to donate blood or sign up to be an 
organ donor because you can fun-
damentally save a life with that.”

LSA freshman Parker Schaub 

said he participated without hav-
ing had prior knowledge of the 
event because he realizes the 
importance of organ donation.

“I just happened to find the line 

in middle of the Diag, and thought 
that I wanted to join,” Schaub said. 
“I think it’s really important that 
people know that they can donate 
blood and organs and know how 
strong the need is.”

In addition to raising aware-

ness about organ donation, the 
event also advertised the kickoff 
event for the annual Blood Battle 
between the University and Ohio 
State University. The event will be 
held on Nov. 1, from 8 a.m. to 4:45 
p.m. Blood Battle lasts during the 
entire month of November.

on-three basketball tournament to 
commemorate Evan, who played 
basketball in high school. Smith 
and Rosenstock hope this will 
change the way athletic programs 
view mental health issues.

“Because my brother, Evan, was 

an avid basketball player, besides 
the fact that exercise is a great 
outlet for mental health issues, I 
see the athletic portion as remem-
bering my brother as an athlete,” 
Rosenstock said.

Since umttr at the University 

was approved in late September, 
the group was unable to be at Fes-
tifall and therefore started the year 
with a small following. However, 
the leaders of umttr on campus 
were able to attend the So Cool, So 
Just social justice student organi-
zation fair in the Diag last month.

On Oct. 24, umttr will attend the 

Defeat Depression Dash, an annual 
5K in honor of University student 
Garrick Roemer, who was a mem-
ber of the University’s track team 
and lost his life to suicide in 2014.

will be used.

“We actually need a committee 

that looks closely as the way it’s 
released,” Weineck said. “That 
is just as important as having 
a committee that looks at the 
questions themselves.”

Faculty 
concern 
over 
the 

release 
of 
course 
evaluation 

data resulted in the LSA Student 
Government withdrawing their 
request for the data. Biology 
Prof. John Lehman, a SACUA 
member, 
predicted 
Central 

Student Government would soon 
do the same. He said students are 
willing to wait for the data if it 
means developing a more helpful 
instrument.

“Talking 
to 
the 
student 

governance 
leaders, 
they’re 

saying none of the students really 
care about this as much as some 
faculty are really passionately 
against it,” Lehman said. “I asked 
the students in my oceanography 
class how important this was 
to them and they said, ‘Not at 
all.’ They said they had other 
ways to find out what they want 
to know about these courses. I 
mean we’re talking about upper-
division students.”

Business Prof. Dave Wright, 

a SACUA member, said if the 
committee fails to create a 
more effective instrument for 
collecting 
course 
evaluation 

data, the University should opt 
not to release data at all.

“If the body of experts comes 

to the conclusion that there is no 
reliable, valid way to measure 
this, then we shouldn’t have it at 
all,” he said. “At some point you 
have to reach the conclusion, is 
the signal to noise ratio worth it? 
Is it positive? We know there’s 
noise, we know there may even 
be bias. But the question is, is it 
better than no information at 
all?”

SACUA 
members 
also 

expressed 
concern 
over 
the 

administration’s 
decision 
to 

switch to Canvas beginning in 
the fall 2016 semester.

Pollack and Laura Patterson, 

associate vice president and chief 

information officer, announced 
the decision in an e-mail to 
students, faculty and staff last 
month.

Weineck said there is concern 

among faculty about making the 
transition that quickly.

“I think one of the potential 

problems 
coming 
down 
the 

pipeline is Canvas,” Weineck said. 
“It seems that some problems 
have come up that didn’t come 
up in the pilot and they concern 
the migration of course size from 
CTools to Canvas.”

In response, Pollack said the 

transition date would not be 
delayed. She encouraged the 
board to forward their questions 
and concerns to Patterson.

Wright 
questioned 
the 

tradeoffs 
associated 
with 

delaying the switch.

“My question would be what 

is the real cost of pushing it back 
a year?” he asked. “And what 
happens if I don’t transition to 
Canvas — in other words, how 
enforceable is this?”

Pharmacy Prof. David Smith, a 

SACUA member, said the faculty 
has no choice but to transition 
next fall.

“It’s pretty enforceable, you’ve 

got to convert over,” Smith said. 
“You don’t have a choice, you’ve 
got to learn it and give them 
feedback on things you need that 
they don’t have that will help you 
do a better job.”

To aid their transition, faculty 

can consult online resources, 
the 
University’s 
Information 

and Technology Services Center 
and Canvas support, available 
through phone, e-mail and live 
chat 24 hours a day, seven days a 
week.

