Tagged: University of Michigan

There will be one Michigan team playing in the Final Four in next weekend’s NCAA’s men’s basketball tournament. 

The Michigan Wolverines jumped to a double digit lead early in their Elite Eight game against the Florida Gators on Sunday. And they never relinquished their lead. The final score was 79 to 59. 

Michigan is the only Big Ten team to reach the Final Four. Michigan State and Ohio State both lost tournament games over the weekend.

U of M will play the Syracuse Orangemen in one of next Saturday’s national semi-finals in Atlanta.  

Twenty years or so ago, I got up the nerve to ask the late Coleman Young, the controversial and acid-tongued mayor of Detroit, why affirmative action was necessary.

Nobody ever thought of Mayor Young as shy, retiring or diplomatic, and I was fully prepared for a caustic and profane reply. But he instead grew almost philosophical.

He mentioned a case where white students were complaining that affirmative action in college admissions gave an unfair advantage to lesser qualified students of color.

March Madness tips off for Michigan and Michigan State on Thursday at the Palace of Auburn Hills, but for fans of the two schools, the madness has already started online. 

Earlier this week, Facebook unveiled a set of maps showing the most-liked college basketball team in every county across the United States. The map is based on more than 1 million Facebook likes.  

And while U-M and MSU were pretty evenly matched on the court this year — the teams split two meetings during the regular season — Wolverine fans are delivering a butt-kicking on Facebook. 

Only seven counties in the whole state support the Spartans over the Wolverines, according to a map comparing the two schools directly. Nationally, wide swatches of the country are painted maize, showing support for Michigan, with only a few patches of green. 

Yesterday, Republicans on a Michigan House Appropriations subcommittee voted to punish universities they believe are trying to avoid the state's new right-to-work law.

The state's new right-to-work law goes into effect on March 28. It outlaws contract agreements with unions that require dues or fees as a condition of employment.

But some public schools and universities are working out new contracts ahead of the deadline.

Wayne State University and the University of Michigan recently struck contracts with their unions causing some legislators to cry foul.

The subcommittee voted to strip public universities of 15 percent of their funding if recently passed contracts or contract extensions did not achieve at least a 10 percent savings.

At this point, it's just a subcommittee vote. To go into effect, the bill would have to pass both the state House and Senate and then be signed by Governor Rick Snyder.

MLive's Jonathan Oosting wrote about Gov. Snyder's thoughts on the bill:

"It's early in the legislative process," Snyder said Tuesday evening when asked about a proposed higher education budget bill that could cost his alma mater, the University of Michigan, millions in state funding next fiscal year.

"What I would say is, if people are coming in and bargaining in good faith and showing real benefits, I don't believe people should be penalized. Now, the real issue would be if somebody were doing that with no substance to simply extend the date, then I could see legislators having a concern. So it's just something to watch in the legislative process."

If it's passed, the universities stand to lose a lot of money:

The University of Michigan...could reportedly lose up to $41.1 million in state funding... [and Wayne State University] could lose up to $27.5 million of a possible $184 million in state funding next year under the proposed budget bill.

Today I am going to talk about something in which I could be accused of having a conflict of interest. Normally, we try not to do that, and if it were only something affecting me, I wouldn’t. But the people really being threatened here are thousands of young people in Michigan, and the state‘s future.

I am talking about a vote yesterday in a state house of representatives subcommittee designed to punish schools and universities who agree to contracts with their faculty and staff that lawmakers don’t like for ideological reasons. This has to do with the anti-union, right to work legislation that was rammed through a lame-duck session of the legislature last December. This bill doesn’t take effect until eight days from how, so technically Michigan is not a right to work state yet.

On a 4-3 party-line vote, a Michigan House Appropriations subcommittee voted to punish universities the Republicans believe are trying to avoid the state's new right-to-work law.

That law goes into effect on March 28th.

Wayne State University and the University of Michigan have struck contracts with their unions ahead of that deadline.

Public universities that signed new contracts or contract extensions that did not achieve at least a 10 percent savings would face a 15 percent cut in state funding under a budget bill approved this morning.