Yes, an overtly racist column will piss people off
Newspaper opinion section suspended after racist column: After one of their columnists wrote a pretty overtly racist column (poorly disguised as satire) entitled “If it’s war the Asians want, it’s war they’ll get,” the editors at The University of Colorado at Boulder’s newspaper the Campus Press were protested and criticized for, among other things, being idiotic, insensitive, and racist. The paper has since taken action, suspending the entire opinion section, apologizing, and pretending to take diversity seriously with an open forum and several planned training sessions.
An interesting sidenote: the kid who wrote the column, Max Karson, is a known troublemaker at CU who was arrested at one point for making comments about killing his classmates shortly after the Virginia Tech massacre. Shockingly, this guy has also made other ridiculous cries for attention, opining in an article that the female clitoris is a non-functioning organ and that because “breasts have no nerves they should be squeezed as hard as possible.” Unfortunately, this guy has been repeatedly saved by the First Amendment. We hope you find yourself something productive to do, sir, instead of inciting people with your riotous prose.
College news from around the U.S. and the world
JuicyCampus.com creator didn’t intend site to get mean: In an open letter, he writes “Our hope for the site has always been that JuicyCampus would be a place for fun, lighthearted gossip, rather than a place to tear down people or groups.” Well, alright. But the opposite happened. Please correct this, for the sake of all the defamed sluts out there.
British towns buying rights to build university campuses: In what’s being called the ‘university challenge’, towns will be able to bid for the right to have an ivory tower built in their backyards, to stimulate the economy of the area and help adults get degrees more easily. Interesting approach, Britain. But will it work?
Apple taking over on college campuses: According to an executive with the computer maker, for the first time ever Apple’s laptops have outsold Dell’s at U.S. colleges. Next up: Apple wants every freshman to have an iPhone. It’s already working.
Post VTech and NIU, every gun threat turns into a lockdown: After reports of gunmen on campus, two schools in the Southeast, Appalachian State University and Middle Georgia College, were locked down and canceled classes. The AP says that both gun reports were found to be either a hoax, confusion, or mistake. Thank God.
Ithaca is newsworthy?
When I first arrived in rainy, cold (it’s raining and cold right now) Ithaca three and a half years ago, it seemed like there was never any news here. We were just that hippie city surrounded by ten square miles or so of reality, or whatever that stupid bumper sticker says. Ithacans kept to themselves and their drum circles and solar panels, and everything was fine. Deader than Jerry Garcia for those of us practicing journalism, though.
But our city and college have been awash in interesting, newsworthy stuff lately. First, the Dalai Lama rolled through. As always, he’s a big deal. Sandra Day O’Connor and Stephen Colbert are in town this week, too. One had a profound effect on many of the most important legal decisions that now affect our society on every level. The other’s running for president. I consider just these three visits, collectively, to be evidence that our little city is, however transiently, a Big Deal.
And it keeps getting better, at least for the news monkeys/junkies creeping on this blog: this week, the national media picked up on our city for two very different reasons. The New York Times ran an article today about racial tensions simmering in the bitter, socio-ethnic brew that is the Ithaca City School District. I personally think we did a better job almost three weeks ago, but hey, who’s counting?
Then there’s the article in the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education about our school’s plan to construct two LEED-certified green buildings at the doorstep of our campus. We also did a better job on this story almost a month ago, but again, it’s nice to have the coverage, MSM.
So here’s to hoping there’ll be more news in Ithaca. It’ll certainly make my job a little more interesting.
Some quick bits
I’ve been AWOL for a while, so I’ve missed any chance I had of talking about the Dalai Lama’s talk Wednesday. I’ll sum it up succinctly ? it was a real learning experience for me, and I’m definitely glad I went. If you haven’t already, check out Tricia’s article and the video we have up from his talk at the State Theater.
