2020-09-16

ANN ARBOR, MI | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2020 | MICHIGANDAILY.COM

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Speaking from the steps of the Michigan Union Friday afternoon, graduate student instructor Chris Campbell called on University of Michigan administrators to “do the right thing, probably for the first time.”

“Stop talking about the law and the cops, stop talking about listening to us,” Campbell said. “Listen to us about what it takes for a safe and just response to a pandemic and to policing on this campus.”

Five days into the graduate students’ strike and amid other labor actions on campus, Campbell was one of hundreds of University students, faculty and staff who spoke out Friday against the administration’s response to COVID19. Various open letters, speak-outs and protests occurred throughout the day, in-person and online.

The Graduate Employees’ Organization went on strike Monday, demanding more COVID-19 protections and a reduction in policing on campus.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

ALLISON ENGKVIST/DAILY Members of the graduate employee organization strike due to the university’s pandemic response outside of the biological sciences.

A day after the Graduate Employees’ Organization voted to extend its strike, University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel is seeking an injunction to get graduate students off the picket lines and back to teaching.

Schlissel is asking Washtenaw County Circuit Court to require GEO members to return to work by issuing a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction. In a video released Monday afternoon, he described the request as a necessary step.

“Following the announcement that GEO will continue to strike and not teach for at least five more days, I made the very difficult decision to seek help from the courts so we can resume all of our remote and in-person classes,” Schlissel said in the video. “We welcome the opportunity to discuss the issues that GEO has raised. The University’s offer to continue talks remains open.

What we cannot welcome is the profound disruption to the education we’ve promised our undergraduate students.”

See COURT, Page 3

MADELINE HINKLEY/DAILY Students show support for the GEO strike due to the university’s pandemic response outside of the union friday evening.

Long-time issues between ‘U’ and RAs come to light with pandemic

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Problems between student staff and University Housing at forefront amid concerns about administration COVID-19 response, lack of protective equipment FRANCESCA DUONG Daily Staff Reporter

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As resident advisers prepare to strike in protest of the University of Michigan’s response to COVID-19, some members of Residential Staff say the pandemic has forced long-time issues between University Housing and the student staff into the open.

ResStaff, or the students who work for University Housing, are calling for stronger communication and increased COVID-19 protections. Several ResStaff workers told The Daily they have privately complained for years about a disconnect between University Housing and the students who work for them, but say the pandemic has made the situation even more urgent.

RAs are calling to attention the disconnect between University Housing, which makes

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policy regarding COVID-19, and members of ResStaff, who implement it.

RAs’ contract includes a clause stating they are not allowed to publicly disagree with University Housing policies. Because of this, two current RAs and a student who quit the position from COVID-19 concerns have requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the University. They will be referred to as Olivia, Emily and Noah, respectively.

Personal Protective Equipment and Enforcement Custodians have been working since early July to prepare rooms for students, Daniel Henne, director of communications, marketing and design for Student Life, wrote in an email to The Daily. Custodial staff clean the bathrooms two times a day

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and ensure hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes are readily available, Henne said.

But many RAs said that these protective measures were not enough for buildings filled with new students from different states, including some COVID-19 hotspots.

They pointed to Cornell University, where RAs asked for plexiglass dividers between sinks and additional sanitation near heavily congested areas, like elevators.

University Housing said they would not put up plexiglass dividers between sinks, stating the decision was consistent with other campus buildings. Amir Baghdadchi, Senior Associate Director of Michigan Housing, said the University has taken other precautionary measures, like placing social distancing signs in bathrooms and installing paper towel dispensers throughout campus.

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See RA, Page 3

ARTS .........................11 S TAT E M E N T. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 4 SPORTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17

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Northwood Apartments on North Campus are being used to house studens in quarantine.

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Students encounter unsanitary conditions in quarantine housing

Inhabitants of University isolation apartments face a lack of supplies, inadequate meal service, uncertainty in protocol, general confusion

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When LSA junior Sam Burnstein arrived at the University of Michigan’s quarantine housing at Northwood apartments, he was underwhelmed by what he found.

“When walking into the apartments here, the whole time I kept thinking, ‘This feels like a big afterthought,’” Burnstein said. “It feels like the University had, like, two or three weeks till the school year starts and they’re like, ‘Oh, we need somewhere to put these students,’ because everything was just very haphazardly thrown together.”

In an effort to contain the spread of COVID-19, the University has told students who test positive for the virus, are symptomatic or were in close contact with someone who tested positive to isolate or quarantine for up to two weeks.

But students in Universityprovided quarantine housing on North Campus have expressed concerns about what they describe as a lack of sanitation, the low quality of the meal delivery service and insufficient communication between them and the University.

Students who live in residence halls and test positive for the virus are required to quarantine or isolate at apartments on North Campus, return to their

permanent residence or book a room at a local hotel. If a contact tracer discovers that a student had close contact with a COVID-19 positive individual, the exposed student is also instructed to go into quarantine.

In an email to The Daily, University spokesperson Kim Broekhuizen said students are not required to stay in Universityprovided housing.

“Students who need to isolate or quarantine are not required to observe that period in a university unit; some students choose to go home, others might choose a local hotel,” Broekhuizen wrote. “The university provides quarantine and isolation housing so students have a place to live, safely, outside of their regular residential community.”

According to University data on quarantine and isolation housing, as of Monday morning, 20 people were in isolation with a positive test result and 39 were in quarantine after having been exposed or awaiting a test result. Nearly 10 percent of the quarantine and isolation housing was full.

Unsanitary housing conditions Four students told The Daily that upon arrival, their apartments at Northwood were unsanitary.

LSA freshman Rochelle Smith said she found hair on the bed and on the floor as well as in the bathroom sink, in addition to cobwebs with spiders

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in the unit.

Smith moved to Northwood after a student who tested positive reported her name to a contact tracer. She said she was told to quarantine for two weeks even if she tested negative.

While she was provided with a number to call for complaints, she decided not to report the condition of her apartment. After one day at Northwood, Smith returned to her parents’ home to quarantine there.

In a message to The Daily, Engineering sophomore Cate Sullivan said there was crusted, used soap in her shower and the apartment’s door lock was broken when she arrived.

“It’s quarantine housing,” Sullivan said. “It probably should be cleaned well between residents.”

Broekhuizen outlined the cleaning procedures for quarantine rooms in her email to The Daily.

“Student Life Facilities cleans and sanitizes each unit before and after each use, using EPAregulated cleaners certified as effective against germs and viruses,” Broekhuizen wrote. “This is an enhanced cleaning protocol put in effect for all residential units since March. After a student leaves a quarantine room, Facilities disinfects the room 7 days later, after which time the next student may get assigned. The timeline is based on CDC guidelines.”

According to Sullivan, the Division of Public Safety and Security opened her apartment unit to check if someone was there when she moved in and later walked into her unit unannounced.

“When I arrived, DPSS knocked and asked if anyone was inside, checked the apartment, then said, ‘It’s all set,’ like they didn’t know if it was gonna be empty or not,” Sullivan said, adding that later on, “DPSS randomly entered my apartment without knocking or asking. When they saw me, they said sorry and left without an explanation.”

Central Student Government President Amanda Kaplan and Vice President Saveri Nandigama wrote a letter to students living in quarantine housing giving them more details on cleaning procedures.

“Each room remains empty for a week after a student leaves quarantine and it is cleaned between students,” the letter said.

“We are currently working to ensure that cleaning procedures are specified and documented upon a student’s arrival to quarantine housing.”

According to the Campus Maize

& Blueprint website, custodians clean the facilities’ high-traffic surfaces.

“These disinfectants will be regularly applied to frequently touched surfaces such as door knobs and handles, door push plates and crash bars, light switches, sink and faucet handles, elevator handles and more,” the website states.

Lack of supplies Students moving to Northwood received an email from Eric Aiken, assistant director of student leadership for Michigan Housing, regarding their move-in.

This email, obtained by The Daily, has a section titled “For your comfort” suggesting students pack items such as bedding, hand soap, bathroom toiletries, cooking materials and a trash can. Students were also told to bring two weeks of clothing because there are no laundry facilities available.

Four students told The Daily they were given anywhere from 20 minutes to eight hours to pack their belongings before they were transported to Northwood by DPSS. Burnstein posted a nowviral Tik Tok on Friday about the conditions in Northwood quarantine housing. As of Monday morning, Burnstein’s Tik Tok has racked up nearly 90,000 likes on Tik Tok. “We were given almost no supplies, we were given no food, no masks, no gloves, no microwave, no bedsheets, no soap, no cleaning supplies, no nothing,” Burnstein said in the Tik Tok. He also challenged University President Mark Schlissel to spend a night in quarantine housing.

Burnstein told The Daily he had about two to three hours to pack his belongings before being transported to Northwood

by DPSS. He said he does not recall receiving an email about suggested items to pack.

Music, Theatre and Dance freshman Joseph Bickel said he received limited supplies when he arrived in quarantine housing.

When he requested items such as trash cans, paper plates, toilet paper and garbage bags, he said it took more than a day to get them.

Kaplan and Nandigama addressed the lack of supplies in their letter. They said they are currently working on ensuring that students are provided with necessary supplies, including personal protective equipment, upon arrival.

“Students will now be provided with bar soap, toilet paper, shampoo, trash liners, trash can, sheets, pillow, pillowcase (and) microwaves,” the letter said.

See QUARANTINE, Page 3

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QUARANTINE From Page 2 “Central Student Government is currently working with the Dean of Students office and MDining to provide individual pots and pans for each student.”

Dissatisfaction with meal service In addition to issues with the cleanliness of the rooms, students isolating expressed dissatisfaction with the meal service. Students are instructed to fill out a form every day by midnight to receive food the next day.

If students arrive at Northwood past 12:30 p.m.,they can submit a form for a late afternoon delivery that goes until 4 p.m., according to the meal request form. It is unclear whether students arriving at Northwood after 4 p.m. can submit a meal request for that night.

“Please complete the form daily by Midnight the night before if you wish to have food delivered for the next day,” the form reads.

Sullivan said when she arrived at Northwood apartments at 7:45 p.m., she was given a bag of chips for dinner.

Broekhuizen said Michigan Dining is currently working to streamline the system so students are able to order food up to 8 p.m. for doorstep delivery that evening.

Whether or not students without a meal plan are charged for University meal delivery while in quarantine housing was another source of confusion.

According to the meal request form, if students request meals and do not have a meal plan, they will be billed $20 per day for each day they request food delivery.

They are responsible for paying the charge “in a timely fashion.”

However, the email from Aiken says the Office of the Dean of Students covers this charge, adding that those with a meal plan will see the charge for three meals per day deducted from their account.

Initially, students were not provided microwaves. Students told The Daily that the food was delivered in plastic, so they were not able to heat it in the oven or on the stove if they did not have cooking supplies.

In an email to students, faculty and staff on Friday, Schlissel noted some of the students’ complaints about quarantine conditions. “(The University is) also addressing concerns about the quarantine and isolation housing we’re providing to students,” Schlissel wrote. “Our commitment to providing meal delivery is continuing, and Student Life staff check in with each student daily. From now on in response to feedback, we will be providing microwaves, and all Michigan Dining meals will come in microwavable packaging.”

As of Sunday, Bickel said he has not received his microwave. After calling DPSS Saturday evening, he was told he would not receive one until next week.

“The food situation here is abysmal,” Bickel said. “We have been told we will be receiving microwaves, but I have not received mine yet. The food that they provide is low-grade and cold. Nothing like what we paid for in the dining halls. I have not brought myself to eat any of it.

Most food deliveries occur close to noon, so there really is not a chance for breakfast. The vast majority of my meals have been through DoorDash.”

Students unsatisfied with the meal plan can order food from online delivery services or local businesses. However, Burnstein said he worried local workers could be put at risk when delivering food, noting there are no signs indicating that the Northwood housing is filled with COVID-19 positive residents. The Daily confirmed the lack of signage.

“You’ll regularly see, especially at meal times, just random delivery drivers walking around the apartment, because there’s no clear cut protocols like where to drop off food or interact with your driver, and it just puts the drivers at risk,” Burnstein said.

Schlissel did not address safety precautions for meal delivery in his email. According to the meal request form, University-provided meals are

delivered by a “Universityappointed contractor.”

Smith said she was concerned about the potential spread of the virus at Northwood.

“The man who came and delivered our meals, first of all, he wasn’t wearing a mask,” Smith said. “He opened the screen door and put the food behind the screen door, which made me a little uncomfortable because the person in the apartment across from me … actually had COVID and had a fever.”

When asked what precautions are in place so Unive rsity staff members coming in contact with students do not spread the virus, Broekhuizen declined to offer details but clarified that meals are delivered to the students’ doorsteps and DPSS officers wear appropriate PPE. Protocol uncertainty If students living offcampus need to quarantine or isolate, the Washtenaw County Health Department, in coordination with the University’s Environmental, Health and Safety Department, will determine if their living situation is fit to safely do so.

If it is not, off-campus students may need to move to Universityprovided quarantine housing or return to their permanent residence as well.

University Health Service tracks positive COVID-19 results. Students who are not tested at UHS can submit a form to notify the University they tested positive for the virus.

Washtenaw County is also filtering test results in an attempt to identify students who test positive. Students who are known to have tested positive will be contacted by a contact tracer and asked for the names of those with whom they have had close personal contact.

Sullivan had symptoms of COVID-19 and stayed at Northwood for one night until her test came back negative.

UHS then authorized her to leave. Other students, including Bickel, were instructed to continue quarantining for 10 to 14 days, even if their test results were negative.

According to Burnstein, the University is keeping students in the same complexes who tested positive for the virus and those who tested negative but both must continue quarantining.

“Basically there’s … four or five of these apartment clusters, and in each of these cluster apartments there’s students who are exposed but are negative or students who are just straightup positive, and they’ve just been mixing these students together,” Burnstein said.

The Daily interviewed students who tested positive and those who tested negative, both after being in contact with COVID-19 positive individuals and after developing symptoms similar to COVID-19. All these individuals were being housed in Northwood apartments.

In her email to The Daily, Broekhuizen elaborated on how the Northwood apartments are being used for quarantine and isolation.

“There are five different neighborhoods in Northwood Community Apartments,” Broekhuizen wrote. “Units in Northwood I-III are used for isolation and quarantine housing. These are private apartments with no forced air system connecting them to other units.”

Broekhuizen also clarified that “students are free to leave their rooms, but should not access communal areas, in accordance with public health guidelines.”

Burnstein’s roommate tested positive and reported his case to the University, listing Burnstein as someone with whom he had close personal contact. Soon after, Burnstein tested positive and has been isolating at Northwood since.

Burnstein said the University’s procedure for reporting positive COVID-19 cases is not well-defined.

“There was no clear-cut protocol for how to report this stuff,” Burnstein said. “It was very unclear … If he hadn’t reported it, I don’t know how they would have found out.”

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

RA From Page 1 RAs have also requested additional personal protective equipment for move-in duties, mailroom services and other tasks requiring in-person contact.

On Aug. 23, more than 80 resident advisers drafted an open letter to University Housing, asking for more resources to protect against COVID-19. They said University Housing was not responsive to their demands, and they felt scared for their safety. More than 750 people signed their open letter expressing support for the RAs’ demands.

After the letter was sent, University Housing scheduled two town halls with the RAs in an effort to strengthen communication. During the first town hall, many RAs asked University Housing to address each of their concerns in the open letter through a lineby-line response. University Housing complied and sent an edited version of the letter, which was reviewed by The Daily, addressing each of their demands on Aug. 27. In addition, Housing said they had ordered face shields and each ResStaff member would also receive an additional COVID-19 safety kit.

Despite the order for more personal protective equipment, some RAs told The Daily they do not feel well-equipped to handle their other tasks. Noah said one of the reasons he quit was because of a modification to Community Center responsibilities. The CC is a lobby-like area generally situated in a high-traffic location in a dorm where residents can ask ResStaff members questions.

Previously, each staff member only had to work in their residence hall’s CC. But now, ResStaff members might be required to work in CCs outside of their residence hall. Noah argued this new requirement was unsafe.

Additionally, Noah said he didn’t feel comfortable enforcing social distancing policies, since they could jeopardize his health. The University requires residents to maintain health precautions outlined in Community Living at the University at Michigan (CLAM), the handbook all students living in residence halls must abide by.

“I didn’t feel safe being the person to break up a dorm party in the middle of the pandemic,” Noah said. “I think putting that responsibility on other students, especially students who are dependent on their jobs for housing, is just not a good solution.”

In response to the pandemic, the guest policy in dorms has been updated. An Aug. 26

COURT From Page 1 Schlissel later added that “we don’t want anyone to feel threatened simply for wanting to go to class.”

“Going to the court was our only choice after learning that the strike would continue,” Schlissel said.

GEO’s strike began last Tuesday in response to the University’s plans to reopen for the fall semester. Some of GEO’s demands include the universal right to work remotely without documentation, more robust testing plans and a partial reallocation of funds from the Division of Public Safety and Security to community-based organizations.

In a statement Monday, the union assured the striking graduate students that no individual member was at risk because the University had filed for an injunction.

“We’re disappointed that President Schlissel has chosen to immediately abandon these promises in favor of trying to shut down our strike by brute force,” GEO’s statement reads. “Shame on the University of Michigan for using their immense resources to bully their graduate workers out of striking — instead of using those same resources to create a safe and just campus for all.”

The union’s members voted overwhelmingly to reauthorize their strike Sunday night, saying their demands were not met.

In a Sunday night email informing members that the strike

Wednesday, September 16, 2020 — 3

email from University Housing leadership obtained by The Daily states that outside guests, or people living outside of one’s dorm, are not permitted in residence halls, but residents living in the same dorm are allowed to visit each other.

Once the “no guest policy” took effect after residents move into their dorms, RAs were instructed to tell outsiders that they are in violation of the CLAM. Emily said it will be difficult to differentiate who is an outside guest and who lives in a different part of the dorm.

Baghdadchi wrote in an email to The Daily that staff has a shared responsibility for “cultivating a culture of care.”

He wrote that the hall director — the leader of each residential building — is responsible for holding students to community standards. University Housing’s conduct office will manage students who repeatedly break them.

Emily said there is no way to enforce the policy. Currently, the only repercussion from breaking this rule is equivalent to violating the CLAM: the case is forwarded to Housing Student Conduct and Conflict Resolution for the staff to review.

“There’s really no teeth to this policy,” Emily said. “Yes, on paper it sounds good … but in terms of enforcement, as an RA, we’re really relying on a bluff.”

Approximately two weeks after the town halls, some RAs announced plans to strike claiming no concrete action has been taken. They also added new demands including hazard pay, a statement of nonretaliation should they form a union, and the inclusion of “real consequences” should a student break social distancing policies.

In an email to ResStaff sent Wednesday night, Rick Gibson, director of Michigan Housing, responded to some of the RA’s demands. He began the letter by acknowledging ResStaff’s need for action and thanked ResStaff members for their commitment to public safety and change.

He listed various efforts Housing has made to adapt to the RAs complaints, noting that under the University’s surveillance testing program, RAs will receive priority status.

He said because compensation for ResStaff primarily comes in the form of room and board, the University would not provide hazard pay.

In his email to ResStaff, Gibson also elaborated on consequences for residents who fail to abide by community guidelines, noting that follow up measures may include contract termination.

“Given the gravity of COVID-19, that means contract termination may be appropriate after one or two serious

violations,” Gibson wrote.

would continue for another week, GEO leadership said the strike had made a major impact on campus.

“Last week, we proved to University leaders, to the University community and to each other that GEO is committed to fighting for a safe and just community, and we are not prepared to stop until we get it,” the email read.

The union, which represents more than 2,000 graduate student instructors and graduate student staff assistants, previously voted to reject the University’s proposal on Wednesday, which gave GSIs and GSSAs the ability to cancel class if a student did not wear a mask and pledged to increase the transparency of COVID-19 case data but did not address the union’s demands regarding policing.

Other University groups have echoed GEO’s demands for a safer pandemic response — more than 100 residential advisers announced a strike on Wednesday, arguing that the University did not provide adequate COVID-19 protections. Dining hall employees also conducted a “slow down” of operations across campus Friday after initially planning a walkout.

The walkout was postponed due to fear of retaliation from the University.

The request for an injunction isn’t the first time the University administration has sought outside involvement in the ongoing labor dispute. On Tuesday, the first day of the strike, the University filed an unfair labor practice charge against GEO, asking the Michigan Employment Relations Commission to weigh in on the

strike. The charge names GEO President Sumeet Patwardhan.

In an email sent to all undergraduate students Wednesday, Provost Susan Collins called the strike “disruptive, confusing and worrisome,” noting that it violates both state law and the union’s contract, which was ratified in April.

“The strike violates Michigan law; in addition, GEO has agreed by contract not to take actions that interfere with the University’s operations, in this case, your education,” Collins wrote in the email. “Nonetheless, the University’s team will continue to meet with GEO in good faith to resolve remaining issues.”

GEO has repeatedly noted that the strike is illegal, including joking about it online. In a document addressing concerns about the work stoppage, GEO described possible consequences for graduate students who participate in the strike.

“If GEO strikes when the contract is in force, the organization may not be able to collect dues,” the document reads. “We would also be open to lawsuits and could be forced to pay damages.

If the contract is not in force, the likelihood of a lawsuit is lower, but UM could still get a court order for us to stop striking and if we do not obey it, the coordinators of the strike (the GEO officers) could be placed under arrest. GEO has done work stoppages in the past, and the university has not retaliated.”

In its statement Monday, GEO leadership said they were “not surprised” that the University had

Communication Disconnect The three RAs also expressed frustration and discontent with the lack of communication between Housing and ResStaff.

Noah said the University did not let ResStaff know if they would still have a job or housing in the fall until he received his letter of appointment the first week of August.

“That was really stressful as a student who depends on them for housing,” Noah said.

Olivia said she’s often put into a difficult situation when the first time she hears about housing updates is through a general email that was also sent to residents. It can be difficult to guide residents and make them feel secure when RAs have the same questions, Olivia said.

To help increase communication between RAs and Housing, the letter sent to University Administration asked for the creation of a student liaison elected by ResStaff members to advocate for their concerns and inform them of updated plans and policies.

Emily said the liaison will help RAs feel more heard.

“As staff members, we are consistently asked to be flexible and adaptive to our community needs,” Emily said. “However, when we ask for changes or attempt to voice our concerns with policies and how they’re being implemented, we are told that we should not do that.”

University Housing has not yet addressed the demand for a student liaison.

With limited channels to voice concerns, both current and former RAs said there is a disconnect between policy and implementation.

According to alum Deryl Long, this disconnect is not new. During her time as an RA from 2018-19, she said she was instructed by leadership to call DPSS when mental health incidents arose. She said many of the RAs who experienced mental health crises firmly believed engaging the police would worsen the situation, and RAs are put in difficult situations when determining if a situation needed the police.

“If you were the RA on duty and this kind of situation was unfolding, you had to decide whether or not you were going to involve the police, which is a terrible idea, obviously,” Long said. “Or you had to risk your job security, housing security and food security, to go around the procedure and just deal with the situation yourself.”

Other members of the campus community have taken issue with the University’s ties

to law enforcement. Similar to the RAs, The Graduate Employees’ Organization, which represents more than 2,000 graduate student instructors and graduate student staff assistants, announced a strike on Monday in protest of the University’s reopening plans.

One of GEO’s demands was cutting funding to the Division of Public Safety and Security and reducing law enforcement’s presence on campus.

Long also recalled the job taking a large toll on her and other RAs’ mental health, especially because they weren’t trained mental health professionals but were often put in serious situations.

This policy has been confirmed by several current RAs and is still active.

Fear of Retaliation RAs have told The Daily they are concerned about losing their jobs for speaking out.

Each ResStaff member has to sign a letter of appointment saying they must uphold all expectations of the role. Failure to meet the expectations and duties outlined may result in dismissal from the role, according to the LOA. The letter contains a nondisparagement clause that says ResStaff cannot publicly criticize any University Housing policies. Student staff members who disagree with any policies are encouraged to ask their supervisor questions, but they should continue to enforce all policies and “show public support” for them.

The Daily could not confirm if an RA has been fired for criticizing Housing or its policies, however many RAs have said they are fearful of breaking their contract. As a result, Olivia said many students on ResStaff did not want to voice their concerns publicly.

“I’ve been really afraid there will be consequences for me even though … (I just want to) ensure we’re actually safe,” Olivia said.

“The fear of retaliation is on all of our minds.”

ResStaff requested the University administration to write a statement of nonretaliation, as one of the demands sent in a letter to University Housing on Aug. 23.

Since they still had not received a written statement by the Aug. 24 town hall held between RAs and University leadership, over half of the attendees turned off their cameras and signed in anonymously.

Martino Harmon, vice president of Student Life, later sent a written statement promising non-retaliation.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com turned to the court system.

“We always knew legal action was a possibility, and this was a transparent part of our multiple member-wide discussions about the risks of authorizing a work stoppage,” the statement reads.

“Moreover, this legal move is a clear sign that withholding our labor is working: The University is feeling our power.”

In the video released Monday, Schlissel said the University administration welcomed the chance to negotiate with the union but would not allow the work stoppage to continue indefinitely.

“The issues raised are very important and we’re committed to addressing them, but we can’t do it at the expense of our students’ education,” Schlissel said. “We need our classes to be in session while we work out our differences together.”

Schlissel and Collins will hold a public conversation on Tuesday to discuss COVID-19, campus planning efforts and the impact of the pandemic on members of the community.

“No questions or topics related to these issues will be off-limits,” an email announcing the event reads.

The conversation will be live-streamed here. University community members can submit questions here.

Managing News Editor Leah Graham can be reached at leahgra@ umich.edu. Daily News Editors Barbara Collins, Emma Stein and Liat Weinstein can be reached at bcolli@umich.edu, enstein@umich. edu and weinsl@umich.edu.

4 — Wednesday, September 16, 2020

News

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Students with underlying conditions voice concerns

Medical vulnerability leaves some questioning safety on campus JENNA SITEMAN Daily Staff Reporter

BECCA MAHON/Daily Members of the University of Michigan’s Graduate Employee Organization protest the re-opening of the University, among other causes, outside near the Central Campus Transit Center Wednesday afternoon.

