from the graduate voice: "the diversity proposal that wasn't"
here be an article i wrote for "the graduate voice" - now available at newspaper stands all over campus.
The Diversity Proposal That Wasn’t
by Uri Strauss
On March 12, the first day of Spring Break, Chancellor Lombardi posted a plan entitled “On Improving Diversity at UMass: A Draft Action Plan”, ostensibly a response to the set of recommendations contained in the March 1 report of the Commission on Campus Diversity. In reality, the Chancellor has broken his promise to implement the commission’s recommendations. His proposal rejects or ignores most of them, including its main recommendation and all the ones regarding student affairs. Instead, he proposes to destroy independent student government, reversing decades of a proud UMass tradition, while considerably strengthening Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Michael Gargano, who undergraduate students voted no confidence in last November. In this space I’ll present my analysis of the Chancellor’s proposal, as well as an insider’s view of the Commission on Campus Diversity (I was one of two students who sat on the Commission).
Not a diversity proposal
On the first day the Commission met, the Chancellor delivered the charge in his typical plain-spoken, easy-flowing style that fools many people into thinking he’s a straight-talking, no-bullshit kind of guy. During this speech, he made a very clear promise to the Commission: whatever it recommends, he will do. It could not have been said more clearly or less ambiguously. As a result, his subsequent breaking of the promise could not have been more dishonest.
Let’s start with the Commission’s main recommendation: the creation of a senior administrative position to be the main point-person for diversity initiatives. Though it was not flagged in the Commission’s report as being the main recommendation, in internal discussions the Commission treated it that way. Certainly, the fact that it is at the top of the list in the report’s executive summary, and the fact that it in terms of restructuring it is the biggest recommendation, make it more prominent than the Commission’s other 26 recommendations.
The Chancellor rejects this recommendation out of hand, on the pretext that since diversity is a key priority for all areas of the university, and since the Chancellor is the chief official of the university, he himself is the accountable official for diversity concerns. Obviously there’s something wrong with this reasoning. The Chancellor has not been fired nor otherwise held accountable for the serious diversity failings of the University, including the events that led to the formation of the Commission. The reality is that if diversity was truly a core value, like academics, research, administration, and student life, there would be a senior official in charge of it, as there are for those areas. The only reason the Chancellor can get away making such cynical statements about diversity is precisely because it is not a central value of the university.
To what extent is the Chancellor’s proposal a rejection of the Diversity Commission’s recommendations? I can think of six levels at which a set of proposals could fail to live up to the diversity recommendations that supposedly form the basis for them. In order of increasing offensiveness, they are: (1) ignoring the recommendations; (2) rejecting the spirit of the recommendations; (3) rejecting the recommendations outright; (4) making proposals that are explicitly against the recommendations; (5) using the cover of the set of recommendations to implement an anti-diversity agenda; and (6) distorting the recommendations in order to make them seem to be supporting the anti-diversity agenda.
The Chancellor’s proposal contains all six of these. Many of the Commission’s guidelines are simply ignored or rejected, and the whole tone of the proposal goes against the values of diversity and inclusiveness that are emphasized in the Commission’s report. A good example is the Chancellor’s theorizing that students’ frustration and dissatisfaction results from student programs being “scattered throughout the campus bureaucracy” in “relative isolation”. The Commission’s report, in contrast, validates students’ own explanation for their frustration and dissatisfaction, which is quite different from the Chancellor’s, and largely has to do with the deprioritization of diversity programs and with the contempt that the campus leadership shows for them, exemplified by the Chancellor’s rejection of students’ own accounts of their frustration.
The proposed restructuring of Student Affairs in the Chancellor’s proposal includes a hostile takeover of SGA and GSS agencies, which directly contradicts the Commission’s insistence that “student voices should be valued and the integrity of student government and its agencies respected”. The proposed Student Affairs restructuring is an attack on diversity under the cover of a diversity proposal, a cynical exercise worthy of George W. Bush. By taking control of the SGA and GSS agencies and putting them under the programmatic control of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, the proposal hands the reins of the historically most committed and effective advocates for diversity on campus to a man who is well-known for his hostility towards diversity, as well as a range of problematic attitudes towards students.
