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Thursday, April 9, 2015 — 3A

how much time he wasted try-
ing to figure out which teachers 
were the best. He said he ended 
up completing the app in one and 
a half days at the 2015 MHacks 
competition.

“I spent like two hours going 

back and forth through like eight 
tabs trying to find the best teach-
er, so I thought, ‘What if I just 
made it automated?’ ” Gildenberg 
said. “I didn’t really do anything 
with the idea for a while, but 
then I went to one of the Michi-
gan hackathons and I thought, ‘I 
need an idea to work on, why not 
do that?’ ”

In the weeks since publishing 

the extension, Courseguide+ has 
gained about 1,000 users, mostly 
in the last week. Gildenberg said 
he was surprised by the number 

of downloads.

“I wasn’t even sure how it 

would turn out in the beginning, 
and it was really anyone’s guess 
as to how people would receive 
it, but it was something that I 
really wanted, so I figured other 
students would want it as well,” 
Gildenberg said. “The friends I 
showed went, ‘Mitchell this is 
amazing.’ They wanted it very 
much, so I figured I would release 
it.”

Gildenberg said he believes 

the extension will help speed up 
the process of backpacking for 
classes.

“I think it’s going to help them 

speed up their decisions — having 
all the information they need on a 
teacher and helping them choose 
the best professor they could get,” 
Gildenberg said.

Though he thinks the exten-

sion and the site will help stu-
dents, Gildenberg recognizes the 
flaws associated with students 

trusting ratings based on little 
feedback, as some of the profes-
sors only have one or two ratings.

Though 
this 
extension 
is 

geared toward students, some 
professors say they have mixed 
feelings about RateMyProfessors.
com, in general.

Physics Lecturer David Winn 

said he would neither discourage 
nor encourage students to use the 
website. Winn is listed as one of 
the more popular professors on 
the site, but he said this does not 
change his opinions. He pointed 
out that students should not solely 
use the site when deciding wheth-
er or not to take a class.

“These criteria make it use-

ful as a tie-breaker, but students 
should really pick their classes 
based on what subjects are inter-
esting and useful to them,” Winn 
said.

“All of those efforts that, in 

different ways, shine a spotlight 
on this issue are really, really 
important,” Harper said. “So 
the more creative and diverse 
we can be with our programs 
means we will pick up differ-
ent students in different areas 
to help understand and begin 
to change the climate. And 
that’s why I think culture 
shift is so important.”

Though students raised ques-

tions related to sexual assault 
during the chat, Schlissel set 
the conversation by opening 
the forum with a video to tie 
with Sexual Assault Awareness 
Month. The clip featured Uni-
versity administrators discuss-
ing their commitment to ending 
sexual misconduct.

Schlissel 
said 
University 

administrators dedicate a sig-
nificant proportion of their time 
together working to create a 
safer campus.

“...Sexual assault, in par-

ticular, is a topic of discussion 
almost every time we meet,” 
he said. “It’s not backburner, 
it’s a front burner. I think 
it’s going to take a consistent 
effort that’s a collaboration 
between the University lead-
ership, the faculty, the staff, 
and then, all the members of 
our community need to figure 
out together how to make this 
place the safest place to go to 
school that there is.”

An LSA junior, who asked 

to 
remain 
anonymous 
for 

this article, identified her-
self as a survivor of sexual 
assault. During the chat, she 
described 
her 
experience 

with the University’s report-
ing process. She told Schlissel 
she first reported the assault 
to the University last July and 
received her first decision that 
September. Because she did 
not agree with the initial deci-
sion, she was given 10 days to 
file an appeal. The results of 
her appeal were not released 
until just before the fall 
semester’s final examinations.

“I do not feel at all that 

the 
University 
supported 

me throughout the process 
because it was a very trying, 
very horrible time in my life 
and I feel like, first off, that 
the University could improve 
its process is by shortening 
the time between the report 
and the decision,” she said. 
“And also when we turn in 
the appeal, we have 10 days 
to write that appeal and 
then we don’t get a decision 
for a month and a half, it’s 
extremely unfair.”

