| 11-8-2001
Letter to the editor
MSA could be run by poo-flinging monkeys
To the Daily:
Ever since I arrived at the University in 1999, I always had the opinion
that the Michigan Student Assembly was simply a springboard for tomorrow’s
Dan Quayle’s and George W’s. After attending an MSA meeting last night, I
realized that I was only partly correct. I stood outside of the crowded
MSA room while the procedings were going on, and was shocked, no let me
say disgusted, at what I saw. As brave women stood in front of these
“representatives” speaking out against sexual violence on campus and the
need for MSA to take action on this issue, I was horrified to see people
rolling their eyes, snickering, passing notes and then pointing at people
seated on the Defend Affirmative Action Party side of the room and then
snickering again. These same people snickered as people spoke out against
the chalking attacks against DAAP representative Jessica Curtin.
The focal point of this arrogance seemed to be a Young Republican kid, who
not only acted as if the meeting were taking up his precious stock
assessment time, but was actually reading what appeared to be a Forbes
magazine. Seated next to this compassionate conservative was a sorority
poster-girl, in full uniform I may add, who seemed to have a smirk/grimace
pasted across her face the entire time. Not to mention that she was
knitting throughout the proceedings, pausing only to mutter a secretive
comment to Mr. Forbes in that permanent smirk that has burned itself into
my mind.
My point is not to draw attention to these people particularly, but rather
that they were the most obvious in their disdain for anything having to do
with the prevention of sexual violence, while similar but no less
condescending looks were cast across the room every second. As a member
(but not a spokesman) of Men Against Violence Against Women, what I saw
deeply disturbed me.
But back to my original point, the only people who even remotely seemed to
be actually interested in bettering the University, or even simply doing
anything about sexualized violence, were the DAAP and friends, who
actually seemed to give a darn about people on this campus, imagine that!
Whereas much of the rest of MSA could have been replaced with doped-up lab
monkeys, secretely whisked away from the dark halls of a hospital and
dressed in human clothing to “represent” the student population. And you
know what? No one would have noticed! Except that maybe the monkeys would
fling poo instead of condescending looks.
So in conclusion, my fine friends at the University, when you vote this
coming election, please, don't do as we all did in high school and vote
for the cool kid, or the really pretty girl you know. And just as
important, don't allow people who simply want to pad their cushy resumés
exploit you and your vote, reject these people. If you feel strongly about
an issue, please vote in support of that issue, but if you don't, don't
allow yourself to be used by people who care nothing for you or your
university community.
Reject resumé representatives!
Benjamin Osborne
LSA senior
* * *
11-7-2001
MSA won’t ask for president in favor of affirmative action
Kara Wenzel
Daily Staff Reporter
A resolution to ask the University Board of Regents to search for a
president who supports affirmative action was voted down at last night’s
Michigan Student Assembly meeting.
Another resolution that sought to condemn sexist attacks on women,
specifically women in politics, was postponed until next week.
The resolution concerning the regents came down to one vote.
MSA President Matt Nolan decided to break a simple majority that would
have caused the resolution to pass by voting against it, an action he does
not usually take.
“The president of MSA, under our code, has the right to vote,” Nolan said.
“I try to stay away from voting because I think the president should try
to be impartial unless he has to break a tie or feels very strongly about
an issue.”
Nolan said he voted against the resolution not because he opposes
affirmative action, but because he opposes limiting MSA’s support of the
regents if they were to consider a candidate who did not support
affirmative action.
“These issues are important to students, so this resolution definitely
falls under MSA’s responsibility. It is important to know the stance the
future president takes on affirmative action,” said Monique Luse, Minority
Affairs Commission co-chair and a sponsor of the resolution.
Luse was disappointed that the resolution did not pass and said it was
because the sponsors considered it “very legitimate and uncontroversial.”
Earlier in the meeting, MSA representatives listened to women constituents
voice their opinions on why MSA should pass a resolution condemning
violence and hate speech against women.
“The effects of sexual assault on this campus are immense,” said Law
student Anna Phillips, who was speaking on behalf of the Ann Arbor and
University coalitions against rape. “One thing MSA could do to eliminate
sexual harassment and assault on campus is to pass this resolution.”
The resolution was written in response to an increase in physical and
verbal attacks against women on campus.
Rackham Rep. Jessica Curtin said she considered articles published by the
Michigan Independent and comments chalked on the Diag to be sexist
attacks, thus prompting her to draft the resolution with Rackham Rep.
Suzanne Perkins-Hart.
The assembly agreed to postpone voting on the resolution to allow time for
revisions. There was concern expressed by some representatives that the
resolution emphasized the significance of the verbal attacks against
Curtin over more recent physical attacks against women on campus, and did
not specify any action.
“When I heard what happened to Jessica, I was disgusted,” said Women’s
Issues Commission Co-Chair Liz Higgins, “but I’m worried about how these
rape victims are going to feel.”
* * *
10-30-2001
Chalk it up: 70 in running for MSA
by Kara Wenzel
Daily Staff Reporter
It’s that time of year again. The sidewalks are cluttered with chalking
and posters are appearing on every surface that can hold tape; campaigning
for the Michigan Student Assembly, LSA Student Government and the
University of Michigan Engineering Council elections has officially begun.
The elections will take place Nov. 14 and 15, and voting will be only
online, as it was last year, said elections director Elizabeth Anderson.
Students will be able to vote at any computer during the 48-hour election
period by accessing the voting website, vote.www.umich.edu.
MSA Election Board member Siafa Hage said the only changes to the election
rules concern the mandatory candidates’ meeting, which is tonight for this
fall’s election.
Last winter, some candidates were disqualified from the election when they
did not attend or give notice that they would not attend the meeting. The
decision was appealed and eventually overturned, and this year the
punishment for not attending the meeting without notice will be one
demerit point.
“A candidate needs five demerit points to be expelled from the election,”
Hage said. “The reason for that is when someone signs up to be a candidate
it is assumed that they know all the rules about the election and will
attend the candidates’ meeting.”
Candidates have a choice of running independently or as a member of a
party. The familiar Blue Party, the Defend Affirmative Action Party and
Michigan Party will join the University Democratic Party, which formed
last winter, and the newly-formed Yeza party, whose members will be
seeking office for the first time.
MSA Rep. Rob Goodspeed, a member of the University Democratic Party, said
running with a party “allows voters to know directly where we’re coming
from.”
The U-Dems want students to be very involved in the presidential selection
committee. They also plan to address campus improvement issues, Goodspeed
said.
Yeza was formed from a group of friends who want to make MSA more
productive.
“The goal essentially is to have a party on campus that’s more of an
everyman’s party — stop politicking and represent what people really
think,” said Yeza candidate Richard Crow, an LSA senior.
The Blue Party, which currently holds a majority of seats in MSA as well
as the presidential and vice presidential positions in Matt Nolan and
Jessica Cash, is looking to expand its past accomplishments and build new
ones.
“We are looking to increase the number of minors available, improve online
resource access for classes, increase the availability of Entrée Plus and
adopt the recently-proposed fall study break,” said Blue candidate John
Carter, a Business junior.
The Defend Affirmative Action Party is the oldest party. It was formed in
1997 in response to the lawsuits challenging the University’s affirmative
action policies.
DAAP members have always been clear on their commitment to building what
they call a new “civil rights movement” and fighting the lawsuits against
the University's affirmative action admissions policies, but recently they
have taken up condemning the bombing in Afghanistan and ending anti-Arab
scapegoating in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“Our three main points are defend affirmative action and integration, stop
the war and defend students’ rights and stop the scapegoating of arab
muslim middle eastern and sikh students,” said DAAP candidate Jessica
Curtin, a Rackham student. “Now that the affirmative action cases are on a
fast track to the Supreme Court, whoever does get elected in this election
is likely to be there when the cases do get to the Supreme Court.”
The Michigan Party, formed two years ago, is seeking to address student
concerns only and eliminate the time MSA spends on international issues.
“Our top issues will be to increase the proportion of the MSA budget that
is allocated to student groups to more than the 50 percent that it
currently is and to make general campus improvements such as improving
busing to and from North Campus and improving the CCRB,” said Michigan
Party chair Joe Bernstein, a Rackham student.
[PHOTO CAPTION: LSA sophomore Ben Royal chalks on the Diag yesterday for
the Defend Affirmative Action Party. Michigan Student Assembly
representative elections are Nov. 14 and 15]
* * *
10-24-2001
Advocates of affirmative action rally in Cincinnati
CINCINNATI (AP) — University of Michigan students and other affirmative
action supporters rallied in support of affirmative action admissions
policies yesterday, even though the appeals court hearing on two lawsuits
challenging the University’s race-conscious admissions were called off.
Hundreds of students marched from the University of Cincinnati campus and
swarmed downtown’s Fountain Square, joining other students and labor union
representatives from Detroit and Louisville, Ky., to pump fists into the
air and chant “Educate, don’t segregate.”
“If we cannot have affirmative action in this country, we can never have
justice,” said the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, 79, a Cincinnati clergyman who
once marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during civil rights
protests in Alabama. “We’re in a war for freedom and equality,” said
Robert Richardson, 22, president of the University of Cincinnati’s student
body.
The activists focused on two parallel lawsuits pending before the 6th U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals which challenge the use of affirmative-action
policies in admitting students to the University of Michigan’s Law School
and the College of Literature, Science and the Arts.
A three-judge panel of the Cincinnati-based appeals court was to have
heard the Michigan cases yesterday. The court handles cases from Michigan,
Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio.
But the court granted a request last week to postpone the hearing until
Dec. 6 so that the full, nine-judge court can hear the case.
The pro-affirmative action rally went on as scheduled anyway. Activists
said they were collecting thousands of petition signatures they hope to
present to the appeals judges.
Shanta Driver, 47, of Detroit, an organizer of the rally and member of the
Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action and Integration and Fight for
Equality By Any Means Necessary, urged students in the audience to put
their energy into fighting for affirmative action.
“You will lead us into the future, a future in which the dream of
integration in America is realized,” Driver said.
* * *
October 16, 2001
Jesse Jackson slated to visit ‘U’ on Friday
by Rachel Green
Daily Staff Reporter
The Rev. Jesse Jackson plans to visit campus Friday to promote affirmative
action before a federal court of appeals in Cincinnati examines the
University’s race-conscious admissions policies.
A spokeswoman for Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH coalition yesterday confirmed the
visit. Fliers posted around campus say Jackson is scheduled to speak at a
rally in the Michigan League Ballroom at noon.
Jackson last visited campus in March, two days after a federal district
judge struck down the Law School’s admissions policies.
Meanwhile, with the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals scheduled to hear the two
lawsuits challenging the admissions policies of the Law School and College
of Literature, Science and the Arts one week from today, students are
questioning what might happen to diversity at the University if the use of
affirmative action is deemed unconstitutional.
Nursing junior Joe Salazar said he believes the sole purpose of the use of
race in admissions is to promote diversity. “If you have a whole crowd of
the same, it’s like hanging out with a bunch of ‘you,’” he said.
Salazar said he adds a unique dimension to his Nursing classes as one of
the only male and Latino students in his program. “Because of affirmative
action, I can offer my perspective in class, what my culture offers to
medication and healing,” he said.
