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UC Berkeley’s chapter of the College Republicans plan to host a bake sale on campus this morning as a commentary on affirmative action policies under consideration in the state legislature. (The idea is to critique affirmative action by offering food for sale to some groups for less than others.)
The “affirmative action bake sale” is a bit of a relic in conservative organizing — it had its heyday in the early 2000s. But it always provokes, and Berkeley is no exception. Some of the institutional reactions, however, have been fascinating.
Sunday, a group calling itself the Multicultural Coalition for Affirmative Action released a list of demands in response to the planned sale, calling on the Berkeley administration to — among other things — add clear anti-discrimination statements to the university’s Principles of Community, and to add those principles to the Berkeley code of student conduct.
On Sunday night ASUC — Berkeley’s student government — unanimously passed a resolution that, after a page of careful laying out of the various jurisdictional issues and imperatives involved, “condemn[ed] the use of discrimination whether it is in satire or seriousness by any student group.”
And yesterday Berkeley’s chancellor sent out an open letter on the sale. The event, he said, was “hurtful or offensive to many” at Berkeley, though he didn’t say why. It was not the politics of the sale, he implied, that were problematic, but the form of their expression: “Regardless what policies or practices one advocates, careful consideration is needed on how to express those opinions.”
Absent from each of these formal statements was any explicit statement of what exactly was wrong with the Republicans’ sale. (ASUC indicated that actually selling treats to certain students at reduced prices might violate anti-discrimination regulations, but of course actually selling stuff was never the point of the event.)
I wrote yesterday about the hundreds of non-violent protesters who have been arrested at UC campuses in the last three years, and I’ll be writing more about those events as this week rolls on. Seen in that light, the failure of ASUC and Chancellor Birgenau to do more than merely place themselves on the side of sensitivity and civility rings hollow.
As an act of political theater, the affirmative action bake sale is a pretty paltry one. It offers a weak and overplayed analogy to the admissions debate, rehashing claims that have been batted around for ages. What makes it provocative isn’t its form but its message: that affirmative action is an immoral act of discrimination.
That’s what the College Republicans of Berkeley believe, and that is the message they are attempting to convey with their sale. They believe that affirmative action is racist and sexist against against whites and men, and there’s no polite way to call someone a bigot.
Birgenau wants to make the debate about the bake sale a debate about how polite the Berkeley community should be. But that’s not what it’s about, on either side. It’s about who should be allowed to enroll in the university, and on what terms.
That’s what’s under discussion. That’s what’s at stake.
Update | Zunguzungu has provided a report from the scene in comments, and there’s a lot more info to be had at the Twitter hashtag #theaffirmation. All in all, it sounds like student supporters of affirmative action responded cogently and soberly to the bake sale. And it’s worth noting that a list of demands released today by “The Coalition,” an anti-bakesale group, pretty much ignores the bake sale, and the College Republicans, altogether.
The coalition demand the passage and implementation of California’s Senate Bill 185, which would allow race and ethnicity to be taken into consideration in UC admissions, and Assembly Bill 540, which addresses admissions and tuition issues for undocumented students. They demand new funding and staffing for support services for students of color at Berkeley. They demand a restructuring of the school’s American culture course requirement to center scholarship on race, ethnicity, and gender, and the inclusion of the university’s “Principles of Community” on course syllabi. They demand representation of underrepresented campus communities in admissions hiring.
Each of these demands is addressed to the functioning of the University of California as an institution. None of them have the College Republicans or those who share their views as their target. Crucially absent from the list are demands that appeared in a draft version that appeared on Friday, calling on the university to bolster its code of conduct with new restrictions on bigoted student behavior.
As I said above, Berkeley’s chancellor Birgenau is seeking to frame this conflict as a dispute between students over standards of civility. Berkeley’s campus activists have rejected that framing, and are properly centering the government and the university itself in their response.
