L

ast week, I attended a town 
hall meeting hosted by Stop 
Spencer at the University 

of Michigan, which was set up in 
order to discuss Richard 
Spencer’s 
impending 

visit to campus. I wanted 
to catch myself up on 
the current situation, 
the 
likelihood 
he 

would 
actually 
come 

and to understand the 
University’s response to 
this saga.

I want to respond 

to two different things 
that I learned. First, 
according to the organizers 
of the meeting — who did an 
incredible job presenting all of the 
information — administrators have 
made no contact with Counseling 
and Psychological Services (CAPS) 
to either understand the status of or 
to improve the mental well-being of 
their students.

This 
failure 
to 
coordinate 

with CAPS demonstrates an act 
of callousness. And it entirely 
contradicts 
the 
University’s 

publicly disseminated, “official” 
position. In one of the sparse, 
vague 
statements 
released 
by 

the University about Spencer’s 
visit, University spokesman Rick 
Fitzgerald wrote, “The university 
will carefully consider [Spencer’s] 
request, paying close attention 
to the safety and security of our 
community.”

Since I began writing this 

column, 
the 
University 
has 

announced that Spencer will not 
be coming this semester. I urge you, 
the reader, the campus community, 
anyone, to not understand this as a 
victory, but simply as the University 
kicking this disgusting can further 
down the road. Even with this 
news, I think we should deliberate 
about Spencer’s potential visit.

We might, for example, pause 

and consider the debate around 
hate speech more broadly. Why 
would the University want Spencer 
to come here? I believe it’s because 
the University would like to 
demonstrate the strength of this 
institution. This position might say 
that no one individual, regardless 
of their beliefs, can tarnish what 
we have collectively made here. 
By allowing Spencer to come and 
continuing to function as a school, 
even after he is gone, we will 
emerge stronger; victorious over 
this one bigot.

But the University has arrived 

at this position without any input 
from its students. By largely 
excluding its students from these 
negotiations, 
the 
University 

is 
suppressing 
the 
voices 
of 

marginalized communities — the 
victims of Spencer’s hate speech — 
in order to promulgate this image 

of strength in the face of evil. To 
be clear, this school belongs to its 
students. By coming here, we give 
these administrators work to do. 

They work for and 
alongside us. And yet 
nobody among us, 
not even those most 
informed 
on 
this 

issue, knows what’s 
going on.

It 
takes 
an 

immense 
amount 

of 
exclusionary 

privilege to declare 
what 
will 
make 

our 
University 

stronger, 
especially 

as marginalized communities are 
crying foul in the face of those 
declarations. To arrive at the 
decision that Spencer’s presence 
will ultimately be a withstandable 
event, one that might eventually 
bring us together and prove our 
collective strength, ignores this 
conflict entirely. The solution would 
be to engage the entire University 
community, Ann Arbor residents 
and the relevant southeastern 
Michigan communities in this 
debate. Tragically, the University is 
doing just the opposite.

What does all of this say about our 

University? What characteristics 
can be gleaned from this misguided 
response? What does it say about 
our campus climate that Richard 
Spencer, one of the most prominent 
white supremacists of our day feels 
he can come here, feels he would 
have enough of an audience here 
to make it worth his time? And, 
finally, why does the University 
believe Spencer’s presence on this 
campus would make us better off?

By not reaching out to CAPS, 

the 
University 
is 
failing 
to 

leverage its power to make a real 
difference in the mental health of 
the members of its community. 
Apparently, mental health does 
not fit the scope of the “safety and 
security” that Fitzgerald and his 
fellow administrators are trying to 
protect.

By hardly telling us — the 

students — anything about the 
ongoing 
negotiations, 
by 
not 

providing any real public space for 

a conversation between students, 
faculty and the administration to 
take place, thereby leaving it to 
uncompensated students — already 
coping with the psychological 
burden of Spencer’s impending visit 
— to make that meeting happen, the 
University is seeking to suppress 
dialogue.

By telling us that we cannot 

stop Spencer from coming here 
based on the content of his speech 
and that stopping him would lead 
to a court battle, the University is 
capitulating in the face of bigotry. 
I say, go to court for your students. 
Fight for us. By protesting (as we do 
so often), we fight for you, we fight 
to make this place more equitable. 
Now, it is your turn for an equitable 
and inclusive exchange between 
diverse groups of people. Diversity, 
equity 
and 
inclusion. 
Sound 

familiar? These are principals that 
you, the University, claim to uphold 
and strive for but routinely fail to 
embody.

