Ken Kollman, a professor of 
political science, is familiar with 
constitutional law and believes 
it’s best for free speech to be 
uninhibited until it becomes 
threatening. 
“I think like most faculty I’m 
generally in favor of free speech 
unless it’s dangerous and incites 
violence,” Kollman said. “When 
possible, when there’s no threat 
to the people or the public order, 
then it’s better to allow people to 
speak on campuses.”
The second bill, the “College 
Campus 
Intellectual 
and 
Expressive 
Freedom 
Act,” 
provides standards to ensure 
protections 
for 
free 
speech, 
with nine different statements 
with which universities would 
have to update their policies. For 
instance, anyone who is brought 
in by an organization or faculty 
member would be allowed to 
speak. 
This would allow controversial 
figures — such as conservative 
commentator Ben Shapiro, who 
spoke at the University in March 
— to visit campus with fewer 
obstacles.
Vidhya Aravind, School of 
Information graduate student, 
worked on the #StopSpencer 
campaign when white nationalist 
Richard Spencer attempted to 
visit the University last year. 
Aravind said she finds the bills 
ridiculous and believes they 
would only allow for more hate 
speech on campus.
Aravind had invited Alice 
Walker, an American novelist 
and activist, to speak on campus 
back in 2013, but her visit was 
canceled due to her involvement 
with the Boycott, Divestment 
and 
Sanctions 
movement, 
a 
Palestinian-led 
campaign 
seeking “justice in Israel.” 
“The University does not give 
platforms to marginalized view 
points,” Aravind said. “It doesn’t 
give platforms in particular to 
Palestinian students and the 
University does give an ear to 
conservative white students far 
more regularly.”

Aravind 
said 
she 
finds 
the second bill in particular 
extremely 
ineffective 
and 
ignorant of the real reason 
behind student protests.
“Part of the point of student 
protests is to be disruptive,” 
Aravind said. “When we protest 
we’re 
drawing 
attention 
to 
things that people are otherwise 
ignoring and typically that’s 
after trying to fight for change in 
other avenues.”
Ultimately, 
Aravind 
said 
she doesn’t think the bills will 
be effective and would not be 
surprised if the bills did not 
make it past the governor’s desk. 
State Rep. Yousef Rabhi, 
D-Mich., told The Daily in a 
previous interview on April 
3 that members of the House 
are concerned with outside 
organizations 
using 
public 
universities to share their 
hate. 
“I 
think 
at 
least 
(for) 
Democratic 
politicians, 
it’s 
definitely 
been 
something 
that’s high on the radar and 
that people are aware of,” Rabhi 
said. “Especially for folks who 
represent 
campuses, 
because 
a lot of these hate groups are 
coming to university campuses to 
spread their hateful messages.” 
Rabhi told The Daily that he 
personally is involved in crafting 
civil rights legislation that would 
fight hate speech, as well as the 
hate organizations themselves. 
Rabhi is worried, however, 
that some representatives are 
protecting hate speech by filing 
it under free speech. 
“Some 
of 
the 
negative 
legislation 
coming 
up, 
it 
generally is under the guise of 
free speech,” Rabhi said. “So 
often times people who are 
wanting to support and defend 
these organizations like the 
American Freedom Law Center 
and others are doing it with 
the guise of free speech and 
saying 
that 
universities 
and 
other 
organizations 
denying 
the opportunity for hate speech 
to occur is a violation of free 
speech.” 

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
News
Thursday, April 18, 2019 — 3

DISC DISTINGUISHE D LECTURE

RUCHITA IYER/Daily
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed speaks on politics, empathy, and Muslim identities at the DISC Distinguished Lecture in Weiser Hall 
Wednesday afternoon.