University requests state to intervene in ongoing graduate students’ strike

‘U’ files unfair labor practice charge against GEO with Michigan Employment Commission, asking for halting of work stoppage LEAH GRAHAM

Managing News Editor

The University of Michigan is asking the state to intervene in graduate students’ ongoing strike in protest of the school’s reopening plans.

In an unfair labor practice charge filed with the Michigan Employment Relations Commission on Tuesday — the first day members of the Graduate Employees’ Union took to the picket line — the University requests that the commission order GEO to “cease and desist from unlawfully striking or conducting a work stoppage.”

Lawyers for the University also urge the commission to require GEO to stop “repudiating” the union’s collective bargaining agreement and refrain from “violating its duty to bargain collectively” by demanding negotiations on “mandatory and/or illegal subjects of bargaining over the University’s objections.”

The filing is signed by Gloria Hage, the University’s senior associate general counsel, and Craig S. Schwartz of Butzel Long, a law firm with offices across Michigan as well as in Washington, D.C. and New York City. It names Sumeet Patwardhan, president of GEO, the union that represents more than 2,000 graduate student instructors and graduate student staff assistants.

The charge highlights that it is illegal for public employees to strike in the state of Michigan.

GEO’s contract with the University, which was ratified in April, also prohibits members from participating in a work stoppage.

In a Sunday night email regarding the strike, Provost Susan Collins described the work stoppage as unnecessary and unlawful.

“We do not believe it is necessary for GEO to strike,” Collins wrote. “We successfully reached an agreement with GEO in April on its entire collective bargaining agreement. GEO’s strike falls outside of that negotiation and is based on a number of issues, some of which have very little to do with the wages, hours, and working conditions of GSIs and GSSAs. A strike is not appropriate, as the primary impact will be on our students, particularly our undergraduate students.”

In a message to undergraduates sent Wednesday, Collins called the strike “disruptive, confusing and worrisome,” reiterating the illegality of the job action.

Numerous deans at colleges across campus echoed these concerns in their own emails to faculty within their departments.

The union has been upfront about the illegality of the strike, even posting about it on Twitter.

In a statement addressing U-M leadership’s opposition to the work stoppage, GEO elaborated on the risks of retaliation.

“If GEO strikes when the contract is in force, the organization may not be able to collect dues,” the statement reads. “We would also be open to lawsuits and could be forced to pay damages. If the contract is not in force, the likelihood of a lawsuit is lower, but UM could still get a court order for us to stop striking and if we do not obey it, the coordinators of the strike (the GEO officers) could be placed under arrest. GEO has done work stoppages in the past, and the university has not retaliated.”

The strike runs until Friday, with the potential for reauthorization if the University does not meet the organization’s demands. Despite Patwardhan’s support for a proposal from the University, GEO members rejected a deal on Wednesday night, arguing it failed to satisfy their platform.

In an email Friday, University spokesperson Rick Fitzgerald wrote that in “every case,” the school tries “to meet the interests of all employee unions through discussion and negotiating to an agreement.”

“Part of the agreement from our recent contract negotiations with GEO was a promise on the union’s part that its members would not strike and leave their students without instruction,” Fitzgerald said. “It was only when they went against that promise that the university took additional action.”

Fitzgerald added that the University “stands ready to continue discussions with GEO so that all students are able to continue their studies without further interruption.”

When asked about the next steps in the charge against GEO filed with MERC, Fitzgerald directed questions to the state commission.

MERC handles labor disputes involving public and private sector employees. It also weighs in on unfair labor practice cases.

The chair of the body, Sam Bagenstos, is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School. Bagenstos, who was appointed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in December 2019, did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Schwartz, the outside lawyer signing onto the charge, has experience with labor conflicts in higher education.

In 2019, he helped Eastern Michigan University obtain the dismissal of unfair labor practice charges brought by the union representing EMU’s

tenured and tenured track faculty. EMU “prevailed” after a hearing in front of MERC over four alleged violations of the Michigan Public Employment Relations Act, according to a press release from Butzel Long.

Schwartz referred The Michigan Daily’s request for comment to Fitzgerald.

In an email, Fitzgerald said the University often looks to hire outside attorneys with experience in relevant matters.

“It’s not unusual at all for the university to engage attorneys outside of the Office of the General Counsel to handle specific matters within their areas of expertise,” Fitzgerald wrote. “They work in conjunction with attorneys in OGC.” The law firm where Schwartz works has also been involved in the debate over the state’s COVID-19 restrictions.

Butzel Long attorneys represented several Michigan CEOs who sent a letter in midApril pushing Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to “reopen” the state and allow employees to return to work. The letter cited data indicating that Michigan’s COVID-19 cases had peaked.

According to The New York Times, Michigan’s new daily case count peaked in early April, at 1,722 new cases on April 7.

The CEOs noted how hard it was to “balance public health and the economy,” but argued when it comes to deciding between saving lives and saving jobs, “Michigan has enough moxie to do both at the same time.”

Whitmer later offered a path for reopening certain businesses following the firm’s efforts.

COVID-19 precautions are at the heart of the graduate students’ strike in Ann Arbor.

GEO has called to reduce the police presence on campus and cut the University’s ties to law enforcement.

The unfair labor charge takes issue with these demands, calling the aspects of the platform related to police reform — such as demilitarizing the Division of Public Safety and Security and diverting funding to the department — “non-mandatory and/or illegal subjects of bargaining.”

The charge notes that GEO’s other demands are relevant to graduate students’ work conditions, but argues that GEO has “declined to seek a resolution of such issues through the grievance and arbitration procedures of the collective bargaining agreement.”

Managing News Editor Leah Graham can be reached at leahgra@umich.edu.

Because students with underlying conditions are more vulnerable to COVID19, they face new challenges while returning to campus this fall. About 70% of classes are being held entirely online, but some still require in-person attendance, which can force these students to decide whether to risk their health or their degree.

Kinesiology senior Akshay Luthra experienced a medical emergency when he was 15 and has since experienced a weakening of his lungs and developed gastroparesis, among other issues. He said these conditions weaken his immune system and put him at risk not only for being more susceptible to COVID-19, but also make him more likely to experience lifethreatening consequences if he does contract it.

Luthra said though returning to campus may place him in danger, he felt the benefits of being back in Ann Arbor for his mental health were substantial enough to outweigh the risk.

“It had to do a lot with mental health, actually,” Luthra said. “(At home, in) the case of being high risk, it was a lot of just barricading myself in the house, and I definitely had a lot of low days this summer. I just needed to see and interact with new people, and so I was just like, ‘I’ll still be safe; I’ll still be in my apartment; I’ll be wearing a mask all the time when I walk outside, but I need to just do this for my mental health.’”

Luthra’s struggles with mental health during the pandemic were shared by many of his peers, and now that many students have returned to campus, social gatherings of unmasked students in large groups have begun popping up.

Luthra said he relies on other students for his safety, and he wishes all of them abided by social distancing mandates.

“It’s easy to tell that people don’t care as much as they should,” Luthra said. “They think that they’re the safest age and don’t need to worry about it. (They think that) even if they get it, they’ll get over it, but the point of masks isn’t to save you,

it’s to save people like me and people that are at a higher risk.

It’s very selfish.”

Cheyanne Killin, LSA senior and the 2019-2020 Undergraduate Chair of the Services for Students with Disabilities student advisory board, said she chose not to return to campus due to preexisting conditions.

“The University has not only put the lives of chronically ill and high-risk students in jeopardy, but also reinforced the ableist notion that my life and my presence at this University do not matter,” Killin said.

“I should not need to choose between not graduating with my degree and losing my life, or at best what’s remaining of my health.”

Killin said her friends are concerned for their health, even going as far as considering writing wills.

“I have a couple of friends who are considering writing their wills because they’re either one semester away from graduation, or they have scholarship requirements that they can’t get out of. Everybody is kind of scrambling and afraid, and not being supported in any way,” Killin said.

University spokeswoman Kim Broekhuizen told The Daily that a good resource for students with medical conditions is the Campus Blueprint website. She also said these students should reach out to a few campus offices for more help.

“Students with disabilities and/or chronic health conditions —including those who are at increased risk for severe illness from COVID-19— are encouraged to contact their professor/instructor, the Dean of Students Office (DOS), and/ or Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) to explore educational arrangements or accommodations for in-person courses,” Broekhuizen wrote.

But Killin said she believes administration has not done enough to protect medically vulnerable students.

“The Administration’s silence is not only deafening but murderous, now that this incomplete plan has been put into action,” Killin said.

LSA senior Lauren Payne,

who has a thyroid condition that causes her to have weakened immunity to the virus, echoed Luthra’s sentiments regarding social gatherings on campus.

“It’s really frustrating,” Payne said, “It doesn’t really feel like (my peers care about me) because people are being irresponsible and pretending it’s a personal health choice when it’s really a public health choice.”

Payne said there is ableism at play when students gather in large settings and how their acts further enable the virus to spread.

“They’re putting people at risk because they’ve lived most of their lives in positions of privilege and are healthy,” Payne said. “It’s never going to get better if we don’t get ourselves under control.”

Payne said she can’t utilize learning as well as other medically vulnerable students might because as a senior, she is mainly enrolled in labs, which require in-person work.

Though Payne recognizes that her professor is supposed to comply with medical requests of online learning, she worries she won’t gain enough from that experience.

“I think that if I really wanted to get in touch with my professors, I could find ways to not go to the labs, but it would be pretty detrimental to my learning of the material,” Payne said.

Luckily, Payne is in the Program in the Environment and her classes take place in large outdoor spaces which allow her to remain more than six feet away from anyone else. Payne’s roommate, LSA senior Theodora Reynolds, is also a student in PitE and was supposed to have an in-person tutorial with her professor for a class she was taking.

Reynolds immediately expressed her concern with meeting in person due to Payne’s health risk. Reynolds said she assumed it would be an easy switch to attend their meetings via Zoom. Her professor, however, did not agree.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Testimony shows reversal in decision to fire Anderson

Documents reveal former U-M officials overturned action in 1979 LIAT WEINSTEIN Daily News Editor

A former University of Michigan vice president overturned a 1979 decision to fire Robert Anderson, the late University athletic doctor accused of sexual misconduct, documents filed in U.S. District Court Thursday reveal.

Thomas Easthope, former vice president of the Division of Student Life, said in a deposition that he took steps to fire Anderson upon learning of these allegations.

Easthope later changed this claim, telling investigators he actually gave Anderson the option to resign.

Easthope recounted his experiences working with Anderson, whom he described as “authoritarian” and “in a position of supreme authority” at the University, in a deposition held on July 28 and Aug. 4.

According to the amended class action complaint, the University received “credible allegations” of Anderson’s behavior in 1979 but chose to conceal them, allowing Anderson to retain his position at the University until his retirement in 2003. Anderson died in 2008.

Instead of returning to private practice, Anderson transferred from his role as director of health services to a position as senior physician with health services in 1980. His personnel file states the reason for this transfer as “resuming former position.”

“U of M had and has a duty to protect the health and safety of its students, and this duty includes protecting them from sexual assaults by U of M employees, and responding properly if a sexual assault does occur,” the complaint reads. “U of M violated this duty by failing to implement and enforce appropriate policies and procedures to prevent, and properly respond to, sexual assaults of its students.”

In his deposition, Easthope accused former Athletic Director Don Canham of ignoring the allegations and allowing Anderson to take on a more formal and increasingly influential role within the University Athletic Department. Canham served as athletic director from 1968 to 1988 and is now deceased.

“U of M, through its most senior administrators, employed a false artifice and misrepresentation that Anderson was an ethical and competent doctor,” the complaint says. “In that regard, U of M continued to hold Anderson out as a leader in its healthcare community.”

In March, the University hired the law firm WilmerHale to investigate the sexual misconduct allegations against Anderson after initially hiring Steptoe and Johnson LLP. WilmerHale is also the firm that released the 88-page report detailing its investigation into sexual misconduct by former

Provost Martin Philbert, who was removed from his position in March.

University spokesman Rick Fitzgerald declined to comment on Easthope’s deposition due to the ongoing investigation into Anderson’s behavior.

“We don’t have anything to add, while the WilmerHale investigation remains active,” Fitzgerald wrote.

In June, the University began reaching out to more than 300,000 former students who attended the University between the 1960s and early 2000s, asking them to report any interaction they may have had with Anderson. In a letter to the University community, Schlissel stressed the importance of protecting students’ privacy during the investigation.

“Safeguarding the confidentiality of Dr. Anderson’s former patients is of paramount importance,” Schlissel wrote.

“Accordingly, WilmerHale will not disclose any identifying or confidential patient information to the University, and the identity and confidentiality of Dr. Anderson’s patients will be protected from disclosure to others to the fullest extent permitted by law.”

University lawyers representing alleged victims of Anderson are preparing to speak at mediation next week, according to the Detroit News.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

News

Wednesday, September 16, 2020 — 5

Plume cleanup proposal release sparks criticism from residents Dioxane contamination removal plan arrives 40 years after its discovery KRISTINA ZHENG Daily Staff Reporter

RYAN LITTLE/Daily Members of the University of Michigan’s Graduate Employee Organization protest the re-opening of the University, among other causes, outside of Angell Hall Thursday morning.

With graduate students strikes, undergrads debate attending class

A virtual picket line, asynchronous classes, mixed support from faculty creates less clear cut options for students, forcing them to consider several factors IULIA DOBRIN & JOHN GRIEVE Daily Staff ReporterS

Chants from picket lines echo from campus building to campus building. But step off campus — where most students are tuning into remote classes — and that echo quickly fades.

Graduate students at the University of Michigan are on strike, demanding more stringent COVID-19 precautions in the fall semester reopening plan and reforms in policing on campus.

Many of those striking are Graduate Student Instructors who lead and assist with undergraduate classes.

The Graduate Employees’ Organization, the union representing graduate student instructors and graduate student staff assistants, has asked undergraduate students to observe the picket line in solidarity with the strike, meaning they should not attend class. Central Student Government also encouraged students not to cross the picket line in a resolution passed Tuesday night.

When LSA sophomore Lindsay Adams heard this call-to-action, skipping class was a no brainer.

“I’m fortunate enough that I’m in a position where I can do that without sabotaging myself,” she said. “I think this is a really, really important cause so I’m planning

on standing behind the strike members.”

Some students who aren’t strongly opinionated about the strike, such as LSA sophomore Lorenzo Luna, were left to decide whether or not to stand in solidarity with the GSIs by skipping classes.

“I feel like I don’t really have a place in (the strike), because I myself am not a GSI,” Luna said.

“Me skipping class won’t really do much to give the GSIs more leverage in their negotiations.”

Engineering senior Hannah Lowenthal said she’d be willing to skip class, but only if her classes’ GSIs ask her to do so.

“If my GSI expressed to me that, ‘I am part of this movement and I don’t feel comfortable attending classes,’ I would be totally supportive of that,” Lowenthal said. “I would go with whatever he wants.”

Students who have decided to join the strike must navigate a question few have faced before: Where does the picket line stop when classes are taught online?

LSA sophomore Renee Boudreau said it would be harder for students to ignore the strike if classes were in-person.

“The lines are really blurred with everything being online,” she said. “If you were to be going into class, you wouldn’t want to cross the picket line.”

LSA junior Alyssa Thomas is an active supporter of the GEO. She attended the union’s die-in protest of the University’s fall reopening protocols, boycotted her synchronous classes this week in solidarity with the strike and expressed support for Residential Staff — of which she is a member —voting to strike alongside GEO as well.

Thomas said attending asynchronous lectures and completing assigned class material does not take away from the strike.

“Because I don’t have an attendance responsibility, it would be pointless for me to not go to those asynchronous lectures,” she said. “If we are to get a University response by the end of the week, I would still be responsible for obtaining all the information. It’s basically a matter of ‘do I want to do it now, or do I want to do it later?’”

LSA junior Andie Gardiner decided to do her asynchronous classes and homework outside of the GEO’s official picket hours.

“Even if it’s asynchronous and the lectures are pre-recorded, I would like to just show my support by doing that outside of when the strike line is visible,” Gardiner said.

Lowenthal said she’d be more likely to boycott if her classes weren’t online.

“There is some discomfort

walking solo past a big crowd of people protesting for something,” she said. “At that point, I probably wouldn’t go to class.”

GEO Secretary Amir Fleishman said undergraduate support is a vital component of this strike’s success. He said undergraduates have attended picketing events and spoken at GEO events.

“Undergraduate support is so, so important for us because we’re out there for everybody,” Fleishman said. “Inadequate testing impacts undergrads too. It impacts the entire community far beyond this campus. So we really love to see undergrads come out in support of us.”

Some students who said they were initially unaware of the significance of crossing a picket line eventually decided to skip classes in solidarity.

Boudreau attended classes on the first day of the strike. It wasn’t until Tuesday evening that she decided to boycott her classes for the remainder of the week.

“I think it was questioning my privilege,” Boudreau said. “I kind of just had to consider that my performance in class is very, very much less important than other people’s safety in their lives as they interact with people on campus.”

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

After four years of negotiations, local officials have come to a proposed agreement on a cleanup plan for the Gelman dioxane plume on Aug. 31.

The plume’s history goes back to 1958, when the late Charles Gelman began manufacturing micro-porous filters in the local Ann Arbor area. A chemical called 1,4-dioxane was used during the process, and eventually seeped into soil, polluting groundwater at the company’s Scio Township plant.

Over decades, the dioxane spread into a large plume of underground contamination in northwest Ann Arbor. Dioxane was deemed a probable carcinogen and has been found to cause kidney and liver damage as well as respiratory problems.

The newly proposed settlement with polluter Gelman Science Inc. details a thorough plan for a cleanup protocol, which includes expanding prohibition zones and increasing well installments to monitor the plume’s migration through Ann Arbor area’s groundwater systems.

The settlement’s executive summary states there will be “a significant increase in the obligations imposed on Gelman to investigate and remediate 1,4-dioxane contamination at and migrating away from the Gelman site.”

Prohibition zones were also redefined in the proposed settlement. These zones prohibit the use of groundwater in particular areas due to the heightened levels of dioxane. Additionally, the state’s dioxane assessment for drinking water saw a significant decrease from 85 parts per billion to 7.2 parts per billion. Areas within the prohibition zone show levels of dioxane greater than 7.2 parts per billion.

Ann Arbor City Councilmember Ali Ramwali, D-Ward 5, said this agreement is the result of years of negotiations, going back long before he assumed office in 2018. Regardless, Ramwali acknowledged that this proposal is not perfect.

“I think it ultimately is the best agreement the intervenors’ and the polluters’ attorneys can come up to,” Ramwali said. “And ultimately, this agreement is the summation in the totality of improvements that we can make on the current situation. Does it satisfy all our

concerns? No, it does not.”

In 2016, the city officially filed a lawsuit against Gelman and has been negotiating since then. The proposed settlement, however, has drawn criticism from local residents who wish to see the federal government intervene.

Dan Bicknell, an environmental remediation professional and former Environmental Protection Agency Superfund enforcement officer, discovered the Gelman plume when he was completing research at the University of Michigan in 1984. He is now the president of Global Environment Alliance LLC and an Ann Arbor resident.

“The state government has failed us for almost 40 years now on this project,” Bicknell said. “And the idea that a local government, who has no expertise whatsoever, can do a better job at compelling this very, again, resistant polluter to do the right thing is not logical.”

Larry Lemke, a hydrogeologist and professor at Central Michigan University, was hired as an expert for the Ann Arbor, Scio Township, Washtenaw County and Huron River Watershed Council’s lawsuit against Gelman. In a series of videos, Lemke gave a thorough rundown of the proposal, saying that the contamination will likely remain in the groundwater system in the future.

“Although concentrations have decreased over time, we can expect dioxane to stay in the groundwater and continue to spread for many years to come,” Lemke said.

Ramwali clarified that cleanup of the plume will never result in completely pristine water levels, regardless of who is in charge of it.

“The way that the dioxane in the natural world, the complexities of our underground aquifer system, the geology and again, the way the dioxane behaves in these conditions, we will never get to pristine levels ever in our lifetime,” Ramlawi said. “It’s just scientifically, technologically impossible at this point in history to get those underground aquifers back to pristine levels.”

Bicknell said the community is not asking for pristine water levels, but rather reverting the groundwater to drinking water state. He also noted that a Gelman feasibility study found that it was not an impossible feat.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Six months later: what treating COVID-19 looks like Health care professionals discuss struggles in seeing coronavirus patients, reflect on beginning of pandemic at Michigan Medicine HANNAH MACKAY Daily Staff Reporter

Thursday marks six months since the first positive COVID-19 tests were detected in Michigan. Since then, health care professionals at Michigan Medicine adapted to an unprecedented public health crisis that has tested the strength of the hospital’s resources and employees.

During the first three months of the pandemic, cases in Michigan skyrocketed, reaching a peak of around 1,000 cases on March 30.

Health care workers experienced great personal tragedy and loss as a result of the pandemic and said they made it through thanks to the support of colleagues.

For many health care systems across the country, the last six months have also resulted in extreme financial losses — Michigan Medicine is no exception.

In May, Marschall Runge, chief executive officer of Michigan Medicine, announced the hospital would begin layoffs and furloughs affecting around 1,400 full-time employees in order to promote the

hospital’s economic recovery.

The Daily spoke with five physicians from Michigan Medicine to discuss progress made in treating the disease and the hardships faced by health care professionals over the past six months.

‘Nobody knew just how contagious this was or how risky it was’ According to Robert Dickson, assistant professor in the Medical School who specializes in pulmonary and critical care, nobody knew the best way to tackle the impending crisis when it first began.

“A lot of that initial speculation I think was driven by uncertainty and a lack of experience,” Dickson said.

“Early on in the COVID crisis we just didn’t have data, we didn’t even have observational cohorts to tell us what we were seeing. So in the absence of that, all you have to go on is personal experience and expert opinion.”

Physicians said the lack of clear evidence and tested treatments created confusion when attempting to help their patients recover from COVID-19. Many said they were

working outside of their areas of expertise to treat the disease.

Hallie Prescott, a pulmonary and critical care physician working in Michigan Medicine’s main Intensive Care Unit and the Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs Medical Center, said a six-month learning curve gradually eased their fears about the virus, and gave time for doctors to determine effective treatments.

“In the beginning, nobody knew just how contagious this was or how risky it was to be working in these ICUs, so there was a high level of fear about people contracting the virus and among people working outside of their normal scope,” Prescott said. “As we learned more, we increasingly realized that the normal ways that we take care of people in terms of life support were appropriate.”

Since March, physicians around the world have learned about the best ways to treat patients with COVID-19. Various treatments fell in and out of use, including hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir and most recently, corticosteroids.

ALLISON ENGKVIST/Daily

It has been six months since the first COVID-19 case was detected in Michigan.

Dickson said some of the practices he and other critical care physicians used six months ago are no longer used to combat the virus.

“I think we’re smarter about some of the therapies we offer — there are some things that we were doing back in March and April that had no data to support them,”

Dickson said. “One lesson we’ve learned is that nothing competes with the standard, evidence-based practices.”

‘There’s no precexdent in my or anyone else’s experience’ Several health care providers expressed pride in their responses to the massive demand for care. Robert

Hyzy, medical director of Michigan Medicine’s critical care unit, said neither he nor any of his colleagues anticipated or even fathomed an event like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

6 — Wednesday, September 16, 2020

Michigan In Color

The Youth Justice Fund:

Disclaimer: Not all the writers of this piece are POC. Although MiC is an exclusively POC space, we felt this piece was important to share as a collaborative work as it upholds the standards, values and mission of MiC. SAMANTHA NELSON, CALLIE TEITELBAUM, SAMANTHA CANTIE, ANNIE KLUSENDORF & GABRIJELA SKOKO MiC & Daily Staff Writers

Navigating the return to everyday life for formerly incarcerated individuals is no small feat. Youth Justice Fund (YJF), a non-profit based in Ypsilanti MI, works to assist formerly incarcerated youth reacclimating to society.

Executive Director Aaron Kinzel, who spent 10 years in the prison system, aims to provide mental and financial support to get formerly incarcerated individuals back on their feet.

YJF’s website thoroughly explains the mission, stressing healing, reconnection and education as core values and ultimate goals for each client and the nonprofit at large. Within these values, there exists a commitment to securing housing, employment and transportation. Financially, YJF aims to assist clients with paying their rent, DTE or water bills, as well as provide them with food. For those with small children, YJF looks to provide diapers, formula or other necessities.

Last year, founder Deborah Labelle led a retreat in Dexter, Michigan for the Incarcerated Children Advocacy Network, ICAN, and YJF clients. YJF clients participated in outdoor activities, such as fishing and swimming — activities they couldn’t experience as youth in the criminal justice system. Not only were there recreational

activities, but the retreat also focused on trauma therapy and discussing mental health to provide YJF clients with support, a sense of community and understanding among each other. YJF is currently seeking $5,000 to lead another retreat this year.

The stigma surrounding people with a criminal past in tandem with the pandemic has led to a rapid decrease in available jobs and has made finding employment even more difficult for YJF clients and returning citizens everywhere. These challenges have made YJF’s efforts to help clients apply for unemployment insurance among other government benefits within the past few months even more influential.

Struggling to reintegrate Pat Bates, a member of YJF who met Kinzel at a panel a week out of prison, reflected on his own experience transitioning back home and the support he received from YJF. “What I didn’t want to do was come home and be selling drugs or committing crimes or anything like that, but I also didn’t want to be somebody’s slave,” Bates said. “With Aaron and the Youth Justice Fund they found me opportunities. The biggest resource that I’ve had since I’ve been home is the Youth Justice Fund.”

Since Bates’s return home, YJF has provided him immense aid, including a car that has made his career pursuits more feasible.

Additionally, Kinzel has pushed Bates to pursue higher education beyond the Associates degree he earned prior to his incarceration. “[Bates] had an associates degree while he was in the system, but I’m going to make sure I push Bates further because he’s a smart individual,” Kinzel said. “When he comes to a bump in the road I can say, ‘Bates, you

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know what, steer a little left, this is what I did.’ And if he needs resources I can connect him with people, give him a little financial, whatever he needs to make sure that he keeps climbing that hill.”

Bates explained that without support and resources, many returning citizens resort to committing crime for the sake of survival. Kinzel admitted that, upon his return, he considered robbing people while struggling to acclimate to society.

“The one thing about people who come home (from prison) is that we are very proud, but that pride can get us into trouble because we don’t have these resources or opportunities,” Bates said. “So we might go take another pass, so to speak.”