Just by living here, students 

of color and marginalized folks 
sacrifice their sense of safety and 
their mental well-being (which you 
don’t even care about enough to 
check in with the office delegated 
for doing exactly that), and yet you 
won’t potentially lose a legal battle 
in the name of these students.

Because it would tarnish your 

reputation as a premier law school 
in the country. It would be a drag 
to be dealing with Spencer in such 
a public way. This drag, of course, 
pales in comparison to the drag that 
so many of my peers and professors 
feel in having to deal with this 
University all the time.

Maybe Spencer wants to come 

here because he can sense all of this 
in the air. Maybe he wants to come 
because the University’s shocking 
inaction has left a real void in our 
trust of the administration that 
runs our everyday lives, in the 
communication between us and 
them, in our collective feeling of 
security here in Ann Arbor, in 
our sense that we can actually do 
anything to advocate for ourselves 
in such a way to see tangible, direct, 
immediate results. He sees an 
opportunity to fill this void with his 
sick, twisted version of an answer 
to our problems.

No matter his reason, it’s time 

this University stops prioritizing 
its lofty, mystical, fake public image 
over its responsibility to take 
tangible actions to ensure the safety 
and well-being of our community. 
It’s time we stop having to judge 
this University by noticing what it is 
not, what it refuses fails to do, time 
and time and time again.

Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4A — Wednesday, January 31, 2018

DAYTON HARE

Managing Editor

420 Maynard St. 

Ann Arbor, MI 48109

 tothedaily@michigandaily.com

Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890.

ALEXA ST. JOHN

Editor in Chief
 ANU ROY-CHAUDHURY AND 

ASHLEY ZHANG
Editorial Page Editors

Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s Editorial Board. 

All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

Isaiah Zeavin-Moss can be reached 

at izeavinm@umich.edu.

Megan Burns

Samantha Goldstein

Emily Huhman
Jeremy Kaplan

Sarah Khan

 
 
 
 

Lucas Maiman
Jason Rowland

Anu Roy-Chaudhury

Ali Safawi

 
 
 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 

Kevin Sweitzer
Tara Jayaram
 Ashley Zhang

Ellery Rosenzweig

Elena Hubbell

T

he federal government 
shutdown 
ended 

anticlimactically 
last 

week after three tense days, 
with a bloc of Senate Democrats 
lending their support 
to 
a 
Republican 

short-term spending 
plan. In exchange, 
Republican 
Congressional leaders 
promised to schedule 
a vote in the coming 
weeks on continuing 
the Deferred Action 
for 
Childhood 

Arrivals 
program, 

which 
President 

Donald Trump plans to dismantle.

Despite 
the 
compromise, 

a renewed struggle looms in 
the near future. The stopgap 
funding 
measure 
will 
expire 

on Feb. 8, setting the stage for a 
prolonged battle over a long-term 
spending plan. Even with the 
Republican 
concessions, 
many 

Senate Democrats and a majority 
of House Democrats still voted 
against the spending bill that 
ended the shutdown, raising the 
possibility that the government 
could shut down again, especially 
if Congress is unable to come to 
an agreement on the future of 
DACA. An even more bitter fight 
potentially waits in the distance 
over the debt ceiling, which will 
need to be raised or suspended at 
some point this year.

This shutdown — and the 

sparring to take place over the next 
few weeks — is closely intertwined 
with immigration policy, similar 
to the infamous 2013 shutdown 
revolving 
around 
Obamacare. 

While policy takes the central 
role in each iteration, the broader 
issue of the national debt looms 
above these spending battles, even 
though shutdowns are not directly 
related to the debt.

The current hyper-partisan 

political 
climate 
prevents 

Congress from reliably passing 
the 
12 
core 
appropriations 

bills, as in decades past. This 
forces Congress to fund the 
federal 
government 
with 

massive 
“omnibus 
budgets,” 

but the deep divide between 
Republicans and Democrats on 
government spending, taxation 
and the federal deficit makes this 
challenging. When legislators fail 
to agree to an omnibus budget, 
Congress must resort to funding 
the federal government through 
a series of short-term continuing 

resolutions. These continuing 
resolutions are ripe for partisan 
conflict, as evidenced by the 
current fight over DACA. Since 
their primary purpose is to simply 

keep the government 
operating, continuing 
resolutions often fail 
to address budgetary 
concerns or produce 
a plan to stabilize the 
national debt.

