The University of Michigan Faculty Senate met in a hybrid format in the Alexander G. Ruthven Building April 27 to discuss artificial intelligence-free zones, early decision admissions and trans student athletes.
The Faculty Senate currently consists of more than 7,753 faculty members from all three campuses, including tenured and tenure-track faculty, research faculty, librarians, lecturers, clinical faculty, executive officers and deans.
The Faculty Senate considered seven motions, all of which passed after members voted on them in the 72 hours following the conclusion of the meeting. Of the 7,753 Faculty Senate members, 2,336 participated in this ballot. Motions hold no administrative authority, but represent the views of the University’s faculty and will be submitted to U-M administrators.
Motion #042726-3, calling on the University to reverse its enacting of Early Decision admissions first tested for the class of 2030, passed with 1,364 votes yes, 424 votes no and 548 abstaining. Early Decision rounds typically increase a students’ chances of gaining admission, but also obligate the student to attend the school if accepted.
Chemistry professor Neil Marsh said he believes the decision to add Early Decision admissions benefits the University rather than the students, and it was made with little to no consultation from the faculty.
“Faced with increasing application numbers, they identify the students who are keenest to attend,” Marsh said. “They can lock in a preset number of students into the entering class. Thus, they make fewer offers and have less uncertainty about the final class size. There’s also a significant financial advantage. Early Decision applicants tend to come from wealthier families who can pay full tuition.”
Marsh said most students relying on financial aid are not put in a fair position by applying through Early Decision.
“Students who need financial aid are understandably reluctant to commit without knowing first what the final cost will be,” Marsh said. “Early decision restricts students’ college choices and advances affluent families. We contend that this admissions mechanism as currently implemented is antithetical to the values that we hold here at Michigan.”
Motion #042726-2, urging the University’s administration to create infrastructure allowing faculty to detect when students use AI to complete their work, passed with 1,711 votes yes, 356 votes no, and 269 abstaining. The motion requests a lockdown browser option preventing the use of AI on assignments, as well as creating classes for students who want to distance themselves from AI and implementing a required training module on issues surrounding the technology.
Salome Viljoen, assistant professor of law, said students become lazy when they start to use AI, preventing them from developing critical thinking skills.
“AI can enhance productivity and the productive capacities of experts, but there’s also growing evidence of the risk that AI poses to the cognitive conditions necessary to produce new experts, in particular risks to cultivating perseverance and cooperation,” Viljoen said. “College involves a delicate balance — allowing students to experiment with the capacity enhancing the capabilities of AI while retaining spaces for them to build and develop the muscles and habit and grit of true domain expertise.”
Carina Ray, associate history professor, said she has been preventing AI in her class by assigning shorter essays via Blue Books for students to complete during scheduled instructional time. However, Ray said completing assignments by hand instead of online creates problems that a lockdown browser feature could fix.
“Some of the writing is just illegible, and therefore creates a big problem in terms of how you assess that,” Ray said. “(Blue Books) do not have the elasticity that a Word document provides, where they can go back and quickly erase, rethink, move things around. A blue book is structured in a way that allows no flexibility for thought, no revision in real time. … We need these AI free zones where students can have access to the type of writing technology that allows them to think in much more elastic ways.”
Motion #042726-4, demanding that the University reverse its policy banning transgender women from participating in women’s intramural leagues, passed with 1,299 votes yes, 572 votes no and 465 abstaining. The policy was established after President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14201, which threatened to revoke funding to educational institutions that “deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities.”
Daphna Stroumsa, clinical lecturer of obstetrics and gynecology, said these policies prevent transgender students from participating in a key part of campus life.
“This is not about a level playing field based on hormonal status or your body physique, this is simply about kicking certain kids out of the gym,” Stroumsa said. “We don’t exclude students by having some unique genetic makeup that makes them particularly tall or (have) particularly long arms from swimming or from basketball. In fact, we embrace them.”
