Opinion
SHOHAM GEVA
EDITOR IN CHIEF
CLAIRE BRYAN
AND REGAN DETWILER
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORS
LAURA SCHINAGLE
MANAGING EDITOR
420 Maynard St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
tothedaily@michigandaily.com
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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4 — Friday, January 29, 2016
Claire Bryan, Regan Detwiler, Caitlin Heenan,
Jeremy Kaplan, Ben Keller, Minsoo Kim, Payton Luokkala,
Aarica Marsh, Anna Polumbo-Levy, Jason Rowland, Lauren Schandevel,
Melissa Scholke, Rebecca Tarnopol, Ashley Tjhung, Stephanie Trierweiler,
Mary Kate Winn, Derek Wolfe, Hunter Zhao
EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS
S
chool buildings fester with mold and
vermin. Students fill frigid classrooms
beyond capacity. Teachers instruct
from
outdated
text-
books, if they even have
books at all.
For the students and
teachers of Detroit Pub-
lic Schools, these sen-
tences do not amount to
a mere horror story: It is
their reality.
The Detroit Federa-
tion of Teachers, the
district’s primary teach-
ers union, brought these
issues (and many more)
to light after sick-outs
closed more than half of Detroit’s schools
over the past couple of weeks. Though the
sick-outs are a fresh tactic taken on by DFT,
the problems they protest are anything but
new.
“Teachers in DPS have been talking about
these things since I was in middle school,”
said Michael Chrzan, an LSA and School of
Education senior. Chrzan, who attended DPS
for his entire grade-school education, gradu-
ated
from
Renaissance
High School before com-
ing to the University. He
describes his experience
at Renaissance, one of the
district’s premier magnet
schools, as “atypical” com-
pared to other high schools
in the city. Though Renais-
sance had a “college-going
culture,” fantastic teachers
and state-of-the-art facili-
ties, Chrzan admitted it
was not entirely immune to
the problems that plague the cash-strapped
district: Outdated textbooks, large class sizes
with inadequate resources and teacher lay-
offs were still a reality at his high school.
DPS has struggled over the past couple
decades as the district’s enrollment has
continually dwindled while its debt has
increased. Emergency managers, appointed
by the governor, have governed DPS since
2009, after the state deemed the district
incapable of handling its own finances. The
emergency manager has complete author-
ity over the financial (read: all) matters of
the district. Since emergency managers
took over DPS, its debt has only deepened;
in 2015, under the governance of Darnell
Earley, 30 to 40 percent of state funds allo-
cated to DPS were used to pay off city debt
instead.
There is no doubt DFT’s tactics have been
effective in exposing their cause. Photos
posted to the union’s Twitter account gar-
nered national attention, and the American
Federation of Teachers joined forces with
DFT to spread their cause. Sick-outs caught
the attention of politicians on both local and
state levels, as Mayor Mike Duggan toured a
handful of Detroit’s schools to inspect their
conditions, and Gov. Rick Snyder called for
immediate action in his State of the State
address.
Snyder’s proposed legislation would split
the district into an “old district” and a “new
district.” The old district would exist solely
to address DPS’s accumulated debt, while the
new one, named Detroit Community School
District, would facilitate schooling. $250 mil-
lion from the state’s general fund would fund
the new district. A nine-member interim
school board appointed by Snyder and Dug-
gan would govern the district until Jan. 1,
2017, when a seven-member elected school
board would take power.
Suspiciously absent from these plans are
the voices of teachers, students and their
families, without whom the need for change
within the district would have gone unno-
ticed.
“Those closest to the problem, being stu-
dents and families, have great ideas of their
own that they can contribute about the use of
resources, and they should be allowed to do
so,” said Camille Wilson, an associate profes-
sor in the School of Education.
Wilson argues that for any tangible change
to occur, community involvement — on both
the district and school level — is necessary.
Yet Snyder’s legislation fails to take com-
munity voices into account. In fact, the state
seems to hush them in order to promote its
own agenda — one that hasn’t worked over
the past seven years.
Teachers, for example, are kept as far
away from the bargaining table as possible:
Following a sick-out that closed 88 of DPS’s
97 schools, the district filed an injunction
against DFT and other participating parties,
citing that the sick-outs “deprived (students)
of their right to attend school” and are a
“waste of taxpayer money.”
Though the court ruled
against the injunction, the
state’s will to suppress the
voice of those closest to the
issue is cause for alarm in
itself.
The
legislation
also
implements a system that
feigns
autonomy.
Sure,
Detroiters get to elect their
own school board, but the
emergency
management
system will stay, allowing
the state to continue to exercise control over
the district.
The state’s rhetoric on the issue is all the
more concerning. In his State of the State
address, Snyder emphasized the need to
improve students’ ability to transition from
high school to jobs, implying that higher edu-
cation is not an attainable — or reasonable
— goal for students in DPS. To succeed aca-
demically, students in DPS often overcome
hardships that students in other districts do
not, but receiving a college education certain-
ly isn’t an impossibility for them. Many DPS
students graduate and matriculate to colleges
each year.