After hearing the account, 

Harper apologized for the poli-
cy’s faults and said the University 
is working to make the reporting 
process more efficient.

“One of the things we are 

changing 
is 
the 
timeline, 

holding 
ourselves 
to 
that 

standard much, much tighter 
because it’s too hard,” Harper 
said. “And also switching it so 
that you don’t go all the way 
through the process and then 
appeal, but you can appeal 
right away. You are absolutely 
right about the timeline and 
we are going to fix that.”

Several members of SAPAC 

attended the chat, includ-
ing members of their Men’s 
Activism Program.

Schlissel 
also 
discussed 

engaging student-athletes in 

sexual assault awareness, 
and said he talked about 
the issue during a recent 
meeting 
with 
LSA 
junior 

Cooper Charlton, the former 
president of the Student-Ath-
lete Advisory Committee and 
Central Student Government 
president-elect. Charlton said 
there are two problems with 
the existing sexual assault 
education programs for ath-
letes — the programs are 
lengthy and student-athletes 
feel stigmatized.

“I think you need to reach 

a student leader on each 
of 
those 
teams,” 
Schlis-

sel said. “Then they become 
your champions and then it 
becomes cultural.”

LSA senior Ashley Barnes, a 

member of SAPAC, said sexual 
assault education needs to become 
more of a priority to the Univer-
sity. She said many administra-
tors don’t seem to have educated 
themselves on the topic.

“My issue is it’s not that 

it’s only at the student level 
at this point, it’s also at the 
administrative level,” Barnes 
told Schlissel at the chat.

Schlissel 
acknowledged 

that there is still room for 
educating University admin-
istrators.

“Five years ago I didn’t 

understand 
this 
issue 
at 

all,” Schlissel said. “I didn’t 
understand why it wasn’t 
the police and courts’ prob-
lem until I started talking to 
people that had experienc-
es, so I think there’s a huge 
amount of learning that has 
to go on at all different lev-
els, and I do think I should be 
responsible for helping train 
the senior staff to understand 
these issues.”

remember that 148 is not a number.”

Ajetunmobi said the relatively 

small turnout at the vigil reflects 
the need for students to know more 
about international events than 
what they can find on Twitter.

“We don’t want people to forget 

the issues and simply move from one 
hashtag to the next,” Ajetunmobi 
said. “Hashtags don’t save lives unless 
we do something about them.”

Social Work student Cynthia 

Simekha also spoke of the lack of 
media coverage of the murders. 
She said events such as the January 
2015 massacre of 12 people at the 
offices of the French satirical paper 
Charlie Hebdo garnered immediate 

international attention, whereas the 
murders in Kenya attracted suffi-
ciently less media coverage.

“We go on with our lives, be 

happy and get our degrees, but what 
for?” Simekha said. “Two-hundred 
girls from Nigeria are still missing. 
Forty-three children from Mexico 
are still gone. What do we do? Noth-
ing. This isn’t a one-time incident. 
It’s been happening for years.”

At the event, LSA freshman Davi-

na Buruchara spoke about three of 
the students who were murdered as 
they ran back to save their friends 
inside the college building. She also 
recited a poem about the experi-
ence, which was written by her 
friend from Kenya.

“How many of you dream of 

passing exams with honors and 
getting an internship?” Buruchara 

said. “Many of us also have dreams 
about getting married soon. They 
also had dreams just like us. But 
now they are all gone.”

Trey Boynton, director of the 

Office of Multi-Ethnic Student 
Affairs, said it is important for the 
University community to come 
together during such tragedies and 
help one another.

“Events like these allow people 

to come together in a safe space to 
express their grief and emotions 
and not feel isolated,” Boynton said.

Ajetunmobi also emphasized the 

importance of students having safe 
spaces to talk about these events.

“The University needs to create 

spaces for all students,” Ajetunmobi 
said. “The University should take 
time to learn about the students and 
create resources for them.”

The hashtag generated thousands 
of tweets from across the country.