Not to continue on this Dalai thing, but he’s due to get a Congressional Gold Medal at the U.S. Capitol, which I’ve hear is a pretty big deal (”[Congress'] highest expression of national appreciation”). Unfortunately, China’s pissed. The NYT hedline of the AP story says China’s “warning” against it, the BBC says they’re “condeming” it, and CNN’s AP hed says they are “protesting” it. Very interesting: The BBC says this is “the first time a sitting president will appear in public” with the Dalai Lama.
I could understand China’s stance if this Dalai Lama hadn’t spent so much time in the West. The fact that he’s so well known outside of China and Tibet undermines their idea of this being the “internal affairs of China,” as Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said. But now I’m stepping on The Spectrum’s toes.
The other thing I was going to talk about before I get back to the books (and then a few days unplugged) is our local racism issue that’s going on. The Ithaca Journal published an article today about differing accounts of an Oct. 10 meeting that discussed the matters of punishment related to two students (one black, one white) at Ithaca High School. ISH principal said it wasn’t true that a white student admitted to different treatment at that meeting. I don’t think The Ithacan had anybody there to report, so at this point it appears to be a he-said she-said, of course with one party being the leader of IHS.
The Journal also has an editorial telling us what we pretty much already know: the Ithaca City School District has to get back to learning, and everybody needs to help. It reminds those who are protesting that their views have been heard, and we need to let the process work. Maybe I’m a little skeptical of the process, and though the Journal advocates for the Community Dispute Resolution Center to step in, I’m not sure what can be truly done in the meantime for the Board besides acquiesce to some of their critics. Truce isn’t the right word here.
Hopefully fellow blogger Aaron Munzer can step in with some of his own commentary on this subject. He’s been following this topic a little more closely than I have, so he can probably lay it out a bit better than I can.
Back to the books, and I’ll catch you on the other side of fall break.
A new view on doing something about racism
It’s nothing new: Columbia University’s been dealing with the repercussions of several instances of racism in the past weeks on its NYC campus. Racist graffiti, comments, abuse and attitudes seem to be a perpetual problem at institutions of higher learning across the country, including Ithaca College.
The Columbia Spectator’s columnist J.D. Porter has written an excellent piece about why most responses to racist events don’t ever end up changing anything. Although he seems to believe that chanting, protesting and making your voice heard won’t help, what he’s really doing is lampooning the current way in which college students attempt to enact change.
Outraged, I looked to my student leaders, whoever they may be, and quickly learned that I had no choice but to start a dialogue. ?How do you feel about racism in campus bathrooms?? I asked, and long conversations ensued. I felt that I was really opening channels of communication, forcing the administration to engage with student voices, and creating an atmosphere of open exchange where everyone could feel safe.
Which is to say, we generally give it the old College Try. After protests, outrage and anti-racist events that students tend to organize, the racists dig into their foxholes and hide away, and the world is a place of harmony again. For awhile.
But without institutionalizing equality initiatives that actually work, he argues, students can “create dialogues” and “instinctively congregate … to create [unified diversity]” forever without making a dent in the real problem.
Here’s the core problem: how do you eliminate racism effectively? You can’t beat it out of people, you can only educate it out of them. And some people don’t listen. Especially people who don’t consider themselves racist, but are, just a tiny bit. We all know who we are, and we’re all a little bit ashamed, so we act astonished and pretend that we’re enlightened folks to whom an education in racism would almost be insulting, because we’re so incredibly race-blind. Or race conscious. Same thing.
But race, ethnicity and stereotypes are how we understand and interact with other people and the world we live in. So a little prejudice is normal.
It’s not letting that prejudice influence our actions in a negative way and also working to eliminate it that is so abnormal. Our institutions can help with that, as Porter points out:
“[Add] a Columbia-run school for community children, maybe…” or “better financial aid for the poorest students…”
Kudos, Mr. Porter. Well put. Now let’s stop writing about this and actually do something.