At the University, however, the number of
students hailing from DPS, Michigan’s larg-
est school district, is miniscule. Yet this is not
a reflection of poor admissions on the Univer-
sity’s end inasmuch as it is a reflection of the
repressive system below it. In order to level
the playing field of college admissions, we
must fix the problem before students’ senior
year of high school. We must create equity
among our country’s schools so that inner-
city students are afforded the same academic
opportunities as students in more affluent
neighborhoods.
Most students in Detroit simply do not
have access to the academic and extracur-
ricular resources that students who attend
schools in districts just outside of the city’s
limits have. And, as of now, the state has no
true plan to fix that.
For Detroit, perhaps the best route to
equity is to let the people shape the district
themselves.
—Rebecca Tarnopol can be reached
at tarnopol@umich.edu.
A better fix for DPS
REBECCA
TARNOPOL
“For any tangible
change to occur,
community
involvement is
neceessary”
E-mail Yazmon at EYazmon@umich.Edu
YAZMON ECTOR
F
rom my seat here in Mason
Hall, I can hear the constant
clicking open and closing of
the doors, the
sounds of hun-
dreds of fellow
students filing in
and out. I can see
these
students
ignoring
their
peers’ efforts to
try to get them
to acknowledge
their work on
campus,
with,
at most, a dona-
tion, but more
likely, about 15
seconds of time — but the sacri-
fice is too great for these students.
I acknowledge my guilt in these
situations as well. Rushing to class,
how dare anybody try to stop me?
Sitting here, though, hearing
and watching all of this happen,
I notice this guy next to me who
is eating a banana while plugged
into his computer screen, watch-
ing a YouTube video of some man
talking. Every now and then, the
fellow to my right chuckles to him-
self; alas, he has just scarfed down
the last of the ripe banana that he
has been caressing in his right hand
for some time now — but instead of
feeling the all-too-familiar loss-of-
banana blues, our man produces the
most ferocious of chuckles yet (still
silent, totally to himself, but as a
witness sitting just a few feet away
from him, I see the extraordinary
passion in his eyes; this chuckle is
like no other), his eyes still glued to
the screen. Suddenly, his face turns
serious, and his hand lowers onto
the control pad of his laptop — per-
haps he will now be changing vid-
eos, moving on from this moment
that has provided him with an
intimate session of joy that no one,
besides me, has noticed.
I wonder how he would react
to knowing that this laughter was
not actually private, that it has all
been observed by me. Who am I to
this person? Nobody — a student, a
random student, and sure, he and
I go to the same school, but that
does not actually feel like it means
all that much, does it? This shared
affiliation of ours does not pro-
vide enough information for me to
confidently guess anything about
this person — his background, his
beliefs, anything. So, in effect, I am
nothing to this person. I don’t mean
anything to him.
And this happens thousands of
times, every day — passing by stu-
dents on the Diag or sitting next to
them in the Undergraduate Library.
These are students whom I have
never seen before and may as well
never see again. Sometimes, I might
even have a nice exchange with
one of them — earlier today, sitting
here, a girl offered part of her table
for the endless school supplies bil-
lowing out of my backpack. “No,”
I said. “It’s fine. But thank you!”
And we shared a smile, but then it
was immediately back to business;
she focused once again on her com-
puter, and me on mine. But I want
more! I thought. You seem gentle
and kind! Can we be friends?
This question of intimacy, then,
becomes very important to my
Michigan experience: where to find
it, how to properly test its validity.
I have found that this phenom-
enon of passing strangers, of hav-
ing no reliably informative link
between me and my peers, can
often make attending this univer-
sity very difficult. It can feel like I
am not making up any ground, like
my experience here is becoming
no more personalized or intimate
or regulated by me. It instead feels
like this stream of strangers will
continue endlessly, regardless of
the friends I make, and that I will
always feel tiny here, I will always
struggle to believe my presence
here changes anything, at all.
The challenge becomes, then,
to make friends whom you trust
and care about enough; friends
who will make the experience here
feel sufficiently used; friends who
provide ample space for me to feel
socially relaxed. But this creates
perhaps the most destructive ele-
ment of the Michigan social scene:
Since the school is so huge and the
feeling of isolation so scary, every-
body (myself included) finds their
friends and then clings to that
group tightly, holding on for dear
life, knowing no other option. In
the end, the campus feels colder,
because while people have formed
bonds
within
their
respective
social groups, hardly anyone is
invested in the larger community.
Hardly anyone is invested in mak-
ing new friends, friends beyond the
group you already know, because
to do this is to take a risk. We greet
those people who do try to engage
“strangers,” to begin a conversation
across the all-too-rigid boundary,
with silence.
This is what often makes it
impossible, as I walk alone through
our campus’s halls, for me to feel
comfortable enough to be myself.
And this lack of comfort makes me
not want to stop for peers whom I
do not know, even if those peers are
trying to stop me for a valiant and
worthy cause. Since I do not know
you, since I have never seen you
before and will never see you again,
I have no reason to do you a favor.
Sure, we go to the same school,
but you are not a part of the group
about which I care, the only group
that matters to me.