The most cynical kind of dishonesty that the Chancellor’s proposal exemplifies is its attempt to justify its reactionary agenda by appealing to the Diversity Commission’s recommendations. For example, the Student Affairs part of his plan is directly counter to the spirit and letter of the recommendations, as I have just briefly reviewed. Yet the proposal cites seven of the Commission’s recommendations in an attempt to justify it. Evidently, the author is not aware that such overjustification usually looks suspicious to the intelligent reader. I don’t know whether the author is Chancellor Lombardi, displaying contempt for the intelligence of the reader, or Vice Chancellor Gargano, displaying his own lack of intelligence.
Actually, it seems fairly clear that Gargano had a hand in writing the document. The hodge-podge nature of the proposal, with its reasonably progressive and useful Academic Affairs section and its backwards and pathetically argued Student Affairs section suggest that the former was written by Provost Seymour while the latter was written by Gargano. Some of the language in the Student Affairs section, such as the reference to students of color as “non-majority” students, as well as the pseudo-hippie passages about all students just getting along, are pretty good indicators.
An Alternative Proposal: UMass Community Action Plan
In response to the clear inadequacies of the Chancellor’s proposal, the student members of the Commission – Eddie Bustamante and I – wrote up a set of guidelines along which to implement the Commission’s recommendation, and then wrote an alternative proposal, the UMass Community Action Plan, based on those guidelines, which include being consistent with the Diversity Commission’s report and being written in the spirit of respect for all members of the UMass community. The proposal implements all 27 of the Commission’s recommendations and makes additional suggestions for improvement of the campus.
The UMass Community proposal offers a clear alternative to Chancellor Lombardi’s proposal, one which would improve campus diversity if enacted. It is available on the Take Back UMass website (http://www.takebackumass.com) and will be presented to different sections of the UMass community for feedback and support. The Graduate Student Senate, at its March 22 meeting, rejected Chancellor Lombardi’s proposal and called for an alternative proposal, based on the guidelines of the UMass Community Action Plan.
The Banality of Evil Administrators
One of the Commission’s recommendations that never made it to the final document, for reasons of tact mostly, was the recommendation that Vice Chancellor Gargano be fired. Rather than put it in writing, the Commission asked Chair Taylor to convey this recommendation to Chancellor Lombardi in person. Those who think I’m being too harsh on the Vice Chancellor in this article should read the transcripts of the Commission’s proceedings when they become available. They will provide insight into his character and an understanding of why the Commission was so repulsed by him, while sparing the reader the discomfort of an actual interaction in close proximity to the Vice Chancellor. I’m disappointed that the transcripts have not yet been released – they would have worked well in The Voice’s entertainment section.
What the transcripts would show is the following: our Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs shows an exceptionally poor capacity for understanding simple questions, even when they are asked repeatedly. But his comprehension varies based on the identity of the person posing the question, and he understands questions much better when men ask them than when women ask them. (How would he perform if asked a simple question by a transgendered person? This is an interesting question that can only be investigated empirically.) The Vice Chancellor, in a manner that suggests not linguistic disorder but abnormal psychology, will sometimes use descriptions to refer to himself, rather than first person pronouns, as in: “When the Vice Chancellor came to UMass on June 1, 2003, the Vice Chancellor noticed such-and-such”. Gargano came across as a person constitutionally incapable of accepting responsibility for anything. When particular criticisms or questions of decisions regarding Student Affairs would be raised, he would not address the substance of the criticism, but repeatedly assert that he is not responsible, saying things like, “I came to UMass on June 1, 2003. Anything that happened before then can’t be blamed on me”. When not using that excuse, he was blaming students for problems within Student Affairs, such as lack of cultural programming. All the while, he presented himself to the Commission, in a pathetic, self-pitying tone, as a victim of unfair accusations of racism.
The Commission was not impressed with the Vice Chancellor, and one commission member blasted him more than once (he seemed not to understand). After he left, off-campus members expressed their disbelief, asking, “how could you let this guy become a Vice Chancellor”? The Commission had no trouble reaching the conclusion that Gargano, besides being completely unqualified for his job, is a serious obstacle to diversity at UMass. The only debate that took place was about the best way to recommend that he be fired.