Kinzel elaborated, emphasizing that in many communities with high rates of crime and poverty, there are few to no resources to help former inmates get back on their feet.

“We know these communities, we know what it’s like living in poverty, living in crime-ridden areas without opportunities or resources,” Kinzel said. “Coming home now all these years later, it’s been like a new prison experience in a weird way. When you go into prison you have to learn this new environment, you have to adapt.

But then when you come home it’s almost like the same thing….You have to build a reputation, you have to make connections and network and (find) people who are on your team.”

This “new prison” experience that Kinzel described comes from an intense societal stigma against formerly incarcerated individuals. Kinzel highlighted the stark variation in mental health resources based on a community’s affluence. In most privileged environments, Kinzel suggested that emotional support is far

A three person mission rehabilitating Southeast Michigan’s formerly incarcerated community

more accessible.

“A 16-year-old kid kills themselves in a privileged community,” Kinzel said. “There’s all types of trauma counseling and therapy for them in high school. But an eight-year-old kid in the city of Detroit sees death and murder all the time and they get a teddy bear and maybe a t-shirt and balloons.”

The essence behind Kinzel’s example is clear: Socioeconomic divisions play a major role in access to healthcare and, by extension, strongly shape the way children learn to cope with trauma and violence in adulthood.

“We’re broken little boys in really tough communities and then we have to become hardened, aggressive, hyper masculine teenagers, to prove ourselves in a community where we had to survive,” he said.

Therein lies a central problem — a societal ignorance about where formerly incarcerated individuals like Bates and Kinzel “come from.” This lack of understanding produces a sense of indifference toward civilians coming out of the criminal justice system and disregards the traumatic circumstances that might have led them into the system in the first place.

The gap between socially conscious and unconscious individuals in regard to the prison system and larger American systems remains drastic. This persistent ignorance perpetuates a stigma that formerly incarcerated individuals are unworthy or lesser members of society, presenting a significant barrier for them when finding sustainable employment opportunities.

Professional pursuits The pervasive stigmas encountered by returning citizens are not only unfair, but also untrue.

Incarcerated individuals often

Release Date: Monday, September 16, 2020

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis ACROSS 1 “We’ll tak __ o’ kindness yet”: Burns 5 Made, as a tunnel 8 “Oh, no you __!”

13 Item inspected with a flashlight, perhaps 14 Commute but not pollute 15 “We’re broadcasting” sign 16 Remaining 17 John McClane in “Die Hard,” e.g.

19 Have something 20 Ont. neighbor 21 Lips sound 22 B sharp equivalent 25 Weapon that stuns 28 Promise not to prosecute 30 Peeper 31 RSVP facilitator 32 Junk __ 33 The Game of Life pieces 36 Wreck room?

37 Rely (on) for support 38 Kitchen tool brand 39 “You got it” 41 Brown or pale order 43 “The Jungle” author 47 Friend of Natalie, Jo and Blair on “The Facts of Life” 48 Indication of a Realtor’s success 51 Put back in the hot oil 53 Article in the L.A. Times?

54 Email address part 55 What an X may mean 58 Sea level shift 59 Con artist’s asset 60 Speaker’s spot 61 Homey lodgings 62 Don José in “Carmen,” e.g.

63 Vote of agreement 64 Showbiz “grand slam” comprising the awards found in the circled letters

DOWN 1 Allstate competitor 2 Bring up to speed 3 Govt. building flier 4 Vet’s patient 5 Enjoy, as a restaurant 6 Monroe plays one in “Some Like It Hot” 7 Birthstones, say 8 Daytime talk pioneer 9 Like much beer 10 Seductive 11 Home of Thule aspect of the Force U.S. Air Force’s 11 Strategic math game 12 Sample In great demand 12 14 Ludlum spy Jason 18 24-hr. stores to many BP 24 next __ dixit: assertion stations 20 Wharf 23 Half of seis 24 Does as told 26 Sicilian smoker 27 Seacrest of morning talk 32 Mother’s John’s instrument 29 Day 33 month Light-wave units

33 Annoyed look 34 Trade show 35 Totally collapse 36 Hindu title 37 Island garlands 39 Short-stemmed brandy glass 40 App buyers 41 White gold et al.

42 Glasgow guys 44 Verdi’s penultimate opera 45 Lassie, for one

46 Emulating cavalry members 49 “That’s awful!”

50 A-bomb tryout 52 Movie guru with his own grammar 55 Sports rep.

56 To be paid 57 Vote of disagreement 58 Game no one wins

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09/16/20 09/10/20

By Jake Halperin ©2020 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

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09/16/20

hold leadership positions during their sentences — which enforce a large variety of clerical and critical skills — but employers don’t value these experiences when they’re compared to applicants with a more traditional work background.

“Just think about a guy in prison who’s the man of the yard,” Bates said. “You might have one guy that was a law clerk, a paralegal in a law library, you got another guy and he’s a 4.0 student in Jackson college, the only college they offer, and you might have another guy who was in the recreation department and he was coordinating all types of events and activities, huge things that people out here get paid really good to do. That’s what I was. I was the rec official, I organized events and everything. But then you come out here and you’re just a piece of shit. You’re nothing.

You were important in prison — just think about the culture shock in that alone.”

Without any structure in place to aid the return of formerly incarcerated citizens, Kinzel emphasized how important participation from businesses around Ann Arbor is. Employers like Phillis Engelbert, owner of the Lunchroom LLC and the Detroit Street Filling Station, have become a key resource for rehabilitative pursuits. Though small businesses should not be the backbone of these community efforts, their contributions can be incredibly impactful. Engelbert speaks openly of her passion for criminal justice reform through helping individuals with employment, accountability and rehabilitative spaces, and patrons of both her restaurants know the importance behind these principles.

“Phyllis is a prime example with The Lunchroom,” Kinzel said. “Maybe some of you have connections or family that might own a business — if they’re willing to hire someone that’s been in the system, that’s a huge help.

Or just taking donations at businesses too is another way. Or volunteers, interns, to just kinda get the word out that this is something that we need to build as a community.”

Engelbert has found incredible success in doing just that and her businesses are both financially stable and creating rehabilitative communities. “(My employees) are the brightest bright spot. Our crew is upbeat, professional, responsible, caring and accountable to the business and each other. They are a pleasure to be around. It is because of their hard work that our business is succeeding,” she wrote in the Detroit Street DisBatesch.

“I don’t want handouts for my clients,” Kinzel said. “But I want them to get a helping hand and that first step so they can become productive citizens and people that are community members.”

Of course, money is what pays the bills, and returning citizens often come away from the prison system with very little.

But a network of volunteer positions, internships and connections make one person’s efforts, like Phyllis’, more sustainable in the pursuit toward community enrichment.

Performative activism Both Kinzel and Bates emphasized the toxicity of performative activism, imploring University students, white allies and those from wealthy, Eurocentric-based backgrounds to invest in their communities and engage in onthe-ground, tangible support in order to catalyze justice reform.

“I think what a lot of people who come from privileged areas think is that they’re gonna come in and save the day,” Kinzel said.

“You know, they throw a little money sometimes in the system or they volunteer, and then they’re good. That’s not what’s gonna change society. We need people that are from privileged communities, we need all races, all ethnicities, all religions, everybody. We all need to work together to fight oppression.”

Kinzel emphasized the importance of letting those who have been oppressed guide our communities in the right direction. He referred to a tendency amongst privileged individuals to participate in protest for the sake of performative signage and social media posts, only to return

to the comfort of their homes an hour later, feeling as though they have changed the world. He proposed more productive alternatives, like engaging in mentorship programs, advocating for policy reform, challenging personal biases and prejudices and supporting previously incarcerated individuals in their career search.

“We need people that are gonna treat us like human beings, we need people that can be mentors. College students need to reach out to some of my participants and help them get navigated.”

For college students looking to help returning citizens, Kinzel is constantly looking for mentors and tutors for his participants that are starting their higher education or working in the Ann Arbor or Detroit area.

“But the thing is you have to actually come and be a part of these communities,” Bates said.

“Come and dig in the trenches with us, get your hands dirty. I’d like to see more actual work than crying and shouting.”

University of Michigan students or any residents in the Ann Arbor area can volunteer with the Youth Justice Fund by filling out this form or donate using their Gofundme page.

Systems and cyclic oppression Questions about prison reform and policing –– such as community policing, police budgets and the prison industrial complex and their relationship to civilian societies –– have been at the forefront of many American minds following an outburst of civil rights activism in recent months. Bates and Kinzel’s stories illuminate the urgency of disrupting the current system. “(The prison system) was designed and is doing exactly what it was intended to do — which is to marginalize, oppress and control certain populations. And these are populations that are living in poverty, populations that are predominantly and desperately impacted as communities of color, these are people that to society, — at least the elites in the world and to politicians — are throw away people.”

Kinzel explained that the corporate entity behind the prison system is what makes the operation so powerful — similar to slavery, incarceration is economically “too big to fail.” As Kinzel puts it, “It’s the best experiment in United States history of business malpractice.”

The University of Michigan is a community largely revered for its diverse intellect and passion for social justice; however, Kinzel discussed how it often feels as though universities exploit these communities and individuals for research purposes.

“I work part time for the University of Michigan as faculty on the Dearborn campus and I see it in Dearborn, I see it in Ann Arbor,” Kinzel said. “They want to do this research, they want to get the stories from people like myself and Bates, but they don’t invest much in us and those communities. It saddens me and angers me simultaneously. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t people with good intentions in these spaces, but I think overall universities very often become corporate bureaucracies and are just trying to make a buck off of us.”

In positions of privilege, such as our own — being the University student body — we must confront and actively work to uplift these communities, no matter how distant they seem from our lives at U-M. Aforementioned opportunities to do so, such as tutoring, and serving as a prominent academic or professional mentor for these returning citizens, is one way to pursue helpful contributions.

Bates and Kinzel remind us that we are capable of incredible change when we work as a collective.

“Let’s be real, the people in power are more wealthy.....if you don’t get wealthy white folks on board for justice reform, shit’s not gonna happen,” Kinzel said.

“But we also need Black folks, we need Indigenous people, we need Latinx people, we need Hispanics, and Arab Americans — everybody’s gotta be sitting at this table. But, when I say we’re holding hands, it’s gotta be equal. But help us, those who have lived the oppressed experience, help us lead you in the right direction. Because we know the answers.”

Michigan In Color

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‘Why I strike’

Wednesday, September 16, 2020 — 7

The sixth love language JESSICA KWON MiC Columnist

MADDIE HINKLEY/Daily

VICTORIA MINKA MiC Columnist

Wildcat strike. When I first heard this term, it seemed something feral, yet unavoidable, similar to when you mistreat an animal for long enough and it finally decides to bite back. As a ResStaff member in West Quad, I would say that this is an accurate portrayal of my own feelings about choosing to strike. It feels as if I have been knocked down, ignored and belittled enough times that finally I have reached my breaking point. And so, at 9 a.m. this past Wednesday, along with the majority of ResStaff members, I decided to start striking.

I will not speak for all of ResStaff, but I will share the personal occurrences that have driven me to risk my housing and food security. This week has been a thrown-into-the-deep-end way of being introduced to labor unions. I was not raised in a family that instilled the importance of not crossing the picket line. While my grandfathers were an auto-worker and a factory worker, and my grandmothers were a seamstress and a homemaker, I have received little to no education on labor unions up until this point. My mother is a University administrator at another institution, so when I heard of unions it was often laced with traces of frustration. Now, as a laborer participating in a strike myself, it feels like a comical turning of tables.

While walking picket lines and refusing to show up to work shifts this past week, I often pondered about legendary Detroit activist

Grace Lee Boggs and how she was first introduced to activism through labor unions and poor housing conditions. In an NPR piece about her life, she describes her introduction to activism: “she was forced to find free housing in a rat-filled basement…

One day, as Boggs was walking through her neighborhood, she came across a group of people protesting poor living conditions — which included rat-infested housing.” To think, only five years after her death in a city she knew and loved, student workers are striking over similar conditions. No demand for safe, comfortable living conditions is too great, whether it be due to pests or a pandemic — or both in the case of the Northwood Apartments where students are being quarantined. It is soothing to know that I walk in the steps of an outstanding Asian American woman activist, but it’s heartbreaking that I must fight the same struggles.

To mention Grace Lee Boggs without also recognizing the intersectionality of safe housing and race would be a slight. Grace (and I use her first name because I feel that she would embrace the rejection of typical status signifiers and would also stand with the more radical ways of teaching from activist authors like Paulo Friere) actively fought against the oppressive and racist systems of housing in our society for both Asian and Black Americans. There is an inextricable link between the location of communities of color and poor living conditions in intentionally underfunded neighborhoods.

Communities of color have been

historically displaced, segregated and denied access to equal wealthbuilding opportunities and home ownership. This has been carried out through redlining (which was particularly directed at Black communities) as well as other blatantly discriminatory housing guidelines that denied people of color a chance at upward mobility.

While I would never say that the University of Michigan is underfunded, I would say that it uses some of the same predatory practices on students with marginalized identities that housing authorities have utilized. Michigan Housing’s hiring process often targets ResStaff who would not have another option when it comes to paying for room and board. Many are dependent upon financial aid, and would be risking housing and food security if they stepped out of line in their positions. It is this fear mongering that has prevented ResStaff from striking for so long. However, many were catalyzed into acting because the difference between striking and not striking was literally life and death.

In my experience, striking was less a choice and more a duty as a leader to residents in my community and a colleague to my fellow ResStaff members. It was essential that I use my voice to advocate for others. However, this is a terrifyingly vulnerable place to be. It has been a privilege that I have never felt the same housing insecurity that I am feeling now. The constant paralyzing ache of awaiting an email telling me to remove myself from Housing premises immediately is all-con-

PICES

ARIES Get your sweetheart fully involved with any decisions you make, especially about money. It’s the respectful thing to do and will help you avoid any potential pitfalls from the Venus-Uranus square.

Keep talking.

suming. In such a situation, I lean on the community around me, but this comes with mounting challenges as I balance trying to protect those I care about. Over the past few weeks I have told friends I was radioactive — too often exposed to spaces where students are blatantly irresponsible and potentially contributing to the spread of COVID-19. I didn’t want to return home to visit my father for his 68th birthday because I didn’t want to expose him to everything I could be carrying. I have dodged repeated phone calls from my mother because I can’t lie to her again and tell her that I’m alright while holding back tears. This is nothing in comparison to ResStaff members who are risking homelessness in the case that the University decides to fire us en masse for making our voices heard.

I can return to my hometown if no other housing is available, but not all of ResStaff can say the same. This is why I strike. For the marginalized folks in my community who are being taken advantage of by University Housing practices that echo the discriminatory rules of another era. I strike for future student workers who do not yet know how to raise their voices and I strike for myself, to give myself an opportunity to demand more. Throughout her work, Grace Lee Boggs always mentions that revolution and activist action comes from a place of deep love. A love for people and the places they live and work. Funnily enough, the place where I work is also the place I live and like Grace says, I have an enormous amount of love for it.

For this reason, I strike.

YOUR WEEKLY

The New Moon is in your love zone, but the Venus-Uranus square suggests that you’ll simply be too busy to spend much time on romance this week. If you can get your sweetheart involved in your work in any way, two heads are better than one.

Growing up as “that one Asian kid” in a community where the average civilian resembled Gary Busey more than myself, I devised several methods to fit in with the other children at school. I wore chic American clothes, like stripped, glittery V-necks from Justice, and I pretended to have an intense passion for all things equestrian so a pig-tailed horse girl would befriend me. One of the early routines I adopted to be cool was eating the food my mom packed for me as quickly and discreetly as possible, because it was absolutely nothing like what the other girls at my table had. There were days that I came home after school and told my mom I’d simply “forgotten” to eat the kimbap she woke up at 6 a.m. to assemble for me. I probably thought if I ate enough mashed potatoes, everyone who looked at me would see a blue-eyed blonde instead of the pasty, bifocaled Korean I clearly was.

I am the proud daughter of immigrants who raised me in an agrarian town where food options, for an Asian fob, were nonexistent. (We had one sad “Chinese” buffet whose highlight was a vanilla soft-serve machine.)

It would have been easy to raise me on a diet of Hamburger Helper and grilled cheese sandwiches, but instead my parents went to great lengths to ensure we could retain the cuisine of our culture at home. Comfort food was not to become one more sacrifice they had to suffer in the name of the American Dream. And as I grew, so did my appreciation for Korean food. (In retrospect, I can’t believe that as a kid I would have preferred the synthetic cheese and bland ham of Lunchables to laboriously marinated meats laid out over a freaking pillow of white rice.) Every ingredient which had embarrassed me before — copious spoonfuls of garlic, pungent kimchi, roasted seaweed which clung to the teeth — just came together as delicious food I felt incredibly lucky to have at the table, cooked fresh every day.

Korean food takes patience and dedication. My mom will slice away every spare strip of fat from our short ribs. She spends days preparing her rich ox-bone broth, and weeks to ferment and pickle half a dozen side dishes. My dad delights in searing a perfect,

Michaela Coel is Destroying the Single Story Content warning: This article discusses themes such as sexual assault and trauma. It also contains spoilers from the television show “I May Destroy You.” CAMILLE MOORE MiC Columnist

TAURUS

Conflict this week could come from your blood family’s reaction or attitude towards your lover.

There may be prejudice or just irrational dislike in the mix here – but either way, you owe it to your partner to stand up for him or her.

AQUARIUS

WHISPER

This can be a very healing week for your relationship, especially if in-laws or others have previously tried to interfere in your togetherness. The New Moon highlights a fresh bond of trust between you, which you can definitely build upon.

“mothers are just people who give birth to roommates”

GEMENI The biggest problem you face in a relationship this week is your belief that you know what your partner wants. Do you? Really?

Have you actually listened, as opposed to just hear what you want to hear? Think deeply about this.

CAPRICORN This week’s Venus-Uranus square is actually a good chance to liven up a flagging relationship. Spice things up in whatever way you choose, but do introduce some spontaneity to keep the magic alive. Boredom is your enemy.

“i have decided to become really attractive and hot”

CANCER Any financial waste or irresponsible monetary decisions this week will cause problems within a relationship. The New Moon boosts your communication skills, but you’ll need a lot of tact and patience to handle this well.

LEO Your identity is inextricably linked to your career, but is your partner fully onboard with that?

This week’s New Moon underlines the need to ensure that you share your values with one another, and that communication lines remain open.

SAGITTARIUS The New Moon fires up your ambitions zone, so this is a great week for seeking a new job or a promotion. If you’re single and looking for love, don’t be too narrow-minded about the kind of person you’re seeking. Break the mold.

“i want a gf who drinks soup”

VIRGO The New Moon in your own sign is a very positive event. There’s potential magic in romance this week too, despite the Venus-Uranus square. Speak to your partner from your very soul and you’ll awaken a deeper desire than ever before.

LIBRA With a New Moon in your privacy zone, it’s important to rely on your own counsel this week – especially as advice from friends could be misleading. Their intentions are good, but when it comes to romance, you should definitely trust your own instincts.

SCORPIO What you think is good news for your relationship may be viewed very differently by your partner, especially if it involves your career.

The New Moon encourages you to share your dreams and plans with your sweetheart – get on the same page.

Read your weekly horoscopes from astrology.tv

medium steak for his family, testing new recipes, making inscrutably terrible food puns (preferably about nachos) and using tongs and scissors to fry us immorally indulgent slabs of pork belly. They demonstrate how to eat mussels with a single shell and entreat me to take the crispiest portion of a fish — the tail. We each get one bowl of rice, the food placed in the center communally, and we dig in together.

Food, for my parents and for many immigrant parents, is an expression of pure love. My mom will debone a whole fried swordfish and make sure I have plenty of the meat before she lifts a single grain of rice to her mouth. If I’m ever too busy to come to the table, she’ll wrap pork, rice, garlic, a jalapeño slice and a generous heap of ssamjang in a lettuce leaf, walk to my desk, jam it in my mouth and tell me not to work so hard. K-BBQ fed to you by your umma just hits different. A love expressed through food is quiet and unassuming, like East Asia’s cultural status quo, but the reward is a complex medley of deep, spicy, garlicky, sweet and earthy flavors which play off of each other and warm you from within. It tastes like home. When I went to college, I realized I hadn’t appreciated the full extent of my parents’ efforts and I craved home food and cut fruits more than ever. Nowadays, I’m off the meal plan and I take buses to Korean grocery stores and try to learn — though I can never quite replicate the flavor —to cook my mom’s recipes myself. I text her asking how to make budae jjigae and she replies with bafflingly rough estimations of her cooking process (“when you’ve chopped up enough onions, you’ll know”) followed by “good luck!” and a smiley face or heart emojis. I host dumpling parties with my closest friends where we sit around the table and whine about being single and applying to internships while folding meat filling into pale dough wrappers, just like I grew up doing with my family. And when I visit my big sister in Seattle, she always has a hot, Korean meal set on the table, waiting for me. Whenever I’m exhausted from a long flight out West, all it takes is the sight of a steaming odaeng broth on the stove to remind myself that family is worth crossing any borders and taking any risks for. Together, my sister and I try to hold onto these precious remnants of our parents’ love and, my God, do they taste delicious.

The vast majority of my free time this quarantine was spent streaming movies and television shows. I found solace in lounging around on whichever piece of furniture seemed most comfortable that day and spending hours fully engrossed in fictional and far away worlds. The TV show “I May Destroy You,” created by Michaela Coel, took me to an entirely different state of mind. The HBO series, set in London, follows Arabella, a young Black writer, and her group of friends as she juggles work life, family, friends and romantic relationships after being sexually assaulted.

While numerous aspects of the twelve-episode series were exciting, puzzling and even triggering, the most notable theme that stuck with me was the importance of portraying imperfect people on screen. This realization immediately made me think of the ‘single story,’ a phrase coined by the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie during her 2009 TedTalk titled “The danger of a single story.”

She speaks about the dangers of oversimplified stories or ideas we form about individuals, groups of people or entire countries. Speaking in generalizations is harmful and erases any kind of dignity or possibility of seeing each other as full human beingsand not just one part of a monolith.

Coel sincerely invests in deconstructing the ‘single story’ of sexual assault, showing that sexual assault looks differently for every individual who experiences it.

Throughout the series, we see five different incidents of sexual assault. Each survivor responds in such different ways, making it impossible to force into a single narrative, character or plotline.

This is an applaudable feat as media portrayals of people who survive traumatic experiences can often be stereotypical. Highlighting varying experiences with sexual assault shows that no one survivor, perpetrator or environment is the same as one another.

It is vital to understand that every survivor of sexual assault processes trauma in different ways, therefore we must reject the single story of the ‘perfect victim.’

It is for this reason that the characters are written to be honest and flawed; no character is fully good or fully evil. Coel captures the messiness, the confusion, the denial, the anger, the grief and the acceptance that may come after being assaulted and how that can play out in daily life. “I May Destroy You” makes us ask ourselves, can we really judge an individual until we’ve experienced the same trauma and triumphs that they have?

By understanding this and writing with respect and nuance to the complexities of sexual assault, Michaela Coel has created a show that resonates with viewers worldwide, including myself. This series truly strives to bring more voices and varying experiences into light while forcing audiences to be introspective. In the end, she leaves us with a powerful message that after the dust fades (while some may still linger), trauma does not define the individual, and neither can we.

Opinion

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Wednesday, September 16, 2020 — 8

GEO MEMBERS | OP-ED

GEO strike gains momentum despite smears

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ALEXANDER NOBEL | COLUMNIST

COVID-19 is a practice test for the climate crisis

I

t has been 218 days since the first COVID-19 case on United States soil and there is still no organized national testing strategy.

Despite being warned ten times by public health experts as early as Jan. 18 about the threat the virus posed to our country, President Donald Trump and his administration failed — and are continuing to fail — to take the pandemic seriously.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert for decades, claimed “no one is going to deny fewer lives would have been lost had the administration acted sooner.

What’s been less clear amid all the chaos is that this global pandemic, an unprecedented catastrophe that has so far taken the lives of over 180,000 Americans, is unfortunately also a microcosm of the climate crisis.”

Whenever there is a crisis, there are always those with reactionary politics who are quick to downplay the threat or even completely deny its existence. With the pandemic, that takes the form of anti-maskers, antivaxxers and conspiracy theorists.

By now everyone has seen at least one video of someone refusing to put on a mask inside a grocery store or shopping center. While it can be entertaining to watch grown adults scream and whine about having to wear a face-covering for 15 minutes, it does reflect extremely poorly on the political climate of the country.

From “5G causes COVID-19” to “Bill Gates is tracking people with the vaccine,” the number of conspiracy theories gaining traction in the U.S. right now is incredibly dangerous.

These theories may contribute to the skepticism surrounding a potential COVID-19 vaccine; a recent Gallup poll found that one in three Americans would not get a free Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved COVID-19 vaccine that is estimated to be ready for distribution in early 2021. The Mayo Clinic estimated that for contagious diseases the ideal percentage of the population to reach herd immunity is in the ballpark of 70 percent. If the Gallup poll ends up being accurate,

the 65 percent of Americans that would be willing to be vaccinated for COVID-19 might not reach the percentage necessary for widespread immunity, causing the pandemic to drag on longer.

This same skepticism is seen in conversations about climate change, with conservatives arguing climate change is natural and global temperature always varies over time. Trump has even gone as far as to tweet in 2012, “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” despite having signed a letter in 2009 urging then-President Barack Obama to support a global climate deal. Surprising no one that pays attention to the future of the planet, NASA reported that 97 percent of climate scientists believe climate change is a man-made phenomenon.

Many climate scientists have suggested a deadline of 2030 to stop global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (34.7 degrees Fahrenheitper year, or the damage caused to the planet will be irreversible.

Even with scientists emphasizing 2030, neither of our current presidential candidates have a plan to hit that target. While Trump has no policies or plans on his website — and the Republican Party has even gone so far as to have no platform at all at their convention — Joe Biden does. His climate plan currently sets a date of 2035 to implement a carbon-neutral power grid. Biden campaigned in the Democratic primary with the target date of 2050, but thanks to the advocacy and tireless work of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, the Sunrise Movement and environmental activists nationwide, he has moved up the date to 2035.

While it is certainly an improvement, it does not go far enough.

