said there is more to be done. 
Earlier in the semester, Schlissel 
introduced the HAIL scholarship 
program to attract low-income 
students by giving them resources 
and information on financial aid 
prior to applying for college. In 
October, he announced a second 
scholarship — called Wolverine 
Pathways 
— 
which 
mentors 

middle and high school students 
from Southfield and Ypsilanti 
and gives them a full ride to the 
University upon admission.

With 
these 
initiatives 
in 

mind, Schlissel and Page asked 
audience members to come to 
a microphone and talk about 
their goals for a more inclusive 
campus — with the year 2025 
as a benchmark for evaluating 
potential successes.

“An 
interesting 
common 

theme, for me, which came out 
of several of the comments today, 
was the fact that improvement has 
to be led, but it can only come from 
the folks…in working groups, on 
admission committees,” Schlissel 
said. “It happens in the trenches 
as everyday acts of commitment, 
it doesn’t necessarily happen with 
folks sitting in front of a room 
making suggestions or setting 
rules.”

Emily Lawsin, a lecturer 

in the American Culture and 
Women’s Studies departments, 
said 
faculty 
diversity 
plays 

an important role in campus 
climate. She noted that one way 
to retain a diverse faculty is to 
offer faculty members of color 
incentives to stay on campus 
— adding that many of her 
co-workers of color have left the 
University because they were 
denied tenure and not given 
retention offers.

“I appreciated your comment 

earlier about retention, and how 
retention of students of color 
are very important,” she said. 
“Retention of faculty and staff 
of color is equally as important.”

Comparative Literature Prof. 

Silke-Maria Weineck, chair of 
the Senate Advisory Committee 
on 
University 
Affairs, 
said 

Muslim students, in particular, 
must be included on campus.

“Since that has not been 

stressed in discussion so far, 
I would also just like to mark 
that there is one group that also 
needs to be included,” Weineck 
said. “It would be good by 2025 
if we had religious inclusion as 
well.”

Rackham 
student 
Ashley 

Wilson 
said 
the 
University 

should 
be 
up 
front 
about 

diversity challenges from the 
very 
first 
interactions 
with 

new students. She said on 
her first day at the School of 
Education, Dean Deborah Ball 
was immediately open about the 
lack of diversity on campus.

Wilson said she appreciated 

Ball’s straightforward approach 
to 
talking 
about 
diversity, 

instead of waiting to discuss the 
issue later on.

“When 
we 
have 
these 

conversations 
immediately 

in our first interactions with 
students, I think it sets the tone 
for us to be able to do the rest of 
the things that we want them 
to learn and be receptive of,” 
Wilson said.

Jerrica Delaney, a program 

coordinator 
in 
the 
Office 

of 
Academic 
Multicultural 

Initiatives, said she felt she 
would like to see significant 
progress in terms of inclusion 
starting as soon as next year, 
rather than by 2025. She noted 
that professors should receive 
training 
to 
better 
prepare 

them 
to 
facilitate 
healthy 

dialogues concerning race in the 
classroom.

“One thing I would like to see 

next year is a classroom setting 
where professors from adjunct 
all the way up to tenure are 
culturally competent to handle 
the battleground — the arrows 
and the darts that are thrown 
at students of color in their 
classrooms,” she said.

She additionally challenged 

the University to seek out 
students who may not fit the 
stereotype of what it means to 
be an underrepresented, but 
exceptional student, as defined 
by the HAIL Scholarship and 
Wolverine Pathways programs.

“While we seek out this 

cream of the crop in Southfield 
and Ypsilanti, don’t forget the 
rest of the crop, because there 

are outstanding and exceptional 
students that may not be at 
that GPA that can still offer 
many beautiful things to this 
University that they really do 
need,” Delaney said.

In an interview with the 

Daily on Tuesday afternoon 
after the assembly, Schlissel 
said Southfield and Ypsilanti are 
only the pilot locations for the 
Wolverine Pathways location. 
The 
University, 
he 
added, 

intends to expand the program 
into Detroit as soon as possible, 
provided that its methodology 
finds success in Southfield and 
Ypsilanti first.