Engineering senior Bernard Drew said he considers affirmative action a
vital and equaling factor in college admissions. “Affirmative action
benefits many students who might ordinarily be overlooked during selection
processes due to factors outside of their immediate control,” he said.
“These external factors may manifest themselves through the gender roles,
race relations, financial barriers and more.”
As a member of Omega Psi Phi, a black fraternity that boasts members
including Jackson, Drew said members of his fraternity will be attending
Friday’s rally and will travel to Cincinnati to protest the hearing next
Tuesday.
But for every student on campus who believes a ruling against the
University would be detrimental, it’s not difficult to find another who
thinks the opposite.
“I think initially enrollment of minorities will go down, but I don’t
think it will change that much,” said LSA junior Chantelle Gendron.
“Possibly you’ll see an increase in academic achievements because the
criteria (for admissions) will change.”
Jodi Hybarinen, an LSA junior, said: “Admissions should be more socially
and economically based than racially based. If the argument (for
affirmative action) is that you didn’t have opportunities, it shouldn’t be
about race, it should be because you went to a bad school district.”
Statistics on minority enrollment in states where affirmative action
policies have been dismantled are ambiguous at best.
In Florida, where Republican Gov. Jeb Bush implemented the One Florida
Initiative program last year as a substitute for racially sensitive
college admissions procedures, figures released last month showed a 5
percent increase in minority enrollment.
But the program’s critics argue that while minority numbers may be up
overall, the University of Florida — the state’s largest and most
selective school — saw a steep decline. The increase in minority student
enrollment was also accompanied by an overall rise in the number of
students statewide applying to Florida universities. The One Florida
Initiative mandates that the state’s universities accept the top 20
percent of all graduating high school seniors.
In the University of California system, where affirmative action was
banned in 1995, the number of minority students dropped initially but have
rebounded in recent years. However, the numbers are not as high as they
were before 1995.
* * *
10-24-2001
Cincinnati Enquirer
Students rally despite delayed court hearing
By Kevin Aldridge
Hundreds of high school and college students demonstrated at Fountain
Square Tuesday to support affirmative action in college admissions.
They gathered despite a last-minute federal court delay that pushed back
the visit of the keynote speaker, the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
The protest and his appearance had been timed for the beginning of two
appellate-court hearings that challenge University of Michigan admissions
practices. Friday, the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals postponed the
hearings until Dec. 6 so the entire panel of judges could meet.
Several hundred people — from the University of Cincinnati, University of
Kentucky, University of Tennessee and Michigan as well as high schools in
Cincinnati and Detroit — marched from UC's campus to Fountain Square. Some
chanted “Don't segregate; Educate.”
Court challenges of minority-oriented admissions policies “have unleashed
the fury of a new civil-rights movement to be led by a new young
generation of students,” said Shanta Driver, organizer for the Coalition
to Defend Affirmative Action & Integration and Fight for Equality By Any
Means Necessary (BAMN).
BAMN has gathered 30,000 signatures on a nationally circulated petition it
plans to present to the appellate court.
“It's time for the young people of this country to decide what kind of
country you want,” said the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a civil rights
veteran who marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Robert Richardson, UC's student government president and founder of its
NAACP youth chapter added: “We are going to fight this battle until hell
freezes over. Then we are going to fight on the ice.”
* * *
9-26-2001
BAMN blasted for dominating racial issues
Kara Wenzel
Daily Staff Reporter
The Michigan Student Assembly approved its $415,370 budget last night, but
much of the meeting centered on a push by several members of the assembly
and other constituents to bring to light the probable motives of one of
MSA’s most vocal factions.
Many expressed disappointment over actions by the Coalition to Defend
Affirmative Action and Integration and Fight for Equality By Any Means
Necessary since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
BAMN has organized an anti-war rally on the Diag and begun a green armband
campaign meant to show support for Arab-Americans who have been victims of
harassment or violence because of the suspected terrorists’ ethnicities.
Some BAMN members have also formed a new group, the Coalition to Stop
Racial Scapegoating and the War.
The speakers accused BAMN of using the issue of racial scapegoating to
gain visibility on campus and draw support for their group.
“They did not come to any Arab or Muslim students and ask them if they
wanted that representation,” said LSA Rep. Fadi Kiblawi.
Rackham Rep. Jessica Curtin, a member of BAMN, said the green armbands are
part of a national campaign supported by Arab-American students at other
campuses.
“It’s not true that Arab students as a whole oppose this campaign,” Curtin
said.
The assembly also voted down a resolution introduced by Curtin and Rackham
Rep. Suzanne Perkins-Hart to stop “war hysteria.”
“Terrorism is a crime and our response can only be to treat it as a
crime,” Perkins-Hart said.
But other members of MSA argued that the resolution was another
BAMN-supported tactic to draw attention to itself.
“I would vote against war hysteria if I knew what it was,” said MSA Vice
President Jessica Cash.
Jackie Bray, a member of Students Organizing for Labor and Economic
Equality, asked MSA to stop groups like BAMN from dominating important
issues on campus.
“Please take a stand against organizations that hurt student activism,”
Bray said.
Curtin and other BAMN members defended the group’s involvement, saying
they only promote causes they truly believe in.
“I am a socialist, but this red-baiting is just a political tactic,”
Curtin said.
Earlier this week, a number of affirmative action proponents not
affiliated with BAMN created the group Students Supporting Affirmative
Action.
Also at the meeting, MSA increased funding to the Ann Arbor Tenants Union
to $26,000 from a proposed $21,100.
The union provides legal advice to students regarding their landlords’
legal obligations and students’ roles as tenants in Ann Arbor.
“If you want to see the AATU here this year, $26,000 is the amount it
needs to survive,” said Law Rep. Chris Sheehan.
The money in the MSA budget, meant to fund student groups and services,
comes from a mandatory fee added to each student’s tuition. MSA supports
the Ann Arbor Tenant’s Union, which is not a student group, with 5 percent
to 7 percent of its budget each year.
The increase was opposed by some who argued that the money would be more
beneficial if allocated elsewhere.
“Last year the AATU missed deadlines even when they were given extensions.
They have done nothing and continue to do nothing,” said Siafa Hage, last
year’s MSA treasurer.
* * *
9-21-2001
Protesters rally to stop war
by Karen Schwartz
Daily Staff Reporter
Chanting “stop the war” and “U-S-A,” anti- and pro- war student groups
clashed verbally yesterday on the Diag over the subject of U.S. military
actions and policy.
Luke Massie, a member of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action and
Integration and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary, organized the
group’s anti-war demonstration. He said it is important to organize
against the prospect of a prolonged “real war.”
“We’re linking the fight against racism against a racist war abroad,” he
added, commenting on the racist hysteria he said is now taking place
against Arabs, Muslims and Sikhs. Massie said that the Coalition to Stop
Scapegoating and the War is being formed to respond to and take action
with regard to current events.
LSA junior Justin Wilson stood among a crowd holding American flags in the
middle of the Diag. Wilson, director of Young Americans for Freedom, said
that the goal and focus right now needs to be unifying Americans.
“We’re not caught up in the cause, we’re caught up in being Americans,
whatever it takes,” he said.
“This is not a racist war, this is a war against racists,” Wilson added.
“These people want to eradicate America and all that it stands for.”
BAMN supporter Jodie Masley said even though she lost an uncle in the
World Trade Center attack, she does not support military action.
“It’s appalling to me that people would use the suffering of the people
who died to justify an unjust war,” Masley said. “An escalation of the
same U.S. foreign policy that led to these attacks will mean a further
escalation of reciprocity and an increased of hostility towards our
country.”
LSA senior Peter Apel, chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, said he
feels that people are more focused on the peripheral issues than the fact
that the United States was attacked.
Apel said there is a need for action and a unified community to be behind
the U.S., supporting its efforts. He added that he feels patriotism on
campus is one of the necessary elements missing right now.
YAF students also took issue with what they called BAMN’s “opportunism.”
“These people are capitalizing on tragedy to garner support that has
nothing to do with this,” Apel said.
“On the way here this morning, I heard them on the radio, and they were
talking about this event in total disgust. That’s the general sentiment
outside of campus. This demonstration brought disgrace on the campus in
the eyes of the public,” YAF supporter and LSA sophomore Jon Book said.
Philosophy Prof. Rachana Kauntekar said she attended the rally to protest
the idea of war.
“I’m here today because I want the United States to not go to war and not
to escalate the attacks on innocent civilians that I’m afraid will
continue,” Kauntekar said.
Dawn Wolf, from the Green Party of Michigan, also spoke out against war.
“I’m not proud to be an American, I’m proud to be a human being,” she
said, talking about the need for people to learn to live together. “We
must answer even their hatred and their fear with our pride and our love.”
Department of Public spokeswoman Diane Brown said DPS estimated about 200
protesters were present on the Diag.
Michiganians who oppose going to war are greatly outnumbered, according to
poll numbers. About 92 percent of the state’s voters expressed support for
military action against terrorists in a poll released yesterday by
Marketing Resource Group Inc.
* * *
August 3, 2001
Chronicle of Higher Education
Student Activists are Making Noise, But is Anybody Listening? As a new
movement takes shape, protesters struggle with ideology, apathy
By Andrew Brownstein
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v47/i47/47a03801.htm
Ann Arbor, Mich. A baptismal rain falls upon the stained-glass windows of
the University of Michigan Law School, as students inside bow their heads
and join hands in prayer.
They come from Harvard and Brown, Penn State and Wayne State, fresh from a
season of protest many call the most intense in recent memory. This
afternoon, instead of railing against the administration or shouting down
the demons of global capitalism, they are here to talk to each other.
"Common blood flows through common veins!" they chant.
The inaugural meeting of the National Student/Youth Conference to Defend
Affirmative Action & Integration and Struggle for Equality could more
simply be called a meeting of the choir. Many hope it marks the start of a
new student movement, a renaissance of the activism that charged campuses
in the 1960's.
But few among the 100 or so in attendance at the June meeting think that
will be easy. In the not-too-distant past, it looked like students would
shake the foundations of society. Now, the 60's are a generation ago, and
"Revolution" is the soundtrack to a Nike commercial.
This year evoked a sense of deja vu. The sit-ins were longer, the
administrations more cowed, the concessions larger. Yet for all the allure
of these protests -- and some demonstrations drew students by the
thousands -- most failed to touch the apathetic heart of the modern
college student. For him or her, the protest is a sideshow in the carnival
of higher education, and just as easily ignored.
That's why the activists are networking The Ann Arbor conference may sound
like a revival meeting, but organizationally it looks like a conference of
Rotarians. There are workshops ("Linking the Struggle for Affirmative
Action to the Environmental and Anti-capitalist, Anti-globalization
Struggle") and best practices (how to manipulate the media). Members of
the Black Caucus at Pennsylvania State University, who occupied the
student union for 10 days last spring following racist death threats, wear
"Hello, My Name Is ..." stickers and fraternize between sessions over ice
cream with members of the International Bolshevik Tendency.