 “There’s a Canvas support 

team but they don’t seem to be 
particularly well trained because 
I get a lot of e-mails from faculty 
saying ‘I go to Canvas support 
and they don’t know the answer,’ 
” Weineck said. “Once you get 
high enough up in the Canvas 
support team you will eventually 
get to someone who knows the 
answer and who will be very 
helpful. But knowing faculty, a 
lot of faculty will get to this in 
August.” 

Smith from Suriname to Tokyo 
to Detroit to Tangiers. Woven 
throughout are brief, yet aching, 
references to her late husband 
Fred “Sonic” Smith, a musician 
who passed away in 1994, and 
whose memory seems to haunt 
many of these places. Other 
tropes include Smith’s passion 
for visiting, and tending to, the 
graves of her literary heroes (Jean 
Genet, 
Rimbaud, 
Rynosuke 

Akutagawa), her love of coffee, her 
attachment to detective shows, 
and the inevitable nostalgia that 
accompanies aging.

The book has its moments. 

There are lines so poetic and pure 
that you want to etch them on 
the inside of your eyelids. After 
losing the photographs she once 
took of Sylvia Plath’s grave in 
autumn, she returns years later 
to take new ones: “There is now 
one of Sylvia in spring. It is very 
nice, but lacking the shimmering 
quality of the lost ones. Nothing 
can be truly replicated. Not a 
love, not a jewel, not a single line.” 
After losing both her husband 
and her brother in a short period 
of time, Smith recalls “hours 
sitting in Fred’s favorite chair, 
dreading my own imagination. I 
rose and performed small tasks 
with the mute concentration of 
one imprisoned in ice.”

And, if nothing else, “M Train” 

is a series of recommendations. I 
walked away with a page-long list 
of things to read: Jean Genet’s “The 
Thief’s Journal,” Roberto Bolano’s 
“2666,” Haruki Murakami’s “The 
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” Mikhail 
Bulgakov’s 
“The 
Master 
and 

Margarita.” That’s not including 
dozens of poems, songs, paintings, 
TV shows and a veritable atlas of 
cities and towns to explore. Smith 
intended it this way, claiming, “I 
offer my world on a platter filled 
with allusions.”

But, ironically, it’s in offering 

so much of her unedited world 
that Smith makes things difficult 
for the reader. Books are like belly 
buttons: They can be innies, ones 
that force you to look deep into 
yourself, outies, ones that force 

you to confront the vastness of 
the world and all its knowledge, 
or the rare combo of both. 
“M Train” is, unfortunately, 
an outie. As you read page 
after page chronicling Smith’s 
diverse adventures, friendships 
and musings, but with no real 
unifying theme, the whole thing 
feels like an extended brag, a 250-
page account of how amazing her 
life has been.

Yes, this is Patti Smith’s book 

about Patti Smith’s life. But 
the “narrative” is so loose, and 
yet so relentless, that reading 
it is exhausting rather than 
enveloping. And in a book of 
moments, the beautiful ones stand 
out, but so do the cringe-worthy, 
like this description of Veracruz, 

Mexico: “The air was perfect, 
like milk from the breast of the 
great mother. Milk that could be 
suckled by all her children — the 
babes of Juàrez, Harlem, Belfast, 
Bangladesh.” 

So what would you get out of 

reading this book? Some beautiful 
prose, enough book titles to keep 
you reading for years, a definitive 
stance on the pleasures of drinking 
coffee alone. But really, “M Train” 
’s existence is, in and of itself, 
an exhortation to live a fuller 
life. Drive across the country on 
a whim, it says. Bake your own 
bread, go to the movies, learn how 
to play chess, whatever. Write 
poems and take photos. Travel. 
Fall in love. Have stories that could 
fill a book.

The 
conversation 
turned 

multiple times to the “wars 
on drugs and crime” in the 
United States, and how these 
policies have caused higher 
incarceration rates of both men 
and women.

Carol Jacobsen, a panelist 

and professor of both women’s 
studies and Art & Design, noted 
that many women who commit 
serious crimes such as homicide 
do so as an act of survival. 
The murder may have been a 
response 
to 
life-threatening 

physical or sexual abuse, or 
to issues related to poverty or 
drugs.

Panelist 
Heather 
Ann 

Thompson, 
an 
Afroamerican 

and African Studies professor, 
echoed this point.

“Murder is murder, isn’t it?” 

Thompson asked. “Or is it?” 