University 
alum 
Hector 

Galvan, a program coordinator 
in 
the 
Office 
of 
Academic 

Multicultural Initiatives, said 
his ideal climate would be for 
students of all identities to safe 
and comfortable on campus.

“I would very much like this 

place to feel like home,” Galvan said. 
“I didn’t feel like I fit in, and I didn’t 
feel like I was aptly represented 
here. What’s even worse — I feel 
like no one really cared.”

Schlissel said the summit 

marks a critical point in the 
University’s ongoing planning 
process to create a more diverse 
and inclusive campus.

“Up to this point, campus 

leaders, 
representatives 

from different units, chairs, 
deans, executive officers and 
individuals have been coming 
together to discuss how to 
refocus, but I think this is the 
first event during this process, 
and 
perhaps 
ever, 
where 

everybody in our community is 
given an equal opportunity to 
step up and tell us what you’re 
thinking,” Schlissel said to the 
assembly. “What kind of campus 
do you want us to have for our 
successors, and how do we get 
there?”

He further emphasized that 

the most effective plan will not 
come directly from the input of 
only the University’s executive 
officers, but from all members 
of the community.

“We need all of you to work 

with us,” he said. “We need to 
crowdsource the solutions to 
the challenges that we all share 
in an environment that we all 
love.”

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
News & Arts
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 — 3A

FILM REVIEW

Nostalgic ‘Peanuts’

By BRIAN BURLAGE 

Daily Arts Writer

What do we know about 

Charlie Brown? Only a few 
things. He’s a kid who never 
grew 
out 
of 

his baby hair. 
He’s got a sister 
named 
Sally, 

a best friend 
named 
Linus 

and a pseudo-
rival-slash-
girlfriend 
named 
Lucy. 

The 
four 

friends 
live 

in a suburban 
neighborhood, presumably in 
the Midwest, alongside a colorful 
range of other kids, including 
the 
Beethoven-obsessed 

Schroeder, the perpetually dirty 
Pig-Pen and the best athlete in 
town, Peppermint Patty. Oh, and 
Charlie Brown has Snoopy, his 
loyal beagle.

These 
aspects 
of 
Charlie 

Brown 
and 
the 
“Peanuts” 

gang have remained true and 
untouched for the better part of 
50 years. Director Steve Martino 
(“Ice Age: Continental Drift”) 
is extremely careful not to get 
in the way of this, and he even 
goes so far as to incorporate 
quotes and scenes verbatim 
from the renowned cartoons. In 
this way, “The Peanuts Movie” 
is a fantastic continuation of 
the comic strip’s long-beloved 
values, 
a 
testament 
to 
its 

resounding popularity.

The question is, though: how 

does this movie contribute to 
the “Peanuts” saga? From what 
necessity does this story arise?

Well, we learn pretty quickly 

that Charlie Brown is a hopeless 
romantic. The Little Red-Haired 
Girl has just moved in across the 

street, and Charlie Brown sees it 
as an opportunity to finally start 
fresh with someone. He tries to 
win her heart in the school’s tal-
ent show; he writes a book report 
for her while she’s out of town, 
wooing her with flowers and 
trying to return her pink pencil 
along the way. But the course of 
true love never did run smooth, as 
Charlie Brown, aside from being 
a hopeless romantic, is also hope-
lessly accident-prone. Despite his 
best efforts, he just can’t beat his 
own tendency to screw up.

We learn, too, that Snoopy is 

a rather prolific novelist. After 
he finds an old typewriter in a 
dumpster outside the school, 
Snoopy begins writing an epic 
World War I-era love story. Most 
of the movie’s action scenes 
emerge from Snoopy’s jet-fueled 
rivalry with the Red Baron, a 
skilled pilot who has kidnapped 
Fifi, Snoopy’s love interest. A 
multi-part war story develops, in 
which Snoopy tries to win back 
the love of his life. The beauti-
ful part about this storyline is 
its wordless entanglement of 
puppy love. The two dogs can’t 
talk, of course, but in Charles M. 
Schulz’s “Peanuts” world, that 
doesn’t matter.

