write. The weather was awful the day I first set out to see the President’s House. I left around noon and faced the September mix of warm humidity and cold wind that begs both for shorts and a flannel, and doesn’t blink an eye at the contradiction. I wore neither, and downed a Claritin instead, as September not only gifts split personality weather but also searing and persistent allergies.
ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OF EDITORIAL FREEDOM
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T H E M I CH I GA N DAI LY | S E P T E M B E R 26 , 201 8
ACADEMICS
Students in Mark Schlissel gave me Ross search writer’s block for broader curriculum ALEC COHEN/Daily
Despite outward emphasis on positive business, students say opportunities lack
Vice President for Equity and Inclusion Robert Sellers shares his experiences working for the University of Michigan at the U-M and Minority Serving Instituions Disciplinary Hub Plenary Reception in the Ross School of Business Tuesday.
Minority Serving Institutions lay plans to build partnerships with ‘U’
VP for Equity and Inclusion critiques DEI plan, says University lacks minority inclusion REFAEL KUBERSKY Daily Staff Reporter
Robert Sellers, the vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer, opened the Minority Serving Institutions Disciplinary Hub Plenary and Reception at
the Ross School of Business Tuesday afternoon. The event, attended by dozens of students and faculty, was the conclusion of a conference between the University of Michigan and minority-serving institutions intended to cultivate relationships and develop strategic goals moving forward.
Sellers began by discussing the University’s current fiveyear Diversity, Equity and Inclusion plan. The plan, which is currently in its third year, aims to recruit more minority faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students as well as cultivate solutions to improve retention rates.
While Sellers acknowledged the plan’s successes, he believes the University and the country’s academic system, in general, is still deeply lacking minority inclusion. Students have challenged the DEI plan in recent years, saying it has failed to create a safe See DEI, Page 3A
ZAYNA SYED
Daily Staff Reporter
Defying stereotypes about college students’ preference for loungewear, one can find students sporting suits at any given day at the Ross School of Business Building. With a sleek, modern exterior and an interior that hosts a private gym, cafeteria and frequent visists from top recruiters, some students have remarked that the building itself resembles a traditional business atmosphere. Belying the Business School’s traditional business image, however, is a school that considers one of its
core values to bepositive business. While this may be a core value, some students have noted classes and recruitment efforts seem to focus heavily on finance, consulting and marketing opportunities, leaving those who are pursuing a business degree to enter other social impact or nonprofit careers disappointed. Jamie Jacobson joined Ross as a pre-admitted freshman, hoping to use her business degree in work with nonprofit or political advocacy organizations. “The original impression I got was that it was sort of this new age, more progressive See ROSS, Page 3A
Central Student Government ‘State of M Den to Results of open new the Campus’ speech talks inclusivity Rackham
BUSINESS
RESEARCH
storefront in Detroit
Partnerships with off-campus resources, Office of Financial Aid discussed
The University’s official merchandise retailer will now have seven locations
Tuesday night, the University of Michigan Central Student Government convened to discuss goals for the semester, including promoting inclusivity and enhancing communication on campus. The CSG session confirmed 12 members for various leadership positions. The meeting began with a presentation from Erik Wessel, the director of the Office of Student Conflict Resolution, on the amendment cycle for the Statement of Student Rights and Responsibilities. Wessel explained OSCR is in the process of bringing proposals to amend this statement, noting how the statement has always been and will continue to be shaped by the University community. “I should mention that the statement itself has always been a community-owned, communityamended, community-crafter document from its inception,” Wessel said. Wessel also encouraged students to attend OSCR’s conflict skills education workshops, such as Conflict Resolution 101 or Nonviolent Communication. “Feel free to reach out to OSCR,” Wessel said. “We are always willing and wanting to be supportive to you all as a group and to you all as individuals as well.” After Wessel’s presentation,
SONIA LEE
Daily Staff Writer
The M Den, the University of Michigan’s official merchandise retailer, will be opening its first Detroit location on Columbia Street in 2019 in partnership with Olympia Development of Michigan. The new location occupies a stretch of Columbia Street that’s part of the Ilitch family’s District Detroit, a new blocklong development that will feature several shopping and dining attractions. Downtown Detroit will be the seventh brick-and-mortar store for The M Den, which has locations across Ann Arbor, Novi and Livonia. The location’s collection will include regular M Den merchandise as well as Detroitthemed products. With two storefronts for both The M Den and the Victors Collection by The M Den –– a subsidiary that features higher-end apparel and accessories –– the store will incorporate 4,000 square feet of space on the first floor See MDEN, Page 2A
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CSG President Daniel Greene, a Public Policy senior, gave a State of Campus address, loosely based on the president’s annual State of the Union address. Greene discussed CSG’s financial affairs, partnerships with off-campus resources, areas for improvement, key campus issues and upcoming September policies. Greene highlighted some of his goals for the upcoming year,
hoping to improve relationships with institutions like the Office of Financial Aid and MDining, and trying to start a process of online registration with University Health Services and Counseling and Psychiatric Services. He also noted the creation of the executive diversity officer executive position, which he hopes will encourage diversity, equity and inclusion on a student level.
“I think as of now the DEI plan on our campus has been too administratively and academically heavy, and if we’re really going to get to the point where students of any identity feel included on our campus and safe and comfortable to attend the University of Michigan,” Greene said. “There’s not a better way to get to those social interactions than to See CSG, Page 3A
AARON BAKER/Daily
Central Student Government President Daniel Greene delivers his State of the Campus address during the CSG meeting at Palmer Commons Tuesday night.
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Vol. CXXVII, No. 143 ©2018 The Michigan Daily
research released
The Doctoral Experience Study aims to improve experience of students RACHEL LEUNG Daily Staff Writer
U-M chemistry professor Zhan Chen, who received his post-doctoral degree from University of California, Berkeley, pursued chemistry since childhood. After graduate school, Chen considered other careers, but ultimately decided on teaching because he understood how significant an impact professors can have on their students. “From very young, I knew that it was extremely important for young people to have good teachers,” Chen said. “I chose chemistry as my major because I had excellent chemistry teachers in my middle school, high school and college.” Researchers from the Rackham Institutional Research office’s first Michigan Doctoral Experience Study in September 2017. The results of the survey, designed to collect data about the first-year graduate are now publically available. The University of Michigan’s administration hopes the data See RESEARCH, Page 3A
NEWS.........................2 OPINION.....................4 ARTS......................6
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THIS WEEK IN HISTORY: 48 PROTESTERS ARRESTES AT SIT IN Tuesday, September 24, 1985 23 students, 1 prof among those jailed Forty-eight demonstrators, including at least 23 University students and one professor, were arrested yesterday during a sit-in protesting U.S. aid to Central America in Congressman Carl Pursell’s Ann Arbor office. The arrests came about six hours after the protest, which attracted about 100 chanting demonstrators, began. THE AFTERNOON’S events
followed in this order: *4:55 p.m. - Two Pittsfield Township Police officers arrive at the scene, read protesters the tresspass act which states that they’ll be trespassing if they don’t leave by 5 p.m. Police say they’ll return to the scene at 5:05 p.m.; *5:15 p.m. - Police return to the scene of the demonstration and tell protesters that they will be arrested if they don’t leave the office; *5:20 p.m. - Protesters, some carried out of the office by police and others walking out, are arrested and loaded into
a Washtenaw County Sheriff bus and taken-to the Pittsfield Township Police station; *7:30 p.m. - All of the protesters are released on their own recognizance. They will face a $50 fine and/or up to 30 days in jail if charges are pressed.
atrocities in Central America,” said Mark Weisbrot, an economics teaching assistant one of the protesters arrested.
Pursell never arrived at the protest. Ron Dankert,. owner of the building which houses Pursell’s office, called the police.
Yesterday’s protest, was organized by members of the Latin American Solidarity Committee, the Humanity Assistance Project for Independent Agricultural Development in Nicaragua, World Hunger Education Action Committee, Society for a Sane Nuclear Policy, and several church groups.
“PROTESTING IS the only way we’ll stop our government from contributing to the
THE PROTESTERS oppose the Reagan administration’s request for $483 million to
be appropriated to a Foreign Assistance bill. The bill is expected to be voted on in congress next week. Pursell’s District Coordinator Cynthia Hudgins said that she doesn’t know for sure how the congressman will vote on the bill. But she added that judging by the way he has voted in the past, it’s safe to assume that he will support the measure.
He has heard from his constituents, but he, is not listening. We therefore have no other recourse than to protest,” Weisbrot said. AND THAT is just what the students and city residents did. They sang peace songs: “I’m going to lay down my war books, Down by the riverside, Down by the riverside, Down by the riverside, I’m going to lay down my war books,
“Pursell has voted to support this terror in spite of an overwhelming majority of letters and phone calls from his constituents opposing his position on these issues.
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ON THE DAILY: VOTING IS SEXY The University of Michigan’s School of Art & Design is now offering a threecredit course designed to make voting “irresistible.” Associate Profs. Stephanie Rowden and Hannah Smotrich teach the new course titled Voting is Sexy. “Do you believe in the power of voting? Do you want to be part of a super passionate creative team working to make voting irresistible? We need designers, photographers, illustrators, Instagram magicians, pop-up event geniuses, videographers, animators, social media stars, snappy writers, performers, and unabashed political nerds,”
the course description on the Stamps website reads. “Students in this team-based class will create a high-energy campaign of pop-up events, posters, video, social media and you name it. You’re going to educate, entertain, motivate, inspire and enliven your peers all the way to the ballot box on November 6, 2018.” Rowden told WWJ News Radio the class partners Art & Design and Music, Theatre & Dance students to create a campaign of events and media projects and raise awareness for the Nov. 6 election. “I was looking at the last midterm election — 2014 — and I
noticed that 43 percent of all Michiganders voted but only 14 percent of U of M students turned out to vote in that election,” Rowden said. “I looked at that as a really important civic challenge but also as an artist it’s a really interesting creative challenge.” Today, the course tweeted a photo of the students’ art installation on the walls of an Art & Design School building to remind University members of the day’s special occasion: National Voter Registration Day. Other student organizations on campus highlighted opportunities for University members to register to vote. The U-M Museum of Art,
in partnership with the Ginsberg Center, offers voter registration in the UMMA Forum every Tuesday until Oct. 9 under UMMA’s VOTE! 2018 initiative. Registration opportunities were also offered Tuesday in Haven Hall until 2 p.m. Central Student Government President Daniel Greene, a Public Policy senior, reminded students via Twitter to vote in an effort to win the #Big10VotingChallenge, which is an initiative created by University of Michigan students and faculty in which all 14 Big 10 schools will compete for the highest student voter turnout rates in the 2018 election.
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MDEN From Page 1A of the new Little Caesars world headquarters.
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The Detroit location may also host autograph signing events with professional athletes, some of whom played for the University and currently live in the city.
Travis Arbogast, vice president of development at Olympia Development of Michigan, said The M Den opening will be a fresh addition to diversify the stores at the Columbia Street shopping center. “As an athletics retailer, The M Den will be a fitting and welcome addition to The District Detroit, the only destination in the nation where four major sports teams play in the city’s urban core,” Arbogast said. “The apparel and merchandise shop is among many storefronts planned for Columbia Street that will continue to bring retail diversity to our steadily-growing district.” Scott Hirth, co-owner and president of The M Den, had hopes of establishing a Detroit store since 2013, especially as the University became more involved in the city. “It was very important to us that the next round of investment was in the city of Detroit,” Hirth said. “With the resurgence, we wanted The M Den and by extension, the University of Michigan, to put our stamp on Detroit.”