This inaction repeats a pattern all too familiar during the COVID-19 crisis: politicians failing to listen to public health experts and take public health crises seriously. Esteemed scientists, trained experts, have

provided political leaders with data and have pronounced their scientific opinions, but, amazingly, politicians refuse to act in a manner that meets the moment. Throughout the pandemic, we have seen a massive failure of government to act and actually provide help for the millions of Americans who have been devastated by an economy not seen since the Great Depression. Congress provided a one-time stimulus check of just $1,200 and then discontinued the previously-expanded unemployment insurance when it ran out a few weeks ago.

Because of the failure at all levels of government, it comes down to communities to care for those who need it most. An example from New York City is “community fridges” that were set up in the low-income neighborhoods that were hit hardest

by COVID-19 and the economic downturn. These fridges were free, accessible to anyone who needed food and stocked by neighbors, helping each other whenever community members had any leftovers.

In the midst of all this economic and humanitarian failure, everyone wants to go back to a “normal,” which has caused the rush in reopening schools and corners to be cut in treatment approval. But this is a strategy that will lead to even more disastrous results if it is repeated with the climate crisis. Navigating these crises takes time and patience, and we must learn from past failures if we are going to stand any chance against what a disrupted climate will be throwing at us. The government’s handling of COVID-19 highlights the necessity to act urgently.

Fortunately, Ann Arbor is leading by example having unanimously passed the A2Zero initiative last June. Cities like ours have begun to take the matter of future survival into their own hands and are finally treating climate change as the existential threat that it is.

Alexander Nobel can be reached at anobel@umich.edu.

EVAN DEMPSEY | COLUMNIST

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Don’t be a grasshole

n a classic scene from Spongebob Squarepants, Mr. Krabs opens the door of the Krusty Krab to find Plankton and his vast army of green, redneck relatives.

Krabs, not realizing what the mob surrounding his restaurant is, asks Plankton, “You planted grass?” The obvious condescension with which Krabs poses the question implies that he doesn’t find a massive ring of grass around his place of business to be threatening. Krabs, however, had never visited suburban America.

I was recently tasked with mowing a lawn in my neighborhood in East Lansing, Mich. Due to some particularly dry weather this summer, the lawn in question was not Spartan green. While I was rubbing my eyes to remove the irritating bits of dead grass that the lawnmower was coughing up, I realized that lawns are nothing but a total waste of time and resources.

Before you, dear reader, assume the role of the armchair psychologist and pin my newfound hatred of grass on my distaste for the chore of mowing lawns, know that my grudge against the lawn isn’t just personal. The cost of maintaining a whole yard’s worth of grass, in terms of water, space and time is a burden not just upon my fellow lawn tenders and me, but upon society and the environment.

While we have grown accustomed to seeing grass just about everywhere and might think that it belongs in as many places as we see it, the truth is that for grass to keep its deep green

color and plush springiness, it needs quite a bit of water — more than many American climates tend to provide in the summer. As a result, Americans use nearly 9 billion gallons of water per day to keep their lawns healthy, per Environmental Protection Agency estimates. For the average household, some 30 percent of water used is allocated to outdoor usage, primarily thirsty lawns. In certain regions, especially the West and Southwest, that figure can be closer to 60 percent. Considering the frequency with which that region experiences droughts — like the one responsible for California’s current crop of wildfires — using that much water to make sure your yard has a nice, luscious layer of grass on it seems inherently wasteful. And when one considers that those droughts are going to become even more common in upcoming years thanks to our friend climate change, it becomes worse than wasteful: It becomes irresponsible.

What do we need grass for, anyway? We cover most of our lawns with it, but how is all of that space used? Most of the time, it isn’t. A graduation party here or a Fourth of July cookout there might allow a grassy yard to be used to its full extent. But those events could be enjoyed on a nice brick patio or even at public parks, which might see increased use, interest and funding if Americans abandon the false idol of the grassy yard and turn to more

efficient spaces to satisfy their only occasional desires for large outdoor gatherings.

Some grass holdouts might look beyond these types of private, yet sizable gatherings to justify their lawns. “What about the children?” they’ll ask. “Where are they supposed to frolic and play?” And I’ll respond: “What about them? They’ll enjoy the trip to the park as much as the playtime itself, and besides, most of them would rather be playing Fortnite anyway.”

Where would all of this space — previously hogged by the verticallychallenged villain known as grass — go, you ask? Well, I have a fancy new word for you: xeriscape. This is a school of landscaping design that prescribes the use of native plants in place of grass. These plants aren’t usually the kind you can walk on, but in exchange for the lost space, you get a garden that is much more interesting to look at and, because they’re native, much more suited to survive on the amount of water that comes out of the sky than a mat of boring old grass.

If xeriscaping still sounds unappealing, maybe you will find another alternative worth examining: getting rid of the front yard altogether.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com Evan Dempsey can be reached at evangd@umich.edu.

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espite smears framing GEO as duplicitous and untrustworthy, a careful analysis of the timeline demonstrates that GEO has continually negotiated in good faith and it is the administration that has been operating recklessly.

On the evening of Sept. 7, the University of Michigan’s Graduate Employee Organization officially announced its intent to strike after fighting all summer for its platform of demands for a safe and just campus. University administrators immediately discredited GEO as hostile and noncompliant, responding with communication tactics that divert attention from the work stoppage platform in an attempt to sidestep any real engagement. At that moment, our movement entered public awareness and gained the solidarity of individuals and organizations across the country. For many, the intricate root system supporting this shoot of defiance remains invisible, but it should come as no surprise that this unrest did not develop overnight. The administration’s words ring hollow when we take a closer look at the timeline of events leading up to GEO’s decision to strike. This University’s administration has made a habit of sweeping the concerns of students, faculty and staff under the rug, prioritizing financial gain over the well-being of our community and the grossly mismanaged reopening plan is no exception. The difference is that the stakes of the current moment could not be higher.

Beginning in late April, the administration gave GEO leadership the run-around in an effort to sideline good-faith negotiations. According to GEO Member Yael Kenan, the union’s attempts to engage with the University’s COVID-19 reopening plans were bounced back and forth between the Rackham Graduate School and Academic Human Resources, who both threw up their hands and declared that our demands were outside their wheelhouse.

They preempted any criticism of the University’s policies by declaring our critical ethical concerns beyond the scope of our bargaining contract.

These included the universal right to remote work without documentation, policing and surveillance concerns and cutting ties with the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, among others.

To add to the frustration, the University was determined to discuss its reopening plan without ensuring that graduate students had a seat at the table. “It would literally cost them nothing to include us,” says Kenan.

Despite the fact that inviting a GEO or other graduate student representative to these meetings presented minimal risk or inconvenience to the University, Kenan says the administration refused point-blank to entertain our requests to this end. As the weeks passed, it became increasingly clear that bargaining was not going to yield the desired outcome.

The combination of exclusion and relentless filibustering found GEO with little choice remaining but to withhold labor. The first public mention of the intent to go on strike in the event that our platform would go unaddressed appeared in The Michigan Daily on Aug. 31, and GEO leadership had notified uncooperative University administrators of this possibility many times in the weeks and months preceding as alternative options began to be exhausted. In light of all this, a panicked email from Provost Susan M. Collins at 11:17 p.m. that night made the utterly absurd claim that they have “only learned today” of GEO’s intent to strike. It reveals that she and her fellow administrators are thoroughly Photo courtesy of GEO members

out of touch with what is going on with their students, or else willing to lie through their teeth in an attempt to save face. Either option is equally damning.

Overwhelmingly, the University’s response has mischaracterized GEO’s decision to strike, our demands and prior steps GEO had taken to avoid the strike. The rhetoric used in both internal and external coverage of the protests, rallies and work stoppage has sought to paint the University administrators as victims who have been working tirelessly with unreasonable graduate students, only to be blindsided when they supposedly learned on Labor Day, Sept. 7, that labor stoppages would commence the next day. Yet at that point, GEO leadership had already spent months engaging in a fruitless and infuriating dialogue with the University. This is by no means a new problem: The University’s decentralization of decision-making consistently obscures who is responsible for a given issue, rendering failures in communication and enforcement common.

One deceptive statement is that the University is “not aware of any graduate student who is being required to teach in person against their expressed preference.” Collins made this claim in her email on Labor Day, and it has been cited repeatedly as evidence that the rationale behind this strike has no foundation. Unfortunately, it simply is not true. Graduate Student Instructors, who will remain anonymous out of fear of retribution, have come to GEO expressing concerns about in-person work, including scenarios in which the student was assigned a teaching placement requiring in-person work despite explicitly requesting a remoteonly assignment. Without a universal right to work remotely, we cannot guarantee that all are in a secure position to make the appropriate decision for themselves free of the threat of retaliation. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Collins’s claim is based on a survey conducted in early July when the fall reopening plan was not yet public.

Moreover, that survey had tiers for who “deserved” remote work based on subjective values. It is not a valid measure of how GSIs and other instructional staff currently feel about in-person teaching. GSIs have told us they feel coerced into “volunteering” for in-person work out of a sense of altruism, given the University’s messaging regarding in-person teaching as a “shared responsibility,” or fear of retaliation from their faculty and departments. This is especially true for masters’ students, who do not have funding guarantees and express severe concerns about retaliation.

If everyone who wants to work remotely is already allowed to do so, then the University should make it a policy since it supposedly would not change anything. Meeting this demand is low-hanging fruit, yet the administration has not offered the universal right to remote work nor provided reasoning beyond baseless assurances that it is unnecessary.

Their reticence belies their true concern: that the option for universal remote work would likely result in fewer in-person classes. Universal remote work is only one of many planks in the GEO strike platform; the discourse presented diverts attention from the others while appearing to discredit the platform as absurdly positioned and divides our community.

Furthermore, the University administration claimed that it only had $1.3 billion available for COVID-19 response — a claim later undermined by an independent audit.

GEO’s COVID Caucus wrote an open

letter to the administration that was signed by more than 1800 individuals and major student organizations and presented to administrators on May 8. It was dismissed out of hand on the grounds that the requests were not “financially feasible.”

GEO repeatedly sought financial transparency around the response, and on May 13, the administration was presented with a second petition circulated by the Huron Valley Area Labor Federation that also called for greater transparency. This time the administration did not even deign to respond.

By May 28, the independent audit of the University’s finances revealed a sum of approximately $6.7 billion was in fact available for COVID-19 response and could easily cover all of the necessary spending required to meet our COVID-19 related demands. Once again, this came as a disappointment but not a surprise.

Despite this institution’s routine deployment of scarcity narratives to justify austerity policies, the evidence from the independent audit revealed that this is simply not the case.

The Board of Regents were charged with oversight of various committees that drafted reports on safely reopening the University in the midst of the pandemic. The Coordinating Committee on Instructional Planning drafted a report on reopening on May 29, and about a week later, on June 8, the Ethics and Privacy Committee finalized their own report on reopening. It is worthwhile to note that the decision to open campus preceded the formation of the Ethics and Privacy Committee: “We were not tasked with assessing the ethics of whether or not to reopen. Instead, we were asked to assess the ethics of different measures that might be used if we reopened,” one member of the committee explained in an internal email to the authors.

As such, their report highlights issues like the inadequacy of symptom-based screening alone, which would fail to catch the 25%-40% of those infected who never develop symptoms, and the necessity of “testing (for viral RNA or proteins) to determine prevalence of the infection, identify infected individuals who are symptomatic or asymptomatic carriers, identify contacts, and inform necessary mitigation is essential to an organized response to the COVID19 pandemic.” That same member reports being disappointed in the decision to reopen, but still “willing to give them the benefit of the doubt at that relatively early stage that all needed safeguards would be in place.” The member gave credit to the administration for forming the committee at all, though it was clear they were strictly advisory.

But as the summer wore on, the University doubled down on its reopening plan even as the national situation deteriorated.

During the month of July, University President Mark Schlissel responded noncommittally to personal emails from at least one member of the EPC as well as a collectively-written follow-up letter that strongly implied reopening was no longer feasible.

Ultimately, he brushed them aside by stating he appreciated their concern, but the University intended to proceed with reopening anyways.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com Many members of GEO contributed to the writing of this article but insist that they are not speaking on behalf of the organization. The authors can collectively be reached at geo.oped. adhoc.committee@gmail.com.

Opinion

9 — Wednesday, September 16, 2020

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

BRITTANY BOWMAN | EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR

Why we must support GEO: The historical power of strikes at the University

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s students and faculty at the University of Michigan started their second week of the fall semester, a day was set aside to observe Labor Day. In a Twitter post on Monday, GEO wrote, “(Our) membership has authorized a strike, effective (Tuesday). This is a historic moment: we are striking at the beginning of the year, in the midst of a pandemic, to protect our whole community.” On Tuesday, Sept. 8, the day after the national holiday, members of the Graduate Employees’ Organization and their supporters convened before daybreak on the dark campus, with cardboard signs, raincoats and courage. As the early morning rain and thunderstorms caused the marked words of “U-M Makes Us Sick” to bleed, individuals popped open umbrellas and began the first day of their strike against the University’s inadequate reopening plans. On Wednesday evening, a historic number of GEO members congregated to discuss an offer presented to them by the University. With an overwhelming majority, membership rejected the offer, concluding that it inadequately addressed their demands and did not express any continued progress.

During a deadly pandemic with cases rising in college hotspots around the country as a result of tens of thousands of students and faculty returning from around the globe, university environments and administrations were devastatingly unprepared. With approximately five

months to plan for the fall semester after classes moved to virtual formats in mid-March, students, faculty and the greater Ann Arbor community hoped that the University and their public health experts would create effective and safe plans for the fall.

Within the first two weeks of the majority of students being back on campus, many feel they have not.

In an interview with The Daily, GEO Secretary Amir Fleischmann commented, “We’re striking over the University’s totally inadequate reopening plans and just the series of policies they put in place over the summer that’s making students and workers on campus unsafe.”

Fleischmann continued, “It’s important because GEO is supporting the safety of everyone on campus.

One of the reasons is the University’s totally inadequate testing policy, which doesn’t include randomized testing of asymptomatic people, which all experts, including the University’s own (experts), think is necessary for a safe campus.”

In addition to striking in response to reopening plans, GEO is also concerned about the lack of communication and transparency from the University administration during the implementation of the Michigan Ambassadors program and resulting partnerships with the Ann Arbor Police Department and the Division of Public Safety and Security. After a particularly momentous summer that centered on the national protests against police

brutality, violence and racial injustices, the University’s ploy to work with law enforcement to police students did not sit well with the community.

Motivated by fear for livelihood, health, security and the future during a pandemic and civil rights movement, hundreds of people have gathered across campus to stand in solidarity with graduate students.

However, in an email to undergraduate students on Wednesday morning, Susan M. Collins, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, wrote, “I strongly affirm the importance of student perspectives and student activismattheUniversityofMichigan.

The University has a long and celebrated history of its community members standing up for what they believe in through acts of freedom of speech and peaceful protest. The strike violates Michigan law; in addition, GEO has agreed by contract not to take actions that interfere with the University’s operations, in this case, your education. Nonetheless, the University’s team will continue to meet with GEO in good faith to resolve remaining issues.”

In 1973, after a University policy was initiated that would charge non-resident graduate employees out-of-state tuition for the first time as well as a 24-percent tuition increase, graduate student employees founded the Organization of Teaching Fellows, deriving from a group that first started organizing as “teaching fellows” three years

prior. The University administration refused to recognize the concerns of the teaching fellows unless they were certified by the Michigan Employment Relations Commission, an election process that had already failed a few years before. OTF began loose associations with the American Association of University Professors, and discussions of a strike were underway but never came to pass.

Shortly thereafter, in the summer of 1973, the teaching fellows merged with research and staff assistants of the University to found the Graduate Employees’ Organization.

In an effort to speed up the process of gaining certification, GEO members compromised, only calling for their recognition as employees of the institution. With low stakes, the University agreed to GEO negotiations for official recognition and there was an immediate Michigan Employment Relations Commission certification election, allowing the organization to be certified on April 15, 1974.

However, things did not continue to proceed smoothly for graduate student employees. In June 1974, negotiations for a contract — demanding nondiscrimination, better working conditions and fair wages — began and lasted for months without progress. A handful of months later, all methods of negotiation were enervated, and union members decided to strike in 1975. On Feb. 11, with no clue of how long the intensive picketing and striking would last, hundreds of GEO members gathered

Members of the Graduate Employee Organization strike in response to the University’s pandemic plan outside of the Biological Services Builiding Wednesday evening.

Allison Engkvist/Daily

EVAN STERN | COLUMNIST

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undergoing testing by companies such as Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Eli Lilly and Co., according to the Wall Street Journal.

At the moment, if someone contracts COVID-19 and is in need of medical attention, there are few options outside of medicines like Remdesivir,whichmightbesomewhat effective against the coronavirus for serious cases. Therefore, these monoclonal antibodies — which can help prevent patients from developing severe cases of COVID-19 — change everything in our battle against this virus. “The drugs, which are injected intravenously or with a short needle, have the potential to work soon after someone is infected and still feeling only slightly sick, stopping the virus in its tracks before the seriously afflicted would need to be hospitalized,” the Wall Street Journal noted.

This exciting treatment also has the potential to prevent somebody from contracting COVID-19 in the first place, serving as a “temporary vaccine.” The United States has always prevailed even in the most trying times, and it’s become clear that monoclonal antibodies are another inspiring advancement from our nation’s scientific community that could help our country turn the page on the coronavirus crisis.

Excitingly, monoclonal antibodies are just one weapon in our growing arsenal against COVID-19. Another advancement somewhat similar to these monoclonal antibodies is convalescent plasma. As scientists have discovered, a patient who has been previously infected with COVID-19 is likely to have a high concentration of antibodies in their blood. This convalescent plasma treatment takes advantage of these antibodies, transferring them to a patient who is currently ill with the virus and is in serious need of help.

“Hospitalized patients who received

highlights the members’ opinions on American society, politics and military actions. The creation of SDS’s manifesto, denoted as the Port Huron Statement, was spearheaded

by Tom Hayden, a student at the University that came from a working-class family. An article titled “Resistance and Revolution: The Anti-Vietnam War Movement at the University of Michigan, 19651972” outlines the impact of the Port Huron Statement.

The authors wrote that the statement “described the existential crisis of many Northern, white students as they experienced the disillusionment of the world that they were growing up in. From the campuses of their mega-universities, the students and activists witnessed the growing risk of nuclear war that the Cold War caused and the continual violence in the white segregationists’ resistance to the civil rights movement.

The students felt disenfranchised by the American Dream that encouraged consumerism and conformism while alienating people of color and the impoverished.”

This manifesto facilitated the much-needed steam and momentum that student activists sought during the era of the Cold War and the Vietnam War. In a Smithsonian Magazine interview with former SDS president Todd Gitlin, the editor wrote, “The 2016 election brought student activism back into the spotlight. No student activist organization in U.S. history has matched the scope and influence of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), thwe national movement of the 1960s.”

A few years later in 1968, on the day of the burial of Martin Luther King Jr., the newly founded Black Student Union at the University took over the Administration Building. After sitting inside for five hours while demanding more funding for Black students and higher rates of hiring for Black faculty members, the members of BSU had a discussion with then-President Robben Fleming and the lockout ended. The conversation between Fleming and the members resulted in the establishment of the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies.

However, two years after the takeover, rates of Black faculty hires and Black student enrollment had not improved. Students called for a strike, campuswide.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com Brittany Bowman is the Editorial Page Editor and a senior in the College of Literature, Science & the Arts and can be reached at babowm@umich.edu.

JESSIE MITCHELL | COLUMNIST

The power of American innovation

arlier this year, I watched NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley blast off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in a SpaceX rocket. When the roar of the rocket’s engine filled the air, I was reminded of the boundless potential of American science as a tall, sleek spacecraft climbed past the outer reaches of the earth’s atmosphere.

As exciting as I — and so many Americans — found this SpaceX rocket launch, there wasn’t anything unusual about it. For almost 250 years, Americans have been at the forefront of science and innovation. Whether it has been exploring the depths of space, making breakthroughs in medicine or lighting up our homes and businesses, the American scientific community has made the impossible possible, transforming countless dreams into reality.

Since public health experts first began warning of the threat posed by COVID-19, scientific communities across the country haven’t disappointed one bit. Instead, doctors, epidemiologists and others have worked tirelessly on the front lines in order to eradicate COVID-19 and get life back to normal. Whether it be right here at the University of Michigan or in labs across the country, scientists have gone to work to find safe medicines and therapeutic, plasma and antibody treatments, as well as an effective vaccine. Six months since much of the nation first went into lockdown, the fight against this invisible enemy now looks more promising than ever before.

While an effective vaccine remains one of our greatest hopes to defeat COVID-19, innovators are working on countless other fronts in this rapidly evolving battle against the coronavirus. As this vital effort moves full steam ahead, one of the most promising advancements has taken the form of monoclonal antibody treatments, which are already

on campus with signs, gloves and warm jackets: the onset of a cold February.

In the early days of the strike, more than half of undergraduate students boycotted classes and joined the picket lines to stand in solidarity with their teachers, peers and fellow academics. Within the first week, agreements on affirmative action and non-discrimination cases were achieved and local workers, such as the Michigan Brotherhood of Teamsters, recognized the importance of the strike and vowed to not cross picket lines. The Strike for a Contract lasted for a month and on March 14, 1975, GEO proved successful with its demands and achieved tuition reductions, pay raises and other benefits.

The current strike against the University administration for the failure to enact proper safety protocols and an effective pandemic plan does not reflect new sentiments expressed by graduate students. Efforts for unionization arrived in a first wave throughout the 1960s and ’70s, where graduate students at public or state universities largely decorated the front of picket lines. Cedric de Leon, a professor and director of the Labor Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, explained, “Graduate students have been unionizing for decades.” These unionizing efforts were already instituted at the University of California system schools and the University of Michigan when strikes at other universities around the country happened. In 2016, Columbia University graduate students won bargaining rights when the National Labor Relations Board reversed a decision from 12 years earlier at Brown University. More recently, in June 2019, University of Chicago graduate students touted marked signs with “Workers’ Rights are Human Rights” and chanted “recognize our election.” This strong history of graduate students linking arms, forming picket lines and taking up unionization efforts has proved critical to the situations GEO is faced with in the contemporary moment.

Apart from explicit GEO strikes at the University, there have been many notable and revolutionary protests, sit-ins and strikes worth mentioning when examining the atmosphere surrounding today’s concerns. In June of 1962, a group of students met in Port Huron, Mich. to discuss their ideologies and goals for a new organization, later named the Students for the Democratic Society. Their ideologies heavily reflected the political agendas of the New Left, and their quasi-manifesto

the plasma within three days of diagnosis, are under the age of 80 and not on mechanical ventilation, benefited the most, with a 35% improvement in survival 30 days after receiving the transfusion,” the Wall Street Journal reported. While experts note that convalescent plasma treatment doesn’t mean we don’t need monoclonal antibody treatments or an effective vaccine, this is nonetheless a major step in the right direction. Even small flickers of hope delivered by treatments like convalescent plasma mark significant strides from the beginning of the pandemic, when we knew nothing about how to combat COVID-19.

Finally, beyond all of these intriguing developments, the most promising tool in our battle against this pandemic is a safe and successful vaccine, which we’re racing toward in record time. Although there are numerous vaccine candidates in development across the globe, American companies like Moderna Therapeutics and Pfizer remain at the forefront of this unprecedented effort. With the vaccine being rolled out so quickly, some people have expressed concern that medical officials are rushing the final stages of development and testing due to political pressure from President Donald Trump, who is fighting for a second term in the White House against former Vice President Joe Biden. But health officials have repeatedly reassured Americans that the final vaccine distributed to patients across the country will be safe and effective, and manufacturers have pledged that they will not release a vaccine to the general public until it is safe for all Americans.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com Evan Stern can be reached at erstern@umich.edu.

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‘U’ is positioning students to take the fall

s schools around the country reverse their face-to-face reopening plans, it seems less and less likely that the University of Michigan will make it through the first few weeks of classes with the current hybrid model. If classes get moved to be fully remote, the blame will be shifted to students — it could have worked, but we just weren’t “responsible” enough.

In an interview with The Daily, President Mark Schlissel said he “get(s) a little insulted when everybody says there’s no way that students are going to wear masks, and there’s no way that they’re not going to party in dangerous fashions ... I think you can and will step up as a community.”

Here’s the thing: Even if 99 percent of the U-M undergraduate student body are compliant, choose not to party, social distance and wash their hands, we could still have a massive community outbreak. As of Aug. 6 — well before tens of thousands of students from around the country descended upon Ann Arbor — a single gathering of 100 students at a party (one-third of 1 percent of the undergraduate population) carried between a 30 to 50 percent chance that someone had COVID-19. It is probably much higher now that students from states with higher incidence rates have returned to campus.

Furthermore, while partying may be the most dangerous thing college-aged students can do right now, many students also must work service industry jobs which put them at risk. A recent Atlantic article rightly pointed out that a recent rise in cases in people under 35 would be predictable irrespective of parties, as newlyopened restaurants and bars are overwhelmingly staffed by young people.

An outbreak would be difficult to control even if every person on campus were required to get tested, but only students living on-campus, about a quarter of students overall, carry that requirement. One party is enough for a residence hall outbreak, or several. The problem is that President Schlissel’s plan relies on 100 percent compliance, something that he, as a medical professional and rational adult, should understand is utterly unrealistic. The opening of campus isn’t a reasonable risk, it is a recipe for a clusterfuck, as put so eloquently by The Daily Tar Heel.

The confusing part is that Schlissel understands compliance is unrealistic. In an email to faculty and staff on Aug. 18, he wrote, “after a few weeks, non-compliance among students might become common,” as a way to defend why the University will not be doing large-scale testing on asymptomatic individuals. It must take some mental gymnastics to write an email effectively saying there will be too much virus in the community to test, but we are going to open anyway. Research indicates that in the case of coronavirus testing, quantity is better than quality, and testing all students every two days is recommended. If this is impossible, as Schlissel suggests, we cannot open, period.