These are the basic story 

points of a very G-rated “Peanuts 
Movie.” Vince Guaraldi’s legend-
ary, and wholly American, score 
accompanies light-hearted ice-
skating scenes and breezy walks 
through the park. Guaraldi’s sub-
tle but upbeat music — “Skating” 
and “Linus and Lucy” mostly — 
is by now inseparable from the 
characters themselves. However, 
the film does throw in modern 
pop music like Flo Rida’s “That’s 
What I Like,” and it’s not a det-
riment so much as a distraction 
from the otherwise perfectly-
framed “Peanuts” world. 

Part of the reason why “The 

Peanuts Movie” works so well is 
that it feels suitably subdued in 
time. Telephones are still wired, 
Snoopy flashes in and out of the 
1910s, the kids still wear galoshes 
and grades are posted on bul-
letin boards in the hallway. The 
animation, 
though 
certainly 

modern, is simple and linear, a 
conflation of two-dimensional 
and three-dimensional shapes — 
an odd but endearing throwback 
to Schulz’s cartoons. Adults are 
never around, and if they are, 
they stay off camera and mutter 
gibberish to the children — the 
“wah-wah” voices still a per-
fect double-sided pun (are the 
kids simply not listening, or are 
the adults just sputtering totally 
insignificant things?). In either 
case, the absence of adults ren-
ders the “Peanuts” world warm, 
wacky and completely insecure. 
Without any of those elements, 
everything would unravel.

There’s a moment in the movie 

(borrowed from the Christmas 
special) that captures viewers’ 
interest from generation to gen-
eration. In the winter, Lucy sets 
up and operates her own five-
cent Psychiatric Advice stand, 
which is a lovely play on the lem-
onade stand. Charlie Brown is, 
of course, Lucy’s first and most 
frequent customer. He tells her 
all about his anxiety, his grow-
ing fear of responsibility and 
bad luck with girls. Lucy listens 
intently like a good friend. And 
as she gives him advice (good 
advice, too) something about the 
whole exchange strikes us: these 
kids genuinely depend on one 
another for help. “The Peanuts 
Movie” and indeed the “Pea-
nuts” empire teach us that only 
children really understand each 
other. And that’s where the nos-
talgia sets in. 

A-

The 
Peanuts 
Movie

20th Century 
Fox

Rave & Quality 16

“We 
have 
a 
tremendous 

number of really worthy singing 
actors who we would like to be 
able to accommodate with more 
performances,” Swedberg added. 
“So by doing two one-acts, we’re 
able to engage like 30, 31 singers, 
with double casting … so that’s 
giving a lot of our students a good 
opportunity to sink their teeth 
into some performance time 
onstage, and that’s how you learn 
to do it.”

“The other nice thing about 

this double bill is that one is 
in Italian and the other is in 
French, so it gives our sing-
ing actors an opportunity to 
increase their ability to sing in 
these foreign languages as well,” 
Swedberg continued, expand-
ing his focus on the educational 
aspects of the production.

The first of the two operas 

being 
produced 
is 
L’heure 

espagnole 
(“The 
Spanish 

Hour”) by French composer 
Maurice Ravel. Ravel, who is 
associated with Debussy and the 
Impressionist movement (though 
they both took issue with that 
term), is known for his popular 
composition Bolero, his colorful 
orchestrations 
and 
numerous 

masterworks. Composed in 1911, 
the comical opera is Ravel’s first 
foray into the genre.

“This is sort of a French 

bedroom farce … although it has 
a Spanish flavor,” Swedberg said. 
“The Spanish hour is a time in 
the day when the husband might 
be away and the wife might 
possibly entertain lovers … on 
this particular day, though, the 
husband (a clockmaker) is away 
and the wife has complications 
with the lover that she expects, 
who turns out to be more 
interesting in writing poetry 
than in her.”