The panelists unanimously 

condemned the closed nature 
of prisons. They discussed how 
difficult it is for researchers and 
visitors to gain access to prisons 
and how this has resulted in 
critical 
gaps 
in 
knowledge 

about the lived experience of 
prisoners.

“In our society, we take it as 

normal that prisons are these 
closed 
spaces,” 
Thompson 

said. “(Prisons are) so closed 
that there is no data on how 
many hours prisoners spend in 
isolation — no one has access to 

collect it.”

The panelists pointed out 

that though Michigan’s only 
women’s prison, the Women’s 
Huron 
Valley 
Correctional 

Facility, is 15 minutes away from 
the University’s campus, many 
University students have not 
heard of it.

Panelist 
Ruby 
Tapia, 
a 

professor of women’s studies 
and English, said it is important 
to 
analyze 
representations 

of 
lived 
experiences 
of 

incarcerated women, including 
but not limited to “Orange is the 
New Black.”

Moderator Valerie Jenness, 

a senior visiting scholar at the 
University’s Institute on Women 
and Gender and a professor at 
the University of California, 

Irvine, asked panelists about a 
passage from Kerman’s memoir.

In the passage, Kerman tells 

the story of a newly released 
prisoner who told local media 
she had a “magnificent” and 
positive experience in prison. 
Some inmates still incarcerated 
in the prison were angry with 
this description because they 
felt it was false.

Tapia noted that some women 

who have been incarcerated 
have 
expressed 
the 
same 

feelings toward “Orange is the 
New Black” — that the narrative 
represented is a narrow one 
that may not encompass the 
multitude of lived experiences.

Kerman’s 
address 
begins 

Tuesday at 5:10 p.m. in Rackham 
Auditorium. 

not happy about it.”

With the highest proportion 

of underrepresented minority 
students in a freshman class in 10 
years, enrollment numbers saw 
significant gains toward a more 
diversified student body.

In the freshman class alone, 

the number of Black students 
admitted 
increased 
by 
58 

students — a community which 
made up 3.84 percent of the 
freshman class in 2014 and 5.11 
percent of the class in 2015. In the 
state of Michigan, 14.3 percent of 
the population is Black.

“The campus — admissions, 

financial aid, recruitment teams 
and our partners across the 
university — worked together 
in response to the charge to 
achieve our target class size 
and find ways, consistent with 
state law, to bring further 
diversity to our student body 
with this class,” Kedra Ishop, 
associate vice president for 
enrollment management, wrote 
in a press release. “We are 
pleased with the progress and 
want to continue our forward 
momentum in 2016.”

University 
President 
Mark 

Schlissel said in an interview 
with the Daily last month that 
he expected to see improvement 
within 
the 
student 
body’s 

diversity enrollment as early as 

this semester, a reflection of the 
University’s effort to package 
financial 
aid 
awards 
with 

admission decisions.

The University received a 

record number of applicants 
this year and admitted 26.24 
percent of those applicants. This 
fall, 6,071 students of the 13,584 
admitted actually enrolled into 
the University, resulting in a 
45-percent yield.

In-state 
students 
represent 

more of the student body this year, 
making up 57 percent of students 
this year compared to 55 percent 
of students last fall. The University 
accepted 50 percent of in-state 
student applications, while only 
accepting 20 percent of out-of-
state applicants. There were 31,573 

more 
out-of-state 
applications 

than in-state applications.

With regard to socioeconomic 

diversity, 
the 
percentage 
of 

freshmen eligible for Federal 
Pell Grants rose by 1.1 percent 
from last fall. First-generation 
students make up 8.5 percent 
of the incoming class, and low-
income students make up 10.2 
percent of the class.

According to a press release, 

the 
University 
continues 
to 

invest more money in financial 
aid than ever before, increasing 
aid to undergraduate, need-
based financial aid by 8.1 percent 
since last year.

The 
increases 
in 

underrepresented 
minority 

enrollment come in wake of an 

eventful two years, during which 
members 
of 
the 
University’s 

Black Student Union called on 

the University to increase Black 
enrollment and improve campus 
climate. 

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
News
Tuesday, October 13, 2015 — 3

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fast,” Powers said. “It’s been an 
enjoyable four years.”

The administration committee, 

comprised of Mayor Christopher 
Taylor (D) and Councilmembers 
Sabra Briere (D 
–Ward 1), Stephen 

Kunselman (D–Ward 3), Chuck 
Warpehoski (D–Ward 5) and 
Graydon Krapohl (D–Ward 4), 
will narrow down the list of 
potential applicants for the post.

Briere said Powers’ successor 

will have big shoes to fill.

