According to unofficial results, Chowdhury and Atkinson are set to become the 2024 president and vice president , and SHUT
DOWN candidates won 22 of 45 Assembly seats.
3 other CSG parties, 1 CSG candidate and 1 student brought forth the lawsuit to the Central Student Judiciary, alleging SHUT IT DOWN violated CSG election code.
More than 600 University of Michigan students and Ann Arbor community members rallied on the Diag Thursday afternoon, calling on the University to divest from companies profiting from the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. The protest — the largest pro-Palestine protest this past year — included a march down East University Avenue, through the Ross School of Business and through the Michigan Union before returning to the Diag.
During the rally, student representatives from each of the U-M student organizations that make up the TAHRIR Coalition, a coalition of more than 90 pro-Palestine U-M organizations, took the stage to demand divestment. Shortly after, the TAHRIR Coalition announced the voting results for the Divest! Don’t Arrest People’s Referendum. The referendum, which was organized by Students Allied for Freedom and Equality, outlines three action items: for the University to immediately divest from companies that profit from the Israeli military campaign, provide full disclosure of all University investments every fiscal quarter and drop all charges against student protesters.
people like (Cesar) Chavez and Dr. (Martin Luther) King is incredibly hypocritical. They’re gonna look back in 50 years and be embarrassed because they were on the wrong side of history. We won’t let them forget that.” On the benches behind the Diag, a small group of students held Israeli flags high in protest. One of these students was LSA junior Josh Brown, who said he hoped his actions would call attention to the platform of the SHUT IT DOWN party running in the Central Student Government election.
“I think people should listen to what they’re saying and understand that their message is very clear,” Brown said. “They want to shut down the student government and prevent any funding for any of the services that
In an interview with The Daily, Rackham student Garima Singh said she found the draft policy to be hypocritical, given how the University praises past protests that created positive change.
“When universities say that they’re proud of the history of
According to voting results obtained by The Michigan Daily, there were 3,251 valid votes cast. Of these valid votes, 3,204 people voted yes, 39 voted no and 8 chose to abstain. The emergency rally was announced after the University sent an email to the campus community Wednesday night asking for feedback on a draft policy that would prohibit U-M community members from engaging in any activities that disrupt University operations. The rally comes after University President Santa Ono sent an email Tuesday evening to the campus community denouncing the interruption at the University’s 101st Honors Convocation.
protests, they don’t understand it,” Singh said. “If you go back in time, the protests were disruptive, every single protest on the campus has been disruptive. (The) University cannot take credit for protests that happened in the past, at the same time trying to finish any sort of possibility of protest on campus right now.”
In an interview with The Daily during the rally, SAFE Education Director Zaynab
Elkolaly said the University often celebrates change makers in history but does not acknowledge marginalized communities on campus.
“The University loves to highlight change makers and civil rights activists historically when they’re distant enough to distance themselves from their role in the oppression and shut it down,” Elkolaly said. “So to have an event highlighting
The regents discussed their continued decision to not divest from companies with financial ties to Israel, the new University of Michigan Center for Innovation and moreMATTHEW SHANBOM & MARISSA CORSI Daily Staff Reporters
The University of Michigan Board of Regents met Thursday morning in the Alexander G. Ruthven building to discuss their continued decision to not divest from companies with financial ties to Israel, resolutions honoring departing executive officers and schematics for the new University of Michigan Center for Innovation.
In response to continued student protests, University Regent Sarah Hubbard (R) reaffirmed that the Finance, Audit and Investment Committee has decided not to divest from companies profiting off Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. In her remarks announcing the decision, Hubbard said the main focus of the endowment is on profitability.
“We do not make this decision lightly,” Hubbard said. “Together we must work to address the most complex challenges of our time. We do this through active engagement with one another and with researchers in countries around the world. After deliberation, we have decided to stand by our long standing policy. We will continue to shield the endowment from political pressures and base our investment decisions on financial factors such as risk and return. We are not moving to make any divestment of any kind from the University endowment.”
In comments following the announcement, University Regent Michael Behm (D) responded to statements from the U-M community regarding Israelrelated investments. One of the statements Behm responded to included the figure that $6 billion of the endowment is invested in what a Jewish Voice for Peace Instagram
post calls “the Israeli regime.” Behm said the $6 billion figure refers to investments in companies that do business with Israel, not Israeli companies themselves.
“We have no direct investment in any Israeli companies,” Behm said. “What we do have are funds (that Israeli companies) may be a part of. … I asked the endowment managers and in reality, less than one-tenth of 1% is in such companies.”
University Regent Denise Illitch (D) then spoke in support of the creation of a varsity women’s hockey team at the University. The prospect is currently undergoing a feasibility study. University President Santa Ono and members of the board, such as Regent Jordan Acker (D), said they supported the study during Thursday’s meeting.
“The time has come and this is part of our service to the people to have a women’s hockey team and not force our elite female hockey players to go elsewhere,” Acker said.
The Board of Regents also passed two resolutions honoring two departing executive officers. The first is Sally Churchill, vice president and secretary, who is retiring after serving as vice president and secretary since May 2005. The other resolution honors Dr. Rebecca Cunningham, vice president for research and innovation, who has recently accepted a position as university president at the University of Minnesota. The resolutions were followed by remarks from the board thanking them for their time at the University. In her remarks about Churchill, Illitch thanked Churchill for her dedication to the University and her management of the eight U-M Regents. “You have been able to manage eight very independent thinkers and strong-minded leaders as well as the president and officer team,” Illitch said. “It’s a lot of balance, and you’ve done just an exemplary job.”
The design for the UMCI was also approved by the board. The UMCI, which will house graduate programs, offices and shared spaces for community engagement and public projects, broke ground in December and is estimated to be completed in 2027. University Provost Laurie McCauley said the UMCI will expand on academic and career opportunities in Detroit.
“The UMCI will bring together the best of the University of Michigan to catalyze economic development in the city of Detroit,” McCauley said. “It will house a robust portfolio of academic programs, including new interdisciplinary graduate degrees and certificate programs aligned to the skills of the future and needed to attract startups and major employers to the region.”
Meera Herle, Central Student Government president, presented the final report of her term and
highlighted her administration’s past accomplishments. Herle expressed disappointment with University’s policies around the Israel-Hamas war, including a draft policy that would prohibit any disruptions of University operations like the TAHRIR Coalition’s protest during the University’s 101st Honors Convocation.
“Recently, it feels as though the board has been making decisions on behalf of our campus from an emotionally charged place,” Herle said. “By being reactive decision makers, you are encouraging students to reciprocate this behavior, and you are escalating tensions. While as members of the board, you represent constituents external to this university, you also have an obligation to make sure that you are taking care of our campus community.”
The University sent a survey seeking feedback on the draft policy following a protest at the 101st Honors Convocation
requests to leave U-M facilities.
The University of Michigan sent an email to the U-M campus community Wednesday evening seeking feedback on a draft policy on disruptions to University operations. The email follows an interruption at the 101st annual Honors Convocation Sunday afternoon when about 100 student protesters staged a demonstration condemning the University’s investment in companies profiting from Israel’s
military campaign in Gaza.
In an email to the campus community Tuesday, University President Santa Ono wrote that the demonstration at the convocation was a violation of student code.
“We all must understand that, while protest is valued and protected, disruptions are not,” Ono wrote. “One group’s right to protest does not supersede the right of others to participate in a joyous event. The protesters’ intrusion on one of the university’s most important academic traditions was unacceptable. It was not in keeping with our student code and our
longstanding policy on freedom of speech and artistic expression.”
The draft policy would apply to students, staff, faculty and campus visitors, and would prohibit these groups from interfering with regular University operations, such as classes, performances, proceedings and exams. It would also prevent individuals without appropriate legal authority from interfering with movement around campus, including blocking pedestrians, bicycle lanes and vehicle traffic. Those found violating the guidelines — or aiding others in doing so — would be required to comply with lawful
According to the draft, this policy is intended to protect others’ right to free speech from being infringed upon by outside interruptions, in keeping with the University’s stated values.
“The University of MichiganAnn Arbor (the University) respects, encourages, and defends free speech and free expressive activity as bedrock principles of our academic community,” the draft reads. “Those principles extend to engagement in the University community, including academic and social activities, gatherings, and celebrations. …
No one has the right to infringe on the exercise of others’ speech and activities by disrupting the normal celebrations, activities, and operations of the University.”
According to the draft, students accused of a violation would receive written notice and may opt to discuss allegations with a University official. If necessary, formal hearings would be held, with disciplinary action ranging from a formal reprimand to expulsion. Any faculty, staff or other accused violators on U-M campus are subject to University policies on misconduct outlined in U-M Standard Practice Guide policies
201.96 and 201.12, respectively. The survey will remain open until 11:59 p.m. on April 3.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan released a statement Thursday evening on X regarding the proposed policy, writing that the language within the policy concerns the organization.
“We are concerned that the University of Michigan’s proposed ‘Disruptive Activity Policy’ is unnecessary, vague, and overbroad,” ACLU said. “We will be providing our input to the University by April 3, which we will also make public.”
New England Scholars Speak, an educational public service initiative composed of more than 1,000 academics from the New England region, sent a letter addressed to President Biden on Feb. 14 titled “US Scholars to President Biden: You Must Act Now to Prevent Genocide in Gaza.” The letter demands an immediate cease-fire, restoration of humanitarian aid and a “just and peaceful” resolution for both Palestinians and Israelis amid the ongoing violence in Gaza.
The open letter currently has more than 4,100 signatories — more than 50 of whom are from the University of Michigan — and is signed by faculty, instructors, fellows, research associates and doctoral alumni of U.S. colleges and universities. The letter expresses disapproval of the Biden administration’s policy in Gaza its support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The letter also says it is the obligation of scholars to speak out in the face of injustice.
“Mr. President, with all due respect, there is simply no explanation that PM Netanyahu — or you — could offer to justify this ongoing massacre and weaponization of humanitarian aid against the people of Gaza,” the letter reads. “You must heed these warnings, which have emanated even from within your own administration. As scholars and educators, we object in the strongest possible terms to the collective punishment of Palestinians, including the use of starvation as a war tactic and the recent suspension of US support for (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency), a lifeline for Gaza’s 2.2 million people.”
The letter to Biden was adapted from an earlier letter sent by NESS to U.S. senators of New England on Dec. 5, 2023. This letter called for a permanent cease-fire; the deployment of United Nations peacekeepers in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem; and the establishment of a commission to investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity during the ongoing Israeli military campaign.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Malak Rafla,
assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and NESS Working Group member who helped write and review the letter, spoke about the initiative and how scholars worked together to address their concerns about the violence in Gaza.
“We, collectively, in our own individual professional circles, began to realize a pattern, or a similarity, of a silencing or censoring in our academic roles when we try to address some of the concerns (about the war),” Rafla said. “We decided to get together, think together, brainstorm together, about how we could collectively respond to this situation.”
Rafla said one critical principle of NESS is promoting academic freedom and free speech when discussing the violence in Gaza.
“One of the initiatives that we’re trying to do is to defend academic freedom and not allow it to be undermined or threatened in particular ways,” Rafla said. “This is my very firm and strong belief.
Justice and equality for Palestinians means justice and equality for Jews, for Blacks, for Indigenous populations, for all walks of life.
That in and of itself, comes to the core power of this movement.” Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, U-M American culture associate professor and signatory of the February letter to Biden, said Israel’s destruction of all of Gaza’s universities contributed to her decision to sign the letter expressing disapproval of U.S. military aid to Israel.
“I remember (University President Santa) Ono’s first letter that didn’t even say the word Palestinian but mentioned Israeli universities, and one of the things that the letter I signed talks about is how so many, if not all, the universities in Gaza have been completely destroyed,” Abdul Khabeer said. “Prominent academics — my colleagues, basically — have been killed by the Israeli government and paid with the support of the U.S. government with U.S. military aid. That’s an affront to so many things that I value.”
Abdul Khabeer said she believes faculty members should be able to freely express their opposition to the violence in Palestine and the
About 600 University of Michigan community members gathered in the Rackham Auditorium Tuesday evening to hear from Deb Haaland, secretary of the interior, about the climate crisis and President Joe Biden’s efforts toward sustainability.
Haaland, a 35th-generation New Mexican and member of the Pueblo of Laguna, served as a U.S. representative from New Mexico from 2019 to 2021 before being appointed secretary of the interior by Biden in 2021, making her the country’s first Native American Cabinet secretary.
Rackham and Law School student
Jasmine Neosh, member of the Bear Clan of The Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin, introduced Haaland, highlighting her career in local and national politics.
“Through this work, and with immense grace and kindness, Secretary Haaland has opened up a realm of possibilities, once unthinkable, for every generation that will come after her,” Neosh said.
Haaland opened her remarks by emphasizing the urgency of taking action against climate change. She
highlighted Biden’s Investing in America agenda as a crucial step towards protecting the future of the environment.
“The climate crisis is real, it is happening now and it’s uprooting lives across our planet,” Haaland said. “It’s the shared reality that keeps me up at night. But it’s the passionate students and community members in this room and the historic progress made possible by President Biden’s Investing in America agenda that inspires me to keep going.”
Haaland said it is important to prioritize marginalized communities and Indigenous knowledge in the decision-making process at the federal level.
“We must place environmental justice front and center,” Haaland said. “That means meeting people where they are, ensuring that historically marginalized communities are given a seat at the table and how programs are implemented and where our resources are spent.”
Haaland highlighted the Biden administration’s environmental accomplishments, such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law which helped fight droughts and wildfires, address legacy pollution and restore ecosystems.
“Legacy pollution was unfortunately hurting poor people and people of Color,” Haaland said.
“Our response to the injustices is
$16 billion from the president’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law going directly toward addressing legacy pollution.”
Haaland also spoke about the Department of the Interior’s commitment to updating management policies to adapt to changing climate decisions.
“The way our organizations function can also be part of climate solutions, both at the Department of the Interior and right here in Michigan,” Haaland said. “Adaptation and resilience must continue to be core pillars of our collective climate response.”
The event then moved into a Q&A session moderated by Kyle Whyte, U.S. Science Envoy and environment and sustainability professor at the University. The questions came from preselected students involved with environmental activism on campus. LSA senior Mahalina Dimacali asked about the Biden administration’s plans regarding the Line 5 pipeline, which has been operating in Michigan since 1953. In 2023, the Michigan Public Service Commission approved a permit for Enbridge, the energy company that owns Line 5, to go forward with a project to repair segments of the pipeline. The decision sparked outrage and was appealed by four Michigan tribal nations.
“Here in Michigan, all of us, but particularly Indigenous people, are
being threatened today and in the future by a pipeline whose permit has expired,” Dimacali
The grant aims to support students coming from medically underserved communities
The University of Michigan received a grant in October from the Health Resources and Services Administration to support the new Michigan Maternity Care Traineeship Program. The grant provides nearly $1 million annually to the program, which aims to support students coming from medically underserved communities with mentorship and financial assistance.
HRSA’s grants are available to all organizations that work to expand the health workforce, increase access to affordable and quality health care and provide HIV medical care, medications and support services. All midwifery programs in the nation are eligible to earn a grant. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Lisa Kane Low, U-M associate dean for professional graduate studies, said programs must propose how they would utilize the money to address disparities in the midwifery profession and diversify the field in order to receive a grant.
“When this grant opportunity
came up it was an opportunity to bring together community partners, a strong midwifery education program and try to think about new ways to recruit and support students to be successful, to meet the needs in communities that have been previously underserved,” Kane Low said.
Kane Low also explained how the MiMat Care program went through the proposal process.
“The criteria was announced in June, the grant was due in July,” Kane Low said. “We had to put forward a proposal that explained how we were going to run the program, the strengths of our approach and what we would be doing to meet the goals of the grant. Then it was competitively scored and I think that there were then nine or 11 programs that were awarded funding as a result.”
MiMat Care’s grant will be used to provide full tuition support to 13 selected students and fund additional mentorship opportunities through partnerships and workshops with other organizations starting winter 2024. During the selection period, the review panel prioritized students
from medically underserved communities, or those who are looking to serve them in the future.
“The 13 were selected by a holistic application process,” Low said. “We looked at financial need, we looked at experience in medically underserved communities and a commitment to return to working with those types of communities. We also then consider their prior experience, their status in the program, where they’re at in the program, and how they represented their goals and interest in this type of project.”
In an interview with The Daily, Clinical Associate Prof. Lee Roosevelt said that these selection criteria for students to receive the scholarship would diversify the midwifery profession.
“In the midwifery program, we’ve been working for a decade to think about how to diversify the midwifery workforce so that we mirror the patients that we take care of,” Roosevelt said. “This grant allowed us to think about our values, and how we live those values, both as a school, a University, a profession and be able to offer financial support for patients that would not have
access to midwifery education otherwise.”
In an interview with The Daily, Nursing student Ashleigh Anderson, who is in the U-M graduate Nurse-midwifery program and will receive a scholarship from the grant, said she believes the scholarship is necessary for students like herself.
“In numerous ways, I just feel like it was a godsend,” Anderson said. “It’s no surprise that grad school is expensive, but for me, that transition of having a fulltime job as a nurse to not really being able to work full time at all for the next few years is a very big financial hit. To be able to know that as long as I do my part academically, that the rest is covered, is huge.”
The MiMat program also created partnerships with Birth Detroit, a birth center in Detroit focused on providing culturally relevant care for communities of Color, and Metro Detroit Midwives of Color, an organization that works to create a network for minority midwives serving in metro Detroit.
Jessica Fladger is a U-M alum, a School of Nursing adjunct clinical instructor and has worked as a nurse midwife at Birth Detroit
since its founding. Fladger said she believes the partnership will be incredibly beneficial to students, as it will allow them to go to Birth of Detroit for their clinical rotations.
“Both Birth Detroit and the MiMat grant have very similar values and missions to increase accessibility of high-quality midwifery and culturally competent midwifery care,” Fladger said. “So the partnership will be a big alignment, as now the students will be able to come to Birth Detroit for some of their clinical rotations, which is where they learn how to be midwives and also have workshop opportunities with Birth Detroit.”
In an interview with The Daily, Nursing student Faith LucasScott, another student who will receive a scholarship through the grant, said she believes the program will allow her to connect with those in her community.