However, the opening of The M Den’s new location, along with several other retail flagship stores in Detroit, raises questions about businesses’ and entrepreneurs’ attempts to “revitalize” Detroit. Many Detroiters identify the economic development seems to be pushed in certain areas of Detroit while the rest of the city is left largely ignored. LSA junior Alyson Grigsby comes from an area of Detroit near where the new M Den will be built. She said though opening a store like The M Den may help Detroit financially, it is important to question why only some parts of Detroit are included in city growth. “On the one hand, sure, you can probably bring a little bit more revenue to Detroit,” Grigsby said. “But Detroit is only really being developed in certain areas like the Midtown and Downtown area, that’s the only thing that really irks me. Just them selling M Den stuff isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’m just wondering how come groups that do so much in the Midtown and Downtown areas like Little Caesars Arena don’t do anything with other parts of Detroit.” The new M Den location See MDEN, Page 3A
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ROSS From Page 1A business school, and I really liked that perception of it,” Jacobson said. “They really talked about social impact and nonprofit sector and things like that. That’s kind of what I wanted to do, and still probably want to do.” After spending three semesters at the Business School, though, Jamie felt the culture there emphasized certain careers, while forgetting about others. “I felt very pressured to follow the typical Ross career path, whether that be investment banking, consulting or even marketing, and I’d say marketing was the least popular of the traditional business tracks people tend to follow,” Jacobson said. “There was always this, ‘Well, a lot of people don’t do the traditional recruitment and we support you through all of that.’ But all of the emails that I got and consistent talk about recruitment was all consulting, finance, investment banking and sometimes marketing. It felt very constraining.” Jacobson acknowledged institutional programs for students pursuing social impact exist, but said a majority of Business students were interested in traditional career paths, which is where administration focused its efforts on. “It’s really tough, because I think there are plenty of people like me who want to do social impact, and Ross does have some options there and some programs there,” Jacobson said. “To a
RESEARCH From Page 1A will help improve programs for future graduate students. “The goal is really for us to try to better understand the doctoral student experience,” Gonzalez said. “We have lots of kinds of dry data (gender, race, and ethnicity information) about these students, but we don’t know, at least on a large scale, the details about their experience and how that changes over time.” For the 2017 MDES survey, all participants were first-year graduate students from multiple disciplines. Researchers will follow up with these students each year to track how their experiences change as they approach graduation. John Gonzales, director of Rackham Institutional
DEI From Page 1A campus environment. Sellers called for better cooperation between institutions within the University and more focus on developing the skills of minority faculty and students instead of just recruiting them. “We, like many other predominantly white institutions that have had these relationships, have tended to think about them in a model that is more consistent with what happened in terms of the negro leagues,” Sellers said. “When we integrated baseball, we didn’t fully integrate baseball … what we said was we will let the talent play everywhere, but not the management. … We have to change that paradigm.” Edmund Graham, the Minority Serving Institutions coordinator at Rackham, hosted a panel following Sellers’ speech that featured Dina Stroud, the executive director
MDEN From Page 2A comes as the University has attempted to build its presence through conferences and years of partnership initiatives in Detroit, where the school was
lot of students who don’t end up wanting to do that, my perception of that is that they feel that all the social impact and nonprofit talk is kind of a waste of their time, whereas on the other side I never really intend to use accounting, so that kind of felt like not a good fit either.” Business senior Liz Fawley also plans to pursue social impact work. While Fawley admits it can sometimes be difficult to not follow a traditional business path, she believes the Business administration is trying to offer opportunities for students like her. “Our dean and associate dean are very pro-positive business and talk a lot about developing future business leaders to create a more positive future,” she said. “They really are passionate about this –– I really do think that it’s not just all talk. They’ve spent a lot of money on all the programs.” According to Norman Bishara, associate dean for undergraduate and early career programs at the Business School, the school has over 100 organizations dedicated to social impact and nonprofit work. One such organization Fawley is involved in, Net Impact, combines students from all majors to create positive social and environmental change. Finding this niche within the Business School played a key role in her decision to continue with her field of study, Fawley said. “One time this summer, I had to teach a Ross student what a union is,” said Fawley. “In Net Impact, everyone is on the same page. You can
find your community within Ross, and that is one reason I’ve been able to stay levelheaded throughout the entire process.” Bishara stresses while the Business School values positive business, the administration does not wish to force students into one career path or another. “We are the positive business school and have been for a while now. More than other schools around the world, we really care about business’ impact on society,” Bishara said. “One thing I don’t really love hearing is, ‘Ross wants this.’ There is no Ross desire for students, other than we want our students to be engaged, have good lives, be good citizens, be good leaders, and it’s not in a certain field or another. That’s not what we’re designing at all. Yeah, there are students who want to go in certain directions, and we want to support that, so we do that for any student who wants to go into any role. I think there’s tons of opportunities, and so if people aren’t finding them, that’s a failure in some way.” Jacobson said while the two sides of the Business School each had strengths, but seemed to compete with each other rather than work in tandem. “Honestly, I think that they’re in a very strange crux right now, where they have a lot of kids and a lot of alumni and just a lot of people expecting them to continue sending all these people into Wall Street and to continue developing really, really good business students for that, but then they also have this other goal of being a social impact
business school,” Jacobson said. “And I think right now bridging the two identities of the business school, as being this elite institution that connects really big firms with exceptional, well-performing, passionate students, there’s that side of it, but there’s also the side of trying to develop a social impact focus curriculum, a social impact focused recruiting process and I think it’s really difficult for those two to connect.” Business senior Mohammad Shaikh hoped to pursue positive business in his studies, but found the school’s curriculum did not live up to its branding of being a positive business school. “I think that Ross brands itself as a business school that cares about positive business, positive business being defined as business working to solve society’s biggest problems,” Shaikh said. “If you look at their website, what they’re about, that’s how they brand themselves. What it looks like right now, it seems like they don’t really care about it. They sort of just weave it into their curriculum without making it central. It seems like the core business classes that you take at any business school are 100 percent the central component and then impact positive business initiatives are kind of wrapped around very subtly.” However, Shaikh believes Business School Dean Scott DeRue may change the culture in a few years. “Anytime (DeRue) goes on anything, he talks about (positive business),” Shaikh said. “I do think that they’re working to make that a bigger part of their vision, because he goes on different trips,
Wednesday, September 26, 2018 — 3A and this is his thing. I think that in future years, because he just started two years ago I believe, I think in coming years he’s going to hopefully carry it out.” Jacobson thinks making it easier for students to double major would allow students pursuing social impact adequate space in their schedule to take the classes or electives they need to supplement their business degree. “I felt like they’re telling me to be social impact focused, but then I’m focused mostly on getting good grades for recruiting, recruiting for a bunch of firms, to be perfectly honest, their main goal was not social impact,” Jacobson said. “As someone who was trying to do a dual degree, I didn’t have room in my schedule at all to take an easy class to inf late my grades.” Shaikh believes the solution lies with a realignment of what society should value. “On a larger scale, the smartest people in my class don’t go into the impactoriented careers because they’re not valued by society,” Shaikh said. “What’s valued by society? The positions that, in my opinion, contribute to the problem. That’s the problem. There should be an incentive structure that’s built up, such that if I’m someone who wants to go into a career that helps others, and I’m very smart and qualified, I should have a very clear avenue to that path. And in my opinion, even if you’re not someone who’s super passionate about impact, I think that the world demands that there’s more talented people in these spaces that are helping others.”
CSG From Page 1A work with the structure of student organizations.” Greene elaborated on the student liaison program, which he and CSG Vice President Isabel Baer, an LSA junior, created. The program allows student organizations to communicate and meet with each other through a CSG forum. He said the goal of the program is to allow for a more collaborative culture on campus. “The idea is to really build that cross-student organization collaboration, but really tap into the ownership of our fellow Wolverines and into our campus community,” Greene said. “Because to me, it’s planting the seeds for the long-term investment that’s going to allow for the cultural and social shift on our campus.” The meeting continued with community concerns, where two members of the University community talked about their boycott of Israel, relating it to Prof. Cheney-Lippold’s refusal to write a recommendation letter for a student to study abroad in Israel. After, CSG members nominated for certain executive positions were confirmed. The representatives ended the meeting by discussing various resolutions, including one aiming to amend elected representatives’ office hours to make them more efficient and useful. LSA sophomore Benjamin Gerstein, an LSA representative and chair of resolutions, emphasized the importance of office hours and listening to community concerns. “A lot of what we talk about and a lot of our goals on CSG is to be the mass representative of our schools, and office hours provides you the opportunity to hear perspectives other than our own on what is going on in our communities,” Gerstein said.
Research, explained the study allowed researchers to obtain information from students beyond what was shared on their applications. Topics the questions explored includes the diversity of the student population, students’ prior experiences, and expectations for graduate school and future careers. Because many graduate programs require students to complete some research during their studies, the MDES team was pleasantly surprised to learn 86 percent of the firstyear students had experience conducting some form of research at the undergraduate level. “Often we hear a notion of how some students might be unprepared (for graduate school), so we ask about a number of experiences that people have coming in,” Gonzalez said. “Doing research
is one of the big experiences that are critical in preparing students to go to graduate school, so we didn’t expect that number to be so high.” Joslin Musick, a Rackham student studying molecular and integrative physiology, attributed her confidence coming to graduate school to her undergraduate preparation. “I did feel prepared for graduate school,” Musick said. “This could have been a combination of my course load and my research that I had done during my undergraduate years.” The Rackham Institutional Research team also asked students about their career expectations. About 72 percent of surveyed students pursuing a master’s in social sciences reported they wanted to teach after earning their degrees. Seventy-three percent of these students who chose both
teaching and research reported wanting a tenure track position. In comparison, only about 43 percent of surveyed students pursuing their master’s in the physical sciences or engineering reported they wanted to teach after earning their degrees and 46 percent wanted a tenure track position. [twitter:https://twitter. com/laura_schram/ status/1043072757288845314] Gonzalez explains these differences in career expectations between students of the natural sciences and those of the social sciences is most likely related to the nature of these fields and their corresponding job opportunities. “This is probably a reality of the kinds of job markets that our students are expected to go into and the kind of available positions,” Gonzalez said. “So if you think about students
of engineering, for example, and the biological and health sciences, they might have other opportunities in other areas like start-up companies ... where they can go into the private sector.” While natural sciences students have more options to go into the private sector, Gonzalez explains traditionally humanities and social sciences students tend to find more jobs in education. “Social science students, the traditional pathway for a lot of students in these fields is tenure track faculty positions or government,” Gonzalez said. “So I think it kind of aligns with their disciplines and the expectations and realities of those disciplines as well as the markets that are out there after they graduate.” Chen hopes he will have the same impact on his students as his teachers had on him when
he was a young student with a budding interest in chemistry. In 2017, Chen even visited his high school chemistry teacher in Nanjing, China. His former teacher turned 100 years old last year and Chen gave him a mug with a U-M logo as a gift. Chen also came from a family with an academic background, so for him, working for a corporation was just not as attractive as teaching. Currently, researchers are in the process of collecting data for the 2018 MDES survey. Respondents will respond to similar questions while in their second year in graduate school. The Rackham Institutional Research team hopes to glean new information from these students to help future classes. They also hope to reach out to a new group of first-year students after the original group of respondents earn their degrees.
of the Fisk-Vanderbilt Master’sto-PhD Bridge Program. The program helps Vanderbilt University graduate students, specifically underrepresented and minority students, complete their master’s degrees and place them in a position to later acquire a Ph.D. Stroud highlighted some of the measures the program has taken to better suit minority needs, including the need to tailor the graduate program to the students’ needs and career ambitions. Stroud also encouraged students to take part in committees pertaining to minority students and share their thoughts on how the programs can better suit their needs. Providing consistent mentorship and mental health services was also of utmost focus. Despite this, Stroud said the program’s efforts are met with massive obstacles. Stroud noted lack of funding from institutions as a key issue, in addition to problems with the application and acceptance process.
“We have made the most progress in terms of holistic admissions… but we are still pushing back against GREs and numbers,” she said. “And I feel like we even took a bigger step backwards, actually, this last year when we … had no fee for
our graduate application, and now we have a fee … It’s a push all the time.” Stroud also pointed to systemic racism as a persistent issue. “You get frustrated at times opening doors to a place … that’s still not welcoming all the time, and you have to tell them, ‘This is the systemic racism that you
are going to have to encounter,” she said. “Are you going to get treated differently because you are at Fisk? Yes.” The panel also featured Brian Beckford, a presidential postdoctoral fellow at the University who served as the Bridge Program project manager in the Department of Education and Diversity for the American Physical Society in College Park, Maryland. The Bridge Program focuses on increasing the number of physics Ph.Ds awarded to underrepresented minority students at Maryland. Beckford stressed the importance of supporting diversity inclusion programs until academia is more inclusive of minority and underrepresented communities. “These efforts are going to be continued, in my opinion, to be overlooked at times, to be unrewarded, to be under volunteered … and it’s going to fall on a specific group most of the time to continue these efforts,” he said. “Until there
is a larger participation and until access to participating in academy is changed, I think you have to have these programs in place.” Beckford called for the need to focus on sustaining these programs through funding and participation. Beckford specifically highlighted the importance of support from tenured professors when creating one of these programs. “You have to (have) 20 percent at minimum tenured faculty that are willing to be involved,” he said. “If you are smaller than that, I think you are starting with one leg cut off. It’s just going to be new junior faculty. … It’s really hard to get going.” Naomi Wilson, a Ph.D candidate at the University and President of Rackham student government, asked the panel how graduate students can play a role outside of recruitment in assisting minority graduate students. Stroud responded by encouraging a student
mentorship program for minority and underrepresented students and increasing graduate student involvement through activities and workshops meant to educate other students. “You can do professional development type of presentations, you can put abstracts in some places to do workshops, or you can be designing some things … really start brainstorming as to what we want to see and how you can make that happen, and faculty listening to them when they tell you what they want to see and how you can help them make that happen,” she stated. Beckford responded by encouraging graduate student involvement in the admissions process, and requesting review of the graduate program’s professional development. “In part of your annual review… request to have a large component where there is a professional development component or something that is discussed,” he said.
originally founded in 1817. Some of the University’s programs, such as Semester in Detroit, have also been problematic. Companies like General Motors and Quicken Loans have also made efforts to increase their presence in the city. Grigsby asserts problems such as the city’s access to education
are left largely unaddressed while business development like Columbia Street increases. She believes it is cause of concern for native Detroiters, who want to see their city grow and want to make sure Detroiters are not left behind. “Along with the people living in Detroit, I don’t say there’s a
revitalization because they’re only really developing some parts of the city,” Grigsby said. “In some parts of the city, people are having their water shut off because they can’t afford water, or they can’t afford to live where they are or they can’t afford to get the jobs or opportunities they need to succeed. There are
things like that where they’re not trying to improve public services but instead trying to improve the parts of Detroit that they want to make look pretty. Midtown and Downtown are at least fine in that aspect, people are coming to games and promote the city. But you have to make sure the people who
live there are taken care of first in my opinion.” Grigsby suggested hiring workers from Detroit for the new stores in the development. “You could try and get local people involved,” Grigsby said. “If they hire Detroiters, that could at least make a better impact on the city.”