Dillard said the #BBUM cam-

paign and other diversity-related 
expressions of student concerns 
generated an internal discussion 
within LSA about how to educate 
faculty on issues of diversity and 
inclusion.

“We believed that the way of 

addressing some of these concerns 
was to give faculty more informa-
tion and then start to give them 
resources for how to think about 
microaggressions and the other 
kind of things the students were 
talking about, inside their own 
classrooms,” she said.

Speaking to broader Univer-

sity struggles with low minority 
enrollment, Dillard said one par-
ticularly troubling rate at which 
enrolled Black students leave the 
University for another institution.

She said the University must 

take decisive steps to make signifi-
cant progress on the issue.

“When I think about race in 

America, I am increasingly com-
ing to find that what we need to 
do is to not just think in incremen-
tal ways,” she said. “I think we’ve 
been really inhibited by that — we 
can only do things around the 
edges, that we have to be careful. 
So it means that nobody wants to 
do anything bold anymore.”

Dillard said there are currently 

about 99 courses that fulfill the 
University’s Race and Ethnicity 
requirement. She said 43 percent 

of these courses focus on issues 
within the United States. Over-
all, Anthropology 101 is the most 
popular.

She opened up conversation 

of specific reforms to the crowd, 
asking how attendees think the 
requirement could be reformed. 
Dillard said the committee plan-
ning the review of the requirement 
remains in the information gath-
ering stages, and is still exploring 
what changes could be made.

Students’ concerns were most-

ly centered around whether the 
courses should focus more on 
past or current issues related to 
race, as well as whether current 
courses clearly address matters 
of race. Attendees also discussed 
how future courses could do a bet-
ter job of educating students who 
haven’t previously engaged with 
these topics.

LSA freshman Darian Razdar, 

a frequent seminar attendee, said 
in an interview after Wednesday’s 
session that while he was confi-
dent Dillard is passionate about 
reforming the requirement, he 
was disappointed by omissions in 
the information she presented.

He pointed, in particular, to 

courses listed in part of the require-
ment that he said don’t focus heav-
ily on race — an issue also raised 
during the group discussion.

“I feel that she should want to 

have substantive discussions of 
race happening, and I didn’t hear 
anything on that from her,” he said.

Schlissel also addressed the 

requirement. He said he didn’t 
think it was possible to design an 
ideal Race and Ethnicity require-
ment course, and that he liked the 
idea of many courses fulfilling the 
requirement.

“I think that one purpose of the 

race and ethnicity requirement 
is to promote the discussion,” he 
said. “Any kind of discussion that 
taps into this set of issues and 
that licenses you to speak with 
one another and to speak with the 
faculty about this set of issues of 
what it’s like to be part of a group 
or many groups in modern society 
in any context.”

Schlissel added that he felt the 

University did have an obligation 
to make everyone on campus feel 
safe, but said achieving that would 
require some unsettling conversa-
tions.

“If we want to make progress on 

this set of issues together, which I 
think most of us would recognize 
are the most challenging issues 
we’re dealing with in terms of the 
campus climate, we’re going to 
have to go through some uncom-
fortable times and some really 
difficult, challenging, threatening 
kind of conversations in order to 
educate each other and to see how 
one another are looking at these 
difficult issues,” he said.

Along 
with 
discussing 
the 

requirement, attendees also asked 
questions about a variety of issues, 
including campus police and fac-

ulty and staff knowledge of diver-
sity issues.

In response to a question about 

his plans to increase diversity 
overall, Schlissel highlighted sev-
eral initiatives from the past year. 
He pointed to his launch of a plan-
ning process for the whole campus 
to increase the diversity of the stu-
dent body.

“There are series of creative 

ideas that are being considered, 
and we are going to pick some and 
get started and see how it works, 
with the goal of increasing diver-
sity of the campus in many ways,” 
he said. “Not just racial and ethnic 
but socioeconomic, geographic. I 
think there is dearth of diversity 
of political thought on our campus 
— I think that’s an important thing 
to diversify. So, in many ways.”

Razdar 
said 
hearing 
from 

administrators exposed him to the 
realities of working within institu-
tions.