The setting is fitting, given the rising stakes in national politics. The
law school is appealing a federal judge's ruling that struck down its use
of affirmative action in admissions. It was after that defeat that the
Rev. Jesse Jackson called upon students in Ann Arbor to hold a national
civil-rights conference. Many observers believe the suit, headed for the
federal appeals court in Cincinnati this fall, will ultimately reach the
U.S. Supreme Court for a final referendum on the legality of admissions
preferences.
Ben Royal, a sophomore at Michigan, was one of several foot soldiers who
traveled to college campuses in April in search of recruits for the
conference. Tall and thin, with intense eyes and a wild mane of Art
Garfunkel hair, Mr. Royal looks like he stepped out of an earlier protest
era.
In a green 1992 Toyota Corolla, he and three friends drove eastward on the
protest trail. There were plenty of roadside attractions. "It was sort of
a nationwide sweep -- stuff was happening on all these campuses," he says.
"But it all seemed to be happening in isolation."
Protesters, he found, weren't communicating. Even students in Boston were
unaware of similarly themed demonstrations elsewhere in the city. That
confirmed Mr. Royal's belief that a conference was needed to "draw these
students out" and get them talking about common approaches.
One of the first stops was Harvard University, where 26 red-eyed, smelly
students were in the middle of a 20-day occupation of the administration
building. Along with others who erected a shantytown of pup tents in
Harvard Yard, they were protesting the low wages paid to the university's
service workers.
The genesis of those demonstrations underscores the changing nature of
today's student activism. Harvard, like many other campuses, had been the
scene of several protests against the sale of clothing manufactured in
third-world factories, often called sweatshops. But those actions came
under fire for being too removed from national concerns. The Activist, a
college publication of the Young Democratic Socialists, suggested the
protesters were part of the problem: The anti-sweatshop movement "is
predominantly white, and perhaps even more troubling, it is predominantly
middle class."
Administrators who have been on the receiving end of some of the most
vociferous anti-sweatshop protests noticed the disconnect. "Minority
students are quick to say, Why are you focusing all your energy on
Guatemala or Indonesia? What about South Tucson?" says Peter Likins,
president of the University of Arizona.
Partly in response to such criticisms, the Harvard students switched their
focus to unfair labor practices back home. They held rallies and began
demanding that the university pay all its employees $10.25 an hour, which
the progressive Cambridge City Council had declared the city's "living
wage."
Almost immediately, the issue began to click with students in a way the
anti-sweatshop campaign never had. "We were guided by the absurdity of the
notion that Harvard, the richest university in the world, with an
endowment of $19-billion, has workers living on poverty wages," says
Stephen Smith, a junior majoring in sociology who was among those who
stayed with the sit-in until the end. (Poverty, at Harvard, means just
under $10 an hour, and, officials say, a handful at $8.05 an hour, the
lowest wage paid to any university employee.)
Demonstrators took to the administration building, redecorating the walls
with protest posters and laying out their sleeping bags among the antique
chairs and Persian rugs of Massachusetts Hall.
In Michigan, Mr. Smith told the conference crowd that the sit-in was
guided by tough bargaining tactics and a keen sense of public relations.
Once they had the support of a large number of students, the protesters
gathered more than 400 faculty signatures and lured Sen. Edward M.
Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat, and John Sweeney, president of the
A.F.L.-C.I.O., to Harvard Yard.
"These people legitimize your movement, so it's not just students," Mr.
Smith explained to the gathering. When negotiations faltered, the
demonstrators threatened to play their trump card -- graduate students --
"because organizing them scares the bejesus out of the administration."
Ultimately, Harvard agreed only to name a new committee to re-examine the
question of a fair wage. Nonetheless, the move by the nation's oldest and
wealthiest university sparked a series of copycat demonstrations.
The episode also marked an important facet of the new activism -- the
convergence of students and organized labor. Over the past few years,
labor, which has been losing much of its blue-collar base, has made a
concerted effort to recruit on campuses. Professors and graduate students
have looked to unions for organization and money, and union members have
lent their muscle to a range of student causes. The collaboration has been
evident not only on campuses, but in larger demonstrations like those in
Seattle and Quebec City, where students joined sometimes-violent protests
against globalization.
At Harvard, the result was a disciplined action made for prime time: The
David-and-Goliath struggle made good copy, as students reminded reporters
in daily, sometimes hourly, cell-phone briefings. This is a revolution,
after all, of pagers and modems. One protester inside the administration
building hammered out a column for The Nation on his laptop. Some called
home to let Mom and Dad know they were all right. There were no arrests.
Far from it -- Cambridge police officers brought the protesters deodorant
and dinner.
For some, the protesters were effective by default -- administrators did
not stand up to them. Donald Kagan, a classics professor at Yale who has
watched student demonstrations since the 1960's, says universities send a
"morally misguided message" when they don't enforce rules of decorum and
allow student protesters to succeed without meaningful sacrifice. To Mr.
Kagan, the softness of administrators, many of whom came of age during the
Vietnam era, is evidence that they are "unwilling to protect the campus
from attacks from the left."
"The answer to any bully who promises to make trouble is to give them
whatever they want or just hope they go away," he says.
The battle of the Harvard students, with their expensive degrees, was one
largely removed from their collective experience. As the sit-in for a
living wage unfolded, students at Penn State fought for what they believed
was a matter of life or death.
For students at the Michigan conference, who listened to the presentation
about Penn State's turmoil with nervous excitement, the tale provided a
visceral edge to the weekend's affirmative-action rhetoric. LaKeisha Wolf,
until recently the president of the campus's Black Caucus, described a
harrowing year in which she and other students received death threats. The
last was impossible to ignore: "Those like you have been run off and
killed. You, also, will just disappear." The letter stated, ominously,
that a young black man had been killed and and that his body would be left
in the woods near campus.
A week later, the body of a black man turned up 20 miles from the
university. Prophecy fulfilled or coincidence, the discovery seemed to
offer tangible evidence of students' worst fears.
The truth of the threats often seemed a moot point. The letters tapped
into a current of distrust between black and white students that has
always flowed just below the surface. According to the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, Pennsylvania has one of the largest concentrations of hate
groups in the nation. Minority students at Penn State, who make up 11
percent of the student body, have long complained that the predominantly
white campus lacks services that cater to their needs and that they are
frequently the targets of racist taunts.
"The attitude was often like, You niggers should be glad you're here,"
says Brian Favors, a leader of the protests who recently left his post as
a staff member in the dean of students' office. "You feel that at Penn
State."
Mr. Favors and other students fought the system with its own records. They
discovered that the university had failed to carry out several aspects of
a diversity plan for which it was receiving federal funds. When their
appeals to the administration failed to yield results quickly enough, they
got political. They went to the state legislature's Black Caucus armed
with testimony from more than 300 students alleging racist incidents at
Penn State. Last December, they pushed the university's president, Graham
B. Spanier, to admit in writing that the university had failed to enact
many of the plan's recommendations.
"They were able to outmaneuver the university because they were more
politically savvy when it comes to race relations," says Carey Fraser,
assistant professor of African-American studies at the university. "They
were sophisticated enough to turn to the political process when it was
clear that talks with the administration were going nowhere."
Following the April threats against Ms. Wolf, students took their struggle
to the student union -- some, out of fear of death threats; others, no
doubt, out of fear of finals. For 10 days, the members of "the Village" as
the community of protesters was known, prayed, danced, and railed against
the administration. They made laminated buttons and launched a Village Web
site. They produced reporter-friendly pamphlets with a time line of events
and held nightly town meetings urging students with laptops to blitz the
news media with e-mail. In the end, much to the chagrin of professors who
felt officials caved in too easily, university administrators gave the
demonstrators much of what they asked for: a pledge to add four faculty
members to the tiny African-American-studies program, and $900,000 to
establish an Africana Studies Research Center.
It is hard to know for sure -- and administrators aren't talking -- but
the impact of the threats and the body on the university's bargaining
position was probably considerable. The body, it turned out, was that of a
man from Brooklyn, N.Y., who had no known ties to Penn State. The students
told the Michigan audience that the body was among four found near campus,
although, according to investigators, one was found as far away as
Pittsburgh. None of the dead was linked to the university. As for the
threats, some officials and faculty members have speculated -- off the
record, of course -- that some were hoaxes. But so far, they have offered
no evidence.
Mr. Favors acknowledges that the students used the charged episode as
leverage to achieve their diversity aims. ("We'd be foolish not to," he
says.) But he dismisses the hoax allegations as "ludicrous."
"Someone writes a letter and says that in a week a body will be found, and
then a week later, police find a body. You think that's a coincidence?"
More than 20 residents of the Village caravaned to Ann Arbor. They remain
a close-knit group, with strong feelings about the bonds forged among
minority and white students during the sit-in. Some members of the group
are working with a consultant to package the Village experience for a
college tour this fall. Ms. Wolf, after months of wearing a bullet-proof
vest and living under 24-hour security, told the audience the protests
were "God's way of showing us what was possible."
"Everywhere you went, people were having meaningful conversations about
their differences," she says.
The Harvard and Penn State presentations, like the protests at those
universities, were models of organization and pluck. Elsewhere at the
conference, however, many sensed the birth pangs of a movement. Some
presentations lacked rhetorical fire. Students from the University of
California at Berkeley, who had orchestrated a huge march against the
affirmative-action ban there, went on for 90 minutes in a set of
off-the-cuff speeches. Some participants accused the conference organizers
of being overly democratic and refusing to cut off speakers with more wind
than wisdom. When a University of Michigan presenter started to ramble,
Eddie Baker, a law student at New York University, began to squirm in her
chair and rustle the quilt she brought to protect herself from the
unseasonably cold June weather. "I don't know why they can't stop
talking," she said to herself. "We get the point."
During the questions that followed, Ms. Baker spoke up. "When you talk
with the media, you've got to talk in soundbites. You are not going to
have three hours to make your point."
Now was a good time to practice, she told them.
There were also disquieting echoes of protests past. David A. Gerber, a
professor of history at the State University of New York at Buffalo, was
an activist in the 1960's and 70's. He says he knew ideology was beginning
to erode the antiwar message when speakers began demonstrations with
promises to avenge the death of Che Guevara. "It was just a tremendous
drain of time and energy," Mr. Gerber says.
Well, Che has not gone away. His wild-eyed visage stared out from several
booths representing the Revolutionary Workers League, the Socialist
Workers Party, the Socialist Equality Party, not to mention the
International Bolshevik Tendency. Pamphlets about racist achievement tests
and the racist death penalty shared shelf space with one called "Cuba and
the Coming American Revolution."
It's not the paraphernalia of the radical-left participants that bothered
some students; it's their zealotry.
"It worried me a little, to be honest," says Mr. Smith of Harvard. "It is
very easy for certain groups to say, because of our larger beliefs about
capitalism, we're going to exclude X, Y, and Z. Once you do that, you're
lost."
The target of much of their venom was the man who suggested the conference
in the first place, Jesse Jackson.
Mr. Jackson, who had been scheduled to address the gathering, canceled due
to illness. And that's probably a good thing. Had he attended, he would
have endured more than one lecture about being a "reactionary bourgeois
politician," as one speaker called him, in addition to an attempt to purge
the new organization of his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition's sponsorship. (The
move failed. Whatever their ideological differences, the groups need each
other for political and financial support.)