“We have made the most progress in terms of holistic admissions”
Opinion
4A — Wednesday, September 26, 2018
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ALEX KUBIE | COLUMN
Losing my innocence, finding myself
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DANA PIERANGELI | COLUMN
Sick of victim shaming? Yeah, #MeToo
I
t’s been almost a year since the fateful Harvey Weinstein story broke, upending Hollywood and most of the world. It seems like every day people are coming forward with their own tales of sexual harassment. Obviously not every predator has been dealt with, not every assault has been exposed and not every victim has come forth, but we are beginning to recognize this problem and deal with it accordingly. With every #MeToo, we seem to rid ourselves of another sexual predator infesting our movies, offices and even our government. This cleansing of the legislative branch, as well as many other areas of our society, is an encouraging prospect. After this era of silence, we now can rid society of this plague once and for all. Right? Wrong. Just when we thought we wouldn’t have to put up with this anymore, prospective Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh done gets #MeToo’d. Christine Blasey Ford, a Northern California a psychologist and professor of statistics at Palo Alto University, recently came forward claiming Kavanaugh attempted to rape her at a party in high school. Kavanaugh claims it never happened and that he doesn’t even remember the incident detailed, but Ford remains strong in her story. She and the Democrats want an FBI investigation to provide credibility to her story, but Republicans are resisting. Another allegation released in a recent article from The New Yorker reveals Deborah Ramirez, a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s, has recently come forth with a sexual harassment claim from an experience she had while at college. This claim is extremely new and investigations still must be made, but many have backed up her story and Ramirez is also asking for a full FBI investigation. She decided to go public only because she didn’t want others to do it for her. “I didn’t want any of this,” Ramirez said to The New Yorker. “But now I have to speak.” She hoped her story would add credibility to Ford’s claims as well. In the race to get a conservative Supreme Court justice sworn in before the possible turnover during the midterm elections, Kavanaugh is a key player in the Republican agenda, to which these allegations pose a monumental threat. Some are even implying this is all just a political ploy created by Democrats to get rid of a possible conservative judge. The main question these Republicans are asking is
why now? Why did Ford, the first allegation, wait until Kavanaugh was about to be confirmed into the Supreme Court to come forward with her allegations (though there is proof that she told Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., about the issue in July). Even President Donald Trump tweeted “I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!” Here’s the thing: There’s so much complexity in when
How, when and if victims of sexual assault reveal their stories should always be their choice and why victims come forward. After the beginning of the #MeToo movement and women from all different careers and income levels were exposing their abusers, it seemed like the taboos that came with this issue were beginning to dissolve. But there are still so many reasons women do not step forward about sexual assault, or why they do it long after the assault. In response to Trump’s tweet, many are tweeting #WhyIDidntReport, detailing their own experiences with sexual assault and why they were not able to come forward at the time, writing they were too young to be taken seriously, it was a friend or husband, it was a police officer or no one would believe them. This isn’t just an issue with Ford — it’s an issue for thousands of women all over the world. While talking to The Washington Post, Ford personally grappled with what coming forward publicly would mean for her and her family, a common issue for many victims, especially if their predator is someone powerful or wellknown. Eventually, through a series of events that led to her name being exposed against her will, Ford decided it was her duty as a citizen to reveal this disturbing story about a possible Supreme Court justice. Ramirez detailed similar feelings in her interviews. According to the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual
Assault, victims often don’t report sexual assault incidences for a number of reasons: they are afraid of repercussions from the predator, think the police won’t do anything, don’t want their family and friends to find out, are afraid to be attacked as liars, among many other reasons. Sexual assault is a complicated issue, so coming forward about it is naturally just as, if not more, complicated. For those who do decide to come forward, the fear and doubt don’t end there. Often times these victims are shamed and their experiences are minimalized by outsiders. Especially if the perpetrator is a popular, well-liked figure, they are even more likely to receive hate and discrimination because of their experiences. Like many victims, Ford suffered extreme trauma because of this event. She has experienced long-term anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms from this event, as many other survivors face; that is, coming forward can be practically impossible because of all the painful memories it drags up. According to The Washington Post, Ford has been unable to form healthy relationships with men, and her friend, Jim Gensheimer, revealed she resisted buying a house without a second exit in the master bedroom. However, despite her struggles, she has given other women courage to stand up against predators and finally come forth about their experiences, as it did with Ramirez. Ford wasn’t lucky enough to have her complete say in how and when her story was revealed. Though she eventually decided coming forward was crucial in preserving the integrity of our government, her life and the lives of her family will forever be changed because of these events. How, when and if she and any other victims of sexual assault reveal their stories should always be their choice. Throughout these trials, we see much debate about whether Ford and Ramirez’s claims are real and why they are emerging now; yet, rarely are these women being granted the respect they deserve for putting themselves on the line to stand up against corruption in the government. We have gained incredible ground over the past year in listening to women’s stories and respecting their experiences — Ford and Ramirez should be treated no differently. Victims are not always able to come forth about their abuses. But when Dana Pierangeli can be reached at dmpier@umich.edu.
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T
he day I told my mom that I was gay, she cried. The day I told my mom that I was gay, she cried. She wept not because of who I was, but because of what I was losing. “Life is hard enough as it is, and I want things to be as easy as they can be for you.” she said. “I just don’t want you to lose that innocence any earlier than you have to.” I nodded half-heartedly, trying to fully understand what she had meant. After seeing my younger sister diagnosed with cancer at the age of four, my mother had already witnessed first-hand how fragile the world that she had spent years molding for us can be. Thus, she did all that she could to keep that delicate refuge intact. But at the age of 15, my innocence was stolen. It was a gradual exhaustion— a creeping yet steady depletion that grew stronger as the foundation below me began to cave. Each day, as I began to piece together the origins of that pervasive “off” feeling, I would watch as the once-childlike landscape of the world I had rested upon for so long became soiled. My mother was right. Coming to terms with my sexuality also meant I could no longer view life through the narrowed lens carefully crafted for me — for a greater awareness of myself meant a fuller understanding of the world around me. Most of these things were innocuous — things most people don’t even think of. I couldn’t experience the showy, juvenile thrill of holding someone’s hand as I exited the school doors (an essential validation for any true high school relationship). Rather, I sat in a classroom as my basic rights and privileges were assigned at the class “debate of the day.” I didn’t get to spend my time ruminating over how to craft the perfectlyextravagant “promposal” (one that looked like it had come straight from the dashboard of a teenage girl’s Pinterest). Rather, I had to worry if my school principal would permit me to attend prom with my date at all. As a 15-year-old, I had to juggle the responsibilities that most people my age dealt with.
High school in general is a confusing time for everyone. Yet, as someone who was aware of my identity and the additional questions that came along with it, I found myself having to also navigate another world without any map on which to rely. While the realization of this lone perspective became increasingly evident in the years I spent discovering my own identity, it took one unanticipated development that occurred hundreds of miles away from me to truly grasp this reality. It was the last week of April, and the issue of samesex marriage had reached the Supreme Court for the second time in three years (the first being United States v. Windsor, which invalidated the federal ban on such relationships). I anxiously awaited as the audio of the oral argument was released. It was a school night, and I had an exam in my statistics class the following morning. While I should have been spending my night mulling over confidence intervals, or even defiantly ignoring my academic responsibilities in the name of senior year, I instead found myself fixated on the words, the questions, the silence of these nine seemingly God-like figures who held the fate of me and millions of others in their hands. Now 16 years old, I was no constitutional scholar. The front page of the New York Times the next morning was sure to offer a sufficient prediction of what the outcome would be. Yet I needed to hear every word of the case, the way in which each meticulously crafted question was delivered. I yearned for some sense of control of this potentially life-changing decision. Every now and then, as I sat in the confines of my room the soft, yet stern, delivery of the counsel’s voice would be interrupted by a piercing ring from my phone. While I was listening attentively to the case presented, as if I were there in the chambers myself, text messages from friends and classmates would appear on my screen. “Do you think we need to remember the Central Limit Theorem?”, “Coffee before school tomorrow?” or the absolutely original “I’m done studying! It’s not like colleges are gonna take
back my acceptance anyway.” Each message served as a reminder of the vastly different realities we lived in. Two months later, the degree to which these two distinct worlds had diverged fully settled. It was the day after my high school graduation. The weather was perfect, and my friends were headed to the beach to celebrate the commencement of our last summer before college. What should have been a morning of excitement over the accomplishment of one of life’s greatest milestones was instead filled with dread. While no concrete schedule was disclosed, the decision on the Supreme Court’s case on same-sex marriage seemed poised to be released that morning. Wrapped in my covers, unable to remove myself from the comfort and safety of my bed, I frantically opened Twitter, wincing as each new tweet appeared on my feed. To my surprise, rather than finding an influx of messages on the incoming momentous decision, I instead found myself navigating through tweets that were simply “normal.” As my stomach knotted in fear and anticipation, my timeline filled with “we finally did it #Sen15rs” posts and retweeted images of cats. But eventually, those two worlds froze. There, alone on my bed, my life had transformed at the hands of five people. Now, I could one day legally marry the person whom I loved. In my room, an air of change became palpable. However, once I stepped out, that poignant feeling began to melt away. Outside, life proceeded in a seemingly unchanged manner. Most people were not even aware that the decision took place. In that moment, the reality of my position truly hit me. But this time, I didn’t allow myself to be a victim to my situation. While I may have had to worry about things most others did not, it was through being gay I first learned my strength. It has pushed me to find the best qualities in myself and others. Though I thought at 15 years old I had figured out my life’s hardest decision and knew all I needed to know about myself, here I am, five years later, still cautious of many
Alex Kubie can be reached at akubie@umich.edu.
REED ROSENBACHER | COLUMN
Boycott Israel? Why not boycott China and Western Europe?
E
arly last week, Prof. CheneyLippold of the American Culture department sent an email to student Abigail Ingber letting Ingber know that for political reasons he did not feel comfortable writing Ingber a letter of recommendation to study abroad in Israel. Cheney-Lippold cited an “academic boycott against Israel in support of Palestinians living in Palestine” as his reason for “rescinding” the letter. This decision has been nothing but controversial among students and the broader University community. CheneyLippold’s decision opens up a wide variety of questions about Israel, ethical responsibility and anti-Semitism. At a fundamental level, the refusal to write the letter comes from an admirable place, as Cheney-Lippold acted upon his beliefs. For Cheney-Lippold, studying abroad and traveling to Israel upholds and reifies a system that oppresses Palestinians living in Palestine. The most common and intuitive reaction among supporters of Israel is to bring these beliefs about the unethicality of the state of Israel into question, but there is a larger and more important theoretical question at hand about the nature of American discourse on Israel. For the sake of argumentation, let’s assume the views of Cheney-Lippold and other boycotters on the state of Israel are true. The official Boycott Divest Sanctions movement website says study abroad programs are a form of “propaganda … designed to give international students a ‘positive experience’ of Israel, whitewashing its occupation and denial of Palestinian rights.” The BDS website also clearly outlines United Nations definitions of human rights violations ast the main standards for academically boycotting Israel. I would be shocked if any study abroad program was not designed to give students a “positive experience” of the country. Let’s also assume these are not just acceptable standards for denying to write a letter of recommendation but actually ethical guidelines. From this, should a professor in France deny a student’s request to study at the University of Michigan because the U.N. deemed Detroit water shutoffs
to be a human rights violation? Should the French professor deny the request to study here because the professor believes the United States is founded upon a history of slavery and genocide? Isn’t one’s intuition to point out there are many people in the U.S. who have committed their lives to fighting against the many problems in our country? To say any visit to America necessarily supports these violent histories is not only reductive of American history but silences people in the U.S. who are working against these forces of domination. Maybe you aren’t sold on the example of the French professor and the student who wants to study at the University. Currently in China, nearly a million people of the Uighur ethnic minority are being unlawfully detained and sent to “brainwashing” internment camps. The Chinese government refuses to give explanations for these actions and often denies the accounts of Uighurs who have escaped or been released from the internment camps. China is running an intentional campaign to arrest and eradicate an ethnic minority yet no one in the United States is talking about it or protesting against it. The Chinese government has also been criticized for its rampant use of censorship and general free speech suppression. Would Cheney-Lippold deny a student’s request to study in China? I doubt it. Furthermore, I would be hardpressed to learn of a country that does not have a history soaked in blood. England, Germany, France and Spain, the most common destinations for study abroad have histories of colonialism and/or genocide that have deep lasting negative effects on the world today. Why don’t we hear professors reject other nations on the basis of ethical premises? What is the theoretical threshold that makes a country so unethical that a professor shouldn’t support a student studying there? I would imagine a supporter
of the boycott would respond to this point by highlighting Israel-Palestine is an undeniably more vibrant issue in American political discourse than human rights violations in China or even the ongoing violence caused by western Europe’s colonial history. In a non-academic context, I think this argument is compelling: There are a limited number of political issues worldwide of which someone can keep track and at some level political prioritization is arbitrary and/or dictated by media. However, I don’t think Cheney-Lippold, an academic in the humanities, should be able to access this argument. Academics and humanitarians are the people who should be thinking through political orientations on larger, more theoretically consistent levels. If there is anyone who should theorize about the ethicality of political orientations and the ways that media narratives shape our understanding of those issues, it is academics like CheneyLippold. My contempt for CheneyLippold’s decision does not stem from Cheney-Lippold’s political views on Israel or the fact that he was willing to act. In fact, I respect Cheney-Lippold for boldly standing up for what he believes. What frustrates me is CheneyLippold did not place his decision within a larger framework for understanding which countries have acceptable enough politics and which ones do not. For Cheney-Lippold and fellow boycotters, I request a thorough explanation of what makes a country worthy of academic boycotting and which countries do or do not meet those standards, because without an explanation, I can’t help but wonder if there is a double standard for Israel.
