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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
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