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BRITTANY BOWMAN Managing Editor babowm@michigandaily.com BARBARA COLLINS and LIAT WEINSTEIN Managing News Editors news@michigandaily.com Senior News Editors: Emma Ruberg, Hannah Mackay, Calder Lewis, Jasmin Lee, Francesca Duong, Kristina Zheng Investigative Editor: Sammy Sussman FOIA Manager: Ayse Eldes LIZ COOK and JOEL WEINER Editorial Page Editors tothedaily@michigandaily.com Senior Opinion Editors: Zack Blumberg, Andrew Gerace, Min Soo Kim, Mary Rolfes, Elayna Swift ELISE GODFRYD and ZOE PHILLIPS Managing Arts Editors arts@michigandaily.com ALLISON ENGKVIST and MADDIE HINKLEY Managing Photo Editors photo@michigandaily.com ANDIE HOROWITZ Managing Statement Editor statement@michigandaily.com Deputy Editors: Isabelle Hasslund, Marisa Wright MADISON GAGNE and OLIVIA BRADISH Managing Copy Editors copydesk@michigandaily.com Senior Copy Editors: Caroline Atkinson, Anjali Chiravuri, Ethan Patrick, Kelsey Burke, Emily Wilson, Vanita Seed, Sophie Kephart, Rena McRoy PARTH DHYANI and NAITIAN ZHOU Managing Online Editors webteam@michigandaily.com IULIA DOBRIN and ANNIKA WANG Managing Video Editors video@michigandaily.com Senior Michigan in Color Editors: Noor Moughni, Maya Kadouh, Eliya Imtiaz, Jessica Kwon, Lola Yang Senior Sports Editors: Rian Ratnavale, Drew Cox, Lily Friedman, Jack Kingsley Senior Video Editors: Margaret Rudnick, Jordan Shefman Senior Social Media Editors: Kirti Aplash, Natalie Knight, Ria Dubey, Ryan Postman, Evan DeLorenzo, Atticus Raasch, Bella Morreale Stanford Lipsey Student Publications Building 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1327 www.michigandaily.com ARTS SECTION arts@michigandaily.com SPORTS SECTION sports@michigandaily.com NEWS TIPS news@michigandaily.com LETTERS TO THE EDITOR tothedaily@michigandaily.com EDITORIAL PAGE opinion@michigandaily.com TARA MOORE Business Manager tmooree@michigandaily.com CLAIRE HAO Editor in Chief cmhao@michigandaily.com PHOTOGRAPHY SECTION photo@michigandaily.com NEWSROOM 734-418-4115 opt.3 CORRECTIONS corrections@michigandaily.com LANE KIZZIAH and KENT SCHWARTZ Managing Sports Editors sportseditors@michigandaily.com Senior Arts Editors: Andrew Pluta, Grace Tucker, Kari Anderson, Katie Beekman, Sophia Yoon Arts Beat Editors: Elizabeth Yoon, Peter Hummer, Mik Deitz, Sabriya Imami, Kaitlyn Fox, Anya Soller AYA SALIM and SAMUEL TURNER Managing Design Editors design@michigandaily.com Senior Design Editors: Shannon Stocking, Adam Bressler ANAMIKA KANNAN and GABRIJELA SKOKO Michigan in Color Editors michiganincolor@michigandaily.com HALEY JOHNSON and ASHA LEWIS Managing Social Media Editors Editorial Staff Business Staff Senior Photo Editors: Emma Mati, Miles Macklin, Becca Mahon, Julia Schachinger Assistant Photo Editors: Maddie Fox, Luke Hales, Jeremy Weine, Gabby Ceritano, Sophia Afendoulis RORI MILLER Creative Director EMILY OHL and GERALD SILL Managing Podcast Editors SCHUYLER JANZEN Sales Manager The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com News 2 — Wednesday, January 27, 2021 ADVERTISING WMG-contact@umich.edu JACK GRIEVE Digital Managing Editor jgrieve@michigandaily.com ALEX HARRING and SARAH SZALAI Co-Chairs of Access & Inclusion Senior Podcast Editors: Doug McClure, Max Rosenzweig, Avin Katyal La Casa releases statement on Victors Award following drop in Latinx enrollment The University of Michigan’s central Latinx student organization, La Casa, released a statement on Jan. 19 speaking out against the Office of Enrollment Management’s decision to change the amount of financial aid offered to out-of-state students with demonstrated need. The Victors Award, which replaced the Provost Award in April 2020, will be available for incoming out-of-state students in the class of 2024 and beyond. The Provost Award, last distributed to members of the class of 2023, met the full demonstrated need of out- of-state students and did not include a merit component. The Victors Award offers a flat $8,000 per year award and includes merit consideration. La Casa’s statement outlines the organization’s concerns about the change. They say the new award disproportionately impacts the Latinx community and resulted in a 16% decrease seen in first-year Latinx student enrollment for the Fall 2020 semester. Public Policy junior Juliana Collado, who recently finished her term as La Casa’s lead director, stated that though they know the COVID-19 pandemic may be a contributing factor, the decrease in Latinx first-year enrollment provoked La Casa to write the statement. “What we know is the numbers,” Collado said. “What we also know is that Latinx students are particularly loan adverse. Because the transition from the Provost Award to the Victors Award (provides students with a) significantly (smaller) amount of money, it just is inaccessible for students that can’t afford (the University). ” La Casa has discussed the change with OEM. According to La Casa Internal Director Xalma Palomino, an LSA sophomore, La Casa’s discussions with administrators at OEM were responsive, yet brief. “They were answering our questions but it was only a 30-minute meeting so there wasn’t much that we could cover,” Palomino said. “The two main things that we took away from that meeting is one, they said that they weren’t going to change the policy this year, and two, that they wanted … other colleges across the University to pick up on that funding.” La Casa External Director Rebeca Yanes, an LSA junior, was also at the meeting and said she thinks OEM did not seem to have any plans to make changes to their decision to implement the Victors Award. “They made it clear that this was a decision that was already made and that they were planning on continuing it for the next year,” Yanes said. “It makes it seem like the University of Michigan isn’t reachable. It’s