WALLIS ROGIN: Last week, The Daily reported on Illinois legislation defining where “detention center facilities” can be located, Northwestern professors’ policies on artificial intelligence and a Canvas hack that targeted over 9,000 schools.

From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Wallis Rogin.

RUBY DOWLING: And I’m Ruby Dowling. This is The Weekly, a breakdown of the top headlines from the past week.

[music]

RUBY DOWLING: First, I sat down with Daily reporter Emily Dissanayake to talk about House Bill 5024, a recently-introduced piece of Illinois legislation that, if passed, would place well-defined constraints on where “detention center facilities” — including those controlled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — can be located or constructed.  

Emily, thanks for being here to come on The Weekly. 

EMILY DISSANAYAKE: Thank you for having me. 

RUBY DOWLING: First, let’s recap. What are some of the key moments in the past few months that have led up to this bill being passed by the Illinois House in April?  

EMILY DISSANAYAKE: So, actually, one of the reasons why this bill came about in the first place is because the House Speaker, who spearheaded this bill, his district actually encompasses the Broadview facility. And for the past few months since Operation Midway Blitz, there’s been so many protests there raising awareness about the conditions in that detention center and just ICE activity in general. 

And when ICE activity intensified in the fall, that’s when this idea pretty much came about, and around December and January is when the drafting for this legislation really kick started. 

RUBY DOWLING: Talk to me a bit about the community support, which is really the core of your story, behind House Bill 5024. 

EMILY DISSANAYAKE: Yeah, so there’s actually a broad range of community activists and advocates for immigrant rights organizations that really support this bill. I spoke to people from the Muslim Civic Coalition, people from Latino Union of Chicago, and a lot of those advocates really just want to see more restrictions and regulations towards these detention centers, and actually their ultimate goal is to see the end of detention centers. 

RUBY DOWLING: Could you tell us a little bit about who Speaker Welch is? 

EMILY DISSANAYAKE: Speaker Emmanuel Chris Welch is the House Speaker of the Illinois legislature, and he represents the 7th district. And like I said before, his district encompasses the ICE detention facility in Broadview, and so that was one of the major reasons why he was the one spearheading this legislation. 

He actually told me during our interview that because he is House Speaker, he usually doesn’t have the time to actually work on, like, drafting legislation, because this issue was so important to him and affected his district directly, he felt the need to get this legislation going. 

RUBY DOWLING: You reported that some critics of the bill have questioned its ability to regulate federal action. Can you break down that issue for us?

EMILY DISSANAYAKE: Yeah, so some critics of the bill say that because detention centers are federally operated, the state doesn’t really have the jurisdiction to regulate these detention centers, but when I spoke to the Speaker — Speaker Welch — he did say that he worked with the Attorney General’s office to make sure to modify the bill’s language to make sure that it is legal and that it does have the capacity to regulate detention centers. 

RUBY DOWLING: What’s next in the legislative process for House Bill 5024? 

EMILY DISSANAYAKE: So, right now, it passed the House and it’s waiting for approval in the Senate, so, a lot of these community advocates are working towards lobbying and making sure that House Bill 5024 and legislation like it are being pushed through the Illinois legislature. 

RUBY DOWLING: And what does that mean for the community groups who are in support of it? 

EMILY DISSANAYAKE: For these community groups, they see it as a big first step when it comes to immigration reform in Illinois and regulating these detention centers. But like I said before, they really want to see an end to the existence of detention centers in Illinois. And while that may not be the case in the near future, they do see this as progress. 

RUBY DOWLING: Emily, I appreciate you coming on The Weekly to explain House Bill 5024 to us. 

EMILY DISSANAYAKE: Thank you for having me. 

[music]

RUBY DOWLING: Next, here’s a preview of The Daily’s upcoming audio recap of the Shinyhunters Instructure breach that shuttered Canvas  operations for students at Northwestern and nearly 9,000 other universities. 

ANAVI PRAKASH: I don’t think they even mentioned Shinyhunters by name.

RYAN OTTIGNON: TL;DR: Hundreds of millions.

CLARA B. FREETH: Oh my God. We just got hacked.

I sat down with three Daily reporters for a full-length bonus segment of The Weekly on our podcast What’s New at NU. We went over the timeline of events, the University’s response and what may come next now that Canvas is back online. The full episode is forthcoming — but for now, here’s part of my interview with Staff Editor Clara B. Freeth. 

RUBY DOWLING: Walk me through the timeline of what’s happened until now. 

CLARA B. FREETH: Yeah, so there was a lot going on in the past couple of days. So originally, Thursday afternoon, Canvas was down, and I was talking to some people that were taking exams when it went down and they weren’t sure if their exams got saved or not. 

So then, around 9 p.m. on Thursday, Canvas appeared to be back up and we actually started writing like a Canvas is back up brief, but then it was back down again, so that didn’t end up happening. 

And then around midnight again, Thursday night into Friday morning, we thought it was back up, but then we returned to the maintenance message. 

So then Friday morning, a Friday University IT incident report stated that Canvas was still unavailable for use. And then in an email Thursday night, we understood that the NUIT program was still monitoring the situation, confirming that other institutions were experiencing the problem as well. It wasn’t just a NU thing. 

And then, as of Saturday morning, the site was back up and we were able to continue on as scheduled. I was able to keep working on my conspiracy theories paper, and everything since then has been as normal, but obviously, the IT department is still monitoring the situation and we’ll see if it remains that way. 

RUBY DOWLING: In the ShinyHunter’s message that originally replaced the Canvas website, they said they have breached Instructure “again.” What do we know about any other attacks? 

