Category Archive

Georgia’s selective public universities will bar undocumented aliens from admission under a policy adopted by the state’s board of regents today.

The ban applies to all public colleges and universities that do not admit all academically qualified applicants in a given year, and will take effect next fall. Currently five state institutions — the University of Georgia, Georgia State, Georgia College & State University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Medical College of Georgia — meet the regents’ definition.

The regents’ decision makes Georgia the third state to bar undocumented students from some or all public higher education institution. South Carolina bans undocumented immigrants from all public colleges, and Alabama bars them from two-year colleges.

Currently only 27 students attend the five colleges that are affected by the ban, while another 474 attend the state’s thirty non-selective institutions.

All undocumented students in Georgia are required to pay non-resident tuition rates, regardless of how long they have lived in the state. The regents today also passed new regulations designed to ensure that universities are aware of the residency status of students they enroll.

I’ll have a full post up on this with new developments in the story soon, but in the meantime I wanted to be sure to point y’all in the direction of my most recent Huffington Post op-ed — an exposé of the misrepresentations behind CSU Northridge Economics professor Kenneth Ng’s latest defense of “Big Dummy Kenny,” his Thai sex tourism website.

Krystal Ball is a 28-year-old entrepeneur who is running for Congress from Virginia’s First District. A Democrat, Ball has long been considered a long-shot against the district’s Republican incumbent, and her race has garnered little national attention.

That changed last week when someone anonymously released a set of photographs taken at a private Christmas party several years ago. In the photos Ball is dressed as a sort of dominatrix Santa Claus, leading around a man dressed as Rudolph on a leash. Rudolph’s nose is dildo-shaped, and in some of the photos, Ball mimes masturbating and fellating it.

There’s no nudity or actual sexual activity in the photos, and it turns out — if it matters — that “Rudolph” was her then-husband. (She’s since remarried, and has a young daughter.) But the photos went viral quickly, turning a spotlight on Ball.

Yesterday Ball responded with a Huffington Post op-ed that rejects the “youthful indiscretions” script standard in these sorts of mini-scandals. In it, she refuses to apologize for the photos, and takes on the ways in which attacks like this attempt to shame women candidates.

Some highlights…

I don’t believe these pictures were posted with a desire to just embarrass me; they wanted me to feel like a whore. They wanted me to collapse in a ball of embarrassment and to hang my head in shame. After all, when you are a woman named Krystal Ball, 28 years old, running for Congress, well, you get the picture. Stripper. Porn star. I’ve heard them all. So, I sat in my husband’s arms and cried. I thought about my little girl. I couldn’t stand the idea that I had somehow damaged the cause of young women running for office. I couldn’t stand the idea that I might shame my family, my friends or my supporters in some way.

The tactic of making female politicians into whores is nothing new. In fact, it happened to Meg Whitman, one of the world’s most accomplished business women, just last week. It’s part of this whole idea that female sexuality and serious work are incompatible. But I realized that photos like the ones of me, and ones much racier, would end up coming into the public sphere when women of my generation run for office. And I knew that there could be no other answer to the question than this: Society has to accept that women of my generation have sexual lives that are going to leak into the public sphere. Sooner or later, this is a reality that has to be faced, or many young women in my generation will not be able to run for office.

…I decided that I had to fight. I had to come out publicly and raise my voice on this issue, even though I risked becoming some joke candidate named Krystal Ball. I also risked drawing more attention to the photos, which I still find tremendously embarrassing, but mostly because I’m shy, not because I think that what I did was wrong.

…My biggest support during this whole sad episode of my life has come from supporters of Hillary Clinton. In effect, they have been telling me that what happened to me could have happened to one of their daughters. They will not see their daughters called whores when they run for office just because of some college or post-college party. They will not watch the tide of everything they fought for washed away by the public exposure of female sexuality. Once again, like the heroes that they were a generation ago when they made their careers, they are stepping up to protect young women like me and to support us and to help us to grow up. We are young women. And we are dedicated to serving this country. And we will run for office. And we will win.