“Being from Detroit, my entire goal with becoming a midwife was to be able to serve people that look like me and to serve in underrepresented communities,” Lucas-Scott said. “It allows me to give patients that safety, that advocacy and that feeling of being heard. And
so with this scholarship, it gives me the opportunity to connect and network with those within that area of midwifery within the city within underrepresented communities.”
Fladger said the program builds a bridge between patients and providers where there was previously a gap.
“It’s very important to have culturally consistent and culturally congruent care,” Fladger said. “This is going to be another piece to making sure that the providers and patients … speak the same language, come from the same culture. I think that’s going to make a really big difference with health outcomes.”
Anderson said her selection for the scholarship made her feel more supported by the University. “When it comes to minoritybased scholarships, for me, I’m 28 and have been in post-secondary education since 2014, and this is the first scholarship of its kind for me,” Anderson said. “It really just makes me feel seen, and I know that I’m not alone when I say that. I think that everyone that was chosen for it really does feel like we’re being supported by our professors and by the institution in a way that’s very revolutionary.”
More than 2,300 U-M health workers unionize
The health care professionals joined Service Employees International Union Healthcare
More than 2,300 health care workers from University of Michigan Health joined Service Employees International Union Healthcare, a labor union representing about 2 million workers in both the United States and Canada, Wednesday morning. The Michigan branch represents nearly 30,000 health care workers.
According to a statement released by SEIU on Wednesday, the newly organized workers include “patient care techs, phlebotomists and phlebotomist specialists, unit clerks, unit hosts, patient service assistants, patient services intermediate, and patient services associates, and patient services senior.” They joined a group of 283 Michigan Medicine respiratory therapists and techs, who unionized with the SEIU in July 2023.
Willie Griggs, patient service
associate at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital and Von Voigtlander Women’s Hospital, wrote in Wednesday’s statement that joining the SEIU would help the group better communicate with the U-M Health system.
“I grew up in a union family in the auto industry and I saw the benefits and protections it provided them,” Griggs wrote. “A union at the University of Michigan gives us a voice to express our concerns and be heard in the workplace.”
In the same statement, Em
Mayhew, who has worked as an inpatient unit clerk at the U-M Hospital for six years, said unionization was important in part because of the negative effects of changes made during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“During the pandemic, the University took away retirement benefits,” Mayhew said. “Nonunionized workers did not receive a raise while our union colleagues did. They also cut costs on smaller things that affect patients like limiting the salt and pepper packets on food trays. A
union would be our voice to fight for better pay, and benefits, and preserve the quality care our patients deserve.”
Currently, Michigan Medicine respiratory therapists and technicians at the Children’s and Women’s Hospital are bargaining for their first contract, according to SEIU.
Mary Masson, senior director of public relations for Michigan Medicine, wrote in a statement to The Michigan Daily that Michigan Medicine is currently meeting with the unionized
workers and will continue to prioritize their patients.
“We look forward to continuing to discuss issues facing our team members in the new bargaining unit, who play such an important role in our patient care teams,” Masson wrote. “As with all of our employee groups, we hope to work toward our shared goal: providing the best care possible for the patients of University of Michigan Health. We are currently meeting with these workers on a regular basis.”
The Secretary of Health and Human Services visited Michigan Medicine’s Turner Senior Resource Center with U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell last week
for Medicare Part D participants, effective 2025. The legislation includes provisions to financially penalize pharmaceutical companies that raise drug prices above the rate of inflation within Medicare.
Becerra opened by emphasizing the law’s impact on medication costs, especially for low-income patients and senior citizens.
“We are now watching prices of medications go down,” Becerra said. “This new law is going to make it possible to afford medication far more, so you don’t have to split your pill in half so it can last longer or miss tomorrow’s medication because you got to make it to the end of the month.”
At the beginning of the event, Dingell said she believes the Inflation Reduction Act, which aims to reduce the federal deficit and lower prescription drug costs, is helping seniors access necessary prescription drugs without imposing a heavy financial burden.
“For years we’ve heard about the high costs of drugs facing Americans,” Dingell said. “Too many seniors cannot afford the drugs they rely on, like treating heart disease, cancer and diabetes. And that’s why I was proud to support the passage and the enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act, which takes action to rein in rising drug prices.”
The IRA authorized Medicare to negotiate the cost of certain high-priced prescription drugs. It also sets a $2,000 annual cap on out-of-pocket drug expenses
The event then moved into a roundtable discussion with Becerra and Dingell. The questions came from invited community members involved with the senior center, Michigan Medicine and local organizations in Washtenaw County. Barbara Niess-May, president and chief executive officer of Ypsilanti Meals on Wheels, expressed concerns about the House Republicans’ debt limit bill, which cut funds for senior welfare programs like Meals on Wheels. “For 25% of the seniors in our county, hardship is reported toward affording prescriptions and also just maintaining basic needs,” Niess-May said. “There were some recent congressional cuts to Meals on Wheels, so there is a direct relationship for the folks getting the proper nutrition so they can take the medication and achieve health equity because they are experiencing daily stressors, which also impacts their health and wellbeing.”
Amid tightened budgets and reduced federal funding, Becerra said the Department of Health
and Human Services was one of the most affected federal departments, impacting groups dependent on federal programs like seniors.
“The federal department that took the heaviest cuts in these rounds of cuts that occurred in Congress is the Department of Health and Human Services,” Becerra said. “We lost more money than the Department of Defense. There are programs that a lot of seniors have not taken advantage of where they get subsidies for their medications. There are, I think, 1 million seniors who don’t
know they qualify for discounted pricing for their medications.”
Dana Habers, chief operating officer of Michigan Medicine Department of Pharmacy, said she believes communication and information access surrounding health care programs are extremely important.
“We talk about medication access all the time, and I think we should work across the health care continuum from that lens to try to encourage awareness and programs that are available,” Habers said. “I think it’s an unfortunate reality that we have
a lot of gaps, and there are many patients who aren’t executing medication adherence, and there are consequences to that.”
In response to Haber’s comments, Becerra said the Department of Health and Human Services lacks the financial resources to communicate such programs, especially when Congress does not approve those funds. “Unlike a drug company that advertises all the time on television … we don’t have resources to do that type of communication,”
“You have to imagine it with two people, it’s swell with two people.” The Johnlock Conspiracy. It’s a simple phrase that strikes a frightening jolt of recognition into the hearts of mid-2010s fandom bloggers or anyone who watched that Sarah Z video. TJLC, as it is commonly abbreviated, was the popular fan theory claiming that the romantic endgame for BBC’s “Sherlock” was a relationship between Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch, “The Imitation Game”) and John H. Watson (Martin Freeman, “Fargo”).
I am using “was” in a loose sense: As of today, the TJLC Tumblr blog is still running despite the conclusion of “Sherlock” roughly seven years ago. TJLC Explained, a YouTube channel dedicated to “documenting the TJLC fan reading of BBC “Sherlock,” also uploaded a video earlier this month and is in the process of publishing a “Sherlock” retrospective, 10 years after the term TJLC was coined in early January 2014. Though not thriving as it once was, the community around not just
Superwholock — the combined fanbase for “Sherlock,” “Doctor Who” and “Supernatural” — but also TJLC specifically still exists; with this is the nagging hope that there is a secret fourth season four episode that will make the show both not garbage and also canonize the queerbaited-to-super-hell-andback ship at the center of the show. For context, super hell is the warm special place reserved for the writers who canonized the other long-running queerbait-y ship reigning across Tumblr feeds: “Supernatural’s” Destiel, albeit in monkey’s paw fashion. Destiel is the shipping name of the angel Castiel (Misha Collins, “Gotham Knights”) and human lead Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles, “The Boys”), a gay romance teased for years in the show but never directly addressed. Immediately after Castiel confesses his feelings for human lead Dean, cementing the long prophesied ship in “Supernatural” canon, the writers chose to send our fallen angel to a turbo-mega-evil hell called the Empty as the conclusion to their 11 season-long arc. Complicated! Though Destielgate was not a conspiracy in that the episode did very much air, combined with the other nonsense of Nov. 5, 2020
(namely rumors of Blue Georgia, Putin’s abdication, “Sherlock” season five, and MHA leaks), the day started to feel less like early November and more like April first.
The resolution of Tumblr’s very own decade-long underdog homoerotic pairing activated nearly every Tumblr sleeper agent, driving them to dust off their accounts and care about “Supernatural” for the first time in years, making posts at an inconceivable rate. It was a marvel to behold, the mass of users simultaneously posting about a single subject reminiscent of finales for big shows dropping back at the height of the platform’s use, but now it was all hyperconcentrated on the shitshow of an ending to the most beloved, most scrutinized and most hotly debated ship the website ever had. In what I can only assume to be a natural reaction to fill the power vacuum left by a just-fulfilled pipe dream, online interactions on Tumblr exploded into misinformed yet mirthfully shared memes about the cause-and-effect between Castiel’s “I love you” and whatever circulating rumor was hastily appended to it.
Contrary to my examples so far, not every fan theory centers
on romance. The most obvious example? The Five Nights at Freddy’s community. Given the gross reception of the game and the recent movie adaptation, it’s easy to assume it has a significantly large fanbase. What is less easily inferred is the degree to which fan theorizing makes up the bulk of the discussion. Most people’s fascination with the subject was primarily motivated by the now 75 videos on The Game Theorists’ YouTube channel, the “final” of which just dropped this week after starting almost a decade ago. I use quotations on “final” as this is the sixth in a line of videos presented as being the ultimate definite answer (the first one released five years ago now). But since the lead writer and host of the channel, MatPat, has just announced his departure, it might just be the final nail in the coffin. However, his videos have been the gateway to a slew of fervent fandom back-andforth on the canon explanations for the convoluted plot the creator has crafted, the debate often revolving around whether MatPat’s latest leap of logic (as he is wont to make) is the straw that breaks the camel animatronic’s back.
Isn’t it neat how conspiracies are — despite their lack of evidence and shaky morals — the most exciting things ever? You’re telling me the mafia killed John F. Kennedy? Fuck yeah. The moon landing was fake? Oh yes. Princess Diana is still alive in Moscow? I love it!
Conspiracies are hundreds of things all at once. They’re silly, they’re harmful, they’re addictive, they’re viral, they’re stigmatized, they’re good, they’re evil, they’re ill-fated coping methods, they’re attempts at uncovering the truth. They are Schrödinger’s boxes of culture — depending on the angle you look at them, they shift and change shape.
Just as they change, the people they inhabit change with them, with their theories possessing them like ghosts from the afterlife, commanding them to entrench themselves so deeply in their beliefs that they can’t live without them. At a certain point, the truth doesn’t matter.
Just faith.
And in understanding someone’s theories, faiths and beliefs, you can understand anything about them. And that’s what this B-Side is for: to dissect the hundreds of angles of blind belief to understand a line of thinking. To put the disparate pieces of cultural piety in perspective, aligned on our corkboard of devotion. If we look at it in just the right way, we might be able to find the key to all this… maybe.
Like any kid with a cable box and too much time on their hands, I watched a lot of TV and movie reruns growing up. My personal favorite was Brendan Fraser’s (“The Whale”) 1999 classic “The Mummy.” It wasn’t just the explosive action sequences or the larger-than-life visuals that built my love for the film; it was the nuance of the characters. As a voracious reader with a specific fascination for Egyptology, I saw myself in Evie (Rachel Weisz, “The Favourite”), the leading-lady British librarian with a knack for historical research. She was practical, cautious and judgmental beyond belief but did all those things while still pursuing a sense of adventure and romance, showing me who I could grow up to be.
That made it particularly painful, then, to rewatch “The Mummy” as an adult and come to terms with who the film thought I could be. While Evie stood out as an admirable representation of complex womanhood, the film’s representation of Arabs and the Middle East and North Africa are nothing short of disappointingly one-note. “The Mummy,” made for a white Western audience, relied heavily on orientalist caricatures of MENA culture as “mystical and dangerous,” choosing to sacrifice their characters to prop up its white leads. Despite taking place entirely in Egypt, the only named Egyptian characters are Beni (Kevin J. O’Connor, “Deep Rising”), the spineless, greedy traitor who becomes the evil mummy’s lackey, and Gad Hassan (Omid Djalili, “The Infidel”), the equally greedy, perverted prison warden. Both characters serve as nuisances to the central characters and, in what little screen time they have, spend every second nefariously scheming until meeting a gruesome end. This is how the film treats its few Arab characters who have the privilege of a name. The vast majority of MENA characters are silently relegated to the background — props used to flesh out the caricature of a backward fantasy world for the leads to traverse. The women are either scandalous belly dancers who make Evie look like a chaste heroine or they’re dressed in modest religious clothing that contrasts Evie’s sheer version of the same styles, thus making her seem like the perfectly liberated ideal of “exotic” womanhood. Either way, Arab women are admonished by
the film so it can then exalt a white female lead. The same can be said of the Arab men when compared to Rick O’Connell’s all-American charm. He seems even shinier and braver when examined alongside Beni and Gad’s griminess, inside and out.
MENA people in this context are not treated as complex human beings, instead serving as storytelling devices that stand in the way or remain in the background of a white lead’s self-actualization. More often than not, they are villains. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen TV shows and movies sink to the classically racist “Arab terrorist” villain storyline. “Ghosts of Beirut,” “American Sniper,” “Liaison” and many others use MENA people as de-facto scapegoats. Visual media have always been the most effective vehicle of modern ideology, so for this to be the most pervasive form of Arab depiction in Western media propagates the harmful painting of MENA individuals as violent and heartless. “Homeland” built an entire brand around this stereotype for multiple awardwinning seasons, undeterred by a protest within their own show. When a group of artists hired by the “Homeland” team spray painted “Homeland is racist” in Arabic on set for a scene, the words of protest made it through final cuts because there wasn’t a single Arabic speaker on set or in production. It didn’t matter to the show what the Arabic script said, just that it could be in the background to “complete the horror-fantasy of the Middle East.” Co-creator Alex Gansa even said that he “admired” the act of protest, but clearly not enough to change the way he steered depictions of MENA people in their storylines. This is how Hollywood chooses to see MENA people when it chooses to see them at all. Arabs are mostly missing from Hollywood projects. Often, our stories and culture are stripped away and repackaged in exchange for watered-down non-MENA portrayals. “Dune” is a recent highprofile case of this type of glaring commodification of Arab culture. Despite the book being an obvious allegory for Western imperialism and environmentalism in the Middle East — even drawing up heavy inspiration for the fictional Fremen of Arrakis from Middle Eastern culture — there is not a single MENA person on the cast, let alone portraying one of the Fremen.
Here’s a funny story. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the Titanic. I devoured novel after novel, documentary after documentary — but I never actually watched the “Titanic” movie out of an inclination to avoid actually seeing the tragedy. One of the first long-form pieces of writing I ever produced was about the Titanic, one evidently so compelling my mom had the pages of my scrawled chickenscratch laminated. But somewhere in that timeframe, during my obsession with that tragedy, I saw a kid’s bounce castle themed after the Titanic online, one like this Reddit post. It wasn’t just the ship, but a bouncy slide of the Titanic turned on its axis in the image of it sinking. For a kid constantly reliving the tragedy of the Titanic through the art it had inspired, the inflatable felt like a monument to generational apathy.
I remember to this day a comment made on the post, furthering my perception of the internet’s abhorrent insensitivity: “So when do we get one of the Twin Towers?”
Some say comedy is tragedy plus time, and enough time has passed, it seems, for some people to consider 9/11 jokes acceptable. One epitomizing example of this is a compilation of the late, great Norm MacDonald (“The Orville”) invoking the incident every chance he got: “9/11 was a National Tragedy.” It features a catastrophically incongruous image in the thumbnail: MacDonald’s laughing silhouette with a superimposed image of the smoking Twin Towers and the second plane inbound. MacDonald evokes the video’s title phrase to plant tension and discomfort in his guests. At the slightest hint of an uncomfortable laugh, he admonishes them for doing so, interrogating them for the source of their potential disrespect. This, of course, is all for MacDonald’s enjoyment, building up tension in his subjects as much as he can, prodding them with anecdotes until he releases
it all in fits of laughter. But how did we get here? I’ve watched the clock pass from Sept. 11, 2001 until now, and somewhere in all that time, a switch flipped to make a national tragedy comedic. Was it just that time had passed? Was there something involved in the politics of its fallout? Was the “comedification” of 9/11 another part of its grand “conspiracy”? I don’t know. Let’s wind back the clock and find out.
Some of the first comedic responders to 9/11 were on the country’s comedy TV circuit, many of which are filmed in New York. A week after, on Sept. 18, 2001, Conan O’Brien (“Weird: The Al Yankovic Story”) delivered a monologue about the attacks in a completely sober tone. Two days later, on the 20th, Jon Stewart (“Death to Smoochy”) on “The Daily Show” gave his bit, receiving laughs admonishing the omnipresence of these tragic television monologues, even suggesting that low-brow TV shows like “Survivor” would give their own speeches on the matter. He then told an anecdote about how excited he and his classmates were to be sitting under their desks and given cottage cheese from their teachers, not knowing it was an act of security because riots had broken out over the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — Stewart delivering this all while visibly on the edge of tears. Eighteen days after the attack, two more jokes came. “Saturday Night Live” returned with a cold open featuring a gathering of first responders and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (“Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”) praising them before the night’s musical performance, a cover of “The Boxer” by Paul Simon. At the end of the cold open, Giuliani is asked, “Can we be funny?” He responds after a cathartic bout of laughter, “Why start now?” With a shout of the show’s title phrase, they would proceed into the week’s skits, which would include an uncomfortable Weekend Update segment, complete with blackface and another guest advocating racially profiling turban-wearing people with the phrase “Shake ‘em down!” The same night, just a few
blocks down from 30 Rockefeller Center at the New York Friar’s Club, Gilbert Gottfried (“Beverly Hills Cop II”) delivered this line at the roast of Hugh Hefner: “I have to catch a flight to California; I can’t get a direct flight, they said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first!” There’s first a wave of laughter, crescendoing before crashing into a foam of offended groans. A heckler cries that one temporal phrase: “Too soon!” And that’s an interesting phrase, isn’t it? “Too soon” implies a condition of eventual appropriateness. It’s perhaps rooted in the time it takes to process the trauma response of tragedy before it can be made light of. There are two ways that this was circumvented, however. The first would be the rise of the 9/11 conspiracies, which would indeed be categorized as some type of trauma response but were nonetheless mocked for their inanity. 9/11 conspiracies would then go on to become a foundation for internet meme culture.