The students also put to a vote whether they should describe themselves as
"militant." That motion passed, overwhelmingly. A Penn State student
wondered aloud if it was too early in the struggle to use such terms, but
his less incendiary appellation, "vigilant and vibrant," met with groans.
In describing what "militant" means, Mr. Royal of Michigan quoted Malcolm
X's famous promise to fight racism "by any means necessary." If that means
offensive tactics like the violence that tore through the streets in
Seattle, so be it, he said. Militant also apparently means a somewhat
fluid view of free speech. When a Brown University student took to the
podium to describe how protesters there trashed student newspapers that
carried an ad criticizing reparations for slavery, few questioned his view
of the destruction as "a revolutionary act."
The escalating tactics of student demonstrators have not been lost on
college administrators, however.
Last summer, Mr. Spanier told fellow officials at Penn State that this was
going to be the busiest protest season in years. It wasn't just that
groups on campus were mobilizing, he says. More and more conferences about
protest tactics were popping up. Other presidents spoke of manuals
published by various national organizations that described how to conduct
effective protests and get them covered by the news media .
The changing tone was brought home when a Penn State official found a
locally produced manual that described how to take over the administration
building. "It was very specific," Mr. Spanier recalls. "It went into where
certain doors were and where certain locks were located."
Mr. Spanier says he was "surprised by the level of sophistication" of many
of the training manuals that fell into his hands.
For activists, there's no shortage of material to choose from. Labor is
reaching out to students with programs like Union Summer, in which
activists learn how to organize; two of the Harvard protesters were
graduates of the program. The Direct Action Network offers helpful hints
in the event of a police scuffle: Tie your hair back so it can't be
yanked, and screech in pain if they grab you, whether it hurts or not. The
Web site of the Ruckus Society offers detailed instructions on how to hang
from a building or billboard for a staged media event. But it cautions
safety: "A good activist is a living activist."
Mr. Likins, the Arizona president, says he learned last fall just how
efficient and organized protesters had become when several anti-sweatshop
demonstrators padlocked the entrances to his campus's administration
building and chained themselves to the doors. They brought a lawyer with
them, Mr. Likins says, and seemed to know exactly how much they could get
away with before a misdemeanor became a felony.
Since the protesters were blocking an entrance to a well-traveled
building, Mr. Likins didn't hesitate to have them arrested. In doing so,
however, he illustrated the danger of being strict with demonstrators:
Arrest them, and risk creating martyrs.
"They understood very well they would achieve the goals of public arrest
and getting on the evening news," Mr. Likins says. "It's not a bad tactic,
when you think about it."
The movement may be getting smarter, but that doesn't make it any more
unified. With as many causes as Web sites, protesters often strain to
connect with each other, let alone the campus at large.
Reparations for slavery? Pay hikes for janitors? Those do not seem like
the sorts of issues to draw the majority of students away from keg parties
and Playstation II.
"They're just fringe groups," says Joseph Konzelmann, a sophomore majoring
in economics at Harvard who counter-demonstrated against the living wage.
"They're rebellious spirits in search of a cause. They're just looking for
something to complain about."
Howard Zinn, the radical historian and retired Boston University
professor, joined Harvard students this spring and saw something
different.
Mr. Zinn, referring to the civil-rights struggle and protests over the
Vietnam War, says that, in order to build a movement, "the issue of right
and wrong has to be very clear."
He believes that underneath many of the recent protests, there is an
emerging theme that could galvanize students in the years to come: the
widening gap between rich and poor. "The potential is very much there for
these groups to coalesce into a national movement."
Mr. Gerber, the SUNY historian and former antiwar demonstrator, doesn't
see it happening. Today's students, he says, are "apolitical by virtue of
1,000 diversions."
He believes that the greatest chance for a renaissance in activism would
be if something happened that challenged students' sense of personal
security -- if, for example, President Bush nominated a Supreme Court
justice intent on overturning Roe v. Wade.
"There is a tyranny in seeing everything through the eyes of the 60's,"
says Mr. Gerber. "Today, there are small groups of very disciplined people
who are very passionate about what they believe in. I wouldn't call them a
movement. There's really no mass support for what they do."
But don't tell that to the group who assembled in Ann Arbor. As the
weekend came to a close, they retired to a co-op where many of the
Michigan students dwell and share duties like cooking and cleaning. At
night, visiting students were packed so tight in their sleeping bags that
it was hard to walk without tripping over someone. They engaged in a wild
poetry slam, two hours of intimate verse with a heavy hip-hop influence.
As they drifted into morning, talk turned to religion, politics, and the
chances of forming a movement.
"It's what I always imagined living in a commune would be like," says
Harvard's Mr. Smith. "We stayed up all night. ... We were delirious from
talking."
A Beatles song once described a youth of another era with "hair down to
his knee." Three decades later, the haircuts are different but the
soundtrack remains the same.
That was evident the next morning, when the students again clasped hands
in prayer.
The verse was one that Penn State's Villagers used to loudly mark the
hours of their sit-in at the student union. "Now! More than ever," one
student began, and the other protesters followed in call and response.
"All the brothers and sisters," they shouted -- and a few looked up, a
little self-consciously, savoring the electricity of what they hoped was a
historic moment -- "must come together!"
When it was over, a Brown student, one who had taken part in the trashing
of the student newspaper there, took his eye away from his Sony digital
camcorder and pressed the "off" switch.
The revolution will be televised, after all.
http://chronicle.com Section: Students Page: A38
* * *
June 4, 2001
BAMN national leaders convene
by Maria Sprow
Daily News Editor
It wasn’t the shouts for equality and desegregation that attracted
attention to the rally for affirmative action Friday, but the music of
Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor” coming from the Cass Technical High School
Marching Band that stopped traffic on the Diag and lead the march toward
Rackham Auditorium.
The rally and march, attended by several hundred high school and college
students, were part of the weekend’s civil rights and affirmative action
conference, hosted by the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action and
Integration and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary.
The rally and march were delayed an hour and a half to allow visiting
students time to consider various petitions discussed earlier that
morning.
Wayne State Law School student Shanta Driver, who mediated the conference,
said it was designed to bring together leaders from across the country and
“pull together a national leadership for the new movement.”
Speculation that the Rev. Jesse Jackson would come and speak on the Diag
ended during the rally when Gary Flowers, a spokesman for the Rainbow/PUSH
coalition, announced Jackson was sick and unable to attend. Jackson
instead made a call to the conference Saturday afternoon.
Flowers offered some words of advice during the rally. “Each generation
must define for itself the critical issues of the day.”
“Nothing lasts forever,” he added, commenting on the University of
California Board of Regents’ May 16 decision to reverse their ban on
affirmative action.
Student activist leaders from around the country spoke, including Harvard
student Stephen Smith, one of the organizers of a recent 21-day sit-in for
workers’ rights. Ronald Cruz, an openly gay Asian student from the
University of California at Berkeley, and Hoku Jeffrey, a founding member
of BAMN’s chapter at Berkeley, also spoke.
On Saturday, students reported about recent events on their campuses.
“When you tell a story, you learn from that,” said Pennsylvania State
University alum Ryan Rzepecki. “We’re all coming from different angles but
it’s all part of a collective story.”
Cruz and Jeffrey had encouraging words for the conference.
“We even got Ward Connerly to vote for the demise of his own proposal,”
said Cruz, referring to the University of California regent who lead the
campaign to ban affirmative action and two weeks ago joined the 21 other
regents in the unanimous vote to reverse the ban. Attacking the Regents’
decision to ban affirmative action through petitioning and classroom
presentations was just one step they took, Cruz added. The repeal of the
University system’s ban is the first step in removing Proposition 209, the
state-wide ban on affirmative action.
Students from Penn State talked about the flood of death threats students
say they have been receiving since 1999. “Basically what happened was for
the first time in 20 years, Penn State had its first losing (football)
season,” said Penn State student Chenits Pettigrew, comparing the school’s
athletic tradition to Michigan’s. “Football is the only thing that kept
the Penn State community together.”
“Football players getting death threats hurts recruitment,” added Penn
State student Brian Favors.
The students said after they began receiving the threats, they asked their
administration to help them build up the university’s diversity
curriculum. “We realized that they didn’t know anything about us,” said
Lakisha Wolf, a student who said she personally received several death
threats.
The students said they wanted the new curriculum to ease the racial
tensions at Penn State.
“We realized that the University had fallen short on its diversity
initiatives,” said Penn State student Charleen Morris. “There wasn’t a
shared and conclusive understanding of diversity.”
The group said although they successfully created a new diversity program
at Penn State, they are still fearful of the climate at the school. “We
created a multi-million dollar diversity plan, but we are struggling,”
Favors said.
At one point, Helen Halyrad, a member of the audience, spoke out against
affirmative action, saying that class, and not race, is the leading factor
that contributes to inequality.
Halyrad said she is a member of the Socialist Equality Party, which,
according to a written statement, believes that “affirmative action is
based on the premise that some sections of the population must be denied
access to higher education, and argues that this deprivation should be
rationed out differently than at present … excluding white youth from a
college, in order to include more minority youth, cannot be reconciled
with fairness.”
Although Halyrad spoke against affirmative action, participants of the
conference received her comments with applause. “There’s a lot of strong
points that are being made, even hers,” said Heather Brewer, who will be a
freshman at Oakland University in the fall. “I didn’t understand quite
what was going on and that’s the main reason I wanted to come.”
On Sunday, the lawsuit challenging the University of Michigan’s Law
School’s admissions policies was discussed and several resolutions were
passed, including the conference declaration and a resolution to establish
a coordinating committee from those who attended the conference and have a
second conference in November.
* * *
5-13-2001
New York Times
Allow Us to Demonstrate:
Student Protest Comes of Age
By Jodi Wilgoren
SINCE they finished finals at the end of April, Ben Royal and three fellow
University of Michigan students have been driving around the Northeast in
a green 1992 Toyota Corolla, trying to make a movement.
They went to Pennsylvania State University, where death threats to black
students recently inspired a sleep- in at the student center. They stopped
at Brown University, where protesters outraged by an advertisement
concerning reparations for slavery confiscated copies of the student paper
and formed human chains to block its distribution. And they made several
visits to Harvard, where 26 smelly students emerged Wednesday after a
three-week sit-in over how much the nation's richest university pays its
janitors.
Mr. Royal and his comrades, cell phones at their ears, are recruiting for
a June conference on their Ann Arbor campus. They hope for attendance of
200 — twice, they note, the number that gathered for the founding
conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960.
There is a fine line between a march and a movement, and with students, in
the glare of springtime, that line can be hard to see — particularly in a
culture that has become inured to the endless variations on chants that
begin, "Hey hey, ho ho." There is, cynics will say, always a hardy band of
leftists decrying something or other on every college campus, like
background noise on the soundtrack of a liberal education. But if the
activism of the late 1960's signified a more profound challenge to the
fabric of society, today's demonstrations — focused, tolerated and
relentlessly coordinated — may be more efficient at achieving their goals.