The final decision was to make the recommendation privately to the Chancellor. Clearly, the recommendation was ignored. As I’ve mentioned, Gargano appears to have written a chunk of the Chancellor’s proposal, and without a doubt it is his agenda that has been proposed. I’ve been told that the consolidation of all student services, cultural centers, agencies and organizations into a “Center for Student Development” under two directors and an associate vice-chancellor will create a structure exactly parallel to the Student Affairs structure at George Washington University, where Gargano last worked before coming to UMass. Apparently the reason the proposal leaves the Commuter Services and Housing Resource Center out of the Center for Student Development is that there is no analogous office at GWU, which must have created great conceptual difficulty for the Vice Chancellor.
The Chancellor’s proposal strengthens Gargano’s hand: by creating several new staff positions under him, by consolidating forty organizations directly under him, and by taking control of the student government agencies away from students and putting it in his hands. Gargano has been after these student agencies for a long time, denying the SGA its ability to fill vacant staff positions in the Office of ALANA Affairs and the Student Center for Education, Research and Advocacy, holding up the salary of an employee at the Office of ALANA Affairs, and stopping pay for positions in the Commuter Services and Housing Resource Center, in violation of a signed agreement with student government.
Since the Diversity Commission’s recommendations were made, Gargano has gotten rid of Director of Housing Michael Gilbert, with whom he reportedly had differences of opinion. The vacancy has not been filled – apparently Gargano’s strength is in firing, not hiring. W.H. Auden could have been writing about Gargano when he penned his poem “August 1968”, which reads:
The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.
That the Chancellor chooses to retain and even strengthen Gargano says something about his priorities. The Chancellor is surely not retaining him for his management skills – Gargano probably couldn’t manage a bowling alley, let alone a major administrative area at a large university. But while he may be very stupid, he does have a talent for senseless destruction – which may be why Lombardi hired him and keeps him around. The destruction of independent student government, a historic UMass institution and a great source of pride to students and alumni, could well be Lombardi’s agenda. It would dovetail with his transformation of the university into a corporation, by replicating the authoritarian model of corporate management, so that the destruction of thepublic university in Massachusetts can proceed without interference from theuniversity community.
The Commission’s Recommendations: Shortcomings
So far my remarks about the Diversity Commission’s recommendations have been positive, and I have limited my criticisms to the Chancellor’s refusal to implement them. However, things are not so simple. On one hand, the Chancellor’s proposal contains some useful parts. I’ve mentioned the parts I believe were written by Provost Seymour, regarding faculty of color recruitment, retention and development, and general education courses. On the other hand, there are some shortcomings in the Diversity Commission’s analysis and recommendations - chief among them the narrow focus on racial diversity.
From the beginning of the process, the two student members of the Commission – supported by others, most notably State Representative Ben Swan – tried to include on the Commission’s agenda other kinds of diversity issues, particularly economic and geographical. The idea is that for UMass to truly meet its mission as a public university, it is not enough to increase the number of people of color on campus, not enough to just improve the campus climate, but it is necessary to make UMass truly accessible to the people of the state. If this goal was reached, students would be able to come to UMass based on their demonstrated potential as university students, rather than as currently, based on their ability to afford a university education and their ability and willingness to tolerate the UMass climate. If the university became seriously accessible, it is a straightforward prediction that racial diversity, as well as diversity in other terms – economics, geography, gender, ability – would follow.
The main way in which we tried to nudge the proceedings in this direction was through the list of invited interviewees. We sought out individuals who could speak to the importance of UMass to residents of the Commonwealth who currently might be shut out of the system because of the difficulty of paying for a college education at the current rate, people who could speak to the philosophy of public education and the university’s mission. We also tried to use the Commission’s information-gathering process as an opportunity to get our hands on the demographic data that the university continues to deny us. Unfortunately, we had little success in these attempts, and the Commission was steered towards a position of considering only racial diversity. A number of individuals testified about the shortcomings of economic and geographical diversity, as well as about oppression based on gender and disability, but these did not significantly impact the committee’s report.
Moving forward
There are two possible responses to the Chancellor’s duplicitous plan: we can give up, or we can fight for what’s ours. We need to keep in mind that we are at a historic decision point. The administration is destroying the student organizations that were built up over the course of generations of struggle, the organizations that have made UMass such an enriching experience for many students and alumni, and which have done a great deal to promote diversity and social justice on campus. If we give up this battle, we will graduate from a university that gives us little to be proud of. If we fight and lose, then at least we can be proud of our integrity, and we will learn the lessons of struggle that will help us down the road. If we fight and win, we will gain so much more.
