Stefany Chen/Guardian
Two weeks after A.S. President Utsav Gupta panicked under pressure and froze media-org funding campuswide, all he’s got to show in the name of progress is an ominously divided committee, a lot of angry students and a fat lawsuit in the works.
We saw the shitstorm on the horizon the second Gupta’s rushed decision hit our inboxes, announcing he would cut the A.S. umbilical to all student newspapers until there was some way to guarantee they wouldn’t harm the campus climate.
What he should have known, of course, is that any sudden executive restriction targeting a bunch of righteous journalists is bound to lead to a First Amendment showdown.
But through Gupta’s rose-tinted glasses, a momentary hold seemed the perfect way to instigate a civilized discussion about whether we wanted our student fees going to any and all publications — even those that promote hate speech. He saw that black students were enraged to be funding something that degraded them, and wanted to do what was right. He also knew that — of the 14 print-media orgs that rely on the A.S. Council for funding — only the Left Coast Post, the California Review and the Koala were scheduled to publish a third issue by the end of Winter Quarter, and the Week Seven deadline for any last-minute requests had already come and gone.
So, given the increasingly toxic campus climate, Gupta accepted what he thought to be minimal consequences: Essentially only one (conservative) paper would be silenced — as the Koala would surely print anyway, on alternative funds — and any publications that wanted to print issues covering the controversy could put in the extra legwork to seek sponsors, or pull out leftover funds from their bank accounts.
Or so he thought. In fact, when California Review Editor in Chief Alec Weisman tried to use the last $260 in his account to publish an issue last week, he was shot down by A.S. Fund Manager Suzy Valenzuela, who cited an e-mail from A.S. Vice President of Finance and Resources Peter Benesch that said under the freeze, “any funds allocated in previous quarters can no longer be spent or accessed.”
Somehow, our once-popular leader failed to recognize that — once he flapped his wings and revealed his gross executive ability to freeze funds — people would cry “King Gupta,” no matter how low-impact the freeze. In addition, he has unintentionally turned the media orgs who don’t want to pay the price for the Koala’s televised racial slur against students who were hurt and angered by it — all while the Koala sits back, fanning the flames on the sidelines with their brand-new issue.
Indeed, the most disturbing part about Gupta’s decision was his ability to make it: The A.S. Council Standing Rules pretty much condone dictatorship when things get gray. As Title II puts it, when “a situation arises that is not provided for in the rules of the Associated Students, the President has broad authority to make any decision that is consistent with the spirit of the rules.” Few A.S. presidents have shocked us with such raw authoritative action in the past, so Gupta’s drastic choice to intervene — no matter how divinely it was meant to serve our Principles of Community — revealed the true control the council has over freedoms of student-funded press. It’s a control that may not hold up if challenged in the court of law.
Utsav must now answer to the two student groups he pitted against one another, with nothing but a committee full of opinionated media-org representatives and councilmembers to come up with a solution. And both sides do have a right to be angry. Though many orgs affected by the freeze have sympathized with the Black Student Union, they can’t be expected to relinquish their journalistic passion to the cause, and sacrifice their (and the Koala’s) First Amendment rights — which are protected by precedent of funding, when applied to student-government situations. At the same time, offended students don’t necessarily want to sit back and watch their fees feed the Koala’s spew of racist jokes just so Weisman can publish more singleminded arguments against affirmative action.
But there’s no legal way to make both sides happy. That is, there’s no legal way to fund all media orgs freely while excluding the Koala, which is — news flash — what the council has been trying to do all quarter.
In response, Benesch is touting a funding system that might just throw our fellow publications into the general student-org melting pot — allowing the council to pick apart a publication’s purpose and content, a notoriously lengthy process, before throwing it a bone. It might be momentarily satisfying to defund the havoc-wreakers at the Koala, but they’re so dedicated to offending everyone that they’ll keep publishing no matter what. What’s on the line, however, are weaker-willed newspapers with controversial content who may not have the time or patience to withstand future councilmembers’ attempts to guide their voice.
This board cannot condone content review for all campus media in the name of withholding 30 cents per quarter from the Koala’s beer fund, and wouldn’t want to see the encouraging environment for diverse student media on this campus sucked dry by a convoluted funding process.
Not to mention, all of these hypothetical situations put forward by the anti-Koala A.S. Council do not provide equal opportunity to express one’s views. We’re not lawyers, but a history of intent to defund the Koala based on content is enough to suggest, if taken to court, that any changes to the format of media-org funding was a violation of the First Amendment.
Who’s to say? Both the Koala and A.S. Council apparently have lawyers who guarantee they’re in the clear. But we truly hope Gupta can realize he’s created a monster and humbly end the freeze as soon as possible. Choose your battles, man.
Related posts:
Right now we have two groups on campus.
