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

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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4A — Thursday, February 4, 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

aturday evening, I slid into 
the back seat of the third 
Uber I have ever been in. I 

was on my way 
to a near-Main 
Street bar with 
two 
friends, 

both from states 
with 
stricter 

seatbelt 
laws 

than Michigan. 
They 
instant-

ly 
harnessed 

themselves into 
the 
passenger 

and 
rear-pas-

senger 
seats 

of 
the 
Uber 

driver’s car. I remained unbuck-
led in the rear driver-side seat. I 
didn’t even notice I was the only 
one without a seatbelt on until we 
arrived at our destination. Though 
I always buckle up in the front seat 
of any car, it isn’t as instinctive to 
me when riding in the back.

Fifty years ago, the federal 

government passed the National 
Traffic Safety and Motor Vehicle 
Safety Act of 1966, allowing it to 
create and enforce safety stan-
dards for motor vehicles. As the 
years passed, seatbelt require-
ments became more and more 
strict. In 1984, New York became 
the first state to require drivers to 
wear seatbelts.

About one year later, Michigan 

was the third state to enact some 
sort of seatbelt requirement. By 
2000, the Michigan legislature, 
similar to several states across 
the nation, instituted a primary 
enforcement 
law 
giving 
police 

officers the authorization to pull 
over drivers for not wearing a seat-
belt. Originally, officers were only 
authorized to ticket unrestrained 
citizens after pulling them over for 
a separate offense.

In 2004, Michigan was the first 

state east of the Mississippi River 
to achieve a 90-percent seatbelt 
use rate. Five years later, it held 
the national record for highest 
seatbelt use at 97.9 percent. Today, 
Michigan requires that all drivers 

and front-seat passengers always 
wear their seatbelts. However, if 
you are over 15 years of age, a seat-
belt is not required in the back seat 
of vehicles. In 2010, the state had 
the fifth-highest seatbelt-use rate 
at 95.2 percent. Nationally, the 
rate is 87 percent for drivers, 85 
percent for front-seat passengers 
and 78 percent for rear-seat occu-
pants in 2013.

According to the National High-

way Traffic Safety Administration’s 
2010 State and Territory survey, 
“Jurisdictions with stronger seat-
belt enforcement laws continue to 
exhibit generally higher use rates 
than those with weaker laws.”

The Insurance Institute for 

Highway Safety and the High-
way Loss Data Institute notes 
that seatbelt rates are often lower 
among men, younger people and 
occupants of pickup trucks. A 2012 
national telephone survey found 
that short-distance drives, forget-
fulness and discomfort were the 
top reasons for not wearing a seat-
belt among those who sometimes 
used a seatbelt. Among those who 
never wore a seatbelt, discomfort, 
the belief that seatbelts are not 
necessary and a dislike of being 
told what to do were the top three 
reasons for their decisions.

Seatbelt-use rates have soared 

since the 1960s as researchers 
and citizens have come to realize 
how vital they are to protection 
while riding in vehicles. In 2009, 
more than half of passenger occu-
pant fatalities occurred while the 
passengers 
were 
unrestrained. 

NHTSA estimated that seatbelts 
saved more than 62,000 lives from 
2009 to 2013.

Growing up in a rural Michigan 

county, I witnessed a lot of unbuck-
led car passengers. Whenever I went 
on long trips as a kid with my cousin 
and her dad, he would make the back 
seat of his van into a pull-out bed 
and let us sleep during the ride. My 
mom always scolded me, telling me 
to make sure to wear my seatbelt in 
cars, but I was a kid. It was fun not 
having to wear a seatbelt. 

When I turned 16, I stopped 

wearing my seatbelt in the back seat 
during short-distance rides or with 
drivers whom I knew. With fewer 
than 800 residents in my home-
town, the roads are nearly always 
empty. I never questioned my 
behavior until I came to Ann Arbor 
and made friends who did.

After watching the Democratic 

debate nearly three weeks ago, my 
friend Derek offered to drive me to 
my car. It was freezing outside. We 
piled into Derek’s roommate’s car, 
dropped another friend off at her 
apartment and then headed across 
campus to the Maynard Street 
parking garage. Almost 300 feet 
from our destination, Derek had a 
sudden realization.

“You’re not wearing a seatbelt,” 

he said.

“You don’t have to in Michigan 

when you’re over 15 years old and 
in the back seat,” I retorted.

“There’s a strict seatbelt rule in 

this car,” replied Derek’s room-
mate, Sam. “I wouldn’t even start 
the car until everyone was buckled 
when I was a camp counselor.”

“Well, I trust your driving,” I 

directed toward Derek.

“It’s other people on the road 

that you have to worry about,” 
responded Sam, poking me in the 
knee as he said it.

Instantly, I felt guilty. As much 

as I hated to admit it, they were 
right. How many times have I 
heard of a fatality when a car pas-
senger was unrestrained? How 
many public service announce-
ments have I watched about the 
importance of seatbelts? How 
many lives could have been saved 
with a seatbelt?