Student protest has a long history in Europe and Asia, dating at least to
the 19th century. American campuses were slower to simmer, with the first
sparks coming over economic issues in the 1930's and 1940's. It was only
as universities opened up to a more diverse student body, in the 1960's,
that a true student movement took hold, focused first on civil rights and
then on the Vietnam War. A second generation arose in the 1980's, when
students erected mock shantytowns and pushed many universities to divest
themselves of their holdings in apartheid-era South Africa.
In both cases, the involvement of the young intellectual elite served to
grab public attention. But the linkages between the student efforts and
more established adult groups — businesses and antiwar veterans,
Democratic politicians and civil rights leaders — were crucial to creating
actual change.
"Students very often are the most publicized element, and very often they
engage in the most dramatic actions because they are young and free and
more ready to take risks because they are young and free," said Howard
Zinn, the radical historian who visited the Harvard encampment several
times. "If that movement doesn't go beyond students, then it doesn't go
very far."
THE latest rumblings, dating back about five years, focus on economic
justice and globalization, with a dash of environmentalism. Students have
rallied against the use of sweatshop labor to make their sweatshirts; now,
at Harvard and across the country, they are aligning with union organizers
to call for a "living wage" for the universities' lowest-paid employees.
Mr. Royal and his friends, meanwhile, are trying to defend affirmative
action.
Students were a major element of the recent civil disobedience disrupting
world trade meetings in Seattle and Quebec, and unions have also stepped
up their organizing among professors, graduate students, and even
undergraduates across the country. In both the actions on campuses and the
highly publicized protests of globalization that have targeted political
and diplomatic conferences, students have forged an unusually strong
alliance with labor.
This new partnership comes in part from the increasing interest among
union leaders in direct action, and labor has reached out to young people
with programs like Union Summer, an echo of the 1964 Freedom Summer, with
college students organizing workers this time instead of registering
voters. It also reflects the outward-looking ideology of today's students,
who are rallying for the rights of low-wage workers even though, with
their expensive degrees, they are unlikely to confront such problems
personally.
ELECTRONIC communication has also revolutionized the revolution.
Organizers now coordinate activities through e-mail and Web sites; the
Harvard protesters spent much of their time on cell phones, blitzing the
media and urging celebrities to come to the daily noontime rallies outside
the window (they also frequently called their parents and assured them
they were all right).
Whether the series of campus demonstrations in recent years will escalate
into a sort of third wave of student movement, on the order of antiwar or
divestment, remains a question. Harvard did not yield to the students'
demands to pay all workers at least $10.25 an hour, instead just naming a
new committee to reconsider the question. Still, the high-profile action
at the nation's most prestigious university has already spurred copycats
at the University of Connecticut, and could prove a bellwether.
At the same time, where once student protests shook the nation to its
core, they have now become common enough to feel like a springtime rite of
passage, prompting yawns or dismissive contempt. In the 1960's, students
were questioning the foundation of American society, protesting the very
authority of the institutions that governed their lives. Today, the
questions seem far narrower, the protests somehow safer.
When Students for a Democratic Society occupied administration buildings
in the 1960's, the abiding image was of long-haired hippies smoking cigars
with their feet propped on the university president's desk. This year,
many students brought books and laptops into Massachusetts Hall so they
wouldn't fall too far behind in their schoolwork. In 1969, during a
demonstration against R.O.T.C. recruiting at Harvard, the police stormed
University Hall and threw the students out after 24 hours; officers
brought today's protesters deodorant and dinner.
And many student protests are about far less cosmic, more self- interested
concerns, like the recent University of North Carolina march over budget
cuts, or last weekend's demonstration at Boston University complaining
that construction on a soccer field was a noisy disruption during exams.
Donald Kagan, a classics professor at Yale University, said that
administrators — many of whom came of age in the 60's, some through
sit-ins — have gotten soft, and that by failing to discipline students for
acts of civil disobedience, are "miseducating them morally."
"In the real world, your acts have consequences," Professor Kagan said.
"At Yale and Harvard, they don't. If you don't risk anything, it costs you
nothing. You're not a hero, you're a bully."
THE cynics say that students protest in the spring because they prefer it
to studying, that students protest because they have more time and less to
lose, that rallies and demonstrations are like so many other extra-
curricular activities.
But if they don't do it, who will?
"This is going to sound like what adults say when they're patronizing
students, but when you're older, you're saddled with a lot of different
responsibilities," said Ari Weisbard, a Harvard junior from Madison, Wis.,
who was among the sitters through Day 21. "You can't really throw
everything aside for several weeks to devote to something important. It's
not just that we're more idealistic because we haven't had as much world
experience. It's that we have a real chance to act on our ideals."
Mr. Weisbard, whose father was among the protesters at Harvard in 1969,
acknowledged that skipping two and a half weeks of classes was unlikely to
hurt his law school applications. The only homework he managed to get done
inside was reading two chapters of a text titled "Political Equality," but
he was able to get an extension on his philosophy paper until next week.
Then there's his social studies tutorial, a seminar called Community
Organizing and Civic Democracy. He is hoping the professor will understand
why he missed class, gathering primary research for his final paper.
* * *
May 7, 2001
And justice for all
The Michigan Daily Editorial
Most students arrive at the University of Michigan expecting to learn a
little something about the real world. But those whose actions — through
one way or another — conflict with the Student Code of Conduct will soon
realize that the University administration functions less like an
ambassador of society and more like a surrogate parent. The home life of
most students isn’t a democracy, as nurturing parents can sometimes be
dictatorial and arbitrary; this metaphor can be extended to the University
administration under the Code. Its flaws allow instances of unfairness and
injustice.
Consider the case of Brian Montieth, who was charged and found guilty of
destroying University property. Before leaving for winter break in 1996,
Montieth was approached by two Department of Public Safety officers who
asked to search his room. They informed him that someone in his West Quad
Residence hallway had just been launching apples across the street against
the Fleming building and had broken some windows.
Despite a hall mate’s eventual confession, the administration believed
Montieth was involved. According to Montieth, it threatened him with a
more severe punishment if he pleaded not guilty and attempted to defend
himself. Montieth claims the only evidence the administration possessed
was a statement from the dormitory housekeeper that she remembers hearing
his remarks about a broken window. Seeing no other options, he entered a
guilty plea. Montieth’s case shows the potential for the administration to
function as prosecutor, jury and judge under the Code; the U.S.
Constitution forbids one body from assuming all these roles at once.
Consider also the case of Ryan Hughes, who was recently charged with
assault and vandalism for allegedly spray-painting the sign of an
anti-Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender demonstrator at the LGBT
Kiss-in in the Diag. DPS arrested Hughes and forwarded a complaint to the
Office of Student Conflict Resolution. OSCR continued prosecuting even
though Hughes’ so-called victim never filed charges. The Code prevented
his lawyer from speaking on his behalf during meetings with
administrators. Hughes’ case highlights the potential for excessive
prosecution under the Code.
In an e-mail sent to The Daily, Hughes states that as of April 13 the
administration has officially dropped its case against him. According to
Hughes, the administration was prosecuting based on a complaint it had
received; the subsequent withdrawal of the complaint prompted the
administration to drop the case completely. Since it is believed that
Hughes’ victim never filed charges, there may not have been a “complaint”
at all. In the end it seems the administration was prosecuting Hughes
based only on a report that DPS filed as a matter of procedure.
Based on the available information, the administration’s recent actions
seem to be motivated by damage-control intentions; it unjustly used its
extensive powers of prosecution against Hughes and, because of the
undesired attention generated by Hughes’ case, has shifted the blame onto
an undefined third party. It seems that under the Code, the administration
possesses the power both to arbitrarily charge students and to drop those
charges for its convenience. Hopefully, the administration’s recent
actions (however Machiavellian) are an indication that it is beginning to
recognize the Code’s flaws.
* * *
4-17-2001
MSA takes up local, international issues
Carrie Thorson
Daily Staff Reporter
Treasurer Josh Samek was one of many Michigan Student Assembly members
who, at last night’s special meeting, posed the question “Where do we draw
the line?”
This question was in reference to the three controversial resolutions the
assembly passed last night regarding divestment in Burma, the New Era hat
company’s alleged use of sweatshop labor and intelligent design creation
theory in schools. Although these resolutions were pertinent to the
University in some way, assembly members questioned how involved MSA
should be in matters of state, national and international governments.
The first resolution opposed Michigan House Bill 4328, which would require
students be taught not only that evolution is an unproven theory, but that
life is the result of the “purposeful, intelligent design of a creator.”
“The sponsors of the bill do not understand what is meant by a scientific
theory,” Rackham student John Solum said. Solum was one of several
graduate students in science who came to the meeting to speak for the
resolution.
“There should be an avenue in the classroom to maybe be able to talk about
creation,” LSA Rep. Omari Williams said.
Another resolution asked the University to withdraw any money it has
invested in companies that do business with the government of Myanmar,
which is accused of perpetuating human rights violations against its
people.
“I pay tuition to the University of Michigan and I do not want that money
to support human rights abuses and military dictatorship,” LSA freshman
Mara Neering said.
Aside from passing these resolutions, the assembly created the Campus
Improvement Taskforce Initiative but tabled the creation of a Greek
Relations Taskforce until next fall. They also distributed money garnered
from student fees to student groups for the second time this semester.
“MSA has never done a second funding cycle before, and that’s absolutely
amazing,” said President Matt Nolan.
LSA Rep. Rob Goodspeed moved to adjourn the meeting after old business,
forcing the voting on MSA code amendments to be postponed until next fall.
“We were going to discuss code amendments that could be controversial,”
Goodspeed said. “I wanted more assembly members present and interested.”
When the meeting began there were slightly more than enough members to
legally vote on resolutions, and by the time the meeting was adjourned,
only the minimum voting block remained.
“I was disappointed that we adjourned,” Nolan said. “ But what we did do
tonight was great.”
Although the year ended on a tense note, several assembly members said
they were happy with the new assembly and anticipated a successful
semester in the fall.
“When we come back in the fall, campus will notice a change in MSA,” Vice
President Jessica Cash said.
* * *
April 16, 2001
National conference in the works
by Maria Sprow
Daily Staff Reporter
When the Rev. Jesse Jackson came to Ann Arbor for a rally in support of
affirmative action following U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman’s ruling
striking down the University’s use of race as a factor in admission to the
Law School, he challenged students and the University to become active
members and leaders of a new civil rights movement.
Jackson specifically asked campus leaders to hold a national civil rights
conference this spring, as well as participate in a national march on
Washington next year.
Rising to that challenge, members of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative
Action and Integration and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary are
making preliminary plans to host the conference, planned for June 1-3.
Though the dates were announced a few days ago, representatives of several
schools, including Colorado State University, the University of California
at Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania have already reserved spots
at the conference. Other schools expected to send representatives to the
conference are the University of Texas, where the Hopwood v. Texas
decision banned the use of race in admissions; the University of Florida,
which recently held a rally to protest Gov. Jeb Bush’s One Florida
Initiative that would end the use of race in admissions there; and the
University of Virginia.
“These are schools we have been in contact with in the past and we expect
to keep in contact with in the future,” said Rackham student and BAMN
member Jessica Curtin. BAMN has sent an e-mail invitation to campuses
across the country. “We’ve made contact with people we’ve never had
contact with before,” Curtin said.