Though Republicans 

championed themselves 
as 
deficit 
hawks 

throughout the Obama 
administration, 
their 

actions thus far during 

the Trump presidency paint a 
different 
picture. 
The 
GOP’s 

signature piece of legislation in 
2017, the tax reform bill, slashes 
government 
revenue, 
which 

inevitably bloats the federal deficit, 
thus increasing the national debt. 
When passing the bill, Republican 
leaders argued that economic 
growth would offset the tax breaks, 
leaving government revenue levels 
the same, but this contention is 
simply not supported by the facts. 
The nonpartisan Congressional 
Budget Office projects the tax bill 
will pour $1.5 trillion onto the 
national debt, while an analysis by 
The Wharton School of Business 
at the University of Pennsylvania 
predicts a nearly $2 trillion 
national debt increase.

Meanwhile, 
Trump 
seems 

misinformed about the national 
debt, despite his campaign pledge 
to eliminate it within eight years. 
On the campaign trail, Trump 
made a disturbing proposal to 
renegotiate the debt in hopes of 
persuading the U.S. government’s 
creditors to accept less than 
they are owed — in essence, 
defaulting on the national debt. 
Doing so would derail the U.S. 
economy and irreversibly destroy 
investor confidence in the federal 
government, as experts were quick 
to point out.

And after Trump was blasted 

for the proposal, he countered 
with the claim that the U.S. 
can’t default on the debt, since 
it can merely print money. This 
is technically true — the U.S. 
Treasury could theoretically just 
make the money it owes — but 
this “solution” is nonetheless 
ludicrous, as it would lead to 
catastrophic inflation and major 
economic problems of its own.

Since 
his 
victory 
and 

inauguration, Trump has stepped 

back 
from 
his 
renegotiation 

proposal while making several 
more suspect claims. Last October, 
Trump blamed the debt on 
foreign aid, even though such aid 
constitutes only a minute fraction 
of the federal budget. Days later, 
Trump falsely claimed that gains 
in the stock market are reducing 
the debt.

Little can be interpreted from 

the president’s statements about his 
true feelings towards the national 
debt, but his conflicting claims 
and evolving positions are clear 
evidence that his administration 
lacks a clear and realistic plan to 
address the national debt. In fact, 
Trump’s enthusiastic embrace of 
the Republican tax plan indicates 
that the debt is likely to grow far 
worse during his presidency.

In order to truly address 

the national debt, a pragmatic 
solution 
involving 
both 

reasonable 
tax 
increases 

and spending cuts is needed. 
Unfortunately, such a solution 
seems 
unlikely 
to 
manifest 

itself in the near future given 
the passage of the Republicans’ 
fiscally irresponsible tax bill 
and 
the 
Trump’s 
apparent 

commitment 
to 
wasteful 

spending on frivolous matters 
such as his infamous border wall. 
Still, voters and legislators should 
not let the national debt fade 
into the political background. 
Without concrete action and 
responsible budgeting, Congress 
could easily come to rely on 
continuing resolutions to fund 
the 
government. 
If 
these 

stopgap 
measures 
become 

the 
norm, 
shutdowns 
will 

become commonplace and our 
government’s functions will 
consistently be held hostage 
to 
partisan 
gimmicks 
and 

political feuds.

Though the end of the latest 

shutdown may bring short-term 
relief, it is no cause for celebration 
and Congressional leaders deserve 
little praise for the bare bones 
stopgap measure that temporarily 
reopened the government. With 
this spending plan only funding 
the government until Feb. 8, more 
trouble looms on the horizon, and 
always will unless political leaders 
can reach consensus on budgeting 
and implement a comprehensive 
plan to counter the nation’s 
growing debt.

Shutdown ends, but trouble looms

NOAH HARRISON | COLUMN

A

fter 
Larry 
Nassar’s 

sentencing last week, the 
convicted sexual predator 

will now serve a minimum of 100 
years in state and federal prison. It 
is an unquestionable that he will 
die there.

Controversy was elicited by 

the intense, emotional nature of 
Nassar’s sentencing. Specifically, 
the behavior of Judge Rosemarie 
Aquilina attracted a significant 
amount of the media’s attention. 
Far 
from 
being 
impersonal, 

Aquiliana ensured her fury was 
felt by Nassar. She also extended 
her empathy to each victim 
immediately after they read their 
statement, as opposed to waiting 
for every victim to speak first, as 
is convention. Hesitation towards 
her approach, if not outright 
disapproval, could be found in 
varied and credible news sources.

