I once did with regard to my father’s accent, I still get nervous about offhand comments. I feel a need to protect him from the bigotry, but I feel powerless to do so. Ultimately, it is the media that shapes people’s thoughts and opinions. Only once it accurately depicts the wide range of Indian men’s personalities and interests will people understand the truth.

10 — Wednesday, February 16, 2022

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Michigan in Color

Wednesday, February 16, 2022 — 11

Experiencing the unexpected: my first total solar eclipse

Design by Melia Kenny

DEVEN PARIKH MiC Columnist

All life experiences are binary; they are either expected or unexpected. You are familiar with most of your daily routine, starting with waking up.

What you do for the rest of your day is up to you. Maybe you decide to get out of bed.

Maybe you choose to shower and get ready for the rest of your day. Maybe you visit your favorite coffee shop for breakfast, or maybe you don’t. But no matter what you choose, you expect the outcome of your choice and at the end of the day, you close your eyes, you fall asleep and you repeat it all over again.

Now look, I’m not saying this to be morbid. I think it is important to create consistent habits, and repetition is

comforting. I love my morning routines. I love the comfort of walking over the same bridge to get to class each morning.

I love my daily calls home to my family, and I love ordering from my favorite restaurant once a week. I love all these things because I know what to expect. But what happens when you experience the unexpected?

You are probably thinking, I experience new things all the time, it’s not that special.

I don’t mean new. With new things, we can often anticipate what the experience feels like or recall past memories to help our mind fill in the holes of what just occurred. I’m talking about the rare “hold my breath, what just happened” unexpected — the type of feeling that leaves your brain perplexed and mouth speechless.

I can only remember a few

moments in my life when I’ve felt like this, one of them being when I witnessed my first

northern Oregon just to look at the sky for a few minutes, I thought he was crazy. Why

“I can only remember a few moments in my life when I’ve felt like this, one of them being when eclipse in 2017.”

total solar eclipse in 2017.

When my dad first told me we were going to drive over eight hours from the south of San Francisco all the way to

would someone drive for eight hours just to look at the moon?

I told him that we could witness the moon cover roughly 85% of the sun from home and

that it would be 85% as fascinating — I would quickly learn to eat my words.

The thing about total solar eclipses is that you can see totality, which is when the moon completely covers the sun. Only if you are within the path of totality, which is the small strip of area where the moon’s shadow blankets the Earth’s surface. The further from the center of the path, the less the moon covers the sun and the shorter the time that you experience totality.

So we could have stayed home, but we would have only witnessed a partial solar eclipse, not a total solar eclipse — two completely different phenomenons.

After the leng thy drive, my dad, brother and I arrived in Madras, a small town in Oregon with a population of over seven thousand people. By the time we arrived, tens of thousands of people, who’d traveled from all corners of the world, had already f looded the ill-prepared town. Since Madras has the lowest chance of cloud coverage, people from over 39 different countries and all 50 states f locked to Solartown, Madras’s makeshift campsite, for the weekend.

Even Oregon’s National Guard was called in to mitigate traffic. I was stunned. People had been living out of their cars for days, setting up tents and telescopes. It gave off an almost cult-like atmosphere: as if it were Judgment Day and this was the final hurrah. As time passed, the anticipation grew.

“Two hours,” yelled the crowd. “One hour! Ten minutes!! It’s starting!!!” Finally.

First contact: the invisible

ring remains. Five seconds before totality, you notice Baily’s beads, in which tiny balls of light surround the rim of the moon. It is almost time. A shadow washes over our world as if God has thrown a blanket over us.

And then it hits. Second contact: totality. The moon has completely covered the sun, and all that is left is its corona, the outermost part of the sun’s atmosphere which is typically masked by the sun’s rays. You throw off your glasses, and at this moment, life is transformed. The world changes from light to dark, from hot to cold and from anxious to calm. The deadness of your surroundings f lows through your body. You hear nothing but animals shouting in confusion, as your senses overload.

You are entranced and nothing matters, not even time: minutes pass but they feel like seconds. And then it’s finished and you want more.

Third Contact: the sun slowly reappears. Your soul comes back to life and you become aware of your surroundings.

Putting the shades back on, you see the diamond ring effect and Baily’s beads again.

You wave goodbye to the experience and pray that you will see another once more.

Fourth Contact: the sun is now free and cheers ring out from the crowd. You look around and people are still looking up at the sky to process what they have just witnessed. Some people are still in awe, others have looks of confusion and a few are wiping away tears they didn’t know they had.

I fall into the first cate-

“Some people are still in awe, others have looks of confusion and a few are wiping away tears they didn’t know they had.”

moon kisses the tip of the sun.

If you are not wearing the special shades that block all visible light, you can hardly notice the gradual bites the moon has taken out of the star. Now, it’s just a waiting game. Roughly ten minutes before full coverage, the world is enveloped in gray twilight. As time slowly progresses toward totality, you notice the diamond ring effect, where only a portion of the sun resembling a diamond

gory. The experience was so enthralling that we traveled to Chile a few years later just to get a glimpse of totality again.

While I could expect what it would feel like then, no one could have prepared me for my first eclipse. As the next total solar eclipse visible from North America will occur on April 8, 2024, you already know that I have plans to see it. But until then, I’ll have to wait.

Michigan in Color

12 — Wednesday, February 16, 2022

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On belonging in college: observations of a Muslim woman

Design by Reid Graham

YASMINE ELKHARSSA MiC Columnist

“ Who ‘belongs’ in college, a nd who feels like they belong?”

w o m e n . I n 1 8 3 9, t h e f i r s t c o l l e g e f o r w o m e n , We s leyan College, opened and was founded on Evangelical theolog ies. Of course, Christianit y was not the only widely followed reli-

“Who ‘belongs’ in college, and who feels like they belong?”

This is a quote from t he s yl la bu s of WGS 258: Belong ing in College, a class I decided to ta ke af ter scrolling through what seemed like hundreds of pages on the LSA Course Guide. I st umbled upon t his course a nd t he title stuck out to me — it mirrored a myriad of conversations I’ve had with myself and my friends: Do we really belong?

We s t e r n institutions can have that impact on p e o pl e o f c o l o r. A s a v i s ibly Muslim, A rab woma n, I of ten question the idealization that I once felt toward higher education.

Before com i ng to t he Un iversit y of Michigan, I rarely regarded institutions with a critical lens; I took them for what they were advertised as: prestig ious, f ull of opportun i t y, e x c i t i n g a n d d i v e r s e .

Although I was aware that students from more privileged backg rounds had g reater access to precollege opport unities a nd resources than I did, I had yet to f ully connect how these barriers have systemically restricted students from Muslim and Arab backg rounds like mine from at tending institutions of higher e d u c a t i o n . H o w e v e r, s i n c e t hey were established, such institutions were never created to ser ve diverse student populations.

In t he Un ited St ates, higher education was created with the intent to ser ve a majorit y Christian, white, male majorit y p opu l at ion . For ne a rl y t wo hundred years since H a r v a r d ’s founding in 1636, higher education would be g uided by Christian ideals and values, training men to become ministers, law yers and teachers — on rare occasions only did they ser ve

g ion, as other relig ions were widely practiced in A mer ica at t he t i me; howe v e r, w e s e e t h a t i t h a s had the largest inf luence on the shaping of universit y culture and life.