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

BILLS
From Page 1A

Njee demanded the com-
pany provide her with back 
pay to compensate her for 
the hours she worked with 
lower 
wages 
than 
those 
given to her coworkers. She 
said she filed complaints 
with the Michigan Depart-
ment of Civil Rights and the 
Equal Employment Oppor-
tunity 
Commission 
and 
planned to reach out to “as 
many employment discrimi-
nation and wage and hour 
departments and agencies 
as I can.”
“At that point, I was like, 
‘I’m sorry but I don’t work 
here because I like you, I 
work here for money, to be 
able to pay my bills,’ so I 
decided to walk out, to leave 
my job,” Njee said. “... I was 
just not comfortable what-
soever at that point. It was 
making me physically ill to 
be in that space and to be 
around them.”
According to VICE, Njee 
hired a lawyer and Mighty 
Good agreed to a settle-
ment at the end of 2018. In 
an interview with The Daily 
on Thursday, Njee said she 
had signed a nondisclosure 
agreement 
with 
Mighty 
Good and declined to com-
ment further.
In a statement posted to 
Mighty Good’s Twitter on 
Aug. 4, the day after Njee 
quit the job, the company 
said if changes were needed 
to improve the business for 
employees and customers, 
they would make them.
“We are deeply concerned 
about serious and disturb-
ing allegations of race dis-
criminations that have been 
made about our family busi-
ness,” the statement read. 
“Our value system drives 
our decisions and how we 
operate at every level. We 
have always strived to be 
inclusive, 
supportive 
and 
invested in our staff’s suc-
cess and professional devel-
opment.”
The company said they 
did not plan to make any 

further public postings, and 
have not posted on their 
Twitter account since then.
The letter sent to Mighty 
Good’s employees on Mon-
day offered them the oppor-
tunity to discuss a closing 
agreement 
with 
Mighty 
Good’s owners and their 
attorney on Tuesday. 
LSA 
sophomore 
Elias 
Khoury, 
a 
member 
of 
Democratic 
Socialists 
of 
America and a former staff 
member for The Daily, said 
he attended the meeting out 
of solidarity. He said about 
10 
union 
members 
were 
present, in addition to Sims 
and Ryan. He called the 
atmosphere “tense,” noting 
the two parties agreed that 
if Mighty Good were ever 
to reopen, there would be 
preferential hiring for cur-
rent employees. However, 
according to Khoury, the 
consensus ended there.
“That was something that 
the lawyer was totally on 
board with, but the main ask 
was the severance and they 
were not agreeing on that 
at all, and the workers were 
getting pretty upset and I 
could tell that the lawyer 
was getting kind of squea-
mish because it was him 
versus these 10 disgruntled 
workers,” Khoury said. “He 
wasn’t 
comfortable 
with 
that at all. Like I said earli-
er, the meeting was tense. It 
was not as if as though there 
was a lot of agreement, no 
one was saying kumbaya.”
Gallegos said severance 
pay was one of WACWA’s 
primary demands.
“All we can do is spread 
the word about unions, let 
people 
know 
that 
union 
busting is a real thing and 
work for equal treatment,” 
Gallegos said. “We’re just 
trying to get severance for 
the employees that are being 
laid off immediately.”

Alice Tracey contributed 
to reporting on this story. 

SMTD
From Page 1

“If you’re not thinking that 
there’s 
not 
some 
inherent 
risk in the ‘Big Brother’ in a 
machine doing things to you, 
then we’re doing you a misser-
vice,” Bermann said.
Business 
freshman 
Ian 
Cooper attended the Disso-
nance panel to take part in the 
exploration Bermann fears 
students are missing. Cooper 
is enrolled in an engineer-
ing course where he has been 
forced to think critically about 
AI. He told The Daily after the 
event that he came across an 
announcement on the Hap-
pening at Michigan webpage 
for the Dissonance event and 
thought it would be a proper 
supplement to his classwork.
“AI 
is 
basically 
chang-
ing the world as we know 
it,” Cooper said. “All of these 
distinguished 
professionals 
in different fields can really 
inform the way we think about 
it.”
Cooper appreciated Disso-
nance’s attention to interdis-
ciplinary exploration of the 
issue.
“It seems like a lot of people 
are just saying AI is going to 
ruin the economy and automa-
tion is going to make everyone 
jobless,” Cooper said. “I’m 
wondering if maybe some of 
these people will have more 
optimistic viewpoints.”
Panelist Ella Atkins, an 

aerospace engineering pro-
fessor, 
addressed 
Cooper’s 
concern about job loss during 
her presentation. From the 
perspective of her work with 
autonomous 
aircrafts, 
she 
has seen a reorganization of 
labor rather than a loss of jobs. 
She said there are the same 
amount of people being hired, 
but the jobs they are doing 
require a more advanced edu-
cation and elite technology.
“A lot of people are work-
ing together to solve prob-
lems that will make money for 
the company and hopefully 
benefit society,” Atkins said. 
“They’re just doing different 
jobs.”
Atkins presented on the 
neutrality 
of 
technology, 
explaining it is not inherently 
good or bad. Atkins said tech-
nology serves the purpose of 
those humans who employ it, 
no matter whether it is con-
structive or regressive to soci-
ety.
“It’s more complicated than 
not liking the AI, because peo-
ple have a long history of also 
doing some pretty good and 
some scary things,” Atkins 
said. “We expect the same 
thing from the AI agents … If 
we begin imagining all of the 
scary things that AI can do, 
maybe we forget two things. 
One, the scary things people 
can do, and the second thing is 
how the AI on the things like 
drones can help stop the scary 
things.” 
Panelist 
Kentaro 
Toya-