Reed Rosenbacher can be reached at rrosen@umich.edu.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
ALBUM REVIEW
Wednesday, September 26, 2018 — 5A
DAILY ENTERTAINMENT COLUMN
The Cat is back & brings a warped reality with it was released on Sept. 14, yet it seems that the origin of the album Daily Music Editor itself, its essence, was conceived during a sleepover between the The album cover that graces two boys many years prior. A night the front of The Cat Breathes the that started with rudimentary Fresh Water is a barely discernible piano banging and what can only cacophony of red. “The Cat,” it be imagined as a pretty impressive declares in messy scrawl in the falsetto courtesy of Stewart upper left-hand corner, before himself, and ended with the hazy getting cut off by what can only be emergence of what would later described as a vague approximation become The Cat. of a human face. The Cat Breathes On either side, the Fresh Water two stars hang at a grows from this lopsided angle and a initial youthful miniature cat hides exuberance. It’s in the empty circle apparent from of the left eye. Its those very first whiskers are askew; few lines of “The The Cat its solemn eyes are Cat Is Back.” pinpricks. “Yo! Homeslice The album cover is akin to G,” a disembodied voice calls, almost every single bored doodle and is immediately answered by you would see if you picked up any makeshift beatboxing, which then high schooler’s Algebra notebook falls into a beat that punctuates the and flipped through the pages. It vocals with an intensity that belies is totally, completely and utterly the actual words themselves. “The offhand, yet its roughness beguiles cat is back, and he’s ready to rap” is the casual observer rather than repeated, climbing pitch each time repels. After all — especially in until it reaches a fervor that makes music — so rarely are you allowed your eyes water. to see art displayed like this: Musical experimentation for Stripped down to its essence, the musical experimentation’s sake, seemingly meaningless byproduct The Cat finds a way to layer and of an errant hand and a wandering stitch together a variety of sounds, mind. The Cat’s convoluted lines textures and genres in the span call to you. Intrigued, you can only of 35 minutes. The rolling beat wonder who the cat in question is, that drives “Give This Cat A Slap” how they can even breathe water forward is interspersed with in the first place and hit play on the ad-libs as abrupt and absurd as first song. It is titled “The Cat Is Playboi Carti’s. The rage-infused Back,” and it announces its return electronic/rap hybrid of “Summer with a buoyant: Sweat Mix” is a reminder (albeit “Yo! Homeslice G.” a more subtle reminder) of Death The Cat Breathes the Fresh Water Grips’s particular brand of is the third album to come out of industrial hip-hop fusion. “Red The Cat, a musical duo consisting Flannel”’s raspy guitar hum is of former Daily Arts writer and every Alex G song on steroids. Ford senior Will Stewart and The album isn’t cohesive; it Dylan Trupiano, a senior at George isn’t meant to be, yet, even so, the Washington University. The album soft children’s choir sequence SHIMA SADAGHIYANI
The Cat Beathes the Fresh Water
sampled at the end of the “The Cat Is Back” bleeds into the first few seconds of “Give This Cat A Slap,” and the acoustic trepidation of “Red Flannel” is picked back up again during “King of Downriver” and “Holding Me Back.” It holds together all the same. Maybe it’s because of the history behind The Cat, years of friendship between band partners acting like a glue of sorts, or maybe it’s because of the album’s own constant unpredictability. You genuinely don’t know what to expect from song to song on The Cat Breathes the Fresh Water, so you come to expect it all. Above everything else, The Cat has created something that is genuinely fun to listen to. The album’s individual components — the mournful, autotuned tirade against a past lover in “That’s Not My Phone Number” (“How did you get this phone number, baby / That’s not my phone number,” the narrator croons, and the audience cries with him), the harmonious dance between deep electric guitar riffs and what could either be Bauhaus-esque electronica or a really out of tune piccolo towards the end of “Don’t Burn My Kids Shorts” — are each one more creative than the last. You can’t help but smile at the dramatically pitched vocals, at the unceremonious changes in rhythm, at every weird and wonderful aspect. The Cat stretches their bona fide sincerity and musical expertise into grotesque shapes on The Cat Breathes the Fresh Water. What we know as music is warped into absurdity; the resulting carnival funhouse mirror maze reflects back a reality that is both familiar and not, colorful and vibrant in a way that compels you to just sit down and just soak it all in.
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
COMMUNITY CULTURE REVIEW
MGM
‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ unites live music & film ALLIE TAYLOR Daily Arts Writer
It’s an undeniable epic: Stanley Kubrick’s classic film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which turned 50 years old this past Apr., is known to be one of the most wildly influential films of all time. Pioneering visual effects, bold aesthetic decisions — including scene length, dialogue, music (or lack thereof ) — and abstract plot classify the film as contemporary art. By itself, it can be an intense moviewatching experience, given its
length ( just shy of three hours) and unconventional pace. But add a live orchestra, and you’ve got a new movie-watching experience entirely. To kick off their 140th season, the University Musical Society presented “2001: A Space Odyssey” in conjunction with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Though Hill Auditorium seats over 3,500 people, community members began lining up for the free event long before 8:00 p.m., and by the time it began, nearly every seat in the house was full. The music featured in — and now cognitively inseparable from — “2001: A
Space Odyssey” is almost as famous as the movie itself; the opening piece, a theme from the Richard Strauss tone poem “Also sprach Zarathustra,” begins with those iconic three notes — the root, the perfect fifth and the octave — (you know the three), followed by those next two notes, the dramatic half step between the minor and major third. It’s one of the most famous musical phrases of all time. I’ve heard it a million times before, and this was not my first time seeing the film. Yet there was something different about hearing the notes from a full, live orchestra, performing
WARNER BROS.
The Peril of Prequels This morning saw the release of the third and final trailer for the upcoming J.K. Rowling film “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald,” and with it the reminder that, oh right, there’s a “Harry Potter” prequel series going on right now. Beginning in 2016 with “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” J.K. Rowling, along with director David Yates, began telling what they claim will be a five-part story exploring the life of Newt Scamander and a young Albus Dumbledore, the fight against archvillain Grindelwald and a great wizarding war that appears to bear a striking resemblance to another wizarding war we witnessed not that long ago. Before this series not-so-subtly revealed itself as a full-blown Harry Potter prequel, it was ostensibly supposed to follow the adventures of Newt as he traveled around the world collecting creatures to study for the eponymous book for which the first film was named. That seems to have largely fallen by the wayside in favor of the story surrounding Dumbledore and Grindelwald, arguably one of the larger portions of backstory given to us in the original Potter text. While possibly an interesting story in its own right, how can it ever compare against the backdrop of the boy wizard saga that taught a generation to love reading? For many creators, prequels appear like a safe way to move forward with more of a beloved story without actually having to do so. It’s a way to give you more Star Wars without having to write past the natural ending, and a way to give the world more Harry Potter without ruining Harry’s story. Prequels, at first glance, seem like a good bet but they inevitably hurt a franchise more than they help it.
Harry Potter, in particular, feels like a franchise that should be allowed to die while it’s still alive. For a time, J.K. Rowling herself seemed content to let Harry lie low and relax, but in recent years, she has become far more willing to go back to the proverbial well and (at the risk of mixing metaphors) milk the cow for all its worth. Like Tolkien and Lucas before her,
Rowling simply can’t resist the pull that her creations have over herself and over the wallets of the world. First came “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” a play that received rave reviews for the production but came under intense scrutiny by fans for its confusing narrative, shock value twists and seeming disregard for the previously established canon. This newest trailer for “Grindelwald” leans even more heavily into previously established Potter lore, name-dropping Voldemort’s snake Nagini, seen here as a young woman one presumes will eventually become trapped in the form of a snake in a twist straight out of an Animorphs book. This development is another classic example of the plight that prequel stories often have to contend with. In the original series, Nagini was merely a creepy pet of a creepy villain. Now, she’s a seemingly central character,
hinting that Voldemort himself will eventually appear. How are we supposed to be afraid of Johnny Depp’s Grindelwald when we know that the real ultimate evil, the one who will one day murder Grindelwald himself, is just waiting slightly offstage? Such is the problem with prequels. For the audience to maintain interest the stakes have to be upped, but if the stakes are upped too high, it can undercut the narrative of the original story that the prequel is building towards. Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” trilogy fell straight into this trap. Instead of trying to make something different from “Lord of the Rings,” Jackson tried to make “Lord of the Rings” again. At times in this new “Fantastic Beasts” trailer, one can’t help but wonder if Rowling is heading down the same dark path. Surely, this is all leading to a scene two or three films from now where Dumbledore or Newt face off against Grindelwald in a wand-waving feat of fantasy filled with colors and explosions and just enough orchestration to stir the heartstrings of geeks everywhere. Will that be enough to satisfy the demands of the fanbase that grew up with Harry but who might now have kids of their own? Will it be enough to satisfy the bottom line needs of Warner Bros.? It seems unlikely. Just a few years ago, most people thought Harry’s story was over. Who doesn’t now think it will be only a matter of time before we see Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint and all the rest back on the big screen? With a world as expansive as Harry’s, in today’s day and age of IP recognition against all else, it’s a wonder the original films were allowed to end at all. The Boy Who Lived indeed. Perhaps one day soon we’ll be wishing that he hadn’t.
right under a huge projection of the movie. The grandiosity of Hill added a sense of greatness to the event — even from the balcony, I could feel the energy of the hall, the audience and the cohesion of art in front of me. I’d never seen a movie and a live orchestra playing simultaneously, and as I sat watching it among the 3,500 other people around me while the DSO played, I began to notice a strong similarity between the experience I was having and that of going to the opera. I don’t know exactly what it was that triggered the association, but watching the overarching story happening on the screen, with the orchestra and conductor on stage, reminded me of what it feels like to sit in the audience of a show like “La Bohème” or “Cosi Fan Tutti.” It’s an experience where you can see the instruments in front of you producing the sound that completes what you are visually intaking; it is an experience that is well-rounded — one that you can almost feel throughout your entire body, with all of your senses engaged in a way that doesn’t happen every day. This also got me thinking: While the music used in “2001: A Space Odyssey” was not written specifically for the movie, most films have scores that are commissioned for the sole purpose of complementing the movie at hand. Today, a few composers who are known for film scoring are household names: John Williams, Hans
Zimmer and Alexandre Desplat, to name a few. The mental association of melodies with their respective movies — such as the “Indiana Jones” theme, the “Star Wars” theme, the “Pirates of the Caribbean” theme — is unbreakable. They are as essential to the movie as the plot itself. So why is movie music generally not taken as seriously as, say, the music written for operas by Mozart, Puccini and Verdi? In the Academy Awardwinning 1984 film “Amadeus,” Mozart is shown composing and conducting operas he has written — operas that are now considered some of the greatest and most famous of all time, such as “The Marriage of Figaro,” “The Magic Flute” and “Don Giovanni.” When his performances finish and the operas come to a close, we see the audience erupt in to applause and praise. He is portrayed as a rock star of his time. The stories that these operas ref lect, however, already existed in some capacity before they were made into an opera by Mozart. “The Marriage of Figaro” was first a play, “The Magic Flute” is based on Viennese literature and “Don Giovanni” tells the much-performed story of Don Juan. But it is when Mozart tells these stories through music that they become something else entirely, evoking emotion in audiences that is only possible through music. There are fundamental differences between an opera,
where the entire production is done through music, and a film, where the music is usually not the absolute focus, but the two may not be as contrasting as we might think. Rightly so, operas and films are not overtly considered to be competing art forms, as they embody quite different characteristics and require distinct preparation, pre-production work and post-production work. But as I sat watching “2001: A Space Odyssey” with the orchestra playing right there, I realized that, although the evolution of entertainment is often examined through a technological lens — beginning with early forms of radio and moving through the subsequent decades from there — it is worth considering the commonalities between the viewing experience of an opera and that of a movie. Maybe having a live orchestra with a film screening will become more common and accessible; maybe audiences will like having a special, extravagant movie-going experience that parallels that of going to the opera, realizing it combines the excitement of seeing a movie with the exhilarating nature of seeing live performers. Maybe something like this will be the new iPic. Who knows. But either way, seeing “2001: A Space Odyssey” in this way completely transformed my experience watching the film, listening to the music live and understanding the marriage between the two.
IAN HARRIS
Arts
6A — Wednesday, September 26, 2018
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
NO FILTER
TV REVIEW
I love staircases ROBERT MANSUETTI Daily Arts Writer
NETFLIX
‘Maniac’ doesn’t meet expectations SAYAN GHOSH Daily Arts Writer
Filmmaker Cary Fukunaga was recently announced as the next director to helm the “Bond” franchise. A daring, creative artist with an incredible track record (including the acclaimed first season of “True Detective” and Sundance darling “Beasts of No Nation”), Fukunaga uses his artistic genius to great effect in Netflix’s “Maniac.” Despite a massive budget and star-studded cast, however, the series offers little of note. “Maniac” takes place in futuristic New York, one where capitalism is taken to an untenable extreme. Owen Mulgrim (Jonah Hill, “The Lego Batman Movie”) is a rather depressed-looking heir of an industrialist family, forced to testify in the trial of one of his brothers while suffering from schizophrenic hallucinations. Meanwhile, Annie (Emma Stone,
“Battle of the Sexes”) is a fellow whose entire existences are New Yorker and the pair cross dedicated to pestering you about paths in a drug study conducted products as well as services that by a foreboding pharmaceutical provide replacement husbands company. for widows. Not much else happens in But beyond the pretty visuals, the premiere. At the end of the the pilot’s pacing is depressingly episode, I still have no idea slow. Combined with the what the personalities of the gloomy portrayal of the city, characters are and the 40-minute the nature of the running time world they live in. feels more like Sure, everything an hour. The Netflix is very pleasing to prologue wastes look at. This version Justin Theroux of New York is dark (“The Leftovers”) and brooding (as almost every with a dreary narration of dross version of the future seems to be). about amoebas and the big bang. The old computers contribute Unfortunately, Hill’s acting also to a “vaporwave” atmosphere. contributes to the glacial pace. The pharmaceutical company, He stays on more or less the headed by two Japanese doctors same note throughout the entire played by Sonoya Mizuno episode. He’s not emulating (“Crazy Rich Asians”) and Rome the stoic melancholy of Ryan Kanda (“The Informant”), is Gosling in “Drive,” but rather a sleek and minimalistic, the flat sadness, a single monotone familiar intersection of analog expression glued onto his face. and digital. The city is filled Even though Owen faces a series with services that make Uber of disturbing hallucinations, and Doordash seem completely including a recurring fictional primitive; here, you’ll find people brother who tells him to watch
‘Maniac’
out for a “contact” who will help him in his quest to save the world, Hill’s acting never lets the viewer see beyond the surface of Owen’s psyche. Meanwhile, Stone has little to do during the pilot beyond popping up here and there to encourage Owen’s delusions, but her acting is miles more vibrant and compelling. The few bright spots of the episode are taken up by the other characters, including Owen’s father Porter (Gabriel Byrne, “Hereditary”) and other members of the WASP-y, brash Milgrim clan. Hopefully, “Maniac” speeds up and delves deeper into the inner workings of the pharmaceutical trial where Owen and Annie meet. The world the pilot sets up is intriguing in its own right, especially in its depictions of the gig economy on steroids, and there is potential to be explored. However, if the pilot’s issues are not resolved, there is little chance that the series develops into more than an utter borefest.
