The first time I ever had to carry grief that did not belong to me was the day I began to report on survivors of former University of Michigan Athletics doctor Robert Anderson. Over a span of 37 years, more than 950 victims reported thousands of incidents of sexual abuse and misconduct at the hands of Anderson, remaining as likely the most sexual abuse allegations against a single person in United States history. There is an untold grief in reporting this kind of trauma, in reporting the tragedies that affect our schools and communities — the people we love and know — and what they ultimately leave behind. In time, even grief that does not belong to us has a way of becoming our own. College journalists are especially vulnerable to the weight of reporting. The world sees them as too young to understand the heaviness of grief or to report on the shootings that fracture their campuses, the homicides that destroy their student bodies, the bomb threats and sexual abuse scandals that define the way they reckon with themselves. But oftentimes, long after national news outlets have left, when press conferences become a rarity and towns begin to quiet again, student journalists and student-run newspapers become the last to remain, to understand, to painstakingly cover all that happens in between. And at a cost few are ever willing to make. What becomes of college journalists in the face of collective grief? What does it mean to grieve, to process, to become angry, to be in pain, to know joy and love and healing as a journalist first, and as a student last? I’ve spent the past month researching college newspapers across the country, and more importantly, college newspapers that found themselves at the forefront of national tragedies — those that have had to contend with what it meant to no longer feel safe in your own libraries, classrooms, newsrooms and homes. Over the past few weeks, I spoke to Ava MacBlane, Editor in Chief of The Cavalier Daily at the University of Virginia; Haadiya Tariq, Editor in Chief of The Argonaut at The University of Idaho; and Jasper Smith, Editor in Chief of The Hilltop at Howard University. These are their stories. This is the weight they carry. The Cavalier Daily, The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va. The Cavalier Daily — The CD or The Cav, for short — is the University of Virginia’s independently-run student newspaper. It employs approximately 400 staffers and is led by Editor in Chief Ava MacBlane. The Cavalier Daily’s offices are located in the basement of Newcomb Hall, a student center that also houses the campus’s main dining hall. Staff sometimes take long naps on a couch chock-full of Squishmallows. A life-size cut-out of Will Ferrell sits in an odd corner, and there are lopsided frames of old newspapers from decades ago hung on the walls. Meetings are held in an area fondly dubbed “The Office” and on Fridays, when the production schedule is pleasantly light, the Copy staffers spend hours at one of the few empty tables gossiping about the day’s latest happenings. The newsroom here is well-loved. It’s the kind of place people visit just because they can. On Sunday, Nov. 13, 2022, University of Virginia students and football team members Devin Chandler, D’Sean Perry and Lavel Davis Jr. died after a gunman opened fire on a bus returning from a University of Virginia class trip to Washington, D.C. Two other students were wounded. A shelter- in-place warning issued a campus- wide “Run, Hide, Fight” alert that lasted well into the next morning. Students spent the whole night cramped into libraries and a variety of campus and academic buildings, trapped in an uncomfortable state of limbo and a terribly unsettling cloud of fear, in search of a reason why. MacBlane, who was the Managing Editor of The Cavalier Daily at the time, spent the entirety of the next 72 hours following the shooting, on the ground reporting. She missed meals and sleep, and much of her grief was experienced as a journalist first. Reporting on her community became one of the only ways she carried her grief, or rather, the only way her job as a student journalist allowed her to. “You want to feel connected to people and to your community, but you can’t because you’re still the media,” MacBlane told me. There is a heaviness that comes with reporting on fellow peers who left the world so violently, a half-removed kind of grieving. While it became the sole responsibility of MacBlane and The Cavalier Daily to print the victims’ names, their hometowns, what they studied, the lovely, wonderful tiny things that made them who they were, there is also the realization that the journalists are students, too. They might have run into the victims of the shooting somewhere in line at a coffee shop or in the library, or the victims might have picked up a copy of The Cavalier Daily, because Devin Chandler, D’Sean Perry and Lavel Davis Jr. were here as fellow students, and now after a senseless act of violence, they no longer were. SARAH AKAABOUNE Statement Deputy Editor The weight we carry: college journalism’s untold grief Read more at MichiganDaily.com Read more at MichiganDaily.com This is not an essay about watching movies — this is an essay about going to the movies, about its likeness to ceremony, about how it makes me feel quite a bit less lonely. About how it saves my weekends. About why sometimes, (and I never know