1. The first group believes that liberty is precious and that Freedom of Speech is under attack on College campus all over the country. They believe that we must Fight Against Liberal Intolerance and ban all “Speech Codes”. They believe we should stand up to these leftist and defend our rights.
2. There is a second group who feels the same way Vladimir Lenin did when he said that “It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed.”. This is why they are rationing UCSD’s publications. The USSR had Pravda, AS has The Collective Voice.
Many of the students in the BSU and AS are hardline communists. Don’t let them ruin UCSD like they did Cuba and the rest of their failed experiments at creating utopia.
I would be more inclined to take those who are offended by racism seriously if they weren’t so manipulative in how and when they take offense.
The ten trillion insensitive biogoted things that the BSU and Muslim student union does stays under the radar. By whitey acts in a simlar fashion and the plug on free speech is pulled quickly
Yes, we do have two groups on Campus.
1. A group that has zero social lives with nothing better to do and must expend energy on a completely bullshit controversy as a college Compton cookout party.
2. A group that is embarrassed that they go to school with such fucktards as the group above.
Seriously.. I am so embarrassed right now, these idiots are practicing tyranny of the few right here.
Agreed to the comments above. Finally some rational thought. Instead of forcing everyone to sit in an ethnic studies class to learn about how not to offend people, why don’t we force everyone to take some early European history. Clearly there is a large cross-section of UCSD that isn’t familiar with the events that led to the Magna Carta or why it was so important.
@theBman
So this controversy was really all about the Magna Carta? Who knew!
@UCSD
KOALA is not free “speech”–it’s free toilet paper.
@ jeff
I assume that you consider yourself a non-fucktard. Congratulations on that.
And on a more serious note:
@jane
Do you have some examples to share with us about the alleged bigotry of the BSA and the Muslim student union? Or is it just that neither one is a fan of US foreign policy in the Middle East right now, and states as much in strong terms? It could be either, and I’m serious in asking you this. (Note the absence of emoticons.)
Nikki
You really need to educate yourself. The freedoms we have today are a consequence of centuries of struggles against central government authority.
The great thinkers of Western Civilization created the richest and most free societies in all human history.
By contrast, African cultures remain mired in poverty and oppression, partly because of their rejection of western values and adaptation of the alternative ideas of Soviet Marxism.
Middle Eastern and Moslem nations remain islands of oppression, even retaining slavery in some cases. Women have no rights, gays are stoned and fanatical religious police roam the streets in Saudi Arabia, a state that trains most Muslim leaders in a wide set of nations.
Educate yourself Jane, before it is too late. Before you are forced to wear a head covering or made into a slave. Slavery was the natural condition of most of mankind for thousands of years, and if Western Civilzation dies it is the condition we will return to.
Nikki
You really need to educate yourself. The freedoms we have today are a consequence of centuries of struggles against central government authority.
The great thinkers of Western Civilization created the richest and most free societies in all human history.
By contrast, African cultures remain mired in poverty and oppression, partly because of their rejection of western values and adaptation of the alternative ideas of Soviet Marxism.
Middle Eastern and Moslem nations remain islands of oppression, even retaining slavery in some cases. Women have no rights, gays are stoned and fanatical religious police roam the streets in Saudi Arabia, a state that trains most Muslim leaders in a wide set of nations.
Educate yourself Nikki, before it is too late. Before you are forced to wear a head covering or made into a slave. Slavery was the natural condition of most of mankind for thousands of years, and if Western Civilzation dies it is the condition we will return to.
“Not to mention, all of these hypothetical situations put forward by the anti-Koala A.S. Council do not provide equal opportunity to express one’s views. We’re not lawyers, but a history of intent to defund the Koala based on content is enough to suggest, if taken to court, that any changes to the format of media-org funding was a violation of the First Amendment.”
This hits the nail on the head. You guys may not be lawyers, but you understand the law better than the university’s lawyers with whom Gupta claims to be working on a new funding policy.
The ACLU and FIRE do not lose cases like this. That is because they litigate cases like this for a living, and they know when they have a case. The University’s lawyers do not do this sort of thing for a living, and they are less familiar with the relevant case law interpreting the First Amendment.
Changes to funding rules are generally facially constitutional, but if it can be proven that the motivation for a change was to punish a student group for its viewpoint on any issue, then it is unconstitutional in its application.
Public universities do not fare well in cases where they try to punish students or faculty for expressing opinions that are protected by the First Amendment. In Rosenburger, the Supreme Court held that viewpoint discrimination via funding policies is presumptively unconstitutional. In Southworth, the Supreme Court held that if student groups are funded by mandatory fees (or “opt-out” fees), then funding decisions must be viewpoint neutral. AS may not explicitly discriminate on the basis of viewpoint, nor may they enact facially neutral rules that have the intended effect of discriminating on the basis of viewpoint.
