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Wednesday, November 13, 2024
NEWS BRIEFS
Faculty Senate votes to censure Board of Regents; passes motions on gender-based violence, policy transparency
The motions called on the University to be more receptive to faculty feedback on policy changes EMMA SPRING Daily Staff Reporter
The University of Michigan Faculty Senate passed four motions on Friday, addressing a halt on changes to the Statement of Student Rights and Responsibilities, the formation of a
committee to update the Standard Practice Guide, a censure of the University’s Board of Regents and measures to enhance protocols for addressing gender-based violence and sex-based discrimination. The Faculty Senate had previously discussed these potential policy changes at an afternoon meeting Monday.
In July, the University’s Board of Regents decided to modify the SSRR to streamline the complaint and dispute resolution process, aiming to reduce the number of individuals involved. The new motion passed by the Faculty Senate calls on the University to pause this implementation, citing concerns that the changes were
made without consulting the Faculty Senate’s Student Relations Advisory Committee and conflict with the U-M community’s values. The second motion established a committee to ensure formal faculty representation in reviewing and updating the SPG, intended to maintain
the document’s accuracy and relevance. The Faculty Senate’s third motion formally censured the University’s Board of Regents, objecting to the Board’s alleged use of surveillance, policing, physical force and legal action in response to campus protests over the past year.
The fourth motion called on the University to strengthen protocols for addressing genderbased violence and sex-based discrimination. This includes an emphasis on prevention, enhanced support services, training, investigatory standards, independent audits and accountability measures.
STUDENT GOVERNMENT
CSG discusses executives’ attendance, committee funding
The Assembly also passed a resolution supporting the creation of a bereavement absence policy CHIARA DETTIN Daily Staff Reporter
The University of Michigan Central Student Government met in the Anderson Room of the Michigan Union Monday evening to discuss a resolution encouraging the University to create a new bereavement absence policy and plans to distribute funds to various committees. Assembly Speaker Mario Thaqi started the meeting by thanking members for attending and explaining why the meeting had been moved from its usual Tuesday date. “Even though it is an off day, I’m sure you will appreciate having the day off for Election Day,” Thaqi said. “It’s very important.” The meeting moved to a motion to recall two members due to a lack of attendance: Medical School representative Joanna Hua and Art & Design representative Stella Moore. Law School student Vincent Pinti expressed support for Hua and said the duties of both being a graduate student and
ADMINISTRATION
a CSG representative are difficult to balance, more so than being an undergraduate. “Grad school is going to be a big eye opener for you guys and everyone,” Pinti said. “The hours increase, the time increases, the grades become a lot harder. The exams are a lot more, there’s a shorter turnaround when you get to your next one.” Both Hua and Moore were recalled, with Moore being recalled unanimously and with 16 votes for, four against and six abstaining for Hua. The Rules Committee, which writes and reviews legislation regarding CSG rules and elections, then shared that CA 14-003 and AR 14-046 were unanimously sent back for review for this meeting. The Student Organization Funding Committee also delivered a report regarding general student organization funding and its plans to meet with the speaker of CSG, the Dean of Students Laura Blake Jones and Associate Dean of Students Sarah Daniels to discuss future funding. When it came to CSG President
Alifa Chowdhury and Vice President Eli Atkinson’s turn to report, tensions ran high as many representatives expressed concern about the executives’ attendance records and limited updates over the last few meetings. Chowdury and Atkinson were present at the meeting but refused to answer questions posed by several members of the Assembly. Thaqi raised concerns about the fallout from the Oct. 8 meeting, which ended early due to reactions from student protesters after a majority of the Assembly voted against F24-002: The Rebuilding Education in Gaza Act. The resolution would have sent $440,000 collected in student fees to the Birzeit University Rebuilding Hope Initiative in the West Bank. “In previous meetings when we talked about the events that happened on the meeting on the eighth of October, there was a promise made that the administration of both Alifa and Eli would reach out to Assembly representatives,” Thaqi said. “(It) seems like that has not been the
case at all. So my question is very explicit about Alifa and Eli: Have you done anything for the past two months? Anything?” Later during the meeting, Rackham student Angelica Previero, LSA sophomore Tiya Berry and Rackham student Erin Neely were nominated as Ethics Committee members. No objections were stated, and all nominations were confirmed unanimously. Tiya Berry was then approved as a nomination as vice chair for the Policy and Government Affairs Committee. Amendments and resolutions were put out for review and action after nominations were completed. CA 14-003, a constitutional amendment to reduce the time limit for the president to decide a veto for a resolution, was passed unanimously. It will be referred to the student body in the CSG November elections. The Finance Committee proposed recommendation FB-006, which requests a $4,000 appropriation from the Legislative Discretionary Fund toward
the Disability Empowerment and Advocacy Committee, the Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Survivor Empowerment Committee, the Policy and Government Affairs Task Force, and the Programming Committee in the Office of the Speaker. Margaret Peterman, vice chair of the Resolutions Committee, was quick to object to the proposal, stating that $4,000 is too little for the four organizations to function effectively. “From (my) experience planning events for the Assembly last year, one even cost well over $1,000 dollars,” Peterman said. “If we want to really make meaningful changes on campus and continue to do advocacy work that we’ve been doing in the past with CSG, I don’t think this is sufficient funds.” Members requested an increase in the funds of FB-006 from $4,000 to $5,000. After this change, the resolution passed unanimously. AR 14-037, an act requesting that the University create a labor studies minor and AR 14-040,
the Trans Umbrella Student Protection Act, were both passed with no objections. AR 14-040 calls upon U-M administration to protect and affirm its commitment to supporting transgender, nonbinary, two-spirit and gender diverse students. AR 14-042, the Creation of a Bereavement Absence Policy, was also introduced and passed. This policy will encourage the University to allow up to five excused absences in a two-week period for students who have experienced the death of a loved one. It will also accommodate additional excused absences for travel for those students. Although the resolution does not specify what constitutes a loved one, LSA representative Riley Kina argued passing the resolution represents progress, even if it lacks specifics. “They (the administration does not) know how to work this, and they’re looking for other places like CSG resolutions to figure this out,” Kina said. “I just wanted to push this out there again, to get it on the top of their mind.”
