Two seats on the University of Michigan Board of Regents are up for grabs during a consequential time in the university’s history.
Currently, the 8-member board is made up of six Democrats and two Republicans. Incumbent Democrat Paul Brown, who was initially elected in 2018 and served as board chair in 2022 and 2023, is running for re-election to his spot. Five others are also on the ballot: Democrat Amir Makled, Republicans Lena Epstein and Michael Schostak, Libertarian Andrew Chadderdon, and U.S. Taxpayers Party candidate Kyle Maas.
Regents provide general oversight of the university’s leadership, with perhaps their most critical and noticeable roles focused on hiring and evaluating the university president and providing oversight over the university’s more than $16 billion operating budget.
This particular election comes at a critical moment for the university. C. Cybele Raver, PhD, was just named Michigan’s 17th president in December of 2026, the university’s fifth president or interim president since 2022. The University of Michigan and its board are also embroiled in a controversial more than $1 billion computing and A.I. center plan in Ypsilanti Township that critics argue has ignored the input and concerns of local residents.
The university is also still dealing with fallout over how administration responded to student pro-Palestine protests in 2024. In fact, Makled, a civil rights attorney and UM-Dearborn graduate who defended the free speech of students accused of and charged with crimes during the protests, is running in part because of how the university handled those issues. Makled beat incumbent moderate Democrat Jordan Acker for the nomination at the Michigan Democratic Party’s convention and promised to push for reforms at the university.
The university also found itself in a controversial position when it announced it was shutting down its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion office in response to federal pressure from the Trump Administration.
And, although the UM regent race has obvious statewide implications, it is also an important downballot race locally, with a University of Michigan campus located in Flint. UM-Flint is one of the largest employers in Genesee County and has an enrollment of more than 7,200 students, but while the Ann Arbor campus receives the largest amount of state funding in Michigan among public universities, the Flint campus is near the bottom. Who is on the Board of Regents matters, particularly when it comes to providing more equity for students, faculty, and staff on the Flint and Dearborn campuses.
Brown and Makled visited Flint at an event organized by the AFT Michigan union with support from the Arab American Heritage Council and the Flint Alliance for Immigrant Rights (FAIR) on October 18. They shared more about their campaigns and reasons for running, their belief in the importance of the Flint campus, data centers, free speech issues, and more with voters in attendance.
On UM-Flint
Both candidates were asked for specifics related to ensuring more equity across University of Michigan campuses, particularly in Flint and Dearborn, as well as continued funding for the Go Blue Guarantee, a financial aid program that provides full tuition for eligible full-time students in the state of Michigan pursuing their first bachelor’s degree from households that earn less than $125,000.
“I feel that in many ways, the Dearborn and Flint campuses are even more impactful on our state than even Ann Arbor is, and that’s saying a lot,” Brown said, nothing that early in his tenure on the board, he was part of a majority that publicly voted down a proposed budget for the first time in the institution’s history because he and colleagues felt it didn’t allocate enough money to the Flint or Dearborn campuses.
Brown also proposed changes to the university’s government relations structure. He said that the Ann Arbor campus has a government relations team that lobbies on behalf of the university, but he thinks Flint and Dearborn could benefit by having similar formal ways to engage with state government rather than relying on that function through Ann Arbor.
“We obviously get appropriations from the state government,” Brown said. “Those appropriations are lobbied for by our government relations team. There’s a life rule I believe, which is you can’t serve two masters. And when that team sits in Ann Arbor and is really judged on what they get out of state government for the Ann Arbor campus, they shortchange Flint and Dearborn. So I think we need separate lobby groups and government relations groups for each campus, so they can be there fighting for each campus’s appropriation. Ann Arbor gets the highest appropriation of any university in the state, and Flint gets the lowest, and that has to change.”
As a UM-Dearborn graduate, Makled has long been a proponent of providing more resources to the non-Ann Arbor campuses even before he was running for the Board of Regents.
“I’ve been to the Flint campus a number of times, and I’m seeing that there is a huge disparity when it comes to the resources that are in Ann Arbor vs. the regional campuses,” he said. “And as a product of a regional campus at UM-Dearborn, I know the impact that the graduates have on the local economy in Dearborn, what the students have produced, and really the tremendous amount of talent that comes out of these regional institutions. So it is an institution (UM-Flint) that needs to be supported.”