when that sometimes is going to be) being alone in public is comforting. For the past three weekends, I’ve spent a Friday or a Saturday or both at the Michigan Theater and State Theatre. The stretch began with the hotly anticipated, box-office hit “Dune” in a packed showing room at the Michigan Theater. The following weekend it was a quieter, charmed “The French Dispatch” in their largest auditorium, and a rowdy “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” seen (for the first time) from the upper mezzanine the same night. “Dune” again the next weekend in the Michigan Theater. The night after, a chilling “Last Night in Soho” from the cozy, elevated rows of the State Theatre. An anniversary showing of “Blade Runner” is slated for this coming weekend. It’s not like I had outright planned to spend my October and November weekends this way. It just sort of happened, as these things often do. I saw “Dune” and realized what I had missed so much about a communal viewing experience, and so I went again. And again. And again. I’m enjoying this stint, as I tend to indulge in things for weeks at a time, only to abandon it once the novelty wears off. Next month I may be fervently knitting scarves that won’t see their ends, tossed in baskets with the needles still clinging to the last row I attempted. But I will have occupied myself for the month of December. Like my pocket-sized copy of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” that protects against preventable boredom, going to the movies ensures a thing to do, it is something to put in your calendar. You can use it as a crutch. You can say, hey, I’m sorry. But I’ve got plans with red velvet seats, Bill Murray and incurable back pain tonight. And you can’t reach me. It’ll be dark and I’ll be happy. Or maybe not happy, but convinced of the possibility. I take care to treat moviegoing as a ceremony, one I should smarten up for: eyeliner, coiffed hair, heeled loafers. A scarf? Let’s put on some Etta James and dance a little (to my playlist called “Songs to Secretly Dance To”). Like when getting ready for the party is more fun than the party itself, going to the movies represents everything that surrounds the experience — it’s not actually about the movie, though I suppose it could be — it isn’t usually for me (even though “Dune” was actually quite good). And it’s never about the party. It’s about if the butter has journeyed through to the bottom of the popcorn bowl, or the blessed moment the lights dim, finally introducing the sanctuary of silence. Sticky floors. A glorified night to myself. A place where you are commanded to turn off your phone and where nobody can reach you. It is a wonderfully liminal space where you feel transported, not totally out of reality, but somewhere perched on its border. ~ Who is going to get offended when I say that going to the movies feels more religious than church? But how could you deny the parallels of a showing at the Michigan Theater: veritable gold banisters winding up to the second floor, the organ playing that precedes each movie. Gold leaf molding on the ceiling — a truly divine display. Enforced quiet. People congregating under the bright marquee. I pay more respect to going to the movies than I ever did going to church — and that should tell you all you need to know about my Catholic upbringing. At the movies, I am alone but surrounded by people who are also alone. It is comforting. At parties, I am only surrounded by people who are better at pretending that they are not also alone. Or people — and I write this with jealousy — who are actually not alone at all. I feel less lonely going to the movies for obvious reasons, but also for less obvious ones. The presence of other people without the responsibility of having to interact with them is a nice thing. You’re all connected by a desire, however fleeting, to see this movie. To eat popcorn loudly. To laugh at the right time. To suck the air out of the room by collectively gasping at a jump-scare. Durga Chew-Bose in her essay “Summer Pictures” puts it this way: “Going to the movies is the most public way to experience a secret. Or, the most secretive way to experience the public.” When going to the movies, I am seeking out pleasure and entertainment. But I am also avoiding confrontation — I never like to interrogate why being home alone on a weekend night so disturbs me, but I imagine that much of this conception has to do with the social mores of college and conflicting ideas about solitude. Alas, it’s so much easier to watch Anya Taylor- Joy dance to “Downtown” with the smugness of having escaped than it is to admit what we are escaping from in the first place. ~ This past summer, a “moviehouse” was built on the western end of my hometown’s main drag. Its construction was followed by a minimalist bakery, a tapas restaurant, and a “unique urban market.” All of these establishments were constructed within the same year, which has given this street a sort of faux-modernity. Like the youngest child of five that wasn’t planned, this street’s end is late and too young to understand much. From left to right: ANNA FUDER/Daily, ALUM BECCA MAHON/Daily, ANNA FUDER/Daily, JEREMY WEINE/Daily 8 — Graduation Edition 2023 michigandaily.com — The Michigan Daily Statement At the movies TAYLOR SCHOTT Statement Managing Editor Two months ago, I received an unexpected direct message on