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OPINION & EDITORIAL

Amid failures of Plan 2008, students need to demand action

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by Letters to the Editor

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Chancellor Wiley sent me an e-mail Tuesday, Sept. 20, at 2:14 p.m. In truth, he sent it to all 40,000 University of Wisconsin-Madison students, but nevertheless I was still excited to get an email direct from the man whose salary I pay to lead this university.

"I would like to personally invite you to the sixth annual Campus Plan 2008 Forum, which will be held over two days, Thursday, Sept. 29 and Thursday, Nov. 3, both at Memorial Union … " the e-mail started.

I had no desire to read any further. Not that I have no interest in the issues of diversity, race relations, or administration accountability. Having worked with the Multicultural Student Coalition (MCSC) and other student groups for four years on this campus and having attended countless forums, discussions, and focus groups, I have been deeply concerned and involved with these topics. The reason I refused to read Wiley's full e-mail was because I already knew what he was going to say.

Every semester, Wiley publishes an "open letter to the campus community" (pretending that all campus members actually feel part of the same community) in which he recycles the rhetoric that has been used for the past 30 years at UW-Madison and most of America: "Diversity is important to us … we have a plan to improve the situation … it is difficult to make big changes … work with us to make the campus more welcoming for everybody … but remember that this a long process."

Bull.

If diversity were so important to Chancellor Wiley, Provost Peter Spear, Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity Bernice Durand, and the other top administrators (including former ones like Paul Barrows and Luoluo Hong), they would have made concrete changes long ago. Instead, their policies have made it so that in 2005, the number of African-American students graduating from UW-Madison, is smaller than it was in 1975.

As students, though, this should not surprise us. The UW administration has never been about justice and equality, and it never will be. The only way that they will change their ways is if we make them change. As Frederick Douglass said, "power concedes nothing without demand." Thus, if it were not the struggles like the Black Student Union strike in 1969 and the Civil Rights Defense Coalition's protests in the 1990s, the state of racial justice on the UW-Madison campus would be even worse.

What we need do as students who want real diversity is to think strategically, develop new campaigns, and most importantly, act. But we need to act independently of the administration. And this is my main frustration with recent student efforts around diversity, especially those led by the Associated Students of Madison (ASM) and MCSC, my own organization: we have not been acting, we have been reacting. Whether it is the university dismantling a certain administrative office or holding a new forum, we let these small events distract us from the larger goal.

Moreover, we need to reclaim the language that sets forth the goals we actually want. We should not even talk about "Plan 2008." Plan 2008 is a joke, just like the Madison Plan before that (which ended in 1998, thus starting the ten-year Plan 2008) and the Plan 2018 that will surely come afterwards. Any plan that only offers vague assurances of change — but not until ten years from now — is a waste of time. That is why no one takes the promises of the United Nations to "cut world hunger in half by the year 2025" seriously. I do not want any more plans, and I will be graduated and gone by 2008. I want action now.

Students: do not allow yourselves to be co-opted by the administration, be it on the issue of racial justice, domestic partnership benefits, the Iraq War or sweatshop UW clothes. Nor should you let the drive for SSFC money blind you from your organization's original purpose. Only a sustained, strong, independent student movement can force the administration to do not only what is right but also what is necessary.

So I do encourage everybody to come to the Plan 2008 Forum this Thursday, Sept. 29 in the Memorial Union. But only come if you're willing to put in the time and energy after the forum to push for real affirmative action.

Josh Healey (jghealey@wisc.edu) is a member of the Multicultural Student Coalition.

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Anonymous (September 27, 2005 @ 5:52pm):

Josh Healey just assumes that if blacks have low graduation rates, it must be due to injustice. The proof? Who needs proof? He's with the MCSC!

Instead of committing more money to "diversity" (i.e., politically correct racism), the university should do something useful for its students: zero out funding for the MCSC.

Anonymous (September 27, 2005 @ 10:10pm):

While I disagree with your arguments and assumptions vehemently, Josh, I have to admit your column is well written.

Anonymous (September 27, 2005 @ 10:25pm):

The "proof" is in the graduation numbers Mr/Ms. Anonymous. MCSC has looked at the graduation data. I invite you to come into the MCSC office, 324 N. Henry street, if you are interested in seeing that same data yourself.

-=Ken Taté

Anonymous (September 28, 2005 @ 12:56pm):

Ken,

Graduation rates are not proof, or even evidence, of injustice. The rates themselves say nothing about WHY some people graduates and some don't. Josh simply assumes that it must be racism. If that's true, than there must be a lot of racism in favor of East Asians and Jews.