C u r r e n t l y, t h e r e a r e s t i l l many universities that practice Christian values in their curriculum a n d o n c a m p u s ; h o w e v e r, ma ny public instit utions have strayed away from claiming an off icial relig ion, welcoming students o f a l l r e l i g i o u s b a c kg rounds to their campuses. Although modern higher education institutions don’t out wardly discriminate against relig i o u s d i v e r s i t y, M u s l i m students receive the short end of the stick on their college ca mpuses nationw ide. At t he Un iversit y of Michigan, there is a sma ll Muslim population, but it is home to the f irst Muslim St udents Association chapter in the Un ited St ates. A s a Muslim woman, I’ve of ten questioned why the Muslim and Arab populations at Michigan are so small — af ter all, Michigan is home to the cit y of Dearborn, which houses the la rgest Muslim a nd A rab populat ion in t he Un ited States. At Michigan, and many other higher education institutions, antiMuslim prejudice is not a lways blata nt but ca mouf lages itself under a myriad of experiences that build upon one a not her to create a sense of disbelong ing for its Muslim and Arab students.

In a political science c l a s s I t o o k l a s t s e m e s t e r, we examined the legalit y o f D o n a ld T r u m p ’s f i r s t e xe c u t i v e o r d e r, k n o w n as the Muslim Ba n. In the following discussion s e c t io n , m y G SI pr o m p ted a conversation about t he t reat ment of “cer ta in

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“I found the way she phrased this striking — why couldn’t she say Muslims, and those perceived as Muslim, when it was so obvious that that is what she meant? ” 9/ 1 1 . I f o u n d t h e w a y s h e phrased this striking — why couldn’t she say Muslims, a nd those perceived as Muslim, when it was so obvious that that is what she meant? The discussion was any thing but riveting; it was quiet, and the room of predominantly white students seemed v isibly apprehensive to spea k up, becoming calculating with their word choices. One student

af ter pla nning to show a s c r e e n i n g o f “A m e r i c a n S n ip e r,” a f i l m t h a t depicts a triggering a nd harmf ul perception of the I r a q Wa r a n d c o n d o n e d anti-Middle Eastern/ Nor th Af rica n a nd Muslim rhetoric, at a UMix event.

Later in 2015, a f ter t he t r a g ic Ch a p el H i l l Sho o ting, st udent s at t he Un iversit y organized a vig il for the v ictims a nd Muslim students were scared

“Currently, there are still many universities that practice Christian values in their curriculum and on campus; however, many public institutions have strayed away welcoming students of all religious backgrounds to their campuses. ”

in particular consciously chose to beat around the bush, claiming that “people w it h … dif ferent sounding names … were t r e a t e d b a d l y. ” A t t h i s point, it felt as though my identit y was ja rring to my white peers; as the only Muslim in the room, my identit y was a salient part of the discussion we were having. I felt a pressure to elaborate on the treatment of Muslims in a p o s t - 9/ 1 1 s o c i e t y. T h e i s o lation alone pressured me into silence for the rest of the period.

This instance is only one of ma ny; a nti-Muslim occurances have been rampant on Michig a n ’s c a m p u s f o r y e a r s n o w. I n 2 0 1 5 , t h e U n i v e r -

that a similar tragedy could occur on their campus. Students discussed a ra nge of a nti-A rab a nd a nti-Muslim of fenses on campus, ranging from casual microagg ressions to anti-Palestinian sent iment at t he Un iversit y level. I n 2016, “#StopIsla m” was chalked in the D i a g . Fol low i n g t h i s i nc ident, students received a statement t hat “condemned” discrimination f r o m t h e U n i v e r s i t y. O n t h a t s a m e d a y, s t u d e n t s received a slow response from the Division of Public Safet y and Securit y (DPSS), a nd some felt hu r t that they were the ones erasing the chalk instead of the administration.

These experiences are

not the only a nti-Muslim experiences that Muslim students have endured on U - M ’s c a m p u s . A l t h o u g h t he Un iversit y is not a n exception, t hese exa mples prov ide insight to

ond year of college, I f ind myself constantly feeling isolated. I am perpet ually t he on ly h ijabi in most of my courses, student organizations and social g roups, which was uncom-

“Although the University is not an exception, these examples provide insight to the barriers that Muslim students face when feeling a sense of belonging at predominantly white institutions.” the ba rriers that Muslim students face when feeling a sense of belong ing at predominantly white institutions.

Even beyond universities, a nti-Muslim bigotr y runs rampant in our ever yday lives. Even over 2 0 y e a r s a f t e r 9/ 1 1 , M u s l i m s c o n t i nu e t o c o n s t a n tly f ight against harmf ul biases, defending their ident it y aga inst a t ragedy that had nothing to do with them. Politicia ns in Cong ress spew antiMuslim rhetoric about the only t wo Muslim women in Cong ress, targeting harmf ul remarks about not only them but Muslims across the nation.

The violence that stems from these incidents, and others like them, is found s t r uc t u r a l l y a nd r e pl ic a ted in various economic, political and social institutions across the count r y.

In my own communit y of Dea rborn Heights, MI, I never felt isolated due to my relig ious or ethnic identit y since most people looked like me a nd prac-

mon in my predominantly Muslim, A rab communit y back home. In higher education, we see how larger systemic barriers restrict specif ic communities f r o m r e c e i v i n g a c o m f o r table education experience in colleges a nd universit i e s a c r o s s t h e c o u n t r y.

Before at tending college, I viewed it as a mutually benef icial space for all its st udents. Though I a m still pa r ticipating i n WGS 258: B elong i ng i n College, I have since been more aware of how higher education actively constructs barriers against those who don’t f it the demog raphic that they have been foundationally built to ser ve. On college campuses across America, Muslim a nd A rab st udents are stuck in a perpetua l c yc le o f p a r t ic ip a ting in a system that was never built to represent t hem, while act ively t r ying to f ight the obstacles put in place by sa id system. While higher education has become more relig iously and racially diverse, it still raises

“While higher education has become more religiously and racially diverse, it still raises the question: Do I really belong?”

ticed the same faith as m e . N o w, e n t e r i n g m y s e c -

t he question: Do I really belong?

Opinion

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Wednesday, February 16, 2022 — 13

How the pandemic has made each of us toddlers Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890.

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The Board of Regents doesn’t represent UMich stakeholders; it’s time they do QUIN ZAPOLI

Opinion Columnist

W

hen the Board of Regents fired former University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel, The Michigan Daily Editorial Board was focused on the regents themselves. The regents — who serve unpaid for eight-year terms and are elected by Michigan residents — approve the yearly budget, appoint the president, oversee the University’s $17 billion endowment and regulate all three U-M campuses through the Regents’ Ordinance. They answer to Michigan voters, not the University community. How can the regents meet the needs of students, faculty and staff when those groups have little to no control over the board’s membership, and when regency itself is only a voluntary, part-time position?

The board has clearly made mistakes with its power, particularly in the last couple of years. In the words of the Editorial Board, “many of the trademark bad decisions made

by Schlissel were directed, or at least directly influenced, by the board (of regents).” The regents’ decision to reopen student housing in the fall of 2020 is specifically cited. In the same month, the regents failed to temper the administration’s aggressive response to the GEO strike or act on the Faculty Senate’s historic vote of no-confidence on Schlissel.

