 The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Opinion
 Wednesday, February 16, 2022 — 13

PAIGE HODDER

Managing Editor

Stanford Lipsey Student Publications Building

420 Maynard St. 

Ann Arbor, MI 48109

 tothedaily@michigandaily.com

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

JASMIN LEE

Editor in Chief

JULIAN BARNARD 

AND SHUBHUM GIROTI

Editorial Page Editors

ficial position of The Daily’s Editorial Board. 

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

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

Julian Barnard
Zack Blumberg
Emily Considine
Brandon Cowit
Jess D’Agostino

Zoe Phillips

Ben Davis

Andrew Gerace
Shubhum Giroti

Min Soo Kim
Jessie Mitchell

Mary Rolfes

Nikhil Sharma

Jack Tumpowsky

Joel Weiner
Erin White

Anna Tupiano

W

hen the Board of Regents 
fired former University 
of Michigan President 

Mark Schlissel, The Michigan Daily 
Editorial Board was focused on the 
regents themselves. The regents — 
who serve unpaid for eight-year terms 
and are elected by Michigan residents 
— approve the yearly budget, appoint 
the president, oversee the University’s 
$17 billion endowment and regulate 
all three U-M campuses through the 
Regents’ Ordinance. They answer to 
Michigan voters, not the University 
community. How can the regents 
meet the needs of students, faculty 
and staff when those groups have 
little to no control over the board’s 
membership, and when regency itself 
is only a voluntary, part-time position?

The board has clearly made 

mistakes with its power, particularly 
in the last couple of years. In the 
words of the Editorial Board, “many 
of the trademark bad decisions made 
by Schlissel were directed, or at least 
directly influenced, by the board 
(of regents).” The regents’ decision 
to reopen student housing in the 
fall of 2020 is specifically cited. In 
the same month, the regents failed 
to 
temper 
the 
administration’s 

aggressive response to the GEO strike 
or act on the Faculty Senate’s historic 
vote of no-confidence on Schlissel. 
One University’s fight to provide 
the Flint and Dearborn campuses 
with equitable resources also faces 
resistance from the regents. More 
recently, the regents didn’t stop 
Schlissel from returning to campus 
as a tenured professor — despite an 
ongoing investigation into his actions. 
And, as the Editorial Board points 
out, the regents have also historically 
failed to address sexual misconduct 
throughout the University with any 
sort of vigor.

The regents were also criticized 

for raising tuition in the summer of 
both 2020, where it failed the first 
time it was proposed, and 2021. Each 
increase added just under $300 to 
in-state tuition and nearly $1,000 
to out-of-state tuition. Financial aid 
awards were increased for low and 
middle-income 
in-state 
students, 

so many, myself included, weren’t 
impacted by the increase. Additional 

aid was not awarded to out-of-state 
students, who already paid the 
highest out-of-state tuition of any 
public university in the country.

Despite their importance to the 

University as a whole — out-of-state 
students make up nearly half of all 
undergraduate students and their 
experiences and ideas are invaluable 
to the growth of in-state students 
— out-of-state students suffered the 
brunt of recent tuition increases 
engineered by a board they have 
no say in electing. In fact, they have 
no say over how the University’s 
highest authority handles any of 
the controversial issues impacting 
students. Moreover, because the 
board 
appoints 
the 
president, 

and the president fills most high 
administrative positions, out-of-state 
students’ lack of input extends to the 
entire University administration.

Representation is only marginally 

better for in-state students and 
staff because they share electoral 
responsibilities with millions of 
other voters, most of whom have 
no vested interest in the University. 
The fact that University voices are 
drowned out was evident after the 
2020 election, when former Regent 
Shauna Ryder-Diggs (D), one of two 
regents to oppose the 2020 tuition 
increase, narrowly lost reelection to 
current Regent Sarah Hubbard (R). 
Even by acting clearly in the interest 
of students, Ryder-Diggs was not able 
to keep her seat. 