@ Janet ROFLMAO!!!!!!!!!!
:D:D
To everyone else:
Every UC student needs to read this:
http://www.counterpunch.org/parrish03012010.html
“…The State of California’s political elites and business leaders routinely use the language of crisis now whenever discussing the UC. In the past few decades, state funding of the university has suffered steady erosion. The UC now receives more funding than ever from private corporations and the federal government (the latter being in most instances pretty much the same as the former). Its various revenue streams range from student fees to several billion dollars in medical hospital revenue to private grants and donations, to its own hedge fund-like investments portfolio, to atomic bomb dollars from the Department of Energy.
Thus, despite the state budget cuts, the UC’s overall revenue reached an all-time high of $19.42 billion in the 2009-10 academic year, and the Regents’ claim that the UC faces an “imminent and substantial” funding deficit is inaccurate, to say the least. According to both the university’s own financial documents and Moody’s bond rating agency, the university had access to over $8.3 billion in unrestricted investment funds it was holding in reserve at the time.
The university has undergone a neo-liberal-style “structural adjustment” at the behest of the UC Regents, and this transformation has been accelerated during Yudof’s tenure as president. Under the leadership of California’s economic elite, the UC has become the leading prototype for a “disaster capitalist university.”
Since the mid-1990s, administrative salaries have absorbed a dramatically increasing share of the university’s overall budget. According to a study by UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus of Physics Charles Schwartz, the number of UC administrative positions increased by an almost unbelievable 118 percent from 1996 to 2006, as compared with a 34 percent increase in faculty positions and 33 percent increase in students over the same period. As a result, there are currently 3,600 UC employees who make more than $200,000 a year, many of them through administrative positions.
An even more damning revelation was made public this past October when UC Santa Cruz Professor Bob Meister published his scathing analysis of the UC administration’s use of student tuition dollars as collateral for construction bond debts. In addition to his PhD in economics, Meister serves as Chairman of the Council of University Faculties – essentially, a faculty union with representatives on all 10 of the university’s campuses. He knows what he’s talking about. According to the Regents’ own data and policy documents, the primary use of student fee revenue since 2004 has been as collateral for bonds to fund campus construction projects. In this “modified credit swap,” students are forced to take out “subprime” student loans, often charging six percent interest, so the university can borrow money at a reduced rate to construct new facilities like – to take one example — the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley, which UC Regent Richard C. Blum’s own construction company, URS Corporation, was contracted by the university to build……”
READ THE WHOLE THING
Nikki says:
“I assume that you consider yourself a non-fucktard. Congratulations on that. ”
To everyone reading this: Not all UCSD students are as full of hate and obscenities as Nikki. Please don’t judge us by this type of student. Outside of a few majors (mostly with the word “studies” in them), UCSD students have mastered seventh grade.
Err, “Janet at Muir,” you can’t possibly claim to have mastered the 7th grade and simultaneously use the word “Moslem.” Hahaha you should make sure your 7th grade teacher is fired. Both you and Nikki are complete fucktards–there really isn’t a better word to describe arrogant, pompous, undereducated and ridiculously narrow-minded people like yourselves.
Michael, on the other hand, should sit on the Supreme Court one day.
Last laugh is on you Hahaha.
Merriam-Webster and American Heritage Dictionary both list Moslem as acceptable spellings.
Incidentally, Moslem in Arabic means “one who is evil and unjust” when the word is pronounced, as it is in English, Mozlem with a z. Thus some arabs dislike that spelling.
By the way, as a general rule, people who call others “fucktards” are not in a good position to assume intellectually superior attitudes. Why don’t you sign your name if you really believe what you write.
Yes, Janet at Muir is correct. After calling into question her education the use of the term “Moslem” and being conclusively show to be dead wrong, don’t you feel a bit ignorant yourself “Hahaha”?
Oh boy, the arrogance of the wannabe censors…
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/moslem
Main Entry: Mos·lem
Pronunciation: \ˈmäz-ləm also ˈmäs-\
variant of muslim
Poor, poor “Spell Check” as well as “Janet at Muir”. I know what “Moslem” is, thanks for reinforcing my point using a dictionary. I’m simply expressing my amusement that Janet attempts to call herself an educated person while using a term long obsolete and archaic in academia and now considered insulting. If you two need everything to be backed up by a dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary has this to say: “Moslem is the form predominantly preferred in journalism and popular usage. Muslim is preferred by scholars.” It’s the same as referring to African-Americans as “Negroes” or “colored.” Still used? Sure. Derogatory? Maybe, maybe not. Indication of an educated, knowledgeable and intellectual person? No. Indication of an above-7th-grade level education? No.