Makled said that he wants to see each institution have a budget that is adequate enough to address any challenges specific to those campuses, including faculty and lecturer pay, facilities improvements, and more. He thinks resources can be allocated in a way that serves each campus well.
“The way the system is now is that these institutions are running in silos,” Makled said. “Flint and Dearborn are getting their own revenue from their own tuition, and central campus is not really putting in much money into the Dearborn and Flint campuses. So maybe there’s creative ways like the president’s fund (to do that). But also when it comes to the state allocated funds, we got about $480 million I believe (in Ann Arbor), this last year from the state, maybe a little less. I think the budget at Flint is around $100 million or $130 million a year, and Dearborn, I think, is a little bit more. If we got an extra $20-$30 million to each regional campus out of the $400 and some million we’re getting, it would have a significant impact, a 20 percent impact on those regional campuses. That would go a long way.”
On Data Centers
The University of Michigan is currently pursuing proposed construction of what it calls a “research computing center” along the Huron River in Ypsilanti Township, in partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory. The project would dramatically expand the research computing power on campus, something that both candidates concede is necessary even though both have expressed opposition to the project.
“It’s actually not a data center, it’s a supercomputer,” Brown said. “That is in most ways a distinction without a difference. But I like to be accurate. We used to have the second most powerful supercomputer of any campus in the country, and now we’re below 100th on that list. So we are in desperate need of better computing power, whether it’s for climate change or cancer research (or other research). We do need to advance and invest in that area.”
But for this project in particular, Brown calls it “totally inappropriate,” and has been the most vocal board member opposing the project.
“We had our meeting here this last week on the Flint campus, and boy, we got into an ugly fight in the closed-door board meeting over this subject,” Brown said. “I understand that we have to build the university of the future, and a lot of that is infrastructure and technology investment for our national economy. But this specific project, there are some things that people that stand with me in opposition of it, we’re not perfectly aligned, and others that we are. There is a lot of misinformation. This is a relatively small project. This project in particular, for many reasons, is totally inappropriate. First of all, the university did not engage with the community at all, and they still aren’t engaging appropriately. And it’s completely frustrating. Number two, we chose a location that is a greenfield. I mean, do we really need to bulldoze a natural area again to do anything, let alone a project like this? Lastly, there are no community benefits right now for that community who is hosting it.”
Brown framed data centers and artificial intelligence as, potentially, public goods and pointed out that other technologies that have improved lives, like electric power generation and high tension power lines, the freeway system, internal combustion engines, and other examples have also come with controversies in how they were developed. He is hoping that data center and A.I.-related development can learn from those past transgressions. In particular, those technological advancements often came at the expense of the environments that poor, predominately minority populations lived in.
“All that infrastructure that has a broad-based societal benefit, it always ends up having a very focused, very negative impact on a specific community,” Brown said. “And that community always ends up being marginalized, politically weak, and usually Black and brown. And we’re seeing it again now with this process with the compute center at U of M. It has all of those characteristics of being another case of environmental racism, and the university should not be a part of it. If we decide that this is an appropriate piece of technology for the university, for the state, for the nation, then it has to be done in a way that could become the model. If we can’t do it in a way that is environmentally safe and sound and equitable to all of our communities, then we’ve failed.”
Makled pointed out that as a land-grant university, Michigan does not have to follow local zoning laws when they buy land, so they have autonomy over what can be developed on this particular property even if the local municipality and residents are opposed. But, he argues, that distinction gives the university more responsibility to communities, not less. He said his concerns with the project are both financial and environmental.
“When they purchase this large swath of land, they have full autonomy to build what they’d like to,” Makled said. “As a constitutionally mandated institution, we need to make sure that the communities where they’re expanding this new technology understand what the impact is going to be on their community. They’re gonna lose the tax revenue. So that impacts dramatically a small township like Ypsilanti who needs the revenue. These are areas (where data centers are being developed) that have very small budgets that can’t keep the lights on at night and the streetlights on. And here comes an institution that has a $17 billion dollar budget annually, maybe a $40 billion dollar endowment at this point, a massive institution that’s coming in and not really giving anything back in community benefit or taxes to that township. That’s the first concern that I see. And now let’s talk about something that’s even longer lasting than financial impact. Environmental impact. How is that going to impact the people that are living most closely to that data center in that area? What’s the long-term health effect going to be for that area? Maybe nothing. We don’t know. But why hasn’t it been communicated? Why hasn’t it been researched? Let’s call it what it is, a failure to describe this project and effectively communicate what the impact is going to be. The technology may be necessary. It may improve the institution as a whole. It may make Michigan a super computer that’s going to elevate the institution as a whole tenfold. Who knows? But before we make that investment, so we can get folks behind it to support it, we have to answer the basic questions of what’s it gonna cost? How is it gonna impact the local community? What’s the economic impact it’s going to have? Is it a job creator?”