not accessible. We talked about members of the Latinx community being loan adverse (and) not receiving sufficient aid from the University is sending a message that (this University may not be accessible for them).” Rick Fitzgerald, assistant vice president for the University of Michigan’s Office of Public Affairs, stated in an email to The Daily that the decision to switch to the Victors Award came from the fact that the Provost Award was no longer financially sustainable. “While the Provost’s Award meets full demonstrated need for eligible continuing non- resident students, the amount awarded changes from year to year as individual financial need is determined annually,” Fitzgerald wrote. “It was important not to adversely affect the affordability of a Michigan education for non- resident students who were already here despite the unsustainable finances of this award in the longer term. The introduction of the Victors Award is intended to continue to support non-resident students.” Fitzgerald also noted that the University and the Office of Enrollment Management share La Casa’s concerns with the enrollment decrease, but suggests that further analysis is needed in understanding the factors that may have contributed to this decrease, including the COVID-19 pandemic. “The university is aware of La Casa’s concerns and shares La Casa’s goals of greater college affordability and diversity in our student body,” Fitzgerald wrote. “While La Casa points to the changes in financial aid awards as the reason, we believe more analysis is needed to fully understand how many factors — most notably, the COVID-19 pandemic — may have influenced enrollment decisions … rest assured that the university is committed to doing this analysis.” As a part of La Casa’s efforts to challenge the Victors Award, the organization has asked community members who previously received the Provost Award to prepare testimonials explaining its impact on their educational experience. La Casa Undergraduate Advisor Tania Zaragoza, an LSA junior, was one of these Provost Award recipients. “It’s actually through (receiving the Provost’s Award) that I’m able to attend the University,” Zaragoza said. “It’s pretty straightforward. If you don’t have the money, then it’s just not a possibility, no matter how much you want to be here.” Moving forward, La Casa hopes to continue their conversations with the University to help further support not only the Latinx community, but all low-income first-year students affected by the new aid policy. “We’re not just here to protest (and) be angry at the University,” Collado said. “We have actively engaged with the University (and) we want that partnership reciprocated to us. The University has shoveled out millions of dollars to different DEI initiatives (and that) shows the value that they see in diversity, equity and inclusion. Here’s another way that they can show that they care about DEI, about having accessible education.” LARA JANOSZ Daily Staff Reporter CAMPUS LIFE Organization claims new award disproportionately impacts the Latinx community masks, avoiding large groups, spending time outdoors when the weather allows, washing hands more frequently, those kind of things, and I think if we can remain vigilant about those things a very high percentage of the time, I think the campus will do okay despite the presence of this more transmissible strain. If we let our guard down more people will get infected if the strain is around. TMD: Can you talk about what the slower-than-anticipated vaccine distribution and administration means for U-M? MS: The good news is, having a vaccine that works as well as these two existing vaccines is just remarkable. 95% effectiveness is about as good as it gets for a vaccine. The challenge is the supply, you know, can we make enough of it and how quickly can we make it? It’s a novel kind of vaccine … and so it’s complicated, and ramping up the production to the level of hundreds of millions of doses has never been done before, and it’s challenging. Michigan Medicine has gotten our campus to the stage where we can deliver between 12,000 to 25,000 doses a week. So, if we had enough vaccines now, it would take us two weeks to vaccinate the entire student community in Ann Arbor. So, that’s great. The problem is we don’t have enough vaccines. We put in a request each week for how many doses we want, and in the last couple of weeks, we haven’t gotten nearly the number of doses. And it’s not the state’s fault — they don’t have the supply. So, we’re ready to very aggressively vaccinate everyone in the order of their eligibility as soon as we have the supply. TMD: We know you don’t gamble — you’ve told us that before — but what do you think the chances are that the University will be administering vaccines to the general student population this semester? MS: I think it’s rather unlikely that we will get to have enough supply and work our way through all the other priority groups to be able to begin vaccinating students before the end of the semester. I would love to be proven wrong. So the priority is to give the vaccine to people for whom the disease is even more dangerous. And because the students are in an age group that is least likely to have a lethal outcome, on average, your priority is the lowest. However, amongst the student body there are people that have high risk. People with certain underlying diseases that put them in a high-risk group, they might get vaccinated before the end of the semester. But healthy students that are typical — no unusual health issues — I would hope that vaccine becomes available by the summer. My hope for next fall is that we can have a high enough fraction of everybody in our community vaccinated that we can have a semester that looks a lot more like a normal semester. I don’t think