“I didn’t really hear completely 

everything that I wanted to out of 
the president, in particular, when 
it comes to concrete solutions,” he 
said. “Obviously it’s hard for him 
to talk about that because he is get-
ting to know the University after 
a year. I don’t know. I was slightly 
disappointed. I felt like he could be 
more pointed on his remarks.”

LSA sophomore Reon Daw-

son, who has attended several 
seminars, said while the guests 
addressed many issues, group 
discussions like Wednesday’s also 

showed that sometimes the chal-
lenge is not identifying problems, 
but implementing solutions to 
make the University a safer place.

“The way we talked about 

(diversity) in class, there was no 
set solution,” he said. “There were 
solutions, but nobody was ready to 
put it in place.”

In an interview with the Daily 

after the event, Schlissel said he 

thought these kind of discussions 
help make progress on these sets 
of issues.

“The things I learned today 

give me a sense of what’s impor-
tant to students, what’s important 
to some of the faculty and (to) this 
gentleman from town,” he said. 
“All these thing get incorporated 
in how we think about the plans 
we need to make.”

VIGIL
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EXTENSION
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SCHLISSEL
From Page 1A

“Michigan 
Football 
will 

watch 
‘American 
Sniper’! 

Proud of Chris Kyle & Proud 
to be an American & if that 
offends anybody then so be it!” 
Harbaugh tweeted.

The controversy surround-

ing the screening — which has 
since gained national media 
attention — began Tuesday, 
when Mekkaoui wrote a per-
sonal letter of concern to the 
CCI.

After posting a screenshot 

of her letter on Facebook and 
garnering support from peers, 
Mekkaoui created a collec-
tive letter urging the CCI, who 
organizes UMix, to choose 
a different film. The letter 
attracted more than 300 signa-
tures from people who signed 
as members of Middle East-
ern, North African or Muslim 
communities. Those who did 
not identify themselves as fall-
ing in this category signed “in 
solidarity.” Mekkaoui said a 
majority of the signatures were 
signed by students in solidarity.

“There were actually more 

non-Middle Eastern students 
and non-Muslim students than 

there were Middle Eastern or 
Muslim students signed on, 
so that’s fantastic,” Mekka-
oui said. “It shows that this 
is clearly an issue that every-
one thinks, from a variety of 
backgrounds, that it is some-
thing really salient and that it’s 
something that needed to be 
changed.”

Mekkaoui said during her 

time as a student at the Univer-
sity, she has learned to take a 
stance against injustice.

“U of M teaches us that when 

we see something that is wrong 
on campus to raise questions, 
and we proceeded to, so I’m 
really happy about that,” she 
said.

However, 
other 
students 

who disagree with Mekka-
oui’s views have united behind 
third-year Law student Rachel 
Jankowski’s 
petition, 
which 

called on the CCI to reverse 
their decision and show “Amer-
ican Sniper” on Friday as 
planned. It’s unclear whether 
the petition will be taken down 
now that CCI announced its 
plans to reschedule the show-
ing for a different forum.

“If the University prevents 

a movie like this from being 
shown, it promotes intolerance 
and stifles dialogue and debate 

on the subject and goes directly 
against the atmosphere UMix 
purports to provide,” the CSG 
petition states. “As adults at a 
public university, we should 
have the option to view this 
movie if we so choose and have 
the opportunity to engage on 
the topics it presents to come 
to our own conclusions on the 
subjects.”

The petition calls for the CCI 

to show the movie as planned 
but allow students to present 
their own opinions on the film 
after its showing. The petition 
currently has 486 signatures as 
of Wednesday night.

Jankowski 
could 
not 
be 

reached for comment.

University alum Hari Vutuk-

uru, an officer in the U.S. Army, 
tweeted Wednesday morning 
that he was disappointed in the 
University’s initial decision to 
cancel the screening.

“...Did you ever consider how 

the hundreds of ROTC cadets, 
midshipmen, & student-veter-
ans would react to this? Shame 
on you,” he tweeted.

For continuing coverage, visit 

michigandaily.com.

SNIPER
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@michigandaily