Personal responsibility is important, but it is not the solution to a public health crisis. Don’t get me wrong, when I see people posting pictures of their parties and group events, I get angry. I think it is selfish and irresponsible to be hanging out in large groups of people. That said, 20-year-olds should not be responsible for the health of the nation. Irresponsibility is not a “risk” in the 18 to 22 year old age group, it is a given. Willful ignorance is the only explanation for President Schlissel’s refusal to

recognize the impracticality of a plan predicated on the notoriously excellent decision-making skills of young adults. Countries that have successfully curbed this virus do not have supernaturally responsible young people; they have competent leadership that managed to control the virus before widespread quarantine fatigue set in. From New Zealand to Rwanda, swift governmental response with strong messaging and actions that emphasized scientific expertise has controlled, if not eliminated the virus.

President Schlissel is not a governmental figure, but he does have the power to make decisions that will impact the health of tens of thousands of people. He is not making decisions in the best interest of the U-M community or the broader Ann Arbor community.

He is making decisions in the best interest of the University’s bottom line. One could argue this is also a failure of the government or at the least, a flaw in our system.

In countries where tuition is free, I don’t think they are panicking about enrollment numbers. Students have every right to question whether an online education is worth the same cost (or 1.9 percent more). If school were free, what would there be to question?

The virus is not Schlissel’s fault and the lack of control in this country is not his fault, but any disease or death that results from the opening of campus? That is his fault. Schlissel has all of the science he needs to see that opening is not the way to go.

If a statement comes out blaming students, I hope the Michigan community calls it out. A plan that relies on 100 percent compliance to work is not a plan, it’s a prayer.

Jessie Mitchell can be reached at jessiemi@umich.edu.

Opinion

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

SPIROS KASS | COLUMNIST

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Practice what you preach

y morning routine has been the same for years.

I wake up to the blaring sound of my alarm, and as soon as I touch my phone to turn it off, I have an instinctual reaction to open up Instagram and scroll through my feed. I am normally greeted with genuine pictures of friends, aesthetically pleasing nature photos from someone’s most recent vacation or a funny meme that offers a good morning laugh. However, Instagram has looked much different in the past few months.

Between the COVID-19 pandemic and social justice movements, most people I follow have turned away from sharing light-hearted, personal material and have shifted to using their platform as a tool to educate their followers on societal issues and raise awareness. The beauty of social media is that it’s not just a way for users to keep their followers updated on themselves, but rather a way to connect and share valuable information across the globe, which is crucial during a divisive time like this.

September is here, which means that it’s time for most college students to head back to campus. As students make this transition, the educational posts and stories remain present, but personal posts are starting to trickle in once again. The latter is not problematic alone; however, if a social media user’s personal life starts to contradict what their profile preaches — for example, if they constantly post about the importance of social distancing but fail to distance themselves — then it becomes an issue.

Why preach what you don’t practice?

Using social media as a tool to educate and spread awareness is more important now than ever. We are in the midst of a transformative time period in terms of our approach to public health and social justice, such

as the Black Lives Matter movement.

I applaud those who take time to find pertinent information and share it with their friends. Yet, I question those who do so, then explicitly — or implicitly — prove that they are not holding themselves up to the standard they preach. Instead, they do this to maintain a social media image that showcases passionate, high-ground activism. It has become “trendy” to be a social media activist. This needs to end.

But the more education, information and awareness the better, regardless of the person posting it, right? The issue is not with the material itself, but rather the standard these social media users are promoting.

By contradicting your own activism by clearly not following the action items you promote, you are showing your followers that the activism you are engaging with is indeed not that serious. It delegitimizes the work of real activists who put significant thought into their activism and then proceed to live a lifestyle that supports what they preach.

There is a fine middle ground that people our age often fail to realize.

It is not a black and white situation; just because an Instagram user does not make daily posts about the importance of wearing a mask does not mean that they are denying the pandemic’s severity. If you are someone who understands the severity of the pandemic but knows that there’s a likelihood that you will be in a large group setting (with a chance of posting it to your page), then you should not preach against large group settings. By contradicting your own activism, you are telling your followers that what you are preaching is only important enough to make stories or posts about, but not important enough to follow through in supporting.

Wednesday, September 16, 2020 — 10

ZOE ZHANG | CONTACT CARTOONIST AT ZOEZHANG@UMICH.EDU

I understand why people in our generation often engage in this type of performative activism, and I do not believe these people are inherently bad. When social justice movements become prominent — especially as prominent as the Black Lives Matter movement, which may be the largest movement in U.S. history according to the New York Times — people begin to support the cause even if they were not passionate or knowledgable about the movement before. Some of these people become truly passionate supporters, while others simply become passionate posters on their social media accounts.

The latter type of activism stems from white guilt — people constantly posting information in support of the movement to prove to their followers that they, too, are passionate about supporting and protecting Black lives.

It’s for mere self-validation rather than the intention to generate change and true impact. When everyone does this, the information shared becomes meaningless and fails to help the cause.

We are students at the University of Michigan. If we truly care about a cause, then we must work to do whatever we can to support it. As college students, we are capable of doing more to support a cause than simply raising awareness on social media and then failing to personally uphold what we exhort onto others. Oftentimes, we find ourselves under a lot of pressure to conform, especially in a society that is so interconnected. But just because someone else is using their social media platform to educate and exhort does not mean that you are required to do the same in order to be perceived as a good person. Keep yourself accountable and stay informed. Just remember to practice what you preach.

Spiros Kass can be reached at spikass@umich.edu.

ILANA MERMELSTEIN | COLUMNIST

A

s reported by The Michigan Daily in January of this year, Witness for Peace, an anti-Israel hate group, has spent the past 16 years of Saturday mornings protesting outside Beth Israel Congregation in Ann Arbor. A congregant of the synagogue motioned to sue the group at the end of 2019. On Aug. 19, 2020, the ruling was justified by the First Amendment and the lawsuit was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts.

As a young Jewish adult, I am often confronted with the question of whether antiIsrael beliefs equate to antiSemitism. Many of my Jewish peers accuse people who are simply critical of the Israeli government’s actions as being anti-Semitic, though in my mind, these aren’t equivalent.

On the other hand, I have had non-Jewish peers assume my identity automatically constitutes support of the

UNIVERSITY FACULTY | OP-ED

A

s members of the faculty at the University of Michigan, we are deeply troubled by the administration’s response to the ongoing strike led by many of our graduate students.

The administration has been quick to characterize the strike as “illegal.”

But so were many of the strikes that make up the history of the labor movement worldwide. Strikes are by definition meant to disrupt business as usual.

The Graduate Employees Organization has made several important demands with regard to the administration’s reopening of the campus in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic. GEO has persistently raised concerns about the lack or inconsistency of testing, tracing, quarantine, distancing, masking and other actions that would help improve safety and reduce infection spread on campus and in the surrounding community.

GEO’s insistence on a universal, unqualified right to work remotely is in the best interest of the broader U-M community. While the University has consistently responded that they are “not aware” of any coercion to teach in-person or in a hybrid format, they have also refused to institute such a guarantee as university policy.

The health and safety of the community are also at the heart of

When criticism of Israel becomes anti-Semitism Israeli government’s actions, a conf lation which I perceive as anti-Semitic. It is possible to defend the existence of a Jewish state while criticizing its politics and to advocate for Jewish people while advocating against the Israeli government.

Judaism exists independently of the state of Israel, so legitimate disapproval of the Israeli government should not include ridicule of the Jewish people.

However, legitimate disapproval of Israel’s government does not describe what is expressed in the protests outside Beth Israel Congregation. According to the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that aims to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all,” criticism of Israel becomes anti-Semitic when the actions of Israel are attributed to the Jewish people, when “Israel is denied the right

to exist as a Jewish state and equal member of the global community” or when known anti-Semitic “symbols, images or theories are used” to defend anti-Israel ideologies.

Signs displayed by WFP protestors meet all three criteria, making their antiIsrael protests undoubtedly anti-Semitic. Their slogans included “Resist Jewish Power” and “Jewish Power Corrupts,” implying that the corruption within the Israeli government is a direct result of the Jewish faith of government officials, even though Israel is not governed

by Jewish law. Furthermore, these phrases allude to the widespread conspiracies that claim Jewish people have “all the power,” which are antiSemitic by nature. Another sign held during WFP protests demands that people “boycott Israel.” In promoting the shunning of Israel as a whole,

WFP denies its equivalence to other members of the global community. Although it is possible to denounce Israel without being anti-Semitic, WFP does not use such tactics in their protests.

The WFP conducts protests at the same time each week, specifically during Jewish holidays, which adds to its blatantly anti-Semitic message.

Since 2003, members of the group have stood outside Beth Israel Congregation, holding signs with antiSemitic language, on Saturday mornings, when many Jews come for Shabbat services.

Chabad, among the largest Jewish religious organizations globally, describes Shabbat as “the centerpiece of Jewish life.”

It is widely known as a day of rest. It is said in the Torah, the holy scripture in Judaism, that G-d created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, blessing the day and

declaring it holy. This seventh day is what we now know as Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath.

The WFP intentionally protests outside the synagogue during congregants’ celebration of Shabbat, ultimately tarnishing the holiness of the day and denying congregants the opportunity to observe the day of rest. The fulfillment of traditions in the Jewish faith has no correlation to the questionable actions of the Israeli government, so the WFP’s interruption of one to protest the other is sacrilegious and unjustifiable.

There is no issue to be had with a protest of the Israeli government’s actions; many can agree that the state’s politics are deeply flawed. However, the defamation of the Jewish people as evidence against Israel is not an ethical way to approach such concerns. I can confirm that we, as a Jewish people, have not been asked by Israeli government

officials for our input regarding their actions, so the protest of the Jewish people as a means to protest the state of Israel is futile. Instead of perpetuating debunked conspiracies about Jewish people while disrupting their religious practice, the WFP should lobby Michigan’s representatives in the United States Congress and encourage them to decrease American funding to Israel. Not only would these efforts be better received by the public, but they would also be more effective in bringing about the tangible change they wish to see.

The lawsuit against the WFP was dismissed, as the U.S. Constitution upholds freedom of speech in the First Amendment.

However, it is important to remember that the legality of an action does not speak to its integrity or morality. It is okay Ilana Mermelstein can be reached at imerm@umich.edu.

Faculty letter supporting GEO strike GEO’s demands regarding policing.

In recognition of the persistence of police violence and surveillance, which disproportionately impact the communities of individuals that are Black, Indigenous and people of color, GEO has called for the redirecting of 50% of the funding allocated to the Division of Public Safety and Security to communitybased justice initiatives. They have also asked that the University cut ties with the Ann Arbor Police Department and with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As the #BBUM campaign has powerfully documented the “unique experiences of being black at Michigan” since 2013, Black students regularly experience racism on the part of both campus and city police. We must also remember the 2014 killing of Aura Rosser by Ann Arbor police, for which the officer responsible was promoted and the then-chief of AAPD was later hired by the University as the Director of Housing Security for DPSS. GEO’s demands for reallocating funding from DPSS and cutting ties from AAPD are particularly pertinent in light of the University’s forming of student ambassador teams, which effectively recruit and employ students to become extensions of the campus police and surveil their peers. The money spent on this programming could easily be

used for COVID-19 testing, personal protective equipment or remote learning — any number of things that would make our campus safer for all.

Most recently, residential advisers at the University have initiated a work stoppage to protest their working conditions, as have dining hall workers. Like the members of GEO, R.A.s used the official channels to voice their concerns before taking this measure. As non-unionized student employees, many of whom come from working-class families, they take a considerable risk in their collective action. Like our striking graduate students, they have determined that the risks to themselves and to the campus community posed by the University’s reopening plan outweigh the risks of going on strike.

We are deeply disappointed that, while so many of the University’s constituents bravely risk their livelihoods to raise grave concerns about public health and safety on campus, the administration has used procedures and technicalities to silence, delegitimize or ignore their concerns. Some of the University’s language — along with its use of non-disparagement clauses — carry an implicit threat of retaliation. We are gravely concerned about the language of intimidation deployed in the University’s response to GEO and in its communication with

Michael Bagazinski/Daily

faculty about the strike. We believe that those striking and protesting do so for the health and safety of both the University and surrounding community, envisioning a more robust and just culture of care that all members of our campus and neighboring communities deserve.

The University’s official response and attitude to the demands and concerns raised by GEO echo attempts by the administration to undermine faculty governance and obfuscate the communications

of the faculty during COVID-19 by ignoring or dismissing faculty petitions and protests over the campus reopening plan.

We express here a concerted show of faculty solidarity with GEO, our graduate students and R.A.s, and demand a more forceful and concrete condemnation by the administration of the assaults to which people of color and immigrants are subjected on a daily basis.

We call for a more serious engagement by the University in

hearing and responding to GEO’s important and timely demands. To sign the letter, please complete this form.

Several faculty members co-authored this op-ed collaboratively and can be reached at concerned@ umich.edu. A growing list of signatures, which includes the authors and indicates support of this article and for GEO, can be found online. At the time of publication, the number of signatories was 436.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

the b-side

THE B-SIDE: CITIES

On the value of graffiti BEN VASSAR & PETER HUMMER Daily Arts Writers

New York City Going to elementary school every morning in New York City, I would always look out the train window hoping to catch a glimpse of something I could never quite forget. Painted on the wall about midway between the 103 and 96 St. stops on the 1 train line in Manhattan, there were two vividly-depicted life-sized rats schemingly grimacing at one another. An assortment of wildlywritten words, profanities and codenames I didn’t understand surrounded them.

This kind of experience has characterized countless other childhoods in the city since the ’70s. While back then street art was the sign of a generation, it’s since fully incorporated itself into the subconscious of children born in the ’90s onward. In that time, it’s hybridized in unforeseen ways in response both to its urban context and, increasingly so, the decontextualizing force of the internet.

For 21-year-old street artist August Quinn (@bozo_207), inspiration comes just as much from the toy store he grew up around the corner from, Kidrobot in Soho, as it does from the graffiti he grew up around.

“Whenever I would take the train I remember, even as a little kid, looking out the window and seeing all the tags in the tunnels,” Quinn said. As I replied that the exact same thing had happened to me, he said “I know, it happens to so many people, and it gets in your head. I fucking love it.”

For Quinn and so many others from the city, it seemed natural, almost a foregone conclusion, that he would paint. Starting a little over a year ago, he began setting out alone at night to find spots. He had plenty of ideas from years of filling sketchbooks, but this was a different medium entirely.

“It took me almost six months just to figure out how to get control of the drip,” he told me when I asked if he had trouble with the paint itself. Even with a better grasp on the medium, paranoia can dominate when the canvas is the city. No matter where you go, there are eyes on the street. And even if you can bank on passerby not to tell, any one of 38,000 cops can pull up on you while painting.

It can be advantageous, then, to go out with friends. “That’s the

difference between doing street art and painting in the studio is that street art you’re interacting with the world … going out and meeting people. It’s just more social,” Quinn said.

Quinn met his friend George when he noticed him painting one night during a visit to London last year. They painted together several times during the remainder of his stay. More recently, he met a guy in Vancouver who’s been tagging the word “work” for over ten years now. It’s interesting, though, that

Such is the transient nature of street art.

Even the work of those held highest in the community... can be almost entirely painted over citywide within weeks of its completion a Google search for “work graffiti Vancouver” yields no results.

Such is the transient nature of street art. Even the work of those held highest in the community — people like Zexor — can be almost entirely painted over citywide within weeks of its completion.

Other artists can be to blame, but most of it can be put on buffing, a rage against street art that has been just as fervent an effort as the art itself since the ’80s.

This summer in the city, along with upticks in illegal fireworks and gun violence, graffiti also made a resurgence. Trends like these lead some conservative media outlets like the New York Post to allege a one-for-one relationship between graffiti and acts of violent crime. While graffiti does increase when police are distracted by other issues, in reality, most graffiti is arguably harmless posturing and is disconnected from other crimes or infractions.

Despite many wins for the graffiti art form, it is met by constant resistance in the form of institutionalized removal

efforts that cost city agencies thousands. Not to mention that all the while, these artists could face felony charges for their work.

I’m not saying graffiti should be universally legalized — there are other aspects of street life to cherish — but felony-sentencing is too harsh of a punishment for the offense, and its mass appeal should be accounted for in the law. As a kid, two rats painted on a moldy concrete wall illuminated by sparks from the tracks was one of the most poignant things I’ve ever seen. People like Quinn should be given more freedom to create these affecting works for the next generation of artists.

— Ben Vassar, Daily Arts Writer Detroit Full disclosure: I am not a graffiti artist. I am not a street artist. In fact, my ability to draw or paint in any medium is at best mediocre. In my parents’ living room at home, they have a self-portrait hung on the wall that I drew when I was seven. The painting has earned a number of exclamations of surprise and disgust. “What is that??” is common, but I’ve also heard a “That’s horrifying,” and a “Why is your face melting?”

Despite my below-average ability to draw or paint (or spray) any sort of visual, I have an affection for graffiti. There is more to graffiti than an edgy image on an otherwise crumbling wall.

It has the paradoxical effect of blending into the fabric of a city, yet also being something that draws the attention of a passerby.

You can get as good a measure as any of what a city is like and what it means to the people in it by looking at its graffiti. Detroit, a city that has gone through so much, is a prime example of this, especially the Dequindre Cut. The Dequindre Cut is a walkway on the eastside of Detroit.

It was initially a railroad line. In 1998, after the rail was no longer in use, The Cut was sold. In the years of abandonment between its use as a walkway and its use as a railroad, graffiti artists flocked to The Cut; it was turned into an oasis of creativity. When the walkway was commissioned in 2003, it was decided that the murals would stay up, and to this day The Cut is filled head to toe with graffiti that has only grown in the years since its redevelopment.

Read more online at

michigandaily.com

THE B-SIDE: CITIES

Has 2020 country music all moved into the city?

KATIE BEEKMAN Daily Arts Writer

“God’s Country,” “How Country Feels” and more recently “UNAPOLOGETICALLY COUNTRY AS HELL” are but a few examples of country music’s allegiance to its bucolic namesake.

Not to mention the scores of songs about small towns, dirt roads and that one spot by the river no one else knows about. Sometimes, this devotion can turn hostile. Jason Aldean disparages the “guys in first class” who don’t appreciate the heartland in “Fly Over States.”

Luke Bryan shakes his head at the unknowing city weatherman on “Rain is a Good Thing.”

But just how “country” is mainstream country music in 2020? Jason Aldean, for example, is probably riding first class himself. What does Luke Bryan care if it rains or not? He’s not a farmer. Additionally, for some, contemporary country music’s glossy production and heavy pop and hip-hop influences have rendered its rural roots unrecognizable, roots that several stars no longer make an effort to even nod to when they brand themselves. As of late, many plaid shirts and cowboy boots have been ditched for crisp, firm-fitting T-shirts and sneakers.

Nothing better encapsulates the country-turned-city trend than Thomas Rhett’s career. When he

first found success in 2012, he was scruffy. Adorned in jeans and a baseball cap and armed with an acoustic guitar, his image and sound were firmly planted in the fields of his bro-country predecessors.

By 2015 though, Rhett was better groomed and more style savvy and popular than ever. Hit songs like “Crash and Burn” and “T-Shirt” found Rhett sonically uprooted and crafting a style reliant on infectious, dance-ready drums, synths and clean-cut lyrics while leaving the thought of fiddles, steel guitar or corn fields behind him.

Despite Rhett’s success in the city, tons of country songs continue to belittle it — often in a way that’s gendered. Sometimes, the sentiment manifests in little digs.

In “Singles You Up,” Jordan Davis is flirting with a girl who’s taken and taunts “does he want you to be just a little more city?” But other times, moving to the city as something unconscionable, even for love, is the premise of the song itself. Morgan Wallen gushes about a girl on “More Than My Hometown” but ultimately has to wish her well. He loves her, but not enough to follow her and her dreams away from home.

As strange as it might seem, this country/city dichotomy narrows how women are able to participate in country music. Not only are women most often portrayed as the ones who want to leave the small town, which is decidedly

uncountry of them, but they also face the universal pressure to have a more glamorous image than their male counterparts. Luke Combs will wear a tee and jeans, but that isn’t considered acceptable stage attire for artists like Carrie Underwood. This kind of double standard expands into how artists’ songs are judged sonically as well.

Rhett hasn’t attracted nearly as much pushback based on the sound of his music as Maren Morris or Kelsea Ballerini for their similarly pop-inspired work and branding.

Ultimately, worrying about where the genre’s heart resides is pointless. Country music never left where it came from — the city, that is. With beginnings in Atlanta, Nashville and Chicago, even the genre’s earliest recordings are not entirely “country.” And with a long, well-established history in Nashville, neither was its in-between. Even the images we associate with country music have somewhat urbane origins.

Country singers used to get dressed up in their finest clothes to play on country radio. That is, until the city-based radio executives thought that having the musicians dress up like farmers would sell their music better. Whether one likes it or not, country music, in its many evolutions, has thrived in part because of the city, not in spite of it.

Daily Arts Writer Katie Beekman can be reached at beekmank@ umich.edu.

Wednesday, September 16, 2020 — 11

THE B-SIDE: CITIES

The grounding of music SAYAN GHOSH Daily Arts Writer

Unlike the clear geographical divides that segregate the rich and the poor in most American cities, London is a city where “council tower blocks (roughly, housing projects) are mingled in with the multimillion-pound mansions,” writes Dan Hancox in “Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime.”

In the center of the city lie its central business districts: the City of London and Canary Wharf, symbols of extreme privatized wealth and decadence, not unlike similar projects undertaken in New York City and other world cities in which high finance has taken over. Just a few miles away lie “the boroughs of Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham,” arguably the creative centers of the book’s eponymous genre, grime. Notably, these boroughs also constitute some of the “most deprived local authorities in the entire country.”

Despite the interconnectedness of the city that Hancox describes, even those only somewhat familiar with London’s history might recognize the position of East London in comparison with the rest of the city. From “Mary Poppins” to “West End Girls,” East London has always been seen as the more deprived area of the greater metro area, with a large workingclass population, and recently, an especially large immigrant working class population. After widespread changes in the shipping industry decimated the London docklands, then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ushered in a new age of capitalism, one in which developers and the financial sector could retake the abandoned docklands under an environment of “no questions asked” deregulation, all with public financial support. This sealed off what is now Canary Wharf from the “disproportionately sick, unhappy, overcrowded, addicted, jobless and impoverished neighbours.” Grime MCs such as Dizzee Rascal note how when growing up, the skyscrapers of the new financialized London were ever-visible and ever-present as a reminder of the city they were never a part of, their own green light in the harbor.

On the other side of the Atlantic, similar events played out in the 1970s and ’80s, the era when postNew Deal America crumbled and when the foundations of Reaganism, Clintonism and everything beyond rose from its ashes. In “Black Noise,” Tricia Rose explains that by the middle of the 1970s, New York City was “virtually bankrupt and in a critical state of disrepair” after the refusal of the federal government to provide any more public funds, as well as widespread changes in America’s economy. In response, city officials negotiated a federal loan which was to be accompanied with crushing austerity measures such as the removal of federal jobs.

According to Rose, these conditions had an outsized impact on Black and Hispanic communities in the city, with homes being destroyed by the hundreds of thousands to facilitate city planning projects designed not to support the city’s most vulnerable, but rather to attract wealthier, whiter, more technocratic new residents. This had the effect of shifting large Black and Hispanic populations from all over the city into the South Bronx: a cultural mélange where native New Yorkers, immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean and a crushing environment of poverty and desperation all gave rise to the genre of hip-hop.

These days, geographical boundaries are almost obsolete in delineating musical genres.

A teenage boy in Sweden can make hip-hop that recalls the washed-out sounds of Houston, a Californian can make Jersey Club and a Nigerian can make shoegaze without a blink of the eye. Labels such as Artetetra can set up shop in Bologna, yet sign artists from Moscow to make extremely cosmopolitan pop. Not to say that this couldn’t or didn’t happen before the advent of mp3s and SoundCloud. After all, we did see rock take an impressive hold in some countries in South America as well as the migration of jazz to Africa and East Asia. However, this process often unfolded over much longer time periods than

today. Traditionally, supporting a burgeoning scene takes work.

It would require the cooperation and enterprising spirit of label managers, record shop owners, A&R personnel, promoters, concert hall owners and of course, the musicians themselves. Due to this, the development of these “scenes” more often than not took place in cities.

Allan Watson, a professor at Loughborough University who studies the interaction between geography and music, wrote that “The local infrastructure of production, including recording studios and live music venue, helps to solidify diverse musical scenes in space, through the ways in which musicians, audiences, and music industry professionals make use of the infrastructure.”

He further noted that “Even at their most intimate moments of birth, creative moments and episodes connect with concrete social conditions. Therefore, it is important to give attention to the social and physical environments in which creativity happens,” and that cities, especially in certain “bohemian” quarters inside them, facilitate these social connections and develop the professional networks that beget the rise of scenes.

In isolation, none of this information is particularly insightful. In a sense, this phenomenon applies to many sectors of the arts and other endeavors. Cities host networks of successful individuals and attract those who want to share part of that success. However, it is important to note that music is one of the arts that is (or at least historically has been) the most dependent on some form of collective experience and enjoyment. Musicians of all levels of popularity have depended on live performances and merchandise sales that come along with them to make up the majority of their income. Moreover, it is undeniable that the city’s material conditions, geography and history all shape the sounds of the music that comes from it. While it may be overzealous to claim genre A or B could not be created anywhere other than the place that it came from, perhaps such a claim is not too far from the truth. It also begs the question: How much of this is relevant anymore? In the age of Spotify, SoundCloud, TikTok, etc., how much do local scenes matter in the development of a sound or new genre? Does this get rid of an intrinsic part of music culture or does it break down barriers and create new revolutionary methods of creative ideation?

Returning to London in particular, how do these geographical factors affect the sound of grime? Hancox suggested one element of its sound is a form of Afrofuturism: “The African diasporic aesthetic that takes science fiction as a tool for discussing oppression and freedom–where spaceships might be a metaphor for slave ships, subverting the journey to make it one of escape, not damnation.”

These ideas are prevalent in grime’s instrumentals. Hancox argued that this could all be traced back to the gleaming skyline of Canary Wharf, constantly visible from some of the poorest, most forgotten council flats in the city, where refugees and immigrants from some of the poorest countries in the world could see the symbols of 21st century London as both a menace and a sort of inspiration.

The philosophy that places like Canary Wharf represent is that of “privately owned public spaces: where security guards can ask you to leave just based on looking at you,” writes Hancox.