The second would be comedians directly involved in that trauma: Seth MacFarlane (“Ted”) and Pete Davidson (“The King of Staten Island”) are noted as comedians that can make light of 9/11 with relative impunity, considering the former barely missed boarding the American Airlines Flight 11 and the latter’s father, Scott Davidson, died firefighting on Sept. 11, 2001. Twenty-two years after SNL’s 9/11 Cold Open, Pete Davidson delivered a speech in Oct. 15, 2023’s Cold Open.
Following the Oct. 7, 2024 Hamas attacks and the subsequent bombing of Palestine, Davidson defended his ethos for speaking on it: “When I was seven years old, my dad was killed in a terrorist attack. So, I know something about what that’s like.”
He recalls that after the death of his father, one of the first things that had made him smile again was an Eddie Murphy (“Shrek”) tape, concluding, “I don’t understand it. I really don’t, and I never will. But sometimes, comedy is really the only way forward through tragedy.” The world came to a complete halt on 9/11, threatening
to tip off its axis. Why was comedy not in question when a similar attack happened in the Middle East — and continued through all the death that would follow?
Following 9/11, more than 600 hate crimes were committed against U.S. citizens because they were perceived as Arab or Muslim, whether or not they actually were. My own father — a Hindu man who had emigrated from India just years before — was almost one of them, escaping the situation as fast as he could to be with my mother, who was pregnant with me at the time. When I entered high school, I began growing a beard and with it, a tolerance for constant insinuations that I could be a terrorist, a baseless accusation that is hurled at countless brown protestors today. At least three post-9/11 murders were confirmed as hate crimes, with several others suspected. George W. Bush’s (“The Daily Show”) administration would use the national fervor to launch war in Iraq, a country with no relation to Al Qaeda but nonetheless a foothold for America in the Middle East. This would be repeated in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Yemen, in Libya and in every country where America could find an opportunity to wage war. A “conservative estimate” from a
2023 Brown University report places
the total death toll between 4.5 and 4.7 million. When discussing the Ukraine invasion in 2022, Bush would drop a Freudian slip condemning the “wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq … I mean, of Ukraine.”
He shrugs and adds, “Iraq too … anyway.” The audience laughs. A former president of the United States openly voices a confession that would deem him a war criminal by any sensible tribunal, and the audience laughs.
Off the top of your head, could you tell me the date of the Pearl Harbor bombing? What about the Oklahoma City bombing, the second deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil? You could likely tell me the date of the 2021 insurrection, but that also could be in part because so many people disagree over whether or not it was an insurrection. 9/11 is an awfully convenient term — one whose naming is rarely questioned — for a date that will rear its head once a year without fail, a day that can be used to pause and rewind the world back to the tragedy of nearly thousands of killed Americans as our country “avenges” them through killing millions more.
Maybe this is the goal of 9/11 comedy, a political project that negates the
power of the politicization of its tragedy, an effort by the West to eternally justify its imperialism in the Middle East that continues up until this day.
When I
had a visible effect on the public, with more than a third of Americans believing that there’s something strange going on. But that’s all the more reason to be critical. While alien theories provoke our primal fear of the “other” and fuel our wildest imaginations, they also fail to assess their complicated source of evidence: the people who have allegedly experienced UFOs.
It’s easy to paint alien believers
with a broad brush. The stigma against them as paranoid attention seekers allows nonbelievers to supersede nearly everything they have to say. And while the stigma may apply to fringe hardcore fanatics, reality is always a shade of gray. Susan Clancy, a cognitive psychology and associate professor at Harvard University, compiled six years of research on a specific group of believers in her book “Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens.” In it, it’s made shockingly clear that her research subjects — self-described alien abductees — are just regular people. Abductees come from all walks of life. They’re doctors, professors and graduate students. They’re mothers and fathers, young and old, rich and poor. If it weren’t for their devout conviction that aliens had snatched them in the dead of night, did God knows what and erased their memory, they would lead pretty normal lives.
As functional people in society, abductees know their stories don’t sound even half-right. They’ve heard from their family and friends that they’re crazy, and they are fully aware that their beliefs run against the social tide. But they can’t help it. This is because these abductions are genuine psychological experiences with measurable impact. A therapist might ascribe these anomalous experiences to mere sleep-induced hallucinations, which would make sense since these late-night abductions are rarely recalled in detail — typical of sleep paralysis hallucinations. But the contours of the experience are so strange and traumatic that alien abductions seemingly provide the only explanation. So, against reason, an abductee’s alien narrative will hold like a fort. All that logic and science prove to abductees is that they aren’t taken seriously, that the public is out to delegitimize and invalidate their experiences and that they are truly alone. Take Steve, a 47-year-old librarian from Massachusetts. Ever since he was a child, he was atypical. In Clancy’s book, he recalls some scary lights on the road that violently flashed at him from every angle. He was scared, but he kept driving on and on and on. Decades pass and Steve decides to go to a hypnotist. He’s having trouble giving up cigarettes, and he’s hoping that the hypnotist can help him put them down. Well, they didn’t but through hypnosis, some “repressed” memories were unlocked. Steve now knows that he was abducted that night of the lights (nothing will convince him otherwise). Although he can’t access the memories, he has confidence that they are lodged in there. He says, “If I were abducted, it explains a lot. Why I never fit in.” The abduction is not viewed negatively by Steve, and even at their most traumatic, people like Steve are grateful that the abductions happened.
Steve represents a prototype that Clancy repeatedly brings forth: the outsider. Clancy notes that alien abductees tend to view themselves as different, unique and creative, but alienated from society. Even before their encounters, they don’t feel like they belong. In this capacity, abduction beliefs are a coping mechanism, like rationalizing an unfortunate event with “things happen for a reason.” Aliens provide that reason and take the burden off of an individual’s actions and/or society’s sins. The special encounters offer an alternative and compelling explanation for the way things are. Abductees can point to the flashing lights and say, “That’s when I knew I was different; that’s when the
SHUT IT DOWN party hosts kickoff rally for CSG elections, demanding divestment
Alifa Chowdhury is a former Daily staffer. Chowdhury did not contribute in the writing or editing of this article. Rows of Palestinian flags danced in the wind as representatives of the SHUT IT DOWN party in the upcoming Central Student Government elections stood firm on the Diag, holding up a banner reading, “No business as usual during a genocide.” The campaign’s kickoff rally proclaimed the party’s refusal to be complicit in the University’s investment in companies profiting from Israel’s ongoing military campaign and occupation of Palestinians in Gaza.
Candidates from the SHUT IT DOWN party presented their nontraditional platform to students gathered on the Diag on Monday afternoon. In one of the rally’s speeches, LSA junior and presidential candidate Alifa Chowdhury stated SHUT IT DOWN aims to disrupt campus normalcy by halting CSG activity and withholding funding for student organizations until the University commits to divestment.
“This campaign, we are setting a precedent that no genocide will occur in our name, that life cannot continue as normal as genocide occurs,” Chowdhury said. “The administration and many students would rather remain comfortable than stand up for what’s right. This campaign is meant to make people uncomfortable — you are meant to lose something.”
Chowdhury and the rest of the slate are supported by the TAHRIR Coalition comprised of more than 80 organizations on campus, and the SHUT IT DOWN party has received endorsements from more than 10 organizations including the U-M chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, United Asian American Organizations and Students Allied for Freedom and Equality.
More students joined as speeches continued. LSA sophomore Levi Pierpont, running for one of the LSA representative seats, emphasized in their speech that though the violence in Gaza may seem distant, the University of Michigan is directly implicated through its endowment.
“Today, we stand on the grounds of a university that is complicit in violence,” Pierpont said.
“It doesn’t matter if you haven’t killed someone with your bare hands if you’re doing it with your
Months of deliberation, of hoarding, Have finally led me to replace My old wallet, split open at the seams, And in my hands
I weigh the replacement, Trace the fabric of its spine, I wonder, No, this is heavier than the other,
The one now in the bedside trash upstairs,
With the edges coming apart,
Small, white, feathery vines, growing up, growing
Away from its own body,
Confessing a saturated sunset satin
That I never knew lay beneath,
dollars. It’s not that different.”
The U-M Endowment Guide, published by the TAHRIR Coalition, uncovered deep connections between the University’s investments in middlemen firms and the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, as well as the military-industrial complex more broadly. According to the U-M Endowment Guide, the University currently has more than 6 billion invested in companies profiting off of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, including companies like Shield
AI, which produces self-piloting drones used by the Israeli Occupation Force for close-quarter combat, and Motorola Solutions, which creates surveillance equipment used at both Israeli and U.S. border walls.
LSA sophomore and vice-presidential candidate Elias Atkinson affirmed that there is strong opposition against the University’s endowment, as there are more than 3,000 Ann Arbor undergraduate and graduate students registered for the Divest! Don’t Arrest People’s
And there’s a purple flower painted
On the left side of the back of my New wallet, and I remember the old one had Purple (but where), teal (but where), was I
Always this negligent, do I always forget, did I
Never look, and the new wallet debuts as
I pay the man behind the counter,
But before this, he shows me his favorite tea,
And its scent is like an accident, an impact,
No one likes this tea, he says,
It’s not what you asked for,
You wanted fruit, soft, sweet, this one
Bites you back, a little, but before
He can put it away, I ask why he likes it,
And the silver skull rings pull back from
Referendum calling for the U-M Board of Regents to divest from companies profiting from Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian people and to drop charges against student protestors in support of Palestine.
“People are dying as we speak, and we will not allow this university to profit off the blood of thousands of Palestinians,” Atkinson said. “We can see this campus wants divestment and is ready to fight to fight for it.”
The rally’s speakers claimed that CSG has been co-opted by the Uni-
versity as a platform for student voices while historically being ineffective in addressing the needs and demands of marginalized students.
During the fall 2023 CSG elections, the University canceled a section of the vote containing ballot initiatives AR 13-025 and AR 13-026. The CSG elections commission was not consulted by the University and condemned this action in an official statement. The TAHRIR Coalition also released a statement condemning the University’s decision to silence the voices of their students.
CSG has since passed a resolution to investigate this cancellation.
LSA junior Becca Meyer-Rasmussen attended the SHUT IT DOWN kickoff rally following one of their classes, interested in learning more about the candidate’s goals and demands. Meyer-Rasmussen told
The Daily in an interview that they supports the SHUT IT DOWN campaign because it serves as a rallying force for positive change. “I’m OK with setting aside my comfort because I recognize that all of the work being done here on campus right now is setting the tone and planting seeds for the future,” Meyer-Rasmussen said. “It’s kind of our job, then, to take action. lections for all vacant CSG seats run from Wednesday, March 27 and close at 10 p.m. on Friday, March 28. In an interview with The Daily following the rally, Chowdhury said if students want to live to see a free Palestine, they must also be okay with minor disruptions to daily life. “I’d say you need to put your money where your mouth is,” Chowdhury said. “People are dying on the other side of the world because our institution is funding it. And if we want this to stop, we need to be
The steel top of the tea canister, a little,
And he pauses, or a pause takes him, more like,
And he stands, and I stare, and he
Tells me he doesn’t know, he, well,
It reminds him, of something, of,
You know, just makes him think, helps him
Remember, it helps,
Just helps, and the silence lingers;
I choose a peach tea,
But the taste of gunpowder and smoke sticks to my Tongue, and months later,
Blowing out a candle in my living room,
I remember that my old wallet in fact
Had no teal on it at all.
In the midst of a sea of black, white, green, and red. He peers through his iPhone screen and then shakes his head.
In irritation, I held high a picture of a murdered 4-year old girl. He shoved his camera into my face, with a look of pure disdain.
I’m ashamed to say… My response was a middle finger.
Before the camera, it was only God who bore witness.
In indignation, He damned us to bear witness alongside Him.
Sophisticated airstrikes, elegant in design; mass producers of bags of flesh.
Bags of flesh with the remains of a brother, sister, father, mother. All seen through a phone screen.
I used to watch silly Instagram reels, on that same screen. We’ve seen. We’ve seen. We’ve seen.
And they bear witness. And they bore witness. And He bears witness. And all praise still given to Him.
On the other side of a screen, a grieving doctor is mocked for not saving her son.
On the other side of a screen, a soldier celebrates his daughter’s birthday by demolishing our homes.
On the other side of a screen, 40 real souls were sent to us and were promptly returned to Him.
On the other side of a screen, a soldier slouches over a bleeding man sitting upright. and a six year old girl is found dead, perpetrators unknown.
On the other side, on a day of reckoning, they will bear witness.
But we will not wait until then.
“Show your faces!” another screams. I’ve already shown mine.
Now, I turn away.
For they do not know what we have seen– on our phone screens.
I texted my little sister happy birthday, on that same screen.
to know is that we are now just strangers. And when we pass each other on the street, there is no hint of acknowledgment — we have faded into a distant memory.
around me.
found myself becoming an illusion, persistently yielding into what others expected of me.
had a friend who once told me I was mean around her, and that this was my true self, and that all of my other supposed instances of being nice were lies, a facade. I will never forget what she said, nor will I ever forgive myself for believing it. In all of the intertwined jabs and laughter, our friendship became a burden of identity, defining who I was and who I was becoming. When the final tie was cut, I lost the sanctuary I had placed all my reliance on. Maybe this is only from my perspective and maybe I will never know the other side of the story. All I may be condemned
If I had never apologized, would things have been different? Or maybe, what if I continued to pretend as if nothing was wrong? If so, would this friendship have lasted? But maybe this is a sign that the friendship had been over for a long time already. Memories became entangled with reality, fabricating the lines between reality and perception.
I glaze over the fact that we’re no longer friends all the time, wondering if there’s anything more I could have done or if this truly was my fault. Do you echo my heart, tinged with hurt, or were those five years of friendship easily cut for you? In all these memories, I find the truth continuing to pierce through the rose-tinted perception I once had. Maybe, I had held onto something that should’ve been let go of for too long. And in that instantaneous moment, my eyes no longer glimmered with hope of mending what was never meant to be fixed in the first place.
And in my solidarity, I caught a glimpse of myself. No longer consumed by others’ perception of me, I began to listen to my own thoughts once again. An epiphany struck. Maybe I was blonde not because it made me feel prettier, but because it was a comfort I was unwilling to let go of. Reminiscent of the past, my blonde hair was my nostalgia of only the good memories I chose to remember. A perpetual thought scattered my mind as someone who hadn’t resembled me before began to appear. Laughter reemerged and the complexity of mending myself struck as being possible. My resentment dissipated as my worries dissolved and I no longer felt disconsolate. I was no longer scared to get close to people. And then I was finally able to dye my hair dark again, comfortable with the uneasiness of change. I can’t say whether it’s relief or nostalgia that still aches at the back of my subconscious, but this is a thank you for letting go of me when I didn’t have the courage to let go of you.
As the frost fades away and the birds begin to emerge from their winter-long shelters, it becomes a time of year to ponder permanence. Whether we like it or not, the semester is quickly coming to a close, and with that we may experience delight, despair, uncertainty or whatever else rings true for us. Rather than embracing the imminent change or reflecting upon all that’s transpired since I arrived here to start my freshman year, I’ve been caught up with some of the logistics: How will I ever be able to manage packing up everything in my dorm? And, more precisely, what will it take to clear every trace of myself from this room I’ve come to know as home? I don’t
want to, and I once considered carving my name into the side of my closet to sate that nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach, to say I was here, as if that would make my presence last. Life brings multitudes of battles like this — like saying goodbye to our childhood homes and moving on before we’re ready, and all the while I seek a sort of compromise: I try to bring little bits of the past forward with me. I try to picture the way I’ll have to consolidate everything, folding and fitting it all into tote bins, boxes and suitcases. It seems impossible; maybe I own a little more than I did when I arrived here all those months ago, and it feels like my life has expanded out of those very boxes since then. Scattered around my room is a considerable amount of what could be considered junk — various trinkets that are
ostensibly useless. Some of these things have a designated purpose; they act as souvenirs of days passed. They’re sentimental objects — mementos, if you will. I think these various things are attached to me in some way, but not to such an extreme where clutter piles up, or I find myself thinking Oh my god. I can’t let go of anything. Still, I’ve adopted this habit of assigning physical homes to intangible things like love, friendship and memories in stones or coins. I want to believe I can keep them as easily as one could keep the rings on their fingers or the keys in their pocket.
quarter. I should set it aside, but I like to carry it around because my dad gave it to me. He collects coins, not seriously or anything, but over the years he’s gifted me odd little pieces of currency with funky shapes and moderate discoloration. Some are foreign, from his travels, and I’m not sure where the others are from, but every now and then I’ll find a new one on my desk. By now I have amassed a small pouch of them. I don’t intend to ever spend them; they carry his subtle sweetness, a sort of genuine caring that is translated to something like I found this coin and thought of you.
The clutter in my dorm room includes a group of tiny rocks on my dresser, which sit and collect dust day after day. One is ringed with soft stripes, another textured like a honeycomb, the others with spots and streaks of bright colors. I brought them back from the trip I took up north over Fall Break with a bunch of new friends from school. We had spent a windy afternoon scouring the rocky lakeshore, trying to find the most beautiful stones we could, and afterwards I tucked each of the winners away into my bag for safekeeping. Since the trip, I’ve drifted apart from some of those friends, though I continue to reminisce about the days that we were all together up north. I can’t get those moments back, so I’m trying to keep all the little bits of closeness I can in physical spaces, objects I could hold in one hand, things I could package up and move back home with me. Not out of fear, just sort of praying that these sentiments will never leave me, and if they’re embodied in something I can hold or touch or look at every day, I can feel only slightly more reassured that they won’t slip away.