FILM NOTEBOOK
Riding the New Wave: A conclusion STEPHEN SATARINO Daily Arts Writer
My summer column “Riding the New Wave” began with a bit of a tongue-in-cheek introduction alluding to the dry and predictable intro-to-film-study watchlist that a student would be given in any film school anywhere (probably, I didn’t actually do very much research on that part). I think any angst I had about those sorts of unsurprising required viewings came from a long-held belief that there should be room in the arts for a more nuanced discussion on what it means to view a “classic,” and what the goal of those 90-or-so minutes might be. Because a lot of the time, no matter how much of a pillar of cinema — no matter how influential, inspiring or affecting — the film may be, it just might be a bit boring, a slow watch in the eyes of the stimulation-seeking modern viewer. At that point the divide between those who watch for nothing more than entertainment, and those who think of themselves as champions of “high-art” begins to rear its ugly face. I think locking someone into one side of that divide is terrible, and the column was my attempt to begin to bridge the gap, diving into the New-Wave backcatalogue to try and find a selection of films that might satiate those on both ends of the spectrum. A starting point for those who want to watch something with some historical weight but might not have the cinematic stamina to make it through “Roshomon.” (As an aside, I made a few namedropping remarks like this in the other bookend of this series that didn’t sit well with a reader. I think the criticism of my criticism of criticism pushed the column to be more review-like and semiacademic, which wasn’t what I necessarily wanted on the outset. I had hoped to make it a little looser and more readable, but I guess receiving diminutive feedback is the price you pay). Now, that was the goal, not necessarily the execution.
I think there are two central flaws to the premise I just laid out. One being that, though I tried my best, I am not immune to my own preference, meaning I just plain didn’t like some of the movies that I watched, no matter how cinematically important they proport to be. I think, had I brought along with me a team of similarly motivated writers into the depths of the New Wave, we together would have been able to compile a more diverse list of films that can both hang with the “Casablanca”s of the world and manage to entertain in their own right. Specifically looking back at the series, I think the genres that Godard operates in just don’t excite me like they might someone else, making my hot-“Breathless”takes worthless. The other central flaw was the lack of representation. I ended up watching around a dozen midcentury French films over the summer, which just isn’t enough to fully put a finger to the pulse of the movement. This issue would have had a similar solution, enlisting some other writers to watch and critique with me, but this was supposed to result in a column, so that just wasn’t going to happen. However, I don’t want to spend this entire conclusion on the pitfalls of “Riding the New Wave” — at some point I need to start talking about the films. So, without further ado, let’s
begin with this fated fun and educational French film list. Clocking in at number one (one through three really) is the work of director Eric Rhomer. Rhomer made a series of six films in the late ’60s and early ’70s called “Rhomer’s Six Moral Tales,” and I watched the later half of the sextet for the fifth installment in the series. I think Rhomer’s films might be the best starting point for anyone looking to dip their toes in the New Wave, because they are very recognizable character studies that deal with somewhat flawed and adrift protagonists. The interpersonal dramas he places on screen have a lot of familiar and accessible elements that don’t lose anything over time. They’re also just wonderfully shot and paced (I think “Claire’s Knee” might be a five star film), and watching one after another has a cool effect, since Rhomer reuses the same basic story beats in each one — all of the moral tales are, in some way, about a man who drifts away from a love, only to return in the end. The work of the two Left-Bank group directors that I watched would probably slot next in line. The Left-Bank group was a collection of directors who were separate from the original “Cahiers du Cinema,” the filmmakers who all got their start as critics at the same magazine. I wrote more about the similarities and differences in
the sixth article of this column. The Left-Bank films I watched, “Cleo from Five to Seven” and “Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” are fairly different, but they noticeably set themselves apart from the “Cahiers” films. “Cleo” and “Umbrellas” seem more attuned to sensitivity than the works of Godard and Truffuat, the two leading Cahiers. The LeftBank films deal with less violence and criminality and end up feeling a lot lighter in general. It feels strange placing them so low on my personal totem pole, but I just don’t think “Breathless” and “Jules and Jim” really hold up. They’re movies that have plenty of worth if viewing them in a specifically academic setting, but for the purposes of this column, I don’t think they’re the way to go. I hope in some strange way my previous eight-thousand disembodied words on classic French film has guided you towards a life of well-rounded cinema taste and appreciation. I hope that I haven’t dissuaded you from enjoying Godard or hating Rhomer — as it turns out, creating a list of films that is supposed to work for everyone is something I can’t do, because I am not everyone. Nonetheless, there is so much more past this column to discover and explore, and I would feel accomplished if I had motivated you to continue in even the smallest of ways.
CRITERION
Freshman year, I lived on the eighth floor of South Quad, in the room closest to the elevator. When I say closest to the elevator, I mean legitimately right by it. No drab hallway standing in between the elevator and my door. If I was taking big strides, I could get to my door in five steps and fewer seconds. I could open and close my door faster than the elevator could do. If my roommates were particularly quiet any given evening, I could hear many a muffled “GOING DOWN” while dozing off. We had no neighbors, or perhaps we had the most, as that elevator room hosted more people over those two semesters than any cramped double ever could. The two elevators were, initially, my friends. They lifted a bin full of all my crap for move-in up more stories than I ever could, and quickly to boot. On long, raucous nights, they offered me a rectangular chamber of reflection before I unskillfully climbed then crashed into my bunk bed. They made the wait for pizza or wings or cookies a bit more bearable. The left elevator was inclined to break down, however, and I grew to fear it. Leaving for class one day and seeing a repairman lying prone on the floor, flashlight in hand, with cries for rescue in the distance didn’t help, either. There was a rare chance for one or the other or both to be caked with vomit, random expelled libations and burritos from the night before. And what could be a meditative sanctuary when alone was transformed into a playground for social anxiety when flanked by people on all sides. There isn’t any specific day when it started, but not too long into my college career I tried to take the stairs as much as possible. All eight flights of them. “It’s exercise,” I chastised my sluggish self. That usually got me up and climbing after eating too big a helping of vanilla soft serve with my signature Fruity Pebbles garnish, or halfway through days with long breaks between classes and short walks. Yet I still tried to opt for the stairs on exhausting days, days where I rode multiple buses and walked across multiple diags and sat endlessly in multiple classrooms. Maybe it was the possibility of saying hello to fellow 8th Huber residents because the most convenient staircase gave me a considerably longer path to my room than the elevator. Maybe it was the thought of what I would
cinematographically look like dancing up the stairs from a static, exterior lens, as the eight windows only afforded glimpses of my gallivanting. Maybe what kept me stair-stepping was the bliss of stomping along synchronously to the beat of Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out.” A lot of stairways on campus are targets of ire, but I think they deserve better. (Except for any set of stairs in Mason Hall, which are all congested and clammy and as dreadful as the Math 116 class I had in that silly building). A staircase presents its own special experience: Walking up to the 4th floor of the MLB is an odyssey of lighting and varying stair width, the many floors of Haven Hall have a certain medieval bell tower-esque whimsy to them, the twisting stairs tucked in the side of the Union (may she rest in peace) allow for an interior appreciation of its ivy-covered architecture, Hatcher’s dueling grand staircases brace you for the studious battle ahead. A ride on an elevator is fundamentally the same now as it was 160 years ago when Elisha Otis was still farting around. Stairs work our minds as much as they work our bodies by giving us a steadfast stage for contemplation and expression. They have a greater ability to move than their mechanical rivals, despite being set in stone. They provide a lush canvas as an artistic medium, from their tangible aesthetic flourishes to their ability to frame in film. Take “Inception,” a film whose lauded special effects could easily visualize the impossible Penrose stairs but could only make a scene in an elevator exciting through the addition of zero gravity. M. C. Escher might have been less of a household name if he decided to sketch endless elevators. I’m not advocating for some sort of crusade against elevators — “Cut the Cables of Oppression!” — all I’m saying is that staircases have been here before elevators and will probably be here after. Stairs still remain more practical and important and ask your local fire marshal if you’re not convinced. You could ride the same elevator for a lifetime and have only a tiny fraction of the distinct experiences walking up the stairs would grant you. I could escape into the stairwell of that first dorm of mine and leave my mom a voicemail telling her how much I love her and appreciate her after watching “Lady Bird” and noticing my family and the McPhersons have the same cherry red “You are special today” plate. I don’t think I could’ve spit out the same sentiment on a quick, crowded elevator ride.
Release Date: Wednesday, September 26, 2018
Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
ACROSS 1 Muslim pilgrimage 5 Made docile 10 Valley with a Wine Train 14 Melville’s “Typee” sequel 15 Limber 16 Malicious 17 Bandit band 18 Jackrabbits, e.g. 19 Minimum __ 20 *Niacin and riboflavin 23 7UP competitor since 1961 25 Harbinger 28 *Twenty Questions question 29 “I could be wrong” 33 Knocks firmly 34 Pseudonym 35 Part of LACMA 36 *Earth, Wind & Fire hit album whose title means “everything considered” 38 “Nothing to shout about” 39 Some llama herders 41 Nuclear reactor component 42 Ceylon, now 43 *Fighter pilot’s sensation 45 Kikkoman sauces 46 Medical lab specimen 47 *Bravura performance reaction, briefly 51 Copies 54 Pogo stick sound 55 Pac-12 team since 2011 59 Mule team beam 60 The way we word 61 Snapper rival 62 Baaing mas 63 Domingo, for one 64 Whack DOWN 1 Ungenerous sort 2 Physicians’ gp. 3 Trevor’s predecessor on “The Daily Show”
4 Women’s sportswear 5 South Seas island 6 Striped quartz 7 Actress Sorvino 8 Grade sch. level 9 Lucie’s dad 10 Rather and Cronkite 11 Gardner of the silver screen 12 Sty denizen 13 Tavern offering 21 Vitality 22 Prestigious prize 23 They’re not selfish 24 The Supremes, e.g. 26 Captivates 27 What the ruthless show 28 Gets a present ready to present 29 Exodus sustenance 30 “That’s a shame” 31 Fashion initials 32 Giggle 34 Reactive criticism 36 Salt’s “Halt!” 37 “Hamilton” creator __-Manuel Miranda
40 Once-banned James Joyce novel 41 Weak excuses 43 __ snap 44 Mariner’s hazard 46 Winning exclamation aptly arranged and spelled by the standalone letters in the answers to starred clues
48 Adjoin 49 Bridge site 50 Primatologist Fossey 51 Pro vote 52 Comics punch sound 53 Scrape (out) 56 Little kid 57 Historical period 58 Cry out loud
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
By Ed Sessa ©2018 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
09/26/18
09/26/18
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
MEN’S SOCCER
Wolverines top Buckeyes in dominant fashion, 3-1 CONNOR BRENNAN Daily Sports Writer
The field was opening up for the Michigan men’s soccer team. Senior midfielder Ivo Cerda’s inspired run from the center line into the box culminated in a pass played into the feet of sophomore forward Umar Farouk Osman. Osman skillfully held up the ball and nudged it to Jack Hallahan standing right on the edge of the 18-yard line. The junior attacker chopped the ball back onto his right foot and unleashed a curling shot into the top corner. “I knew that a guy was behind me,” Hallahan said. “I saw his shadow come in, so I chopped it backwards knowing I would beat him — knowing the keeper was set off guard, so I had a go and got lucky.” If the Wolverines (2-0-1 Big Ten, 6-1-1 overall) sat comfortably before, now with a three-goal advantage, they switched into cruise control against Ohio State (0-2-1,1-6-2). So much so that the Buckeyes were able to pull one back in the dying embers of the game, making the final scoreline 3-1, in Michigan’s favor. The Wolverines maintained control throughout. Senior defender Daniel Mukuna headed home a corner kick from Hallahan in the 21st minute to open the scoring. Prior to the end of the first half though, Mother Nature made her presence known. The teams had to endure a 50-minute lightning delay before they could finish out the remaining 4:18. “We waited,” said Michigan coach Chaka Daley. “But as soon
as we figured out the timing, we just kinda went back in and said, ‘Hey, we don’t want to have a lull after the long break. Let’s get out and focus on getting things right.’ Passing the ball properly and getting back to competing as well as we did in the first half.” Half-time was shortened to just two minutes and when play resumed, the Wolverines picked up right where they left off. Ohio State’s occasional spell of possession was cut out by the Michigan backline while the few chances the Buckeyes had early in the second half amounted to nothing. At the same time, the Wolverines hung onto their onegoal lead and would’ve liked insurance. With frustrations mounting on both sides, the game became somewhat chippy. Players on each team received yellow cards and free kicks became frequent. The rising pressure was alleviated for Michigan in the 74th minute when Osman capitalized on a rebound opportunity, neatly placing it past the Ohio State goalkeeper. The remaining 15 minutes, though eventful, proved fairly easy for the Wolverines, who now turn their attention to the meat of their schedule against powerhouses No. 2 Indiana, No. 5 Michigan State and No. 20 Notre Dame. “Not every game is going to be comfortable late in the game at 3-0, so we want to make sure we have good habits and continue to build,” Daley said. “The strength of our schedule is to come — the challenge is in front of us. We’re up for it, there is no question about it.”
“We’re up for it, there is no question about it.”