This Gordian knot of romance 

is further tightened when a 
muleteer and third potential lover 
arrive on the scene, leaving the 
wife to juggle her delicate and 
amusing situation.

The second of the two operas 

being 
performed 
is 
Gianni 

Schicchi, written in 1919 by the 
seasoned Italian opera composer 
Giacomo Puccini, one of the most 
frequently performed composers 
of opera, known for masterworks 
like Madama Butterfly, Tosca and 
the unfinished Turandot.

“It’s one of the best written 

comic operas, in my opinion,” 

Swedberg said of Gianni Schicchi. 
“It’s mostly about how groups of 
people deal with greed, and it’s 
just a really funny piece.”

The opera tells the tale of a 

well-off family squabbling over 
the will of a deceased relative, 
and how to rewrite it. Matters 
are further complicated by the 
fact that a young man within 
the family has a fiancée from a 
working-class background, which 
troubles his snobbish relatives.

The production of the operas 

also reflects an update to the 
settings, a change made with 
the aim of making the themes 
more accessible to contemporary 
audiences. Similar adjustments 
have 
been 
occurring 
with 

increasing frequency over the 
past several years — for example, 
Charles Gounod’s Faust, based on 
Goethe’s famous retelling of the 
German legend, was performed a 
few years ago at the Metropolitan 
opera in a recontextualization 
that 
included 
the 
titular 

character as a physicist involved 
in the development of atomic 

weaponry.

“We thought it would be 

interesting to go for the Victorian, 
Industrial 
Revolution 
and 

Steampunk look,” the director 
said of updates to “The Spanish 
Hour,” drawing inspiration from 
the 
clockmaker’s 
workshop 

in the opera. Of the Puccini, 
Swedberg said, “Gianni Schicchi 
was set in 1299 … but we thought 
with an update to the ’20s, we 
would be able to use a different 
costume and scenic palette that 
might be more relevant.”

In 
discussing 
the 

complementary nature of the 
two operas, Swedberg spoke 
about 
the 
slight 
differences 

in comedic style between the 
operas. According to him, Ravel’s 
work is far more exaggerated 
and farcical, whereas Puccini’s is 
more a “slice of life” style.

“They 
stand 
up 
really 

nicely,” Swedberg said of the 
operas. “Having the two styles 
together in one evening is very 
interesting — two different 
types of comedy.”

OPERA
From Page 1A

more performances,” Swedberg 
added. “So by doing two one-acts, 
we’re able to engage like 30, 31 
singers, with double casting … so 
that’s giving a lot of our students 
a good opportunity to sink their 
teeth into some performance time 
onstage, and that’s how you learn 
to do it.”

“The other nice thing about 

this double bill is that one is in 
Italian and the other is in French, 
so it gives our singing actors an 
opportunity to increase their 
ability to sing in these foreign 
languages as well,” Swedberg 
said, expanding his focus on 
the educational aspects of the 
production.

The first of the two operas being 

produced is L’heure espagnole 
(“The Spanish Hour”) by French 
composer Maurice Ravel. Ravel, 
who is associated with Debussy 
and the Impressionist movement 
(though they both took issue with 
that term), is known for his popular 
composition Bolero, his colorful 
orchestrations 
and 
numerous 

masterworks. Composed in 1911, 
the comical opera is Ravel’s first 
foray into the genre.

“This is sort of a French 

bedroom farce … although it has 
a Spanish flavor,” Swedberg said. 
“The Spanish hour is a time in 
the day when the husband might 
be away and the wife might 
possibly entertain lovers … on 
this particular day, though, the 
husband (a clockmaker) is away 
and the wife has complications 
with the lover that she expects, 
who turns out to be more 
interesting in writing poetry than 
in her.”