The announcement urges young leaders to provide a “new, progressive vision
and leadership to the nation.” The conference is expected to include
anywhere from 30 to 200 students from around the nation who act as civil
rights leaders in their own areas, Curtin said.
“If we can get even one or two people from every school that is taking a
part in the new civil rights movement, then they can go back with new
ideas and be organizers at their school for this fight,” Curtin said.
The purpose of the conference is to take grass-roots campaigns at
universities and nationalize them by allowing movement leaders to share
their ideas and strategize ways to overturn the decision against the
University of Michigan Law School and the Hopwood decision.
The conference will also be a key to planning a national march in
Washington — tentatively scheduled for either January or February — tied
to either Martin Luther King Jr. Day or Black History Month. “This is not
going to be primarily an educational kind of conference,” Curtin said.
“It’s going to be a ‘What do we do next?’ kind of conference.”
Curtin said another march could be scheduled for October in Cincinnati,
where the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear the case
against the Law School.
The Rainbow/PUSH coalition, founded by Jackson, is promoting the
conference. BAMN is hoping Jackson will be in town for at least part of
the event, especially the opening rally June 1.
Other groups organizing or supporting the event are the Michigan Student
Assembly, School of Social Work Student Union, African American Alumni
Association, Project SERVE, Alpha Phi Omega fraternity and the Defend
Affirmative Action Party.
MSA signed a list of supporters against Friedman’s ruling and passed a
resolution in defense of affirmative action. “The assembly has time and
time again supported affirmative action and this was just another step in
that direction,” said MSA President Matt Nolan.
Regardless of whether Jackson comes to town, Curtin said, the conference
will be a huge step for the civil rights movement.
“I think that this conference will be extremely significant because it
will put the local struggles into a nationally coordinated framework,” she
said. “This is the first conference of its kind.”
Not everyone on campus is happy that a conference will be held here.
“I just think it’s a cowardly move to hold it during the summer when I
can’t protest it,” said LSA freshman Adam Dancy, who has protested BAMN
events in the past. “I’m actually disappointed.”
Dancy said he does not think the conference will make a difference on a
national level.
“If they decide on anything it’s not going to make a difference,” he said.
“It’s going to be a worthless couple of days.”
A mass organizational meeting will take place on Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. in
the MSA Chambers on the third-floor of the Michigan Union.
* * *
4-11-2001
Viewpoint: Drop the charges against Ryan Hughes
On April 3, the University Office of Student Conflict Resolution hauled
Ryan Hughes, an LSA junior and an openly bisexual political activist, into
a kangaroo court proceeding. Hughes’ case is being adjudicated under the
Student Code of Conduct. Hughes is charged with vandalism and assault by
the Department of Public Safety. These charges are completely unfounded,
politically motivated, and a gross violation of Hughes’ First Amendment
rights. These charges must be dropped now.
Hughes is accused of vandalism and assault for allegedly spray-painting
the picket sign and the face of a far right-wing anti-gay bigot who openly
advocates the assault and murder of lesbians and gay men. The picket sign,
which was allegedly spray-painted and is the only physical evidence of the
alleged vandalism, was destroyed by DPS even though they knew that Code
charges were pending against Hughes. The anti-gay bigot told the police
that he was not spray-painted in the face. Despite the urgings of the
police, he did not press charges against Hughes. DPS has no case against
Hughes. This sham procedure must end now.
This case is a clear violation of the First Amendment. The First Amendment
is intended to protect citizens from discrimination by the state. Its main
aim is to prevent the state from favoring the free speech and assembly
rights of some citizens over others. What is at stake in this case is the
right of lesbians and gay men at the University of Michigan to openly
declare that they are gay and to assemble in public.
On Feb. 16, 2001, Hughes was involved in a peaceful protest action, a
lesbian/gay Kiss-in on the diag. He and the other students at the Kiss-in
were confronted by a group of anti-gay violence mongers. The anti-gay
bigots had traveled from Kansas to Ann Arbor to harass and threaten
lesbians and gay men at the University in order to intimidate all lesbians
and gay men from being openly out. The kiss-in participants who assembled
on the diag tried to get the anti-gay crusaders to stop harassing them
primarily by chanting at them. Someone tried unsuccessfully to graffiti
with spray paint one of the anti-gay crusader’s signs. The anti-gay bigots
were completely unfazed. They continued to taunt and threaten the lesbian
and gay participants in the kiss-in. The free speech rights of the
anti-gay bigots were never limited or threatened.
Hughes and the other lesbian/gay protesters and their supporters had every
right to protect their demonstration and their persons from assault. DPS
did not lift a finger to protect the lesbian/gay demonstration. Instead,
they arrested Hughes and then charged him under the Code of Student
Conduct. Apparently, DPS and the University administration believe that
right wing advocates of genocide against lesbians and gay men are welcome
on campus and must have their “free speech” rights protected at all costs.
At the same time, DPS and the University administration is prepared to
witch hunt Hughes in order to silence those who would defend the rights of
lesbians and gay men. It is exactly this kind of selective abrogation of
free speech and assembly rights that the First Amendment seeks to protect
against. DPS and the University administration must not be allowed to
suppress the free speech or free assembly rights of Hughes or any other
student.
The University administration must not be the protector of violent,
right-wing organizations. The only real impact of the administration’s
unconscionable prosecution of Hughes is to put a welcome sign out at the
University for all violence-mongering groups. This policy says to those
who would maim, bash, and murder: You are welcome here, the University
administration will bend over backwards to be on your side.
The Code is devoid of all fundamental due process rights, from the right
to legal counsel to the right to exclude hearsay evidence to the right to
obtain a jury trial, and despite the veneer of student and faculty
participation, the Code accords a maximum imbalance of power in the
administration’s favor. Throughout Hughes’ case, the administration or its
agents have played the role of complainant, prosecutor, victim, judge,
jury and executioner in tandem. The administration claims independence
from the charges, yet its DPS is the complainant. The administration
claims not to be prosecuting Hughes, yet it has brought the charges
against him. The administration claims not to have judged Hughes, yet it
is his accuser. The administration offers itself as adjudicator in its
case against Hughes and reserves the right to determine the sanction.
The Code is meant to confuse, scare and strong-arm the students who face
charges under it. At Hughes’ initial hearing, we learned that in more than
98 percent of cases, students are intimidated into accepting punishment
outright. By maintaining his innocence, waging an active defense and
throwing the doors to his proceeding open, Hughes has demonstrated the
model for how to respond to Code charges. It is by students dragging the
process into the light of day that charges can be successfully defended,
and the process of abolishing the Code can be realized.
-Jodi Masley
Law School alumna
The writer, Hughes’s attorney, is from the Detroit law firm of Scheff and
Washington
* * *
4-11-2001
MSA joins statement opposing court ruling
Carrie Thorson
Daily News Writer
At their second-to-last meeting yesterday evening the Michigan Student
Assembly passed another highly contested resolution in defense of
affirmative action at the University.
This particular resolution added the assembly’s name to a University-wide
statement in opposition to the “anti-affirmative action court decision”
handed down by U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman in the lawsuits
against the Law School’s admissions policies.
The resolution also involved the assembly in organizing the National
Student Conference to be held on campus this summer and a National March
on Washington next year. LSA Rep. Peter Apel said the resolution was not
appropriate because it specifically endorsed a student group.
Apel said the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action and Integration and
Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary “does not need MSA support on
campus,” adding that the assembly should remain “strictly neutral” about
affirmative action.
Many assembly members said MSA should not diverge from its past trend of
supporting affirmative action resolutions.
“For MSA not to have their name on this (statement) would be embarrassing
to me,” said Law School Rep. Chris Sheehan.
The assembly also voted to establish a Child Care Taskforce to improve
childcare options available to students. Alum Aimee Bingham said childcare
at the University was second to last when compared to other Big Ten
universities.
“There are two changing tables on this campus,” Bingham said.
“The decision to raise a family should never deter a student’s pursuit of
higher education, especially on a campus as diverse as our own,” said
Rackham student Tara Javidi.
Assembly members announced that for the first time in several semesters
Advice Online has been updated.
“Advice Online is a service that allows students to see what their peers
thought of classes,” LSA representative Zach Slates said.
Newly elected officers are LSA sophomore Alex Mcdonough as chair of the
Tax-exempt Textbook Taskforce and LSA sophomore Monique Luse and LSA
junior Leena Soman as co-chairs of the Minority Affairs Commission.
Next Monday the assembly will hold a special meeting to complete business
before the Summer Assembly begins.
* * *
3-21-2001
DAAP, MSA express concern over ‘racist’ attacks on Hideki
Carrie Thorson
Daily News Writer
Many Michigan Student Assembly representatives expressed concern at last
night’s meeting over recent “attacks” on president Hideki Tsutsumi
regarding his ability to communicate with the assembly.
“People are trying to dissuade international students from running for MSA,”
said LSA Rep. Erika Dowdell. Dowdell and others said Vice President Jim
Secreto’s vocal stance that Tsutsumi had difficulty communicating with the
assembly because English was not his first language was racist.
“This attack is beginning to foster racism on campus,” said Defend
Affirmative Action Party member Caroline Wong. “The climate on this campus
for Asian students is hostile as it is.”
Wong called for an apology from Secreto for “allowing the election to
become a vehicle to foster racism on campus.”
Many representatives and constituents said race was not the reason they
were unhappy with Tsutsumi’s term.
“My problems are not with his language,” said LSA senior Rodolfo Palma-Lulion.
“It’s with his ideology.”
“I don’t support the attacks on Hideki, but I don’t see them as racist,”
Kinesiology Rep. T.J. Wharry said. “I can’t understand what my
grandparents say but they’re just as white as I am.”
Tsutsumi said he felt all attacks on him were politically motivated and
that he is “above the fray of party politics.”
Also at the meeting, Hank Baier, associate vice president for Facilities
and Operations, spoke to the assembly about the potential merger between
the University bus system and the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority. The
assembly recently passed a resolution against the potential merger.
“We’re trying to develop ways to increase the bus service, not decrease
service levels,” Baier said. “In order to expand, we have to go with AATA.”
Amendments to the MSA code and constitution were presented for first
reads, and they were not well received.
“As a constituent I have a problem with each and every one of these
amendments,” said Palma-Lulion.
The assembly also consented to the transfer of $1,500 for advertising of
Advice Online during fall registration. “This is one of the greatest
things that we do,” Secreto said. “People need to know about it.”
* * *
3-14-2001
Election Board accused of bias,
new members elected
Carrie Thorson
Daily Staff Reporter
The Michigan Student Assembly decided at last night’s meeting that its
Election Board was in violation of the MSA code and constitution because
of the recent resignation of Student General Counsel Alok Agrawal, from
the board.
Agrawal’s resignation caused the board to fall short of two constitutional
requirements. The board must consists of three members aside from the
election director, and the majority of the board must consist of MSA
representatives.
In an emergency meeting of the Steering Committee, held after the regular
meeting, Medical School Rep. Caroline Scheiber and Women’s Issues
Commission Chair Elizabeth Anderson were appointed to the two vacant seats
on the board.