One University’s fight to provide the Flint and Dearborn campuses with equitable resources also faces resistance from the regents. More recently, the regents didn’t stop Schlissel from returning to campus as a tenured professor — despite an ongoing investigation into his actions.

And, as the Editorial Board points out, the regents have also historically failed to address sexual misconduct throughout the University with any sort of vigor.

The regents were also criticized for raising tuition in the summer of both 2020, where it failed the first time it was proposed, and 2021. Each increase added just under $300 to in-state tuition and nearly $1,000 to out-of-state tuition. Financial aid awards were increased for low and middle-income in-state students, so many, myself included, weren’t impacted by the increase. Additional

aid was not awarded to out-of-state students, who already paid the highest out-of-state tuition of any public university in the country.

Despite their importance to the University as a whole — out-of-state students make up nearly half of all undergraduate students and their experiences and ideas are invaluable to the growth of in-state students — out-of-state students suffered the brunt of recent tuition increases engineered by a board they have no say in electing. In fact, they have no say over how the University’s highest authority handles any of the controversial issues impacting students. Moreover, because the board appoints the president, and the president fills most high administrative positions, out-of-state students’ lack of input extends to the entire University administration.

Representation is only marginally better for in-state students and staff because they share electoral responsibilities with millions of other voters, most of whom have no vested interest in the University.

The fact that University voices are drowned out was evident after the 2020 election, when former Regent Shauna Ryder-Diggs (D), one of two regents to oppose the 2020 tuition increase, narrowly lost reelection to current Regent Sarah Hubbard (R).

Even by acting clearly in the interest of students, Ryder-Diggs was not able to keep her seat.

Because the average Michigan voter isn’t involved with the University, and because downballot races often draw careless decision-making, the board has become dominated by powerful, recognizable figures. Regent Denise Ilitch (D) is the daughter of the late Mike Illich, the founder of Little Caesars Pizza and owner of Detroit’s baseball and hockey teams. Regents Mark Bernstein (D), Jordan Acker (D) and Michael Behm (D) each come from prominent family law firms (Bernstein’s commercials have plagued my television my entire life).

And, of course, Regent Ron Weiser, famous in part for calling Michigan’s top three state officials “witches,” is Chair of the Michigan Republican Party and a large Ann Arbor property owner.

The board members, who all have obligations elsewhere, aren’t paid

either. That has two implications: the University will always come second to the regents’ paid obligations, and those without ample resources might not be able to serve on the board at all.

The decision to bring students back to campus in fall 2020, for example, was allegedly influenced by Weiser’s extensive property interests. He went as far as donating $30 million to the University days before it announced it would reopen. All told, the board’s mistakes are due in part to regency’s part-time nature and because those affected are, at best, weakly represented.

The board has taken an important step by including students, faculty and staff in the Presidential Search Committee. Even then, University stakeholders shouldn’t have to rely on the board’s generosity to have representation. Changing how regents are chosen so that all relevant University stakeholders are always represented — while maintaining the centuries-old relationship the University has with Michigan voters — is the best way to tackle the University’s ongoing struggles.

Current graduate and undergraduate students, members of the Faculty Senate and other University staff (including lecturers, MHousing and MDining employees and other support staff) should each be allowed to elect one regent. Terms should also be limited to two years instead of eight, encouraging the board to evolve with the campus population — or face a challenging reelection fight.

For the 2022 fiscal year, student tuition will account for $1.8 billion of the University’s budget, far more than the $322 million Michigan taxpayers will contribute. The University’s world-class faculty is critical not only to our institution’s prestige but to its ability to bring innovation to Michigan as a whole. And, of course, without additional staff, the entire campus would quickly grind to a halt. These three groups make major contributions to the University and as employees and attendees are most intimately impacted by the board’s decisions. It stands to reason that they should be allowed to directly pick at least a minority of the board’s members.

coach of the New York Giants. But the text went to Flores, who was set to interview for the Giants’ job himself three days later. Flores did have his interview as scheduled, and shortly thereafter the Giants introduced their new coach: Brian Daboll.

Flores’s claims come with instant credibility, both because of the state of racial representation in the league and because of Flores’s stature as a coach. There are only three active black coaches in the NFL — Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin; the Dolphins’ new coach, Mike McDaniel; and Lovie Smith with the Houston Texans — after Flores and Texans coach David Culley were fired after this season. That alone is a pretty bad look for the league, but context makes it worse. The Texans have a longstanding reputation of institutional racism and those allegations have been repeatedly substantiated.

Late Texans owner Bob McNair even faced severe backlash from his own players for racist comments he made in 2017. Racism seems to be hereditary in the McNair family. Bob McNair’s son Cal, current owner of the team, is no stranger to racially charged controversy himself, and recent rumors have been swirling that Houston was dead-set on hiring

former NFL quarterback Josh McCown as coach. They didn’t, but the fact that they were considering a white man in his early 40s with no coaching experience with people like Flores out there is indicative of the larger problem, even if McCown wasn’t ultimately hired.

Flores’s lawyers, justifiably, accused McNair of only hiring Smith to thwart allegations of institutional racism in light of the class-action suit. ESPN’s NFL Insider Adam Schefter chimed in as well, saying “I think (Flores’s lawsuit) changed this (NFL coachhiring) cycle,” on the network’s Super Bowl LVI “SportsCenter” special on Feb 9. “I think the Texans were tracking — tracking — to hire Josh McCown, and the environment and atmosphere changed once that lawsuit was filed. And I think it would’ve been very difficult for them to hire a guy they, I think, were very interested in, and they ended up hiring Lovie Smith instead.” Given the way the McNair family has spoken — publicly — about minorities, it’s hard to disagree with Flores’s lawyers here. From the outside, it looks like they’re racists using Culley and now Smith as pawns to try to throw fans off the scent.

Tomlin is the league’s longest-

LINDSEY SPENCER Opinion Columnist

T

he stereotype of the “iPad baby” has become one of the most detestable and looked-downupon images in recent history.

We as a society tend to look on in disgust at the parents of stickyhanded, wide-eyed children at restaurants, their toddler connected mind, body and soul to their overly screen-protected and intensely loud iPad as you try to enjoy dinner with your family. Whether it be the catchy songs of “CoComelon” or the bright-colored pictures and toys of the YouTube channel “Ryan’s World,” toddlers of this day and age are seemingly obsessed with technology. They just can’t seem to take their eyes (and hands, and mouths) off of it.

Sure, members of Generation Z are met with similar arguments, whether it be complaints that we are “always on Insta-space-tagram” (one of my dad’s personal favorites), or that one day we will eventually lose our eyesight from the perpetual blue light or get “tech” or “text” neck. These comments don’t scare us, and we continue to text, tweet and post because it’s what we know.

We have grown up in the age of social media, and it is our way to communicate our thoughts and express ourselves. But, as opposed to the toddlers of this generation, we grew up reading picture books for fun, watching “Dora the Explorer” in the comfort of our own homes and coloring on the paper placemats at restaurants with chunky crayons: there were no iPads in sight.