ma, 
professor 
of 
informa-
tion, began his presentation 
by 
emphasizing 
the 
other 
perspective 
of 
technology 
being neutral and malleable 
by human beings. Toyama 
presented a graph detailing 
how although technology has 
expanded rapidly over the 
course of the past decade, 
the poverty rate in America 
has remained stagnant. He 
said technology exacerbates 
inequality due to the human 
promotion of inequality.
“Technology, for the most 
part, amplifies other human 
forces,” Toyama said.
Toyama 
said 
he 
thinks 
technology has also deepened 
the country’s political divide 
because it provides a platform 
on which the conflict can 
brew.
“It’s entirely up to the 
human beings in terms of how 
the technology gets used,” 
Toyama said. “It could be 
positive, it could be negative. 
If we’re really confident it’s 
always going to be positive, I 
don’t see any reason why we 
shouldn’t develop more tech-
nology. On the other hand, if 
you have some doubts about 
that, we should be very care-
ful.”
Toyama equated the power 
of AI to the danger a nuclear 
bomb 
presents 
to 
society. 
Toyama said AI could be even 
more dangerous — there are 
only nine countries across the 
world with nuclear weapons, 
but AI is ever-present and 

growing more ubiquitous as 
technology continues to prog-
ress.
“There’s always going to be 
a cat and mouse game in terms 
of security versus people doing 
bad things online.” Toyama 
said. “...The law always tends 
to be behind the technology, 
and so for that reason, I think 
we need to have regulation in 
place that is actually a little 
conservative.”
Bermann said the purpose 
of Dissonance is to spark 
thought and conversation.
“When I was a child and 
watched cartoons like The 
Jetsons, they were science fic-
tions shows,” Bermann said. 
“If you had told me that the 
world today would be full of 
AI and autonomous this and 
that, I would have thought 
that was the most wonderful 
thing ever, but it’s not been as 
bright and rosy a scene as the 
cartoons and movies depict-
ed it to be. Instead, there are 
many dystopian things that 
are related to artificial intel-
ligence.”
Bermann said he hopes 
the panel event encouraged 
attendees 
to 
question 
AI, 
believing it is both a problem 
and a solution.
“I don’t think any of us, 
particularly in the AI space, 
presume to know the out-
comes yet, but we want to get 
people thinking about are we 
comfortable having machines 
making 
decisions 
on 
our 
behalf?” Bermann said.

COFFEE
From Page 1

AI
From Page 2

“David 
Daniels 
remains 
on paid leave,” Broekhuizen 
wrote. 
“How 
long 
a 
U-M 
employee stays on paid leave is 
determined by the individual 
situation in each case and when 
facts may develop that have 
an impact on an employment 
decision.” 
The installation has been 
approved to remain up until 
April 
25. 
Titled 
“Pulling 
Strings,” 
it 
features 
three 
speaker boxes with strings 
dangling 
from 
them. 
The 
speakers play many overlapping 
recordings of Samuel Schultz 
reading his statement on the 
alleged rape, which is published 
on Schultz’s website. When one 
pulls on the strings, the other 
recordings fade away until only 
a single voice is left.
In an interview with The 
Daily, Music, Theatre & Dance 
senior Fisher Diede, the creator 
of the installation, explained 
how 
the 
interactive 
aspect 
highlights the abuse of power 
by large institutions through 
the metaphor “pulling strings.”
“The 
title 
of 
the 
piece, 
‘Pulling Strings,’ plays off the 
metaphor of pulling strings in 
positions of power and that is 
represented in the piece through 
hanging strings that the user is 
invited to pull on,” Diede said. 
“The way pulling strings affects 
the audio is directly playing on 
a metaphor that when certain 
strings are pulled certain voices 
are quieted or eliminated.”
In front of the speakers and 
above the entrance to McIntosh 
Theatre, a projection updates 
Daniels’ 
salary 
since 
being 
placed on paid leave. The figure 