Rackham Rep. Jessica Curtin and LSA Rep. Erika Dowdell called for the
resignation of the remaining Election Board officials — College of
Architecture and Urban Planning Rep. Shana Shevitz, LSA senior Ryan
Norfolk and LSA sophomore Jun Takayasu — during constituents’ time.
“They’ve done a lot of damage to the election, and it’s hampering the
candidates’ ability to run a democratic election,” Curtin said.
Dowdell and Curtin were recently thrown out of the election by the board
and reinstated Sunday night after appealing to the Central Student
Judiciary.
“If you guys can’t read and interpret the code in an unbiased way, you
should not be on the Election Board,” Dowdell added.
Remaining board members were unwilling to capitulate to the demands.
“I firmly intend on remaining part of the election board, regardless of
what they say,” said Election Board Director Ryan Norfolk. “Their attacks
were politically motivated.”
Director of the Office of Student Conflict Resolution Keith Elkin spoke at
last night’s meeting on OSCR’s role in the Statement of Student Rights and
Responsibilities, formerly known as the Code of Student Conduct.
“It is important for a community to define its own values and set
expectations,” Elkin said. The current code “is not going to be abolished,
and the alternative is not positive for anyone.”
Elkin repeatedly said OSCR did not want to create a “quasi-legal system,”
and actively sought student input as to what changes should be made.
“We’re going to become the premiere office of student conflict resolution
in the country, but we can’t do that without student help and obviously
MSA,” Elkin said.
In an effort to voice their concern about the pending merger with the Ann
Arbor Transit Authority, the assembly passed a resolution opposing
outsourcing of major parts of University bus service. They also passed a
resolution for a letter of solidarity to the University of California at
Berkeley student government.
Medical School Rep. Sarah Mohiuddin was appointed as chair of the Student
Health Advisory Board, and LSA Rep. Jessica Cash and Alex Mcdonough were
appointed as chairs of the Tax-exempt Textbook Taskforce.
* * *
3-9-2001
San Francisco Chronicle
UC Protest Rips Policy On Minorities
Charles Burress, Chronicle Staff Writer
Berkeley -- About 2,000 high school and college students converged on the
University of California at Berkeley campus yesterday, calling on UC
regents to repeal their ban on affirmative action in admissions.
The rally at Sproul Plaza -- the scene of innumerable protests ever since
the tumultuous 1960s -- was marred by some looting and violence as
demonstrators marched through downtown Berkeley to demand that the regents
take action at their meeting in Los Angeles next week, before the May 1
deadline for entering freshmen to declare their intent to enroll for this
fall.
The demonstration came amid a renewed campaign to pressure the regents to
reverse their 1995 vote to end racial and ethnic preferences in
admissions. Lt.
Gov. Cruz Bustamante and other state officials held a news conference
Tuesday in support of a resolution introduced by Assemblyman Marco
Firebaugh, D-Los Angeles, calling for an end to the ban.
Even if the regents were to reverse their policy, racial and ethnic
preferences could not be restored. California voters abolished affirmative
action in public institutions when they passed Proposition 209 in 1996.
But the organizers of yesterday's protest said a repeal of the regents'
policy would send an important message of welcome to minority students.
They said minority students now are discouraged from attending UC, or from
remaining once enrolled, because of the regents' stand.
The UC ban took effect in the fall of 1998, but the effect on enrollment
of minorities is not clear. The percentages of several minorities --
including African American, Hispanic and American Indian -- all dropped
that fall, but so did that of white students. Asian students and those
whose race is listed as "unknown" increased.
Last fall, the percentage of African American, Hispanic and American
Indian students all increased, while Asians and whites dropped, possibly
reflecting UC's efforts to recruit disadvantaged minorities. Asians, now
the largest ethnic group among enrolled freshmen, generally have not been
regarded as a disadvantaged minority.
"What the thousands of you out there are saying is, we won't go back to
segregation!" Oakland Technical High School teacher Tania Kappner told the
cheering crowd of students and faculty at a noon rally on Sproul Plaza.
UC police estimated the crowd on the plaza to be "slightly more than a
thousand," said Police Capt. Bill Cooper. One of the protest organizers,
UC student Ronald Cruz, said the crowd was between 5,000 and 6,000. A
Chronicle reporter guessed at more than 1,000 and fewer than 2,000.
More than 1,000 students from several Bay Area high schools packed Pauley
Ballroom on campus for a 10 a.m. rally, but it appeared that not all of
them attended the noon rally.
The protest was called by the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action &
Integration, and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary, which goes by
the acronym BAMN. It has sponsored several demonstrations on campus since
the ban was passed.
One young man, an employee of a clothing store whose name was not
disclosed,
was beaten on Telegraph Avenue shortly before the noon rally.
During the afternoon march, another young man was shoved down and his head
kicked, knocking his face into a car wheel and bloodying his nose. A
Chronicle reporter also was knocked to the ground.
The assailants were high school-age boys. Police said there were other
assaults, although details were not known.
A Chronicle photographer saw about 100 young persons run into the
Athlete's Foot shoe store on Telegraph Avenue and about a dozen of the
youths run out with boxes of shoes.
No suspects were apprehended in the assaults or the looting.
UC Regent William Bagley, who favors restoration of affirmative action,
said he believes that he can secure enough votes on the Board of Regents
to reverse the ban by either the May or July meeting. He said next week's
meeting is too soon.
"The ban needs to be reversed now," said BAMN member Cruz. "We've heard
that same thing said by Bagley and other regents for two years."
The fight for the ban has been led by Regent Ward Connerly, who also
dismisses the value of a symbolic stand by the regents.
But Bagley said the regents' stance has left the black community with the
perception that "UC is tarnished."
"I want to see more ethnic minorities in government," said Erica Nieto,
17, one of about 60 students attending the protest from Kennedy High
School in Fremont.
Nearby, Celia Choy, a sophomore from University High School in San
Francisco, debated with 20-year-old UC Berkeley student Susie Tang, one of
about a dozen Berkeley College Republicans staging a counterrally against
affirmative action.
"The most frustrating is people saying affirmative action isn't needed
anymore," Choy said.
Tang said, "I think with hard work, any person can get into UC Berkeley.
They don't need to get in on the basis of their skin color."
Last week, a coalition of eight student groups at UC Berkeley --
representing African American, Latino and other minority groups that have
traditionally played an important role in recruiting minority students to
campus -- threatened to withhold their recruiting assistance this spring
if the regents do not appeal the ban.
The timing is key because incoming freshmen who have been offered
admission have to inform the university by May 1 if they want to enroll.
Chronicle staff writers Justino Aguila, Henry K. Lee and Tanya Schevitz
contributed to this report. / E-mail Charles Burress at cburress@sfchronicle.com.
©2001 San Francisco Chronicle Page A – 19
* * *
2-21-2001
BAMN prepares for Day of Action rally
Maria Sprow
Daily News Writer
Tomorrow’s National Day of Action is coming at an opportune time for
members of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means
Necessary. The day, set aside as a way to promote and preserve the use of
race in college admissions, comes just weeks before a decision is expected
from U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman in the case against the Law
School’s admissions policies.
“We want to impact the judge before he makes his decision, and he will be
making his decision in the next couple weeks. We’re in the strongest
position we’ve been in,” BAMN member Kate Stenvig said.
BAMN has been participating in the Day of Action since February 1997 but
attracted a record-breaking crowd Oct. 19 at the last Day of Action.
Students from area high schools and universities, including Michigan
State, Eastern Michigan and Western Michigan came to the October rally to
support the University in its fight to keep affirmative action-based
admission policies.
For the upcoming Day of Action march, BAMN expects as many, if not more,
students from area universities to show their support.
“It should definitely be the biggest turnout of students because of the
trial. People are definitely starting a wake up and look at the issues.
They are realizing that it really does affect them,” said Stenvig, an LSA
sophomore.
But members of Multi-Racial Unity Living Experience at Michigan State
University say midterms are keeping some students away from the Day of
Action festivities.
“We have put a lot of effort into the trial, and could not organize
anything for Thursday,” said Michigan State senior Tiffany Gridiron, a
leader of MRULE. Gridiron added that some MSU students might make their
way to Ann Arbor but that the East Lansing school has its own events
planned.
BAMN members are also expecting busloads of Detroit high school students
to attend the march. High schools expected to have the biggest turnout are
Detroit’s Cass Technical and McKenzie high schools. “They know the
importance of this case. They know that affirmative action will directly
affect their life, and they want to make sure that they take this chance
to be a part of history,” said BAMN member Erika Dowdell, an LSA junior.
Students from Cass Tech have been especially involved in the trials,
sending a petition to Judge Friedman describing their schooling
conditions.
“You can’t drink the water in the drinking fountain. There are cockroaches
and rats and not enough books to go around, and it’s supposed to be the
best school in Detroit,” said Stenvig.
The rally is scheduled for noon tomorrow on the Diag. While the Day of
Action is considered a national event, different schools around the
country pick different days to rally.
BAMN members hope the rally will show the University and the judges
overseeing the lawsuits that students are in favor of race-based
admissions.
Dowdell said that the rally would act as “the court for University
students to come and exhibit support.”
“This is an historic case. There was an overwhelmingly big number of
students at closing arguments. Some couldn’t even fit in the room. It made
a huge impact on the judge,” Dowdell said.
Besides the march, there will be several speakers present on the Diag to
talk about the importance of affirmative action to the University.
“The more people know about it, the more people tend to be supportive
about it. We hope people will be inspired to act and get involved. We’re
trying to use this opportunity to really fight for equality and really,
really integrate education,” Stenvig said.
* * *
1-24-2001
Judge hears from student on stand
By Jen Fish
DETROIT - Erika Dowdell, an LSA junior who plans on attending law school,
told U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman yesterday that she does not
think she would have been accepted to the University if not for
affirmative action programs, despite a 3.7 grade point average in high
school.
Describing her experiences in the Detroit public school system to a filled
courtroom, Dowdell said she was motivated to go to Cass Technical High
School in hopes of receiving greater educational opportunities.
As a student at Cass Tech, Dowdell said she didn't realize until her
senior year of the greater advantages afforded to white suburban students.
"They were given every type of resource that we didn't even know existed,"
she said.
At the University, Dowdell said there are definite assumptions white
students make about their black counterparts, and that she experiences
racism "on a daily basis."
Calling affirmative action "a simple acknowledgment of history," Dowdell
also said she "could never participate in a University that can't admit
the truth" that there is a history of discrimination and segregation in
the United States.
Dowdell's testimony opened the case for the intervening defendants. The
intervening defendants are a coalition of students and affirmative action
and civil rights advocates who contend that affirmative action policies
are necessary to remedy past and present discrimination.
Dowdell's testimony was often met with applause and murmurs of agreement
from the students seated in the courtroom. The audience also did not
hesitate to voice its skepticism at the standing objection made by the
Center for Individual Rights against Dowdell's testimony.
CIR attorney F. Lawrence Purdy argued that Dowdell's testimony, while
"compelling," had no relevance to the issues at trial.
Miranda Massie, lead counsel for the intervenors said "you can't
understand the questions set without engaging the questions of race and
racism in American life."