I don’t mean to sound like a total “well, back in my day…” kind of person, but, yeah, “back in my day” (meaning, of course, the late 2000s and early 2010s), we didn’t bring technology to the table. Growing up, my first access to technology was my green iPod Shuffle, which I shared with my sister, and it solely played the soundtrack to High School Musical. I would have never

thought to use it at family times because, honestly, things felt different about technology back then, in the early childhood of Generation Z. At that moment in my personal and emotional development, I was not reliant on technology as a form of comfort or entertainment.

With this having been said, going through the last two years of a global pandemic has possibly changed my perspective on the phenomena of this elusive “iPad baby,” and this constant dependency on media. Now, I may even understand the placative qualities that this huge screen provides to its user, and empathize with the cause.

The pandemic has brought many of us back to old pleasures we may have had in the past, or given us the opportunity to try out new ones. Whether it be reading all those books you forgot about on your shelf, knitting dozens of (unwanted) scarves for your family, trying out that baking recipe you keep forgetting to do or binge-watching all of the programs and films you’ve missed out on because of work or school, we’ve all found ways to cope with the constant state of uncertainty with the help of light-hearted distraction, and more importantly, media.

I have personally (and rather unashamedly) found myself clutching to any sort media possible in the last two years, including rewatching comfort television shows, reading piles of novels and getting through 3,000 levels of Candy Crush.

I am constantly scrolling my TikTok “For You” page, and I am religiously up to date with my “Goodreads” and “Serializd” accounts. I’ve become dependent upon my phone and laptop to provide me the perfect elixir of distraction from real life, whether that be school, politics or the pandemic. In all honesty, it has worked in the long run for the better of my mental health.

Psychological studies tend to say the same thing. In a report from Common Sense Media, it was found that 21% of young people said that using social

media helped them feel “less alone” amid the pandemic (up from 15% in 2018), and 43% of respondents, aged 14 to 22, found that social media has eased nerves and the likelihood of depressive episodes. The upwards tilt in the usage of social media platforms, video-call services and streaming platforms is not unexplained by psychologists and media analysts: it has helped young people everywhere feel better about themselves and their surroundings, especially in such isolating and distressing circumstances.

As a society, we have deemed a reliance on media to be unbecoming and antisocial.

Anyone who binges one too many episodes on Netflix is considered to be lazy, and anyone who likes one too many posts on Instagram is considered an addict. This stigma, especially in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic and the pandemic-influenced world, is incredibly damaging.

It makes people who see media consumption as a form of comfort feel poorly about their coping mechanisms, that they should instead be “doing something with their lives.” Well, in the year 2022, I happen to believe that just getting through your day is doing something, and it shouldn’t go unnoticed, no matter how many times you may have stopped to send out a tweet or sat down to watch a movie to do it. It’s still getting by.We look down on the “iPad baby” since it’s unnatural to us. At their age, we were comforted in different ways. But being a toddler in the pandemic is hard in and of itself, and we can’t help but sympathize with them and their cries of emotional pain when their mother takes away their tablet, because inside, each of us is, in our own way, a toddler; we feel this same codependency.

The pandemic has made each of us reliant on technology to cope: the bright screen of an iPhone filling up that isolating void of quarantine and uncertainty. We must realize that, deep down, we are just like those sticky and drooly toddlers, because we too need the help of a screen at times.

The cold is here

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

The NFL has a big race problem, and it is showing

JACK ROSHCO

Opinion Columnist

F

ormer Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores announced Feb. 1 that he had filed a class-action lawsuit against the NFL and three of its teams. He alleged racial discrimination in league hiring practices as well as tanking — a practice by which teams intentionally lose to amass greater draft capital, among other charges.

Flores’s lawsuit calls into question the legitimacy of the “Rooney Rule,” which requires all NFL teams to interview at least two external minority candidates for coaching and general manager vacancies.

Flores, however, is essentially calling the rule a sham. He claims that multiple teams engaged him in sham interviews meant only to satisfy the Rooney Rule, and he was not a serious candidate for those jobs. He brought receipts; the lawsuit contained screenshots of a text exchange between Flores and Patriots coach Bill Belichick, whom Flores worked for in New England before taking the Dolphins’ job. Belichick evidently believed he was texting his current offensive coordinator, Brian Daboll, to congratulate him on being hired as

tenured coach, and he coaches the franchise owned by the Rooney family, the namesake of the Rooney Rule. None of that is to say Tomlin’s continued presence in Pittsburgh is due to his race. He has long been an elite NFL coach, and the Steelers would be universally ridiculed for firing him. Having said that, Flores had begun to establish himself as an elite coach as well, and his firing by the Dolphins this offseason came as a massive shock both within the league and in the media. He was known as one of the league’s most popular coaches within his own locker room, and is often spoken of as the epitome of a “player’s coach.”

Flores led the Dolphins to their first back-to-back winning seasons since 2002 and 2003, and had restored hope to one of the league’s most success-starved franchises.

Flores’s status as a rising star — one who was already producing winning seasons after taking over a franchise mired in two decades of complete and utter irrelevance — is significant. If Flores was a first-time coach who was fired with a record 7-10 games under .500, you could argue that he was just a sore loser seeking to capitalize on America’s racial tensions. But Flores led one of the league’s most perennially embarrassing franchises to a

24-25 record in three seasons, including 19-13 the last two seasons.

Whether Flores’s firing and/or his interview experiences were racially influenced remains to be seen, but firing him was so objectively stupid that you almost have to wonder whether the decision may not have been entirely football-related. With the league’s record on race, from blackballing Colin Kaepernick to the conspicuous snubbing of qualified black candidates, all of this is enough to raise an eyebrow or two.

That last point isn’t some kind of abstract conjecture. There are multiple well-known AfricanAmerican coordinators who should be coaches right now, and their lack of opportunities is glaring. Schefter noted later in the “SportsCenter” special that the Pittsburgh Steelers’ new defensive coordinator has interviewed for 10 coaching jobs, and hasn’t gotten one of them.

Teryl Austin is a respected and experienced coach who is clearly worthy of a chance to lead an organization. Is it that much of a reach to say anybody who’s been asked to interview 10 times for a coaching job is probably qualified for one? Eric Bieniemy, the offensive coordinator for the Kansas City Chiefs, has overseen one of the most prolific offenses of all time,

Design by Libby Chambers

with two Super Bowl appearances and one championship to his name.

He has interviewed for multiple vacancies over multiple years. He’s still a coordinator. Bieniemy and Flores were passed over for the New Orleans Saints job, too. New Orleans chose to promote from within earlier this month, going with their defensive coordinator, Dennis Allen.

That seems sensible on its face — to maintain stability in an organization which just lost its legendary longtime coach in Sean Payton. After all, Allen had been with the organization since 2015; has coaching experience, like Flores but unlike Bieniemy; and was seen as Payton’s right-hand man in recent years. That sounds great on paper, but Allen was 8-28 with zero playoff appearances in three years as coach of the Raiders. He gets another chance in the big chair before Flores, who’s had more recent (and far more successful) coaching experience?

He gets the nod over Bieniemy, the architect of Patrick Mahomes’s development into an all-time great quarterback? Bieniemy and Flores were passed over for a job that they were both more qualified for than

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Opinion

14 — Wednesday, February 16, 2022

The North Campus dinner experience

It’s okay to take up space AMY EDMUNDS Opinion Columnist

W

e’ve all experienced it. A shoulder brush that knocks you painfully to the side; a body in your way, oblivious to the path you were trying to walk; a sidestep, right where your foot was supposed to go next.