Because the average Michigan 

voter 
isn’t 
involved 
with 
the 

University, 
and 
because 
down-

ballot races often draw careless 
decision-making, the board has 
become dominated by powerful, 
recognizable figures. Regent Denise 
Ilitch (D) is the daughter of the late 
Mike Illich, the founder of Little 
Caesars Pizza and owner of Detroit’s 
baseball and hockey teams. Regents 
Mark Bernstein (D), Jordan Acker 
(D) and Michael Behm (D) each 
come from prominent family law 
firms (Bernstein’s commercials have 
plagued my television my entire life). 
And, of course, Regent Ron Weiser, 
famous in part for calling Michigan’s 
top three state officials “witches,” is 
Chair of the Michigan Republican 
Party and a large Ann Arbor property 
owner.

The board members, who all have 

obligations elsewhere, aren’t paid 

either. That has two implications: the 
University will always come second 
to the regents’ paid obligations, and 
those without ample resources might 
not be able to serve on the board at all. 
The decision to bring students back 
to campus in fall 2020, for example, 
was allegedly influenced by Weiser’s 
extensive property interests. He went 
as far as donating $30 million to the 
University days before it announced 
it would reopen. All told, the board’s 
mistakes are due in part to regency’s 
part-time 
nature 
and 
because 

those affected are, at best, weakly 
represented. 

The board has taken an important 

step by including students, faculty 
and staff in the Presidential Search 
Committee. Even then, University 
stakeholders shouldn’t have to rely 
on the board’s generosity to have 
representation. 
Changing 
how 

regents are chosen so that all relevant 
University stakeholders are always 
represented — while maintaining 
the centuries-old relationship the 
University 
has 
with 
Michigan 

voters — is the best way to tackle 
the University’s ongoing struggles. 
Current graduate and undergraduate 
students, members of the Faculty 
Senate and other University staff 
(including 
lecturers, 
MHousing 

and MDining employees and other 
support staff) should each be allowed 
to elect one regent. Terms should also 
be limited to two years instead of 
eight, encouraging the board to evolve 
with the campus population — or face 
a challenging reelection fight.

For the 2022 fiscal year, student 

tuition will account for $1.8 billion of 
the University’s budget, far more than 
the $322 million Michigan taxpayers 
will contribute. The University’s 
world-class faculty is critical not 
only to our institution’s prestige but 
to its ability to bring innovation to 
Michigan as a whole. And, of course, 
without additional staff, the entire 
campus would quickly grind to a 
halt. These three groups make major 
contributions to the University and 
as employees and attendees are most 
intimately impacted by the board’s 
decisions. It stands to reason that 
they should be allowed to directly 
pick at least a minority of the board’s 
members. 

The Board of Regents doesn’t represent 
UMich stakeholders; it’s time they do

F

ormer 
Miami 
Dolphins 

coach 
Brian 
Flores 

announced Feb. 1 that he had 

filed a class-action lawsuit against 
the NFL and three of its teams. He 
alleged racial discrimination in 
league hiring practices as well as 
tanking — a practice by which teams 
intentionally lose to amass greater 
draft capital, among other charges. 
Flores’s lawsuit calls into question 
the legitimacy of the “Rooney Rule,” 
which requires all NFL teams to 
interview at least two external 
minority candidates for coaching 
and general manager vacancies.

Flores, however, is essentially 

calling the rule a sham. He claims 
that multiple teams engaged him 
in sham interviews meant only to 
satisfy the Rooney Rule, and he 
was not a serious candidate for 
those jobs. He brought receipts; 
the lawsuit contained screenshots 
of a text exchange between Flores 
and Patriots coach Bill Belichick, 
whom Flores worked for in New 
England before taking the Dolphins’ 
job. Belichick evidently believed he 
was texting his current offensive 
coordinator, 
Brian 
Daboll, 
to 

congratulate him on being hired as 

coach of the New York Giants. But 
the text went to Flores, who was 
set to interview for the Giants’ job 
himself three days later. Flores did 
have his interview as scheduled, 
and shortly thereafter the Giants 
introduced their new coach: Brian 
Daboll.