The answer is too many.
And yet, last weekend I found 

myself once again slipping into 
old habits. I remained unbuck-
led during that Uber drive Satur-
day night. But, looking at my two 
friends safely strapped to their 
seats, I once again felt guilty.

Aarica Marsh can be reached 

at aaricama@umich.edu. 

On seatbelts and identity

AARICA 
MARSH

E-mail BoB at wEisBEcr@umich.Edu
BOB WEISBECKER

In September 2015, I launched a UROP-

supported project with four undergraduates 
and a graduate research assistant to explore 
and make public the history of LSA’s Race 
and Ethnicity requirement.

The first question we set out to ask and 

answer was: What conditions on campus 
led to the creation of the Race and Ethnicity 
requirement? The second question has to do 
with the process that led to the vote of the 
LSA faculty on Oct. 8, 1990, which established 
the requirement. Leading up to the decision 
were what then-Dean Edie Goldenberg 
called “several years of soul-searching and 
intellectually challenging dialogue” in the 
Spring 1991 issue of LSA Magazine.

“Faculty of all ranks and disciplines 

questioned the rationale of a ‘diversity 
requirement’ and asked how it could fit 
within the traditional understanding of 
a liberal arts education. Some expressed 
skepticism that a requirement would lead to 
the desired outcome, however worthy the 
intent. They were answered by others who 
argued that the College would be derelict if it 
failed to attempt to prepare students to face 
one of the most pressing social problems of 
the late 20th century,” Goldberg said.

While Dean Goldberg uses the phrase 

“diversity requirement” in her carefully 
worded letter to LSA alumni, the real impetus 
behind the requirement was about racism. 
The first proposal for a “racism requirement” 
was generated by a student activist group, the 
United Coalition Against Racism, in tandem 
with two faculty groups: Concerned Faculty, 
and Faculty Against Institutional Racism. 
Motivated by a string of racist incidents on 
campus in 1987, they worked for over a year 
to get the proposal on the agenda of an LSA 
faculty meeting.

Though this first proposal — sometimes 

called the “radical alternative” — was 
defeated, authorization was given to establish 
UC 299 as a pilot course dealing with issues 
of racism and intolerance. This was not what 
UCAR envisioned; the organization sought 
a committee consisting of seven faculty 
members from various ethnic and gender 
studies departments and two students from 
the Baker-Mandela Center to work together 
over the development of the course. They 
feared the course’s supervisory board would 
consist of people who had little understanding 
of race, racism and discrimination.

In the meantime, the LSA faculty continued 

to consider and debate several alternatives. 
All of this unfolded against the backdrop 
of continued student protest by UCAR and 
within the broader Black Action Movement, 

dubbed BAM III. As was the case with BAM 
I and BAM II issues of campus climate, the 
diversity of the student body and the faculty, 
questions of equity in funding and, of course, 
the nature of the curriculum continued 
to swirl. Some administrations, like LSA’s 
Dean Peter Steiner, were denounced as 
unresponsive and obstructionist.

The debates over what would eventually 

become LSA’s Race or Ethnicity requirement 
(the name was changed to Race and Ethnicity 
in 1995) revealed stresses and fault lines 
within the faculty and on campus. Some 
warned of an overly politicized curriculum 
that would substitute “indoctrination” for 
“education”; others warned that the proposed 
requirement would not go far enough in 
fully addressing the underlying problems of 
racism; some feared more student activism, 
while others sought to promote more radical 
alliances between students and faculty. The 
tensions over whether the requirement should 
focus on racism or on diversity was never, we 
think, fully resolved. Most understood that 
no single course or degree requirement was 
sufficient to solve the problems of race and 
racism, intolerance and discrimination.

The debates — captured in the pages 

of the local press, including the Daily, in 
archival materials stored at the Bentley, 
and in the living memory of participants — 
offer a historical window into the origins 
and evolution of the Race and Ethnicity 
requirement. We also believe they tell us 
something important about the history of our 
campus and the ways we have struggled with, 
and sometimes struggled over, questions of 
race, identity and education.

The main goal of our project is to use a 

variety of sources to tell the story of the 
Race and Ethnicity requirement and to find 
creative ways of share our findings with 
the Ann Arbor campus. You can follow us 
on Twitter (@reumhistory). We’ll also be 
partnering with the Daily on an oral history 
project to capture the voices of faculty, 
students, alumni and administrators who 
took part in the events of the late 1980s and 
early 1990s. As LSA continues to review the 
requirement and to think carefully about 
the role of the curriculum in its Diversity, 
Equity & Inclusion plan, we hope that this 
history will help to inform our contemporary 
perspectives.

Stay tuned for more.

Angela D. Dillard is LSA’s associate dean for 

undergraduate education. She is also the Earl Lewis 

Collegiate Professor of Afroamerican & African 

Studies and a professor in the Residential College.

History of the R&E requirement

ANGELA DILLARD | OP-ED 

W

ith surprisingly no obligations to 
fulfill, no deadlines to meet and 
no meetings to attend, I laced up 

my running shoes. After 
almost four Ann Arbor 
winters, 45-degree days 
in January are still anom-
alies to me, but they’re 
anomalies 
I 
take 
full 

advantage of. 