Space that was yours, invaded.

Invaded is a harsh word to use, but it is a harsh action to experience as well. Society tells women that they must be small in every way. Verbally, in how they speak and voice opinions. Socially, in how they act and present themselves.

And physically, in how much space they are allowed to take up. We are told to be so small, it’s like we aren’t even here, like no one can even see us.

But I see you. I see you, girl on the M-Bus, with her legs turned toward the wall, leaning away from the stranger taking up his space and then some. Your seat is a foot and a half wide, and you shouldn’t have to share it. I see you, girl at the recreation center, waiting by the door in your leggings because another boy took the machine you’ve been waiting on for the past 20 minutes. The leggings are cute, and it was your turn.

I see you, girl in class, with your bag on the f loor and your hands in your lap because the boy next to you has claimed half the table. I see you, girl who makes space for someone disregarding yours. I see you, girl feeling invisible.

The invasion of space, both physically and socially, is so common that we have words for it. “Manspreading” and “mansplaining” are newly coined terms to describe men over-stepping both physically and in conversation. With both terms, they are holding more space for themselves than they should. The problem is, the bigger someone makes themselves, the smaller the people around them are forced to be. In “Shrinking Women,” Lily Myers says that “she wanes while (he) waxes,” and that women have been “taught accommodation,” a scene displayed with crossed arms and legs, folding in to be less. Women spend more time watching for others in their path while walking than men do, and stay within their bounds of the sidewalk more as well. It is clear that this problem persists in life all around, but what is to be done about it?

This societal issue is hard to correct because it is subconsciously ingrained.

One cannot fix the behavior before they are aware of the behavior, and thus unintentional behavior will require an intentional correction. Personal space, as is denoted in the name, is individual to each person, making it subjective and often subconscious. It is natural and acceptable to have different levels of comfort regarding personal space.

However, we need to prioritize spatial awareness. We must make a conscious effort to notice and respect the space of those around us. This includes monitoring our own behavior, as well as that of others.

Dr. Joanne Motiño Bailey, lecturer in the Women and Gender Studies Department at the University of Michigan, and Dr. Lisa Kane Low, professor within the School of Nursing at the University, present seven feminist strategies in “Gynecologic Health Care” that have been researched and found to enact the type of difficult social change that this situation calls for. One of these strategies is to analyze one’s own role or relationship to the issue. This can be done by anyone, of any gender, to support women. Ask yourself, what connection do you have to the issue, and how do you act because of that?

Men may take up more space than warranted in this context compared to women, perhaps unintentionally.

To implement this feminist strateg y as a man, one might recognize his role in this issue, and then consciously decide to make space for others. For a woman, applying this strateg y could be to recognize her position in this dynamic, and then to speak up about it. It is also important to advocate for others who may have a harder time asking for space. Speaking out does not need to be confrontational or unkind, and demanding space is not rude. Addressing the issue comes before resolving it. With intention and respect for all in mind, we can create an environment that is more comfortable for everyone around.

To the women reading this, my message to you is that it is okay to take up space. You don’t have to be short or thin or tiny. Be strong, be capable.

You don’t have to move; you are entitled to that bus seat just like any other student.

You don’t have to yield; you were walking there first. You don’t have to shrink; that’s your personal space. You don’t have to make yourself smaller because others want you to be.

It’s okay to take up space.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Design by Maddy Leja, Opinion Cartoonist

President Biden, it’s time for a diverse and centrist judiciary NIKHIL SHARMA Opinion Columnist

J

ustice Stephen Breyer’s recent decision to retire was one of the few expected political developments in an era of tremendous uncertainty. After a long career of compromise that earned him the respect of both parties, Breyer’s retirement presents President Biden with a chance to re-center his struggling administration and make a lasting impact on the political climate of the nation.

Judging by the strife that has accompanied recent nominees, Biden must approach his choice of a replacement with extreme caution. He must be careful to make a reasonable decision that doesn’t lead his presidency further astray. In order to accomplish this, Biden should look to nominate a nontraditional candidate who can voice a wider set of opinions than current justices: a centrist’s opinion.

During the 2020 Democratic primaries, Biden promised to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court, a promise that revived his stagnant campaign.

While his choice for the high court will be a history-making pick because of their demographic, if Biden is truly committed to

diversifying the bench, he should also look for diversity elsewhere.

The court is currently woefully homogeneous, with almost all of the justices coming from urban backgrounds, and all justices, beside Justice Amy Coney Barrett, having attended Harvard or Yale. While it’s important to have highly qualified individuals on the bench, it’s also paramount to have voices that represent the breadth of American experiences.

Though the multitude of traditional achievements amongst recent justices is evident, the similarity of their backgrounds is clear in both the cases they add to the court’s docket, which overwhelmingly originate from urban areas, and the rulings they ultimately make. In order to widen the breadth of experience in the highest court in the land and push back against the status quo, Biden should stray from convention and look for a judge from a nontraditional background.

In addition to selecting a nominee who represents a broader set of Americans, it’s important that Biden chooses a judge that mirrors the ideologically centrist views of the average citizen. While Biden himself is a moderate, his governing style over the first year of his administration has reflected the influence of left-wing activists in his

party, whom Biden often struggles to push back against.

With only three left leaning justices on the bench, the country needs another justice capable of compromising with the more right leaning wing of the court, in the mold of Justice Elena Kagan or Justice Breyer himself. If, however, Biden selects an activist Judge in the vein of Justice Sonya Sotomayor, who often goes out of her way to comment on national politics, he risks sabotaging any chance of compromise and ceding the court’s rulings to its right wing.

Justice Breyer made his mark on the court as a moderate always open to working with anyone on rulings.

Of the three current left leaning justices, he has cast the lowest percentage of votes aligning with the left wing of his party, deviating on issues he believed would stoke ideological divides. In particular, he voted against the law to uphold the full Medicaid expansion, in the process negotiating with Chief Justice John Roberts to maintain the individual mandate, a ruling that ultimately kept millions of citizens with pre-existing conditions covered by the law. He also sided with conservative justices on issues of religious freedom, allowing the public display of the Ten Commandments in two distinct cases in an effort to avoid

“religiously based divisiveness.”

More recently, he has publicly opposed court-packing and has even gone so far as to pen multiple books defending the Supreme Court as a neutral institution.

His willingness to compromise lent credence to the rulings that he ultimately decided to take strong stands on, allowing him to be the voice of reason in decisions protecting the right to abortion and to respectfully dissent to the expansion of the death penalty.

Finding a new justice who follows this style is critical to maintaining a sense of balance on a court where the right wing outnumbers the left two to one.

Ultimately, Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court will have profound implications on the law for decades to come, as well as immediate impacts on national unity. In a time when Americans face economic threats from the tailwinds of COVID-19 and international threats from China and Russia, the country certainly does not need the outer partisan battling that has accompanied recent nominations.

By choosing a judge with a background that matches a broader set of American experiences, Biden has a rare opportunity to hit the reset button and finally deliver the unity he promised. Let’s hope he makes the right decision.