Flores’s claims come with instant 

credibility, both because of the state 
of racial representation in the league 
and because of Flores’s stature 
as a coach. There are only three 
active black coaches in the NFL — 
Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin; 
the Dolphins’ new coach, Mike 
McDaniel; and Lovie Smith with the 
Houston Texans — after Flores and 
Texans coach David Culley were 
fired after this season. That alone is 
a pretty bad look for the league, but 
context makes it worse. The Texans 
have a longstanding reputation 
of institutional racism and those 
allegations have been repeatedly 
substantiated.

Late Texans owner Bob McNair 

even faced severe backlash from his 
own players for racist comments he 
made in 2017. Racism seems to be 
hereditary in the McNair family. Bob 
McNair’s son Cal, current owner of 
the team, is no stranger to racially 
charged controversy himself, and 
recent rumors have been swirling 
that Houston was dead-set on hiring 

former NFL quarterback Josh 
McCown as coach. They didn’t, but 
the fact that they were considering a 
white man in his early 40s with no 
coaching experience with people 
like Flores out there is indicative of 
the larger problem, even if McCown 
wasn’t ultimately hired. 

Flores’s 
lawyers, 
justifiably, 

accused McNair of only hiring 
Smith to thwart allegations of 
institutional racism in light of the 
class-action 
suit. 
ESPN’s 
NFL 

Insider Adam Schefter chimed in 
as well, saying “I think (Flores’s 
lawsuit) changed this (NFL coach-
hiring) cycle,” on the network’s 
Super Bowl LVI “SportsCenter” 
special on Feb 9. “I think the 
Texans were tracking — tracking 
— to hire Josh McCown, and the 
environment 
and 
atmosphere 

changed once that lawsuit was 
filed. And I think it would’ve been 
very difficult for them to hire a guy 
they, I think, were very interested 
in, and they ended up hiring Lovie 
Smith instead.” Given the way 
the McNair family has spoken — 
publicly — about minorities, it’s hard 
to disagree with Flores’s lawyers 
here. From the outside, it looks like 
they’re racists using Culley and now 
Smith as pawns to try to throw fans 
off the scent.

Tomlin is the league’s longest-

tenured coach, and he coaches the 
franchise owned by the Rooney 
family, the namesake of the Rooney 
Rule. None of that is to say Tomlin’s 
continued presence in Pittsburgh 
is due to his race. He has long been 
an elite NFL coach, and the Steelers 
would be universally ridiculed for 
firing him. Having said that, Flores 
had begun to establish himself as an 
elite coach as well, and his firing by 
the Dolphins this offseason came 
as a massive shock both within the 
league and in the media. He was 
known as one of the league’s most 
popular coaches within his own 
locker room, and is often spoken of 
as the epitome of a “player’s coach.” 
Flores led the Dolphins to their first 
back-to-back winning seasons since 
2002 and 2003, and had restored 
hope to one of the league’s most 
success-starved franchises. 

Flores’s status as a rising star — 

one who was already producing 
winning seasons after taking over a 
franchise mired in two decades of 
complete and utter irrelevance — is 
significant. If Flores was a first-time 
coach who was fired with a record 
7-10 games under .500, you could 
argue that he was just a sore loser 
seeking to capitalize on America’s 
racial tensions. But Flores led one 
of the league’s most perennially 
embarrassing 
franchises 
to 
a 

24-25 record in three seasons, 
including 19-13 the last two seasons. 
Whether Flores’s firing and/or his 
interview experiences were racially 
influenced remains to be seen, but 
firing him was so objectively stupid 
that you almost have to wonder 
whether the decision may not have 
been entirely football-related. With 
the league’s record on race, from 
blackballing Colin Kaepernick to the 
conspicuous snubbing of qualified 
black candidates, all of this is enough 
to raise an eyebrow or two. 