has reached over $114,000 as of 
the date of publication. Diede 
said the figure was calculated 
based on how much Daniels 
made in 2018. 
Although Diede expressed 
understanding 
of 
the 
classification of his piece as 
a protest, he stated the main 
purpose of the installation was 
to emphasize Schultz’s strength 
and healing, as well as create a 
space for discussion. 
“It’s 
less 
so 
focused 
on 
(Schultz’s) allegations and more 
so focused on his healing,” 
Deide said. “I think the whole 
intent of this piece is to share a 
story from a voice that has been 
hushed quite a bit already and 
I think while I don’t disagree 
with the idea of this being a 
protest piece I don’t want that 
to undermine the story because 
that’s why this installation was 
created: to share that story.”
In an interview with The 
Daily, Schultz explained he 
did not know Diede before he 
reached out to Schultz about the 
project. According to Schultz, 
the installation was entirely 
Diede’s idea — Schultz’s only 
involvement in the project was 
recording an already released 
statement.
Schultz said he hopes his 
recovery process shows that 
survivors can find hope after 
assault, as assault does not have 
to become one’s identity. 
“One of the things that I’ve 
had to find in my life is how to 
think of myself as more than 
someone 
who 
was 
gravely 
abused,” Schultz said. “And in 
finding meaning, in finding 
hope, in seeking kindness and 
empathy as guiding forces in 
my life, I have been on a journey 
of recovery that has allowed me 
to find beauty in life. What I 

hope from my statement, what 
I hope people takeaway is that 
there is an alternative to anger 
and bitterness as the lifelong 
choice in reacting to difficult 
circumstances.”
Reflecting 
on 
the 
installation’s theme of the abuse 
of power, Schultz expressed 
the importance of institutions 
recognizing individual dignity. 
“Leaders of institutions have 
an obligation to understand 
reputation and making money 
pale 
in 
comparison 
to 
an 
individual’s worth in terms 
of the dignity of the human 
soul,” 
Schultz 
said. 
“When 
institutions fail to recognize 
the dignity of those who are not 
in positions of power, they do a 
great disservice to the world at 
large.”
Music, Theatre & Dance Dean 
David Gier declined to comment 
on the installation, explaining 
he does not know the specifics 
of 
this 
class 
project. 
Gier 
redirected The Daily to Michael 
Gurevich, associate professor 
and chair of performing arts 
technology, for comment. 
Gurevich 
confirmed 
the 
installation is Diede’s final 
project for his interactive media 
design course. In an email to 
The Daily, Gurevich said he 
is proud of Fisher for tackling 
relevant student issues. 
“Interactive art installations 
act as mirrors, so I suppose these 
pieces are inevitable reflections 
of the climate these students 
are living in,” Gurevich wrote. 
“With ‘Pulling Strings,’ not only 
has Fisher brilliantly addressed 
the themes we address in the 
class and designed an elegant 
interactive system, he has also 
done an incredible amount of 
careful and diligent background 
work on the ethical and social 

considerations 
involved 
in 
creating a piece in a public 
space that addresses such a 
thorny topic. I’m proud of him 
for doing so.”
According 
to 
Diede, 
the 
installation was conceived in 
February as a project for class, 
though it ultimately expanded 
beyond the scope of the class. 
Diede 
explained 
he 
went 
through standard bureaucratic 
channels to clear his installation 
with Music, Theatre & Dance 
administration. In his design, 
Deide said he intentionally tried 
to make sure there would be no 
reason for the installation to 
be taken down or denied other 
than its subject matter. 
According 
to 
Deide, 
he 
pitched his project as a piece 
highlighting the power of large 
institutions and the sometimes 
unjust iterations of that power 
without mentioning it would 
be about Schultz and Daniels 
explicitly. Deide explained that 
while the piece was initially 
approved, 
it 
was 
suddenly 
placed on hold Monday evening 
when administrators learned it 
involved Schultz’s allegations 
against Daniels. However, it 
was reapproved within three or 
four hours of it being placed on 
hold, Deide said. 
Deide said he has received 
support for the project from 
several 
faculty 
members 
and 
students. 
However, 
he 
emphasized 
the 
pressure 
— from the music industry, 
the administration or legal 
proceedings 
— 
that 
many 
stakeholders feel not to speak 
publicly 
about 
allegations 
against Daniels.

Read more at 
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