Trump and the RNC say the quiet parts out loud DEVON HESANO Opinion Columnist

T

he events of Jan. 6, 2021, have been a topic of Republican revisionist history, willing ignorance and delusional falsehoods for over a year now.

Leaders of the Republican Party have gone from blaming former President Donald Trump at least in part for the insurrection, to absolving him of all responsibility. Those who were once labeled domestic terrorists are now being labeled political prisoners, with Trump and his fiercest allies now f loating pardons for the insurrectionists, claiming that they would mend alleged atrocities being committed by federal prosecutors.

Republican members of Congress all are but guaranteed to dodge any question regarding the day, and conveniently somehow never seem to have heard about the barrage of asinine comments from their fellow colleagues. Yet, through all of this, Republicans continue to claim they aren’t saying what they are, and don’t believe what they do.

In the span of a little under a week, this attitude finally

changed with the leader of the Republican Party and the party’s official committee both finally admitting what political observers have long noted. The Republican Party at large believes that the insurrection was just and normal, a mere moment of political protest and discussion, and Donald Trump wanted former Vice President Mike Pence to single-handedly overturn the election.

The first of the two admissions of guilt came from Trump himself when he went the furthest he ever has in his criticism of Mike Pence, this time outright saying that Pence alone could have overturned the will of over 80 million voters. Though Trump has long critiqued Pence for his failure to reject electoral votes from battleground states — something he had no right to do — he has tried to phrase his critiques in such a way that he simply is asking for more time to consider supposed irregularities. Trump likewise posits that state legislatures merely ought to have had more time to debate newly found evidence of fraud, that of which did not exist.

The statement was riddled with his usual gripes, claiming fraud and “many

other irregularities” and slamming Susan Collins as a “wacky” RINO (Republican in name only). He also claimed that pending legislation, that would make it clear the vice president has no power to change the outcome, would take the power away from the vice president, something that is not accurate. Ignoring the immense hypocrisy of this position – how would he feel about Vice President Harris overturning election results and giving Biden a second term? This statement betrays the deep-rooted contempt that the former president and his backers have for democracy and the peaceful transfer of power.

This was so abhorrent that even Pence directly called him out, disputing his claim and outright saying “President Trump is wrong.”

Even putting aside the fact that Trump is painfully wrong in regards to a vice president’s capacity, the idea of a president endeavoring to so blatantly, tactlessly and shortsightedly disrupt the will of a majority of American voters is eye-opening, even for a man with a record like Trump’s.

Not to be outdone, Republican officials also made waves at the Republican

National Committee’s winter summit in Salt Lake City, Utah. A censure resolution, led in part by RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, sought to condemn Representatives Liz Cheney, R-Wyo. and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill. for their roles on the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.

Republicans have long tried to dismiss the committee, claiming it is a partisan, Pelosi-led sham meant solely to hurt Donald Trump and his accomplices. That is a false claim, as the committee features the aforementioned two House Republicans, with Cheney as a co-chair of the committee.

Additionally, House Republicans shot down an attempt to have an evenly partisan split investigation into the events of Jan. 6, one in which Republicans would have had subpoena power of their own, negotiated by a Republican representative that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy himself had assigned to the negotiations.

The resolution said that the RNC should “immediately cease any and all support” of the two Republicans, that the pair “support Democrat efforts to destroy President Trump” and have engaged in acts “not

befitting” Republican members of Congress. While all parts of the statement are insane in their own right, one sentence stands out in particular: “They chose to join Nancy Pelosi in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse.” The statement, which McDaniel later tried to backtrack, was a stunning admission.

It shows that prominent Republicans believe that an insurrection meant to thwart the democratic process, which led to the deaths of at least seven people, injured hundreds, defaced the capitol building and forced the vice president and others into hiding, was nothing more than ordinary citizens taking part in everyday political discussion.

The claim, however egregious it is, is less surprising in itself than the fact that the official party committee was willing to admit such a disgusting belief.

The GOP has now tied themselves to this malicious lie; the lie that the most severe attack on the United States Capitol since 1814 was just citizens using their voice. A voice, according to them, that Kinzinger and Cheney are now maliciously

silencing. According to the GOP, the fault lies with these two honest representatives, not the insurrectionists or those who necessitated their intervention.

That Trump and the RNC are now willing to be so forthright about their despicable actions and beliefs is a sign that things are getting worse, not better.

Though they have both felt these ways for a while — with their continuous push for less protections for voters and more discretion for states to determine gerrymandered congressional maps — the fact that they now feel comfortable outright claiming these authoritarian ideas outright is just another dangerous step towards the dismantling of our fragile democracy. The midterm elections are now less than eight months away, and Republicans have been told by their leaders that political violence is no big deal, that election losses, no matter how legitimate, are not to be accepted and that violence is acceptable in an attempt to overturn an election. It is yet another ominous sign of what’s to come, and a potential pretext for something worse to happen the next time Republicans lose an important election.

Sports

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Wednesday, February 16, 2022 — 15

SportsMonday: Michigan women’s basketball is a title contender, so start treating them like one There’s something we try very are great but having the student sec- by a difference in performance — hard not to do here at The Daily, and tion there and bringing the energy the women’s soccer team made it to the Elite Eight this past season that’s write about the fans. would be huge.”

As you might expect, before falling to eventual champion For the three years I’ve covthe disparity between Florida State and the women’s basered the Michigan women’s basketball team, not talking men’s and women’s atten- ketball team has been ranked in the about the crowd has been easy. dance isn’t a phenomenon top 10 for weeks. exclusive to basketball.

It’s not because women’s sports It’s a sea of gray-haired retirBoth soccer and lacrosse aren’t as interesting, either. Television ees that show up on a Sunday afternoon, politely applauding see attenwhen a basket is scored and dance difrarely rising into a raucous. KENT ferences the It’s middle school basketball SCHWARTZ in regular teams and church groups who come for a bonding activity. It’s less season, though not than a quarter of the total who come on the same scale.

Of the four main to men’s basketball games.

The curtains covering the upper sports that Michibowl have only come up twice, both gan has a men’s in the 2019-20 season: once for a dou- and women’s ble-header where the women played team competing after the men on a Saturday, and the at different times basketother to host Michigan State. The (soccer, stadium felt hollow in the double- ball, lacrosse and header, and the game against the gymnastics), only Spartans is the only time I’ve seen women’s gymnasthe Crisler Center resemble capac- tics outperforms ity — 11,068 fans attended that game. the men’s squad, For reference, 12,445 fans and that’s because watched the men’s basketball team they mostly compete in difference play Southern Utah this past fall. “(In men’s games) you see the arenas with differstudent section’s all the way up in ent capicities.

The disparity the rafters so it would be awesome to have that, it does make a differ- between these proence,” senior wing Leigha Brown grams’ attendance said on Jan. 9. “Obviously the fans can’t be explained Women’s sports at Michigan deserve more attention.

audiences for the women’s gymnastics championship (which Michigan won, by the way), had a 510% increase in viewership from 2019 to 2021. Last year’s Women’s College World Series viewership increased by 10% over 2019, leading to “numbers comparable to those from the men’s College World Series in 2019.”

No, the difference in attendance is because the women’s teams don’t get enough attention, enough hype and, in reality, enough of anything.