On Humanities and Social Sciences Education
Several Big 10 universities have recently made high profile cuts to arts, humanities, and social sciences programs over the past year, including Indiana University, University of Wisconsin, Penn State, and University of Oregon, often citing a lack of revenue from those programs even as data continues to emerge showing strong desire for those programs from a segment of students, employers in the A.I. era who increasingly covet students with soft skills and critical thinking skills often strengthened in humanities programs, and evidence that the presence of those programs strengthen democracy and civic engagement. Both candidates stressed the need for institutions to be well-balanced in the types of courses and programs that are offered.
“I was one of those students, I was a history major, and I loved every second of it,” Brown said. “You can’t be a great institution without a full spectrum of curriculum, and I am dedicated to that at all three campuses.”
Brown also noted that just looking at revenue is a poor way to evaluate the value of courses, particularly as technology rapidly changes.
“As professors and deans and departments, you do have to attract students, you don’t want a professor sitting in a room with zero students,” Brown said. “So there needs to be appropriate expectations to design courses that are attractive to students and give value to students. I think as technology and the dreaded A.I. develops, I hope that the humanities are actually gonna become more important than ever. You don’t need software engineers to build software anymore, but you need philosophy students in order to train (A.I.) in ways that are equitable and moral.”
On Protest and Free Speech
One key issue at the forefront for University of Michigan stakeholders has been the university’s response to campus protest. Many colleges and universities nationwide had student protests on their campuses in response to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, which the United Nations has referred to as a genocide. The University of Michigan’s lasted for 30 days in 2024, with the university eventually clearing an encampment. Many students were charged with felonies resulting from the protests, a move that both Brown and Makled were critical of. A faculty member’s commencement speech in support of student protestors also caused controversy at the university.
At their stop in Flint, both candidates emphasized that free speech, academic freedom, and peaceful protest are essential to the university’s mission, including the right to express unpopular political views. They defended student activism, including pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and opposed criminal prosecution of student protesters.
“I’m the attorney that represented the students on campus who were charged with felonies, and we defended that protest activity, because to me, an institution like U of M and institutions across the country really have been attacking free speech,” Makled said. “Our right to free speech is not just a civil right, it’s a human right. It’s something that we as a community, if we wanna be a just and fair society, we have to be able to speak our conscience, speak our minds, and engage in civil discourse. And the same thing goes for academic freedom issues when it comes to the institution. For an institution like U of M to be the best in the world, it has to allow our faculty, our staff, our leaders to question and to really want to get into areas that may be politically unpopular. I 100 percent am a firm believer in the right to free speech, defending free speech, and making sure that there’s policies in place at every level of this institution from the healthcare system, the Dearborn and Flint campuses, the Ann Arbor campus, whether you’re a worker, a student, faculty, or just somebody who’s coming through the campus and wanting to say something, we have the right to say what we like, whether it’s unpopular or not, as long as we’re doing it lawfully and engaging in the type of discourse that’s non-violent, non-threatening.”
Brown was critical of how the university handled the student protestors, but also noted that there is a responsibility to protect campus safety and address threatening or dangerous conduct. They also stressed the importance of fair, timely disciplinary procedures that protect due process, allow students to challenge accusations and avoid policies or enforcement practices that could disproportionately affect certain groups or discourage free expression. Using the encampment as an example, Brown noted that there was a tornado warning on one of the days it was set up. He also said that people camped there were using open flames to cook within covered tents that law enforcement, fire fighters, and first responders couldn’t easily see or get into should an emergency arise.
“There are instances where our First Amendment rights bump into someone’s health or safety,” Brown said.
More Information
Brown and Makled both have campaign websites set up with more information about their backgrounds and platforms. Opponents Lena Epstein and Michael Schostak have campaign websites set up. Epstein and Schostak also responded to questions from the Michigan Daily, the university’s student newspaper. Andrew Chadderdon doesn’t have a campaign website, but does have a bio listed on the Libertarian Party website. Maas doesn’t have a website or online presence with information about his candidacy.
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