LEAD DISCONTINUED ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY FOUR YEARS OF EDITORIAL FREEDOM
Ann Arbor, Michigan
michigandaily.com
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
SCHOLARS PROGRAM
Scholarship program for minority students ends abruptly
Lila Turner/DAILY
SARAH SPENCER Daily Staff Reporter
The Alumni Association of the University of Michigan sent an email Thursday afternoon notifying members of the LEAD Scholars program that the program will be immediately discontinued. The LEAD Scholars program, founded by the Alumni
Association in 2008, provided merit-based scholarships primarily geared towards supporting underrepresented minority undergraduate students. Ashleigh Hardy, director of student and recent alumni engagement at the Alumni Association, sent the email to members. Hardy wrote that she appreciated the members’ dedication to their studies and
to the University of Michigan community, but all program activity is now being discontinued. “I am reaching out to share some challenging news,” Hardy wrote. “After careful review and consideration, and in order to comply with all applicable laws, the Alumni Association has made the decision to discontinue the LEAD Scholars program, effective immediately.”
ADMINISTRATION
University Housing to ban dorm door decorations
The move upends decades of precedent for free expression in university housing. EMMA SULAIMAN Daily Staff Reporter
For decades dorm room door decorations have been a way for students to express themselves and connect with other students. University of Michigan Housing has decided to ban dorm door decorations effective May 6, 2025 in response to past vandalism concerns. The ResStaff Allied Organization, the student residential workers’ labor union, thinks the ban is not the solution to this concern. RAO has since then drafted an open letter to send to University Housing with almost 100 signatures from ResStaff and students opposing the ban, stating the new enforcement is a suppression of free speech and the ability for a student to express themselves. LSA senior Mark Tallents, RAO president, said in an interview with The Michigan Daily he feels University Housing is banning dorm door decorations as a way to silence residents and ResStaff. “So right off the bat of this academic year, we’ve seen
MHousing be authoritative,” Tallents said. “They’re trying to control what is seen and not seen in the residence halls and by extension of that, they’re limiting resident expression.” In an email to The Daily, LSA junior Henry Barron, RAO secretary, said the decision has the potential to make it harder for ResStaff and residents to create a warm environment. “Having to now police something like this creates an unwelcoming environment where it is more difficult to connect with residents,” Barron wrote. “This reduces our ability to provide meaningful support to our residents on the topics most relevant to them like identity, belonging and community engagement. Additionally, the door dec ban makes ResStaff’s jobs much harder, as they’re now expected to enforce when a resident has a club poster, a national flag, or a nice drawing on their door.” Tallents said he believes the true reason for this ban is to silence opinions that differ from those of University administrators, specifically concerning Palestine,
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from both residents and ResStaff. Similar actions have taken effect at Columbia’s Barnard College, where the administration has mandated dorm door decor to be removed in an attempt to not isolate those with differing views. “I think what is happening here is we’re seeing this policy become a catalog of other policies that’s limiting speech in the dorms,” Tallents said. “This is included with the programming neutrality policy, which restricts ResStaff from holding programming that housing deems non-neutral, which included censorship of events that were planned in November where people wanted to talk about Palestinian history. Those events were censored.” Tallents told The Daily University Housing does not consult ResStaff on such policy changes. ResStaff simply received notice that University Housing had made changes to the Community Living at Michigan Standards, which are the policies that people agree to when they become residents.
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Hardy clarified that previously dispersed winter 2024-25 payments will not be impacted, and the Alumni Association will help LEAD Scholars find continued funding. “The Alumni Association is committed to helping Scholars find additional sources of support, and will continue to offer all other alumni and student programming,” Hardy wrote.
In an email to The Michigan Daily, Rob Clendening, vice president for marketing and communications at the association, wrote that the Alumni Association plans to work with current LEAD Scholars to help find other available financial opportunities to assist with their studies. “The Association is eager to explore ways to continue
to enrich the University of Michigan’s impact and find ways to maintain our rich legacy of supporting students through the generous support of alumni and donors,” Clendening wrote. According to the email from Hardy, the Alumni Association will host a community event Friday, April 4 to provide more details on the discontinuation.
ACADEMICS
SACUA discusses strategy session and questions for Ono
‘Imagine that the administration just threatens to pull funds. Would he fight that?’ ALYSSA TISCH
Daily Staff Reporter
The Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs met Monday afternoon in the Alexander G. Ruthven Building to discuss their thoughts on a strategy session covering the lecture, “The New McCarthyism: Authoritarianism and the Future of Academic Freedom,” cosponsored by SACUA and the National Center for Institutional Diversity. The committee also discussed what questions they plan to ask University of Michigan President Santa Ono in an upcoming meeting. The meeting began with SACUA member Soumya Rangarajan describing what faculty members discussed in the strategy session following the McCarthyism lecture. In the strategy session, faculty members developed action items in five areas: engagement with administration, media engagement, political outreach, research and teaching and organizing faculty. Rangarajan said one thing some faculty
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members focused on during the discussion was having professors share their research with politicians more often. “(Politicians) actually really want to hear from faculty about the things that they have expertise in because otherwise, the only things they’re going to hear is from lobbyists who usually have a profit-based interest in whatever they’re lobbying for,” Rangarajan said. “So we actually need to talk more about our research.” Rangarajan further said the faculty discussed ways to improve the way the University speaks of itself in its communications on The University Record, the University’s news self-publication. “I think a lot of people perceive that a lot of the messaging we have, for example in The University Record and in our public messaging, makes Michigan come off as elitist,” Rangarajan said. “I think we need to change that perception and really make Michigan kind of stand out as a public institution that’s serving the state of Michigan, rather than this elitist, Ivy-type institution that everybody’s kind
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of intimidated by.” Luke McCarthy, director of the Faculty Senate Office, told SACUA he is excited they are discussing these topics and breaking down the meaning of academic freedom. “I’m excited about this because I feel like academic freedom is something that we say a lot, but everybody actually would benefit from some unpacking of it,” McCarthy said. “We need to figure out how we can make sure that everybody understands, as a society, that academic freedom is really important in order to make sure that good progress occurs in knowledge.” SACUA members next discussed what questions they plan to ask Ono in an upcoming meeting set to take place the following week. SACUA member Simon Cushing, in light of Columbia’s University’s recent decision to change their policies regarding topics like campus protests to yield to the President Donald Trump administration’s demands to regain threatened funding.
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