Oh God, you idiots: students re-enact the Jena 6 beatings
Six white college students from the University of Louisiana at Monroe are in some serious hot water after a blackfaced re-enactment of the Jena 6 beatings they made, taped and posted to Facebook was discovered.
Photos and a video were posted to Facebook by Kristy Smith, a nursing student there. Now, the video is pretty hard to see and hear (watch a clip of it here at The Smoking Gun), but apparently, several of the students doing the beating re-enactment shout out, “Jena Six,” and “Niggers put the noose on.” Not very friendly people, I’m going to assume.
Smith took the videos and pictures down after people started calling her out for being racist. But it was too late, because some enterprising kid had taped the video while it was playing on his computer and then posted it to YouTube. Genius.
Smith’s understandably pretty upset about the whole thing, and apparently she cried during several media interviews while she pled her case for not being a racist. According to several articles, she has “just as many black friends as she does white friends,” and her “dad is dying of cancer” and she can’t call him. Well, much sympathy to you for your dad, but that doesn’t change anything. Oh, and those black “friends” you had? Not anymore, sweetie.
Race protests in Ithaca and around the country
The Chronicle of Higher Ed is reporting that students at more than 100 colleges across the country staged walk outs and protests in support of the six black students charged with racial crimes in Jena, La. The case has been all over the news recently, but essentially, six black high school students have been charged with attempted murder for beating a white student after they were repeatedly harassed in December of 2006. On sept. 20, more than 10,000 people marched in protest of their imprisonment, but now the momentum has spread to campuses, apparently.
I say: Bravo, college students. Let’s kick start this whole protesting thing again and make the 60s protests of our dirty hippie parents look like a 3-year-old’s birthday party.
In more local news, Ithaca College students were doing some protesting of their own (with many others) on Monday. Their protest, however, was targeting the Ithaca City School District, which is being criticized for how it is handling a high school student’s case of racial discrimination. Watch the video accompanying my article, it’s a pretty harsh condemnation of the school district.
Ithaca High school student Thandi Farley speaks about racism in her school. here.
Less like a blog, more like a bathroom stall
When you work for a college newspaper or write for a blog, you’re practically begging for junk email. I got ? and promptly trashed ? one last week telling me about LoudCampus.com. The site was launched and certainly looks and smells like Web 2.0: bright colors, oversized text, gradients, tiny and unreadable icons, and of course social networking.
Since Loud Campus content can only be written by students at your school, you know that the content is 100% real… real students… real discussions… real reviews.
What they don’t say is that the discussions can also be anonymous, which leads to some interesting comments. On their blog, Loud Campus says anonmity keeps things “vibrant,” but it also keeps things more raw and potentially libelous. Sample sparkling-dinner-style discussions include:
- Who else agrees that the new Rogan’s sucks a Nut!
- Do you think it’s unnatural to be orange in the middle of winter?
- THE BIGGEST DOUCHEBAG ON CAMPUS?? (I refuse to put the link to this one.)
Now, far be it from
Mean girls: She doesn’t look like any sister of mine
With a front-page expos? in the New York Times, 
the DePauw University chapter of Delta Zeta is facing harsh criticism from pretty much everyone. After struggling with an image problem ? a survey found students labeled them ?socially awkward? ? and some disapproving stares from national leaders questioning their commitment to DZ, 23 of the sisters were “granted them alumna status” (code for inactive) and unceremoniously evicted from the chapter house. The problem? All of the them fell into neat, if not imprecise, categories of fat, brainy and/or a minority. The remaining 12 were popular, pretty and white ? perfect for the social mixers. 6 of the dozen remaining DeeZees had the good sense to leave in protest.
Cindy Menges, executive director of Delta Zeta, said the women did it to themselves; they were not committed to recruitment, to the centennial year of the chapter’s founding, to the ?enrichment of student life at DePauw.? Oh, wait. Turns out they were, but the national leaders themselves pulled a wicked-stepmother move and locked the unsavory-est sisters upstairs in their own chapter house:
Robin Lamkin, a junior who is an editor at The DePauw and was one of the 23 women evicted, said many of her sisters bought new outfits and modeled them for each other before the interviews. Many women declared their willingness to recruit diligently, Ms. Lamkin said.