The Diversity Proposal That Wasn’t
by Uri Strauss
On March 12, the first day of Spring Break, Chancellor Lombardi posted a plan entitled “On Improving Diversity at UMass: A Draft Action Plan”, ostensibly a response to the set of recommendations contained in the March 1 report of the Commission on Campus Diversity. In reality, the Chancellor has broken his promise to implement the commission’s recommendations. His proposal rejects or ignores most of them, including its main recommendation and all the ones regarding student affairs. Instead, he proposes to destroy independent student government, reversing decades of a proud UMass tradition, while considerably strengthening Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Michael Gargano, who undergraduate students voted no confidence in last November. In this space I’ll present my analysis of the Chancellor’s proposal, as well as an insider’s view of the Commission on Campus Diversity (I was one of two students who sat on the Commission).
Not a diversity proposal
On the first day the Commission met, the Chancellor delivered the charge in his typical plain-spoken, easy-flowing style that fools many people into thinking he’s a straight-talking, no-bullshit kind of guy. During this speech, he made a very clear promise to the Commission: whatever it recommends, he will do. It could not have been said more clearly or less ambiguously. As a result, his subsequent breaking of the promise could not have been more dishonest.
Let’s start with the Commission’s main recommendation: the creation of a senior administrative position to be the main point-person for diversity initiatives. Though it was not flagged in the Commission’s report as being the main recommendation, in internal discussions the Commission treated it that way. Certainly, the fact that it is at the top of the list in the report’s executive summary, and the fact that it in terms of restructuring it is the biggest recommendation, make it more prominent than the Commission’s other 26 recommendations.
The Chancellor rejects this recommendation out of hand, on the pretext that since diversity is a key priority for all areas of the university, and since the Chancellor is the chief official of the university, he himself is the accountable official for diversity concerns. Obviously there’s something wrong with this reasoning. The Chancellor has not been fired nor otherwise held accountable for the serious diversity failings of the University, including the events that led to the formation of the Commission. The reality is that if diversity was truly a core value, like academics, research, administration, and student life, there would be a senior official in charge of it, as there are for those areas. The only reason the Chancellor can get away making such cynical statements about diversity is precisely because it is not a central value of the university.
To what extent is the Chancellor’s proposal a rejection of the Diversity Commission’s recommendations? I can think of six levels at which a set of proposals could fail to live up to the diversity recommendations that supposedly form the basis for them. In order of increasing offensiveness, they are: (1) ignoring the recommendations; (2) rejecting the spirit of the recommendations; (3) rejecting the recommendations outright; (4) making proposals that are explicitly against the recommendations; (5) using the cover of the set of recommendations to implement an anti-diversity agenda; and (6) distorting the recommendations in order to make them seem to be supporting the anti-diversity agenda.
The Chancellor’s proposal contains all six of these. Many of the Commission’s guidelines are simply ignored or rejected, and the whole tone of the proposal goes against the values of diversity and inclusiveness that are emphasized in the Commission’s report. A good example is the Chancellor’s theorizing that students’ frustration and dissatisfaction results from student programs being “scattered throughout the campus bureaucracy” in “relative isolation”. The Commission’s report, in contrast, validates students’ own explanation for their frustration and dissatisfaction, which is quite different from the Chancellor’s, and largely has to do with the deprioritization of diversity programs and with the contempt that the campus leadership shows for them, exemplified by the Chancellor’s rejection of students’ own accounts of their frustration.
The proposed restructuring of Student Affairs in the Chancellor’s proposal includes a hostile takeover of SGA and GSS agencies, which directly contradicts the Commission’s insistence that “student voices should be valued and the integrity of student government and its agencies respected”. The proposed Student Affairs restructuring is an attack on diversity under the cover of a diversity proposal, a cynical exercise worthy of George W. Bush. By taking control of the SGA and GSS agencies and putting them under the programmatic control of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, the proposal hands the reins of the historically most committed and effective advocates for diversity on campus to a man who is well-known for his hostility towards diversity, as well as a range of problematic attitudes towards students.
