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On CNN yesterday, former GOP Congressman Tom Tancredo said that the National Council of La Raza, the Latino civil rights organization of which Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a member, is “a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses.” His evidence?
The logo of La Raza is ‘All for the race. Nothing for the rest.’
One big problem with that. The motto of the National Council of La Raza is “Strengthening America by promoting the advancement of Latino families.” (Their logo, if anyone’s wondering, can be seen in this photo of John McCain’s speech to their 2008 national convention.)
Oops.
The phrase Tancredo had in mind, “Por La Raza todo, fuera de La Raza nada,” appears in a 1969 poem/manifesto associated with the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), a Chicano student activist group.
MEChA is a loose federation of campus-based student organizations, some more radical than others. California politician Cruz Bustamente was a MEChA member as an undergraduate at Fresno State University in the 1970s, and he got in hot water with conservatives during his 2003 campaign for governor for refusing to repudiate the group.
MEChA and NCLR could hardly be more different.
In a 2002 interview Judge Sonia Sotomayor said that she felt “isolated … and very unsure about how I would survive” as an undergraduate at Princeton, and that campus organizations for students of color “provided me with an anchor I needed to ground myself in that new and different world.”
Sotomayor grew up poor in the Bronx, and she discovered in her first semester at Princeton that her educational background “was not on par with that of many of my classmates.” She became involved in Accion Puertorriquena, a Puerto Rican student organization, and the campus’s Third World Center, and she credits “the third-world students who preceded me and those who had supported me while I was at Princeton” for helping her to thrive on campus.
The complete article, from Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education, is not online, but extended excerpts can be found here.
I’m going to be speaking at a media conference at Hunter College this Saturday, as part of a panel called “Media for Student Activism: Building Networks, Building Movements.”
The NYC Grassroots Media Conference will feature more than forty panels in four sessions, on subjects ranging from managing online communities to queer youth media. It’s going to be an amazing conference, and student registration is only fifteen bucks!
I’m really excited about our panel too. It’s called Media for Student Activism: Building Networks, Building Movements, and I’ll be talking about Twitter and blogs. We’ve also got a documentarian, a Labor Studies prof, and two undergraduate student activists on board, each of whom will be bringing something of their own to the group.
More on the panel (and the conference) later this week.
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.
So this isn’t something I would have expected to see in the Chronicle, even as a guest opinion piece.
In this Friday’s issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Charles Schwartz, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, argues that students should appoint trustees to public colleges and universities in proportion to the support that their tuition and fees provide to those institutions.
As “state support has dwindled,” Schwartz argues, tuition and fees have come to underwrite an ever-growing part of universities’ operating budgets. Given that, the principle of no taxation without representation argues that students (and, in situations in which they are not paying their own way, their parents) be given a voice in choosing university trustees and regents.
This is more than just a provocation on Schwartz’s part. He offers several sensible mechanisms by which this reform could be implemented, notes a parallel structure in the management of California’s public employees’ retirement fund, and even suggests that such representation could be mandated by federal law if it is not implemented on the state level.
Is such a change coming anytime soon? No, probably not. But it’s absolutely true that students directly fund public colleges and universities to an extent that was unimaginable just a few decades ago, and Schwartz is absolutely right to point out that right now “the industry of higher education treats undergraduate students as cash cows.”
Good for him, and good for the Chronicle for publishing him.
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