There’s this coin I keep in my wallet, worth five Mexican pesos. It’s gold in the middle and silver around the edges. It’s with all my other coins, which has been problematic on the occasions that I am hurriedly digging for change and confuse it for a
One of the first times my mom came to visit me at college, she brought me an acorn. I didn’t need an explanation — it was a lovely acorn, the kind that decorates the windowsill in our kitchen at home. Some of those had smiling faces drawn on them years and years ago, faces that admired whoever would be cooking or washing their hands or gazing out the window. Joyous little things, they were. Of course, keeping this memento was not about the acorn itself. It was about my childhood and the place I grew up, sitting idly in the backyard picking at the grass and seeing little leaf blossoms on the branches of big trees above me, hearing my mom singing songs to herself as she strode around the house. In a relatively uncomplicated way, the acorn carries ideas of my heritage and home. I can’t always be lounging in my backyard or hearing my mother hum to herself — but I can have all of those moments packed tightly inside that acorn. Sometimes, I don’t fully realize the value I’ve placed in an object until I’ve lost it. A while ago, I lost a necklace that my mom gave to me, one I wore constantly. One day it disappeared, and I was a little shocked by how much that bothered me; I didn’t consider myself the type to be broken up over misplaced jewelry. But, after having it around my neck for years, I felt as though it had captured the memories from
each of those days I wore it — as if it was a symbol of how much time had passed, how things had changed, how I had grown. When it became clear that I was never going to find it, I bought a similar necklace, a replacement, and I never loved it quite the same. And although I want my lost necklace back, I feel like losing it has forced me to move on, to find a new beginning of sorts. I’ve had some difficulty figuring out how stuff can be so meaningful and still so easily scrutinized through the lens of minimalism. The concept of owning as little as possible can be criticized for its tendency to promote detachment and conformity. There is a happy middle ground, I think; Marie Kondo helps people clean up their houses when the mess becomes overwhelming, and her philosophy suggests that clients discard the items that no longer bring them joy. There’s much to be said for keeping a tidy space, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be void of personal possessions — the extra belongings that reflect the souls of the people who live there.
The New York Historical Society has an exhibition called Objects Tell Stories, which is an archive of wartime, struggle, triumphs and tragedies. There, moments of intense emotion are meant to be gleaned from viewing the featured objects. The artifacts on display are not crazy or unique creations; they are simply little pieces of time captured throughout the decades. Museum galleries are obviously curated, narrowed based on what is deemed valuable to society or which aspects of the past are decidedly meant to be remembered. I don’t think any of the things in my dorm could be deemed culturally relevant — I certainly would not equate the silly things that I own to artifacts that transcend time and belong to the past, its communities and memories. I’m not looking to devalue history or the precious vessels in which we keep it, merely suggesting that ordinary
things may be just as important in the same way, though perhaps to a smaller audience. These things in museums, these great works of art and relics of the olden days, tell a story. But, hesitantly, I’d argue that their story would be just as clear if they had emptied the contents of their purse onto a table or showed off the collection of knickknacks atop their nightstand. Less historically relevant items could totally belong in a museum too, though maybe not in a history museum. In Zagreb, Croatia, there’s this place called the Museum of Broken Relationships, which displays the symbolic possessions from people’s past relationships. The museum displays the stories of those who contribute to it, and their moments of love and heartbreak. It includes quite the range of items: rings, gastritis tablets, a 27-year-old scab, a “stupid frisbee.” Ordinary things, in the right space, are transformed into repositories for people’s loves, losses, moments and months of their lives.
Objects can be representatives of individuals, not just in who they are or what they’ve experienced, but also how far they’ve reached, how closely they’ve touched the lives of others. From a cognitive perspective, objects can help with retrieving old memories, and this might be why getting rid of something can feel like discarding the memories associated with it, too. In this way, it really could be all about the acorn, the coins, the rocks — or whatever little pieces are left of what once was. And I suppose this is my favorite part: Holding onto these various items suggests how we may pour ourselves into what’s around us, and how they might manage to do that same thing right back. When the time comes, I’ll dutifully gather up all the things in my dorm and tuck them carefully away. And I know that next year, when I’m living
‘Why
My first two years at the University of Michigan have been characterized by what I can only describe as a divided campus. Even when sharing in the communal act of football games, weekend parties or a warm fall day on the Diag, there’s been an underlying political and cultural divide. In my first year of college, the Graduate Employees’ Organization went on strike, prematurely ending some of my classes and leading to conflicting feelings of annoyance and solidarity among the undergraduate population. During this time of division, an article in The Michigan Daily, “Humans of GEO,” shed light on the people behind the strike, encouraging bonds of familiarity with a group many undergraduates saw only in the context of their lab and discussion sections.
When Israel invaded Gaza in the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, different student groups on campus immediately mobilized, organizing a vigil for Israeli victims of the attack and, a few weeks later, Palestinian victims of Israel’s ground assault. With the Palestinian death toll rising to more than 100,000 killed or injured as of this article’s publication, Students Allied For Freedom and Equality, a pro-Palestine organization at the head of the multigroup TAHRIR Coalition, continued protesting in earnest. Their target? The University’s endowment, which they allege profits from companies with military and business interests in Israel. Although the movement is popular, with more than 90 involved student organizations and a victory in the most recent Central Student Government election, it still drives controversy.
The conflict on campus, as large or small as you choose to imagine it, has caught the attention of national media publications, such as The New York Times, Fox News and New York Magazine. Central to all of these stories is one person: SAFE President Salma Hamamy, who has seen her words and social media posts scrutinized under an evermagnifying lens. At times, it can be difficult to divorce the public persona of an activist, Hamamy herself becoming increasingly well known with every rally, from her identity as a person: her hopes, her personal interests and even her reason for fighting in the first place.
Thinking back to that GEO article, I decided months ago to work on a similar interview with Salma, with the goal of breaking down a person some see less as a fellow student and more as a bullhorn calling for whatever they think she believes.
My first interaction with Salma had actually come a month earlier, though I didn’t know it at the time. On Feb. 8, I decided to dip my toes into the waters of documentary photography, using a SAFE walkout that was protesting the University’s investments as my pool. Armed with my camera, I hurried to catch up with the stream of students
leaving the Diag, destined for an odyssey through the Michigan Union and Ross School of Business, ending in front of the Alexander G. Ruthven Building. As I sprinted to keep in front of the march, I was stopped from passing through the side door of the Business School by a marshal in reflective clothing. Barred from the inside — lest I was willing to force my way through the small entrance with the rest of the marchers — I worried about losing a photo. Something was happening inside; protesters were filling the ears of Business students with hundreds of voices chanting in unison. Ready to capitulate and enter the established door, Hamamy appeared by my shoulder, insisting that I be let through the side door with my camera. The moment happened so quickly; I was more focused on my success than the person I had just met, assuming they were just one of the leaders I was so diligently capturing just minutes earlier. It was only later that I realized it was Hamamy herself, working to facilitate the documentation of a movement she had led.
Though I documented other SAFE events in the month between, I didn’t again have a chance to meet directly with Hamamy through the organized chaos of protest. The only time I heard her voice was through a microphone or bullhorn, crying out about the University’s investments, the growing death toll in Gaza and the policies of President Joe Biden’s administration. On social media, I saw her repost story after story of videos from the ground in Rafah and Gaza City. On the news, I saw her mentioned in article after article of The Daily, interspersed with mentions in The New York Times and Al Jazeera.
I was excited when she agreed to an interview, scheduled just a few days before Ramadan, at a time
when she was undoubtedly busier than she’s ever been.
In the café of the Union
Sweetwaters, I noticed Hamamy just as she is: a young, Palestinian Muslim woman in college. If it weren’t for the knowledge of who she was — and the endless hellos she received through the course of our interview by passersby — I’d assume she was an average student, struggling through the stress of midterm season.
The first thing I came to learn of Hamamy was her sweet tooth, which she mentioned as a fun fact after describing her background.
Her pastry, freshly bought, would be a quiet companion during the next 40 minutes. The second thing
I came to learn of Hamamy was her complete and utter dedication to the cause of Palestinian liberation and U-M divestment. Surrounded by students diligently studying for post-Spring Break midterms, I asked Hamamy what drives her to lead this movement on campus.
“I feel like when you ask someone that question, it’s almost as if you’re asking, ‘Why do you sleep at night? Why do you eat? Why do you breathe?’” Hamamy answered. “How can I not? I do this because my family was kicked out of their village, my father had to flee two countries, escaping war twice. The University of Michigan is beyond complicit in this.”
Hamamy was referring to the University’s endowment fund, which invests a pool of money donated and granted to the University into a variety of stocks. Also at issue is the University’s academic connections with Israel, such as the MichiganIsrael Partnership for Research and Education. SAFE alleges that the University directly profits from these connections and that the connections benefit Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine
— an issue at the center of SAFE’s divestment campaign. As president of SAFE for the past three years, Hamamy has spent the majority of her time in college pushing the University to end its investments in these companies. Although she’s motivated by her own identity as a Palestinian, she also said her status as a U-M student fills her with guilt.
“I constantly feel guilty and a sense of shame. … Despite trying to do the best that I can, it feels like it’s never enough,” Hamamy said. “This is quite literally the bare minimum, and it’s to the point where my guilt quite literally eats me alive — it keeps me up at night. This is the only way that I feel like I can transform that guilt and that grief and that anger into action; I guess those emotions kind of lead and spearhead what I do today.”
Before forming the TAHRIR Coalition, a coalition of nearly 100 student organizations on campus dedicated to the issue of divestment, Hamamy was a member of CSG and even ran for CSG vice president in 2023. Despite being endorsed by The Daily and supported by pro-Palestine students on campus, Hamamy lost her bid and left organized student administration altogether. Curious of her thoughts on the difference between grassroots organizing as opposed to institutional change making, I asked Hamamy why she no longer associates herself with CSG.
“We’ve found that CSG continues to be disengaged and not involved in what’s happening on the ground level, especially considering that the TAHRIR coalition has over 80 organizations,” Hammay said. “They’re still not reaching out and trying to see what they can do to help us or represent us in any way. We’ve kind of surpassed them and said, ‘We don’t necessarily need
you at this point if you’re not going to support us in any way.’”
Although she sacrificed her position in CSG to become a full-time activist, Hamamy is still a student, double majoring in biology, health and society and Middle Eastern and North African studies. She’s also declared two minors: one in law, justice and social change, the other in Arabic studies. When I try to conceptualize her daily schedule, my own being fairly barebones, my mind breaks. If it’s any consolation to the reader who might find themselves embarrassed by their own inactivity and slothfulness, Hamamy said she doesn’t manage her time well, either.
“We often stay up in the middle of the night until 7 a.m., figuring out what our next plan is, dealing with any suppression. I don’t sleep very well whatsoever, I barely eat,” Hamamy said. “It’s definitely a lot of sacrifice, and I’m not alone in this. A lot of our board members and coalition members have unfortunately failed classes or pushed their graduation date. And they do that knowing it’s the bare minimum.”
There’s a peculiar feeling you get when meeting an activist. As a history student, I’ve often read about the years of dedication put into a movement, including the willingness to be imprisoned or, if necessary, give up one’s life. I was always impressed by the will required to set oneself on that path, but it was different to see it reflected in the eyes of a peer, and Hamamy’s eyes told me she was not exaggerating. During the course of our conversation, her tone was steady and firm, and I don’t think her voice once faltered; every word was spoken with intention. Her dedication made me think of my own goals. What am I passionate about? What would I be
willing to sacrifice? A part of me wanted to ask, “What else was she willing to give?” Her expression and confident tone answered the question for me.
Hamamy said she believes she can do more. Her main complaints are her own human needs of food and rest, followed by the confines of legal protest.
“I try to stay within the bounds of pacing,” Hamamy said. “I’m still attending my classes. I’m still trying to obtain my degree. I’m still getting a certain portion of sleep at night, still eating properly. At this point, the state has only allowed us to protest in ways that they consider tolerable. But at what point when you’re constantly peacefully protesting and nothing is being done, what more can you do?”
When I reviewed our conversation, this quote elicited a temporary pause in my mind. Hamamy, despite all that she has done in protesting, organizing and opening herself up to death threats and harassment, still feels guilty that she is bound by the limitations of the human body. My growing feeling of respect was coupled with a sense of sadness. No one should have to feel that way, that the burdens of an entire people or movement fall squarely on their shoulders; but in the world we live in, that’s too-often how it goes.
I next asked Hamamy about her own personal safety. She was a leader of the pro-Palestine movement and as such was a recognizable face to her opposition. She’s been physically spat on by pro-Israel students and, digitally, she’s been doxxed online and sent death threats in droves.
“We’ve been doxxed several times,” Hamamy said. “It has led to random parents and external groups trying to call for our expulsion and have campaigns against us. Whenever we get doxxed, we get a cake and sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and call everyone and serve cake. They dox us in the hope it will instill some kind of fear in us, but we do the exact opposite. We celebrate and we truly do take it as a badge of honor.”
Despite the celebratory attitude, Hammay stressed to me that being doxxed and harassed still interferes with her and other SAFE members’ soundness of mind.
“Of course, it does also come with an emotional toll and being careful of one’s safety,” Hammay said. “We do receive death threats. We do receive threats of all levels wishing for the worst things to happen to us. But even if those things were to happen, it would be worth it.”
Hamamy has been doxxed online since 2021 by sites that claim to expose antisemitism on college campuses. Through these groups, someone could find up-to-date information about what protests she has participated in, her location, her social media handles and her appearance all in one click of a button, making it easier for potential death threats to become reality.
Photos by Meleck Eldahshoury
What do you use the Diag for in the winter? You likely only use it to walk to class, but why? Why is this park — a respite from your overcrowded residence hall and the noisy cars, trucks and buses on Hill Street — so underutilized?
The obvious answer is that we go to school in Michigan, a pretty cold place. The average low temperature in January is 19 degrees, well below freezing. I often forget during this part of the year just how many people actually go to this school. I’m reminded every time spring rolls around and the Diag is inundated with people playing Spikeball, friends reminiscing on blankets and students doing a smorgasbord of other activities that are impossible or untenable in the winter cold. Considering the University’s multibillion-dollar endowment, they should be doing much more to craft pleasant, usable space at the center of campus.
I have three potential solutions to this problem — tangible steps the University can and should take to make our built environment more habitable in the frigid winter months.
This is important for a variety of reasons. Spending time outdoors offers a variety of benefits for both
physical and mental health. It’s no coincidence that so-called “frat flu” spikes in the winter, once we all go indoors to avoid the elements. Likewise, seasonal depression is prevalent in the winter and worsened by a lack of sun exposure. Even in the winter, the Diag can serve as a tool to improve campus well-being. However much people might enjoy or benefit from this space, its current amenities make this hard.
Part of the problem is that even if you are bundled up, the stone benches are cold! Stone has a higher thermal conductivity, meaning it steals much more heat from a person than wood does. Wood’s lower density, with layers of “insulation” by virtue of its fibrous makeup, means that you lose less heat and are able to heat up the surface you’re sitting on without too much trouble.
The stone slabs serving as benches in the Diag don’t share these virtues. If you’ve ever spent a night in the woods, you know the cold ground can sap heat faster than even subzero air. I think we are due for a material upgrade. Regardless of material, there is not enough seating in the Diag, relative to how many people use the space. I looked through some historical photos of the Diag, and this has seemingly always been the case. As anyone who has walked through this area in the warmer months knows, the seating provid-
ed is often at capacity. Now, I love a picnic blanket as much as the next person, but adding more benches would make the Diag enjoyable to a greater number of people, especially during the spring and summer. This isn’t the end of the story. Even if you are bundled up head to toe in the winter, the cold air will still leave you shivering. Transit agencies have been contending with this problem for decades. You might have noticed, if you are a Blue Bus enjoyer like myself, that some U-M bus stops are currently equipped with “push button heaters.” It’s the same concept as a heat lamp that you’d use on a lizard. You push a button, and for a minute you have a little piece of the sun at your back. A 4000-watt heater — the approximate size of lamps that heat both some of the University’s bus stops as well as many stops around the country — costs around $500$1,000. The underlying infrastructure, cabling and other electrical work that would be needed to accommodate these heaters would be an additional cost, but I’m more than confident that the University’s $5.9 billion in unrestricted endowment funds could accommodate it. Beyond installation, the heat lamps are not free to use. Electricity costs money, especially in the winter months when the grid may be sporadically strained by the demands of various electric heating systems.
School is an essential part of personality and identity development for children. A lot of our behaviors are influenced by our peers and the people we choose to surround ourselves with. When watching a movie about the high school experience, characters often fall into certain stereotypes that might seem cliche. From the popular kids and jocks to the geeks and band kids, we often fall into groups with people we are similar to, especially in grade school. The class clown stereotype, however, needs to be dismantled. These stereotypes don’t just exist on the screen or in high school: they extend into one’s college years.
But college classrooms are not the place for class clown behavior. You’re in college, and you’re a legal adult at this point. You’re probably living on your own for the first time and experiencing more freedom. Colleges are institutions meant to prepare students for their professional careers by teaching them the skills and information necessary to advance. College is much more se-
rious than high school, and there is more pressure to succeed and learn information, especially if your classes provide information necessary for your career.
From the moment you are born, you begin to exhibit a fundamental form of personality known as temperament. Temperament consists of innate features like mood, demeanor and emotional responsiveness. Over time, your personality develops based on your surroundings and learned behaviors. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung created the 12 Jungian Archetypes, intended to represent the range of basic human motivations. One of these archetypes is the Jester, whose greatest fear is to be bored or bore others. Their cardinal orientation is to connect with others by bringing joy and having a great time.
Some people naturally exhibit this archetype, and they are rewarded for their behavior when people find them funny. This stereotype is more likely to be assigned to boys, and it can have lasting impacts on their education and behavior. The class clown stereotype can come with negative perceptions that influence how teachers and peers view students. In a study conducted by Lynn A. Barnett, as-
sociate professor at the University of Illinois, boys and girls in the first grade were equally likely to be considered class clowns, but afterward the label applied to more boys than girls. In first grade, these playful students were the most popular, with their superior social skills. However, by third grade, these children became the least popular because their teachers and peers considered them disruptive.
The study also found that teachers became increasingly frustrated with playful boys and viewed their behavior negatively because they disrupted the classroom. This made teachers treat the class clowns differently, leading them to feel alienated from their peers and act out more often. By labeling a child as deviant, they are immediately more likely to behave deviantly.