A few days after the interviews, national representatives took over the house to hold a recruiting event. They asked most members to stay upstairs in their rooms. To welcome freshmen downstairs, they assembled a team that included several of the women eventually asked to stay in the sorority, along with some slender women invited from the sorority?s chapter at Indiana University, Ms. Holloway said.
The article has the delicious revenge one of the protesting sisters pulled on them and how they rallied on campus to find out the truth.
Everyone’s backpedaling to soften the blow. DePauw’s press release is quick to point out President Robert G. Bottoms two-page (!) reprimand (PDF) of DZ, which basically says, uh, thanks ladies, we weren’t expecting to house this many homeless ex-sisters. It also tsk-tsks them for sending the letters out a week before finals, which caused many an angry phone call from parents. (Bottoms at least expressed slight disgust at the audacity of the DZ pooh-bahs in the NYT article.)
The National Office of Delta Zeta offers a prim well-I-never response to the article, pointing wildly to their Constitution that bans outright exclusion based on race (ahem) and mischaracterizations about just how diverse they all are. The removal of the sisters seemed to be the lesser of two evils from their perspective: if the house had chosen not to rush as the chapter had voted, the house would have been closed and not guaranteed a spot back in the Row, and since everyone loves anniversaries, it was in the best interest to keep the house open for their 100th pledge class in 2009 and “reorganize.” [Click the t-shirt to get the full effect of what their history seems to suggest.]
Greek life hasn’t been anywhere close to a bastion of fairness and inclusivity on college campuses, but it’s important to not condemn all fraternity brothers and sorority sisters, lock up their column-lined Rows and make them either accept everyone ? or worse, no one. But the idea of image and power getting in the way of their stated objectives outside of the camaraderie of the chapter house is nothing new, as USC freshman Elizabeth Kenigsberg. “[T]he process begins with appearance,” she writes in the Daily Trojan. “Sometimes, though, sorority members get too preoccupied with reputation and forget why they joined a sorority in the first place: for sisterhood.” Brave words, even if she now has to worry about her own possible eviction letter.
But even if the national office made the wrong call, was it for their own personal hate of the non-bubbly, non-white, non-generic sorority stereotype? For one DZ alumna (a real one), the answer is no. It’s all DePauw’s fault; all of the men who played hot-or-not with the new pledges, all of the women who avoided DZ to ensure their place in the popular sororities, and for all the DZ sisters who obsessed about breaking those images, even at the cost of their own personalities. The national office only did what the campus wanted.
At least, unlike a real family, you can choose your sisters.
What part of dead don’t you seem to understand?
Looks like the Illiniwek brou ha-ha isn’t over: The Daily Illini is reporting that a member of the Board of Trustees never voted to remove the Chief. They voted to put him in, so it would make sense to vote to take him out. And the actual announcement came at interesting timing, at least if you buy into conspiracy theories about administration timing the decision to minimize student input.
I’m all for open meetings and fairness, and I hate it just as much as anyone else does when administrations do what’s best in terms of CYA, which it seems pretty clear here that is what’s going on. But have we lost sight of the issue? Of why they should have made this decision swiftly, long ago? People ? an entire people, or more aptly, a gross misrepresentation of said people ? are not mascots. Are we really in business of defending things as ugly as this in 2007 in the name of tradition? Are we honestly willing to wield our power as students, as fans, as alumni to preserve a tradition that insults not only other students but also our intelligence? Enough crying about PC vs. non-PC. We’re past that point. Over. Done. Let’s move forward, without the Chief. Please? Or am I way off here? Let’s hash this out ? without using the word tradition.
Feed for College Ave.