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With Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings getting underway this morning, now seems like as good a time as any to revisit the Supreme Court nominee’s past as a student activist.
The Daily Princetonian has posted seven letters and articles by or about Sotomayor from her undergraduate days, and taken together they reveal her to be a committed advocate for Latinos and Latinas on campus, an opponent of anti-gay violence, and as the recipient of the university’s highest undergraduate honor for her “dedication to the life of minority students at Princeton.”
In a May 10, 1974 letter, Sotomayor explained a complaint filed by “the Puerto Rican and Chicano students of Princeton” alleging “an institutional pattern of discrimination” at the university. In it she noted that there were then only 31 Puerto Rican and 27 Chicano students enrolled at Princeton, and rebuked the university for its “total absence of regard, concern and respect for an entire people and their culture.” (Sotomayor is quoted in two Daily Princetonian articles on the complaint as well.)
In a letter published on September 12, 1974, Sotomayor and five other student advisors to a search for a new assistant dean for student affairs laid out their criticism of the lack of direct student involvement in the search and the racial and ethnic dynamics of the process. (Sotomayor is quoted directly on the controversy here.)
In a group letter from February 27, 1976, Sotomayor and 38 other members of the campus community condemned the recent vandalism of a dorm room that was home to two students active in the Gay Alliance of Princeton.
And on February 28, 1976, it was announced that Sotomayor was one of two co-recipients of Princeton’s M. Taylor Pine Honor Prize, “the highest honor the university confers on an undergraduate.” The Princetonian article on the honor referred to Sotomayor as having “maintained almost straight A’s for the last two years, but” being “especially known for her extracurricular activities.” (The photo at above right accompanied this article.) A follow-up piece two days later noted that Sotomayor was the first Latino student to win the award.
A study of forty thousand American college students finds that gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are more likely to place importance on political activism than straights, and that gay and bisexual men are more likely to be involved with student organizations. (LGB students were also more likely to value participation in the arts.)
The study, which was just published in the Economics of Education Review, is only available publicly as a pricey ($31.50) download. The above info is from the article’s abstract, and if I can get library access to it, I’ll bring you more details.
December 2010 update : If you’re looking for information on the White Student Union at West Chester University, click here.
I’m having a conversation on Twitter this afternoon with a guy who proposed creating a “White Heterosexual Organization” on his campus. He did this, as he put it, to show “how f’ing stupid it was to have a group based on race, or sexual orientation.”
I’ve seen this argument a lot over the years: “If blacks can have a Black Student Union, why can’t whites have a White Student Union? Why is one okay and the other one not?”
When someone asks me this, my response is always pretty much the same: “Do you actually want to have a White Student Union on campus? Would you be active in a WSU there was one? Is there stuff you’d like to be doing that the absence of a WSU is keeping you from doing?”
So far, nobody has ever answered any of these questions with a yes.
The guy I’ve been talking to on Twitter says he wanted “to make a point about the wrongness of segregation, regardless of purpose.” But you don’t demonstrate that something is bad “regardless of purpose” by showing that it’s bad if it has no purpose, you demonstrate it by showing that it’s bad even if it has a great purpose.
That’s the first fundamental problem with the WSU thought experiment — it doesn’t engage with the reasons that BSUs exist.
The argument that people should never voluntarily separate themselves by race (or gender, or religion, or sexual orientation) is one I can respect. It’s not one that I agree with, but it’s one I can respect. But I can only respect it if the person making the argument understands the real-world reasons why people sometimes do separate themselves along such lines.
If you don’t know why people are doing something, why should I listen when you tell me they should stop?
Two fascinating elementary school stories this week: A Colorado third-grader has set up a gay rights rally as an independent study project for school, while a California sixth-grader was made to give an oral report on Harvey Milk at lunchtime, instead of in class.
The Colorado story pretty much speaks for itself, but the California one deserves a bit of explanation.
When Natalie Jones, a sixth grader at Mt. Woodson Elementary School near San Diego, chose Harvey Milk as the subject of a class presentation, the principal of MWES decided that her biographical project fell under the school’s “Family Life/Sex Education” regulations. That policy mandates that students’ parents or guardians be notified in writing “before any instruction on family life, human sexuality, AIDS or sexually transmitted diseases is given.”
But the principal didn’t just send out written notice to the parents of Jones’ classmates. She went further.
According to the ACLU, the principal told Jones that she wouldn’t be able to give the presentation at all, then a few days later rescheduled it for a lunch period. When she sent notice, she told them that students would only be allowed to participate with written parental permission.
Eight of Jones’ thirteen classmates attended her presentation.
The ACLU is demanding that the school apologize, clarify the “Family Life/Sex Education” policy, and allow Jones to give her presentation to the entire class in a regular class session. A PDF copy of Jones’ PowerPoint presentation can be found here.
Last fall, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs student government president David Williams refused to sign a $2100 budget allocation for a National Coming Out Day event sponsored by Spectrum, a LGBT student group on campus. His action didn’t block the money from being disbursed, but did delay its release.
Williams said that the decision reflected his personal beliefs. Other students said it violated the student goverment constitution, and launched a campaign to remove him from his position.
The removal effort drew broad support, but ran into various bureaucratic and procedural stumbling blocks. Six months later, Williams remains in office, and he even ran for re-election this spring.
That election campaign gave the students of the campus the chance to weigh in on the controversy directly, however, and the result was decisive. Not only did Williams and his running mate lose, they lost to Daniel Garcia and James Burge, who are both gay men of color.
The effort to impeach Williams, whose term ends June 1, continues.
studentactivism.net 
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