The most cynical kind of dishonesty that the Chancellor’s proposal exemplifies is its attempt to justify its reactionary agenda by appealing to the Diversity Commission’s recommendations. For example, the Student Affairs part of his plan is directly counter to the spirit and letter of the recommendations, as I have just briefly reviewed. Yet the proposal cites seven of the Commission’s recommendations in an attempt to justify it. Evidently, the author is not aware that such overjustification usually looks suspicious to the intelligent reader. I don’t know whether the author is Chancellor Lombardi, displaying contempt for the intelligence of the reader, or Vice Chancellor Gargano, displaying his own lack of intelligence.
Actually, it seems fairly clear that Gargano had a hand in writing the document. The hodge-podge nature of the proposal, with its reasonably progressive and useful Academic Affairs section and its backwards and pathetically argued Student Affairs section suggest that the former was written by Provost Seymour while the latter was written by Gargano. Some of the language in the Student Affairs section, such as the reference to students of color as “non-majority” students, as well as the pseudo-hippie passages about all students just getting along, are pretty good indicators.
An Alternative Proposal: UMass Community Action Plan
In response to the clear inadequacies of the Chancellor’s proposal, the student members of the Commission – Eddie Bustamante and I – wrote up a set of guidelines along which to implement the Commission’s recommendation, and then wrote an alternative proposal, the UMass Community Action Plan, based on those guidelines, which include being consistent with the Diversity Commission’s report and being written in the spirit of respect for all members of the UMass community. The proposal implements all 27 of the Commission’s recommendations and makes additional suggestions for improvement of the campus.
The UMass Community proposal offers a clear alternative to Chancellor Lombardi’s proposal, one which would improve campus diversity if enacted. It is available on the Take Back UMass website (http://www.takebackumass.com) and will be presented to different sections of the UMass community for feedback and support. The Graduate Student Senate, at its March 22 meeting, rejected Chancellor Lombardi’s proposal and called for an alternative proposal, based on the guidelines of the UMass Community Action Plan.
The Banality of Evil Administrators
One of the Commission’s recommendations that never made it to the final document, for reasons of tact mostly, was the recommendation that Vice Chancellor Gargano be fired. Rather than put it in writing, the Commission asked Chair Taylor to convey this recommendation to Chancellor Lombardi in person. Those who think I’m being too harsh on the Vice Chancellor in this article should read the transcripts of the Commission’s proceedings when they become available. They will provide insight into his character and an understanding of why the Commission was so repulsed by him, while sparing the reader the discomfort of an actual interaction in close proximity to the Vice Chancellor. I’m disappointed that the transcripts have not yet been released – they would have worked well in The Voice’s entertainment section.
What the transcripts would show is the following: our Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs shows an exceptionally poor capacity for understanding simple questions, even when they are asked repeatedly. But his comprehension varies based on the identity of the person posing the question, and he understands questions much better when men ask them than when women ask them. (How would he perform if asked a simple question by a transgendered person? This is an interesting question that can only be investigated empirically.) The Vice Chancellor, in a manner that suggests not linguistic disorder but abnormal psychology, will sometimes use descriptions to refer to himself, rather than first person pronouns, as in: “When the Vice Chancellor came to UMass on June 1, 2003, the Vice Chancellor noticed such-and-such”. Gargano came across as a person constitutionally incapable of accepting responsibility for anything. When particular criticisms or questions of decisions regarding Student Affairs would be raised, he would not address the substance of the criticism, but repeatedly assert that he is not responsible, saying things like, “I came to UMass on June 1, 2003. Anything that happened before then can’t be blamed on me”. When not using that excuse, he was blaming students for problems within Student Affairs, such as lack of cultural programming. All the while, he presented himself to the Commission, in a pathetic, self-pitying tone, as a victim of unfair accusations of racism.
The Commission was not impressed with the Vice Chancellor, and one commission member blasted him more than once (he seemed not to understand). After he left, off-campus members expressed their disbelief, asking, “how could you let this guy become a Vice Chancellor”? The Commission had no trouble reaching the conclusion that Gargano, besides being completely unqualified for his job, is a serious obstacle to diversity at UMass. The only debate that took place was about the best way to recommend that he be fired.