On the lyrical side of grime, it is impossible to escape the overwhelming influence of Jamaican reggae culture and music. Jamaican, and West Indian immigrants in general, have a long history in London. Notably, it in part stems from a 1948 journey by the HMT Empire Windrush which brought hundreds to begin their lives in the city, mainly to work as laborers. When Jamaican immigrants first arrive, many live in the very council flats which later become host to the pirate radio shows and bootleg production studios giving rise to iconic British genres such as jungle, garage, dubstep and grime. Per Hancox, “It’s not just a family connection, or an abstract component of the

musical bloodline: grime echoes its Jamaican reggae heritage in its structure, in its tropes, in its slang, in the way it’s performed, and stylistically: particularly harking back to the ‘fast chat’ reggae style of the likes of Smiley Culture.”

Even more so than the music itself, grime borrows from this heritage through the likes of its methods of distribution as well as the structure of its live performances.

In New York City in the 1970s and ’80s, in the midst of its transformation into the center of global commerce (what economist Yanis Varoufakis dubs the “Minotaur”), a similar set of events played out, producing one of modern music’s most globally dominant genres. Like grime, hiphop owes much of its early sounds to Jamaican immigrants and the music culture they imported.

According to Rose, one of the most important figures in early hiphop history was a Jamaican man named DJ Kool Herc, who helped import Jamaica’s sound-system culture, which involved playing music out of impressively large towers of speakers and a whole range of activities surrounding them. In particular, Kool Herc was known for “his practice of extending obscure instrumental breaks that created an endless collage of peak dance beats named b-beats or break-beats,” writes Rose, with sources ranging from Isaac Hayes to European groups like Kraftwerk. Rival crews established their own sound systems and competed for territory and attention, simultaneously developing innovative DJing techniques such as backspinning to create complex new collages of music from different samples.

Around the same time, MCs and rappers started coming into play, at first as a way to keep the crowd focused on the center stage. Hiphop culture in general resulted as a combination of these West Indian influences, and its interaction with the culture of the South Bronx and surrounding areas. From the very beginning, Black and Hispanic women and men developed the arts of graffiti and breakdancing alongside rapping and beatmaking.

Looking back at these decades, it is remarkable to note the proliferation of new genres and styles popping up by the month.

But these movements weren’t only occurring in the megalopolises of the two countries we’re focusing on. In the interiors of the countries, less “glamorous” cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Manchester and Sheffield were also hotspots of musical creativity. In a suburb of Detroit called Belleville, three Black teenagers found each other in their mostly white town.

Through their love of a wide range of music from ParliamentFunkadelic to Kraftwerk and Yellow Magic Orchestra, they created what is now known all over as Detroit techno. The “Belleville Three:” Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson “belonged to a new generation of Detroit-area black youth who grew up accustomed to affluence, thanks in part to the racially integrated United Auto Workers union,” wrote Simon Reynolds in Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture.

According to Reynolds, their tastes were also influenced by WGPR radio DJ Charles Johnson, who would spin “Kraftwerk’s ‘Tour de France’ and other electro-pop” alongside American artists such as Prince. The music they developed through constant experimentation spinning records and working with drum machines and synthesizers combined the funkiness of their influences Parliament-Funkadelic with the cold, programmed rhythms of the oft-mentioned Kraftwerk. Like grime, this new genre they developed was futurelooking from day one. Later artists such as the legendary Detroit duo Drexciya developed a whole Afrofuturist mythology around their nautical electro. Per Reynolds, “But for all their futuristic miseen-scène, the vision underlying Cybotron (Atkins’s original group) was Detroit-specific, capturing a city in transition: from industrial boomtown to post-Fordist wasteland, from US capital of auto manufacturing to US capital of homicide.”

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12 — Wednesday, September 16, 2020

the b-side

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

DAILY A/PIA ARTS COLUMN

THE B-SIDE: CITIES

Why setting is so important in film Hyphenated: ‘Bulge Bracket’ KARI ANDERSON Daily Arts Writer

When I tell people around here that I’m from Seattle, we often end up talking about one of the following: Microsoft or Amazon (or people they know that work there), rain or “Grey’s Anatomy.”

No one seems to know anything about Seattle beyond the basics. And over time, as I’ve watched films that are set in Seattle, it feels the same — like no one really knows what they’re talking about. It never feels quite right, no matter how many Seattle sports references or aerial shots of the skyline they include.

I’ve never understood why anyone wouldn’t want to use Seattle as a setting — Are the trees too green? Is the water too blue? Are the mountains too beautiful? — but the reality is that, compared to cities like New York, Chicago and L.A., there are few mainstream films set in Seattle. Most of them didn’t start getting made until the 1990s, when grunge and Nirvana got the rest of the country’s attention and people started to realize that Seattle is a pretty cool place. Still, they’re often not quite right. We’re happy to claim these movies — “Sleepless in Seattle,” “10 Things I Hate About You,” “Say Anything” and more — but it’s also difficult not to notice, at the same time, when a city layout that you know intimately is being shifted for the film’s purposes.

Setting is crucial in film. It establishes essential character traits, external and internal alike. But with many films, including many of the Seattle-based films I’ve seen, it feels like the writers picked the film’s location out of a hat. They pepper in major tourist landmarks and design their costumes for the area’s general climate, but the story could really be anywhere.

For Seattle-based films, this means establishing location by showing a few of the landmarks that people actually know: the Space Needle, Pike Place Market, the Washington State ferries, the Space Needle again, the stadiums and skyscrapers downtown, the Puget Sound waterfront and the Space Needle one more time for good measure.

To be fair, there are complications to filming in Seattle proper: It can be difficult and very expensive, which is why many Seattle movies opt to film in California or Vancouver, BC instead. Still, it feels lazy. The unfortunate thing is that people don’t usually notice the difference; anyone who isn’t from the area has no way of knowing that those two neighborhoods aren’t anywhere near each other, or that the weather is way too nice for May in Seattle.

There are a few exceptions to this: “Sleepless in Seattle,” for example. Seattle natives love “Sleepless” for the most part — it’s one of the few Seattle-based movies that are actually filmed in the city, and its use of a houseboat means that the film is filled with lovely images of Lake Union and downtown. Another is “10 Things I

LIZZIE YOON

Daily Arts Columnist

Hate About You,” which prominently features places like Kerry Park, Gas Works Park and the Fremont Troll — places that Seattle natives know very well even if outsiders might not recognize them.

But these films aren’t perfect either. A good chunk of “10 Things” is actually filmed in Tacoma (a city just south of Seattle, about twice the size of Ann Arbor), and some of what’s filmed on site is actually compilations of multiple locations.

Not to mention the notoriously inaccurate scene in “Sleepless” where Tom Hanks’s character and his son inexplicably take a rowboat from Lake Union to Alki Beach while Meg Ryan’s character follows them in her car — a geographically impossible scenario, especially in the short amount of time that it appears to take. This scene, and its blatant disregard for the city’s geographic reality, has been mocked by Seattleites for almost three decades.

Part of the disconnect stems from the fact that these filmmakers are rarely from the area at all. They don’t have the same respect for the city’s structure and layout; to them, it’s just a place where their movie is set rather than a city that has been in existence for 150 years. For example, Cameron Crowe made the choice in “Say Anything” to illogically place a “Welcome to Seattle” sign on the Lakeview Boulevard overpass — a bridge right in the middle of the city, far from city limits. In his mind, he could do that — clearly, he saw the city as a world whose reality he could shape for his own purposes.

The reality is that people don’t know enough about Seattle as a city to appreciate it. Most people I talk to think that rain in Seattle is like most other places in the US: torrential downpours and thunderstorms. It isn’t. Anyone who has lived in the Seattle area knows that Seattle rain is common, but gentle. And in the 17+ years that I’ve lived there, I’ve only witnessed one thunderstorm. It’s a strange double standard: people who aren’t from New York or

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L.A. somehow seem to know enough about it to carry on a conversation with someone who’s from there. Yet when I mention Seattle I get those same responses: Microsoft, Amazon, rain, “Grey’s Anatomy.”

The ways that film and place are intertwined warrants more attention and precision. In an ideal world, the city where a film is set should be seen as a place that the story molds to fit, rather than the opposite. Other films about other cities use it as a setting that is so inextricable from the story and the characters that it becomes like its own character. And yet films about Seattle, and other cities that are discussed less often, are not given the same treatment.

If you’ve never lived in Seattle, or even been there, these films probably won’t make much difference to you either way. But to me, it’s a reflection of the places that I’ve known for most of my life. You might see an image of the Space Needle; I see going to Seattle Center with my family, or the summer I spent working at the Pacific Science Center. You see the Pike Place Market sign; I see first-grade field trips, or forays into the city with my friends. You see an iconic green-and-white ferry; I see trips to Bainbridge Island to visit my aunt. You see a highway with the Seattle skyline above it; I see I-5 North, where I’ve driven and been driven hundreds of times. Any images of Seattle in films are going to be arbitrary, because you don’t know my city the way that I do, just as I don’t know yours.

But I think the tides are starting to change.

People are paying more attention to Seattle — I’ve had a number of people mention that they would love to live there if given the chance. Hopefully soon I’ll get to see more films that show Seattle the way I know it, beyond that one stock image of the Space Needle rising over the waterfront.

Maybe then, when I mention where I’m from, people will have more to say.

Daily Arts Writer Kari Anderson can be reached at kariand@umich.edu.

THE B-SIDE: CITIES

The endless TV shows about NYC SAM DELLA FERA Daily Arts Writer

There is no shortage of television that takes place in New York City. I truly believe there should be an Emmy category titled “Outstanding Series Based in NYC.” It’s almost maddening when you think about it.

Do the universes overlap? Has Jerry Seinfeld ordered coffee from Central Perk? Do Olivia Benson and Captain Holt occasionally pass by each other at NYPD events? Did Barney Stinson ever try something weird with Samantha Jones? The streets of the Big Apple are overrun with characters from iconic shows, so much so that the city itself has become one of television’s most prolific stars.

It’s hard for me to not dedicate this piece to “The Nanny” or “Everybody Hates Chris” — the TV seeds of my childhood that turned into full-blown obsession — but as important to New York television culture as those series are, they’ll have to wait their turn. There are two shows whose existences define NYC television, driving tourists to West Village street corners and Morningside Heights diners. Yes, I’m talking about the two homogenous friend group-based sitcoms we love to hate or hate to love: “Friends” and “Seinfeld.”

“Friends” and “Seinfeld” are the New York City sitcoms. I will actively ignore the existence of “How I Met Your Mother” for two main reasons: 1) Three out of the five main characters are Midwestern/Canadian transplants and 2) that damn finale. People may be angry that I’m putting “Friends” and “Seinfeld” in the same article, let alone sentence, but at the bare minimum, they are both about a friend group navigating life in the big city, and they were both actually filmed in California. With that being said, I do agree the two shows are incredibly different, primarily in the way New York City itself plays a role.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: “Friends” could’ve taken place in any city and still have been the same show. What was uniquely New York about it? The characters largely interacted with only each other, and ventured nowhere in the city beyond a nonexistent coffee shop and the occasional theater. Joey could have been a struggling actor in LA, Rachel could’ve worked at the

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Chicago Bloomingdales, Monica could be a chef in a Miami restaurant — the storylines would barely change. “Friends” couldn’t even bother to get NYC geography right.

The characters often mention coming from or walking through Central Park, and in

The streets of the Big Apple are overrun with characters from iconic shows, so much so that the city itself has become one of television’s most prolific stars one episode Phoebe says her apartment is down the block from the park. Yet all of their apartments are in the West Village, specifically around Grove and Bedford, which is over 50 blocks from Central Park.

And you rarely see them on a subway. It’s madness.

The character potential of New York City is wasted in “Friends,” but “Seinfeld” has no

such problem. From the Soup Nazi to George Steinbrenner, Mr. Pitt to David Puddy, “Seinfeld” utilizes the lawless good of the city that never sleeps. Even the main group itself is a personification of the city; chaotic adults who view life with a nonchalance and indifference that would be infuriating if it wasn’t so entertaining. Nearly every episode in this show-about-nothing provides a look into the zany tedium of city life. A bottle episode taking place in the waiting area of a Chinese restaurant. Fighting for chocolate babka in a crowded bakery. Failing to get sleep against the neon red glow of a chicken roaster sign across the street. These stories, and every odd character thrown into them, don’t try to stif le the absurdity of New York.

They embrace it.

It’s an easy choice to place a show in New York. The city makes for an easy and familiar backdrop, with enough murder to make for a good crime show and enough elites for a good schoolgirl drama. But any show not taking full advantage of the setting is wasting the city, tossing aside plotlines and characters that are essentially written for them on every subway ride and bodega run. Just leave it to the king of observations, Mr. Jerry Seinfeld, to explain it: “All people in New York are funny and get funnier as they get older, and everyone outside New York gets less funny.”

Daily Arts Writer Samantha Della Ferra can be reached at samfd@umich.edu.

The slang term “Bulge Bracket” generally refers to the largest multinational investment banks. As of July 2020, “Bulge Bracket” additionally refers to a TVshow produced by Christopher Au. Despite its unfortunate name, “Bulge Bracket” introduces a relatable Asian American protagonist and rejects soapy genre mainstays. Unlike other high-stress high-drama workplace shows like “The Good Wife” and “Suits,” “Bulge Bracket” doesn’t aspire to be sexy or soapy. Sans steamy workplace romances, Au develops his show around stress and professional hurdles. By cleaving so close to reality, the independently produced show depicts a frighteningly familiar corporate grind.

Au delves into professional stresses through the lens of novice banker Cathy (Jessika Van, “Awkward”).

She faces capricious bosses, frat-bro work culture and unhelpful HR departments.

Though Cathy happens to be Asian, Au treats her as a regular character. Au acknowledges her Asian American-ness but thankfully dodges the overwhelming urge some TV producers feel to harp on and problematize an Asian American character’s ethnicity. Instead, Cathy is first and foremost a woman operating within a very white, institutionalized space. In the show, Cathy’s primary concern is not her Asian-ness. Rather, it’s whether sacrificing her health, relationships and wellbeing is worth uncertain professional success.

But while not making it the center of his character narrative, Au does not skimp on excellent Asian American commentary. Through different APIA (Asian and Pacific Islander American) characters, Au shows that Asian-American-ness is an ethnic umbrella term and not a personality trait. Emphatically: Not all Asians are the same.

In one fantastic exchange, Cathy asks her co-workers where she should rent a hotel for her parents. Danny (Chris King Wong, “Better Call Saul”) her underling analyst quips, “What kind of Asian are you?” noting that his parents always stay in his tiny apartment when they visit. On screen, Cathy shruggs and awkwardly explains that she lives with her boyfriend, a statement that makes Danny raise his eyebrows.

In this exchange, “Bulge Bracket” ribs at a mythologized monolithic Asian American. Not all Asians are the same and there is no “correct” way of being Asian American. To quote a dear friend of mine, “For just as many Asian Americans that there are, there are just as many valid ways of being Asian American.”

By virtue of having more than one Asian American character, Au is able weave in these illuminating scenarios without being heavy-handed. In that same fantastic exchange, Danny personally identified frugality and modesty as Asian traits, yet Cathy, also Asian American, does not identify with his definition.

“Bolo” (Feodor Chin, “Big Little Lies”) is another character Au uses to combat Asian American stereotypes. Cathy’s boss is loud, capricious and hyper-masculine. He plays golf with the other highlevel executives, having broken through the bamboo ceiling. But his success belies the things he sacrificed to become a top-level banker.

In the denouement, however, Bolo reveals a more serious side to his character. He discloses to Cathy that his name is actually John and that a racist coworker nicknamed him “Bolo” during his first year as an analyst grunt. Like Cathy, Bolo suffered racist microaggressions and weathered mercurial bosses. In the end, he tells Cathy that if she sticks with the firm, he will make sure she gets good, career-building cases.

Finally! Someone on the show recognized the existence of racism and articulated it! For the entirety of the first season, the firm’s pervasive Culture of Silence stymied any genuine in-world discourse. Still, Bolo’s cathartic revelation leaves a bitter aftertaste.

Only Bolo’s privilege as an executive-level banker allows him to put a word to the crime. His ability to articulate reality comes from a place of privilege.

In the world of “Bulge Bracket,” without powerful industry connections, a single misstep can cause professional ruin. Having conversations about race and discrimination are unproductive for most employees; HR is unresponsive and bank superiors are unsympathetic. Corporate does not valorize honesty.

The “Bulge Bracket” unequivocally demands personal sacrifice and conformity.

At the end of the day, I hesitate to label the show’s corporate environment as hellish. The show is based off of Au’s wife Cindy’s own two-year stint in the bulge bracket. The world Au depicts is firmly rooted in an earthly reality. There’s a notable lack of elicit file cabinet rendezvous. Instead, the show depicts un-sexy sexual harassment and a young capable employee being ground into the dirt by stress. “Bulge Bracket” digs into corporate politics and presents the corporate workplace for what it is: absurd, montonimous and stressful.

I was incredibly pleased by this unassuming show. I feasted well on “Bulge Bracket,” temporarily satiating my desire for good television and unmatched Asian American representation. *** For this food rec, I struggled to think of something mobile for stressed corporate clogs. My ultimate response is a Panera Bread poppy-seed bagel with plain cream cheese.

However, in honor of my banker aunt, I am additionally recommending a side of lox and a generous sprinkle of capers. My addendums are a little more luxurious than a 100+ hour work week would permit but I am an advocate for treating oneself.

Daily Arts Columnist Elizabeth Yoon can be reached at elizyoon@michigandaily.com.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Arts

Wednesday, September 16, 2020 — 13

I saw ‘Tenet’ in theaters.

Here’s why you shouldn’t.

ANDREW WARRICK Daily Arts Writer

Content warning: gun violence.

They say not to yell “fire” in a crowded movie theater. Why? Are we so gullible that anyone who hears the forbidden word will throw their popcorn and sprint down the aisles like a re-showing of “Cats” has just begun?

I don’t buy it. People aren’t that easy to scare. How many of us have grown up having class interrupted by fire, tornado and lockdown sirens, and barely batted our eyes as we walked outside, hid under tables, barricaded doors or grabbed classroom items to use against a shooter?

It’s something about the movie theater, specifically.

We’re used to bullets flying through classrooms like spitballs, just like we’re used to sitting on airplanes, and wondering if maybe, just maybe, it’ll happen again. These spaces have been under attack for decades — from hijackings in the ’70s to 9/11, from Columbine to Newtown. However traumatized, we’ve learned to live with these threats, and American culture has warped around them.

But movie theaters were safe.

With a sip of soda, a bite of popcorn and the hum of a projector, we could fall into a story and leave the real world and its real terrors behind. We could lean back in those red seats, stretch out our legs and feel safe opposite the silver screen.

I’ve been wondering, lately, if that was what people did in Aurora before their midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” on July 20, 2012. It was a sold out show on opening night, full of kids, tweens, teens and adults ready to see the most anticipated movie of the year. I wonder what the pre-show bustle sounded like. The shuffling of seats as someone with an armful of wrinkling Twizzlers passed fans debating whether Batman would survive Bane, or if Hathaway’s Catwoman would be any good.

The excitement of a blockbuster, a real tentpole event of a film, is infectious no matter who you are.

I can feel their excitement as the movie began, because I’ve felt it myself, year after year, through blockbusters good and bad, memorable and disposable. But, that night in July 2012, around the point where an injured Bruce Wayne finally returns as Batman

for a police chase, a door next to the screen opened. A man walked into the theater, and started shooting.

Movie theaters didn’t feel safe anymore.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’ve given arbitrary value to some walls, a giant piece of plastic, strips of celluloid and a concession stand. That might be true, because the movies have always been a deeply personal comfort. When I first found out I was gay, or, more accurately, admitted it to myself, one of the first things I did was go and see “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.” Not a perfect movie, but a perfect escape.

Immersed in Middle Earth for those two and a half hours, I didn’t think about what it would be like going through life differently from my friends and family, in a place where (at the time) I couldn’t legally marry, and where (in my state) it was still legal to deny me service or the adoption of a child because of my sexual orientation.

For those two and a half hours, I just thought about a particularly officious Hobbit, some obnoxious dwarves and a familiar wizard.

Still, this was mere months after Aurora. Before the lights went out and I chowed down on buttery popcorn, I checked the exits and made a plan, just in case. I’ve done that at the movies ever since. The theater, while still offering escape beneath the flickering beams of a projector, had become somewhere to look over my shoulder every once in a while. It wasn’t too scary, because I’d gotten used to it. For the most part, so did everyone else.

Like with schools and airplanes, American culture warped around the threat to movie theaters, and soldiered on.

Despite the subliminal fear, my imagination remained wide open.

I accepted whatever appeared on the screen, even a CGI creature named Smeagol, as emotional fact. By doing so, though, wasn’t I making myself vulnerable? Is that why someone can’t yell “fire” in a movie theater, because everyone, their disbelief suspended, would believe them? *** That was my attempt to explain why I drove almost 100 miles and donned a face shield, N95 mask, gloves and plastic poncho to see “Tenet” in a movie theatre.

The state government has shuttered cinemas across most of Michigan since March. For

good reason, too. Yet part of me thought that, as a movie critic, I needed to capture what going to the movies looked and felt like during the coronavirus pandemic.

More honestly, I was scared. I have been, constantly, since March.

Throughout my life, whenever things have scared me, I have seen a movie. After the past six months, I desperately craved the escape that only the cinema gave me.

“Tenet,” directed by Christopher Nolan (“Dunkirk”) and starring John David Washington (“BlacKkKlansman”) and Robert Pattinson (“The Lighthouse”), has been the most anticipated film of 2020. The teasers promised a mind-bending thriller that would take my mind off the virus, November’s election and the University’s terrible reopening plans. It seemed perfect.

When I entered the Findley AMC 12, the lobby was empty.

Caution tape hung limp over arcade machines that once flashed bright red and yellow. The concession stand was barren, blocked off by towering plastic spit shields on the counter. Two people in masks and gloves took my ticket, and pointed me to my theater. It wasn’t any better. Large swaths of the empty, opening night auditorium were roped off by yellow caution tape, like something terrible had already happened.

When I sat down, I looked for the exits and made a plan, just in case. The ads dazzled against my face shield. Smiling M&M’S appeared, and said something like “We’re so glad you’re back! Thank you!”

Just as they said this, two people entered the theater and sat on the opposite end of my row.

They promptly removed their masks, and one of them, I kid you not, coughed into their popcorn.

My poncho crinkled against the seat when I shivered.

Then the previews began: “007: No Time To Die,” “Wonder Woman 1984,” “Murder on the Nile” and “Dune.” While these trailers normally would’ve been exciting, especially that last one, it was hard to focus on the screen. It wasn’t just because my glasses kept fogging up behind my face shield; I had already decided that, until a vaccine was widely distributed, I was never doing this again.

The magic of the cinema was choked to death by the yards of caution tape and the smell

SMTD student Nick Daly on Playbill contest win GRACE TUCKER Daily Arts Writer

While the coronavirus pandemic may have shut down Broadway and left the state of professional theatre in disarray, Music, Theatre & Dance sophomore Nicholas Daly is still finding ways to continue pursuing his theatrical potential.

Daly, previously featured

by The Michigan Daily for his rise to musical theatre fame via TikTok, was recently named the winner of Playbill’s

NICK DALY

Search for a Star Contest, a national vocal competition conducted entirely through virtual audition tapes. After a panel of judges consisting of Tony Award-winning casting directors and choreographers narrowed down the 2,658 submissions to the Top 10 vocalists, it was up to voters to name the winner. And Daly proved to be America’s favorite contender. Following his victory, the 19-year-old University student earned himself a professional casting consultation, a headshot photoshoot and a work session

with Tony Award-winning director-choreographer Susan Stroman, among several other professional opportunities.

While Daly was overcome with gratitude for the support of his friends, family and followers, the week of voting proved to be more tragic than exciting. As a resident of Kenosha, Wisconsin — the town where 29-year-old Jacob Blake was shot seven times by a white officer in late August — Daly took a step back from plugging the Playbill contest to post content that would help his community. The shooting

COURTESY OF ANDREW WARRICK

of cleaning fluid that radiated from the tile beneath my feet.

Its replacement was a constant, piercing anxiety. My imagination could withstand the threat of a mass shooting (I’m American, after all), but COVID-19 has stolen everything that made movie theaters so warm.

The other people in the audience, not to mention the smorgasbord of snacks, are both invitations to the virus. Even breathing feels dangerous. Seeing a movie in September 2020 feels like watching a film while the theater burns down around you. It was nearly impossible to suspend my disbelief and use my imagination, because it was already totally occupied thinking about all the horrors, microbial, economic and political, that the starkly different theaters implied.

Still, as “Tenet” began, I had hope. This was 2020’s “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.’”

I could leap into one of Christopher Nolan’s finely-crafted, riveting dreamscapes. I could, finally, forget the world for a few hours in the darkness of a movie theater.

Boy, was I wrong. *** There’s a great movie buried deep within “Tenet.” But it would take a team of skilled special agents, much like those in the film, to remove it without being pulverized by the movie’s sheer excesses.

“Tenet” begins with a pulsepounding scene that rivals even the bank heist opening of “The Dark Knight.” One isn’t entirely sure what is going on, but it doesn’t matter because the action is so riveting, propelled by wonderful cinematography and an intense score. The viewer assumes that, however confusing the opening scene is, answers will come later.

They don’t.

Nolan maintains this highspeed, chaotic energy for the rest of the movie, but never bothers to slow down and explain any of it, which amplifies the worst qualities of his previous films. He is so concerned with his frantic pace, and showing off his intelligence by referencing entropy, paradoxes, inversion, nuclear science and whatever a “temporal pincer movement” is, that he forgoes almost all resolution, character development and cinematic structure. He yanks his cardboard cutout characters from hyperbolic set-piece to hyperbolic set-piece, spewing out incoherent science fiction world-building as he goes along. The first few scenes are fascinating, because you think it’s all going somewhere. But, as the plot becomes increasingly convoluted, even doubling back on itself, my brain shut off.

At one point, a character tells the protagonist “Don’t try and understand it.” This seemed like a message to the viewer, meaning one of two things: This film is intentionally inexplicable, or you’re too stupid to understand this complex cinematic masterpiece.

