of the event’s sketches and acts, 
which ranged from personal 
journal readings and comedy 
acts. Many of the actors were 
involved with the University’s 
Educational Theatre Company 
or were a part of the School of 
Art & Design BFA in Interarts 
Performance program.

ETC Director Callie McKee 

was the Master of Ceremonies 
for the event and performed a 
recitation of a prose piece she 
wrote after the election. In it, 
she describes the emotional 
response she felt when the 
candidate she had campaigned 
for lost. In a compelling, yet 
comical sense, she illustrates 
the “hole” left when Secretary 
of State Hillary Clinton lost 
the election.

“I woke up this morning and 

I was faced with a disturbing 
lack of Hillary,” McKee said. 
“She had been there for nights 
before, for years before, in 
magnets, buttons and shirts, 
pictures framed and cut out, 
articles, greeting cards. Her 
profile carved into the skin of 
a gourd, coursed, yet gooey, 
orange, 
yet 
decidedly 
not 

orange, her profile glowed 
against the dark and greeted 
trick-or-treaters.”

ETC 
member 
Theresa 

Beckley-Amaya, an LSA junior, 

performed a piece she titled 
“I Am Protest,” in which she 
describes how she sees her 
role in society.

“My 
life 
is 
a 
protest,” 

Beckley-Amaya said. “A queer, 
mixed, 
spiritual 
woman 

of color in white, Catholic 
suburbia. 
Now, 
don’t 
get 

me wrong, I am immensely 
grateful for my community, 
as it shaped me into who I am 
today, a battling activist who 
constantly questioned, ‘Why 
in the world can’t women be 
priests?’ ‘Why was our teacher 
fired for being gay?’ Breath, 
fight, breath, protest, breath, 
exhale. I am an on-going act of 
protest.”

Art & Design senior Ian 

Renstrom, of the Interarts 
program, 
performed 
a 

comedy stand-up act. Later, 
he discussed how the faculty 
helped prepare his piece.

“Channel 
the 
darkness,” 

Renstrom said. “For me, it 
was a very vulnerable time 
when Trump got elected, I 
was alone in my room and 
watching 
everything 
turn 

red on the map and thought: 
‘What is happening? Everyone 
is failing me.’ I feel hopeless, 
this was like the epitome of 
hopelessness.”

Renstrom 
said 
he 
saw 

the 
arts 
in 
the 
country 

under 
attack 
by 
the 
new 

administration. At the end 
of 
January, 
Trump 
stated 

he wished to cut programs 
such as public broadcasting 
— programs that cost 0.02 
percent of federal funding.

“It’s inspired me to get 

angrier,” he said. “The U.S. is 
the one country that doesn’t 
have 
a 
state-funded 
art 

initiative. Trump is getting rid 
of the National Endowment 
for the Arts, which is like the 
closest thing we have.”

He said the central message 

of his performance was to 
create change and progress 
during Trump’s presidency. 
He hoped the rally would 
spawn similar events in the 
future, since he felt it was a 
way to express his mind. 

“Let’s not fuck up the next 

four years,” Renstrom said. “I 
want people to realize we can 
overcome this for sure. He’s 
going to get away with half 
the things he’s doing. People 
are regretting voting for him. 
There’s going to be hope.”

He also said he felt the 

University has neglected to 
support 
performance-based 

art forms in favor of more 
mainstream projects. 

“They’re supportive of very 

accessible 
stuff,” 
Renstrom 

said. “Like, oh we’ll do ‘Angels 
in America’ or ‘Rent,’ but I 
feel like with performance art 
people don’t take it seriously 
and the University is becoming 
more accepting. I just wish it 
was faster.”

Fourth-year 
medical 

student Harold Gomez saw 
the event on Facebook and 
felt his views aligned with the 
movement’s message.