I jogged around the cen-

ter of campus and rounded 
my way south through a 
large section of student 
neighborhoods. I origi-
nally told myself it’d be an 
easy jog — a short distance 
at a gentle pace. But I figured I could do a lit-
tle bit more.

I kept pushing onward. One more lap 

around the law buildings seemed feasible. 
Once I reached the last stoplight on my street, 
my over-ambitious mind told my tired limbs 
to work a little harder. It didn’t matter that 
I hadn’t jogged in more than a month or that 
I’d been running for 45 minutes already. I 
probably wasn’t going to be able to squeeze in 
another run for a while.

I sprinted, ignoring the warning signals my 

body was sending.

Darting around pedestrians on the side-

walk, my foot landed in a patch of fresh, 
slippery mud. I tumbled forward, slamming 
onto the concrete driveway of the house 
next to my apartment. My hands — out-
stretched to break my fall — were scraped 
and caked in layers of dirt and blood. Lying 
on my back like an overturned turtle, I con-
ducted an injury inventory.

“OK, so that was probably a bit too much at 

once,” I muttered bitterly as I hobbled along 
the last 30 or so feet to my apartment.

That’s not the first time I’ve uttered that 

phrase, and the tendency to overexert myself 
crossed my mind countless times over the 
past few semesters. Overexertion, for me and 
many other college students, is a matter of 

hindsight. This realization hit as I collapsed 
on the couch at the end of the day, after get-
ting little to no sleep the prior night. It accom-
panied migraines and an empty stomach after 
realizing I forgot to eat until 8 p.m. or when 
two cups of coffee and a bowl of cereal were 
the only things sustaining me throughout the 
day. Additionally, it recently hit when a rela-
tively mild case of bronchitis lingered for an 
entire month.

College cultivates an environment of over-

exertion, and its effects are as diverse as 
the students experiencing this atmosphere. 
As a student population, we’re continually 
reminded that “busy” is always somehow 
“better.” Our success is constantly measured 
according to how hard we push ourselves and 
whether we’re pushing ourselves enough. 
For some, this equates to dividing time out-
side of class between numerous jobs, stu-
dent organizations, internships and clubs. 
As these expectations increase, overexertion 
and exhaustion can plague students regard-
less of their course load. In this balancing act, 
something is always sacrificed — whether it 
be one’s social life, their grades or their physi-
cal well-being.

For students of lower socioeconomic sta-

tus, overexertion is an almost-certainty, and 
large amounts of money and the ability to 
even complete a degree are often at stake. For 
example, students often take heavy course 
loads of roughly 15 to 18 credits for a vari-
ety of reasons: completing a double major, 
switching a major or merely trying to gradu-
ate within four years. However, students from 
low-income households frequently do so out 
of financial necessity. Students coming from 
school districts located in low-income areas 
often are limited in their ability to accrue AP 
or IB credits that could count toward their 
degrees, placing them at a disadvantage in 
comparison to their peers. Taking more cred-
its each semester lessens the time one needs 
to complete his or her degree, and decreases 
the immense financial burden placed upon 
these students.

MELISSA
SCHOLKE

Falling before the finish line

Recognizing that taking fewer 

than 15 credits prolongs both the 
duration and financial impact of 
one’s college education, the U.S. 
Department of Education recently 
proposed an initiative to restore 
access to Pell Grants throughout 
the year, which would enable stu-
dents from lower socioeconomic 
backgrounds to take courses dur-
ing the summer. Additionally, the 
Department of Education advo-
cated instituting an annual $300 
bonus for students receiving Pell 
Grant funds who take at least 15 
credits per semester. The Depart-
ment of Education claims that the 
credit incentive would aid an esti-
mated 2.3 million students and 
encourage students to complete 
their degree at a faster rate. This is 
all occurring in the midst of “15 to 

Finish” campaign that encourages 
students to take larger course loads 
in order to succeed.

While these initiatives are well-

intentioned and done with an 
awareness of how difficult it can 
be completing a degree in a timely 
manner, incentivizing and encour-
aging students to assume heavier 
course loads places even more stress 
on a population of students who 
are already overworked and strug-
gling with time constraints. Cur-
rently the maximum annual award 
a low-income student can receive 
from a Pell Grant is $5,775. Even if 
a student receives additional aid or 
scholarships, it’s likely individuals 
from lower socioeconomic back-
grounds will need to work to cover 
any remaining tuition costs and 
basic living expenses. The struggle 

to balance long work shifts with 
a larger course load may inhibit 
degree completion rates as well.

The 
efforts 
and 
incentives 

are good first steps on a path to 
improve federal student funding 
and aid students in obtaining an 
education in the most efficient 
manner possible. However, these 
initiatives must be navigated care-
fully, recognizing the pressures 
placed upon student populations as 
they try to balance myriad expec-
tations. If enacted, these propos-
als should aid students while still 
acknowledging that pushing over-
burdened students to move too 
fast may cause them to fall before 
they finish.

Melissa Scholke can be reached 

at melikaye@umich.edu. 

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