In an article for Vox, a public 

defender argued that Aquilina 
“overstepped her boundaries as a 
judge.” Andrew Cohen of the New 
Republic took it a step further, 
asserting that Aquilina could not 
be both “crusader for sexual assault 
victims and a tribune for those who 
are struggling to find their voice” 
while maintaining her impartiality 
as a judge who has sworn to uphold 
the U.S. Constitution.

For many, especially those with 

a respect for and a familiarity 
with tradition, it was jarring 
to see such passion in what is 
frequently 
a 
disimpassioned 

process. But as our generation 
begins to work in, for and against 
the current system of justice, it’s 
important that we recognize that 
justice is ours to define.

The 
meaning 
of 
“justice,” 

as practiced, has always been 
contested. 
For 
some, 
justice 

means retribution, as with Larry 

Nassar’s life sentence. For others, 
justice would mean rehabilitating 
Nassar, putting an expectation of 
restitution on him. Most times, 
justice entails both elements of 
suffering and penance.

What is certain is that humans 

determine how justice is carried 
out. To be inhuman is impossible. 
In the 21st century, we can no 
longer let Lady Justice wear the 
blindfold. It was supposed to 
symbolize fairness in spite of race, 
gender or wealth, but I argue that 
the blindfold is a slap in the face.

Our generation has witnessed 

countless instances where justice 
was poisoned by those tasked 
with carrying it out. We’ve seen 
police officers carry out capital 
punishment for noncompliance; 
we’ve seen the character of people 
of color be impugned by the 
media, as if any amount of teenage 
delinquency merits execution in 
the street.

We know the justice system 

counts money. It plays a part every 
time rich defendants assemble 
legal dream-teams; meanwhile, 
poor young people of color are 
often encouraged to plead guilty 
to crimes regardless of their 
culpability, saving the system 
time and money. Lady Justice, 
to be clear, peeks out from under 
her blindfold all the time, because 
we do that same thing. But our 
conversation has evolved in ways 
that have made the pretending of 
impartiality a farce.

The vision of a post-racial 

society in the wake of President 
Barack Obama’s 2008 victory 
came unraveled when segments of 
the public conscience realized that 
racism would never be a problem 
of the past. Even as Obama 
enjoyed unprecedented support 
from people of color, so too did his 

behavior attract derision in ways 
it would not have if he looked like 
our previous 44 presidents, or the 
president after him.

In America now we have two 

paths: to feign blindness, claiming 
that we don’t see race, gender or 
wealth when we make impartial 
decisions, or to acknowledge our 
vision and biases. I choose not to 
act, to pretend as if it’s possible not 
to see these factors of race, gender 
and wealth.

I’d much rather begin the hard 

work of deconstructing the social 
mores in place that allow for 
prejudice to impact impartiality. 
What good does it serve to pretend 
that the justice system works the 
same for people of color, for each 
gender, for the poor?

It’s rarely a good idea to 

remain married to the past. 
Perhaps 
more 
fittingly, 
it’s 

important 
to 
acknowledge 

that some marriages are better 
off ended. When it comes to 
the abuses of the system, it’s 
important that criminals are not 
the only ones being tried. The 
system itself must also come 
under scrutiny.

The voices that flinch at 

Judge Aquilina’s wrath have a 
point. Feelings can’t be trusted 
to fairly inflict punishment, nor 
can emotion ever be expected to 
fairly arbitrate the outcome of a 
case like Nassar’s. But we cannot 
uphold impartiality unevenly. 
It 
is 
hypocritical 
absurdity 

to pretend the system is not a 
method of cathartic vengeance 
for every victim of Nassar’s, and 
all victims of such crimes, while 
looking the other way as the 
guise of impartiality reigns.

Remove the blindfold

ANDREW MEKHAIL | COLUMN

 Our University and hate speech

ISAIAH ZEAVIN-MOSS | COLUMN

Noah Harrison can be reached at 

noahharr@umich.edu

Andrew Mekhail can be reached at 

mekhail@umich.edu

 It’s time the 

University stops 
prioritizing its 
lofty, mystical 

fake public 

image over its 
responsibility

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Letters should be fewer than 300 words while op-eds should be 550 
to 850 words. Send the writer’s full name and University affiliation to 

tothedaily@michigandaily.com.

ISAIAH 

ZEAVIN-MOSS 
 

NOAH 

HARRISON

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