“I 
think 
of 
the 
most 

important for me that, as you 
can tell I’m an immigrant, too, 
being in the United States and 
being American is tolerance,” 
he said. “There have been 
many 
statements 
for 
the 

Muslim 
community, 
people 

who are supporters of Planned 
Parenthood, LGBTQ, who I 
feel transgress all that we have 
done over the past 50 years for 
civil rights … I think there 
should be more work done by 
the University to try and foster 
that kind of environment and 
prevent things that happened 
with the email controversy 
from happening.”

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
News
Tuesday, February 21, 2017 — 3

last 
weekend,” 
Solnit 
said. 

“Intelligence 
agencies 
and 

individual employees seemed to be 
placing themselves in opposition 
to the administration. The power 
of the presidency is to command. If 
people do not obey the commands, 
the power does not exist.”

Solnit went on to speak about 

the Women’s March, the travel 
ban executive order and how she 
came to think of hope as a catalyst.

For 
Solnit, 
hope 
became 

important in 2003, when U.S. 
troops descended on Iraq. Today, 
she sees hope as the driving force 
of all change in the country.

“Fourteen years later, I use the 

term hope because it navigates 
the way forward between false 
certainties of optimism and of 
pessimism, and the complacency 
of passivity that comes with both,” 
Solnit said. “Hope, for me, has 
meant a sense that the future is 
not yet written, and that we don’t 
actually know what will happen, 
but we may be able to write it 
ourselves.”

Solnit, 
a 
self-identified 

progressive 
whose 
political 

ideologies often color her writing, 
did not shy away from claiming 
partisan affiliation in her speech.

“I’m just assuming you’re all 

progressive here,” Solnit said. 
“For those of you who aren’t, I’m 
assuming we can bring you in … 
because it’s more fun and it has 
more people. It has better facts, 
too! The facts are generated on our 
side but the stories have not been. 
We need to tell riveting stories 
about how a progressive agenda 
can make their lives better.”

Solnit returned to her theme of 

hope later in her speech, saying 
that hope in activism — hope that 
what is being done will make a 
difference, even if it isn’t evident 
— is what drives change forward.

“The most important effects 

are often the most indirect,” 
Solnit said. “I sometimes wonder 
when I’m at a mass march like 
the Women’s March a month ago 
… whether the reason it matters 
is because some young woman is 
going to find her purpose in life, 
that will only be evident when she 
changes the world in 20 years as a 
great litigator. Maybe the purpose 
of what you’re doing won’t reveal 
itself in your lifetime, but it will be 
tremendous nonetheless.”

Many audience members came 

to the event because of a passion 
for Solnit’s writing, and a feeling 
of connection to her words. Liz 
Bayans, a resident of Toledo, Ohio 
drove all the way to Ann Arbor 
to hear Solnit’s speech. She feels 
Solnit’s bold stances are what 
make her writing so important.

“I think that she talks about a 

lot of topics people maybe don’t 
breach or feel comfortable with 
discussing openly,” Bayan said. 
“I think it’s important that those 
things are discussed in a more 
mainstream venue.”

Taubman 
graduate 
student 

Phillip Redpath came to hear the 
talk because he’s using elements of 
Solnit’s work in his master’s thesis 
in architecture, but he also shared 
Bayan’s enthusiasm for the way 
Solnit presents her ideas.

“I came because I thought it 

might be relevant to my thesis, 
but also more so because of the 
current political climate,” Redpath 
said. “To me, she offers a way of 
approaching things, not like a 
‘here’s what you do’ but a ‘here’s 
how to think about what to do.’ ” 

WRITER
From Page 1

that they didn’t know about 
it, so we wanted to provide, 
because we had the position to 
do so, (a) comfortable setting 
and educational setting for 
people to learn about it from 
the ground up so that they feel 
more educated on the topic.”

Cole started by explaining 

how the conflict began with 
peaceful protests in Syria in 
March 2011, around the time of 
the Arab Spring, in which both 
Tunisia and Egypt overthrew 
their long-term rulers.

Cole 
stated 
these 

protests 
began 
with 
the 

youth and expanded to a 
broader population as loss 
of employment and lack of 
opportunity 
became 
more 

frequent. He also described 
the unrest in Syria in regard 
to President Bashar Assad’s 
authoritarian regime.