The motion also includes calls for the University to allow transgender women on varsity teams. The NCAA currently restricts participation in women’s sports to only student-athletes assigned female at birth. Plastic surgery professor Steven Buchman said he does not think the motion should include varsity sports because it could make the University’s teams ineligible for NCAA competition and affect female students on athletic scholarships.
“I don’t have any problem with intramural and going there, but going to the next step means that you’re now making a statement, which may make us ineligible for the women that have come here on scholarship to even be eligible to play on an NCAA sport,” Buchman said. “Just telling the varsity people what they have to do, telling the NCAA that they need to do and … not hearing from the women that actually have scholarships, how that’s going to affect them, I think is just reactionary and probably needs more study.”
Motion #042726-6, calling on the University to reject collaboration with the Department of Defense‘s Senior Service College Fellowship Program, passed with 1,440 votes yes, 413 votes no and 483 votes abstaining. The program allows military officers to study national security policy issues, receive college credit and potentially advance to higher positions.
A memorandum published by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth Feb. 27 named the University as a new potential partner institution for the SSCF program. The announcement was accompanied by the termination of several existing university-DOW partnerships, including all five partnerships with Ivy League institutions and partnerships with private institutions including Georgetown University and Tufts University.
During his time in the Pentagon, Hegseth stopped the promotion of two Black soldiers and two female soldiers to one-star general, and has reportedly been eradicating senior officers whom he claims are ideologically incompatible. Rebekah Modrak, professor in the Stamps School of Art and Design, said collaborating with the DOD would show support for Hegseth and his actions.
“In his mind, the schools had replaced ‘study of victory and pragmatic realism with the promotion of wokeness and weakness,’” Modrak said. “Motion six rejects the invitation for the University of Michigan to embody the Hegseth warrior spirit, intent upon suppressing the voices of historically excluded groups. Accepting participation in the SSCF would be an implicit — if not explicit — agreement that within our classrooms, opposing narratives will be silenced and censored.”
Weineck said the University’s inclusion on the list is disheartening, as it should not be in the same realm as conservative colleges supporting the Trump administration.
“The list of potential new partners (was) chosen explicitly for ‘minimal public expression in opposition to the department.’” Weineck said. “I think the fact that we find ourselves on this list, alongside institutions such as Hillsdale College and Liberty University, is a source of embarrassment and a severe reputational as well as ethical hazard.
Motion #042726-1, focusing on childcare needs for faculty and staff, passed with 1,863 votes yes, 256 votes no and 217 abstaining. The motion requests increased daycare infrastructure, after reported struggles among university faculty in trying to register their children for one of the University’s three child care facilities. Additionally, U-M child care tuition is almost $1,000 more per month than Michigan State University’s child care.
Engineering professor Gretchen Keppel-Aleks said challenges with childcare are not limited to parents of infants and toddlers, citing difficulties in coordinating with public school closures. The resolution requests the University create child-friendly spaces for these instances. Additionally, Keppel-Aleks said the University’s spring break should align with Ann Arbor Public Schools’s breaks to maximize family time for faculty with children attending school locally.
“U of M’s spring break falls in between the Ann Arbor Public Schools mid-winter and spring breaks, making it difficult for parents or caregivers to use children breaks for family time and requiring ad hoc child care solutions,” Keppel-Aleks said. “Additionally, finding affordable and safe backup childcare during unplanned closures is difficult. We therefore call on U of M to work with local public schools to align University breaks with those of public schools, to extend mode flexibility, including teaching mode flexibility during unexpected school and daycare closures.”
This school year, spring break for AAPS took place from March 30 to April 3, while the University’s break occurred exactly one month earlier. Most American colleges, including the University, hold spring break in the beginning or middle of March, as the only Big Ten school to hold its break at the same time as AAPS was the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
The resolution also requests the University subsidize access to care.com, which provides babysitting and caregiving services.
Senior News Editor Dominic Apap can be reached at dapap@umich.edu.