Children might be inclined to fit into the class clown stereotype because they have unfulfilled wants, desire attention or have a hard time controlling their impulses. There is a correlation between class clown behavior and children who have ADHD, as they attempt to draw attention away from things they are struggling with.
What is the purpose of education? According to Martin Luther King Jr., “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education.” Note one important omission — there is no mention of memorization. This is because testing a person’s ability to memorize information is far different from testing their understanding of the material. However, in many instances it seems that our education system uses these two distinct methods of testing — closed-note and opennote — interchangeably. Many professors operate under the misconception that open-note tests are too easy and prevent students from bringing in any reference materials for their exams. Though, in certain instances, this format of testing is more useful, open-note tests are ultimately more beneficial to both students and professors, and should be the standard at the university level.
When you’re shopping at the grocery store, do you stop to add up the prices of all of your items in your head? If you’re tipping a waiter at a restaurant, are you doing mental math to calculate the tip? More likely, you pull out your phone to use a calculator instead. This illustrates one of the most fundamental problems with closed-note testing: it’s completely unrealistic. In a typical work environment, it would be counterproductive for an employer to prevent employees from accessing resources that would aid their job performance. Thus, if university courses are meant to prepare students for their future careers, students should be tested in a manner similar to how knowledge is applied in the real world.
Test anxiety is another drawback of exams that can be reduced through open-note testing. When faced with the pressure of memorization, students can often experience heightened anxiety, which can lead to memory lapses during the exam. Open-note tests remove the element of memorization, allowing students to focus on grasping the material and generally promoting a more relaxed testing environment. This, in turn, can lead to reduced
anxiety among students prior to and during exams.
An additional benefit of emphasizing understanding over memorization of course material is that online exams disincentivize students from cheating, particularly in online exams. Cheating on take-home tests is rampant and can be extremely difficult to combat, due to the numerous workarounds to current supervision technology. By making exams open-note and crafting meaningful questions, academic integrity can be preserved while still comprehensively assessing a student’s learning.
However, arguably the most compelling case to be made for open-note tests is the ability for professors to ask more complex questions in their assessments. A well-crafted open-note test assesses more than a student’s ability to recall information. Instead, these types of exams test a student’s ability to analyze, synthesize and apply information.
Though this is a broad generalization, it can be applied in a variety of ways depending on the type of test and subject matter.
We’re in the same place we were when the pandemic began
MAX FELDMAN Opinion Columnist
Four years ago, the trajectory of our lives changed forever. COVID-19 was officially declared a national emergency in March of 2020, leading to the shutdown of thousands of American schools and a hole being ripped out of the high school experience for millions. Lockdown forced us into social isolation for years, the American economy was devastated and more than 1 million Americans died from the virus.
If you’re an 18-year-old college student, the two and a half years that comprised the pandemic era account for 13.9% of your life. To think that such a large chunk of our young lives were gobbled up by a global pandemic is a truly devastating realization. Many of our formative years were defined by this period, yet the pandemic as a whole has largely become an afterthought in our lives. Honestly, even writing about it feels taboo. Nobody wants to talk about COVID-19 anymore. I get it. Who wants to be reminded of what can only be described as a tragic period of collective pain? In conversations with friends and family, on news outlets, in pop culture and in our classrooms, the pandemic is almost never a topic of discussion. Instead, we’ve shifted our focus to the countless other issues affecting our lives, pushing the pandemic on the back-burner where it can hopefully stay buried. The problem is, by letting our collective consciousness move on from the pandemic, we’ve allowed the ramifications of COVID-19 to fester. Despite 59% of Americans believing the pandemic is over, nearly the same percentage of people think life has not returned to normal.
Our desire to put the pandemic behind us is ultimately why we’re still subject to its aftereffects.
This fact is even more prevalent in the lives of college students. Our mental efforts have become consumed by the worries and responsibilities that define university life. There’s no time to ponder the ramifications of the pandemic when we must navigate the social, emotional and academic problems that compound the college experience.
Yet, as we trudge along through the four years of college, desperately hoping to meet the requirements of higher education, we need to remember that there is nothing normal about our educational journey. There will only ever be one group of college students who were in high school when the pandemic irreparably damaged their educations back in March 2020. And that’s us.
In our collective desire to forget about the pandemic, we have blindsided ourselves to how much the college experience has actually been altered. Our ultra reliance on technology for learning and social interaction is a direct effect of the social distancing and online education we got used to during the pandemic. For the same reasons, traditional educational experiences are also becoming obsolete, as we are witnessing an increased desire for individualism marked by less student attendance and engagement. Our feelings of anxiety and depression emerged due to the mental health crisis that the global pandemic exacerbated. The pain, grief and shifting social norms that arose from COVID-19 have dug their claws into the fabric of our young lives — a reality we choose to ignore.
IKATIEMARALDO Opinion Columnist
Feeder schools feed into a negative social cultureRACHELLE EVANS Opinion Columnist
Feeder schools are highly controversial. They create arguments about basic equity, parental duty and accessibility gaps in higher education. People tend to find themselves understanding these schools as either necessary pathways to educational excellence or institutions that further create social stratification among different economic classes. Despite these grievances, each side argues that these schools play some role in professional success. While feeder schools are both celebrated and chastised for their academic rigor, they inadvertently create a damaging social environment for their students.
Feeder schools are schools that send a disproportionately large number of students to elite universities. Despite misconceptions, most feeder schools are public high schools.
More than 71% of public institutions have ties to elite universities, compared to only 29% of private schools. Usually, guidance counselors or school representatives create these relationships. Counselors from high-performing high schools get in contact with admissions officers and carefully collect information about the college’s academic and social climates. The counselors disperse this sensitive information to their student body, who then tailor their applications to the wants of the desired university. Additionally, feeder schools can provide unique resources to students. These institutions predominantly exist in wealthier areas, so they offer better standardized test preparation, more intense curricula and greater support during the college application process. The feeder school system acts as a cycle. As more students earn admission and attend elite universities, admitted
students provide the students and staff of their high school with better demographic information, and more high school students can be accepted. This information includes accepted grades, extracurriculars, scores and other metrics that can be repeated by younger high school students. Time passes and admissions officers understand that students from specific schools are highachieving and likely to succeed. Consequently, these admissions representatives are incentivized to accept even more students from the feeder high schools.
Private and public feeder schools relate more to each other than one would originally expect. Despite differences in funding, students are generally held to the same academic and social standards. The key similarity is that students adopt their high achievement standards as personality traits, and thus translate them into their everyday lives.
Data from the fall of 2019 shows that Novi High School sends the third-highest number of students to the University of Michigan out of all in-state schools. I attended this high school and witnessed how the pressure to attend elite secondary education institutions impacted interpersonal relationships. My first day of freshman year, I remember our assembly leaders asking us to raise our hands if we wanted to go to the University of Michigan post-graduation. I shockingly witnessed almost every single student raise their hand. At 14 years old, we were taught to dream of the University, and see our classmates with similar aspirations as competition.
Our attitudes toward success manifested in our daily lives. The school’s culture praised individuals based on their grade point average, standardized test scores and extracurricular activities. We were internally conditioned to look up to and befriend students who seemed to be on the path to success. Mistakes
were unwelcome. Academic elitism transformed itself into moral righteousness.
My high school was incredibly gossipy. The anxiety of not being the best created this culture.
If one student was doing well academically, others were quick to tear them down socially if they had done any sort of wrong.
When I arrived at college, I faced an immediate culture shock.
I quickly learned that people did not care about your business. It took me a while to let go of the notion that others were constantly belittling me. When I expressed these feelings to my friends, many were confused — except for those who had experienced similar high school cultures.
LSA sophomore Lauren St. Andre attended Notre Dame Preparatory School, one of the largest private schools in Michigan. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, she expressed feeling isolated by her school’s social environment.
“Teachers would talk to the entire class about kids who got best test scores to celebrate them and shame kids who did not meet these marks,” St. Andre said. “Kids would routinely cry if they did not get over 32 on the ACT.
Genuine friendships ended during admissions season when students would spend extra time with guidance counselors to try and get letters of recommendation unfairly. Students who were not accepted to Michigan would skip school dances and days of school out of embarrassment and fear of gossip. At graduation, we had to enact an entire court of valedictorians because kids would pile on miscellaneous IB classes and AP classes they weren’t passionate about to try and increase their college admissions chances and have achieved valedictorian status.”
Navigating these social dynamics is far from easy, made even more difficult by the psychological toll students face as a result of mental health issues. Prolonged exposure to this kind
of environment impacts students’ long-term social growth as well. Early exposure to this kind of stress halts major developmental milestones and impacts the behavior of youth throughout adulthood. Teens growing up in these environments fail to learn how to cultivate healthy interpersonal relationships. They are unable to separate the compulsions of comparison from the benefits of friendships. Relationship formation is a key component of adolescence, and feeder schools prevent their students from experiencing it. The environments of feeder schools exist for a reason. Students are socially and academically programmed to succeed and represent their high school well as they enter their adult lives. It may be true that this hierarchical social structure and competitive dynamic exists across all schools, and can be motivational. Yet, the basic nature of a feeder school intensifies these dynamics. The competition pushes students to succeed, but also often pushes them to their breaking points. It is dangerous for certain schools to have an advantage due to differences in funding. To this point, feeder schools should not even exist at all. However, we must not forget about the students who are damaged within the system as well. Administrators and educators must foster healthier social environments in feeder schools. Proper psychological support should be available in each school, and teachers should make collaborative work assignments more common to minimize competition between students. Students themselves must resist internalizing and perpetuating harmful social dynamics. Encouraging intense self-reflection can help students overcome these thoughts and behaviors. As a society, we need to stop allowing these schools to dominate the admissions process and the mindsets of students. Read
n Michigan, we pride ourselves on our Great Lakes, four seasons and beautiful summers. The state is also often referred to as a “climate haven,” which is an area that is less prone to the damaging effects of climate change. While all the great amenities that we pride ourselves on are still standing, we may not be as safe from the detrimental effects of a warming climate as we think.
In August 2023, three University of Michigan researchers analyzed climate change in six different cities deemed as climate havens surrounding the Great Lakes region, including Ann Arbor. The researchers noted that, despite their standing as climate havens, these cities are likely to face some of the largest temperature increases in the near future. Because of this, they are likely unprepared for the scale of change a warmer climate will actually bring.
According to these U-M researchers, “climate havens” in the Midwest have already experienced the detrimental effects of increasingly powerful storms and flooding. For example, in the summer of 2021, the metro Detroit area experienced a flood so bad that it was declared a “major disaster” by President Joe Biden. I experienced this flood firsthand: My family home’s basement in metro Detroit was completely flooded with sewer water, and we unfortunately lost thousands of dollars worth of furniture and family keepsakes. This was the same weekend as my high school graduation party, which thankfully took place at an event center. But many of my friends who planned on having their celebrations at their homes had to completely cancel, reschedule and even
set up GoFundMes due to the severe damages to their homes. The struggles we faced due to this flood are minuscule in comparison to the loss some Detroit residents faced, where the estimated property damages amounted to about $100 million.
In addition to flash floods and increasing precipitation, climate change has reared its head in Michigan in other ways, like with the Canadian wildfires last summer. Due to the utter amount of smoke and debris these fires produced, the Ann Arbor area, along with many other areas in southeast Michigan, experienced severe air quality declination. I worked at a restaurant that was about a five-minute walk from my apartment and had to call
out of work multiple days due to the air quality being so poor. Some people feel immune to poor air quality, but as someone with asthma and other health issues, it was a very scary time. The cause of these wildfires is complex, but to put it simply:
As temperatures warm up even the slightest bit, more lightning strikes. Many of Canada’s wildfires are caused by lightning, so even a minor warming of the climate can be devastating to the environment. As the Canadian climate heats up, so do our dear climate havens.
In addition to the environmental impact, we must also acknowledge climate change’s social and socioeconomic impact. In an
interview with The Michigan Daily, Richard Alley, professor of geosciences at Penn State University, explained that many of the issues related to climate change in designated areas are directly correlated with socioeconomic status.
“If you are a sufficiently wealthy person, have a good air conditioner for hot summers, have a heater for the winter and you’re not in a flood zone, you’re probably not going to be someone hurt the most by this change,” Alley said. “What we see is that heat stress often is bad for those who are not prepared, so if you’re in a city that’s used to heat, you may be OK.”
Detroit, where many experience systemic economic
hardship, has been warming at about 0.4 degrees per decade since 1960. Although Michigan is deemed a “climate haven,” it may only be so for those who can afford all the technology and resources needed to safely live in this new environment.
Local economies have also suffered as a result of these changes. My family traveled up north this past January and planned on skiing, but due to a lack of natural snow and icy conditions caused by the fake snow, we decided against it. When I was a child, we skied nearly every winter and never worried about there being no snow. Now, we’re surprised if there is snow. While us not being able to ski is most definitely
a first-world problem, the detrimental effect on businesses is much more than that. Even though northern Michigan ski resorts have previously benefited from the warmer lakes (because as cold air moves over warm water, more lake-effect snow forms), they have also been severely impacted due to the temperature being too warm to create fake snow. Given that winter recreation stimulates the Michigan economy with billions of dollars each year, local economies will inevitably suffer when these activities decline due to warmer weather.
While it is increasingly evident that Michigan is not as much of a “climate haven” as it seems, some beg to differ. Many argue, for example, that Michiganders should avoid worrying about Michigan becoming a climate haven and instead worry about the amount of people leaving Michigan. They also claim that climate change hasn’t been severe enough for people to feel the need to move to “climate havens.” While many of us are concerned for the state of our environment, some are more concerned with the economy of the state. While the state of the economy is worrisome, it is deeply connected to climate change in the region.
“Climate havens” like Ann Arbor are not the havens we have made them out to be. In situations that feel so much bigger than us as individuals, we can oftentimes feel helpless — but we aren’t. According to Alley, change starts with educating yourself on which policymakers believe in science and are going to actively work on sustainable energy and against climate change.
“We will have to adapt because the changes are already here,” Alley said. “It is still very clear that if we build a sustainable energy system, we should end up better off.” The effects of climate change are here to stay. Long-term solutions should be, too.
Looking to win its secondconsecutive Big Ten series, the Michigan baseball team called on sophomore right-hander Mitch Voit to secure the final win of the weekend. Consistent on the mound and aggressive at the plate, Voit was just the person to silence Maryland’s hot bats and create a few blazing swings of his own.
Voit is the only pitcher that has made it a complete nine innings for the Wolverines, back when he threw against UCLA in a March 1 win. He has proven that he can go the distance, and in a weekend when Michigan utilized six pitchers and cleaned out the bullpen, Voit needed to be on the mound for the majority of the game. And he was, nearly going the distance and throwing bullets to the plate that the Terrapins had a hard time getting a bat on for most of the matchup.
“AJ has an important role playing in center field for us,” Smith said. “That allows us to pitch to contact. That helps and that’s what we’re looking for.”
Voit is precise, consistent and often pitches to contact. He isn’t going to strike out a ton of guys, but he can be effective attacking the strike zone and trusting the group behind him. His pitching style isn’t possible without a reliable outfield, though. With the outfield carousel that Michigan has been forced to rotate through, you’d think that the Wolverines wouldn’t be able to support Voit’s contact-driven approach. But instead, the Michigan outfield expertly rolled with punches and was a dependable presence behind its pitcher. Throughout the series, graduate right fielder Stephen Hrustich and freshman center fielder AJ Garcia have been the most consistent presences in the outfield. The two combined for four put-outs Sunday and created a demeanor in the outfield that Voit could rely on.
Voit began the top of the third
inning throwing back-to-back strikeouts, adding to his total of six on the day. But those quick trips to the mound came to a close in the fourth inning where Voit felt the wrath of the so-called “cardiac Terrapins” known for their comeback wins. The four runs Maryland scored on Sunday came off of home runs, all flying out over the wall in left field. Over the fourth and fifth innings, Voit surrendered three homers. “Mitch’s job is to compete and throw strikes,” Smith said. “The decision to stay with him late was that we just liked the competitiveness of him on the mound.” Smith called a mound visit after the last homer, and junior catcher Will Rogers returned to the plate pinching the bridge of his nose fearing a momentum shift that the Wolverines wouldn’t be able to overcome. But Voit was up for the challenge. Closing out both the fourth and fifth innings without allowing any more Terrapins to reach base, Voit gave his offense the opportunity to respond — which he then did himself.
When the Michigan baseball team stepped up to the plate Sunday, it was under pressure to produce. But back-and-forth offensive bursts between the Wolverines and Maryland kept the series win up in the air.
At least, until Michigan’s (1117 overall, 4-2 Big Ten) threerun early hot streak turned on the ignition for the offense that claimed the game in a 9-4 win over the Terrapins (20-8, 3-4).
Sunday’s win secured the series victory for the Wolverines and delivered Maryland’s first Big Ten series loss after 23-straight wins. The win wasn’t an easy one to earn for Michigan, though, and the Terrapins made it a fight throughout.
Sophomore right-hander
Mitch Voit held Maryland at bay, opening with three scoreless innings with three consecutive strikeouts across two innings and only one walk to his name, allowing the Wolverines to run out to a 3-0 lead. Shortly after, though, the fourth inning flipped the momentum of the game.
The first Terrapin batter Voit faced smacked a home run and started what became a trend
for the inning. Following after, Maryland notched a base hit and a two-RBI home run, tying the game at three apiece after just three batters. The Wolverines’ early dominance had fizzled out, and they needed to find a quick response. “You’re not playing the scoreboard,” Michigan coach Tracy Smith said. “Your bat shouldn’t change when you’re up or down.” Michigan listened to Smith’s advice, and with a tied game, its consistent bats responded to Maryland and held the scoreboard even until the fifth inning.
In the bottom of the fifth, Voit blasted a homer of his own, after giving two up from the mound. His crushed ball flew over the left field wall and brought graduate second baseman Mack Timbrook home as well, giving the Wolverines a two-run lead going into the seventh inning.