“Any time there’s a ceasefire 

or a slight political opening, 
people come out and protest,” 
he said. “They protest the 
regime, 
they 
even 
protest 

ISIL.” 

Though 
the 
revolution 

did begin peacefully, Cole 

described the violent reaction 
of the regime and the military 
tactics it used to respond to the 
protests, including firing tank 
shells into groups of peaceful 
demonstrators.

“This regime is not nice,” 

he said. “It’s not a nice regime. 
It 
kills 
prisoners. 
There’s 

nothing more helpless in the 
world than a prisoner. They 
torture prisoners to death. 
Not one, not two, how many 
prisoners do we think they 
tortured to death in the last 
five years? At least 10,000.”

Four 
hundred 
thousand 

Syrians were found dead by 
the end of 2016, 11 million are 

currently homeless and 13.5 
million are in need of some 
form of aid or assistance, Cole 
stated in his presentation. 

One 
of 
his 
conclusions 

about civil wars was the 
idea that many people don’t 
understand how easily, or how 
quickly, a nation can fall into 
this sort of unrest.

“People don’t understand 

civil wars if they don’t live 
through them,” he explained. 
“They think it’s something 
that happens to other people, 
but it can happen to you. You 
can fall into a civil war.”

The 
majority 
of 
Syrian 

refugees escaping the chaos 
of their home nation have fled 
to Jordan, Lebanon or Turkey. 
For comparison, he stated the 
United States has let in 22,000 
refugees, while Turkey has 
let in 2.5 million. Turkey had 
many economic benefits from 
the influx of refugees.

“The refugees, when they 

came in, they increased the 
money supply,” Cole said. 
“They figure that Turkey’s 
economy grew 4.5 percent 
because 
of 
the 
refugees 

coming in, otherwise it would 
have stalled out.”

Once refugees enter these 

new countries, however, they 
often find similar hardships 

with standards of living, he 
explained. Many are often 
denied access to local jobs 
and, as a result, are isolated 
and forced to live in tent 
cities.

Michigan has the second 

highest population of Syrian 
refugees in the United States, 
after California, with more 
than 1,400 Syrian refugees in 
September 2016. A majority of 
the Michigan refugee families 
reside in the cities Troy and 
Dearborn.

LSA junior Alaina Dehner 

attended the event because 
she was hoping to learn more 
about an issue with details 
that might be misconstrued 
or not fully explored through 
social media conversations 
or other sources that many 
college students are exposed 
to.

“I think it’s important for 

students to come to events 
like these if only to stay 
informed,” she said. “There’s 
not a whole lot we, as students, 
can do directly involving the 
situation, directly impacting 
the situation, especially with 
the stance that Prof. Cole 
mentioned 
that 
America’s 

taking on it right now, but just 
to stay informed I think is of 
the utmost importance.”

PROFESSOR
From Page 1

said. “However, we keep in mind, 
when 
adjusted 
for 
inflation, 

funding still lags well behind 2011 
levels.”

The 
$316.1 
million 
budget 

recommendation for the Ann 
Arbor campus is lower than the 
funding level in 2011, when the 
state instituted a 15 percent cut to 
higher education funding.

Cynthia 
Wilbanks, 
vice 

president 
for 
government 

relations, 
echoed 
Schlissel’s 

sentiment in a statement and said 
the University appreciates the 
increase in funding, but plans to 
advocate for a greater amount of 
funding and more opportunities 
in the future.

“We 
appreciate 
that 
this 

budget 
recommendation 

continues the recent trend of 
increased funding for higher 
education,” 
Wilbanks 
wrote. 

“In the coming months, we will 
work with the state Legislature to 
support this increase and explore 
opportunities to do better, if 
possible.” 

