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In a Delhi meeting Monday, Indian education minister Kapil Sibal told Australia’s deputy prime minister that the Australian government needs to do far more to protect the rights and safety of the one hundred thousand Indians studying in that country.
As the two leaders met, thousands of students marched in Australia’s largest cities, condemning government inaction against violence and exploitation targeting their community. “After a decade of neglect,” Australian National Union of Students president David Barrow proclaimed, “local and international students rally together to demand justice.”
The treatment of Indian students in Australia has provoked a diplomatic crisis between the two nations in recent months. Two vicious assaults this spring drew attention to an epidemic of bias crime against Indian students, and prompted a major protest march in downtown Melbourne that blocked a busy intersection for hours. The assaults and the protest, organized by the Federation of Indian Students in Australia, made the ongoing violence front-page news in both countries.
Indian students’ tuition payments represent a major revenue stream for Australian higher education, and the bias scandal has led to a new scrutiny for educational practices as well. Three private training colleges have shut their doors in recent months, amid charges that the for-profit institutions were offering substandard education and defrauding learners.
Update: I’d meant to include these first-person accounts of bias violence, but the link fell through the cracks while I was writing.
Trigger warning: The following post quotes a repulsive racist joke that features the N-word.
The Oxford University Conservative Association, one of Britain’s largest and most influential campus political organizations, has been stripped of its university recognition after members of its top leadership told racist jokes at an organization dinner — jokes that were met with applause, laughter, and cheers from the students in attendance.
OUCA is Oxford’s student affiliate of the right-wing Conservative Party. Many of the Conservatives’ top leaders are alumni of the OUCA, which has more than six hundred members. (Americans can think of the group as a vague equivalent of the Harvard Young Republicans, but much bigger and more influential.)
At a “hustings” dinner in June, candidates for the OUCA presidency were asked to repeat the most inappropriate joke they knew. One told a joke about lynching, while another, expatriate American Nick Gallagher, is said to have offered this: “What do you say when you see a television moving around in the dark? ‘Drop it nigger, or I’ll shoot you!’ ”
As I said at the top, reports suggest that there was no objection to either of these jokes from the crowd in attendance.
Gallagher and another student were suspended from OUCA after news of the jokes broke in the British press, and this week Oxford announced that it will no longer allow the group to use the university’s name or participate in the annual organizational fair for new students.
The most impressive part of the whole story was the defenses of Gallagher’s joke. Gallagher himself is said to have claimed that it was from a Chris Rock routine (um, no), while an unnamed friend offered this response:
“To suggest Nick is racist is just ridiculous. This has been blown out of all proportion and everyone just needs to lighten up.”
September 2 Update: Well, this sucks. A Slate investigation has concluded that Roxanne Shante’s story of her life after hip hop is pretty much all fake. Literally almost all of it. It’s mind-boggling.
Whoever drew up Roxanne Shante’s contract at Warner Music in 1984 probably figured he’d earned his bonus.
Shante, a 14-year-old MC from Queens, had a big hit that fall with “Roxanne’s Revenge,” an early hip-hop smash. But though the song sold hundreds of thousands of copies and Shante went on to make two albums for Warner, she never saw much in the way of royalties.
The one upside of her contract, from Shante’s perspective, was a clause committing Warner to pay all of her educational expenses … for life.
Warner most likely assumed that there wasn’t much chance they’d have to pay out much under that clause — Shante was a kid from the projects, and a single mom at 14. And when she did decide to go to college five years later, Warner gave her the run-around.
But Shante found an administrator at Marymount Manhattan College who was willing to give her a hand. Marguerita Grecco, Marymount’s dean, helped Shante to press Warner to make good, and let her take classes for free while she negotiated.
Warner eventually blinked after Shante threatened to go public, and the label wound up paying not only for her undergraduate schooling but also for the Cornell doctorate in Psychology that Shante earned in 2001. (All in all, they wound up paying out $217,000 for her educational expenses.)
Today Shante has a therapy practice serving the black community, owns an ice cream parlor in Queens, and funds a $5000 annual college scholarship for female rappers.
(Hat tips to PostBourgie and Hoyden About Town.)
“The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. … If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. … Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”
–Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation Speech, August 3, 1857.
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.
studentactivism.net 
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