UC's Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture and Inclusion

Gary Fouse
fousesquawk


This week, I put up a posting on the letter from the Zionist Organization of America to University of California President Mark Yudof addressing their concerns about two individuals who have been appointed to the UC Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture and Inclusion. Not knowing either of the two persons, I decided to find out all the names on the council. The below-linked UC document lists the members.

http://www.ucmerced.edu/news_articles/06162010_uc_names_advisory_council.asp

I note there are a couple of students on the council. I know nothing about them nor do I much care. With only a couple of possible exceptions, you can sum up the rest of the council as being the usual collection of liberal activists. Everything is pretty much covered.

As to this gentleman, Herscher, who I guess is supposed to represent the Jewish interests, I have no indication that he has ever spoken out about anti-Semitic issues in the UC system. I do note, however that Pam Geller and Robert Spencer are supposed to speak at Herscher's Skirball Center in Los Angeles in August. (Maybe I shouldn't have said that. I might get him thown off the council.)

As for Jorge Mariscal, a professor at UC San Diego, who ZOA considers a poor choice, he is quite outspoken on the issues of brown and black students at UCSD, where the number of such students is very low. Mariscal is apparently quite anti-Israel as well, which the ZOA letter notes.

Here are a couple of articles Mariscal has written for Counterpunch, a leftist online publication:

Trouble in Paradise

http://www.counterpunch.org/mariscal03122010.html

This essay about the recent mess (es) at UCSD, of which I have written at great length, raises interesting points:

"The events at UC San Diego open a window on to the future of California and perhaps the nation. As public higher education increasingly becomes the domain of the wealthy and working class youth are forced to go into debt for a college degree, fewer Black and Brown youth will be able to attend the most prestigious universities. In California, the resegregation of public education is well underway. With only small and isolated Black and Brown communities on campus, students of color will be subjected to the casual racism that permeates the general culture. The far right’s attacks on the President of the United States, the widespread assault on American Muslims, and every racist shtick in between will resonate across public spaces originally designed to educate an enlightened citizenry."

Here we go again. Yes, there are lots of criticisms of Obama. He is the President of the USA. It comes with the job in case you have not noticed. It's not his race; it is his policies.

Mariscal bemoans the scarcity of black and Latino students at UCSD. Yet, it appears that the problem is not that the university is not accepting them, but that most choose to go to other colleges. If that has developed over the recent incidents (Compton Cookout, noose in the library and the Koala rants)then he has a point. Many Jewish students are choosing not to attend UC Irvine because of what many perceive as an anti-Semitic atmosphere on campus when Israel Apartheid Week rolls around every year.

I don't take issue with Mariscal's quoting of the Koala (unofficial student newspaper) guy getting on the campus closed circuit TV and ranting about "ungrateful n----s". If that happened, I don't need some Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture and Inclusion to know what to do. The student is gone and Koala is gone. Period.

"More important, the students understood that this was about the death throes of public education and every other devastating effect that thirty years of Reaganomics had visited upon working families in what was once called the Golden State."

Yeah, right. It was Reaganomics that caused this economic mess in California. Actually, it has been the out-of-control, profligate spending on every social program imaginable that has brought California to the brink of bankruptcy. And where were the university communities on this spending? They supported it. They cheered it. They demanded it. They elected the politicians who have spent us into this mess. Now the money is gone and the universities are feeling the pinch. But it's all Reaganomics. Gimme a break.



How Military Recruiters Pitch to Latinos
http://www.counterpunch.org/mariscal10132006.html

"How to Spot a Police Spy????"


Well, Mariscal didn't write that. The editors did.

But for cryin' out loud! What's wrong with the military trying to recruit Latinos? I got news for you. If Skippy Peanut Butter can develop an ad that they think will appeal to Latinos, they're sure gonna do it. It's called Madison Avenue.

And what's with all this right brain-left brain stuff? I've been married to a Mexican woman for 35 years, and I have never even thought about whether she is right-brain-dominant or left-brain dominant.

(Now you got me wondering.)

"According to this racializing model, "right-brain" irrational Hispanics, unsuited for "America's system of education," will vote their way into Karl Rove's projected Republican majority, and for decades to come fill the ranks of the lowest echelons of the service sector, the prison system, and the combat units of America's imperial army. Were he alive today Che Guevara, whom a CIA operative once described as "fairly intellectual for a Latin," would undoubtedly be asking progressive Latinos what they plan to do about it."

Karl Rove??!!? Talk about putting irrelevant supporting sentences in your paragraphs! Amazing how Karl Rove gets blamed for everything by the left.



And finally. I posted an article a couple of years ago about Che Guevara explaining to all those young students that wear Che T-shirts that their hero was nothing more than an executioner who ran kangaroo courts when Castro took power where hundreds were taken out and shot after 5 minute trials. That was Che Guevara. I guess I have to explain it to university professors as well.