Unfortunately, though, beneath all the pretentious scientific esoterica and (perhaps intentionally) confusing plot, “Tenet” is just a glorified, multimillion dollar episode of “Doctor Who” (so much so, that anyone who has seen the latter will probably guess some of the movie’s biggest twists). Deep down, it’s an incredibly flat science-fiction spy story shot with a drab industrial palette of greys, blacks and whites that do little to make the onslaught of plot more appealing.

On top of all this, the characters are dimensionless. When your protagonist is literally called “The Protagonist,” and that’s about the extent the viewer knows about him,

it’s hard to care. Why struggle to follow the convoluted story-line when you don’t empathize with those who inhabit it?

The characters that are given a bit of personality are either enormously melodramatic, enormously problematic or both.

Kenneth Branagh (“Dunkirk”), a gem of British acting, is little more than a Bond villain parody here, bad Russian accent and all. His role would’ve been better in the experienced hands of Nick Cage.

The film’s only prominent women are both shot. One is needlessly terrorized and beaten, to add some appearance of depth.

Watching “Tenet” is like watching a Rolls-Royce drive, at high speed, straight into a brick wall. If the car is headed nowhere, who cares how fast it’s going, and how many times it spins around?

When the credits rolled, no matter how exciting and visually inventive “Tenet” occasionally was, how bopping a soundtrack it had and how good Washington and Pattinson were, it felt like a complete waste of time.

I have no desire to see it again, even without the threat of contracting a deadly respiratory disease. It’s a waste of both talent and a potentially strong premise. A dangerous one, too. This isn’t a film worth suiting up in a plague outfit for or, God forbid, getting sick.

Yet I can’t help but feel that even if “Tenet” had been any better, this was doomed from the start. First Aurora poked some holes, and now COVID-19 has ripped the floodgates from their hinges and made going to the cinema an exercise in sheer terror. To find true joyful escape within a film, you need to at least feel like there is no direct and present danger to your life.

of the young Black father elicited a considerable amount of demonstrations in the lakeside city, and Daly found the national attention on his hometown startling.

“The second night [of protests], there was damage that was done to the city, which is a bit shocking, especially when you see it on national headlines,” said Daly. “Me and my friends definitely joke about how we live in ‘Ke-nowhere’ and no one knows anything about our city. But now it’s definitely different introducing myself now, and saying that I’m from Kenosha, Wisconsin, and then watching the people realize that that’s the same [town].”

Kenosha and its district-wide theatre program were enormously influential in developing Daly’s love for musical theatre; it was at Kenosha’s community theatre where he made his theatrical debut as the title character in “Captain Louie Jr.” During his sophomore year at Kenosha’s Bradford High School, under the mentorship of Educational Theatre Association Hall of Fame member Holly Stanfield, Daly realized storytelling was his true calling.

Daly credits much of his development as an artist to Stainfield and her work at Bradford High School. In applying to the School of Music, Theatre & Dance as a musical theatre major, Daly said: “She absolutely encouraged me. She is an outstanding mentor. She

inspired me to believe that it is something I could make a living off of.” The educator was even at his University audition: “She was there at my Chicago unifieds; she was right outside at my Michigan audition with my mom.”

says watching McElroy lead that company “was such a learning experience for me.

Watching that representation, being a Black director ... and a successful musical theatre artist … is huge. I have interests other than just being a musical theatre performer; I have a playwriting minor. I love being behind the table just as much as I love being on stage.”

And to young Black artists aspiring to be in his shoes one day, Daly says: “Don’t put yourself in a box. As a Black performer we always get those stereotypical, token roles. But, I’m fortunate at least in my high school career that I was able to play leading characters: Quasimodo in ‘The Hunchback of Notre-Dame,’... as well as characters [in shows like ‘The Scottsboro Boys’] that allowed me to embrace my culture. You can do just as much as any other actor, and beyond.”

Amid the recent events surrounding the shooting of Jacob Blake in his hometown, Daly remains optimistic about the power musical theatre carries in bringing people together. “In itself, musical theatre is like an empathy machine,” Daly said. “And my big thing is: What will save the world? What will make people understand each other, and take us to a more egalitarian place in society? I believe the answer is empathy.”

Daily Arts Writer Grace Tucker can be reached at tuckergr@umich.edu.

“In itself, musical theatre is like an empathy machine,” Daly said. “And my big thing is: What will save the world?”

Now, Daly is using his storytelling skills and his success at the University to make the kind of representation for Black theatre artists that he never saw as a kid.

“When I was younger, [the representation] was not there. I did not see that representation at least until I got a lot more serious about musical theatre during high school,” Daly said, referencing performers of color like Leslie Odom Jr and Billy Porter.

Daly specifically remembers when musical theatre performer and director Michael McElroy came to the University to direct his original show “Sonnets, Soliloquies, and Soul.” He

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Disney’s Mulan remake: General Tso’s Chicken 14 — Wednesday, September 16, 2020

L

et’s get down to business, to defeat the Huns!”

I will always remember those summer nights I spent sprawled on my grandparents’ living room couch in China, as I passionately sang along to “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” from the animated movie “Mulan.” Based on an ancient Chinese ballad, Disney’s cartoon “Mulan” told the story of a young girl who disguised herself as a man and enlisted in the army in the place of her father. She was constantly picked on in the beginning by other fellow soldiers due to her physical weaknesses, but she eventually proved herself with her determination and saved China from the Huns.

Though I was only four at the time, in the early 2000s, I was fascinated by Mulan’s courage and amused by her clumsy yet witty charm. I always laughed uncontrollably when Mulan spilled a pot of hot tea on her matchmaker’s face and had my eyes glued to the TV screen when she saved Shang (her love interest) from the avalanche during a battle with the Huns.

As a little Chinese girl, it was refreshing for me to see a heroine who shared my skin color in a Disney film and inspiring to see my own culture being represented in such a positive light. She was the first Disney princess that I could relate to and look up to.

Therefore, when Disney announced that Liu Yifei had been cast to portray my favorite Disney princess in 2017, I was beyond excited. I was also relieved that this role would be represented by a native Chinese actress and celebrated Disney’s choice for diversity. Ever since, I closely followed the production timeline and made plans to see it with my friends upon its release. When I went to see “Little Women” at my local theatre last December, I saw the “Mulan” trailer play on the big screen. I shed a few tears as I watched Yifei fighting fiercely on the battlefield while the orchestral version of “Reflection” played in the background. I was so thrilled to see my childhood heroine being represented authentically and the film’s potential to make Asian American cinematic history.

Yet, as I settled in to watch the remake, I felt skepticism creeping up even from the opening scenes. I raised my eyebrows at the sight of a hakka tulou — which is a form of architecture unique to southeastern China — as Mulan’s home, which is known to be located in northern China. I cringed again when Mulan’s father said to her: “Chi is for warriors, not for daughters.” Originated from Taoism, Chi is a vital energy that everyone is born with regardless of gender. I was also confused when writers used “abundance of chi” to describe the witch as powerful, because one does not gain power by merely having chi but rather through their cultivation of it.

As the film went on, I became increasingly angered by the obvious neglect the production crew showed for Chinese cultural references key to the central plot.

The film showed the Chinese character for filial piety, an ancient Confucian “virtue,” engraved on two objects: on the “am-

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BY LOLA YANG, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT

ulet” (with an oriental design that did not resemble anything real Chinese people would carry) that belongs to Mulan’s father and on the sword that was gifted to Mulan by the emperor. The writers clearly dismissed the fact that in Chinese culture, filial piety means more than “devotion to family,” as it is criticized by contemporary feminists for its implications of blind obedience and submission to elders. It is true that Mulan is no modern tale, but the values that she fights for in the film are directly contradicted by the outdated notion of filial piety that Disney writers inadvertently imposed on her.

This new portrayal of Mulan feels foreign to me, as I was unable to connect with her innate power and lack of vulnerabilities. My favourite Disney princess used to be Mulan, not because she was an all-powerful warrior, but the fact that she felt like one of “us.” She was just an ordinary girl who was both scared and excited about the world, who simply wanted to be understood, and then left alone. The way she clumsily finds herself through hardships and betrayals was inspiring because it gave me hope that I could do it too.

By drastically changing the story and Mulan’s motives without any explanation

ILLUSTRATION BY EILEEN KELLY

While I was infuriated by Disney’s lack of effort in historical fact-checking, I was disappointed the most by Mulan’s “flawlessness” as a character. In the original movie, she is an ordinary girl who knows nothing about fighting, but through her perseverance and grit, she becomes a true warrior. In the remake, however, Mulan serves as a “Chinese Elsa” whose superpowers are rejected by society because they do not conform to social expectations of women. While such reinvention of the folklore establishes a feminist premise for Mulan’s story, it rejects further possibilities for her growth. What is the point of her story if she already fights better than all the men?

or foundation behind it, her character is denied agency and becomes an Asian fantasy with no real identity. In the remake, Mulan becomes General Tso’s Chicken — an essentially American dish with some Chinese sesame drizzled on top. With the new film, I lost a childhood heroine whom I most identified with, and a generation of Asian American girls have been misrepresented by an orientalist puppet for Hollywood white feminism.

Prior to “Mulan,” the only all-Asiancast Hollywood film that had entered the mainstream was “Crazy Rich Asians.”

Though the film was a huge milestone in cinematic history and inspired more Asian faces to be represented on screen,

I was unable to form a real cultural connection to the characters and storytelling.

Yes, the film included many Asian cultural references such as families making dumplings together and playing mahjong, but it failed to explore many themes key to the Asian American identity, such as the notion of the model minority and internalized racism. Rather, “Crazy Rich Asians” focused mainly on class anxieties, which was a theme universal and therefore more digestible for Western audiences. While class remains an important topic to address, omitting themes and issues relevant to Asian American culture and identity is damaging to the integrity of such representation.

Neither the “Mulan” remake nor “Crazy Rich Asians” went deep enough to create nuanced characters — they simply cast Asian actors and chose filming locations in Asia, as if that were enough. Niki Caro, the director of the “Mulan” remake, expressed, “It was incredibly important to us that the people in our film were authentically the ethnicities they needed to be for the storytelling.” However, these principles of authenticity were obviously dismissed behind the scenes, as the script was co-written by four white writers and no Chinese experts were consulted for its historical or cultural accuracy.

What does this mean? Must Asians be Westernized in order to enter mainstream American culture? I think the answer is no. I still remember my excitement and pride when I heard BTS, a K-pop group, play in my local department store in Toronto. I still think about when the Academy Award–winning movie “Parasite” was all people talked about; I would hear conversation about it while walking down State Street or while sitting in the East Quad dining hall or in the moments before class time. Both BTS and “Parasite” have reached huge cultural and commercial successes in the United States, yet neither creators compromised their art to cater to Americans: BTS stated that they will not produce English albums and Bong Joon-ho, the director of “Parasite,” didn’t cut out a single Korean cultural reference when the film premiered in the U.S. Through sheer genius and hard work, the two were able to overcome cultural barriers and accumulate global support, forcing diversity into America’s insular entertainment industry.

Disney’s failure with “Mulan” sends a clear message to Hollywood that the Asian American experience is not an easy tale to tell. It will require more than $200 million in budgets and four white screenwriters. It demands the stories to reflect our anxieties and fears, our disconnect from the mainstream and our linkage to our homeland. The failure of the Mulan remake shows that the Asian American experience can never be represented by those who don’t share our identity, and that true representation is not only reflected in the cast but also through Asian writers, directors and producers, and a deep understanding of how to honestly portray our past and stories. So perhaps one day, our reflection on the big screen will show who we are inside.

15 — Wednesday, September 16, 2020

statement

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Why Zoom reflections are a feminist issue

ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE WIEBE

BY GRACE TUCKER, STATEMENT COLUMNIST

P

erhaps one of the most cursed images a young woman can conjure is the female dressing room — the one tucked in the backstage corner of every theatre, dance studio and concert hall. With its taunting mirrored walls and the rancid stenches of burnt hair and the nervous sweat only starved teenage girls can produce, the place is hellish in the most basic sense.

Having grown up doing theatre and competitive show choir, I’ve experienced that hairspray-scented inferno countless times. Girls in dressing rooms like to act as though they’re unbothered by the horror of it all — the sheepish undressing and anxious glances in floor-length mirrors, frantically stuffing your clothes in the deepest corners of the room so no one sees how ugly your underwear is or how enormously-sized your jeans are. But, no matter how strong you like to think you are, the hyper-consciousness we, as women, already feel toward our bodies increases ten-fold the moment we walk through that door. We know that the quicker we undress, the less time other girls have to observe our stomach rolls or our stretch marks or, God forbid, that one patch of cellulite on your left thigh that no exfoliant can seem to alleviate. So, to minimize the gaze of the observer, you move like your life depends on it and get out of there as fast as you can.

I thought I had escaped this unforgiving landscape when I graduated high school. I was wrong.

I was sitting in my third — but what felt like my ninetieth — Zoom class of the week when I took in the image of our virtual classroom, with its stacked profiles and rows of women staring into their reflection. A moment of clarity came over me as I realized what it really resembled: A dressing room — that horrific call to my girlhood.

Zoom’s rectangular profiles act as the room’s mirrored walls. We may be in class, listening and participating, but we’re also

primping. The girl mid-center fixes her hair there, then another girl on the bottom left corner adjusts her glasses. Another quickly sits more upright when she sees the look of her slouched posture in the camera.

As my professor went on about the class syllabus, all I could think about was this dystopian-looking and completely depressing grid of reflections: girls primping, then fixing, then checking, then fixing again. And I was doing it too — obsessively fixing my bangs, turning over my necklaces until they fell at the perfect spot on my chest, using the camera to analyze whether or not I was smiling enough in class.

We were fidgeting robots, adhering to the automated voices in our head telling us to move our head, fix that one stray strand of hair, smile a bit more — anything to appease the cameras in front of us. We were stuck in a figurative dressing room, bound only by the strength of our internet connection, hyperconscious of our appearance, fixated on the reflections we saw.

So why do we fidget and primp our way through virtual classes?

Believe it or not, the narrative of women as vain creatures originated long before the time of cameras and video calls.

A woman staring into a mirror — an image so sacred — is the product of centuries of historical, psychological and socio-political precedent — even Shakespeare was gifting us with sonnets about vanity, beauty and fertility as captured by a woman’s reflection.

At the beginning of the 20th century, American psychologists assigned terminology to this enduring phenomenon when they explored the notion of the “looking-glass self,” which asserts that a person’s sense of self is partially constructed by how others perceive them.

While initial theorizing mostly mused on the non-physical sense of self, in later years there was a greater focus on the idea of the looking-glass self as applied to how women view our physical bodies.

Enter feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir argued that “when a girl becomes a woman, she becomes doubled; so instead of existing only within herself, she also exists outside herself.”

Thus, once she enters womanhood, the adolescent girl is socialized to “exist outside herself,” or in other terms, objectify herself as others — usually men — would objectify her.

The psychological study of women’s self-objectification gained significant momentum when Barbara L. Fredrickson of the University of Michigan and TomiAnn Roberts of Colorado College gave this doubled womanly existence a name and a reason: objectification theory. The conjecture proposes that girls and women tend to internalize a third-person perspective — an observer’s perspective — as the principal view of their physical bodies. This internalized perspective can lead to shame (woohoo!), anxiety (fun!), selfdisgust (sounds about right) and behavior of constant adjusting that psychologists like to call “habitual body monitoring.”

Sounds familiar? That’s because this kind of obsessive preening is taking place in every Zoom call across campus, where you’re forced to stare at — and scrutinize — yourself in the camera for hours at a time.

LSA freshman Rebekah Turner told The Daily how she has become accustomed to this very kind of behavior.

“The first week of classes, I didn’t necessarily feel pressure to look good for Zoom, but I could constantly see myself playing with my hair and looking at myself,” Turner said. “It is distracting thinking, ‘Oh, is my hair good? ... Should I do my makeup?’ I feel like I stare at myself a lot and think, ‘Oh, I look so bad.’”

We’re constantly trying to assume the perspective of this imaginary, third-person observer. And Zoom simply digitizes this experience.

Turner said, “For my PoliSci class, there’s like 200 people there. It’s hard be-

cause I’m thinking, ‘Oh, is someone looking at me right now?’”

The way your female classmates check their profile image throughout Zoom lectures is not based on some shallow, girlish tendency to obsess over their appearance. It’s rooted in a deeply misogynistic notion we’re fed that our identity and our value rests entirely on how we are physically perceived by others. These enduring effects of self-objectification by women means sexism endures, deeply embedded in the subconscious.

Turner summarized this experience in a few words: “(On Zoom,) you really are sitting in front of a mirror for an hour and a half,” she said.

I interviewed two other random students on the Diag about their Zoom experience, and the similarities between their remarks and Turner’s are striking.

Public Health junior Reem Farjo said, “I am definitely more aware of my appearance than when I was in in-person classes.

It’s like if I showed up to class with a mirror.”

LSA freshman Gabi Skinner concluded with, “(On Zoom,) it’s like you’re sitting in front of a mirror, with 200 other minimirrors, so comparison is really, really easy.”

In Zoom classes, in dressing rooms, walking down a dark street, walking through a crowded lecture hall, we’re there and we’re outside ourselves, observing, self-criticizing, listening to our subconscious as we adjust appropriately, with a swift brush of the hair or tucking of the shirt, with a rapid Chapstick application or adjustment of our dress strap. We’re fixing like robots — like the very pixels making up your Zoom screens. This time around, virtual learning means we have a monitor to keep track of this obsessive primping and the habitual body monitoring. Just don’t call it laughable, don’t call it a distraction. Call it what it is: Sexism that endures and a true feminist issue.

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statement

Wednesday, September 16, 2020 — 16

The (really far) off-campus experience

BY WILLA HART, STATEMENT COLUMNIST

ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE WIEBE

L

ast March, when the University announced that classes would be moved online, I was in a philosophy seminar, cramming with my classmates for the exam we had in five minutes. It was one of those classmates who read out the University’s official statement, the rest of us sitting in hushed silence, our notebooks lying open and forgotten in front of us. “Well,” another classmate said, “I guess we all get to go home now.”

“Not until you take your test,” my professor said and dropped a thick stack of exams on his desk. hen I think back now about my decision to return home last March, I don’t remember many specifics — other than how quickly I made the decision to leave Ann Arbor. As soon as I stepped outside my philosophy classroom, my midterm finished, I was pulling my phone out of my pocket and texting my dad: “Classes moved online. When can you come get me?”

The speed of my decision was made partially possible by my family’s proximity to Ann Arbor — my dad lives in Hamburg, less than half an hour away — but also by the fact that my “decision” barely felt like a decision at all. Everyone seemed to assume a shift to online learning would mean a shift offcampus. Around me, friends and classmates were making plans to return home and ride out the pandemic with family. It seemed like the smartest move, especially given that, at the time, we didn’t have specifics about how fatal or contagious the virus was. If I had any lingering resentment over having to take classes from my dad’s guest bedroom, it was softened by the knowledge that everyone else at Michigan was in the exact same boat as me.

When I decided not to return to campus this fall due to safety concerns, I expected my experience to be much the same. Yes, I would miss game days and Espresso Royale, doing homework in the Arb and browsing Literati, but everyone on campus would be missing those things with me. We were still, I thought, all in this together.

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I was surprised by how wrong I was. In August, before the semester had even started, I began to feel isolated from the campus community. Though it didn’t bother me to have fully-remote classes, it was hard to see friends in Ann Arbor posting photos of each other posing and laughing. I FaceTimed in; it wasn’t the same.

Public Health senior Scott Orlov expressed a similar sentiment in a phone interview with The Daily. Though he acknowledged that staying home had its benefits, he said, “One of my clubs is having potentially one or two in-person events, and obviously I can’t be there, which is really disappointing.”

He added, “I think it’s different (than last semester) because a lot of people weren’t, like, socializing on campus like they are now.

A lot of people were in the same situation I was, which was they just went home.”

Students who chose not to return to Ann Arbor this semester often had multiple reasons for doing so, and many were motivated by factors unrelated to safety. Some students I spoke with chose to remain home for financial reasons, reducing housing costs by staying for free with family or in areas with rents lower than Ann Arbor’s. Others were motivated by job availability or a desire to live in a less cramped space than your standard student apartment. But, regardless, the reason most often cited was health and safety concerns.

In a phone interview, LSA junior Piya Garg commented on her decision not to return to campus, noting her skepticism of the University’s reopening plan and student behavior.

“I feel like there’s a lot of people who are very responsible, but there’s a pretty significant chunk of people (who are) decently irresponsible and not really following the rules,” Garg said. “And they’re not really being enforced, so I feel like it’s definitely just best to stay safe in this situation.”

My decision not to return to campus was similarly rooted in safety concerns. I had a lease lined up in Escher House, a co-op within the Inter-Cooperative Council system. Though I had a private room, I knew

I would also have at least a dozen housemates with whom I would share living and dining spaces. Having seen several reports in early August about COVID-19 clusters at other major universities, I decided returning wasn’t worth the risk.

It wasn’t an easy decision for me, as I imagine it wasn’t for others. I had to say goodbye to my vision of what my senior year would look like; now, instead of (legally!) drinking gross beer at frat parties, I’m sipping ginger ale on my mom’s couch. I believe I made the right decision, for the right reasons, and I don’t regret it. But recently, I’ve found myself harboring an emotion different from regret: I’ve become resentful of students who returned to campus.

It’s like travel shaming, a new COVIDphenomenon wherein people taking vacations — and sharing about them on social media — are often deluged with criticism about their decision to travel. Usually, as the above article points out, it’s those who have canceled their own trips who are quickest to judge others. I made a sacrifice to help stop the spread of COVID-19, the thought process goes: Why couldn’t others do the same?

I recognize that my feelings aren’t completely logical and that most students who’ve returned to Ann Arbor have done nothing to earn my resentment. If everyone appropriately obeyed social distancing protocols, as many students have, the process of returning to campus could be safe for students, staff and community members.

But it’s difficult to remember that when I’m sitting in bed with my dog, watching Snapchat videos of my friends wandering down State Street to get burritos and wishing I could be there, too. Harder still when a mob of white-shirted girls appears behind my friends’ shoulders, their lipsticked smiles clear and unmasked even in the dim evening light, because, of course, many students aren’t obeying social distancing protocols at all. he year 2020, so far, has been a year of extremes. For many people, the world feels like it’s at the worst it’s ever been. It should be no

T

wonder, then, that the University of Michigan campus community also feels more disconnected than ever. The on-campus/ off-campus divide is only one fracture line in the smashed mirror of our community.

Everywhere I turn, there seems to be another difference of opinion: divisions between roommates about adherence to social distancing protocol, arguments about the potential for a return to fall sports, debates about the GEO, ResStaff strike for change and campus COVID-19 policy.

That’s not to say there aren’t normally divisions among the campus community.

University students are not a monolith, and, diverse as we are, we should be used to disagreeing in social, political and even ethical opinions. But for the first time ever, I’m unsure where the thread is that ties us all together. This time last year, maybe we would have slung our arms around our drunk friends and hobbled down to Michigan Stadium for a collective karaoke session, which would have healed all wounds, if only for a verse or two. Of course, this year, that’s not an option. So, what do we do instead? Set up a Zoom call? Make another GroupMe? Knowing this is the Michigan I’ll be graduating from is hard. I’ve spent so long here, and yet I know this endless year will be what I remember most. Part of me wishes I could go back to Ann Arbor for the afternoon, just to see it. I haven’t returned since March, and when I think of campus, some part of me imagines it just as it was before I left, filled with students and businesses and the detritus of everyday life. If only I could go back, I think, maybe everything would be normal again.

But that campus doesn’t exist anymore.

Now, it’s scattered and distant, a ghost of its former self. I hope one day it’ll return to normal: It would be nice, in a few years, to be able to return and see everything put back in its proper place. Still, it’s hard to imagine the path that would get us there. Could everything really return to the way it was before?

And even if it did, what help is that for those of us now, sitting lost and disconnected on the fringes?

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Sports

Wednesday, September 16, 2020 — 17

Yost through the eyes of the equipment manager FOOTBALL Drew Kendall in no rush JOSH TAUBMAN

ETHAN SEARS

Daily Sports Writer

Managing Sports Editor

The dull whir of the skate sharpening machine sets a fitting background noise.

Masked up in an empty Yost Ice Arena, Long-time Michigan hockey equipment manager Ian Hume sits at his desk, a wall of skates to his left. Before our interview can begin, a visitor arrives.

Freshman forward Phillippe Lapointe enters the office, asking if his skates are done.

It’s a simple question, but there’s a lot more to it. Hume works with Lapointe to figure out how much extra steel he wants on his blades.

Though a simple interaction, Hume is doing what he does best: getting to know his players.

“Now I know where to start with him and we’ll go from there,” Hume said. “It’s kind of a feel thing. I’ll make a couple of adjustments and try to get him dialed in.”

Hume is a hockey guy through and through. He grew up in Canada, and like many Canadians, hockey was his lifeblood.

“When I was growing up as a kid, there were two seasons; it was hockey and road hockey,” Hume said. “You played road hockey when the snow went away and when the snow came back we were in the rinks or outdoor rinks or ponds or whatever. It was just hockey, hockey, hockey.”

Hume got on Michigan’s radar by working in junior leagues in Ontario, an area in which Michigan recruited heavily.

There, he got to know former coach Red Berenson, and after getting married, he and his wife moved to Ann Arbor, where he kept in touch with Berenson.

Then, he literally walked into a job.

“I just happened to walk in (to Yost) one day in July and they were doing a kids hockey camp,” Hume said. “I knew Red pretty well by that point and I just

Drew Kendall was supposed to be committed by now.

On Aug. 28, the four-star offensive linemen — a top target for Michigan in the 2021 class — told 247Sports that he’d be committing in the next week. It would have been the end to a four-horse race between the Wolverines, Boston College, Duke and Stanford.

Instead, there’s been radio silence from Dedham, Mass.

“He’s very open-minded and he’s not rushing to make a final decision,” Panos Voulgaris, Kendall’s coach at Nobles and Greenough School, said. “And I think the fact that it doesn’t look like we’re gonna be playing any games, it hasn’t expedited the decision at all.

“So he’s being patient and he wants to have the most clarity on making a final decision. So no rush at this point.”

That may not be a bad thing for Michigan. After losing fourstar guard Rocco Spindler to Notre Dame last month, Kendall seems to be the best remaining option on the 2021 board at the position. The Wolverines have four offensive line commits for the class — centers Raheem Anderson and Greg Crippen, both four stars, four-star tackle Giovanni El-Hadi and three-star tackle Tristan Bounds.