Sports
Wednesday, September 26, 2018 — 7A
Back from heart surgery, Beilein looks for normalcy ETHAN SEARS
Daily Sports Writer
John Beilein nearly didn’t get a stress test. He skipped it the first time — he had to go recruiting. He didn’t want to get on the treadmill, and he certainly didn’t intend to come back to the doctor’s office after leaving that day. “Sort of the way I live my life,” Beilein said. “I was in the middle of it, and I had the first part of my physical — I always do it at the end of the year — and they said, ‘Well, it’s time for the stress test.’ I said, ‘Well, I only got 30 minutes, I gotta catch a flight.’ “So they said, ‘Well, let’s do it later,’ and I actually wasn’t going to do it.” He did, and the test showed he needed a double-bypass surgery. He underwent a successful procedure on Aug. 6, missing the Michigan men’s basketball team’s trip to Spain as a result.
So, when Beilein sat at the podium Tuesday afternoon, let out a smile and said, “It’s great to be here,” it felt like he meant it. He joked about spending more time on Twitter, not participating in a simulated airplane crash, getting a lot of reading done, watching the Cardinals get hot. Still, he seems pretty active for someone who had his chest opened up less than two months ago. Beilein said he was walking five miles a day with his wife, Kathleen, within a week of the surgery. He’s back in practices and plans to coach in both the Wolverines’ closed-door scrimmage at Toledo on Oct. 27 and their exhibition game against Northwood on Nov. 2. Ditto for the Nov. 6 season
opener. When the team returned from Spain, Beilein eased back into things. He met with the five-man freshman class on the first day back, according to junior point guard Zavier Simpson, then the rest of the team a couple days later. “He actually wasn’t vocal at all, he was kinda just saying a few things and stepping out of the way,” Simpson said. “Not yelling, maybe one or two sentences, stepping out of the way.” For five brief minutes, when Beilein was told he needed surgery, there was a discussion as to whether or not the team should go to Spain at all. Beilein was all for it, installing assistant coach Saddi Washington as the interim head coach and sending his team on its way.
“I said, ‘I only got 30 minutes, I gotta catch a flight.’ ”
EVAN AARON/Daily
Michigan coach John Beilein has returned to coaching after going through double-bypass surgery on Aug. 6.
Michigan ended up going 1-2 in three games against European competition, a worse result against far better competition than in Italy in 2014. Though Beilein missed time with the freshmen, it hasn’t been hard to catch up. He’s largely stayed in Ann Arbor instead of traveling to recruit and can spend four instead of two hours per week with the players. Right now, ask around and the only tangible basketball impact of Beilein’s surgery is that he has taken a backseat in practices, unable to yell the way he might normally. The assistant coaches have picked up the slack in his stead. “I feel like they all have a piece of their own pie — piece of the pizza,” Simpson said. “I feel like (DeAndre Haynes) is more of a player type of coach, that comes to you and compliments you or tells you things you could have done individually. And (Luke Yaklich) is extremely loud. He is extremely loud. Yak is definitely extremely loud. “And Saddi’s just more the kind of mature one, that wraps up and summarizes everything. He’s the one who — he’s the one who’s kind of like the Coach B when Coach B isn’t there. He kind of takes over, he does — he’s not really a yeller, he’s not quiet. He’s just saying things to regroup us as a team, he’s just probably the most vocal one.” Added Beilein: “I just stand in the middle and sort of talk, probably the way a lot of coaches do coach.” By the time Beilein finished taking questions — having moved on from his own health to the progress of sophomore shooting guard Jordan Poole and comparing freshman forward Ignas Brazdeikis to Scott Ungerer, a player he coached at Richmond from 1998-2002 — you could almost mistake it for a normal circumstance. If Beilein has his way, come Nov. 6, it will be just that.
One play away, McCaffrey stays prepared In fifth season, Marshall FOOTBALL
ETHAN WOLFE Daily Sports Writer
Football giveth and football taketh away. Dylan McCaffrey is the newest member of the Michigan football team to learn the maxim. The redshirt freshman quarterback entered Saturday’s game against Nebraska after the Wolverines’ starters built up a 46-3 lead late into the third quarter. On his first play, McCaffrey dropped back, side-stepped and saw a path down the left sideline to run with abandon. McCaffrey saw nothing but green in front of him, even adding distance between himself and the defensive back in pursuit into the endzone. But a holding penalty on redshirt freshman receiver Oliver Martin that sealed the edge for McCaffrey erased the most electric play of his young career.
“In all honesty, I didn’t think it was holding at all, so I just told him that,” McCaffrey said. “He agreed, but he was bummed like anyone would be.” McCaffrey wasted no time making up for it. He threw two 15-yard throws on rollouts and had a 17-yard scamper on that same drive to set up a field goal. The next drive, he dropped a dime into the hands of freshman wide receiver Ronnie Bell for a 56-yard score. It’s give and take. “Dylan continues to improve every time he gets in,” said Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh. “That’s a position like all the positions in football, but especially quarterback, it takes playing and having time on task and being out there. And it — he’s getting that. It doesn’t — it’s never too big for him. I really like that about Dylan.” A few weeks prior, Harbaugh lauded his demeanor more
“Dylan continues to improve every time he gets in.”
succinctly — “coolness.” It was on full display in the season opener against No. 8 Notre Dame after Shea Patterson departed the game with leg cramps in the fourth quarter. With Michigan within two scores, McCaffrey entered a game for the first time in his college career — let alone at a critical juncture — and completed four of six passes before Patterson returned. “Right away, you could tell he brought confidence to the huddle,” said redshirt junior tight end Zach Gentry. “He hadn’t skipped a beat, he completed some passes, did what he needed to do. … You can never really tell if he’s nervous. He talks really steady and just makes plays.” Assumed backup Brandon Peters was injured prior to that game, making McCaffrey the de facto No. 2 quarterback. And he ran with it, cementing himself as the next man up during
garbage time in the Wolverines’ following three contests. Through three appearances, McCaffrey has compiled just 126 yards and two touchdowns, but a poise that has excited Michigan faithful. From the sidelines, McCaffrey has reconciled his position — perpetually waiting in line — with a quote from his coach. “Coach Harbaugh actually said something at the end of practice the other day that really stuck with me personally,” McCaffrey noted. “He said, ‘It’s better to be prepared and not get your opportunity then it is to be unprepared and get your opportunity.’ I think that’s just something you’ve gotta live by. You don’t wanna go out there and have no idea what you’re doing. “... It’s just one of those things you’ve gotta prepare like you’re one play away because, frankly, you are.” It’s why McCaffrey continually does what he refers to as “mental reps.” Last year, as a member of the scout team, McCaffrey would listen to what plays were being called on the sideline, double-check with the play calls listed on his wristband and evaluate what he would do as the plays would unfold on the field. Following Harbaugh’s words, results from his preparedness have been positive so far this season. “Dylan’s come a long way,” Gentry said. “I know that’s one of the guys that stays after practice a lot and gets route timing with extra guys, gets some extra reps.” McCaffrey still has ways to go before finding himself in the lead role. It probably won’t happen while Patterson is still here. But either way he’ll be prepared, even if the opportunity never comes.
“He talks really steady and just makes plays.”
KATELYN MULCAHY/Daily
Redshirt freshman quarterback Dylan McCaffrey has compiled 126 yards and two touchdowns in three appearances.
finally getting chance MARK CALCAGNO Daily Sports Editor
The Michigan football team left no doubt with a 46-point win over Nebraska. The Wolverines dictated both sides of the ball throughout Saturday, racking up nearly 500 yards while collecting 14 tackles-for-loss defensively. It makes it easy to forget what could’ve been. After a 32-yard pass play early in the first quarter, the Cornhuskers fooled senior VIPER Jordan Glasgow with a readpass-option, leaving receiver J.D. Spielman completely uncovered on a slant pattern. A completion might’ve gone the distance with Glasgow so out of position. But just as Adrian Martinez set to throw, fifth-year senior defensive tackle Lawrence Marshall stuck up his left arm and batted the pass into the hands of junior safety Josh Metellus. It was a critical play — Michigan turned a potential defensive miscue into a touchdown drive shortly thereafter. “I read it was a pass, and (defensive line coach Greg) Mattison always says ‘get your hands up,’ ” Marshall said during Tuesday’s press conference. “I got my hands up, got a piece of the ball — wish I had gotten the pick.” Though Marshall didn’t get his wish, it was one of the most significant plays of his long but limited time with the Wolverines. Briefly a four-star Ohio State recruit before committing to Brady Hoke’s staff in 2013, Marshall had just 11 career tackles at the end of last season. And after undergoing a move from defensive end to the interior, his future at Michigan seemed murky. But in the loss of Maurice Hurst, Marshall saw an opportunity. “I felt like with Mo Hurst (graduated) the spot was open,” Marshall said. “I wasn’t gonna walk away. A lot of guys secondguess their skills, and they go someplace else in a lower division.
I told myself, ‘I can play here. There’s no doubt in my mind.’ ” Naturally however, Marshall did have his moments of doubt. “You really be like, ‘Man, am I really good?’ ” Marshall said. “Or you really start thinking and second-guessing your skills. For myself, I just kept going through it, trying to get better and better.” Marshall said he’s adjusted to defensive tackle by remembering what Hurst did in his Michigan tenure — in addition to watching Hurst’s current tape with the Oakland Raiders. That, combined with an entire summer dedicated solely to refining interior line technique, has Marshall feeling more confident than ever. “I really started feeling comfortable this year,” Marshall said. “Fall camp (is) when I really got my feet wet. Last year, I understood it, but I didn’t know how to play it right. “I know the game much better now. Just looking at how Mo played and just coming off the ball fast, reading my keys and knowing what the offensive line’s gonna do. I’m looking at the splits. I can tell if it’s a tight split, most likely you’re gonna get doubleteamed.” The work paid off when Marshall received his first career start at Notre Dame. Rotating with juniors Carlo Kemp and Michael Dwumfour in the absence of sophomore Aubrey Solomon, his group has become more productive by the week. Marshall hasn’t had the career he probably expected when committed to Michigan. But six years later, his efforts are finally getting rewarded with consistent snaps. “I didn’t play my freshman or sophomore year, barely played my junior year,” Marshall said. “Really started to see the field my senior year. It’s just perseverance — just keep going through it. I started my first game my fifth year. “It’s amazing really getting the chance to play. Showing my skills on the field is a great feeling.”
8 — Wednesday, September 26, 2018
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
statement T H E M I CH I GA N DAI LY | S E P T E M B E R 26 , 201 8
BY MATT GALLATIN, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT
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resident Mark Schlissel apparently lives in a beautiful white house on South University and I was going to see it. I was going to see it because I emailed a professor that I needed a building to write about, and of the hundreds in Ann Arbor, not a single one felt curious enough for a story. “Break into Mark Schlissel’s house!” he wrote. “Will I be arrested?” I wondered. “I’m just an Idea Guy!” he replied. It was an idea, and one I needed, since I signed on to write about buildings for The Daily’s Statement magazine this semester: To turn immobile structures into however many thousand romantically-tainted words on a semi-regular basis. When I applied, I felt I had a lot to say on the subject, and I wanted to force myself to write. The weather was awful the day I first set out to see the President’s House. I left around noon and faced the September mix of warm humidity and cold wind that begs both for shorts and a flannel, and doesn’t blink an eye at the contradiction. I wore neither, and downed a Claritin instead, as September not only gifts split personality weather but also searing and persistent allergies. See SCHLISSEL, Page 4B
Mark Schlissel gave me writer’s block
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Wednesday, September 26, 2018// The Statement
statement T H E M I CH I GA N DAI LY | S E P T E M B E R 26 , 201 8
Managing Statement Editor: Brian Kuang
Photo Editor: Amelia Cacchione
Managing Editor: Dayton Hare
Deputy Editors: Colin Beresford Jennifer Meer
Editor in Chief: Alexa St. John
Copy Editors: Elise Laarman Finntan Storer
Copy That: A descriptivist’s perspective BY KATELYN CARROLL, SENIOR COPY EDITOR
W
hen me found out I’d been hired to work at The Daily I wuz so excited, I
screemed. If you cringed while reading this sentence, then I highly recommend you consider working as a copy editor for The Michigan Daily. My interest in joining Copy can be attributed to one of the reasons I similarly decided to become an English teacher: I enjoy working with the mechanics of writing — pulling a sentence apart one word at a time, deciding whether
to use an em dash or a semi-colon and trying to gauge whether a sentence is approaching a run-on or not (take this sentence, for example). At the same time I began working at The Daily last fall, I also began to attend the class English 305: Exploring the English Language. There I met a professor and linguist named Anne Curzan, who matched and even exceeded my passion for syntax and phonetics. She centered the course by introducing two contrasting ideas: prescriptive and descriptive grammar.
Prescriptivism can best be symbolized by the “red pen wielding” English teacher trope. This teacher uses “whom” in sentences and says you may go to the bathroom regardless of whether you can. A prescriptivist believes there is a correct way to speak a language, and in English that correct way is typically standard English (the English we see in most academic and corporate settings). A descriptivist, on the other hand, views all the dialects of English equally in an attempt to understand linguistic change over time. This doesn’t mean there aren’t rules to each dialect — quite the opposite — but the main goal of descriptivism is to observe and analyze dialectical variety rather than to pass judgement or enforce usage. While a prescriptivist might say English is “deteriorating” with newer generations, a descriptivist would say it is merely “evolving.” English 305 came at an amazing time in my development as a student and future educator. For the first time, I began to question the “rules” of language I had been taught in schools. I ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY KOFFSKY soon realized
I was a descriptivist surrounded by institutions like print media and education where prescriptivism has historically been imposed and, at times, lauded. Even now, many of my fellow copy editors rejoice in the “comforting” laws of the stylebook, and I empathize with them. I too have gone to look up how The Daily formats numbers and I have found solace in a concrete answer (the answer: Numbers from one to nine are written out, while 10 and above are numerals). But it is important to not mistake the laws of the stylebook with universal truth. In the process of making an article more “standard,” am I not still projecting a voice, a style, a bias? What we’ve come to know as standard English is not devoid of connotation, and it’s important to recognize at a prestigious university like the University of Michigan, where test scores measuring standard English literacy play an important role in who gets to be a part of the Leaders and Best. I don’t mean to say we shouldn’t teach or uphold standard English; I believe there is value in standardization in certain contexts. But when we perceive standard English as “unbiased” or “just reporting the facts,” we cease to read critically and consider the author behind the text. While I still love my position as a copy editor at The Daily, I’ve begun to see the stylebook in a more nuanced light, as both a beneficial resource and a potential gatekeeper to marginalized individuals for whom standard English is a second language. Now, each time I edit an error in a columnist’s writing, I am conscious of the system to which I am adhering in the process. As writer Rita Mae Brown said, “Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.” It is the responsibility of readers and writers alike to consider these hidden power structures of language, and only by doing this may we progress in the right direction.