CLARA B. FREETH: Yeah, so they had a May 3 attack on some other institutions, so they were able to get hold of more on the 7th. And then the other thing is that in the fall of 2025, they hacked McGraw Hill, which is a textbook company, so we can see them going after all of these education platforms. 

I’m not entirely sure the why behind that, but they seem to have a pretty common thread of what targets they’re hitting. 

RUBY DOWLING: Clara, thanks for getting this conversation started

CLARA B. FREETH: Yes, of course, thank you so much Ruby.

[music]

RUBY DOWLING: Finally, I spoke with Daily reporter Alex Ingvoldstad about how some professors are changing their curriculums to discourage students from using artificial intelligence.

Alex, thanks for being here with me today.

ALEX INGVOLDSTAD: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

RUBY DOWLING: To start off, how are students using AI in their classes or maybe, more pertinently, how are professors worried students are using AI? 

ALEX INGVOLDSTAD: Yeah, so a lot of professors that I talked to said that in their STEM classes specifically, a lot of students are tending to use some chatbots outside of class to do problem sets. So they have kind of all adjusted in different ways. Some people have made exams more heavily weighted to just kind of give everyone a level playing field in class, some people give out answer keys so that students are, you know, turning to that before AI. So everyone’s kind of adjusting in different ways.

RUBY DOWLING: You mentioned STEM fields. In your reporting, are there any subjects or departments in particular you found are the most disrupted by student AI use? 

ALEX INGVOLDSTAD: Well, one of the students I talked to was in McCormick (School of Engineering), so engineering, and she said that essentially in a lot of her engineering classes, the exams are just insanely heavily weighted because of AI usage. So I definitely think McCormick is pretty heavily impacted by it. And then also, the two professors I talked to were from economics, and they both said that they have seen a lot of AI usage. 

RUBY DOWLING: Getting down to the more technical nuts and bolts of the story, how has the student experience in these classes or departments changed in the past year? 

ALEX INGVOLDSTAD: I heard a lot more emphasis on in-class work, particularly just not allowing students to do like quizzes outside of class. Or like, I mean, one professor said that he administered these quizzes in class now because of AI use or asked students to just work with each other to avoid that. And then I had another student say that her quizzes were also in class. So I would definitely say less emphasis on homework, more emphasis on in class work. 

RUBY DOWLING: You spoke with Prof. Mark Witte. He teaches Economics 201: Intro to Macroeconomics, a class many students take. Tell me about your conversation with him. 

ALEX INGVOLDSTAD: Yeah, so essentially Prof. Witte said that he has adjusted his weight of his exams and he kind of said a similar thing to Prof. (Chiara) Sotis, who’s also an economics professor, and basically said that his advice to students would be to emphasize their learning — like, he can’t control whether they use AI and I think he said something about “people who don’t want to learn aren’t going to.” And so I think, yeah, I mean, both of them really emphasize just even though this tool’s at your disposal, your learning is the most important thing, and it’s ultimately just a loss if AI’s doing it for you.

RUBY DOWLING: These are pretty fundamental structural changes professors are making to their classes. The students you talked to, what was their reaction? 

ALEX INGVOLDSTAD: One of the students I talked to, Christa Kulanda, she’s a, I believe, sophomore in McCormick, and she said that she has noticed students who struggle with things like test taking anxiety or any form of learning disability have a lot of trouble when exams are weighted so heavily because they just can’t thrive in that environment. So, I thought that was a really important point to bring up in the story and to ask her about. 

And I mean, after publishing the story, I’ve had students in McCormick and in these other STEM fields come up to me and be like, “I thought this was just me, like, I never realized that other people are feeling the same thing.” So, I feel like it’s important to talk about, because not everyone thrives in this strict exam environment. 

RUBY DOWLING: Maybe zooming out now, what do these changes tell us about how a NU education might look like in the future? 

ALEX INGVOLDSTAD: Well, I would say we’re still obviously in the pretty early stages of AI’s development, but I think a lot of faculty are taking steps to make sure that students are still receiving a great education here, whether it’s providing them with tools to make sure that they don’t immediately turn to AI for practice sets or just homework in general. 

And I think, yeah, I think there will definitely obviously be more ideas that they can learn from each other, just like communicating what changes they’re making in their individual classes, so yeah.

RUBY DOWLING: Great. Alex, thanks for coming on The Weekly. 

ALEX INGVOLDSTAD: Yeah, thank you so much. 

RUBY DOWLING: Here are the other top headlines from the week:

A Metra train collides with a semi truck in Wilmette, causing UP-North line delays, 

Northwestern extends the class drop deadline after Canvas breach,

Hyperpop artist Tiffany Day announced as The Burrow stage headliner for Dillo Day,

In Lacrosse: No. 1 seed Northwestern embraces ‘holiday season’ attitude ahead of NCAA Tournament,

And ‘Quite bizarre, to say the least’: UChicago student group rallies against 68-year-old onion futures ban at The Arch.

From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Ruby Dowling

WALLIS ROGIN: And I’m Wallis Rogin. 

Thank you for listening to another episode of The Weekly. This episode was reported and produced by Wallis Rogin and Ruby Dowling.

The audio editor is Wallis Rogin. The multimedia managing editors are Ruby Dowling, Isabella Jacob and Matt Wasilewski. The editor in chief is Anavi Prakash. 

Follow us on X and Instagram @thedailynu. 

Email: [email protected]
X: @wallis_rogin

Email: [email protected] 

X: @rubywright0

Related Stories:
— Illinois is trying to restrict the construction of ICE detention centers. Advocates say it’s a good first step
— Northwestern Canvas site back up following alleged website breach
— Some Northwestern professors give exams more weight in grades due to student AI usage