U-M GPT, one year later
UMich technology experts give insights on how the AI has evolved since its release BARRET DOLATA Daily Staff Reporter
In August 2023, the University of Michigan released U-M GPT, making it the first major university to offer its own generative artificial intelligence model. In collaboration with the University’s Information and Technology Services, U-M students, faculty and community members have had access to U-M GPT, U-M Maizey and the U-M GPT Toolkit for a little more than a year. The Michigan Daily spoke with U-M technology experts about how AI on campus has evolved in the year since its release. After playing a primary role in U-M GPT’s development, Ravi Pendse, vice president for information technology, reflected on his initial vision for the University’s role in the AI conversation a year later. “No other institution in the country or world currently has the kind of access that we are providing,” Pendse said. “We did not want a situation where somebody who has money gets to use some of these things and others who don’t maybe don’t get to use good tools.” Pendse said there have been many technical innovations made to the platform since its initial release. One such feature is a personal AI assistant called MiMaizey, which was introduced in September and supports students’ daily needs, ranging from class materials to dining hall options to transportation. Pendse said the University already plans to release a MiMaizey app for both Android
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and Apple users early next year. “You can just ask questions verbally,” Pendse said. “I can say, ‘MiMaizey, can you tell me how long it takes me to go from Central Campus to North Campus?’” Pendse also described plans to release an additional platform called Go To College, aimed at helping first-year college students navigate campus. The platform would provide information on grants and funding to prospective college students in high school, which he says may help prospective students pursue their educational dreams without financial barriers. “There are many families and students out there who sometimes struggle navigating the whole scholarship grant environment because it can be complex and often some of them don’t end up going to college,” Pendse said. “So we asked the question, ‘What should Michigan do (as) the leaders and the best?’ I said we should solve the problem.” Nikola Banovic, U-M associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering, is a human-computer interaction researcher who specializes in human AI interaction. In an interview with The Daily, Banovic said he has researched how students at the University interact with these kinds of technologies. Banovic found a general tendency to exaggerate the competence of AI technologies across his research. “It can easily mislead somebody to over rely on it,” Banovic said. “When I say over rely on it, that means that people are unable to check whether this technology has produced the
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right output.” Banovic emphasized potential limitations for students who lack domain expertise, and said AI literacy is not inherent, leaving students with varying abilities to assess tools like U-M GPT’s outputs. From collecting data and talking to students, Banovic found little evidence to show that students assess biases in their current uses of these technologies. “And even when they notice certain things, maybe they stumble upon some kind of undesirable output, they rarely — or we don’t really have much evidence to show that — they then deeply engage with it and try to resolve it,” Banovic said. “What we have found is that they’re not really principled in their approach, and that is fine because there are no courses that necessarily teach them.” Banovic said LSA students have access to a week-long, generative AI course called Generative AI Essentials: Overview and Impact that provides them a higher level of understanding of these technologies, but it does not offer insight into identifying their biases. In that class, Banovic described a lesson that aids students in understanding some of the potential biases of AI. “We use a very classic example of feeding in a cover letter with a name that is sounding like it’s the name of Caucasian man and then the same cover letter that is signed by a name that is sounding like an African American woman,” Banovic said. “Chat GPT — or U-M GPT in this particular case — actually produces different outputs. When one reflects on
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the differences, well it begs a question: Why, when the only difference truly is somebody’s name?” Rackham student Snehal Prabhudesai, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science and engineering, told The Daily that since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, there has been a rush for universities to create their own proprietary AI models. Prabhudesai has looked at U-M GPT systematically as a part of her research and uses the platform personally. “Maizey and other stuff U-M offers, while they offer these tools, the guidelines they provide are not very concrete,” Prabhudesai said. “ Rather they just say that, ‘Oh it’s important for students to critically evaluate the
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outputs they can have, like biased responses or hallucinations,’ and sort of just shift the responsibility to students without clarifying what or how.” Prabhudesai assessed the ways in which students interacted with the guidelines provided by U-M GPT along with the specific challenges faced by both those with limited AI knowledge and more experienced users. Prabhudesai studied AI use by students with varying levels of familiarity and found that University guidelines on AI use were confusing for students. “People had to default to their prior knowledge because they couldn’t get much more information from these guidelines,” Prabhudesai said. “It really exacerbated inequalities,
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but we saw that providing some form of structure delivered through maybe user interfaces or CS learning theories, they were led to much better support than these very vague and confusing guidelines.” Pendse stressed that the University’s AI tools are available to everyone while making clear that these tools are meant to augment and assist, but not replace. “I’m very excited about the future as to what this technology will bring, but at Michigan, we’ll always be thoughtful about how we use it,” Pendse said. “We’ll always be mindful of its impact on the environment and collectively at Michigan, leaders and best, we will show the world how to use the technology the right way.”
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