The final decision was to make the recommendation privately to the Chancellor. Clearly, the recommendation was ignored. As I’ve mentioned, Gargano appears to have written a chunk of the Chancellor’s proposal, and without a doubt it is his agenda that has been proposed. I’ve been told that the consolidation of all student services, cultural centers, agencies and organizations into a “Center for Student Development” under two directors and an associate vice-chancellor will create a structure exactly parallel to the Student Affairs structure at George Washington University, where Gargano last worked before coming to UMass. Apparently the reason the proposal leaves the Commuter Services and Housing Resource Center out of the Center for Student Development is that there is no analogous office at GWU, which must have created great conceptual difficulty for the Vice Chancellor.
The Chancellor’s proposal strengthens Gargano’s hand: by creating several new staff positions under him, by consolidating forty organizations directly under him, and by taking control of the student government agencies away from students and putting it in his hands. Gargano has been after these student agencies for a long time, denying the SGA its ability to fill vacant staff positions in the Office of ALANA Affairs and the Student Center for Education, Research and Advocacy, holding up the salary of an employee at the Office of ALANA Affairs, and stopping pay for positions in the Commuter Services and Housing Resource Center, in violation of a signed agreement with student government.
Since the Diversity Commission’s recommendations were made, Gargano has gotten rid of Director of Housing Michael Gilbert, with whom he reportedly had differences of opinion. The vacancy has not been filled – apparently Gargano’s strength is in firing, not hiring. W.H. Auden could have been writing about Gargano when he penned his poem “August 1968”, which reads:
The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.
That the Chancellor chooses to retain and even strengthen Gargano says something about his priorities. The Chancellor is surely not retaining him for his management skills – Gargano probably couldn’t manage a bowling alley, let alone a major administrative area at a large university. But while he may be very stupid, he does have a talent for senseless destruction – which may be why Lombardi hired him and keeps him around. The destruction of independent student government, a historic UMass institution and a great source of pride to students and alumni, could well be Lombardi’s agenda. It would dovetail with his transformation of the university into a corporation, by replicating the authoritarian model of corporate management, so that the destruction of thepublic university in Massachusetts can proceed without interference from theuniversity community.
The Commission’s Recommendations: Shortcomings
So far my remarks about the Diversity Commission’s recommendations have been positive, and I have limited my criticisms to the Chancellor’s refusal to implement them. However, things are not so simple. On one hand, the Chancellor’s proposal contains some useful parts. I’ve mentioned the parts I believe were written by Provost Seymour, regarding faculty of color recruitment, retention and development, and general education courses. On the other hand, there are some shortcomings in the Diversity Commission’s analysis and recommendations - chief among them the narrow focus on racial diversity.
From the beginning of the process, the two student members of the Commission – supported by others, most notably State Representative Ben Swan – tried to include on the Commission’s agenda other kinds of diversity issues, particularly economic and geographical. The idea is that for UMass to truly meet its mission as a public university, it is not enough to increase the number of people of color on campus, not enough to just improve the campus climate, but it is necessary to make UMass truly accessible to the people of the state. If this goal was reached, students would be able to come to UMass based on their demonstrated potential as university students, rather than as currently, based on their ability to afford a university education and their ability and willingness to tolerate the UMass climate. If the university became seriously accessible, it is a straightforward prediction that racial diversity, as well as diversity in other terms – economics, geography, gender, ability – would follow.
The main way in which we tried to nudge the proceedings in this direction was through the list of invited interviewees. We sought out individuals who could speak to the importance of UMass to residents of the Commonwealth who currently might be shut out of the system because of the difficulty of paying for a college education at the current rate, people who could speak to the philosophy of public education and the university’s mission. We also tried to use the Commission’s information-gathering process as an opportunity to get our hands on the demographic data that the university continues to deny us. Unfortunately, we had little success in these attempts, and the Commission was steered towards a position of considering only racial diversity. A number of individuals testified about the shortcomings of economic and geographical diversity, as well as about oppression based on gender and disability, but these did not significantly impact the committee’s report.
Moving forward
There are two possible responses to the Chancellor’s duplicitous plan: we can give up, or we can fight for what’s ours. We need to keep in mind that we are at a historic decision point. The administration is destroying the student organizations that were built up over the course of generations of struggle, the organizations that have made UMass such an enriching experience for many students and alumni, and which have done a great deal to promote diversity and social justice on campus. If we give up this battle, we will graduate from a university that gives us little to be proud of. If we fight and lose, then at least we can be proud of our integrity, and we will learn the lessons of struggle that will help us down the road. If we fight and win, we will gain so much more.
posted by Uri at 3:41 PM
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