Also testifying for the intervenors was educational policy expert Gary
Orfield. A professor at Harvard, Orfield said he believed using
affirmative action to achieve diversity is absolutely necessary for a
multitude of reasons.
A majority of black and white students, he said, are in segregated schools
that give them very little opportunity to engage with students of
different races. Michigan, he said, is among the most segregated states in
the country.
In a study of Harvard and Michigan law students, Orfield said he found
that more than half of the students had either little or no contact with
people of other races.
This kind of segregation has increased over the years, he said, despite
the public's belief that most race problems have been solved.
"We're going backwards," he said. "We still have profound, pervasive
inequality."
But Orfield also cautioned against depending on affirmative action to
solve race problems.
"Affirmative action needs to be constantly monitored and altered," he said
outside the courtroom. "It's not the solution, only a way to respond."
Originally on page 1A in the 1-24-2001 issue of the Daily.
* * *
1-16-2001
BSU, DAAP clash during MLK rally
By Jacquelyn Nixon
As students took to the streets yesterday to advocate affirmative action,
there were clear divisions among the 200 participants in how the message
supporting affirmative action should be presented.
Shortly after students marched from the corner of South University and
South Forest avenues to the Diag, where the rally began, the crowd parted
as members of the Black Student Union and the Black Greek Association
entered. They held green signs stating affirmative action was their issue
and not an issue for the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action and
Integration and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary.
BSU members joined BAMN and the other organizations on the steps of the
Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library. BAMN member Ebonie Byndon said although
BAMN has encountered problems with BSU members in the past, BSU members
have never before charged into a BAMN event. BSU members said they feel
BAMN is an outside force which does not truly reflect the concerns of the
minority students of the University.
Monique Luse, an LSA sophomore on the BSU executive board, said BSU
respects that BAMN fights for affirmative action, but they don't agree
with their tactics. "The organization is not run by University students.
BSU, on the other hand, is led by the students. BAMN does not have that
same element," Luse said. Throughout the rally, sparks began to fly
between BAMN and BSU members in the crowd. "We would work hand in hand
with this organization, but they won't let us," said BSU historian D'Yal
Mcallister.
Donna Stern, a paralegal for BAMN, said the BSU and BAMN have different
ideas about the type of action to take for progress in the area of
affirmative action. "They don't want mass militant action. It takes people
getting on the streets to win. (BSU is) against mass action which is how
civil rights was won in the first place," Stern said.
Following the rally a small scuffle broke out between BAMN member and LSA
sophomore Agnes Aleobua and Mcallister. Members of their respective
organizations quickly broke it up.
BAMN chose MLK Day to demand equality and integration in education on the
streets. "Affirmative action is our right," marchers chanted. The rally
also occurred one day before the University goes to trial to defend its
Law School admissions policy.
One student protested what the activists rallied for. LSA freshman Adam
Dancy held up a sign which read "King would hate affirmative action."
"MLK dreamed of a world where children would be judged on the content of
their character, not their race," Dancy said. "King would not like this."
He had earlier held up another sign which read "affirmative action is
racist" that had been torn apart by marchers.
Dancy and his signs were met with a barrage of snowballs and as the crowd
neared the Diag, one marcher mumbled, "you're lucky it's just snowballs."
The march and rally in memorium of King were sponsored by Defend
Affirmative Action by Any Means Necessary, Members of the Social Welfare
Action Alliance, Minority Affairs Commission and Native American Student
Association, as well as students from Mackenzie High School and Cass Tech
High School also participated in the march and rally.
Deseree Mattoks, a Cass Technical High School senior, attended yesterday's
rally and said MLK Day is a reminder of the fight for civil rights.
"We are continuing the fight, which is something he started," Mattoks
said.
Rackham student Jessica Curtin, organizer of the march, said just as King
took action for civil rights, BAMN is also taking action to make change.
"We're continuing the struggle of the civil rights movement through
affirmative action and integration," Curtin said.
* * *
1-10-2001
MSA elects new chairs to follow lawsuits
By Carrie Thorson
The election of the Michigan Student Assembly's Affirmative Action Task
Force chair fueled debate at the group's first meeting of the semester in
the Michigan Union last night.
At the beginning of the meeting, MSA President Hideki Tsutsumi immediately
handed the gavel over to Student General Counsel Alok Agrawal because of
the "controversial issues" on the agenda.
The newly created Affirmative Action Task Force was created to organize
students to attend the trial for the suit facing the University's Law
School scheduled for next week.
Last night the assembly uncontestedly appointed three chairs to lead the
committee: Rackham Rep. Jessica Curtin, School of Social Work Rep. Diego
Bernal and Rackham student Amer Zahr.
During constituents' time, several members of the Defend Affirmative
Action Party spoke in favor of LSA Rep. Erika Dowdell and Curtin to chair
the task force.
"The most experienced members on that party are Jessica and Erika, and to
elect anyone else would be illogical," LSA sophomore and DAAP party member
Agnes Aleobua said.
Members of DAAP are "the people who have been meeting with lawyers and
leaders ... organizing MLK Day ... and did the Reverse the Drop campaign
under the leadership of Jessica and Erika. No one else can match what they
have done thus far or can in the future," Aleobua added.
Bernal initially proposed to run not against DAAP but with them.
"I wouldn't accept any nomination unless it was me and a DAAP person ...
but after talking to Jessica it appears that is not acceptable," Bernal
stated. Initially DAAP members were opposed to Bernal's offer.
Zahr said he was not opposed to running with DAAP members not only because
he felt other groups needed to be included in student's defense of
affirmative action but because of the way DAAP members fervently rejected
his offer of collaboration. Bernal said he was opposed to being called "a
tool of the right wing."
Agrawal's executive decision that there could only be two chairs of a
committee was appealed. The assembly consented to the appointment of the
three AATF chairs.
"I'm really hoping that we can work together and (the Coalition to Defend
Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary) and DAAP can continue to do the
work they've done," Bernal said after being elected. "There's room for
everybody."
Curtin also expressed optimism about the decision to have three chairs
lead the task force.
"This is what we need to mobilize the campus to defend affirmative
action," Curtin said.
Last night the assembly also allocated $700 to the Environmental Issues
Commission for Earthweek 2001 and $300 to the Women's Issue's Commission
for advertisement of the Vagina Monologues, which is scheduled for Feb.
16.
Three new members were recently appointed to the assembly, including
Nursing junior Brad Sprecher and LSA junior Mariam Khalife.
LSA sophomore Zach Slates was appointed as an additional representative to
fill the additional seat allocated to LSA.
* * *
12-13-2000
Assembly votes to form affirmative action task force
By Jane Krull
Daily Staff Reporter
In a crowded meeting characterized by sudden outbursts and character
attacks, the Michigan Student Assembly passed a proposal to form an
affirmative action task force in a vote of 31-6.
"I am sure that my freshman class will be disappointed to hear that you
guys can't control yourselves properly," Engineering freshman Ryan Haag
said to the assembly.
Haag said he attended the meeting at the suggestion of Rackham
representative and Defend Affirmative Action Party founder Jessica Curtin,
who spoke and handed out flyers during the first 10 minutes of his Physics
140 lecture.
The affirmative action task force was proposed by Curtin, former Peace and
Justice Commission chair, the week after she was ousted from her position
by current PJC chair James Justin Wilson.
"There is no precedent for MSA putting up obstacles for reps who want to
work on an assembly supported issue," Curtin said. "The reason that there
is opposition to the task force is that there are reps on this assembly
that are opposed to affirmative action."
During constituents' time 14 people spoke in favor of forming the task
force and two spoke against.
Luke Massie, an organizer of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By
Any Means Necessary, said that if the assembly deems the position of "SuperFan"
worthy of a task force, than affirmative action should be given one as
well.
"Every rep that votes against this Defend Affirmative Action Task force
shows that this assembly takes 'SuperFan' more seriously than defending
affirmative action and integration in society," Massie said.
"If these issues go to trial and we lose, and we as MSA leaders didn't do
anything to fight for our school, I will resign as 'SuperFan,'" LSA Rep.
Reza Breakstone said.
LSA junior Dustin Lee said forming an affirmative action task force "would
set a very dangerous precedent that the University doesn't want to get
involved with -- if somebody loses a chair, they can come back the next
week and set up a task force to get that power back."
Wilson said he doesn't see the formation of the task force as the end of
his work with affirmative action.
"I ran for P&J chair with the intention of bringing levelheadedness to the
affirmative action debate. This vote doesn't bring an end to that
possibility, but I am afraid it allows some abuse," Wilson said.
The assembly also unanimously passed funding $500 to the International
Students Affairs Commission for the funding of a holiday dinner for those
students who are unable to make it home for the holidays.
* * *
11-29-2000
MSA picks winter committee leaders
By Jane Krull
The first action of the newly elected Michigan Student Assembly at their
weekly meeting last night was the election of committee and commission
heads.
Chairs and vice chairs were elected from within the assembly to head MSA's
seven committees and chairs were picked from the entire student body to
lead the 13 commissions.
LSA sophomore James Justin Wilson defeated current Peace and Justice
Commission Chair Jessica Curtin for her position by a vote of 21-17.
"Peace and Justice has only been a political front for (the Coalition to
Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary)," Wilson said. "I am
much more open to all sides of the political and activist spectrum."
Curtin, a Rackham representative, was not discouraged by her loss.
"It's unfortunate, but not a big obstacle to DAAP to build a national
movement to defend affirmative action and integration," Curtin said.
LSA Rep. Reza Breakstone was elected External Relations Committee chair.
"I hope to continue the path that former chair Sarah Pray blazed in
involving the University at all political levels," Breakstone said.
LSA sophomore Elizabeth Anderson said that with being re-elected as the
Women's Issues Commission chair, she can continue her work in getting the
"Vagina Monologues" off the ground.
"It gets the issues of women's sexuality publicity and less fear of
expression," Anderson said.
The guest speaker at the meeting, Sustainable University of Michigan Team
member Karl Steyaert, spoke to the assembly in the hopes that
representatives would support the Proposal for a Sustainable University of
Michigan.
"It is a student-led initiative moving the University of Michigan toward
increased environmental and social awareness through thirty specific
points," Steyaert said.
The points include an environmentally responsibly purchasing policy and a
sustainable campus transportation plan for the University.
Later in the meeting, the assembly unanimously passed a resolution to
support the "National Summit of the New Civil Rights Movement to Defend
Integration and Affirmative Action" to be held Jan. 12-16 at the
University.
The assembly also unanimously passed a resolution in support of a two-week
outreach and educational program about AIDS in the black and Latino
communities sponsored by the Black Student Union.
A motion to form a select investigation committee "to investigate possible
unethical actions by Curtin in regard to Affirmative Action 102 Week" was
withdrawn from the agenda.
Curtin sponsored Affirmative Action 102 through PJC.
"It was strictly a political attack by opponents on the assembly, Curtin
said. "It was really good that they decided to withdraw it."
MSA Student General Counsel Alok Agrawal said he co-sponsored the motion
because "there were certain loose ends that didn't fit" about the effort
of Affirmative Action 102 to get anti-affirmative action speakers in order
to represent both viewpoints.
The motion was decidedly removed because "it became a 'she said-he said'
sort of thing," Agrawal said.
|