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INDEX
Vol. CXXVIII, No. 91
©2019 The Michigan Daily

N E WS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

O PI N I O N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

S P O R T S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

S U D O K U . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

CL A S S I F I E DS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

A R T S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
michigandaily.com

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CAMPUS LIFE

ANGELINA LITTLE 
For The Daily

‘U’ Muslim community reacts after 
active shooter scare interrupts vigil

Police response to reported threats disrupted commemoration of mass shooting 

Journalist, 
 
son discuss 
struggle to 
get asylum 

GOVERNMENT

Knight-Wallace fellow 
shares his experience of 
mistreatment, threats 

JULIA JOHNSTON
For The Daily 

See HEALTH , Page 3

Follow The Daily
on Instagram: 
@michigandaily

Dialogue 
addresses 
racism in 
healthcare

Discussion focuses on 
racial discrimination 
faced by new mothers

MELANIE TAYLOR
Daily Staff Reporter 

Jay Bochert earned both 
his 
master’s 
degree 
and 
PhD in sociology from the 
University of Michigan and 
worked as a graduate student 
instructor. He also spent 
seven years in prison before 
attending the University. 
Bochert is a researcher 
and quantitative analyst at 
the Drug Policy Alliance, a 
co-founder of the Formerly 
Incarcerated College Gradu-
ates Network and an assis-
tant professor of sociology at 
the John Jay School of Crim-
inal Justice. 
Bochert continued by dis-
cussing the powerful sym-
bolic nature of the policy 
which will require Univer-
sity employees to disclose 
felony allegations. Bochert 
examined how, while the fel-
ony disclosure policy itself 
does not impact admissions, 
the message the policy sends 
could prevent qualified peo-
ple from applying. He also 
noted that the University is 
an influential school and it 
could lead other universities 

to implement similar poli-
cies.
“Aside from the people 
who 
decide 
not 
to 
even 
apply or decide that they are 
never going to make it into a 
school,” Bochert said. “And 
there are lots of people who 
just give up like that, there 
are going to be loads of people 
who are going to be affected 
by the symbolic nature of this 
change.” 
Bochert graduated in 2016 
and received many national 
and school-specific awards, 
including 
the 
Emerging 
Diversity 
Scholar 
award 
from the National Center for 
Institutional Diversity, the 
Mellon American Council of 
Learned Societies Disserta-
tion Completion Fellowship 
Doctoral Candidate Research 
Grant, the Rackham Merit 
Fellow and, most recently, a 
certificate of recognition for 
research mentoring. 
Bochert said despite all he 
accomplished on campus, the 
new felony disclosure policy 
sends a message the Univer-
sity does not value those with 
a criminal background. 

michigandaily.com
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Thursday, March 21, 2019

ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS OF EDITORIAL FREEDOM

Disclosure 
policy may 
discourage 
applicants

Professor examines implications 
of Harvard discrimination lawsuit

ADMINISTRATION

Rule mandating staff reveal any felony 
charges draws criticism, concern

EMMA STEIN
Daily Staff Reporter 

Lawyer advised school during trial to determine if admissions process violated civil rights

NIKKI KIM
Daily Staff Reporter

On 
Wednesday 
afternoon, 
around 100 students gathered in 
Rackham auditorium to listen to 
Julie Park, associate professor 
at the University of Maryland 
and author of “Race on Campus: 
Debunking Myths with Data,” 
discuss the implications behind 
Students for Fair Admissions 
v. Harvard, the lawsuit against 
Harvard University to deter-
mine if the college violated the 
Civil Rights Act by discriminat-
ing against Asian Americans 
through their college admissions 
process. Park was the consulting 
expert for the trial, serving as 
defense for Harvard. 
Her talk comes amidst recent 

controversy 
surrounding 
the 
college admissions bribery scan-
dals in schools like University 
of Southern California, George-
town University, Yale University 
and Stanford University. 
The talk was part of a larger 
seminar series by the National 
Center for Institutional Diver-
sity, aiming to invite scholars 
who promote academic under-
standing of both historical and 
contemporary issues about race, 
oppression, power and how they 
occur on campus.
Park’s choice to come to the 
University of Michigan was in 
part driven by her personal con-
nection to it. She explained that 
she was inspired by the early 
2000s University of Michigan 
lawsuits and decided to pursue 

what is now her current academic 
path. Her research on the relation-
ship between affirmative action 
and Asian Americans works to 
question and debunk the myths 
surrounding 
Asian 
Americans 
through statistical data.
“We need to think about how 
we fit into this broader landscape, 
what our stories are and how they 
might be used or exploited by 
other if we don’t take own-
ership of our own stories,” 
Park said.
She referenced one of the ear-
lier college admissions lawsuits: 
the second Abigail Fisher case. In 
2016, Abigail Fisher was one of the 
plaintiffs challenging University 
of Texas in a case investigating 
admissions discrimination based 
on skin color. 

After the first Fisher case, 
Edward Blum, president of SFFA 
and the man leading the initiative 
to eliminate all race-conscious 
admissions, developed a website 
called harvardnotfair.org. After 
four failed cases where the plain-
tiffs were all white with B-average 
grades, the anti-affirmative action 
movement changed their strategic 
course to focus on Asian Ameri-
cans with exceptional grades.
According to Park, Asian Amer-
icans make more sympathetic 
plaintiffs than white students 
with mediocre grades.
“There were a lot of Black and 
Latinx applicants with better 
grades who didn’t get in,” Park 
said.