That last point isn’t some kind 

of abstract conjecture. There are 
multiple 
well-known 
African-

American coordinators who should 
be coaches right now, and their lack 
of opportunities is glaring. Schefter 
noted later in the “SportsCenter” 
special that the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 
new defensive coordinator has 
interviewed for 10 coaching jobs, 
and hasn’t gotten one of them. 
Teryl Austin is a respected and 
experienced coach who is clearly 
worthy of a chance to lead an 
organization. Is it that much of a 
reach to say anybody who’s been 
asked to interview 10 times for a 
coaching job is probably qualified 
for one? Eric Bieniemy, the offensive 
coordinator for the Kansas City 
Chiefs, has overseen one of the 
most prolific offenses of all time, 

with two Super Bowl appearances 
and one championship to his name. 
He has interviewed for multiple 
vacancies over multiple years. He’s 
still a coordinator. Bieniemy and 
Flores were passed over for the New 
Orleans Saints job, too. New Orleans 
chose to promote from within 
earlier this month, going with their 
defensive coordinator, Dennis Allen.

That seems sensible on its 

face — to maintain stability in an 
organization which just lost its 
legendary longtime coach in Sean 
Payton. After all, Allen had been 
with the organization since 2015; 
has coaching experience, like Flores 
but unlike Bieniemy; and was seen 
as Payton’s right-hand man in recent 
years. That sounds great on paper, 
but Allen was 8-28 with zero playoff 
appearances in three years as coach 
of the Raiders. He gets another 
chance in the big chair before Flores, 
who’s had more recent (and far more 
successful) coaching experience? 
He gets the nod over Bieniemy, the 
architect of Patrick Mahomes’s 
development into an all-time great 
quarterback? Bieniemy and Flores 
were passed over for a job that they 
were both more qualified for than 

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

T

he 
stereotype 
of 

the 
“iPad 
baby” 
has 

become one of the most 

detestable 
and 
looked-down-

upon images in recent history. 
We as a society tend to look on in 
disgust at the parents of sticky-
handed, 
wide-eyed 
children 

at restaurants, their toddler 
connected mind, body and soul 
to their overly screen-protected 
and intensely loud iPad as you 
try to enjoy dinner with your 
family. Whether it be the catchy 
songs of “CoComelon” or the 
bright-colored pictures and toys 
of the YouTube channel “Ryan’s 
World,” toddlers of this day and 
age are seemingly obsessed with 
technology. They just can’t seem 
to take their eyes (and hands, and 
mouths) off of it. 

Sure, members of Generation Z 

are met with similar arguments, 
whether it be complaints that we 
are “always on Insta-space-ta-
gram” (one of my dad’s personal 
favorites), or that one day we 
will eventually lose our eyesight 
from the perpetual blue light or 
get “tech” or “text” neck. These 
comments don’t scare us, and 
we continue to text, tweet and 
post because it’s what we know. 
We have grown up in the age of 
social media, and it is our way 
to communicate our thoughts 
and express ourselves. But, as 
opposed to the toddlers of this 
generation, we grew up reading 
picture books for fun, watching 
“Dora the Explorer” in the 
comfort of our own homes and 
coloring on the paper placemats 
at 
restaurants 
with 
chunky 

crayons: there were no iPads in 
sight. 

I don’t mean to sound like a 

total “well, back in my day…” 
kind of person, but, yeah, “back 
in my day” (meaning, of course, 
the late 2000s and early 2010s), 
we didn’t bring technology to the 
table. Growing up, my first access 
to technology was my green iPod 
Shuffle, which I shared with 
my sister, and it solely played 
the soundtrack to High School 
Musical. I would have never 

thought to use it at family times 
because, honestly, things felt 
different about technology back 
then, in the early childhood of 
Generation Z. At that moment 
in my personal and emotional 
development, I was not reliant on 
technology as a form of comfort 
or entertainment. 