“The biggest challenge we 

face is looking for someone who 
will build on what Steve Powers 
has already done and that’s a 
challenge,” she said.

In prior years, the council 

appointed a search committee 
separate 
from 
the 
standing 

administration 
committee. 

During the search for Powers, 
a four-person group of council 
members conducted the search.

“The process is not that 

different than last time,” Taylor 
said in an interview. “It changed 
because we wanted an extra 
council member to broaden the 
set of inputs into the search 
process.”

Briere said the process has 

also 
changed 
because 
the 

administration 
committee 
is 

responsible for evaluating the city 
administrator’s job performance. 
Upon Powers’ departure, the 
committee will contact members 
of staff and City Council to 
compile an exit evaluation.

“To take advantage of the 

council members who are already 
conducting the evaluation seems 
efficient,” she said.

The 
committee, 
with 
the 

assistance of a search firm, will 
narrow the national search to 
about three candidates. From 
there, finalists will participate 
in an interview with each of the 
council members, as well as public 
panels and meetings involving 
city employees, businesses and 
the Ann Arbor community.

“The council is now starting 

to develop a recruitment profile 
for the position that will then be 
made available nationally and 

candidates will be encouraged 
to 
consider 
the 
wonderful 

opportunity that Ann Arbor 
provides,” Powers said.

At last Monday’s meeting, 

there 
were 
some 
concerns 

regarding the search procedure. 
Councilmember Jane Lumm (I–
Ward 2) said she did not feel the 
process was inclusive enough.

“I’ve been through other city 

administrator 
searches 
and 

actually, I feel that already the 
process is not terribly inclusive 
as it could be,” Lumm told the 
council last Monday. “Previously 
when I sat here, we engaged 
all the council members and 
administrator 
profiles, 
we 

engaged the community.”

Other 
council 
members 

responded to Lumm’s concerns 
and said they felt the process was 
inclusive enough for the initial 
stages of the search. The council 
will have the chance to speak 
with each of the final candidates 
and hold public interviews. The 
final decision is also up to a vote 
of the council as a whole.

In the past, senior members 

of City Council comprised the 
administration committee. This 
time, the committee members’ 
levels of expertise and seniority 
vary.

“Getting that cross section of 

experience and expectations has 
already been done for the admin 
committee and that was what we 
were looking for the last time we 
did this search,” Briere said.

On 
Monday, 
the 
council 

also approved the committee’s 
recommendation to hire the 
executive search firm, Affion 
Public, which was the same 
search firm hired to find Powers. 
The firm was recommended to 
the council by Human Resources 
Director Robyn Wilkerson.

The HR department told 

the administration committee 
that surveying for other search 
firms might delay the process 
by six weeks.

“Affion has done a number of 

employee searches successfully 
for the city in the past, and they 
were one of the three different 
search firms that were considered 
who had a record of success with 
the city,” Briere said. “They were 

selected in part because of that 
record of success and because 
they had the staffing capacity to 
do a thorough but rapid search.”

The committee has created a 

job description for the position 
and has sent it to the council for 
review. Once the council has 
approved the job description, 
Affion will create a profile for 
the position and conduct a 
national search.

“The profile is created after the 

firm talks to council members, 
staff and members of the public,” 
Taylor said.

The council also approved 

a proposal Monday night to 
raise the posted salary for 
the position from $160,000 to 
$175,000. The HR department 
found the median salary for city 
administrators in cities with 
populations between 100,000 
and 249,000 was about $167,000. 
The council voted to raise the 
salary in hopes of drawing top-
tier candidates.

In deciding to switch jobs, 

Powers accepted a pay raise 
of more than $50,000. He will 
now earn $210,000 a year, with 
added perks. When Powers 
first began his role as city 
administrator in 2011, he was 
earning $145,000 a year. In 
October 2014, Powers’ pay was 
raised by $14,500 to $159,500.

Ann Arbor’s Chief Financial 

Officer Tom Crawford will serve 
as interim city administrator.

He will receive a pay raise 

of about $1,500 a month for the 
duration of the interim posting. 
Taylor said the timeline for the 
search process is still up in the 
air.

“The search process will 

take a good amount of time,” 
he said. “It’s going to take us a 
couple of months.”

Powers said his successor has to 

be able to view Ann Arbor for its 
values and unique characteristics.

“An administrator needs to 

view the city as more than just 
police and fire,” he said. “It is 
a community that has values 
that are very important to a 
council and the administrator 
is expected to believe in an 
organization that is consistent 
with those values.”

CITY
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