it’ll look like a completely normal semester — we’ll still have to be careful. If you want to be realistically optimistic, I think next fall we’ve got a shot at a much higher sort of quality of experience with much more stuff in person. TMD: The President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality released its draft recommendations in December, and after opportunity for public comment it will deliver its final recommendations to you in February. We’re wondering what’s the process you’ll use to evaluate the final recommendations and decide which parts to act on? MS: The University has been continuing to work on its carbon neutrality goals and its other sustainability goals while we wait for this commission to tell us a timeline and a prioritized set of things we can do to get to neutrality, so I’m pretty excited that it’s coming up to its stage of making recommendations. All along, I’ve been meeting with the co-chairs of the process, Professor Forrest and Jennifer Haverkamp. What I can guarantee is the report won’t be taken and put on a shelf. The report, we’re going to address the things that are straightforward and simple to address immediately. And then, we’re going to spend enough time to really understand the bigger and more complicated things and then focus on those as well. The response is meant to be an action-oriented response. The biggest thing in that report that I’m most interested in and then we’re going to need to study is to convert how we heat and cool all the buildings on campus. To go from steam heat generated by fossil fuels to geothermal and electric heat pumping, which would require literally tearing up every pipe and replacing every pipe that goes through every building on campus and digging these boreholes into the ground, tens of thousands of them, to do this geothermal heat exchange. Other things they’re going to propose are likely to be shorter- term, more straightforward and well-justified and we’ll just do them. So those are the extremes, a decades-long, multi- billion dollar project. And you can imagine with a multi-billion dollar project, we’re a university that has lots of resources, we surely do, but everything we do has an opportunity cost. So the question would be if we spent billions of dollars on one thing, what are the things we’re not going to do to balance that out. And that’s the discussion we need to have with the faculty, with the students, with the deans and with the regents. TMD: Carbon offsetting, according to the draft recommendations, is when an organization counterbalances its direct emissions by investing in or purchasing credits associated with verifiable emissions reductions or sequestration efforts somewhere else on the planet. Proponents argue that because climate change is a global problem, it makes sense to reduce emissions wherever it’s cheapest and easiest. But opponents argue that carbon offsetting allows wealthy institutions to externalize emission reduction while continuing to burn fossil fuels. What is your view on the proper role of carbon offsetting in carbon neutrality efforts? MS: You’ve laid out the problem. So, the leadership team and I and the regents need to understand it better. So it really is a dilemma. I understand where the advocates are coming from, it is a global problem. Of course, everyone in the world can’t buy offsets, because at the end of the day, what everyone in the world has to do is stop emitting so much carbon. We’ll run out of offsets. I also don’t want the purchase of offsets to compete financially with the investments it’s going to take for us to reduce our own carbon release. So, if we buy offsets for X number of millions of dollars a year, I don’t think that relieves us of the obligation to diminish our own carbon output. But, it gets rid of a lot of the resources that we would be using to invest in things like the geothermal system for example. So we have to study, that’s going to be a hard one. And from what I’ve heard, the committee itself is not of one mind about offsets, and then they’ve been getting comments back from the broader community of experts and advocates. So I think it’s something we’re going to have to look hard at, but I’m willing to consider anything that gets recommended. TMD: We wanted to follow up about the MLK symposium yesterday. In light of nationwide protests for racial justice, you said in June that “The important movements and calls for action we are seeing emphasize the need for us to do more to end systemic racism in our society and on our campuses.” What has the University done to address systemic racism on its campuses since then? MS: To put it in context — and this came up yesterday at the symposium — this is a marathon, racism. It’s been around almost forever in various forms — certainly throughout the history of our own country. And as hard as we work at it, I think we have to have a commitment to work on it basically forever. However, in the context of the awful events of the last year, particularly the multitude of police killings of Black people, most of whom were unarmed, it has focused societal attention on the issue in a way that gives us an opportunity to push harder. So amongst the things we’ve been doing on campus, most recently, we launched the task force that the provost and I set up around public safety at the University. I’ve spoken with many people of color, not just African Americans, but many people who don’t feel safe around the police. We need to understand how we do policing on our campus and how people feel about how we do policing, and try to make ourselves best in class. That effort just launched within the last couple of weeks. There will be preliminary reports during the semester, and then a final report at the end of the semester. SCHLISSEL From Page 1 Read more at MichiganDaily.com