With this having been said, 

going through the last two years 
of a global pandemic has possibly 
changed 
my 
perspective 
on 

the phenomena of this elusive 
“iPad baby,” and this constant 
dependency on media. Now, 
I may even understand the 
placative qualities that this huge 
screen provides to its user, and 
empathize with the cause.

The pandemic has brought 

many of us back to old pleasures 
we may have had in the past, 
or given us the opportunity to 
try out new ones. Whether it be 
reading all those books you forgot 
about on your shelf, knitting 
dozens of (unwanted) scarves 
for your family, trying out that 
baking recipe you keep forgetting 
to do or binge-watching all of 
the programs and films you’ve 
missed out on because of work 
or school, we’ve all found ways 
to cope with the constant state 
of uncertainty with the help of 
light-hearted distraction, and 
more importantly, media. 

I have personally (and rather 

unashamedly) 
found 
myself 

clutching to any sort media 
possible in the last two years, 
including rewatching comfort 
television shows, reading piles 
of novels and getting through 
3,000 levels of Candy Crush. 
I am constantly scrolling my 
TikTok “For You” page, and I 
am religiously up to date with 
my “Goodreads” and “Serializd” 
accounts. I’ve become dependent 
upon my phone and laptop to 
provide me the perfect elixir 
of distraction from real life, 
whether that be school, politics 
or the pandemic. In all honesty, 
it has worked in the long run for 
the better of my mental health.

Psychological studies tend to 

say the same thing. In a report 
from Common Sense Media, 
it was found that 21% of young 
people said that using social 

media helped them feel “less 
alone” amid the pandemic (up 
from 15% in 2018), and 43% of 
respondents, aged 14 to 22, found 
that social media has eased nerves 
and the likelihood of depressive 
episodes. 
The 
upwards 
tilt 

in the usage of social media 
platforms, video-call services 
and streaming platforms is not 
unexplained by psychologists 
and media analysts: it has helped 
young people everywhere feel 
better about themselves and 
their surroundings, especially 
in such isolating and distressing 
circumstances.

As a society, we have deemed 

a reliance on media to be 
unbecoming 
and 
antisocial. 

Anyone who binges one too many 
episodes on Netflix is considered 
to be lazy, and anyone who likes 
one too many posts on Instagram 
is considered an addict. This 
stigma, especially in the age 
of 
the 
COVID-19 
pandemic 

and the pandemic-influenced 
world, is incredibly damaging. 
It makes people who see media 
consumption as a form of comfort 
feel poorly about their coping 
mechanisms, that they should 
instead be “doing something 
with their lives.” Well, in the year 
2022, I happen to believe that just 
getting through your day is doing 
something, and it shouldn’t go 
unnoticed, no matter how many 
times you may have stopped to 
send out a tweet or sat down to 
watch a movie to do it. It’s still 
getting by.We look down on the 
“iPad baby” since it’s unnatural 
to us. At their age, we were 
comforted in different ways. But 
being a toddler in the pandemic is 
hard in and of itself, and we can’t 
help but sympathize with them 
and their cries of emotional pain 
when their mother takes away 
their tablet, because inside, each 
of us is, in our own way, a toddler; 
we feel this same codependency. 
The pandemic has made each of 
us reliant on technology to cope: 
the bright screen of an iPhone 
filling up that isolating void of 
quarantine and uncertainty. We 
must realize that, deep down, 
we are just like those sticky and 
drooly toddlers, because we too 
need the help of a screen at times.

How the pandemic has made each of us toddlers

LINDSEY SPENCER

Opinion Columnist

QUIN ZAPOLI
Opinion Columnist

The NFL has a big race problem, and it is showing

JACK ROSHCO
Opinion Columnist

The cold is here

Design by Libby Chambers

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