Twitter. It was from someone I had never met but vaguely recognized from the University of Michigan Twitter-sphere. “I think my roommate found your fake,” they wrote. “It kinda sucks btw.” Said ID was not, in fact, my fake ID. It was my real Michigan driver’s license. It had disappeared somewhere between my apartment and Babs’ Underground Lounge after a night out about two weeks prior. I had been frantically looking for it ever since, tearing through my car, backpack and bedroom on a desperate mission to find it. In the meantime, I endured the humiliation of taking my passport to bars. I didn’t blame the Twitter stranger for assuming my ID to be fake. My driver’s license photo was exceptionally bad. I looked terrible in it — I had forgotten you were allowed to smile so it looked more like a mugshot than a driver’s license photo, and I was still hungover from the night before. I wouldn’t blame someone for thinking it was taken in a dorm basement with a digital camera from the 1990s. And ever since I turned 21, I’ve been paranoid that my license would be confiscated at Rick’s or the liquor store because there’s something about it that just seems so unconvincing. But there was something so stereotypically “college student” about that message that it was almost comical. It was a reminder of the absurdity of the fake ID phenomenon; they’re so ubiquitous that any driver’s license found left behind on the street is assumed to be a piece of fraudulent government documentation. Fake IDs have become almost synonymous with college life since the legal drinking age was raised to 21 from 18 with the passage of the National Minimum Drinking Act in 1984. The law was a bizarre quid-pro- quo that withheld federal funding for highways from states unless they raised the drinking age, meant to circumvent a provision in the 21st Amendment that prohibits the federal government from regulating alcohol. Four years after the National Minimum Drinking Age was passed, all states were compliant and 21 was the de-facto federal age. Suddenly, 21 became the most important — and in my opinion, most arbitrary — social division on college campuses. Perhaps in recognition of how meaningless the divide really was, students almost immediately began trying to circumvent it with fake IDs. Utter disregard for the law became the norm. In one study published in 1996, 46% of college students admitted to using a fake ID to purchase alcohol. For the most part, obtaining a fake ID is low risk and high reward. Minors can effectively purchase unlimited access to alcohol, weed or any other illicit substance. And it’s currently easier than ever to get high- quality “novelty IDs” online, usually produced in China, that can be swiped and scanned. Sure, there’s the small risk of it getting confiscated by the bouncer at Charley’s, but chances are you’ll make it past him just fine. Still, using a fake doesn’t come entirely without risk. Under Michigan law, it’s illegal to “intentionally reproduce, alter, counterfeit, forge, or duplicate an official state identification card or use an official state identification card that has been reproduced, altered, counterfeited, forged or duplicated.” And using a fake ID to “purchase alcoholic liquor” is punishable by up to 93 days in prison and a $100 fine. Students have been arrested for possession of fraudulent identification before, often when police officers are waiting near the lines going into popular bars. In 2010, immigration agents arrested 2 U-M students and 1 MSU student after intercepting a package with 48 fake IDs arriving from Toronto. Regardless, it still seems like many illicit transactions do proceed everyday and uninterrupted, as students hand their ID to the cashier at Campus Corner, perhaps verifying their “address” or “date of birth,” and go on their way. Fake IDs are so common that it can be easy to forget the insanity of the concept: Minors have the opportunity to significantly improve their social lives and overall college experiences by committing federal crimes on a weekly basis. This isn’t to say underage drinking is bad or that people should boycott fake IDs; I actually personally support the lowering of the drinking age. Rather, I’d argue that this fake ID phenomenon that’s accompanied by ample, even grave risk is too often taken at face value. If you don’t have a fake ID, there’s a good chance one of your friends does. One could go as far to say that the never-ending stream of parties, tailgates and smoke sessions that are so integral to campus life stand entirely on an informal network of fraudulent identities. And I think it’s time to confront this network for all it’s worth and all it does for this campus community. These are the real fake IDs of the University of Michigan. *** “I thought I was totally screwed and lost everybody’s money. I was freaking out,” a Ross sophomore explained. The student, who wished to remain anonymous due to fear of legal and professional repercussions, will be referred to as Eric. Eric had placed a mass order of 14 fake IDs for himself and fellow Michigan students. He had meticulously tracked everyone’s information in a spreadsheet and, together, their false personas spanned the entire country — he had ordered “novelty IDs” from Illinois, Connecticut and Colorado, among other states. The real fake IDs of UMich HALEY JOHNSON Statement Correspondent Read more at MichiganDaily.com