Not that it should matter, by the way, since the whole “stripper name” slur is such a creepy classist piece of crap, but Krystal got her name from her dad, who was a physicist working on crystalline structures. It was a dorky geek joke.

Update | Unbelievable. NPR blogger Frank James calls Ball and Rich Iott, who makes a hobby of dressing up like a Nazi, “a matched set.” Right, Frank. Because there’s no difference between parading around in an SS officer’s uniform at the age of 58 (as a part of a “re-enactment” group that grossly misrepresents Nazi history) and getting a little raunchy at a private party when you’re 23.

Second Update | Now Rich Iott has gone beyond defending Nazi re-enactment to actually defending Nazis. In an interview with Anderson Cooper last night, he suggested that the Waffen SS were motivated by patriotism and anti-communism and declared that it’s inappropriate to “sit here and judge that today.”

Third Update | Frank claims that the photo story would be breaking the same way if Ball were a male candidate. The fifty hits this blog has had in the last hour from people searching for “Krystal Ball Rudolph” suggest otherwise.

The whole Malcolm Gladwell networked activism brouhaha has pretty much petered out, but I’ve just had reason to go back and re-read one of my favorite responses to his piece, and I liked it even better this time.

Here’s a big old quote. Go read the whole thing. It’s good.

The question for activists is always how to use available tools effectively. So blogs are for sharing longer ideas, Facebook is for spreading basic information and links, and Twitter is for sending small amounts of information publicly on the go. We even use phones sometimes. The internet can’t hammer a nail, but that’s what hammers are for. But there are some tools that don’t stand the test of time as well. Gladwell writes, “… what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church?” Of course, this is a completely useless question. What good would Twitter have been for dinosaurs? THEY COULDN’T EVEN PRESS BUTTONS! By putting the historical comparison on his opponents (who would “no doubt” make it), Gladwell attempts to dodge responsibility for an absurd line of argumentation. He writes that MLK needed disciplined and strategy because certain exigencies of the particular movement (the need to maintain a moral high ground for the white viewing public), but never explains why those tactical decisions should carry over. In fact, Alain Badiou has argued that while patience was the cardinal virtue required in the past, right now we need nothing so much as courage. Fetishizing the 60′s is a bad idea because we don’t live there any more. Material conditions change; so should our strategies, so should our tactics, so should our methods of communication.

The truth is, ninety-eight percent of the people with whom we need to organize don’t go anywhere in common but online, so that’s where we’ll go to find them.

The most-read StudentActivism.net pieces of the week just ended:

1. October 7 Day of Action Google Map

Nearly eighty co-ordinated student protest actions in twenty-five states, most with links. See also “First Thoughts on October 7.”

2. Reports: Rutgers Student Killed Himself After Roommate Videotaped Him in Gay Encounter

My first post on the Tyler Clementi case. See also “New Developments” and “Statement from Dharun Ravi’s Lawyer,”

3. October 7: Berkeley Library Sit-In

Liveblogging October 7’s most dramatic action.

4. What Malcolm Gladwell Doesn’t Understand About Activism and Social Networks

My rebuttal to Gladwell’s wrongheaded New Yorker piece about social media.

5. Did Tyler Clementi Ask His RA for Help the Day Before He Died?

Questions about the Rutgers response to the dorm-room spying case. See also this follow-up.

6. Quote of the Day

Spongebob and Patrick on action and planning. Really.

7. Oak is My King: School Yanks Transgender Student’s Homecoming Crown

Oak is My King. Truly.

8. “Chekhov for Children” Film and Discussion: NYC, October 21

A heads-up about a documentary in which I appear, having its New York premiere next week.

9. Carl Paladino Invents Past as Student Protest Peacemaker

One in a long string of bizarre statements that have tripped up the GOP candidate for New York governor.

10. The Tyler Clementi Tragedy: Five Takeaway Lessons for Jackasses

How not to be a jerk, and why.