And this has affected my expe-
rience here deeply, to the point
that I have daily conversations
with friends where we explicitly
judge our peers based on shallow
attributes — how they are dressed,
whether they are in Greek life
or not — and I find myself mak-
ing these judgments about people
before I even speak to them. Before
coming to Michigan, I never did
this — at least not as consciously
and deliberately as I do now. My
logic goes something like this:
Because you are not what I know,
because you share some things that I
associate with groups on this campus
with which I am not familiar, we can-
not be friends.
And my hunch is, from hearing
students who have never set foot
in co-ops deride them for their
“weird dirtiness” to others describ-
ing Greek life as entirely full of bad
people, that I am not alone, that so
many of us are complicit.
The
identity
question
that
divides this campus most, I think,
pertains to Greek life: Are you in
or out? But, for our purposes here,
I think we can set aside our differ-
ences. I do not wish to make the
point that this isolating and judg-
mental treatment of each other per-
tains only to one side of the social
spectrum on campus. I have been
kicked out of a frat party because
of my non-Greek affiliation, even
though I was just trying to hang
out with a dear friend of mine from
home, a freshman, during Welcome
Week. Likewise, at a co-op, I was
explicitly called out for wearing a
specific brand of fleece. Two girls
came up to me and sarcastically
said, “Nice brand, man. How much
did that cost?” Silently, dejectedly,
I turned around and walked to
the corner of the party where my
friends were hanging out.
In our classes — conglomerations
of students throughout the Univer-
sity’s social spectrum — we have 10
minutes set aside, often before the
professor has arrived, before class
has “begun.” And how do we use
this time? We take out our phones
or our laptops: achingly, urgently
trying to reconnect with the famil-
iar, because the world in front of
us, inhabited by “strangers,” is
too much to confront. Imagine a
world without these gadgets, these
crutches upon which we can rest
any fear of having to interact with
each other. Our colloquial nick-
name for these 10 minutes, “Michi-
gan Time,” makes perfect sense, for
this time serves as a microcosm of
the entire university, of how we all
treat each other all the time.
And it is not only students who
are complicit in this problematic
social environment. Throughout
my time here, it has been rare to
come across an instructor who
cared enough about the class’s
well-being to enforce conversation
between students. Professors only
learn their students’ names by the
middle of the term, and that’s only
if the class is small enough. This
fosters an environment of apathy
toward one another: I only care
about the work you do here, and
nothing more. I only care about
what is relevant to me.
— Isaiah Zeavin-Moss can be reached
at izeavinm@umich.edu.
WILLIAM ROYSTER | MICHIGAN IN COLOR
“
Yeezy, Yeezy, Yeezy just jumped over Jumpman!”
exclaims the notorious, self-proclaimed King of
Pop, Mr. Kanye West in a recent single, “Facts.”
Within the song, Kanye chronicles his experience
with corporate America, his struggle with intellectu-
al property and fallout with Nike, and his newfound
success with Adidas, which has propelled him over
the jumpman, Michael Jordan. The moral of Kanye’s
“Facts” is that he simply cannot be bought or halted by
corporations and Mr. West is by far one of the only hip
hop artists who has taken deliberate actions toward
denouncing corporate control over artists.
Unlike Kanye, many artists and athletes alike who
receive endorsements are less prone to speak out on
controversial topics or against corporate control due
to the fear of financial loss from their respective spon-
sors. Hence, as Kanye so vividly articulates, one can
see that endorsements and sponsorship can coerce art-
ists and athletes into acting “politically correct.” Nev-
ertheless, Kanye West’s “Facts” is a track that not only
criticizes corporations, but any form of authoritative
control. As a college student, particularly a student of
color, I have found myself in coercive situations with
an authoritarian professor on numerous occasions,
that have always ended in me being silenced.
Junior year, as I sat in my Engineering 202 class,
I found myself shocked at what my professor had said
before the class. “If you don’t bring a calculator to
your exam, I will chase you out of here like a lynch
mob,” noted my professor. Within the class of 50 stu-
dents I glanced over at the one other Black student,
who I found looking back at me in awe. Her facial
expression let me know: Yes, that just happened.
She and I talked briefly after the class ended and we
agreed that what we heard was completely unaccept-
able, but there was just one catch. The teacher dis-
tributed our grades.
As a result, we collectively decided not to address
the teacher’s actions because we felt it could nega-
tively impact our class evaluation and ultimately
our letter grades. Moreover, we were not sure if two
Black students complaining about a tenured Cauca-
sian professor would be heard by anyone and taken
seriously. Hence, we were ultimately silenced and
coerced out of fear. Given how often students of color
are the minority in classroom settings I would imag-
ine that this happens far too often. If you were ever
wondering what a microaggression is, here is your
example. Microaggressions are real. They are unac-
ceptable. They are coercive. And those “Facts” are
facts only.
——Michigan in Color is the Daily’s designated
space for and by students of color at the University of
Michigan. To contribute your voice or find out more
about MiC, e-mail michiganincolor@umich.edu.
Observing our intermingling
ISAIAH
ZEAVIN-
MOSS
Kanye West’s “facts” are facts
Read more at MichiganDaily.com