It’s the same reason the NCAA neglected women’s teams in the NCAA Tournament and continually treats women’s sports as lessthan.

The hike in gymnastics viewership was so stark because ESPN and Disney gave it the attention it deserved and put it on ABC, instead of hiding it on ESPNU. The women’s basketball team is in the middle of a Big Ten Title race in part because the student section finally started to give it attention, showing up to ranked games.

Instead of 20-30 students in groups of three or five sitting down, relaxing, there’s constant noise. Loud applause that rouses the normal attendees and turns the energy into ANNA FUDER/Daily something greater. It spurs on senior Danielle Rauch to make

behind-the-back passes and senior forward Naz Hillmon to put defenders into a spin cycle.

“We see it at the men’s games all the time,” women’s basketball coach Kim Barnes Arico said. “So I think they truly are difference makers and I also think when our student athletes see their peers there it’s really special and means a lot to have them there.”

In women’s basketball, far more than men’s, crowds can impact the play because most teams aren’t used to playing in such hostile environments. In three of the Wolverines’ four losses, they played in arenas with larger-than-average crowds, including their loss to Michigan State on Thursday.

But now, as Michigan stares down a fight to host the first and second rounds of the NCAA Tournament, its attendance average (when fans have been allowed) is the lowest since 2016-17 at 2,910. While the Wolverines are second in the Big Ten standings, that attendance average is 10th in the conference.

There’snoreasonforthattobethecase except that people aren’t paying enough attention to the women’s basketball team.

And they’ve missed out on two top-5 wins, an All-American candidate and a team that’s avenged losses all season.

So start paying attention and start going to games.

Michigan tops Michigan State, Michigan’s upperclassmen shine 24-13, in final home dual against Michigan State on Senior Day LYS GOLDMAN

For The Daily

If there’s one word that characterizes Michigan’s senior class, it’s special.

In front of a sellout crowd on Senior Day, the Wolverines’ upperclassmen showed just why they fit that description, securing dominant victories over the rival Spartans in five out of six bouts.

No. 1 graduate student Nick Suriano started Sunday’s meet off strong with a major decision victory over Tristan Lujan. Competing at 125 lbs, Suriano was in control of the match from start to finish, a position he has become accustomed to throughout his college wrestling career. A former NCAA 133 lb champion, Suriano posted a 70-7 record over his first three seasons at Rutgers and is 7-0 for the Wolverines; Sunday just continued that dominance.

“Nick Suriano is a special talent,” graduate student Kanen Storr said.

“He always sets the pace and sets the tone for not only himself but for the

Michigan wrestling team. He’s fearless, he knows how hard he works and every time he steps out on the mat, he wants to show that and prove it.”

Not only has Suriano been successful individually, but he has contributed significantly to the success of Michigan as a whole, leading by example.

“Nick has been just a tremendous addition to the team,” Michigan coach Sean Bormet said. “He lives a super regimented, disciplined lifestyle. It’s a champion’s lifestyle, day in day out, and he’s a warrior on the mat. He brings a lot of intensity and a lot of fire to his wrestling, and that’s contagious.”

That intensity showed against Lujan, as Suriano wrestled at a constant rapid pace and scored takedown after takedown.

Suriano wasn’t the only senior Wolverine who impacted Sunday’s match and has led by example this season. No. 5 graduate student Logan Massa, who defeated Nathan Jimenez in dominant fashion with a tech fall, has used his own toughness

BECCA MAHON/Daily The Michigan wrestling team’s upperclassmen continued their dominant seasons against Michigan State.

to challenge his teammates and push them to greater success all season. “(Massa is) somebody who’s gonna wrestle you really tough and push you to the limits,” graduate student Myles Amine said. “(It’s) not always the prettiest way, but he’s been a great impact, just that energy and that meanness is something that if you know wrestling, you know that that’s good for the sport and it’s good for our team.”

Massa — along with Amine and graduate student Stevan Micic, who secured a victory over Matt Santos with an emphatic takedown to end the match — decided to return to Michigan for a final year of eligibility. All three have played key roles in Michigan’s success all season.

“It was more of a team decision for their passion for Michigan wrestling,” Bormet said. “Individually, obviously they want to have success and they have their goals, but this is the reason they came back. I know today was really special for them.”

But not all of Sunday’s competitors have found consistent collegiate dominance. Sunday’s match was especially significant for Storr, who returned from injury to defeat Peyton Omania by a score of 5-2.

“It was huge,” Storr said. “It was a lot of emotion, this last time wrestling here in Cliff Keen Arena. And not only that, I had a lot to prove, that I’m gonna step back in this lineup and I’m gonna score points for this team.”

All five seniors who secured victories on Sunday have been critical in shaping Michigan’s overall success, through both their own individual accomplishments and their contributions as team leaders. And as the postseason nears, the upperclassmen hope to add another word to their description: Champions.

LINDSAY BUDIN

For The Daily

As Michigan gears up for the upcoming NCAA Championships, the Wolverines’ final home dual meet of the year served as another test for the squad.

They passed with flying colors.

The No. 3-ranked Michigan wrestling team (10-1 overall, 5-1 Big Ten) extended its five match winning streak against No. 14 Michigan State (9-3, 4-3), winning seven of the first eight matches.

Sunday’s 24-13 victory sent off a lengthy class of seniors and graduate students in their final regular season contest in Cliff Keen Arena It’s hard to find a wrestler more consistent than No. 1 graduate student Nick Suriano. At 125 lbs, Suriano asserted his dominance against Tristan Lujan from start to finish, earning a 14-3 major decision to put the Wolverines up 4-0.

“Nick Suriano, he’s special,” Michigan coach Sean Bormet said. “The guys have connected with him quickly because of the intensity, the work ethic and the way he competes.”

But the Spartans bounced right back from Suriano’s display.

After No. 7 Dylan Ragusin’s loss to Spartans’ No. 11 Rayvon Foley, No. 17 graduate student Stevan Micic hoped to prevent consecutive Michigan State match wins.

Micic’s season has been filled with difficult injuries and inconsistent training, but following a win against Indiana on Friday, he had an opportunity to come out of his last home match on a good note. Micic came out prosperous, winning a 10-3 decision.

Following Micic’s win, 149-pounder Kanen Storr – another injury-ridden senior – displayed resilience in a final home win of his own.

“I made a decision to believe in myself and work hard,” Storr said. “I knew once I stepped back in this lineup that I was going to prove that I’m here to stay, and I’m here to do a job for this team.”

BECCA MAHON/Daily The No. 3 Michigan wrestling team dominated Michigan State on Senior Day, 24-13.

A takedown late in the second period gave Storr a narrow 4-2 lead, and a relatively stagnant third period cemented the win. The 5-2 decision validated Storr’s hard work.

In a low scoring match where neither of the 157 lb wrestlers took control, No. 9 redshirt junior Will Lewan came out victorious over No. 17 ranked Chase Saldate. His takedown with 30 seconds remaining to secure a 3-1 advantage led to a 3-2 victory by decision.

Going into intermission, the Wolverines held a 13-3 lead. Coming out of the break, the Michigan upperweights extended it.

Although a 5-1 decision may not seem like a dominant win, 165 lb redshirt sophomore Cameron Amine imposed his will on his Spartan opponent. From the very beginning, Amine displayed his strength, lifting Nathan Jimenez off the mat multiple times throughout the match.