The Education Optimists blog takes on ten myths about affirmative action in college admissions:
“As many as 15 percent of freshmen at America’s top schools are white students who failed to meet their university’s minimum standards for admission, according to Peter Schmidt, deputy editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education. These kids are ‘people with a long-standing relationship with the university,’ or in other words, the children of faculty, wealthy alumni and politicians. According to Schmidt, these unqualified but privileged kids are nearly twice as common on top campuses as Black and Latino students who had benefited from affirmative action.”
New census data show the devastating effect of the current recession on young adults:
“‘Their really high levels of underemployment and unemployment will haunt young people for at least another decade,’ Sum said. Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard University, added, ‘These people will be scarred, and they will be called the ‘lost generation’ – in that their careers would not be the same way if we had avoided this economic disaster.'”
Campus police at UC Irvine held a mock protest drill last week, complete with a SWAT team deployment:
“I am on campus today and I am currently witnessing a protest simulation complete with UC Irvine SWAT teams, police, fake protesters, and the fire department. It looks like a really strange farce. They are ‘protesting’ outside of Gateway in a closed off area around the library. The protesters are simulating what ‘protesters’ act like, confronting officers, yelling, and running around the building with picket signs and megaphones. There are also photographers and camera men ‘capturing’ the event . . . . There were a lot of SWAT on campus and I thought they had a real emergency going on. It seems it has been going on for over an hour. The protesters even have fake ‘speeches’ and chants.”
Cuts to public higher ed are causing disproportionate pain to community colleges:
“‘Budget cuts might mean larger classes, fewer full-time faculty, shorter hours in the library, or it might be less frequent cutting of the grass,’ he says. ‘But community colleges are pretty bare bones. The vast majority of money they receive goes to academics,’ not to prettifying the grounds, sports teams, or other extracurriculars.”
Short answer? No.
For starters, Twitter has denied that they’ve blocked “Troy Davis” (or #TroyDavis, or any other variant) from trending. Different topics relating to the story have been trending locally and nationally all day — as I type this, two Davis-related topics are trending in the US, while “Who Is Troy Davis” is trending in NYC and Atlanta, among other places.
So what’s the story? Why isn’t “Troy Davis” trending — or why isn’t it trending more broadly and consistently?
Because Twitter’s trending topics don’t measure Twitter users’ interest in a topic directly. They’re not intended to. I wrote about this in excruciating detail last December, when similar questions were being asked about the failure of the #Wikileaks tag to trend.
You can go read that whole post if you like. But the upshot was this:
Twitter wants trending topics to be novel, and widely tweeted, and tweeted by disparate users. They want their trending topics to be trendy.
They don’t censor terms like “Troy Davis” or “Wikileaks.” They don’t have any policy preventing them from trending. But at the same time, they’re not interested in having any topic like these — an ongoing discussion of a major social or political issue, going through peaks and lulls and times of broader and narrower resonance — make the list.
Twitter’s trending topics aren’t intended to measure what people are interested in. They aren’t intended to measure what people are passionate about. They aren’t intended to measure what people are committed to. They aren’t even intended to measure what people are fascinated by.
They’re intended to measure “Ooh! Shiny!”
As university budgets are squeezed, admissions officials are recruiting students who don’t need financial aid:
“More than half of the admissions officers at public research universities, and more than a third at four-year colleges said that they had been working harder in the past year to recruit students who need no financial aid and can pay full price, according to the survey of 462 admissions directors and enrollment managers conducted in August and early September. Similarly, 22 percent of the admissions officials at four-year institutions said the financial downturn had led them to pay more attention in their decision to applicants’ ability to pay.”
A Canadian student has filed a human rights complaint over a campus blackface incident:
“Anthony Morgan filmed the students at a Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC) school sporting event earlier this month, as they were dressed in Jamaican colours with their skin painted black. They were also chanting in mock Jamaican accents about smoking marijuana.”
Mother Jones reports on the “gutsiest” student newspapers of 2011:
“In April, La Salle University in Philadelphia demanded that an embarrassing story about a business profwho’d hired exotic dancers for a class not run above the fold in the Collegian. The paper’s solution? It left the top of its front page blank and ran the story below the fold, gaining national attention. Well played, friends, well played.”