Michigan’s contact at the plate early and often kept it afloat against the consistent Maryland offense, but the Wolverines’ ability to continue executing at that level separated them. With the bats still connecting, they held tight to their two-run lead and picked up right where they left off at their next at-bats, continuing to put
balls in play and batters on base.
And eventually, Michigan’s hitting became contagious and infected the entire lineup.
After a scoreless response from the Terrapins for two innings, Timbrook cemented the Wolverines’ advantage for good. He sent a ball over the right-field wall with a threerun shot, ballooning Michigan’s lead to 9-4.
Timbrook’s impact was essential throughout the close game for Michigan. The Wolverines benefited from his two runs and three RBIs on three hits, which all helped counteract the Terrapins’ run production.
So when Michigan’s hot bats eventually cooled off in the eighth inning, it didn’t matter. Because at that point, the Wolverines already had the cushion from their previous heat to close out the win.
“We’re gonna hit, we’re gonna be professional, we’re gonna be mature and that was it today and this weekend,” Smith said.
Over the weekend, one thing the Wolverines didn’t struggle with was offense. The result of the plentiful hitting varied from tight losses to blowout wins. And on Sunday, it showed that when the Wolverines’ offense ignited, it was their win to take.
Besides throwing bullets on the mound, Voit also maintains the highest batting average for Michigan at .333. Voit was quiet at the plate for the beginning of the game, unable to reach base in first three plate appearances. But in the sixth inning, he came alive.
In the first pitch of his at-bat, Voit rocketed the ball over the left field wall, scoring himself and graduate second baseman Mack Timbrook and giving Michigan the edge it needed to secure the win.
“In one swing of the bat, which was a very crucial hit, in a two- out home run,” Smith said. “He tied the game, and I think it speaks to him, how focused he is and how he goes about his business.”
Beyond his play on the diamond, Voit adds a consistent
and calming presence to a dugout which is hyper-sensitive to momentum swings.
After a quick 1-2-3 frame in the eighth inning and a walk in the top of the ninth for Voit, Smith made the decision to put in sophomore right-hander Kurt Barr to close out the game on the mound for the Wolverines. After 108 pitches, seven hits and four runs, Voit’s afternoon on the mound was over.
While another inning remained, Voit’s impact was already enough to secure the win.
“He’s locked in and has a very mature approach,” Smith said. “… He has to lead by example because he wouldn’t say a word if he didn’t have to. He’s just a quiet guy that goes about his business.”
Once again, Sunday afternoon, he continued to be Michigan’s not-so-secret weapon. A dual threat providing both power at the plate and consistency on the mound, Voit gives the Wolverines a stable foundation in an ever-evolving lineup. And against Maryland, he was the X-factor.
of a team.”
Last season, the Michigan softball team dropped the ball in its series against Indiana. Giving up 25 runs over the course of the series – 15 of which were in a single game — the Hoosiers out-hit the Wolverines, who put up a measly seven runs. They outscored and ultimately outplayed Michigan.
But when Indiana (23-12 overall, 0-6 Big Ten) came face-to-face with the Wolverines (24-11, 6-0) one season later, a drastically different tale unfolded. This time, in its weekend matchup against the Hoosiers, Michigan’s offense surged to life, tallying 28 runs and outpacing Indiana’s offense for a 3-0 sweep.
“The energy was electric from the first pitch on Friday afternoon or early evening to the last pitch today (Sunday),” Michigan coach Bonnie Tholl said Sunday. “Every single person owned their part, owned their role; this was 100% a team effort as it should be.”
Despite coming out with electric energy, Michigan’s offense didn’t truly spark until later.
At the top of the second inning of the series opener on Friday, senior first baseman Keke Tholl whipped her bat around, unleashing a homer over the center-field wall for the Wolverines’ first run of the game.
Keeping pace with Michigan, though, Hoosiers infielder Sarah Stone followed a quick single with a homer over left field to take the lead, 3-1. This back-and-forth pattern continued as the lead changed between the Wolverines and Indiana four times before Michigan tied the game in the fourth inning and began to pick up speed.
With one out, junior left fielder Ellie Sieler’s mighty swing finally earned the tie-breaking RBI in the top of the fourth inning. While Sieler’s shot was ultimately caught deep in left field, it gave sophomore pinch runner Madi Ramey just enough time to slide home for the 6-5 lead.
The Wolverines found their stride with that blast, and they never looked back.
What followed was nothing short of an offensive surge. In the next three innings, Michigan totaled nine runs for a six-inning 15-6 run-rule victory over the Hoosiers. That score mirrored its second game against Indiana last season, except this time, the Wolverines were on the dealing end of the breakout in the batter’s box.
“The work ethic of this team is unmatched,” Bonnie said. “This is a team that cares deeply about getting better and growing, and if you saw us this weekend, they care deeply about each other’s successes. That is the coming together
While nearly every Wolverine found success at some point in the Michigan softball team’s dominant sweep of Indiana, the Wolverines’ freshmen were particularly stellar. And it was a series freshman right-hander Erin Hoehn had circled on her calendar. A native of Poseyville, Ind., Hoehn grew up just over 100 miles from Indiana’s campus in Bloomington.
And in her return to the Hoosier State, Hoehn reintroduced herself.
Hoehn went the distance in her lone start of the weekend, holding the Hoosiers to only one earned run on just four hits, earning her eleventh win of the season in the complete game. Early on this season, Hoehn has emerged as a dependable number two behind junior right-hander Lauren Derkowski, and her complete game this weekend is just more evidence of her emerging stardom.
“Erin was outstanding yesterday,” Michigan coach Bonnie Tholl said Sunday. “It was against her home state school, so there could be a lot of emotions that are tied to that. But she kept herself calm and under control. She’s a gamer.”
In Hoehn’s start on Friday, it was fellow freshman Ella Stephenson who provided key run support.
In the second inning, the right fielder followed up a leadoff triple from freshman outfielder Jenissa Conway with an RBI double to increase the Wolverines’ lead to 3-0. The next inning, Stephenson once again came up to bat with runners in scoring position. And again, she delivered, blasting another double to left-center to score two runs and provide added insurance for Hoehn.
Melding together created the avenue for Michigan’s flourishing offense over the weekend. In contrast to Friday’s slower start, the Wolverines wasted no time pouring on runs in their second game of the series.
With a mighty swing, sophomore third baseman Maddie Erickson blasted a two-run dinger to left-center field just one batter into the game. Michigan scored three more runs off two doubles in the second and third innings from the bat of freshman right fielder Ella Stephenson. The Hoosiers’ only run of the game came on a solo homer as the Wolverines’ offense soared ahead. Keke capped off the match with a home run and a double as Michigan cruised to a 7-1 win.
Energized by success, the Wolverines’ confidence never faltered.
While Michigan’s bats were initially hesitant to strike in the first game of the series, they struck immediately in the second matchup to earn the dominant win.
“The kids have worked really hard at making their strengths even stronger and to really recognize some of the deficiencies we may have had,” Bonnie said. “They’ve been committed to improving their game both defensively, base running, and offensively.”
As the Wolverines’ offense heated up, Stephenson wasn’t the only freshman who caught fire at the plate this weekend. Conway and freshman designated player Ava Costales got in on the action, too.
Compared to Hoehn, Stephenson’s freshman campaign did not get off to as strong a start. She was hitting just .156 entering the weekend, but her confidence never wavered. Against the Hoosiers, she took a step in the right direction. In addition to her three-RBI performance in Saturday’s win, she went 1-for-4 with an RBI in Friday’s win and 3-for-4 in Sunday’s win, including a two-RBI single in the third. “This is a kid who’s just competitively mature beyond her freshman year … she still had a belief in her own ability,” Michigan coach Bonnie Tholl said. “Sometimes it takes a little bit of experience in game to really blossom when you’re a freshman. And I think we’re seeing her game blossom right now.”
On Sunday, Conway crushed a two-run home run to right-center field, contributing to the Wolverines’ 10-run barrage. Despite her inexperience, Conway’s eight home runs on the season are tied for the most on Michigan, and her power is particularly valuable in a lineup primarily made up of contact hitters.
Similarly, Costales helped Michigan’s offense pour it on. In Friday’s 15-6 win, she hit a tworun single in the fifth inning to put the Wolverines up 9-5, ballooning the lead out of the Hooisers’ reach. After Michigan eventually went up 14-6, Costales kept the train rolling, poking an RBI single to left field to drive in Stephenson.
While key veterans anchor the Wolverines’ lineup and pitching rotation, the emergence of Michigan’s freshmen has made the entire order a threat to opposing pitchers and provided depth behind Derkowski in the rotation. That was evident against Indiana.
“We feel really good that we can count on anyone up and down the lineup, whether it’s offensively or defensively,” Tholl said. “It’s a great thing when you can count on each other to execute different roles.”
With those returning anchors, Michigan knew it had some players who could keep it afloat. But as the freshmen shined against Indiana, the Wolverines showed off a deep lineup that can challenge the Big Ten’s best this season.
SportsMonday: This is the start of the Dusty May era, not a return to John Beilein
Don’t hope for Dusty May to be John Beilein. Don’t ask for Dusty May to be John Beilein. Don’t expect Dusty May to be John Beilein.
As much as the Michigan men’s basketball team wants to return to Beilein-era levels of success, expecting that to happen now in the same way it happened then is counterproductive. If this is going to work — if May makes it work — he’s going to have to do it his way. This is his vision and his program. It’s not athletic director Warde Manuel’s program, it’s not Beilein’s program, it’s not your favorite Michigan internet personality’s program. It’s Dusty May’s program.
Usually, that would go with -
out saying. A new coach being brought in for a fresh start often signals the start of a new era, and in some ways May’s hiring has. The Maize Rage student section briefly named itself “May’s Rage” on Twitter, while the Champions Circle NIL collective started a “March with May” fundraising campaign.
But there have also been plenty of signs pointing to the past.
Namely, the hiring process itself. After countless fans reminisced on the Beilein era as this past season turned sour and Beilein was floated over and over again as a potential successor for Juwan Howard despite already being his predecessor, the Wolverines indeed turned his direction after Howard was shown the door. While they didn’t appear to seriously consider hiring Beilein — the one
way they actually could have marked the return of the Beilein era — the former Michigan coach was a key consultant for Manuel during the coaching search, quickly connecting with May after the hiring.
“We spent an hour and a half on Tuesday, just (Beilein) and I,” Manuel said Tuesday. “And then we spent two hours on Wednesday going through every candidate that we looked at, every coach that we looked at. And at the end of it, I told him who my target was and he said, ‘Well, that’s great. Let me also do some analysis for you and analytics and all that stuff.’ And he came back and told me what he saw.”
There’s nothing wrong with involving Beilein and leaning on his expertise to select the next coach — he’s a Michigan coaching legend and any help
he offers should be more than welcome for a team coming off its worst season in program history. But the next coach has now been selected, and his name isn’t John Beilein. So for all the times that Beilein’s name was mentioned in May’s introductory press conference for his role in the search, the mentorship he’s provided to May and the amount of respect May has for him, it’s time for Michigan to fully embrace that this is indeed a new era — not an extension of an old one.
The Wolverines didn’t hire Beilein, and the success Beilein had in Ann Arbor came at a time when college athletics as a whole was damn-near unrecognizable compared to what is now. As similar as you may want May to be to Beilein, he’ll have to be damn-near unrecog-
nizable compared to Beilein in certain respects in order to find success here.
That means leaving Beilein’s name, image and likeness out of May’s program blueprint, because May will have to win in the NIL sphere — something Beilein never had to worry about. It means leaving Beilein’s low-profile recruiting strategy that worked so well for Michigan out of May’s M.O., because May can leverage his programbuilding experience and Michigan’s brand to snag even bigger fish. That’s much needed for a roster with only four scholarship players on it right now, as slowly developing three-star projects by itself just won’t cut it. And it means leaving Beilein’s stellar track record at Michigan in his era, not this one. Because May was hired to win in
the 2020s, not the 2010s — with conference games on the Pacific coast and players appearing in commercials for your local Chevy dealers. The game has changed, and Michigan is changing with it. Its extremely successful former coach helped the Wolverines pick a new one, but expecting May to be like Beilein is unnecessary. This is May’s show now, and to find success he’ll have to do it his way.
So hope for Dusty May to be Dusty May, who guided a previously-unheralded Florida Atlantic program to six straight winning seasons and two NCAA Tournaments. Ask for Dusty May to be the Dusty May that brought a program previously without an NCAA Tournament win to the Final Four. Expect Dusty May to be Dusty May, and no one else.
It’s around 10 p.m. on a Friday night and we’re just returning to the press box at Yost Ice Arena. The flash gamer is in, we finished our post-game interviews and it’s time to get going on our stories.
But first, we have to debrief.
We roll our chairs into a circle, knees touching in the center, and we start chatting. We talk about everything, from the interviews to potential story ideas to embarrassing moments in our classes that day. We should probably be writing, but we can’t help ourselves. No matter where the conversation takes us, we’re always laughing — oftentimes at each other.
We always end up finishing our stories, and we’re proud of the work that we produce when it’s all said and done. But above all, there’s one thing that we are especially proud of:
The bond the four of us have built along the way.
We — Lys Goldman, Rekha Leonard, Anna Miller and Ellie Richard — are the four women who make up The Michigan Daily’s men’s ice hockey beat. While we could write an essay about what it’s like to work in a maledominated space, what sticks out most is the underlying friendship that has defined our past eight months.
It started from day one. We didn’t know each other that well, but even after covering just one game together this season, we knew there was something special about this group. After we finished writing off the home opener at Yost, we didn’t want the night to end. We packed up our bags and ventured to the nearest Domino’s Pizza, grabbing an assortment of shareables and bringing them to one of our houses. Still in our suits, we congregated around the dining table to munch on our cheesy bread and garlic knots, giggling and sharing stories. We got to know each other very well, especially as stressful mo-
ments on the job came our way. Whether we were writing about close games or navigating tense situations, we figured it out together. The collaborative energy fostered a safe environment in which we leaned on one another for input and support, helping us to produce the best content we could.
Nowhere was this more evident than at the ‘Duel in the D’ in Detroit. With all of us writing a story off the game, we started talking through all of our ideas as soon as we returned from pressers. We knew that someone should write a column because there was something there, but we were struggling to figure out exactly what we wanted to say.
So, back in our circle of chairs
again, we talked through it together.
Putting our other stories on hold, we started spitballing story ideas and angles. Most of us didn’t even start writing until after midnight. We were tired, but we were fired up, all four of us passionate about making it work even though it would end up with only one byline. Building off of each other’s
ideas, we ended up finding the right angle that best characterized the moment.
And that collaboration has traveled across state lines.
Long road trips — of which we’ve had plenty of this season — tend to test patience, but we’ve never run into trouble. Even during weekends when we spent every waking moment together, our friendship shone through.
Within the last month, we drove to and from Minneapolis twice. We braved the 10-hour trek and jammed to our collaborative playlist, singing our hearts out to “Minnesota” by Lil Yachty as we crossed the state border. It felt like the fun never ended, even when we got to the arena. We sang and danced before the game, laughed about our tummy problems and snapped plenty of pictures. Through it all, we felt welcomed and respected by everyone in the Michigan hockey program. It was especially nice to see other empowered women in the room, women who have looked out for us and made us feel like we had a place.
And that brings us to where we are today. We drove down to St. Louis on Friday, coming straight to the arena and doing our makeup together in the bathroom. Singing along to “Forever & Always (Taylor’s Version)” by Taylor Swift, we smiled and felt like it represented our beat’s connection.
Now, covering the NCAA Regional Final, we’ve come a long way from that first home game. In two weeks, we’re going back to Minnesota to cover a Frozen Four. But as we write this story, we’re still in that same circle. We’re brainstorming, giggling and doing it together.
The No. 2 Michigan women’s tennis team came into its match against Indiana this Saturday on an eight-game winning streak with the hopes to extend that streak. And it did exactly that.
Steamrolling over the Hoosiers (6-14 overall, 0-5 Big Ten), the Wolverines (17-3 overall, 6-0 Big Ten) continued on their unperturbed path of dominance in quick fashion with a speedy 4-0 victory. The afternoon began with a series of doubles matches that quickly set the tone of day. All three Michigan pairs won their first game of doubles. Seniors Jaedan Brown and Gala Mesochoritou were first to finish their match, taking it 6-1 on the back of their fluid backcourt play and strong volleys. Soon after, freshmen Reese Miller and Piper Charney swept their set 6-0 and secured the doubles point. “Doubles gave me some confidence going into (singles),” Miller said. “The doubles have been giving me a lot of confidence, especially getting a 6-0 win like that.” Riding high on confidence,
Miller came out striking in her first singles set. Her steadiness from doubles clearly translated to singles. She forced her opponent into a game of keepup, running across the court to keep up with well-placed shots off strong rallies. She controlled her first set almost completely, taking it 6-1.
Miller’s second set was more tiring. Miller and her Indiana counterpart Magdalena Swierczynska battered each other down with strong, unyielding volleys. In the final game, three points from Miller’s victory, Swierczynska unwisely changed tactics and offered a soft sly shot to sneak over the net, trying to catch Miller off guard.
Miller was all too ready to pounce. “I was excited to see that shot, I needed to run as fast as I could, ” Miller said. “I like being on the net. So, I knew if I could get that back and hit a good shot I could get a good volley.”
Miller won her second set with a deceptively dominant 6-1 score, earning the second point of the day for the Wolverines.
Sophomore Lily Jones, whose doubles match ended early due to the swiftness of her teammates, blazed through
her first singles match on Court Four. Jones moved across the court as though she knew its every inch. With anticipation she awaited her opponent’s returns, and with speed she delivered slicing shots to sweep her first set 6-0.
Jones’ second set saw her struggle, losing her first two games narrowly on court. The pace of play, though, stayed the same as Jones and her opponent flung powerful lines across the court each vying for an advantage. Jones found her footing after that second game, and finished the set, off with an ace 6-4 taking the third point for Michigan.
Mesochoritou was less dominant in her first match against Hoosier Nicole Teodosescu, starting her first set down 1-2. But after a strong fourth game, Mesochoritou upped the aggression in her playstyle forcing a faster pace. She tiredly pushed through her first set, taking it 6-4.