Wednesday, September 26, 2018 // The Statement
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Cancun the Promised Land of American Plight BY MARTINA VILLALOBOS, COLUMNIST
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here are certain places I tend to avoid when I return to my hometown after a year away at college. The notorious town watering holes: June graduation parties, the grocery store on Sunday evenings, Starbucks. These three places can all be classified by their likelihood of neighborhood small talk, typically conversations that often prompt questions concerning my own college experience. I stepped off the plane and walked down a ramp, only to be bombarded by salesmen promising their best offers. To say it was nauseating would be an understatement. The moment you arrive in Cancun, Mexico, you see its natural beauty exploited and merchandised to satisfy an American clientele. Back and forth you are dragged by people giving you packets to explore the area. The prices are in bright red colors, but the salesman looks you in the eye and say, “For you ma’am, half the price.” Before you can step outside to find a cab, you have already told 20 people that you don’t want to buy their tourist brochures. Finally, a cab. I reach the hotel and I think, “I have found peace,” but instead I spend the next two hours listening to a representative tell me all the things the hotel offers. I am gifted perfume and 20 additional packets. Cancun has become the exploited mistress of a tired United States. I walk down to the beach and promptly three hotel workers come by to ask me if I’d like a drink. I kindly refuse and lay there looking at the white sandy beaches, wondering, “is this really living?” I get up to jump into the pool, hoping the water is cooler than the beach. My senses are quickly overwhelmed. There are five restaurants, three pools and workers everywhere. One of the pools even has a swim-up bar. I am swimming, but I can’t really focus because I hear the voices of drunk Americans sitting at the bar acting like they rule the world, telling their neighbors rather loudly how successful they’ve been in life. Drink after drink, the voices get louder. They never have to leave the hotel. They have a pool, the beach, food, stores and drinks all in front of them. The food is catered to Americans: cheese quesadillas, burgers and wings. Almost like “The Truman Show,” I was in Mexico, but was it
really Mexico? I leave the hotel for dinner. On my way, I see an infinite row of hotels. Once I get to the restaurant, I realize that — complete with bright lights, people in f lamboyant costumes and beautiful women dancing— I have arrived in Las Vegas. The entire strip was an exploited American idealization. I see stores like Gucci and Hermes, I see clubs that are playing Beyoncé and other American hits. The scene is adorned with classics like Outback Steakhouse and Hooters. It felt like Cancun was this strip of beauty that served to give Americans the world traveler status with all the comforts of home. It was all too much. Rather overwhelmed by Cancun, I get in a taxi and ask to go to some unknown cities, far-off beaches or perhaps the Mayan ruins. In the backseat of the car, I realize it takes only 10 minutes to leave the commercial Cancun. The taxi driver starts chatting and I find out that this is the low season. He says the real business is Spring Break, when
all the underage Americans come to party because this is where they can drink. He tells me how President Donald Trump, a former real estate developer, wanted to build a hotel here but the city said no. He says this with pride. The more we drive, the more I start to see Mexico — the Mexico I had fallen in love with. He talks to me about politics and the recent presidential election. Suddenly I am in a different city. I get out of the taxi to look around, and I ask him to wait. I start walking unf looded by tourist packages. I actually realize I don’t understand. I am hearing neither Spanish nor English. The people on the streets are speaking in their indigenous lang uages. Finally, a restaurant with soft shell tacos de barbacoa. I see the hustle and bustle. The landscape is no longer in English and overf lowing with white tourists. The next day the same taxi driver takes me to the Mayan ruins. Here I marvel at the impressive history. A city and an old empire that had more civilization than the wild parts of
Courtesy of Martina Villalobos
resort Cancun. On the drive back, the taxi driver tells me he used to live in the United States. He turns around and says, “I almost tried to go back, but as I faced the border I said it’s not worth it.” I didn’t know how to reply. I was smacked with my own privilege. I could travel freely. I could enjoy Mexico because the dollar-to-peso exchange is in our favor. Yet, I didn’t want to go back to the U.S., nor did I want to go back to my hotel, but this was a choice. I wanted to stay and feel the humidity and to feel lost because I couldn’t speak Mayan. It began to feel like the resorts and hotels populating the strip of Cancun were where tourists went to have their egos inf lated, to be promised the “cultural experience,” to be treated like royalty with staff at hand and to drink. This was not the Mexico that I love but this was still a part of her truth. Cancun is a reminder that you can sell anything to an American, but like the Gucci belts at the market, there’s no g uarantee of authenticity.
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Wednesday, September 26, 2018 // The Statement
Wednesday, September 26, 2018 // The Statement
Mark Schlissel gave me writer’s block by Matt Gallatin, Statement Correspondent
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niversity of Michigan President Mark Schlissel apparently lives in a beautiful white house on South University Avenue and I was going to see it. I was going to see it because I emailed a professor that I needed a building to write about, and of the hundreds in Ann Arbor, not a single one felt curious enough for a story. “Break into Mark Schlissel’s house!” he wrote. “Will I be arrested?” I wondered. “I’m just an Idea Guy!” he replied. It was an idea, and one I needed, because I signed on to write about buildings for The Daily’s Statement magazine this semester: To turn immobile structures into however many thousand romantically-tainted words on a semiregular basis. When I applied, I felt I had a lot to say on the subject, and I wanted to force myself to write. The weather was awful the day I first set out to see the President’s House. I left around noon and faced the September mix of warm humidity and cold wind that begs both for shorts and a f lannel, and doesn’t blink an eye at the contradiction. I wore neither, and downed a Claritin instead as September not only gifts split personality weather but also searing and persistent allergies. My goal for this visit to Schlissel’s white picket fence home was to spark
some initial inspiration that I could hopefully run with, as I had an article due within a few days. I would give myself those days to complete research and finalize the writing. I was hoping the visit would spark my inspiration because truthfully, I was
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failed before I began, but I refused to believe it. I would not let my emptied-headedness preclude me from finishing such important work. I had an article to write, and like any seasoned professional college journalist, I turned to the sources: Wikipedia, Google,
“I had an article to write, and like any seasoned professional college journalist I turned to the sources: Wikipedia, Google, three Advil and a large glass of wine.” lacking motivation. I was too preoccupied with the book I was reading, the boy I was seeing, the baffling strangeness of weather in September. But by the time I reached the backside of the Hatcher Graduate Library and came upon the austere home, I had completely forgotten my intentions. Glancing through the cracks of the fence into the prim backyard with its proper glass porches stirred nothing in me. I merely checked my phone twice for texts as I passed, wondered why there were none, and wondered if it was something I said.
A student passes in front of President Mark Schlissel’s house on South University.
three Advil and a large glass of wine. The President’s House is the oldest remaining building on the University’s campus. It was constructed to be a faculty residence when the University moved from Detroit to Ann Arbor in 1837, and construction was completed in 1840. The first president to move into the home was Henry Phillip Tappan in 1852, who was also the first official President of the University. The house has undergone extensive renovations over the last two centuries, some of the grandest of which are described in the nomination for the home’s entry into the National Register of Historic Places. “In the 1860s the central mass assumed its present appearance. The half story became a full third story; the roof was altered to a truncated hipped roof; double brackets were added; the cupola was replaced by a balustrade; and the house took on an Italianate cast. Later, sometime after 1875, the artificial mortar courses were filled in. The house’s four chimneys and seven fire-places are original as well as the flat roofed Greek revival portico.” Renovations continued on the home well into the 1980s. Some are documented by Anne Duderstadt, wife of James J. Duderstadt, who became University President in 1988. In a photographic essay, Anne Duderstadt describes her odyssey with the home: “The toilet from the first floor bathPrashanth Panicker/Daily room (to be the handicapped bathroom) was on the dining porch. The front yard
was totally dug up, and the side porch was gone. Cigarette butts were scattered all over the floors by the workmen. The University decorators were walking through the house with carpet salesman deciding what THEY were going to do with the house. Suddenly, the house was not as ‘beautiful’ as I had remembered.” When I went back to the President’s House later that evening and looked at the many Italianate windows fronting the home, peered again at the large wooden fence surrounding the porch and looked between the pickets, I could not think much of Anne Duderstadt and her domestic horror. I simply could not see it: There were no toilets on the porch, no cigarette butts on the floors scattered by workmen and no University decorators with unsatisfactory ideas of their own. I saw only how strange it was for a 22-room home to not have a single light on; felt only that it is a bit of a waste for a home so extensively and expensively renovated to sit alone, emptied, unoccupied, surrounded by a tall fence and cut off from the world. Mostly, the image of the lonesome home under the moonlight made me tired, nostalgic and wishful of my own apartment. It made me want to go home. his is the heart of the problem. This is the reason I have not been capable of being the sort of writer I have wanted to be. I am incapable of reading about a 22-room home without thinking about my own single bedroom; incapable of counting the windows of the President’s House without waiting for my phone to ring; incapable of listing the date of the President’s House’s construction without thinking about the first time someone held my hand in public and I didn’t flinch. I am always distracted. In my sophomore year, I misread a question on a history midterm and gave an incorrect response. In a flowing email to my professor, I apologized profusely and asked if it was at all possible to take it again, and if not, if there might be a way to make it up to him. He responded “Focus, my boy, Focus!” and allowed me to redo the question. I have tried hard since to heed his warning. I have only ever been less successful. Writing, at least for me, is one of those specific forms of masochism that asks for regularity but demands ingenious spontaneity. I mean writing happens only at one time of day, when the whole day has
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been exhausted, probably nursing a headache, and when there is absolutely nothing else to do. There are no other options. It’s when I remember, for a minute, for an hour, for an evening, that things just don’t make any sense. At least, they don’t make sense like I’d like them to. Nothing is left but to try and explain this to myself. I am always explaining to myself, never to anyone else, no matter how often I try otherwise. The reason this has always struck me as a bad thing, and the reason I say it prohibits me from being the kind of writer I have wanted to be, is because I have created, for right or for wrong, an ideal in my mind of the kind of person that my distractedness disallows me from being. This ideal me would not walk by Schlissel’s house and check their phone twice instead of taking notes on the number of windows and the year it was built. This ideal would not veer direly off the topic of their assignment. This ideal wouldn’t turn Schlissel’s house into a metaphor. This ideal is an abstraction, and a vague one. I am unsure if anyone exists who truly manifests it. But I have been led to believe someone does — even many someones — and it is that belief that has made the difference. When I walk down the street, I see not a hundred students with their own anxieties running to class, but a mass of people who have it figured out and do not worry about things like empty houses and phones that don’t ring — people who do not try to explain themselves. It is absurd to believe that, of course. Everyone experiences fears and doubts and worries, I am well aware of this. That doesn’t mean it’s not easy to fall into such
guy in the corner of the party who hasn’t spoken a word, and because he hasn’t spoken a word, you assume that he has it all figured out. In all likelihood, he doesn’t know what the hell is going on, or he’s just way too high to be at this party. It doesn’t matter though. I have imparted a coolness on him anyway, and already feel inferior. That cool-looking guy has always been at the party, and he will never leave it. So writing is very uncool, because writing is trying like mad to explain yourself, and in explaining yourself, you are admitting you don’t know it all, and it bothers not to know it all; whereas “cool” is the appearance of a) not having a care in the world and b) having it all figured out. I have never met someone who liked to write who wasn’t at least a bit neurotic, or who had much at all figured out. I have only ever felt uncool when writing, and thus embarrassed. I have only ever felt like I wished I hadn’t said what I finally ended up saying. bout two years ago, I wrote a piece for The Daily during which I came to terms with the fact that I was gay. The next day, it was colder than usual, and I had on the same red sweater I’d worn nearly every day that month. I waited for the elevator to my class in Angell Hall. It arrived, I entered and right as the door began to close, my professor stuck in his hand, and the elevator doors opened again to let him in. It was the same professor who told me “Focus, my boy, Focus!” He looked at me. He was silent a moment, and then began to say, in a hushed, matter-of-fact tone, that he had
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“About two years ago, I wrote a piece for The Daily during which I came to terms with the fact that I was gay.” a simplification when you lack the context of each person you pass. Simply, it is impossible to know the anxieties behind every blank face, and so it is difficult to imagine those anxieties exist at all: I did not see the girl in a yellow sundress who I just passed on State Street crying in the bathroom stall 20 minutes before, then wiping her mascara slowly in the mirror. Perhaps, with some imagination, I can picture her crying. But I cannot in a way that would make it tangible, make it real; not in a way that would make me feel it quite like I would if I actually saw her wiping her makeup. These abstractions of worriless people exist only in a present moment. They have never had pasts and they have never had futures. They are the cool-looking
read my article, and, well, that he did not understand what exactly I had meant by it. I told him matter-of-factly that I did not know what I meant by it either, except that it was melodramatic and best not to be taken seriously. It would have been much harder to take myself seriously. I felt, at least, very serious when I had written it. But I had convinced myself almost immediately that I did not deserve to be taken seriously, and so I joked about how dramatic I had been, and I made fun of myself for it. To ask to be taken seriously would have been to ask to be empathized with, and in quite plain terms, I did not believe I deserved it. Later that week, I saw a photo of myself in the red sweater I’d worn so often, and was taken aback. I had thought it fit quite
Prashanth Panicker/Daily The house of President Mark Schlissel on South University.