Maurice Sendak talks about why he doesn’t think of himself as a children’s book author:
“I don’t know what that means. How do you write for children? I really have never figured that out. So I decided to just ignore it. I knew that my books would only be published as children’s books. And I once objected fiercely to that. I wanted Outside Over There to be realized as a complex work of art. Well, it wasn’t. And I had to live with that. And yet, perhaps, in some ways, it’s my favorite book of everything I’ve ever done. But it’s a weird book. It’s a weird book. It’s a weird world.”
A British observer warns her country against following America’s higher education model:
“Unfortunately, with our tripling of tuition fees and the shifting of the burden from state to the individual, it is the US trajectory that the UK seems to be following – one that evidence shows is unwise. As massive tuition-fee increases and poor state support in the US take their toll, graduation rates have fallen well behind those of most other industrialised nations.”
Students at a Cairo university have ended a weeklong sit-in after administrators met most of their demands:
“The conflict is also part of a larger wave of campus activism sweeping Egypt. At state universities, students and faculty are demanding the resignation of presidents and deans appointed during the Mubarak era, and the holding of elections to select their replacements. They are also demanding more openness and an end to security interference in campus affairs. The national Egyptian Student Union was reconstituted after a conference at the American University in Cairo in August. Its activities had been suspended 32 years ago by then-president Anwar Sadat.”
Even The Economist has doubts about California’s privatization of public higher education:
“In 1990 the state paid 78% of the cost of educating each student. That ratio dropped to 47% last year, and will fall even more during the current academic year, after the latest round of budget cuts, overseen by Jerry Brown, the current governor and son of Pat Brown. In some ways, California has now inverted the priorities of the older Brown’s era. Spending on prisons passed spending on universities in around 2004.”
Aaron Kreider of Campus Activism offers some thoughts on Occupy Wall Street:
“Unlike Tahrir Square, there is no Muslim Brotherhood or April 6th Youth Movement (not to mention the many other Egyptian civic organizations) behind these protests. Instead we have Anonymous – a loose movement of liberal minded vigilante hackers and hacker wannabes. I’d trust their ideas on civil liberties, but not on democracy or anything else. They are more like nonviolent terrorists than grassroots democrats. And they might be less democratic than some violent terrorist (aka liberation) groups. Adbusters is far more legitimate but more of an arts project than a traditional social movement organization.”
British breakfast cereal Weetabix is paying kids to run and play wearing their logos:
“One day a brand ambassador will shoot up a school, and the potato snack company that paid him to endorse its products online will rush out a press release explaining that his actions don’t embody their values, which traditionally involve less screaming and death. And we’ll all be sadder and wiser. And we’ll buy something different. For about three weeks.”
Police in Santa Cruz, California, are using algorithms to predict when and where criminals will strike again:
“A crime is broken down to the two most likely chunks of time it is likely to occur in a certain area. Police are sent out every day with a map of the ten “hot spots” they should watch. The program does not give police probable cause to arrest anyone, but it does give them a good reason to ask questions when they see someone in the right area at the right time looking suspicious.”
Esquire nails the problem with Jon Stewart, and leaves America’s Sweetheart pinned to the wall, wiggling his limbs and squirming:
“Kids who couldn’t sleep at night worrying that their president was a bad guy and that their country was doing bad things could now rest easy knowing that their president was just a dick, and that their country, while stupid, was still essentially innocent. It was like you could get upset about what was going on but still live your life, because there was Jon Stewart right before bedtime, showing you how to get upset entertainingly, how to give a shit without having to do anything about it.”
Ralph Nader, Cornel West, and Gore Vidal team up to primary Obama with Superfriends list of six challengers:
“A slate of six candidates announces its decision to run in the Democratic primaries. Each of the candidates is recognizable, articulate, and a person of acknowledged achievement. These contenders would each represent a field in which Obama has never clearly staked a progressive claim or where he has drifted toward the corporatist right. These fields would include: labor, poverty, military and foreign policy, health insurance and care, the environment, financial regulation, civil and political rights/empowerment, and consumer protection.”
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