KARTIKEYA SUNDARAM/Daily
Julie J. Park, associate professor of education at the University of Maryland, presents a lecture at the Research & Scholarship Seminar Series: 
Affirmative Action, Asian Americans, and the Harvard Case at Rackham Auditorium Wednesday afternoon.

Wednesday 
evening 
the 
International House Ann Arbor 
hosted “Asylum Journey: 10 Years 
in the Immigration System,” 
featuring Knight-Wallace Fellow 
Emilio Gutiérrez Soto and his son, 
Oscar Gutiérrez Soto, who spoke 
on their experiences immigrating 
to the United States from Mexico. 
The event was organized by the 
University of Michigan Center for 
Latin American and Caribbean 
Studies, the Interfaith Council for 
Peace and Justice and Washtenaw 
Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant 
Rights (WICIR). 
Gutiérrez 
Soto, 
speaking 
through a translator, recounted his 
experience facing persecution by 
the government as a journalist in 
Mexico. After facing surveillance 
and the destruction of his home 
by the military in Mexico, he 
entered the United States with his 
son in 2008. Since immigrating, 
the Gutiérrez Sotos have been 
detained in ICE facilities twice, 
most recently for eight months in 
2017. His application for asylum 
was recently denied, and his 
attorney filed an appeal to the U.S. 
Board of Immigration Appeals.
DESIGN BY SHERRY CHEN

 See FELONY, Page 3
See LAWSUIT, Page 3

Students awoke Friday morn-
ing to news of mass shootings in 
two mosques in New Zealand, 
killing 50. The next day, dur-
ing a vigil to commemorate the 
lives lost in New Zealand, police 
officers ran into the crowd urg-
ing people to flee the Diag, where 
the vigil was being held. Shortly 
after, the University issued an 
emergency alert telling students 
to “run, hide, fight”, alleging that 
an active shooter was on campus. 
Though the situation was eventu-
ally resolved and confirmed to be 
a false alarm, many students spent 
over two hours in hiding from 
what they believed to be a lethal 
threat.

When Public Policy senior Zoha 
Qureshi, vice president of external 
affairs for the Muslim Students’ 
Association, first heard about the 
attacks in New Zealand, she felt 
“numb.” She did not want to read 
the stories or see the video circling 
the Internet. She suppressed the 
news and went to sleep, hoping it 
was not true. It was not until the 
next morning that Qureshi was 
forced to confront the reality of 
the tragedy.
“That’s when I started to feel 
like, ‘Oh my god. No. I can’t believe 
this is happening,’’” Qureshi said.
News of New Zealand shoot-
ings affected Qureshi more than 
any other story in what she sees 
as a constant influx of tragic news 
and gun violence plaguing her 
newsfeed.

According to Qureshi, this 
attack was more personal than the 
others.
“I just remember every time a 
mass shooting happens, I always 
worry like, ‘Oh my God. What will 
I do if it hits a community close 
to home?’” Qureshi said. “Every 
mass shooting is a terrible situa-
tion, right, but I was always just 
hoping it would of course never 
happen again but then never enter 
a mosque or never affect a com-
munity that’s close to me, but then 
it did.”
LSA junior Silan Fadlallah, stu-
dent coordinator for the Islamo-
phobia Working Group, echoed 
Qureshi’s sentiments. Fadlallah 
could not wrap her mind around 
how someone could be so hate-
ful in the face of her community’s 

peace and hospitality.
“It really did get to me, and I did 
get emotional at one point because 
even though I’m not a super, super 
practicing Muslim, I do definitely 
consider myself spiritually Mus-
lim,” Fadlallah said. “It was just 
difficult for me to really challenge 
myself to process the fact that 
Islamophobia is so, so real.”
After some initial grieving, 
both 
Qureshi 
and 
Fadlallah 
sprung into action to console the 
University Muslim community, 
also awash in fear and shock. 
Muslim Student Association orga-
nized a DPSS security presence 
for their upcoming Jumu’ah ser-
vice, the same Friday prayer that 
had been disrupted by the attacks 
in New Zealand.
See SCARE , Page 3

See ASYLUM , Page 3

The 29th annual Martin Luther 
King Jr. Health Sciences Lecture 
and Community Dialogue com-
menced this Wednesday at the 
University of Michigan School 
of Nursing. Entitled “Disparities 
Dialogue on Maternal Health and 
Care: Being a Black Woman Giv-
ing Birth in the U.S.: A Maternal 
Health Crisis,” the event focused 
on inequity in maternal health-
care. 
Approximately 100 people at-
tended the event, including stu-
dents, who made up a majority of 
the attendees, as well as faculty, 
staff, alums and community mem-
bers. The discussion was part of a 
series of held by the Martin Luther 
King Jr. Health Sciences Program 
with the purpose of improving eq-
uity in healthcare.
Dr. Lenette Jones, assistant pro-
fessor at the School of Nursing and 
one of the organizers of the event, 
said she hoped the conversation 
would provide a space for students 
to think critically with experts.
“I think for all the MLK events 
we had this year, we really had in 
mind the students,” Jones said. 

