SAPAC Re-Organized

I’ve heard that the Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center is facing a dramatic re-organization, perhaps connected with a number of rumblings I’ve heard about cuts in a number of student services offices - including the Office of Multicultural Initiatives, LBGT Affiars, the Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs, Student Activities and Leadership, and the Trotter House. Although the details are sketchy, it appears as if the counselors will be moved to Counceling and Psychological Services, the the crisis hotline they maintain and staff with student volunteers will be discontinued entirely - students will be asked to call the hotline of the Ann Arbor domestic assault shelter SAFE house (located nearly 25 minutes from campus by bus, apparently).

I’ve also heard the funding for the “prevention” work of SAPAC - workshops and peer educators- will be increased. All in all something is not adding up, since the number of callers apparently increases after education events. The elimination of the on-campus hotline also means it will be much more difficult to keep track of incidents of sexual assault and rape which happen on campus or within the campus community.

Tomorrow’s Daily will contain an open letter to President Mary Sue Coleman from the MSA executives about this re-organization, as well as cuts to a number of other offices and programs. As far as I know, there has been very little or no student input into this process. And I don’t mean “consulting” a bunch of hand-picked nonpolitical student “leaders,” I mean having the courage to engage in an ongoing dialogue among students, faculty, and staff about the cuts. There also seems to be a sense that when cuts are made nobody is hearing about them - I think that’s precisely the wrong move to make. If there are structural changes being made to save money, and the decisions have been made, the campus community has a right to know.

In the 1970s the University went through a relatively severe budget crisis, and decisions about which programs and services to cut were made by a special committee, which included student input. If such a committee exists today, we should know about it, and it certainly have more than one student representative, including someone from the Michigan Student Assembly. If tough decisions have to be made, they should be made as openly and honestly as possible. And we should all send a letter to our senators and representatives suggesting some of the $300+ Billion we spend on the capability to wage war, and the untold billions spend locking up nearly 2 million people in prisons, should go towards higher education. But I wouldn’t want to make this too political.

Prof. Lassiter’s Golden Apple Lecture

In a crowded Mendelssohn Theater the audience attending the lecture of this year’s Golden Apple winner Matthew Lassiter chuckled as U-M president Mary Sue Coleman twice referred to Prof. Lassiter as “Mark Lassiter,” saying she “can’t wait to hear your last lecture.”

Prof. Lassiter began his lecture quipping that not only had he “never won an aware that required I give an hour lecture,” that “I’m not bilingual, and I’ve never made a protein,” referring to the introductions of Hillel Director Michael Brooks who incorporated Hebrew into his remarks and President Coleman’s story about how an undergraduate helped her in the laboratory.

The lecture, titled “Alienation, Apathy, and Activism: American Culture and the Depoliticization of Youth” argued that youth are indeed political, but are often silenced by the mass media, and silenced with false nostalgia for the “1960s,” another period which was widely believed to have “apathetic” youth until the youth themselves proved otherwise beginning in 1965. He used three events from 1999 to give his analysis: the coverage of the Columbine High School shootings, the Woodstock riots, and the Seattle protests during the 1999 WTO meeting. Saying that the stereotype of young people as a “generation of conformists and consumers” has been largely imposed on college students, and that there was more activism among youth today than before 1965, he pointed to these three examples where the political views of youth had been ignored, misrepresented, or repressed. He began with an overview of campus activism of the late 1990s, saying “They’re living proof that student activism is a vibrant force today,” continuing: “Charges of alienation and apathy are overstated … or based on a misunderstanding of the cultural forces at work today.”

“Nobody came to the nonprofit tent to burn it down,” said a young man in a video clip he showed about the rioting that occurred at the 1999 Woodstock where young people looted corporate vendors many felt were exploiting the captive audience with $4 bottles of water. Lassiter argued the stereotype of “Generation X” as a generation of slackers and dropouts largely ignores the successful activism of the 1980s, whether it be the nuclear freeze movement, anti-sweatshop activism, anti-apartheid activism, (And, I would add, civil rights activism such as BAM III and the United Coalition Against Racism strikes at the U of M that created the Martin Luther King day symposium and arguably formed the origins of the University’s affirmative action policies challenged in the 1990s)

He argued the obsession of the media on columbine elevated an unusual event (youth are statistically safer in school than at home and school violence did not increase in the late 1990s) had the effect of criminalizing political youth in general. In closing, Prof. Lassiter commented, “The bad job market is the best thing thing that could happen to the people in this room … Today, as in the 1960s, the belief that history has ended is a lie.”

Hopefully, he’s right. And I believe a good way to think about activism today is to break down the nostalgia and myths about activism of the past, and where better to start than right here at the U of M.

See also: The Daily’s endorsement - “Lassiter a great choice for Golden Apple”

My friend Dan says he found some odd flyers around Mason Hall today. One has a picture of Stalin and says “Communism: The Opiate of the University” and the text “Feb 5th 7:30PM, Michigan Union, Pendleton Room.” The other says ” What Killed Over 100 Million People and STILL EXISTS TODAY?” and has a picture of hammer and sickle and the same date and place.

A quick check of the University Union’s online reservation system reveals the campus Young Americans for Freedom chaper are planning a talk by Larry Reed, the president of the “free market” Michigan-based think tank the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. I suppose he’ll speak on the evils of communism, but I don’t think there’s many communists left these days - then again I wouldn’t expect much in the way of keeping with the times from an organization whose members have pledged ” THAT we will be free only so long as the national sovereignty of the United States is secure; that history shows periods of freedom are rare, and can exist only when free citizens concertedly defend their rights against all enemies… THAT the forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to these liberties … THAT the United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with this menace … “

So remember Dean’s wierd speech after Iowa? Here’s the whole thing.

” … The president used the word quota five or six times on the evening news to talk about the University of Michigan affirmative action program. Not only did the most conservative Supreme Court since the Dred Scott decision disagree with him on that one, but the word quota, every politician and every pollster in America knows, is a race coded word deliberately designed to appeal to people’s fears that they may lose their job or their place in university to a member of a community of color. In other words, the president played the race card, and that alone entitles him to a one-way bus ticket back to Crawford, Tex. … ”

> From Howard Dean’s speech to supporters in New Hampshire

Finally, a letter writer with some common sense on the editorial page of the Michigan Daily:

” … Bush, however, has done nothing to earn the respect these students say he is entitled to. In fact, he has disrespected the American public, our way of life and the world around us. Even though he is the leader of a country that allows people to express opinions freely in this newspaper, our basic rights are fading fast under Bush’s “leadership.” … “

And columnist Ari Paul is dishing out an endorsement in his column “My President was Born to Run”:

“… Edwards is the only candidate adequately focusing on this growing gap between rich and poor America. He is also the only candidate with a realistic chance of success who has actually lived through the American nightmare of working-class isolation. .. “

Also, next week MSA will be voting on whether or not to put a $2 fee increase on the student government election ballot to fund renovations of Trotter House. I wonder if this will go the way of the $1 fee increase for the Ann Arbor Tenants Union students voted on two years ago - passed by the student body, but never passed on to the regents on the advice of VP E. Royster Harper and the administration.

New Hampshire Primary Results

All the big media orgs have called it for Kerry, with Dean a strong second. With 94 percent of the precincts reporting:

Kerry 39%
Dean 26%
Edwards 13%
Clark 12%
Lieberman 9%
Kucinich 1%
Sharpton 0%

> CNN.com’s results page
> NY Times’ Page - Complete with all write-ins

“Hillary Rodham Clinton (Write-in) 1 0.0%”