Conversely, state Rep. Kim 

LaSata 
(R–Bainbridge 
Twp,), 

chair of the Michigan House 
Appropriations 
Subcommittee 

on Higher Education, said in a 
statement she is emboldened 
by the increased investment in 
higher education and would like 
to see this funding in Michigan 
continue to increase to pre-
recession levels. LaSata did not 
respond to interview requests 
from the Daily.

“I am encouraged by the 

proposal to invest more money 
into higher education and will 
work hard as chair to ensure 
these dollars are spent in an 
efficient and fair manner,” LaSata 
wrote. “Michigan’s colleges and 
universities have still not fully 
returned to their pre-recession 
funding levels and it is my goal 
to see these institutions made 
whole again using dollars tied to 
performance.”

State Rep. Yousef Rabhi (D–

Ann Arbor) said in a phone 
interview he was pleased to see 
at least a small increase, but said 
he believes higher education 
in Michigan is still severely 
underfunded.

“I’m happy to see at least higher 

education got a small increase,” 
Rabhi said. “But the governor cut 
higher education substantially 
back like five years ago and if you 
adjust for inflation, we’re not even 
close to where we used to be — 
it isn’t good enough, we can do 
better.”

In 
addition 
to 
funding 

increases, 
Snyder’s 
budget 

recommendation also includes 

a provision to limit any tuition 
increases 
to 
3.8 
percent 
or 

$475 per student in order for a 
university to receive any new 
performance funding.

In her statement, LaSata said 

she believes efforts to cap tuition 
will aid in making college more 
affordable and accessible

“This will serve to keep tuition 

increases down and ultimately 
allow more students to pursue 
their educational dream,” LaSata 
said.

Contradicting this idea, Rabhi 

said he believes this will have a 
vicious effect on higher education 
institutions, because he thinks the 
state is limiting its funding, while 
also capping tuition increases as 
ways for universities to receive 
any additional funding.

“We’re putting our higher 

ed institutions in a situation 
where the legislator is capping 
their tuition increases and also 
underfunding them at the same 
time,” Rabhi said. “So they’re 
really hamstringing the ability 
of our public universities to 
provide that high quality of public 
education that we’ve come to 
expect.”

LSA junior Enrique Zalamea, 

president 
of 
the 
University’s 

chapter of College Republicans, 
wrote in an email interview 
he personally doesn’t support 
massive 
increases 
in 
higher 

education funding without more 
specificity and transparency in 
how 
Michiganders’ 
taxpayer 

dollars are being allocated.

“Federal 
student 
aid 
only 

accounts for roughly 3% of 
Michigan’s 
higher 
education 

spending, the majority of the 
higher education budget actually 
goes to ‘University Operations,’ 
” 
Zalamea 
wrote. 
“Without 

more transparency, I personally 
wouldn’t 
want 
my 
taxpayer 

money going towards university 
sponsored partisan events or 
towards the discounted tuition 
rates of undocumented students.”

In comparison to Zalamea, 

LSA junior Collin Kelly, chair 
of 
the 
University’s 
chapter 

of 
the 
College 
Democrats, 

wrote in an email interview he 
unequivocally supports increased 
higher 
education 
funding. 

Kelly said he believes Snyder’s 
recommendation is a positive 
step, but advocates to see more 
invested in higher education.

“While we are glad this is 

another positive step in the right 
direction, we need the state 
government to go much further 
in supporting higher education in 
Michigan,” Kelly wrote. “A 2.4% 
increase is nice, but that likely 
won’t even be a drop in the bucket 
for most students, we would 
strongly urge the legislature and 
Governor to support our students 
by increasing funding even more.”

HIGHER ED
From Page 1

threat to physical well-being.

“Obviously the risks are 

high in the United States, but 
in other countries, we can be 
talking about their lives that 
are on the line,” Potter said.

Obermayer, 
who 
writes 

for the German newspaper 
Süddeutsche 
Zeitung, 

highlighted the importance 
of being methodical when 
investigating complex data 
leaks. He noted the scope 
of 
an 
investigation 
like 

the Panama Papers, which 
encompassed over 11 million 
pages of leaked documents, 
makes the process of review 
even more important.