Kendall, a top-10 guard and top-130 recruit on 247Sports’ composite score, would fit nicely into that mix.

“I think athletically and technically, he’s gonna be ready to go (in college),” Voulgaris said.

“It’s just a matter of being put in an environment where there are several other players at his level.

And getting used to that speed and to the pace of practice and to what Power 5 football demands. So it’s just a matter of acclimating.”

Voulgaris said Kendall is over 265 pounds right now and could develop to as big as 295. Even over a summer marred by COVID-19,

COURTESY OF MICHIGAN ATHLETICS

Equipment manager Ian Hume has been working with the Michigan hockey team for 31 years.

walked in to see how he was doing and he said ‘You couldn’t have come in here on a worse day.’ ” Berenson had just seen multiple assistants, his video guy and his equipment manager leave the program for the University Illinois at Chicago’s hockey team.

Ironically, that program no longer exists.

Berenson asked Hume if he was still looking for a job and Hume told him he was. He was offered the equipment manager position on the spot.

“He cleared it with administration and 31 years later I’m still here,” Hume said.

“So I owe where I am and all my experiences; I owe that to coach Berenson.”

Hume was on Berenson’s coaching staff for nearly his entire tenure, and he stayed on when head coach Mel Pearson took over in 2017.

“Red wasn’t necessarily negative, but I would say that Red was old school.” Hume said. “(Mel’s) different then coach Berenson. He wants it to be fun for the players and I think he wants it to be fun for us. There can be enough negativity when people aren’t playing well, and so it’s pretty easy. He likes to be very positive.”

Hume’s official role is to handle all the equipment-related tasks.

He’s in charge of getting all the jerseys, pads, helmets, decals and anything else you could think of ready for the players. The process to pack all of that up for a road game is relatively easy. What takes a while is gathering and replacing the extra equipment that travels with the team all season — including five sticks per player for a road trip.

“We take enough stuff so that if there’s a problem, we’ve usually got it covered,” Hume said.

Talking to him, it’s clear that he’s so much more than just the equipment manager. Hume has an open-door policy, and whether players want to talk about equipment adjustments or are just tired of coaching and want to chat, Hume is there. “(Hockey’s) the longest college season. It’s a long grind from when you start in September and you don’t end sometimes until mid April,” Hume said. “It may not be physically demanding as far as the number of games you play, but you’re practicing and it mentally can wear you out. So you get guys that come in and shoot the breeze about whatever.”

Through those conversations, Hume has gotten to know a lot of players in the program in his three decades at Michigan. He’s noticed a trend. The less tinkering a player does, the more success

they usually have.

“One of our sayings is it’s not the tools, it’s the carpenter,” Hume said. “Most guys are pretty good, but some guys are finicky and they don’t need to be.”

Former Michigan defenseman Quinn Hughes exemplified this.

Hughes had an incredible career at Michigan and continued to perform in his first year in the NHL with the Vancouver Canucks. He piled up 43 assists and is a finalist for the Calder Trophy — awarded to the top rookie each year.

This instant success was no surprise to Hume. Hughes went through very few sticks and just wanted his skates to be kept sharp. “(He) was literally no maintenance,” Hume said. “The kid just wants to play.”

At this point, Hume has seen it all. Even in a pandemic, he’s still going into work, checking in on his players and keeping everyone’s skates sharpened — extra steel and all. But it’s not really about the equipment. It’s that every guy on the Wolverines can come in and talk to Hume about anything. It’s been that way for 31 years.

“Teams can change, personnel can change, people can change,” Hume said. “But it’s the relationships you build that last forever. I think that’s what’s unique about hockey.”

he found ways to work out.

“He made a lot of gains in the weight room, with his strength numbers,” Voulgaris said, “and also with his numbers on the field as far as agility time, explosiveness, speed, quickness, all that stuff.”

Kendall’s father, Pete, had a 13-year NFL career as an offensive linemen after a college career at Boston College. He works on the Nobles coaching staff now, and Voulgaris credits him with much of Drew’s development. Voulgaris said Kendall has been exposed to gap, man and zone run schemes in high school, making his transition to college easier.

In Massachusetts, it’s unlikely there will be a high school football season this fall. Coupled with a recruiting dead period, that puts situations like Kendall’s in limbo.

Instead of a season, there’s an indefinite run of practices without anything to practice for or any college coaches coming through town.

“Naturally he’s disappointed, like everyone who’s a competitor, by not playing in the games,” Voulgaris said.

“But he’s controlling what he can control, and making sure that he takes advantage of the practice time that he has and this extra time in the weight room and he’s gonna make gains where he can.”

Even in those practices, Voulgaris sees Kendall leading and setting the tone, other players looking up to him. He’s seen Kendall display that sort of attitude since they first met, three years ago.

“Even before I ever saw him get onto the field, this is someone who loves the game of football and you see it in the way he communicates about it, the way he interacts with coaches,” Voulgaris said. “His desire to learn the game, whether it’s on the white board, in the film room or when it comes to the actual being on the field and getting better from a physical standpoint and a competitive standpoint.”

Film Breakdown: What to expect from Austin Davis’s fifth year with ‘M’ JARED GREENSPAN Daily Sports Writer

Over breakfast with Michigan coach Juwan Howard last February, Austin Davis’s fate for this upcoming college basketball season was sealed.

The then-redshirt junior would be returning for a fifth year in the fall.

It wasn’t too long ago that Davis was largely an afterthought. He struggled to acclimate to the college game, sitting out his first year and playing sparingly over the next two seasons — just twice did he see double-digit minutes over the course of 2017-18 and 201819.

Last season seemed destined for more of the same. Davis started off as the thirdstring center, leapfrogged in the rotation by sophomore Colin Castleton. He sat on the sidelines for seven of Michigan’s first eleven games.

And yet he managed to turn a corner. Davis flourished under Howard’s tutelage, establishing himself as the backup to Jon Teske. In a Big Ten stacked with viable big men, he was a revelation.

“It’s great to have Austin Davis on our side,” Howard said after an 89-65 win over Indiana last February, a game in which Davis contributed 11 points.

“Austin is wired the right way.

He’s such a giver. Total team guy. Never tried to go for his numbers or do anything he’s not good at. Come in with the right attitude in practice, working hard. Buying into the teaching and the developing. And he’s going out and having a great carryover game after game.”

With Teske having graduated in May, Davis’s importance is magnified. Michigan’s other true big man is freshman Hunter Dickinson, and while Dickinson is talented, the transition from high school to college necessitates a learning curve — just ask Davis.

The Daily took a closer look at what went right for Davis during his breakout campaign

and where there’s room for improvement entering his last go-around.

The pick and roll was more integral to Michigan’s offense than almost any other offensive set last season. According to Synergy, the Wolverines averaged 28.5 points per game off the pick and roll, the fourth highest total in the nation.

Luckily for Davis, it’s an element of the game in which he excels.

In this clip taken from Michigan’s February matchup with Rutgers at Madison Square Garden, Davis frees up the ball-handler, Eli Brooks, with a textbook screen. As Brooks veers right, Davis’s defender hedges out, leaving him in the clear.

Brooks threads the needle with a bounce pass and hits Davis in stride. Rather than force up an ill-advised shot, Davis flashes his poise. He possesses the wherewithal to recognize the help defender blitzing in from the far corner to front him on the block.

Working methodically, he gathers himself, takes a dribble and ducks under the air-borne defender. When a second defender closes in, he bides even more time with another successful fake, making for an easy basket.

Davis’ actions on the court are often coherent. It’s when he rushes that his play deviates — shuffled feet, forced shots. He is at his best when he slows the game down.

On this play, even after point guard Zavier Simpson stumbles with his dribble, Davis holds his ground down low. The patience pays off, with Simpson squeaking free and finding Davis for the two-handed slam.

A portion of Davis’s pick and roll success can surely be attributed to Simpson’s ability as an orchestrator. Now, Davis will have to rely more heavily on the trio of Brooks, graduate transfer Mike Smith and freshman Zeb Jackson to execute the two-man game.

Second-chance points are

ALEXANDRIA POMPEI/Daily

Fifth-year senior center Austin Davis turned a corner last season after starting on the bench, behind Colin Castleton and Jon Teske in Michigan’s rotation.

back-breakers, and no Wolverine displayed a knack for securing offensive rebounds quite like Davis did last season. Out of his 62 total boards, 24 occurred on the offensive end — a 37 percent clip that stood as the highest mark on the team.

This play begins with a similar sequence as the prior one. Davis sets a ball screen and both defenders chase the ballhandler, collapsing on David DeJulius.

DeJulius, though, isn’t looking for Davis. On the other side of the court, Brandon Johns Jr. walls off Indiana’s Rob Phinisee with an off-ball screen, freeing Brooks for a shot attempt. While not the

focal point, Davis nonetheless strives to make an impact: he beelines into the heart of the paint, positioning himself for a possible offensive rebound.

By the time Davis’s defender leaves DeJulius, he’s too late — Davis, as if on defense, is boxing out.

When Brooks’ three-pointer falls off, Davis out-wills four Hoosiers for the rebound, using his 6-foot-10, 250 pound frame to his advantage and finishing off the move with a layup in traffic.

If there’s a clear area where Davis has room to grow, it’s perimeter defense.

It’s great to have Austin Daivs on our side.

By all means, Davis is a traditional big man. His scoring radius is largely confined to the paint. Jump shots, let alone 3-pointers, are absent from his arsenal.

And in today’s era of basketball, the stretch-‘5’ is a hot commodity. A big man like Davis can thrive in the paint on the offensive end, but only so long as he can venture outwards on defense.

Against Ohio State, Davis matched up against versatile big man Kaleb Wesson. Here, Wesson catches the entry pass with his back to the basket before quickly pivoting to face the hoop, leaving Davis vulnerable to a dribble-drive.

Wesson lulls Davis with a few jab-steps then darts right. A slow first step dooms Davis, who winds up on Wesson’s backside and commits a foul.

In guarding the insideoutside big, Davis has to make a concerted effort to be out far enough to contest a perimeter shot.

Last year against Wisconsin, for instance, he was a virtual non-factor due to his inability to challenge threepoint threats Micah Potter and Nate Reuvers along the arc.

Without Teske, Michigan will need Davis to stay on the court for long stretches and out of foul trouble. Improved individual defense is therefore all the more imperative.

Last year, after spending three seasons riding the bench, Davis proved he could hold his own among stiff Big Ten competition. If he can continue to make strides, he will not only help ease Dickinson’s transition to the college level, but also make Michigan all the more dangerous.

Sports

18 — Wednesday, September 16, 2020

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Above all, Saturday in Ann Arbor missed the people

T

wo-hundredeighty-nine days ago, when 110,000 fans filed out of Michigan Stadium,

sadness glued to their faces after yet another loss to Ohio State, they had a date circled on THEO MACKIE their calendars: September 12, 2020.

That was the date when many of those 110,000 would come back to the corner of Main and Stadium, ready to do it all over again. They would come from fraternity tailgates and house parties, brunch buffets and golf course cookouts, but their final destination would be the same: the home of this great tradition that’s spanned 137 consecutive falls in Ann Arbor.

It’s one of those traditions that’s marked less by what happens on the field than off it. It’s the sights and sounds, not the wins and losses, that bring those 110,000 coming back year after year.

Instead, on Saturday afternoon, the sight was emptiness and the sound was silence.

The Wolverines were still there, practicing inside Michigan Stadium for a season that may never come.

This week, there are murmurs that it might, but such rumors have come and gone with remarkable consistency since the Big Ten canceled football on Aug. 11.

So for now, all we have on these typically-hallowed fall Saturdays are closed-door

FILE PHOTO/Daily

On what would have been the Wolverines' home opener, Michigan Stadium sat empty, as did many of the traditionally lively tailgating spots.

practices. And yet, somehow, that’s the most normal part.

The first strange thing on Saturday morning was that I woke up to my alarm.

Normally, in my house across the street from East Quad, such an accessory would be superfluous, so long as I wanted to wake up after 6 a.m.

On this Saturday, though, silence was the defining feature. It enveloped the air on Hill Street, where thousands of would-be

tailgaters took advantage of the opportunity to sleep in.

A handful of frat houses picked up the remains of illicit parties from the night before, but for the most part, there was little sign of life.

Where sheets would typically hang from house windows and porches, taunting poor Ball State with creative messages, there was only one. “Rush club lax,” it read.

Behind it, a maize-and-blue Michigan flag sat inside, unused until further notice.

‘Underrated’ Brad Hawkins stepping into leadership role in secondary

FILE PHOTO/Daily

Safety Brad Hawkins is becoming a leader on Michigan's defense.

ARIA GERSON

Daily Sports Writer

Brad Hawkins is one of the most experienced players on Michigan’s defense. A senior two-year starter who’s missed just three games since 2017, Hawkins is one of the biggest sources of continuity on a team facing so much upheaval.

In the spring, defensive coordinator Don Brown mentioned Hawkins among a select group of players he considered the leaders on the defense. Now that the Wolverines are back in Ann Arbor and have resumed practice, Hawkins has been able to fully step into that role.

“Becoming a leader on this defense, it means a lot to me,” Hawkins said on a Zoom call Friday. “I know I’m going to play a big role in the secondary and the defense period, just being a senior and being a leader and playing a lot and knowing what’s going on. That room has helped me a lot, growing as a person and as a man.”

But though Hawkins’ talent and experience isn’t in question, COVID-19 and the postponement of the Big Ten football season have left his status in flux. Like teammate Kwity Paye, Hawkins hasn’t yet made a formal decision on whether to play if a season is held this school year. Though Hawkins acknowledged that things could change quickly, he expressed a desire to play another season with Michigan.

“Honestly, I don’t know. I want to come back, I want to play another year here at the university,” he said. “Of course, there’s a lot of things that can change. But I want to come back and play with these guys, and hopefully I get that opportunity.”

One area where Hawkins’ leadership is key is with the development of sophomore safety Daxton Hill.

Hill showed promise last year, primarily as a backup safety and nickel corner as well as a gunner on special teams. He started three games at the end of the

year when Hawkins went down with an undisclosed injury.

“That was a big loss to us at the end of the year,” Brown said May 22. “And it took Daxton Hill, who’s an excellent player, and put him into a role that, he had to change his role and obviously that was a very good experience for Daxton, but the overall play of our defense obviously gets impacted because you lose a player of Brad Hawkins’ stature.”

Now, instead of backing up Hawkins, Hill will likely start alongside him if there is a season. That means the two of them will work together more than ever.

Hawkins acknowledged Hill’s contributions at the end of last season and expressed confidence in their abilities as a unit. “(Hill) got a lot bigger, a lot stronger, a lot smarter,” Hawkins said. “He’s definitely a guy to watch out for, of course. ... He’s grown every single day.

He’s looking real good. Both of us do a real good job of communicating with each other. I feel like we both cover really well.

There’s versatility back there.

Free safety, rover, it doesn’t really matter with both of us.

Having him back there helps me a lot. With his athleticism and his smarts and his speed, it definitely helps a lot.”

Beyond COVID-19, uncertainty over the season and a new partner at safety, Hawkins is also working with a new position coach in Bob Shoop, whose hire was announced in January after Chris Partridge left for Ole Miss.

Read more online at michigandaily.com

Unused, too, were the steps to Revelli Hall, where the drum line typically performs, entertaining thousands as they walk to the stadium. Across the street, Elbel Field was fully populated by soccer players and frisbee throwers. On Saturday, they were the only people I saw, save for a family of three that stopped at the stadium gates to snap a picture, reveling in their own sadness. But even the populated locales are a

football beckoned, I never noticed either. The warehouse is an electrical supply store, according to Google.

Next door, a sign says the Physical Properties Building sits. Before this weekend, it would have been ‘the building where t-shirt vendors set up’ if you had asked me.

At the end of Keech Avenue, Michigan Stadium is still there, but in concept only. It is, to everyone except players and team personnel, indefinitely inaccessible.

There’s a peeling sign outside the northwest entrance that lists prohibited items. This year, it can be updated to include fans, even if football returns.

Their absence allows for some new discoveries at the stadium, too. The student section entrance, apparently, is called Alumni Plaza — dedicated in 2001. All four corners of the stadium have their own plazas — Wolverine, Champions and Varsity, if you’re curious.

The most important discovery, though, was everything that we missed. We missed the debates over who should start at quarterback and if Jim Harbaugh should lose his job if Michigan can’t beat Ohio State. We missed the smell of spilled Natty Light and burgers on the grill. But most of all, we missed our friends and family and the memories we would have made together.

Because at the center of it all, Saturday afternoon in Ann Arbor missed the people.

strange sight. Typically, Elbel Field would be closed to everyone but marching band families — no one’s playing soccer on a football Saturday.

It’s strange what you notice without the crowds.

Next to the railroad tracks along Hoover Street, where that one tailgate with the _____________________________ big-screen TVs sets up on fall Saturdays, there’s a Mackie can be reached at parking lot and a white brick tmackie@umich.edu or on warehouse. In dozens of Twitter @theo_mackie. walks down this street when

A look into political contributions from athletic department figures

$$$$$$$ $$$$$$ $ $ $$ $ $ $ $ $$$$$$ $$$$$$$ NICHOLAS STOLL Daily Sports Writer

As Election Day inches closer, the push to get people to vote intensifies every day. But behind the scenes and well before Nov. 3, individuals from all walks of life assert their political stance in another way: donations.

Any individual can donate an amount of their choosing up to a government-mandated limit either directly to campaigns, to PACs or to Super PACs. This is an individual’s right as a U.S. citizen, so, the University of Michigan does not infringe on that ability, and neither does the athletic department.

Many athletics personnel donate to political campaigns, and information about their individual donations including amount, donation recipient, name of individual donor and employer are available on the Federal Election Commission website.

“Harbaugh” is the name that immediately jumps off the webpage. The donations coming from Jack, a former Michigan assistant coach, and Jacqueline “Jackie” Harbaugh — Jim and John’s parents — fill up all but one of the search results under the name.

The only other was a $7.00 contribution to ActBlue from James Harbaugh Jr. Jack and Jackie’s donations weren’t of the same vein as James’. The two donated totals of $450 to Donald J. Trump for President Inc., $400 to the Donald Trump Make America Great Again Committee, $350 to the Republican National Committee and $300 to John James for Senate over the past 16 months.

Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh hasn’t donated, per the FEC, but his entire team registered to vote last week.

As for current athletic personnel giving contributions, Michigan swim and dive coach Mike Bottom has donated on

15 separate occasions within the past year to Donald Trump and WinRed, a republican PAC. Overall, Bottom gave $1,375 across the same 15 donations, giving $75 each time to Donald J. Trump for President Inc. and $100 for each donation to a PAC or organization that supported him.

In smaller amounts, Michigan men’s gymnastics assistant coach Jordan Gaarenstroom gave $20 to WinRed last December, and Michigan cheerleading coach Pam St. John gave $53.50 across six donations to ActBlue.

The athletic department declined comment for this story.

Past these few, the FEC website produced nothing discernable about other athletic department persons’ donations, including no results found for either Jim Harbaugh or men’s basketball coach Juwan Howard. This doesn’t confirm either of them — or any Michigan athletic department staff — hasn’t donated, just that results do not come up under their name. They could be donating in other ways not identifiable by the individual contribution database, such as donating under the name of an LLC or alias, especially considering the wide-spread recent activism and sufficient wealth Michigan coaches and staff have available to them.

But with just over a month left, a few last minute donations could pop up, giving even greater insight into the political actions of people in Michigan athletics.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Sports

Wednesday, September 16, 2020 — 19

EXILED FROM FOOTBALL, CHRIS EVANS FINDS POWER IN MENTORSHIP

FILE PHOTO/Daily

DANIEL DASH

Daily Sports Editor

Majdi Issa is no stranger to mentorship. As the youngest of seven children and owner of Ahmo’s Gyro and Deli in downtown Ann Arbor, he has 18 nieces and nephews and a restaurant staff looking up to him.

Born and raised in Ann Arbor, Issa has always been a passionate Michigan sports fan. So when his cousin put him in touch with Chris Evans in February 2019, he immediately recognized the Michigan running back’s name.

At the time, Evans had just lost his spot on the football team due to an academic suspension. The ban came at a critical time in his career, as he appeared set to take over lead back duties for the Wolverines after totaling 2,114 scrimmage yards across his first three seasons.

Instead of gearing up for his senior season, Evans found himself in the market for a job. He eventually found three — one at Ahmo’s, another as an early-morning carpenter and a third as a high school special teams coordinator for Ann Arbor Huron. As Evans grappled with the realities of his suspension, Issa offered him work as a delivery driver and dishwasher at Ahmo’s.

“He just wanted to get everything back on track,” Issa told The Daily. “He was always on time and worked hard. Very positive, always optimistic and always had a smile on his face.”

Even when Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh announced Evans would be reinstated for the 2020 season last November, Evans continued working at Ahmo’s until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In total, he spent just over a year at the restau-

rant. Evans developed a relationship with Issa that ran deeper than his day-to-day duties, and eventually, beyond the walls of the deli itself.

“He was also helping everyone manage and overlooked everything,” Issa said. “I put a lot of trust in him and he delivered. … Even other than working here, he would do some side work with me as well. He was always hustling, just trying to stay afloat.

“I tried to help him in the right direction when it came to schooling, helping him structure his classes and his homework and how to take priority. He came a long way.” *** As winter turned to spring, Evans held out hope that he’d be eligible to play during the 2019 season. He wasn’t enrolled at Michigan, let alone on a football scholarship, yet his appeal remained under review as the Wolverines began spring practices.

But in June, a report surfaced that Evans’s suspension would last through the football season.

“Mentally, it was tough not knowing if you were ever going to be able to play football again at Michigan,” Evans said in a Zoom call with reporters Friday. “That was the big question as I got closer to the end of the school year in November. … I went the whole year without 100 percent knowing if I was coming back or not. It wasn’t my choice. It was coach Harbaugh’s and the school’s to let me back in and if I was going to be on scholarship. I just stuck to what I knew and grinded all the time.”

During his suspension, Evans began working out at Huron’s field to stay in shape. There, he crossed paths with Antaiwn Mack, the school’s first-year head football

coach. They swapped cell phone numbers, and when they reconnected a few months later, Mack agreed to bring Evans on board as his special teams coordinator.

“He felt he could contribute at a high level because he learned a lot of special teams at Michigan,” Mack told The Daily. “One of the things that stood out to me was, no matter what type of player you were, Chris Evans always wanted to coach guys up.

Guys that were average players, not so good, he always worked on developing

At Huron, Evans led daily special teams practices, prepared game plans and assembled scouting reports.

Most importantly, though, the school became a place where Evans could both mentor and be mentored. His arrival paid immediate dividends, and in his first game coaching special teams, Huron snapped its five-year, 39-game losing streak with a 63-14 victory.

Throughout Huron’s season, Evans and Mack formed a close relationship. And as Mack began to open up about

He was able to do whatever I needed him to do.

He was always willing to learn, always worked hard, always coached the kids with high energy.

kids and developing relationships with the kids.

“He was able to do whatever I needed him to do. He was always willing to learn, always worked hard, always coached the kids with high energy.”

During the fall — more than six months after the beginning of his suspension — Evans worked as a carpenter from daybreak until noon before coaching at Huron in the afternoon. Afterward, he spent about four hours at Ahmo’s delivering and washing dishes.

his own past, Evans did the same.

“I would talk to him about things and share hardships that happened in my life,” Mack said. “And he would share some of the things about being without football, how it made him feel and what he needed to work on to get back. We shared things, and as I shared more of my story, it was encouraging for him as well.”

One Saturday, as the Michigan football team took the field, Mack brought up the elephant in the room, asking

how the suspended Evans felt about missing what would’ve been his senior season.

“I’m sad, but I’m rooting for my guys,” Mack recalled Evans telling him. “I’m rooting for the guys starting at my position. I want to see them do well. I want to see them develop. And if I get a chance to come back, I just want to compete at a high level and be prepared for those guys to get better.”

Added Mack: “(Evans) was always positive about his situation, even when he wasn’t playing. That showed me his true character.” *** In November, nine months after Evans’s original suspension and removal from the team, Harbaugh announced he would be reinstated for the 2020 season.

For Evans, the formal announcement marked the culmination of a year of uncertainty. Even more than that, it was a validation of his hard work. Now back on scholarship, everything about the hundreds of hours he spent working odd jobs to stay afloat are in the past.

That is, everything but the lasting relationships and perspective they gave him.

While away from the Wolverines, Evans’ jobs opened his eyes to realities he’d never considered. Perhaps most of all, it shined light on the value of his eventual reinstatement.

“I felt like there were some older high school coaches on the (Huron) staff that wished they could play football again, trying to hype kids up, get them going,” Evans said.

“They knew that they couldn’t play again.

I watched that, and I was like, ‘I get the luxury and might be able to play again.

“So I’m going to make sure that when I get my opportu-

nity, I’m going to make the most of it.’ ” For Michigan, Evans’s reinstatement will add another dimension to an offense that already returns its two leading rushers from last season. Evans will be greeted by an offensive scheme drastically different from the one he left, but he projects as a great fit for second-year offensive coordinator Josh Gattis’s up-tempo system. Addressing the media earlier this spring, Michigan running backs coach Jay Harbaugh mentioned Evans has shown interest in the details of the game, adding that his passion and personality have driven him to ask extra questions.

In Schembechler Hall, Evans’ teammates have welcomed him back with open arms.

“We all know he’s a great guy,” senior safety Brad Hawkins said on a Zoom call with reporters Friday. “We all know he’s a great football player. The mental toughness that he has, being away from the team for a year, getting his mind right, doing the things that he had to do and coming back this year, being a leader and stepping up, that says a lot about him as a person and the character that he has. He’s a great guy and definitely somebody that I look up to.”

With a productive senior season, Evans could play his way up NFL draft boards. He currently ranks No. 50 on ESPN analyst Todd McShay’s list of top 2021 NFL Draft prospects, which translates to a second-round selection.

Regardless of his NFL Draft status, the next time Evans puts on a winged helmet will be a reflection of his own journey. For that, and whatever comes next, he’ll have his battle-tested work ethic and people like Issa and Mack in his corner.

20 — Wednesday, September 16, 2020

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com