“He’s just an incredible gamer,” graduate student Myles Amine said of his younger brother. “Come a few weeks from now he’s gonna surprise a lot of

people, but he’s not going to surprise me.”

Also dominant was No. 5 Logan Massa. Massa’s early takedown and two consecutive nearfalls gave the 174 lb graduate student a 12-0 lead. Two takedowns and a Michigan State stall finalized a technical fall, increasing Michigan’s lead to 21-3.

Myles has proven his importance throughout the season, and Sunday showed no different. Despite struggling to find his rhythm in the first two periods, a ferocious intensity in the final period secured Myles a 8-4 decision over Spartans’ No. 19 Layne Malczewski at 184 lbs.

In Sunday’s victory, Michigan’s seniors rose to the occasion, but it is clear that these seniors are waiting for something bigger to celebrate this season.

“We’re hosting NCAAs,” Myles said.

“So technically, my senior day is going to be on March 19, the NCAA finals.”

And if the Wolverines perform the way they did against the Spartans, they’ll have plenty to celebrate.

Michigan dominates in singles, finds path to victory over Illinois KELSEY RUFF

For The Daily

On Friday night, the No. 20 Michigan men’s tennis team showed up looking for a comeback after a loss against then-No. 19 Harvard the week prior.

It succeeded.

With the Wolverines’ second and third doubles teams both losing both 4-6, Michigan struggled to make room against an unranked Illinois. The Fighting Illini won the doubles point over the Wolverines, spelling an early

end for the first doubles match.

For Michigan, losing the doubles point was concerning; they rely on their strength as a doubles team, and losing the point was an early blow.

That outcome only fueled the Wolverines’ path to victory.

Though they struggled in their doubles matchups, there was no such issue with their singles matches. After giving up the doubles point, Michigan (4-2 overall) swept Illinois (1-5) in the singles and claimed a 4-1 overall win.

“We had a big chip on our shoulder coming out for the sin-

gles,” Michigan senior Patrick Maloney said. “We weren’t happy with the doubles result, but it really helped us.”

That optimism was almost tangible on the court, each side building off of each other’s victories to create a momentum that went unmatched by the Fighting Illini.

When senior Andrew Fenty won his first set, 6-0, it was the boost both Maloney and sophomore Jacob Bickersteth the drive they needed to claim their respective first sets 7-5 and 7-6.

On the other side of the court, junior Ondrej Styler led in a simi-

lar manner, commanding a 6-1 first set followed by a quick second set, which he claimed 6-4.

Sophomore Gavin Young won the final point needed to secure a Michigan victory, battling out a tough win to take his second set.

Young ended the night 6-3 and 7-5, giving the Wolverines a muchneeded success to boost morale.

“We view our doubles as one of our biggest strengths in our team,” Maloney said. “So, to have a dominant win over a team like Illinois… huge confidence booster. We could’ve had six points on the board right there.”

With the loss of a point they expected to win, the Wolverines used the loss to bolster their confidence in the singles matches.

With the win, Michigan snapped a seven game losing streak against Illinois. However, even after coming away with a victory, it seems that there is a lot to build on.

“We have to play better,” Michigan coach Adam Steinberg said. “If we’re going to be a contender to win championships… to lose the doubles point is tough.

That’s the biggest focus now – has to be.”

JENNA HICKEY/Daily On the back of its prowess in the singles matches, Michigan dominated Illinois.

SPORTSWEDNESDAY

TWO

FACED

After dominating Purdue, Michigan falls back to earth in deflating loss to Ohio State NICHOLAS STOLL

Managing Sports Editor

W

hen it’s boiled down to its bare bones, basketball has a simple premise: get the ball in the basket.

When a team can’t do that efficiently, the chances of coming away with a win drop significantly.

The Michigan men’s basketball team (13-10 overall, 7-6 Big Ten) proved the adage true on Saturday, falling to No. 16 Ohio State (15-6, 8-4), 68-57, in a showing fraught with offensive inefficiency.

“We got good looks,” fifthyear g uard Eli Brooks said.

“We missed a lot of layups, a lot of bunnies, a lot of stuff around the rim that we should have made. And it’s tough

when tough when you don’t make the easy ones.”

From the start, the game looked like a rock fight.

Both the Wolverines and Buckeyes — 19th and seventh in the country in KenPom’s adjusted offensive efficiency — struggled to make any gains offensively. Each bucket was hard-earned, and both teams’ offensive possessions were marred by turnovers and missed shots in a messy back-and-forth showdown.

Eventually, the offenses gained some traction, giving Ohio State a 3-point lead at the half.

Coming out of the break, where Michigan would have liked to see a spark to ignite a comeback, it instead saw smoke. At the under-12 timeout, the Wolverines found themselves in an 8-point hole

after shooting a measly 3-for12 from the field to start the half. The Buckeyes, though not accelerating their offensive rate, kept up the pace from the first half, which proved to be enough in the face of an anemic Michigan attack.

The Wolverines were simply not the high-scoring team that decimated No. 3 Purdue Thursday night. Typically, Michigan’s defense sinks its ship, but the Wolverines were actually able to amount stops. They simply couldn’t capitalize on the opportunities they were creating, in spite of having the ability to do so.

“We know that we have shooters on the team,” Brooks said. “We prove it in practice, we prove it through our numbers throughout the year.

I mean, (it’s) just confidence. I think we need to just shoot our

shots and be more confident taking our shots.”

It was a far cry from the Michigan team that bared its formidable fangs against the Boilermakers. The Wolverine squad that dropped 82 points and made over half of its shots from the f loor and from deep was nowhere to be found come Saturday.

Instead, a shell of itself stood in its place. Michigan posted an underwhelming 41.4% from the field and a tragic 23.5% from beyond the arc.

“We shot 4-for-17 from three, and there were some really good looks at the basket,” Michigan coach Juwan Howard said. “I would say maybe five of them were forced (misses). But other than that, it just didn’t go in for us, but we stay with it.”

With every missed shot, the Wolverines lost a chance to build momentum. And when they did make a muchneeded bucket, the Buckeyes always found a way to silence the Crisler crowd and halt Michigan in its tracks.

Star Ohio State forward E.J. Liddell stood on the front lines of the Buckeyes’ spoils. Dropping 28 points on the Wolverines’ defense with odds-def ying makes and clinical shots. Flanked by the rest of Ohio State’s contributors, it was too much for Michigan on a night where it wasn’t at its best.

“He’s gonna make tough shots,” Howard said. “… And that’s what it was tonight.

Liddell made a lot of tough shots.”

The Wolverines’ typical saviors didn’t have it in them

to resurrect their team from the deficit. Sophomore center Hunter Dickinson notched just 14 points on 7-of-17 shooting, freshman wing Caleb Houstan came away with a miserable five and besides Dickinson, only fifth-year g uard Eli Brooks broke into double digits.

Down the stretch, as Michigan f loundered, the Buckeyes pulled away.

Without the ability to score efficiently, the comeback was never realized.

With the chance to grab their second Quadrant 1 win in a row and put themselves in a better position to make the NCA A Tournament, the Wolverines came up short.

As Brooks saw it, the reason why was pretty simple: “We just didn’t make shots.”

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