Mesochoritou’s second set was much smoother than her first. Mesochoritou won her first few games of the second set, barely outdueling her opponent, but found her spots to earn the point. It quickly became Mesochoritou’s game with strong play from the back-
court to retain
tracurriculars was almost inevitable in a matchup like this. Tensions ran high from start to finish, with 10 total penalties levied throughout the night.
MARYLAND HEIGHTS, Mo. — ‘Little brother’ had all but lost its meaning.
The Michigan hockey team was riding a four-game losing streak against its biggest rival. Highlighted by a Big Ten Championship victory just last weekend, Michigan State had taken thorough control of the rivalry. The Wolverines couldn’t claim the Spartans as their ‘little brother’ anymore.
In fact, Michigan State could’ve made a case to turn the moniker on its head.
But on Sunday, with everything on the line, Michigan brought its meaning back.
Behind another late-game surge, the third-seeded Wolverines (23-14-3 overall, 12-11-2 Big Ten) got their revenge over the top-seeded Spartans (25-10-3, 16-7-3) in the NCAA Regional Final. With the 5-2 win, Michigan ended Michigan State’s season and earned its third straight Frozen Four berth.
“We came into this game with the mentality to just win a game, not for personal battles or to get involved in all that extracurriculars after the whistles,” junior forward Dylan Duke said. “We came to win a hockey game, and we did that tonight.”
Although it wasn’t part of the game plan, getting involved in ex-
The Spartans were the first to capitalize, cashing in on an early power-play opportunity and jumping out to a 1-0 lead. The Wolverines created a number of quality chances in hopes of responding, but their shots either skidded wide or were turned away by Michigan State goaltender Trey Augustine.
Midway through the second period, though, Michigan broke through and scored an equalizer.
Spurred by quick passes on the rush, junior defenseman Ethan Edwards found space to shoot and made the most of it, sniping one past Augustine to knot the score at 1-1.
Throughout the rest of the second — and especially on the penalty kill — graduate goaltender Jake Barczewski heated up in net. He turned away a number of good looks from the Spartans, preserving the tie as the Wolverines slowed down on offense.
So it all came down to the final period. Twenty more minutes with everything up for grabs. A ticket to the Frozen Four was at the forefront, but for the Wolverines, revenge and name-calling rights were in the back of their minds.
And in a dominant final stretch, Michigan earned it all. “If you watched our team early
in the year, we had a couple of rough third periods,” Duke said. “We talked about learning from them for moments like this. We learned all year … and it showed the past few nights.”
About six minutes into the third frame, graduate defenseman Marshall Warren fired a one-timer from the doorstep and found the back of the net, giving the Wolverines a one-goal advantage. It didn’t last long, as the Spartans stormed back with another powerplay goal. But after Michigan State pushed, Michigan shoved.
Just a few minutes after the Spartans tied it back up at 2-2, junior forward Dylan Duke took matters into his own hands. Duke charged to the net, eluding three Michigan State defensemen before stuffing the puck behind Augustine.
The Wolverines barely had time to celebrate that go-ahead goal before scoring another. Picking up a cinematic between-the-legs pass from sophomore forward Frank Nazar III, sophomore forward Gavin Brindley put Michigan up 4-2, just 12 seconds after Duke’s score. “It’s huge,” Brindley told The Michigan Daily. “I think any shift after a goal is big with the momentum. So anytime you’re on the ice after a goal, you try to keep that momentum. That was a big goal for sure.”
HEIGHTS, Mo. — The Wolverines’ two leading scorers did what they do best. With just over seven minutes to
play and the game tied, it was do or die for the No. 3 seed Michigan hockey team. So junior forward Dylan Duke and sophomore forward Gavin Brindley lived up to their billing. In the span of 12 seconds, Duke and Brindley broke the game open
with back-to-back goals. Their avalanche buried No. 1 seed Michigan State and swept the Wolverines to a statement win and thirdstraight Frozen Four berth. Duke created his game-changing goal with an almost entirely solo effort. After receiving a pass
MARYLAND HEIGHTS, Mo. — Down 1-0 in the second period, a game-tying goal was imminent.
The No. 3 seed Michigan hockey team had picked up some momentum, and there was no way it would let No. 1 seed Michigan State grow the deficit. Then a three-on-two opportunity emerged, and instead of the typical forward slamming the puck home, it was junior defenseman Ethan Edwards who took charge.
The Wolverines’ 5-2 victory over Michigan State can be described as a lot of things — a barnburner, an upset, redemption — but without the defensemen, it would’ve been none of those things.
Two defensemen — graduate Marshall Warren and Edwards — jumpstarted Michigan’s offense with its first two goals of the game. And without the rest of the core blocking shots in the crease, the game and the ending would’ve looked very different.
A different Michigan-based team could’ve been heading to the Frozen Four.
“On the back end I thought we were awesome,” sophomore forward Frank Nazar III said. “The plays we were able to make out of our zone and just being able to step up in that position when guys are out is just amazing, and they came at the right time. We all knew those guys could do it and were just really proud of them.”
The Wolverines are known for one offensive defenseman, in particular sophomore Seamus Casey. With him absent due to injury, the entire Michigan roster recognized the hole Casey left in its gameplay. While the Wolverines could’ve had one player attempt to fill Casey’s shoes, they took a different approach — each defenseman utilized their own skillset to make up the spaces that Casey typically claims.
It was clear the defensemen were adapting to their updated roles in the second period — especially Edwards. Despite being down 1-0, Michigan still had plenty of time to get one past Spartans netminder Trey Augustine. Picking up the puck in the defensive zone, freshman forward Garrett Schifksy started an
Michigan State took another penalty in the waning minutes, giving the Wolverines their fifth power-play opportunity — and this time, they capitalized. Duke scored his second of the game, and Michigan iced the victory with just under two minutes left.
offensive push but was ultimately knocked down by a Michigan State skater. However, the puck made it to sophomore forward T.J. Hughes, who brought it up to the blue line and passed to junior forward Dylan Duke. With Schifsky back due to his tumble, Edwards made up the space as a third forward and found himself unmarked with the angle to send a ripper to the back of the net, tying up the game at one.
“Ethan Edwards had a goal and two assists,”
“We got that big goal at the end,” Nazar said. “Yeah, we gave up two on the PK but we were able to score that one on the power play at the end and shut the game down.”
Even without one of their most
from sophomore forward T.J. Hughes, Duke carried the puck from his own defensive zone all the way across the ice to the other side of the goal. Just before he reached the goal line, he curled in front of the net, bringing the puck across the crease before tipping it in at the last second.
Spartans goaltender Trey Augustine splayed out attempting to span the length of the goal, but Duke was too quick. He beat Augustine handily, burying the puck in the net. His teammates reacted accordingly, mobbing him when he took his high-five lap past the bench, finishing the coast-tocoast rush in celebratory fashion.
“Just got a nice pass in the neutral zone, took a (defenseman) wide and just cut to the net,” Duke said. “Was fortunate to be able to bury that one.”
Augustine hardly had time to drink his water before another Michigan shot found the back of his net. Duke’s go-ahead goal gave the Wolverines the lead, but Brindley’s goal just 12 seconds later was the dagger. And it was
built from what Michigan coach Brandon Naurato termed a “gamebreaking play” by sophomore forward Frank Nazar III.
With Michigan State players closing in on him, Nazar slipped a backhand pass through his legs for Brindley. Brindley took full advantage of the highlight-reel play and capped it off with a one-timer for the goal. It wasn’t the first time Nazar had tried to set Brindley up for that shot, but Brindley capitalized on it at the right moment.
“I’ve done it a few times, but it’s never worked out, the goalie has always made the save,” Nazar said. “So I was really excited to see Gavin bury that one. … At (National Team Development Program) I actually gave him a nice one, same exact play, and he just fanned on it like it went in the corner. He got it back there, though. I’d rather him score that goal than the other one.”
After Brindley’s goal, the Wolverines were in the driver’s seat. On the power play with less than three minutes left, the game was all but over. But Brindley and
Duke’s games weren’t. Eight seconds into the power play, Brindley rocketed a shot from the top of the circle. Duke, waiting right above the crease, barely tipped the puck in for his second goal of the game.
“(Duke’s) probably the most consistent guy in our locker room,” junior defenseman Ethan Edwards said. “He knows his game, gets to the net and buries. He’s been scoring on an insane level right now, so I’m just super proud of him.”
With his two goals on Sunday and four total on the weekend, Duke just eclipsed Brindley as Michigan’s leading scorer, with 26 goals to Brindley’s 25. But surely neither player cares about that statistic very much with a trip to the Frozen Four now on the horizon.
Duke and Brindley’s back-toback goals sucked the life out of Michigan State in a mere 12 seconds. And after dominating the scoresheet all season, it was fitting that their joint effort iced the game — all just doing what they do best.
The beginning of the game didn’t start as glamorous as the end, though. The Wolverines dug themselves into an early hole as the Spartans scored a power-play goal that slipped five-hole in the first period. For a Michigan State squad with a strong goaltender of its own, this did not signal the strong start that Michigan was seeking.
Nevertheless, it didn’t take long for Barczewski to settle into the game and find his rhythm. The second period highlighted this best. Time and time again, Barczewski came up huge, bailing out his defenseman for miscues around the net front.
“I mean he had 100 freaking people here,” sophomore forward Frank Nazar III said. “It’s like we’re almost playing a home game because it’s DJ Brazos’ home. It’s awesome. I just love the guy to death and I’m so happy for him.”
And Barczewski continued to give people something to cheer about as the game progressed. Michigan added to its goal total four times in the third period, and Barczewski had an answer for every Michigan State response. Despite Michigan’s struggles with the third period throughout the season, and against Michigan State in recent games,
Eleven minutes into the second period, the Spartans were assessed a minor penalty for boarding. Michigan enjoyed the man advantage for a matter of seconds before turning the puck over to Michigan State in the center of the ice. The Spartans were given a scoring opportunity, but Barczewski made sure that an opportunity was all that they would get. Barczewski flashed his glove to make the save, snatching the puck out of mid-air. He then followed up this save with another stop with his right pad, allowing the Wolverines to leave the period tied at one goal apiece. Loud cheers erupted from the stands as family, friends and fans saluted Barczewski for his efforts.
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In observance of Women’s History Month, The Daily’s sports section is launching its seventh annual series aimed at telling the stories of female athletes, coaches and teams at the University from the perspective of the female writers on staff.
How
‘What about the
It’s a lot easier to row a boat when everyone puts their oars in the water. But that’s not enough to push forward. Where it gets tricky is when everyone rows at their own pace, as individuals rather than a team.
Keeping everyone in unison falls on the coxswain.
That’s why the coxswain sits on the stern of the boat guiding its team to row in unison. Their eyes aren’t on the finish line but, instead, on their rowers, leading them there. In the metaphorical Michigan women’s head coaching rowboat, Carol Hutchins, former softball coach legend, serves as the coxswain.
However, even though the coxswain leads and steers, it takes everyone on the boat to row — it takes a ‘One Michigan’ mentality.
“We’re all rowing the boat in the same direction,” Michigan volleyball coach Erin Virtue told The Michigan Daily.
And it’s an accomplished group of women rowing that boat. The likes of Virtue, an Olympic coach, Michigan lacrosse coach Hannah Nielson, whose team is ranked second in the country for the first time in program history, not to mention Wolverines women’s basketball coach Kim Barnes Arico, who has led her team to the NCAA Tournament every year since 2017 are just a few of the many proven coaches. The ultimate Michigan leader, Hutchins, is the winningest coach in Wolverines history. But she’s not just the winningest coach, she’s someone who set the culture at Michigan to strive for greatness and empower each other in the community of female coaches.
Wolverines women’s soccer coach Jen Klein stated that this kind of teamwork generates a ‘One Michigan’ mentality that supports greatness among the women head coaches. Being a head coach is isolating — after all, it’s lonely at the top. But having a sup-
female coaches create a culture of uplifting each other as a team
port system of women with the shared goal of greatness allows them to pick each other’s brains and learn from distinguished leaders. Being a woman in that distinguished position is difficult, and having each other makes the crown they wear a little less heavy.
“Something that definitely drew me to the University is that I wanted to learn from the best in the business, and the best in the business for me were our women’s coaches,” Barnes Arico told The Daily. “I mean so many times everyone talks about our football coach or our men’s basketball coach, but really, the unbelievable women that we have here … is second to none.”
The female coaches at Michigan have established a culture and community of lifting each other up and supporting one another. But that wasn’t always the case.
In fact, there was a time in the sports industry when women would break each other down and climb on each other’s backs to get to the top. According to Barnes Arico, that time is done and dusted at Michigan. Instead, they’re lifting each other to the top. After all, the goal for any head coach is the same: To win.
Different coaches have different strengths. Some might be beasts at recruiting and others lethal at set pieces. Although these coaches lead different sports, they understand the value of looking to one another for things they can implement in their own system. Nielson often frequents Barnes Arico’s practices to pick up on any techniques and practice drills she can translate from basketball to lacrosse. Virtue has sought out Wolverines field hockey coach Marcia Pankratz for her recruiting expertise. Although Virtue is newer to the head coaching ring at Michigan, Pankratz’s support ensured that she didn’t have to start from the ground up, but instead, she could build off the others around her. No coach has to start from scratch when they can lean on the experience of their team of coaches.
Hutchins puts it best: “The greatest resources we have are each other.”
And even when they’re not looking to pick up new tactics, they’re there to support each other’s achievements with just as much enthusiasm and care as their own. That was evident when the Wolverines field hockey team won the 2022 Big Ten Championship.
When the clocks hit triple zeros in
Columbus, Ohio, the women’s head coaches rushed to celebrate Pankratz. One “let’s meet here” text and an hour later, the group had gathered to celebrate Pakratz’s achievement.
Another example of the support the coaches provide is when Virtue snapped the Michigan volleyball team’s losing streak against Ohio State. The texts of support and congratulations came flying in for the secondyear coach. Because sometimes, it’s as little as a supportive text when a coach is having a good season or wins a rivalry match, celebrating every moment together, big or small. The women told stories of the celebration when their teams were at their highest, yet the ‘One Michigan’ mentality has carried them through their lows just the same.
The connections and bonds they’ve nurtured are pivotal to a more abstract support network that goes beyond the bounds of their individual programs. Michigan athletics facilities keep departments pretty separated, in varying buildings along the long corridor of State Street. Though that presents a challenge, it doesn’t keep the female coaches separated.
ESPN’s SportsCenter has a daily segment highlighting the top ten plays in all of sports that day. And on Feb. 14, the No.1 spot was held by sophomore attacker Jill Smith from the Michigan women’s lacrosse team.
Smith took a pass in transition from a teammate with all of her momentum moving down to the ground. Before she hit the grass, she swung her stick behind her head to sink a shot in the left corner of the goalie’s net.
A women’s lacrosse game made national news due to Smith’s highlight-reel shot. A clip on a broadcast might be a small moment for the casual viewer, but it was significantly meaningful coming from Smith, who has spent years playing lacrosse in Michigan while navigating a sport dominated by the East Coast.
Smith’s spirit was clear as she jumped into her teammates’ arms after being picked up off the ground. The execution and commitment showcased in the viral video are the exact qualities that have propelled her journey since the beginning of her athletic career. That drive started in elementary school when she first grabbed a stick.
But before that, she had another love. Smith grew up in a basketball household. Her dad played basketball at two different colleges and her brothers played as well. Smith was no different as she lettered through four years of high school ball.
A young Jill Smith holds a ball in her stick as she prepares to pass.
Courtesy of Kristin Smith
“Whatever sport she played, whether it was basketball, softball or lacrosse, she was super competitive,” Jill’s dad, Brian, told The Michigan Daily. “That always kind of separated her at a young age, and it’s funny to see that’s still kind of her thing now.”
But some saw a different spark when Jill picked up her first lacrosse stick in fifth grade. Her travel team coach, Chris Merucci, who coached her from the beginning of her lacrosse career up until college, saw innate talent from day one.
“So when I met her and she put a lacrosse stick in her hand, we were immediately floored,” Merucci told The Daily. “The number one thing about Jill was at even 11, 12, 13 years old, (there) was a level of competitiveness and tenacity that you don’t see at a younger age.”
Her overall competitiveness didn’t stop when she found lacrosse in the fifth grade. Her natural athletic ability
and desire to win couldn’t be contained to just one sport early on. But no matter what sport she played, her competitive flare was clear. When she was in elementary school, her friends wanted her to join their soccer team just because they believed Jill could help them win the championship.
The intensity of Jill’s play showed positive results. When she decided to pursue lacrosse alone, she knew the odds were against her. While playing club lacrosse in Michigan helped her hone her skills, Jill had to compete against the East Coast teams that dominated the lacrosse world. She sought out opportunities to be seen, playing for teams out of Maryland and Chicago. Those showings gave Jill the chance to compete against skilled and talented players who likely were surrounded by the sport from a young age.
A young Jill Smith cradles the ball.
Even though Jill was traveling around the country to get her chance to play the best, it didn’t interfere with her high school career. She lettered in three years, with her junior year being canceled due to COVID-19, and her competitiveness didn’t waver through the seasons.
Few people get the opportunity to meet the players and coaches of their favorite team. For senior Molly Simpson — a lifelong Michigan women’s basketball fan — that’s just the tip of the iceberg. She’s had the chance to go behind the scenes and work as a student manager for her favorite team.
“I grew up like 40 minutes away from here in North Farmington,” Simpson told The Michigan Daily. “My dad went to Michigan so I was always watching the men’s and women’s basketball games at Michigan growing up.”
Whether it was on TV or in the stands at Crisler Center, Simpson followed the Wolverines all throughout her childhood. As a basketball player herself,
Simpson surrounded herself with the sport, earning a varsity letter all four years at North Farmington High School. When she graduated, she knew her playing days were over. But she didn’t want her involvement with the sport to end along with it.
And in her junior year of college, she finally found a way to stay connected.
“Someone (in my class) started talking about it and I overheard them and was like, ‘Are you guys like looking for people?’ or ‘How does that process work?’ ” Simpson said. “I gave them my email. And then I was talking back and forth with the grad assistant, and found a time to meet up with them. … It just kind of happened to fall right into my lap when I was just sitting in class one day.”