It’s not censorship, Spell Check. I never said she couldn’t use it; simply that its usage is contradictory to her claims. Nope, don’t feel ignorant or arrogant at all. Thanks for asking
Why would I sign my own name? Your name is Janet, a fairly common name. Mine isn’t. If you’re asking me to display my real identity on the interwebs…well, no. That would fall under “stupid” and “unsafe.”
Dear Chancellor Fox:
I am writing to you concerning the continued racial controversies at various University of California campuses. Since the noose left at the UCSD library has been removed, I’m contemplating to send you a new one. Why? Because a good old-fashioned lynching is in order.
Before you rush to conclusions, let me explain.
The current episode of turmoil began with a local party whose theme poked fun at stereotypes supposedly representative of South Central LA. Any reasonable person would readily perceive this approach as satire, a longstanding literary and dramatic device. Was it offensive? As with most satire, it definitely was – and that is good.
You see, when we are offended, we are likely to react. Unless that reaction is simply a knee-jerk response (such as that by your office), a reaction requires activation of one’s brain. You may agree that activating our brains is infinitely preferable over mindlessly swallowing whatever b.s. we happen to be served.
One particularly unpalatable piece of b.s. that is shoved down our collective throat is “diversity.”
In its original form, diversity is highly desirable. In nature, biologically diverse ecosystems are less vulnerable to diseases and more productive than monocultures. On a university campus, opposing (or even merely different) viewpoints spur lively debate, which in turn fosters creativity and innovation. Without question, humanity collectively benefits from the contributions inspired by a large variety of backgrounds and experiences.
Why has the University of California chosen to adopt race/ethnicity as the single decisive factor in furthering diversity? Are you ensuring UCSD receives a balanced mix of Republicans and Democrats? Gays and heterosexuals? Opera lovers and metal heads? Meat eaters and vegans? How about students who prefer the writings of Ayn Rand versus those of Karl Marx? Perhaps a proper mix of students interested in quantum physics and aspiring poets (and those writing poetry about quantum physics)? Folks that can appreciate Dr. Seuss on a subversive level, and those who can’t? I’m virtually certain that more diverse viewpoints will result from any of these arbitrary traits than the color of someone’s skin.
I assumed that college application essays served to differentiate students beyond grades and test scores. It appears that with all the budget cuts, there is no staff to read them. Therefore, instead of treating students as the unique individuals they are, it seems easier to simply lump them into categories with emotionally charged labels.
Sure, race and ethnicity, along with height, weight and gender, are the most obvious traits we notice about people we meet, before they have a chance to open their mouths and let us glean some insight into more substantial aspects of their personas. But isn’t that precisely the sort of simpleminded superficiality higher education is supposed to eradicate?
Throughout history, people with their own agendas have used arbitrary traits to unite, divide and discriminate against people. Each time, they applied a nice, shiny euphemism. “Preserving family values” – sounds like a good thing, right? How about “preserving the pure blood of the Aryan race?” It gives us cold chills today, but it sounded perfectly benign, even laudable, during the Nazi era.
Another shiny euphemism is “diversity.” If we add more “blacks” (however you may define that label), we will create a student body that is more balanced and representative of our society – so goes the reasoning du jour. Are we going to assume that “blacks” … come from challenged socioeconomic backgrounds? Are more conscious about human rights? Have rhythm? Jump higher?
I am not privy to UCSD’s list of stereotypical “black” traits. Make no mistake, that list exists, even if it is only implied – because every time we attempt to force a group of diverse (in its original meaning) individuals under a labeled (or red and white striped) hat, we give birth to such a list. Such a list, while perhaps not offensive at first glance, is far more damaging than the list of attributes used by the Compton Cookout as the recommended attire, behavior and attitude of its attendees. Because any list that is born under the auspices of a prestigious institution such as UCSD will automatically be imbued with a sense of legitimacy.
The characteristics we choose to identify others and ourselves mark the dividing lines between social groups. By focusing on race, we are furthering this broken model of diversity.
If we allow racial definitions to divide us, if we allow the fear of symbols to control us, if we allow the threat of persecution to silence us, our race – the human race – will succumb to the worst form of slavery.
This is my call to hunt down and publicly execute the ignorant and racist notions that have hijacked the concept of diversity. What better place than a library, a place of learning and organized knowledge? Let’s hang these ill-conceived ideas from the rafters and let their rotting corpses remind us that if we want to vanquish racism, we must start by treating all people equally.
For if we allow misguided preconceptions to live, we are bound to witness the death of the accomplishments brought by the Civil Rights Movement, of free speech, and of our human dignity.
Yours sincerely,
The Cat in the Hood
Wall Street Words: From Annuities to Zero Coupon Bonds, Revised Edition ISBN: 1557388652. Author: Richard J. Maturi. Binding: softcover. Publisher: Probus Pub Co. Publication Date: 1992. A wonderful copy with some minor edgewear to the cover. – , Trade PaperBack, Very Good /.