This Gordian knot of romance 

is further tightened when a 
muleteer and third potential lover 
arrive on the scene, leaving the 
wife to juggle her delicate and 
amusing situation.

The second of the two operas 

being 
performed 
is 
Gianni 

Schicchi, written in 1919 by the 
seasoned Italian opera composer 
Giacomo Puccini, one of the most 
frequently performed composers 
of opera, known for masterworks 
like Madama Butterfly, Tosca and 
the unfinished Turandot.

“It’s one of the best written 

comic operas, in my opinion,” 
Swedberg said of Gianni Schicchi. 
“It’s mostly about how groups of 
people deal with greed, and it’s 
just a really funny piece.”

The opera tells the tale of a well-

off family squabbling over the will 
of a deceased relative, and how 
to rewrite it. Matters are further 
complicated by the fact that a 
young man within the family has 
a fiancée from a working-class 
background, which troubles his 
snobbish relatives.

The production of the operas 

also reflects an update to the 
settings, a change made with 
the aim of making the themes 
more accessible to contemporary 
audiences. Similar adjustments 
have 
been 
occurring 
with 

increasing frequency over the 
past several years — for example, 
Charles Gounod’s Faust, based on 
Goethe’s famous retelling of the 
German legend, was performed a 
few years ago at the Metropolitan 
opera in a recontextualization 
that included the titular character 
as a physicist involved in the 
development of atomic weaponry.

OPERA
From Page 1A

DIVERSITY SUMMIT
From Page 1A

aspect to help people have not 
just an academic understanding 
of the barriers of poverty,” 
Warpehoski said.

The 
three-hour-long 

workshop replicated a month of 
poverty by dividing an hour into 
four weeks, each week covering 
15 
minutes. 
The 
concept, 

Warpehoski said, was developed 
by a group of welfare rights 
organizers in Missouri.

“There are all these victim 

blaming narratives out there,” 
Warpehoski said. “The lived 
experience was that it’s not that 
easy, and so they developed this 
simulation to give people just 
that tiny window into all the 
barriers that all the people in 
poverty face.”

The 
students 
were 
given 

scripts and asked to assume the 
roles of low-income people of 
a variety of backgrounds and 
family structures. Volunteers 

from the community played 
staff members of a fictional 
town, taking up the roles of 
store owners, welfare office 
workers, grocers, food pantry 
employees, police, employment 
interviewers and others.

Public Policy senior Blair 

Sucher said she felt very trapped 
in her character’s situation. 
Sucher said, in the simulation, 
her character’s income changed 
from a $60,000 per year to less 
than $1,000 per month.

“I didn’t know what I was 

doing from the get go,” she said. 
“I didn’t know where to go get 
resources. There were so many 
externalities that weren’t even 
covered, and I was already 
so overwhelmed by what was 
happening while sitting here. ”

Students were instructed not 

to break character. Murmurs of 
frustration could be heard in 
the room. One student cried out, 
“This is so hard.”

Assistant 
Sociology 
Prof. 

Alexandra 
Murphy 
noted 

a 
change 
in 
the 
overall 

atmosphere of the room as 
students felt the burdens of 
their mock situations intensify.

“It seemed like no one could 

trust 
each 
other 
and 
that 

everyone was looking out for 
themselves, and their families,” 
she said. “That stress made it 
difficult for students to navigate 
relationships with one another. 
They were trying to make the 
most of what they had without 
getting ripped off by their 
neighbors and the offices.”

At the end of the event, 

Warpehoski 
talked 
to 
the 

students about the need for 
affordable 
housing 
in 
Ann 

Arbor. 
He 
said 
the 
ICPJ 

supports an affordable housing 
development 
on 
Platt 
Road 

and he urged students to lobby 
elected officials in support of 
the housing program.

“The price of housing in Ann 

Arbor is very high,” he said. 
“There have been some voices 
that have come out that oppose 
affordable housing. Don’t let 
these be the only voices.”

SIMULATION
From Page 1A