He also noted the challenges 

of language barriers, political 
knowledge 
and 
sourcing 

that journalists face when 
investigating 
international 

scandals.

“You 
need 
people 
on 

the ground who know the 
language,” Obermayer said. 
“When I was investigating the 
Panama Papers, a part of our 
research involved Icelandic 
politicians, and ... I personally 
don’t know a word of their 
language. You also need to 
have people who know the 
country and politicians.”

Much 
of 
the 
panel 

discussion centered around 
issues faced by investigative 
journalists in the information 

age, such as security issues 
surrounding encryption and 
data transfer and coordinating 
work between large teams of 
reporters.

One 
of 
Obermayer’s 

colleagues on the Panama 
Papers investigation, Guevara, 
from 
the 
Washington 

D.C.-based 
International 

Consortium of Investigative 
Journalists, spoke about the 
challenges faced during large 
collaborative 
projects 
like 

Obermayer’s 
research 
into 

tax evasion in Panama, which 
involved journalists from over 
100 media outlets.

“How 
do 
you 
convince 

journalists to let go of some of 
the control over their work?” 
Guevara 
asked. 
“Because 

when you collaborate, you 
share 
a 
lot 
of 
research 

and resources, but when it 
comes time to publish, you 
have to respect each other’s 
independence.”

Perrin, 
who 
helped 

spearhead 
the 
large 

investigative 
LuxLeaks 

project, 
echoed 
Guevara’s 

sentiments.

“You need to be really 

disciplined 
and 
need 
to 

respect the plan and date,” 
Perrin said, emphasizing the 
necessity to uphold ethical 
standards of fact verification 
prior to publication.

This, Guevara added, is 

particularly 
important 
in 

light of the increasing rate of 
large-scale scandals. She cited 

the revelations of corruption 
in FIFA, the international 
body governing soccer, and 
Petrobras, the Brazilian state-
run petroleum company.

The 
panel’s 
focus 
then 

shifted 
from 
journalistic 

methods and ethics to the 
means of facilitating large 
transfers of data.

Richard, editor in chief of 

Premières Lignes Télévision, 
a French media outlet, spoke 
about his new project — 
Freedom Voices — that is 
being 
developed 
alongside 

University researchers.

Freedom Voices is a service 

that 
enables 
journalists 

to save information to a 
secure server if their work 
or safety is jeopardized. If 
the journalist using Freedom 
Voices is imprisoned or killed, 

their information is then sent 
to a team of journalists who 
will finish and publish the 
uncompleted work.

“SecureDrop 
makes 

communication of documents 
more secure, safer to be a 
whistleblower or investigative 
journalist,” Richard said of the 
open-source 
whistleblower 

submission 
system. 
“But 

to 
send 
information, 

whistleblowers also can also 
opt to use postal mail, which 
is often very secure.”

Guevara 
concluded 
the 

event by stressing the role of a 
journalist as a public servant 
whose job is to share facts 
that have a public interest.

“I believe there is moral 

responsibility in journalism 
to think about what your story 
will change,” Guevara said.

Following the event, LSA 

junior Tyler Robinson said 
he believed it was valuable 
to him as a communications 
major who is not pursuing a 
career in journalism, because 
it provided him with insight 
into how news stories are 
produced.

“I 
thought 
the 
event 

was 
great; 
everyone 
was 

very 
knowledgeable 
and 

experienced in their field,” 
Robinson 
said. 
“I 
think 

that 
whistleblowing 
is 

extremely valuable and at 
times necessary if there is 
severe wrongdoing occurring 
within the government or 
corporations.”

JOURNALISTS
From Page 1

I believe 

there is moral 
responsibility 
in journalism to 
think about what 

your story will 

change

I think it’s 

important for 

students to come 

to events like 
these if only to 
stay informed

RALLY
From Page 1

He’s going to get 
away with half 
the things he’s 

doing. People are 
regretting voting 

for him. 