Simpson was in a basketball environment once again; this time, it had the added bonus of being for a team she ad-
mired. At first, the transition from fan to staff took some adjustment. While taking a tour of the athletic facilities, she was in awe of the state-of-the-art equipment and got to spend time with the team she had looked up to for years.
But she struggled at first to get comfortable in the new environment, feeling like just a face in the crowd of other student managers.
The Michigan women’s basketball team smiles for the camera at the Jumpman Invitational.
“I was pretty much mesmerized by all the facilities and especially the coaching staff, I’ve (grown) up watching them,” Simpson said. “… I’m very fortunate to be able to just be involved in the day-today things.”
Simpson has gone from a fan behind the screen to having a front-row seat to the Wolverines’ games. She gets front-
row seats in other aspects of the program, too.
When Michigan practices or warms up before a home game, she gets to the facility up to an hour before the players do to set up cones, prepare water bottles, check the air in the basketballs and have everything else ready for the team. And once the players do show up, she spends the rest of the time rebounding and passing, staying after practices to help the athletes get extra shots up.
In her first year, Simpson didn’t get the chance to travel on the road with the team. Now in her second season, Simpson has an expanded role of attending some away games and tracking the plus/ minus of the Wolverines at those matchups, staying involved with the game by helping with statistics.
Read more at michigandaily.com
MILLER & ELLIE RICHARD Daily Sports Writers
When talking about her decision to become head coach of the Michigan women’s hockey team, Jenna Trubiano put it plainly:
“It was one of the best decisions I’ve made.”
And her appointment was equally beneficial for the program. In her tenure, the Wolverines have made significant strides — especially since her own time donning a Michigan sweater.
No one knows the program better than Trubiano. As a 2017 Michigan graduate and women’s hockey alum, she’s been part of the team in more ways than one. Battling adversity in her collegiate career to the tune of a hip surgery and a broken leg, Trubiano learned the importance of hard work and dedication early on. After she returned under a new role — becoming head coach in 2021 — she was wellequipped to lead the team through a new era.
And in this new era, Trubiano recognizes the need for a competitive women’s hockey team on campus. Given that it’s not a varsity sport, she puts in the work to make sure it’s not perceived as any less than that.
Over the past three seasons, the Wolverines have continued to ascend to new heights. While most programs can divide responsibilities such as recruit-
ment, social media and coaching among numerous members of their staff, Trubiano oversees almost every aspect of her team. And as a result of her hard work, it’s become a competitive and desirable program for female hockey players.
“The past two seasons, specifically this season, we have the most competitive roster we’ve ever had,” Trubiano told The Michigan Daily. “ … Ultimately, the mission of our program is to compete for and win a national championship. So we need competitive players.”
Recruitment for Michigan women’s hockey is its own beast, as it doesn’t follow the typical NCAA route as a club sport. Each player Trubiano wants to recruit has to get into the University on their academic prowess first — a stark contrast to Division I varsity programs and many of the teams the Wolverines compete against. When your roster relies solely on admissions decisions, and Michigan is already a difficult school to get into, the final lineup isn’t really in your control.
And by April when regular decisions roll out, most prospective collegiate hockey players have already made up their minds.
But over the past few seasons, the women’s hockey team has seen tremendous growth in its recruiting network. And Trubiano is leading the charge. She is more than willing to go the extra mile to foster relationships with players interested in the program — even if that effort
comes with a price.
“This past season, I really tried to go to those high-level, tier-one showcases where we’ve never had a presence before,” Trubiano said. “We don’t have much of a recruiting budget, so when I do travel it’s out of my own pocket, but it’s something that, for us to grow, we need a presence at.”
In spite of this barrier, both for Trubiano and recruits, it’s clear Michigan has a hockey culture that players aspire to be a part of. So much so that players will transfer from their Division I teams to don the maize and blue.
Take junior forward Kelsey Swanson for example. Swanson transferred and became a Wolverine after playing a year of Division I hockey at Long Island University. Since then, she’s tallied 17 points in her club career. And junior forward Lucy Hanson, a transfer from Division I hockey at Franklin Pierce, has 25 points for Michigan this season alone.
Most of the Wolverines on Trubiano’s roster were given Division I and Division III offers to play collegiate hockey. And yet, they still chose Trubiano and Michigan.
“When people hear the word club, it puts a bad taste in their mouth,” Trubiano said. “ … When I talk about our program, I call it a program, not a club. Technically we are a club sport at the University of Michigan, but we are a program on and off the ice. And having players that have played at the highest level
of collegiate women’s hockey, that chose to (transfer) to Michigan … it says a lot.”
Despite its club sport status — and no social media manager on the job — Trubiano, alongside players and staff, has worked to grow the platform as much as possible. The Michigan women’s hockey team’s social media has amassed 11,000 followers on Instagram, where followers can expect a feed full of fun graphics and energetic game-day videos. Trubiano and company brand the program on the same level as varsity programs on campus.
And despite all the hats that Trubiano wears for her team, it isn’t even her fulltime job. Outside of her intense work for the program, she works as a full-time sales associate for public health companies.
Having a part-time coach is an unusual sight for a top-10 team making it to the national tournament. Among the 10 teams playing in the tournament this season, only two compete without the luxury of a full-time head coach — Michigan is one of those two schools.
Even while juggling two vastly different jobs, Trubiano still finds the time in her busy schedule to work on the program.
And her hard work hasn’t come without results. This year, Michigan earned a coveted spot in the ACHA National Tournament, the second year in a row that the Wolverines have achieved that feat. Despite exiting the tournament earlier than desired, this season revealed that the upward trajectory of the team remains steady.
This success is not only a representation of the growth of the program under Trubiano’s young tutelage, but also a reflection of the dedication of players and staff alike.
“We take (hockey) really seriously,” Trubiano said. “We are the only women’s hockey program at the University of Michigan, and we hold ourselves to a really high standard. It’s just really exciting to see the growth that we’ve had, and I’m super fortunate to be a part of it.”
Not only is Trubiano part of it, but she’s the one leading it. Without her at the helm, this tangible growth wouldn’t exist. So whether or not Michigan women’s hockey receives varsity status in the near future, the program will be successful if Trubiano is leading the way.
GRACE WRIGHT Daily Sports Writer
When Karen Heimke enrolled at Eastern Michigan her freshman year, she had no intention of joining the dance team, much less coaching it. Eventually though, peers enticed her to the studio and the Eagles dance team. Amid a season of leadership turnover and transitions, Heimke made her presence known on the team.
Halfway through Heimke’s freshman season, the head coach of the Eastern Michigan dance team decided to leave the program. With the move, the team became completely studentrun and received minimal support or guidance from the university itself. Heimke was eventually handed the reins of the program and became the head coach her freshman year.
She quite literally fell into coaching.
She had begun college with the dance team not even on her mind, but suddenly she was the face of it. In an instant a colossal amount of responsibility was placed on Heimke’s shoulders. At age 18, she was now accountable for the actions of 26 other dancers.
“I didn’t love it at first,” Heimke told The Michigan Daily. “But I saw it as a necessity, and if I didn’t do it I didn’t know if anyone would. (I thought) if someone doesn’t take charge, or someone doesn’t do it, then will it be there?”
Quickly, Heimke learned how to advocate for herself and her team. Though she initially had no intention
of having any involvement with the dance team, she wound up spending her collegiate years advocating to the university for the importance of the dance team within its community.
Heimke has brought that same advocate mentality with her as the first year head coach for the Wolverines. And after years of honing her craft, that mindset has only grown.
Introduced to Michigan as a Universal Dance Association (UDA) nationals consultant, Heimke has since worked her way through the program, eventually earning an assistant coaching role. Then in 2022, the team experienced significant administration transitions and Heimke stepped up and became interim head coach, shepherding the team to finish the 2022 season. Ahead of the 2023 season she was named fulltime head coach.
“When she became head coach I was really excited to see what she’d do with the team,” Michigan assistant coach Deanna Dwyer told The Daily.
What she wound up doing with the team went far beyond dance itself. Heimke implemented a system that subverts the outdated principles much of the dance community experiences.
The world of dance has commonly been criticized for being negative and toxic, full of cutthroat individuals and out-of-date values. While no one person could possibly create an industry-wide transition, Heimke is certainly making sure that those outdated principles don’t make their way into her studio.
‘If you want something done, do it yourself’: Bev Plocki’s journey of determinationMADISON AUCHINCLOSS Daily Sports Writer
In 1990, Jack Weidenbach, the University of Michigan’s then-athletic director, had a decision to make. The women’s gymnastics team was failing. It had finished dead last in the Big Ten the previous year, and its coach, Dana Kempthorn had resigned to “pursue other interests.” The program needed a new voice — someone who could shake up the team and breathe life into it. So he looked to West Virginia and took a chance on its young assistant coach, Beverly Fry.
What he didn’t know was that she would go on to become one of the most successful coaches in the Big Ten and lead the Wolverines to their first NCAA National Championship in 2021, making Michigan one of only seven teams to ever do it.
At the time, Weidenbach just needed a new coach. Instead, he found a game changer born of determination and willpower.
Bev Plocki (who changed her name after marrying Jim Plocki in 1992) has since become the symbol of the Michigan women’s gymnastics program — and for good reason. This is, as she says, the only job she’s ever had. After an All-American freshman year as a gymnast at Alabama, she transferred to West Virginia. There, she earned her bachelor’s in physical education and her master’s in sport management and
administration while also serving as an assistant coach for the Mountaineers’ women’s gymnastics team. Immediately after graduating, she landed the head coaching job for the Wolverines, and she’s stayed ever since.
Revamping Michigan’s program wasn’t easy. Plocki inherited a talented team that had broken program records the previous season, but couldn’t overcome stiff Big Ten competition, finishing just 2-19. So she set out to alter the program’s way of doing things entirely.
It’s that boldness that won over her new gymnasts despite her not being much older than them.
“I used to dread (practice),” former Michigan co-captain Wendy Comeau said in the Jan. 15, 1990 issue of The Michigan Daily. “(Kempthorn) was a really nice person, but she just wasn’t dynamic enough to be a good coach. She wasn’t demanding, she just sort of stood there. Coach Fry’s really loud. She’s a great motivator.”
Plocki knew it would be difficult to force gymnasts into new ways of doing things, especially being the same age as some of the senior class. But things had to change for the program to succeed, and she was determined to do so.
“There’s so many funny stories from that first year — different things that I would try to do and athletes would be like, ‘But we never did that that way before,’ ” Plocki told The Michigan Daily.
‘Kickass women leading kickass women’: How Cassie Churnside and her all-female staff have transformed the culture of Michigan women’s water poloANNA MILLER Daily Sports Writer
If you ask any of Cassie Churnside’s colleagues what they expected of her career trajectory, they would all say the same thing: coaching a men’s water polo team.
“She definitely has the energy to coach a men’s team,” Michigan women’s water polo assistant coach Sami Hill told The Michigan Daily. “She’s very loud, she’s straight to the point and gets her point across well.”
But when the head coach position for the Michigan women’s water polo team opened two years ago, Churnside jumped on the opportunity. While hesitant at first about the transition back to women’s water polo after coaching on the men’s side, she looks at her decision with no regret.
And she shouldn’t. In her short tenure, the Wolverines have a fresh identity both in the pool and in their everyday lives — an identity that Churnside and her all-female staff have fostered.
Creating bonds and mutual respect between players and staff is crucial in rebuilding a program. Churnside was handed a program unsure of its identity — but because she is so confident in her own character, she makes her players and staff feel that way about themselves, too.
Churnside’s personality and coaching style are changing the culture of Michigan water polo out of the pool — and in the water, the Wolverines are reaping the benefits.
Growing up in California, the water polo hub of the United States, Churnside discovered early on that she didn’t like to sweat. So, she took up swimming, and water polo shortly thereafter.
Churnside specialized in only water polo in high school, mainly due to the relationships she developed with her teammates. She has an extremely welcoming personality, but she can also be blunt and honest, making her the perfect teammate in the water and a reliable friend. Those traits only grew when she attended Stanford and captained the Cardinal to a national cham-
pionship her senior year.
Even when her collegiate career ended, Churnside couldn’t give up her life at the pool. So, she decided to move to Spain and play professional water polo for a year. When she returned to the States, she started coaching local teams on the side for cash and worked a brief stint at a desk job. Finding herself on eight different pool decks, however, she realized something: maybe she actually wanted to be a coach.
So, Churnside decided to cold-call Ted Minnis, the head coach at Harvard, and ask for a job. Her bold choice worked, and soon enough, she found herself on a plane to Boston to become an assistant coach for both the men’s and women’s Crimson teams.
Working under Minnis’ mentorship for eight years is where Churnside’s coaching personality truly developed. For the second half of her coaching tenure with Harvard, the Crimson hired an additional assistant coach, Jackie Puccino, which allowed Churnside to focus solely on the men’s team. And although she was originally apprehensive about commanding the male team, the players
embraced her coaching style and personality, fully buying into her system. Her ‘tomboy’ intense personality was exactly what they needed to succeed, and under her guidance, they won backto-back conference championships.
“She somehow had a way of interacting with the men’s team where they feared her so much, respected her and got along with her like she was their sister,” Puccino told The Daily. “For all of these guys, being able to interact with a female in a position of power taught them how to respect and get used to seeing that women can be in these positions of power.”
Churnside taught the men how to be strong in the water and gentlemanly outside of it. She felt that providing these men with a strong female authority was crucial in their development, teaching them about sexism and misogyny in the world of water polo. They even started noticing it themselves when referees would show attitude toward Churnside and not her male counterparts.
Although Churnside loved coaching men much more than she expected, she recognized the reality of her situation
— the world wasn’t ready for a female head coach of a men’s water polo team. After all, it’s barely ready for a female head coach of a women’s team. Churnside was ready to head her own team, and she knew that would mean switching back to coaching women.
And then, the head coach position opened at Michigan.
Churnside interviewed at a few schools in California, but as soon as she stepped on Michigan’s campus, she instantly knew it would be the next stop in her coaching career. With little knowledge of the Big Ten or Wolverine culture, Churnside came to Ann Arbor ready to learn — both on and off the pool deck.
Churnside claims it was obvious she hadn’t coached women in a while when she arrived at Michigan. However, she had her own experience as a player and Minnis’ mentorship to rely on, quickly learning what it takes to command a women’s team.
“When I watch her coach now I’m so proud of her,” Minnis told The Daily. “I
They say you’ll always end up where you’re meant to be.
For senior Jaedan Brown, even if she didn’t always realize it, that place was always Michigan.
Now in her final season on the Michigan women’s tennis team, Brown has fulfilled that destiny, as she’s blossomed into a highly decorated player and teamcaptain. But Brown’s destiny to attend the University actually predates her existence.
In addition to her two older siblings attending Michigan, her parents Corwin and Melissa both graduated from Michigan in 1993 and as varsity athletes, competed as Wolverines themselves. Jaedan’s mother, Melissa, was a member of the women’s swim and dive team from 1991-1993. Her father, Corwin, played as a defensive back on the Michigan football team from 1988-1993
where he served as a co-captain of the team, and later had an eight-year career in the NFL.
“My dad was a captain of the football team, and everyone always talks about how great of a leader he was, I feel like that’s something I get from him,” Jaedan told The Michigan Daily. “… And also
my mom swam here, so knowing how she always talked about how hard she worked, and having those two people as role models in my life made me understand that if I want to be great, I have to do these things.”
Given her parents’ impressive collegiate and professional careers, it was
clear Jaedan and her siblings would have athletic potential from a young age. To nurture this potential, Corwin and Melissa planted the seed of dedication and helped them find their own sport, allowing them to try several, including basketball, softball and gymnastics.
“I think all my kids tried everything, or at least had the opportunity if they wanted to, and then they kind of just whittled it down,” Melissa told The Daily.
When Jaedan was eight, she and her siblings joined Lakeland Academy of Tennis located in Niles, just 12 miles north of their home in Granger, Ind.
“So Jaedan showed up and she was a little skinny, tiny little thing,” Auggie Guimaraes, Jaedan’s former coach and director of Lakeland Academy, told The Daily. “The level that Jaedan has achieved in her own merit actually, was just not so much what we do as coaches but how determined she was as a player.”
With a spark in her eyes, Tamia Tolbert started playing recreational soccer at just four years old. When her parents, Robert and Tangie, placed her on the team, Tamia’s interest in the game at such a young age made them enthusiastic about her potential. But when her grandparents came into town, excited to watch her play, Tamia had other plans for that game.
“She was bored,” Robert told The Michigan Daily. “And that game she picked up leaves on the field the entire time. So she had no interest in playing at all, she wanted to pick up the flowers.”
At the time, it made Tamia’s parents wonder whether that initial spark would ignite or fizzle out. They knew, however, that it was too early to make any decisions. After all, she was only a kid still learning the ropes. As Tamia
gained more exposure to soccer, her spark grew into flames along with her competitive nature and strong work ethic. That flame ultimately turned her into the player she is today.
Now starting for the Michigan women’s soccer team, Tamia has become a crucial part of its success. Recording the third most minutes on the roster, the junior defender’s presence in the backline has helped build the Wolverines’ defensive fortitude.
For Tamia, the route from the recreational league to becoming a Division I athlete has been the result of her internal drive to become the best.
Growing up in Texas, Tamia was always surrounded by athletes. Her dad played football for Purdue and her mom was a competitive cheerleader. Tamia’s older brother, Robert IV, and older sister, Tyla, were involved in football and soccer, respectively. It wasn’t a matter of whether Tamia would play sports or not, just a matter of which one.
Tamia decided to follow in her sis-
ter’s footsteps. Participating in her first rec league before transitioning to club soccer, Tamia learned the fundamentals of the game. As she adopted the basic skills like passing and dribbling, her athleticism also grew.
With the requisite strength and mobility, Tamia wanted to face better competitors like her sister, Tyla. Even though Tyla was a couple of years older, she inspired and pushed Tamia to be
better on the field. As her role model, Tamia wanted the opportunity to play with her and improve her play. So as a nine-year-old, she began to play a few age groups above her own.
While she had the talent and athleticism that made her shine at times, the level of play often presented a challenge for Tamia.