well and I liked it a lot. But when I looked at myself in the photo, it looked all wrong. The sleeves were too large. My head was bloated when framed in the shade of red and the collar style. I threw the sweater out that evening. I would never be able to wear it again. Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette comes to mind here. When she explains how she used jokes to cope with her coming out story, I felt it as if she stood there in the room, scolding me like a loving older sibling: “I froze an incredibly formative experience at its trauma point and I sealed it off into jokes. And that story became a routine, and through repetition, that joke version fused with my actual memory of what happened.” Months ago, I emailed The Daily and asked them to scratch my name from that article my professor in the elevator had not understood. I understood completely what I had said in it. I only wished I had not said it. Nothing in the article was untrue. I had had those feelings. I only no longer felt that way, that it was such a big deal to be gay — perhaps no longer felt it by the time the article was even published; and to read something written by someone who was me, yet terribly and completely no longer was me, was painful, disturbing and sad. It was seeing a photo of yourself with a bad haircut years before, a haircut you loved for so long, and finally realizing that you should have just cut off the mane. Above all, it was embarrassing. The future version of myself did not believe the prior one deserved empathy. In a more stable and assured place, I looked down upon a version of myself that was more unsure. I wanted only to erase his existence entirely, and create a “me” that had only existed in the present, like that cool-looking boy at the party: always there, never leaving. My article was physical evidence that not only had I been late to the party, but
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that I would surely leave it soon enough. But we cannot delete the person we were before we arrived. We cannot ask the kind editors at The Daily to scratch away their existence. What we are saying — what I was saying — when I tried to erase the existence of that past version of myself is that he did not deserve to be empathized with. When we preclude a prior version of ourselves from empathy, and when we know that our present will never last, we say, in short, that we have never and will never deserve it. And I can’t believe that’s true. tried to go to the President’s House again. This time more than ever I was hell-bent on writing the article I was supposed to. Whatever I’d find was more necessary, I knew — I thought — than whatever I’d been ranting about in my head: perhaps an in-depth history of its renovations, a telling of the process of installing its complex indoor and outdoor watering system, commentary on the time the Duderstadts spent $70,000 replacing a turquoise carpet. It was cloudy outside, the wind was blowing, and for the first time I realized fall really was coming, global warming hadn’t created the eternal summer I’d always asked for, and there was nothing I could do about it. The trees around the President’s House swayed dangerously, and two passing students with large black backpacks, matching Michigan t-shirts and weary eyes appeared to wake up from their trance to give me an odd look; I standing in front of the building, still and starry eyed. It didn’t look like anyone was home. I wondered if a story would appear to me if I walked up to the house, unannounced, and asked a few questions. The driveway is short. It took only a few moments to reach the door. But when I got to there and looked inside, again, it looked only emptied, and I could not for the life of me bring myself to knock.
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Wednesday, September 26, 2018 // The Statement
Student athetes’ silent struggle BY MIRIAM FRANCISCO, with eating disorders DAILY ARTS WRITER
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mong student athletes, there’s a fine line between being mindful of your health and becoming obsessed with it. “Take care of your body,” motivational speaker Jim Rohn writes. “It is the only place you have to live.” Despite the changes wrought by puberty, aging and disease, the body is singularly constant. To some extent, we feel we should be able to control the functions, size and abilities of our body. It is somehow both us and beyond us — ours but not always ours to control. Athletes, whose identities are often directly tied to the capacities of their bodies, experience particularly powerful and complex mind-body relationships. In sports where a specific bodily aesthetic is tied to an athlete’s ability to perform — gymnastics, for instance, or wrestling — participants are much more likely to suffer from poor body image and dysfunctional eating. I was a competitive Irish dancer for 10 years, and while I never had an eating disorder, I understand what it is like to desperately want your body to be able to do something. There’s a sense of frustration I think most athletes have experienced — anger, not at yourself exactly, but at your body’s refusal to cooperate with your ambition. I see how that exasperation, under certain circumstances, could twist the commitment to a sport into an allconsuming quest for the unattainable. The general, non-student-athlete population of college students is already at an increased risk of developing an eating disorder. Transitional periods are recognized as especially vulnerable times for the development of disordered eating. For most students, the freedoms and rhythms of college present a radical difference from the prescribed routines
they have lived within for the first 18 years of life. In an unfamiliar place, surrounded by strangers, students may feel their eating habits are the one aspect of their lives over which they have control. A desire to fit in — combined with fears about the mythical “Freshman Fifteen” — can also contribute to an emerging eating disorder. Among student athletes, these concerns intersect with the pressures of staying competitive in their sport. There are many misconceptions and myths about eating disorders, partially due to the inf luence of inaccurate media portrayals. Here is some basic information. People who suffer from anorexia nervosa do not eat a healthy quantity of food due to a serious psychological fear of gaining weight. They often rapidly lose weight and do not maintain sufficient body fat. Anorexia can also lead to other serious medical issues, including osteoporosis, cardiac arrest and even death. People with bulimia nervosa attempt to reduce calorie absorption by throwing up or abusing laxatives, and some sufferers may binge — eating excess amounts of food — before purging. People who frequently binge on food and do not purge have binge eating disorder. Orthorexia, which is not formally recognized by most psychiatrists, is an uncontrollable obsession with healthy eating. Though 30 years of made-for-TV movies argue otherwise, young, thin, wealthy white teenagers are not the only sufferers. A person of any age, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, weight and socioeconomic status can have an eating disorder. A 2009 study found about 18 percent of students reported behaviors associated with an eating disorder in 2005 and 2007. A 1999 study found one-third of NCAA Division I female student athletes reported behavior that categorize them as at risk for anorexia. While most colleges and universities have resources for students struggling with eating disorders, these programs are not always well-publicized. LSA senior Julia McMahon, program assistant at the Body Image and Eating Disorder Program of Wolverine Wellness, explained students often enter college with concerns about gaining weight. “I was an orientation leader,” McMahon said. “A lot of people are File Photo/Daily scared about, ‘How will I eat in the
dining halls?’ and the Freshman Fifteen and other food- and body-oriented things.” Though representatives of M-Dining speak to incoming students about dietary restrictions during orientation, eating disorders are not covered. “It’s not a priority of the University to talk about those things,” said McMahon. She thinks this oversight may be due to time constraints, because orientation is only two days. Additionally, the complexity of these issues makes them hard to address in a short presentation. LSA junior Celia Gold trains at Ann Arbor’s Wolverine Strength and Conditioning — a gym that specializes in CrossFit, a high-intensity fitness program. Gold said being an athlete has always been a big part of her identity. Beginning in elementary school, she participated in softball, soccer and basketball, and she stuck with lacrosse and cheerleading through high school. But as her passion for sports blossomed, so did her self-consciousness. “I tried Weight Watchers when I was 12,” she explained. “As a girl, I was always self-conscious about my body and all I cared about was being skinny.” Her high school coaches weren’t particularly helpful in promoting a healthy attitude toward exercise and nutrition. “In high school, especially in cheerleading and lacrosse, I don’t feel there was ever an emphasis on it (nutrition),” she said. “I wish I knew then what I know now about food and fuel.” Gold’s relationship with her body suddenly changed during her junior year of high school, when she started CrossFit. “I would really restrict calories,” explained Gold. “My mom knew how obsessed with working out I was and she started doing CrossFit and brought me into that. That was the first time I saw working out as a performance thing and not an aesthetic thing.” Gold didn’t just enjoy CrossFit and weightlifting, she also showed exceptional talent for both. Four years later, her hometown coach from CrossFit RedZone in Newtown, Conn., is still training her. Gold regularly enters both the CrossFit Games and weightlifting competitions, most recently for Team USA at the 2018 Pan American Junior Championships in Colombia. “For me, I feel like CrossFit was the first time I admired what my body could do versus what it looked like. That was
really huge for me,” explained Gold. Gold, emphasized the importance of fellowship when it comes to promoting healthy eating habits among young student-athletes. “It’s cool to have a community of strong girls emerging from the CrossFit and weightlifting world,” she said. It is a generous and admirable thing to devote yourself wholly to an athletic pursuit the way Gold does, to spend your days pushing outward the boundaries of your abilities. The challenge — one that Gold, like many athletes, once struggled with — lies in preventing that dedication from turning into something darker. How easily tenacity can sour, morphing into a compulsive desire for complete dominance over one’s body. The high prevalence of eating disorders and poor body image among student-athletes is not the kind of problem that can be traced to a single source of malevolence or systemic dysfunction. It is far more complicated than that — a Gordian knot of societal expectations, genetic predisposition, ambition and intimate social inf luences. Some solutions are obvious. Coaches, for example, should be better educated to promote a healthy attitude toward exercise and nutrition and better equipped to intervene when one of their athletes presents signs of an eating disorder. But much of the issue feels frustratingly nebulous, its many layers presenting a unique challenge. Perhaps the first stop-gap measure to creating a culture where eating disorders are less common is to begin meeting our own bodies with kindness, in the hope that it strengthens our resolve to treat others’ bodies with an unconditional respect. This is no easy task for anyone, of course, and for athletes it is especially tricky. It is difficult enough to locate the division between healthy zeal and sickness; it is quite another to resist crossing it when your culture, coaches, teammates and personal goals all seem to suggest you might benefit from doing so. But before the glory and after the disappointments, there must be a middle ground: fervor without agony, gusto tempered by selfempathy. The poet Mary Oliver writes, “As for the body, it is solid and strong and curious and full of detail: it wants to polish itself; it wants to love another body; it is the only vessel in the world that can hold, in a mix of power and sweetness: words, song, gesture, passion, ideas, ingenuity, devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue.”
Wednesday, September 26, 2018// The Statement
7B
Seniors, prepare for landing BY COLIN BERESFORD, DEPUTY STATEMENT EDITOR
T
he internship searches have morphed into job searches, the sought-after executive board positions are now ours and our points have gotten us up to the front rows at the football games; after three short years, we’ve become seniors. And in eight much shorter months, we’ll be alumni. Most of us, myself included, can probably remember — as much as we might try to forget it — our freshman orientation, the day we moved into our first dorm room and ( believe it or not) getting to our first class 15 minutes earlier than Michigan time (RIP) required, utterly overprepared. The last three years have gone by faster than any of us expected — much faster than the first three years of high school. Most likely, even for those of us that peaked then too. Scrolling through Instagram Sept. 4, with the endless “last first day” captions, brutally reminded me of how much longer I have here. It brought an onslaught of stress mixed with sadness and a tinge of excitement.
I’ve seen my own focus and that of my friends shift from the next semester or year to the next five or 10 years. We’re now wondering where we’re going to be come May of 2019 (or, avoiding that thought like we’ve avoided 8:00 a.m. classes for the past seven semesters). Don’t get me wrong, that’s important. I don’t think any of us want to wake up the day after graduation, fight our way through our likely fuzzy thoughts and realize we have no idea what we’re going to be doing the next day (though, for some of us, this might be the first time while living in Ann Arbor that we’re happy about a 12-month lease ending in mid-Aug ust). The stress of a job search forces me to have tunnel vision toward the future, blocking out everything else that’s going on around me and, inevitably, keeping me from truly embracing this last year. But it dawned on me that I’ll never again be around the people I’m surrounded with now. That brought me back to reality, back to where I am
now. Soon enough, there won’t be any midnight trips to Pinball Pete’s the night before an exam, nor shutting down bars (at least in Ann Arbor), nor midnights at The Michigan Daily. It’s easy to see if I don’t cherish the time and people I have here, eight months will come and go, and I really won’t be ready to graduate and move on from Ann Arbor. Talking to a friend who graduated a few years ago, I mentioned the trips out to Colorado with the snowboard club, the weekend trips to New York, the overnight f ly fishing trip for a king salmon run in northern Michigan that went terribly wrong. What struck me was that he told me he wished he had spent his time like that, instead of completely focused on where life would be taking him. That’s not to say I’m doing things right. I don’t think any of us will find that perfect balance of being here, embracing our senior year, all while preparing for the future. But that’s not to say it isn’t worth trying. After we graduate, everything will change. Some of us are ready for
that change, ready to move on, while others surely aren’t. But until May, until we’re no longer undergraduates, we can’t lose sight of where we are now. Things won’t ever be like this again. Soon enough, we’ll be full-f ledged adults dealing with our full-f ledged debt. But for now, embrace living with your friends in your shitty houses (or expensive, nice apartments), dealing with shitty landlords. So moral of the story — sorry for the cliché — stop and smell the roses. This ride is coming to an end soon, but don’t land preemptively. Take that trip. Get coffee with that friend you haven’t seen in months. Go to that show, party, movie the night before an exam. It’s scary that there’s an end in sight, undoubtedly. But I just hope once I fight through my own haziness the morning after graduation, I think to myself, “I did it, and I’m ready for what’s next.”
Courtesy of Miranda Miley
8B
Wednesday, September 26 2018 // The Statement
V I S UA L S TAT E M E N T:
Blue Bus Drivers
Photos by Danyel Tharakan
Sonja is from Pinckney, Michigan and has been driving for the University since April. Prior to working for the University, she has also been a transit operator for Dexter and Pinckney in the last three years. She says that despite it’s high stress nature, she loves the job: “All the students make it very fun, but also a great learning experience and the people I work with are great and it’s been a great experience and I want to stay here.”
Nathan is an undergraduate student at the University studying music education. He’s been driving since the beginning of the summer, and likes being a transit operator. When asked if there was anything he’d like students to know about the people who transport them around campus every day, he replied “We do have schedules and we don’t have arbitrary times that we take breaks… it’s not our fault if there isn’t a bus there.” He said of driving for the University “you’re also with union drivers and it’s kind of a divide...but we all treat each other pretty nicely, it’s a good place.” Read more online at
michigandaily.com