Febuary 25, 2021
Many of today’s most famous, or infamous, headlines were broken by local newspapers -Flint’s water crisis, abuses in the catholic church, Larry Nassar scandal- and this type of investigative journalism is essential to defrauding corruption that would otherwise go under the public’s eyesight. But the professional requirements to have a journalistic-like title has evolved, thanks to a shift of content on populated social media platforms, to uplift amature investigations and calls to action from personal experience.
No platform has captured the attention of millennials and zoomers as much as TikTok has, the 60 second video sharing app that has over 100 million monthly active users in the United States alone. The app provides an opportunity for an unpredictable size of your voice, meaning endless possibilities of becoming a viral moment, and that’s exactly what happened when Sam Burnstien, a junior at the University of Michigan- Ann Arbor posted a Tik Tok criticizing his universities handling of the pandemic, specifically the distressing care for students who tested positive for Covid-19 and lived in on-campus housing. The students reported not having enough provisions like cleaning supplies, microwaves or even food. They also were told they would not have access to a laundry machine and had to pack enough clothes for the two week quarantine. But it wasn’t the university who stepped up to correct these mistakes, it was the graduate student employees.
Like the rest of Burnstein’s audience, student graduate employees found out about their universities mishandling through Tik Tok, as told by Yeager and Dawn Kaczmar, both graduate student employees who are a part of GEO, a union representing graduate student employees, “I was actually first alerted to them from seeing students posting videos on TikTok and Twitter,” said Kaczmar, adding “ My initial response was extreme disappointment with the University of Michigan for allowing this to happen. This university has enormous wealth and resources, there’s no reason for them not to provide proper living quarters and food to quarantined students.”
This sentiment was echoed by Yaeger, who actually joined GEO last summer because of the universities’s (lack thereof) response to Covid. When word got around about the unacceptable living conditions, the graduate student’s realized their responsibilities have exponentially grown, as Yeager wrote “Once we found out how bad the conditions were in Covid housing (through word-of-mouth and Tik Toks, of all things), we gathered all of the food and supplies we could spare and brought it to the students isolated in housing.”
Many graduate students delivered food to the undergraduates, a basic necessity that the university often overlooked. Yeager recounted a story of one of his own students moving into the covid living facilities “As the semester progressed, the dorms got better, but not by much. I had a student get sent to the covid dorms and as a joke, I told her I hoped they gave her a pillow (since I had recently heard that the dorms didn’t have pillows). Guess what they didn’t provide for her? Luckily she had brought her own.” More stories like this can be found on many University of Michigan student’s Tik Tok’s and Twitter, as well as many students using social media to condemn their university’s president, Mark Schlissel.
While conferring with the undergraduate Resident Life employees with how to best support them, the GEO went on strike in protest of in-person classes starting during a pandemic, which “it ended prematurely because the President of the University threatened to destroy the union itself” wrote Kaczmar, further expressing her disappointment with her university. While the strike was not considered a success at the time, Kaczmar credits the university’s second semester plan of being almost exclusively remote with most students residing at home to the strike she was a part of back in September of 2020. Yeager wrote that “one of the really impactful results of our strike – at least to me – was how much the community came out to support us. I was at our basecamp every day, and so many people donated funds, food, and supplies that we often had more resources than we needed,” a heartwarming and empowering byproduct of the graduate student’s persistence, adding “additionally, the school has in fact made many of the changes we demanded, one being mandatory covid testing for UMich members in Ann Arbor, which recently started.”
When asked if they expected the University of Michigan to handle the pandemic in this way, both expressed disappointment and bewilderment to those in power in the university, with Kaczmar writing “in early spring/summer, I had been expecting the University to announce a totally remote semester. Online education is not an ideal scenario, but it was the only reasonable solution to continuing education through a global pandemic. I did not expect the university to put profits above lives in such a dehumanizing way.” Yeager added that he is “honestly still in shock that the school handled the pandemic so poorly. I cannot believe it. UofMich had so much going for it – a strong medical community, time to plan, many committees to consult, labor organizations to work with, and billions of dollars in the endowment cushion – and it just used none of these resources. Teachers and staff weren’t consulted, the ethics committee was ignored, and, as we found out once the semester started, there simply was no plan.”
This feeling of mistrust and abandonment has certainly been felt across all walks of life as citizens during a pandemic, but for these graduate students, it was a calling to rise to the occasion, with Kaczmar reporting that “many of us [graduate student employees] are performing more unofficial duties for our undergraduate students now. Many of them need much more emotional support, and last semester I spent a lot of time helping students find places to get tested because the tests the university provided were extremely limited and often inaccessible.”
It was Yeager’s first year as a GSI, which uncharacteristically began with a pandemic and a strike, and he described his first semester as having “a lot of complications to teaching online, and many GSIs are working their max hours every week. We’re all very dedicated to and protective of our students, and I’ve also realized that there’s a lot of emotional labor in teaching, at least during a pandemic” continuing to add, “In my first semester teaching, not only did I have to learn how to teach, but I had to learn how to answer emails from students who were sick, scared, and so overwhelmed. I never thought I would have so many students email me asking for help or assignment extensions because of deaths in the family in the span of a semester. As a teacher, I think you always expect to be available for students (at least to a limited degree), but the degree to which GSIs have had to be available and go to bat for our students this semester has been challenging.”
The GEO now has a ‘Covid-19 Resource and Updates’ page on their website for graduate and undergraduate students alike, and will continue to advocate for the safety of the students who attend the University of Michigan.
KaseyDeschler.com 