Of Hard Work and Privileged People

I originally posted this piece in a slightly different form on my blog on January 17, 2011. In the meantime, I submitted it to Cultural Weekly. The editor liked it but wanted it to focus more on culture than on politics, so we edited it and here it is in updated form. I like it better than the original.  It was posted on  http://www.culturalweekly.com/  on 

Of Hard Work and Privileged People

My daddy had one necktie: It was permanently knotted, so on the rare occasions when he needed to wear it, he would just pull it over his head and tighten it. I could probably count on both hands how often I saw him wear it over the course of my life. He was a little guy, barely 5’3”, heavyset, with powerful hands. When I made brownies, he would take two walnuts in one hand, squeeze them, and they would crack; just like that. For variety, he would smash them with his fist.

It wasn’t a trick; it was just the way he cracked nuts.

I can’t imagine the fathers in “Leave It to Beaver” or “Father Knows Best,” pulling on a pre-knotted tie, or helping out in the kitchen by cracking nuts with their bare hands. The work these two suburban men did was mysterious. They left in the morning; they were home in time for dinner. They wore ties to work. They had time and energy to help their kids with their homework. Personally, I liked Jackie Gleason’s truculent truck driver; his breezy, worldly-wise wife, Alice, and his friend Art Carney, the sanitation worker in "The Honeymooners." While both the suburban and the working-class families were somewhat idealized, their lives were familiar to me. 

At least, at that time, working-class people appeared on TV and in the movies.  Today, they don’t. In today’s entertainment product, rich and easy-living people predominate, and poverty is always pathological: The kids are in gangs; the working mom is stressed and angry, or defeated.  

This makes me think that maybe GOP Presidential aspirant Newt Gingrich, and this week's apparent front-runner, has been watching too much TV.  By suggesting that poor kids be given janitorial work in their schools [link:http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/gingrich-defends-remarks-on-food-stamps-janitor-jobs-for-poor-children-to-instill-work-ethic/2012/01/16/gIQApmTN4P_story.html] , to help them learn the meaning of work and of earning a paycheck, because they don’t see people working hard around them, he has bought into an image of working-class and poor people as problematic, as if their mere existence is a strain on society.

Then as an example, he offered up one of his own daughters who had a brief stint with working as a janitor when she was thirteen. His daughter raved about the experience. It must have been cool for her to see how the other 99% lives, especially if she only had to do it for a short time. I think the children of the rich should do some work for a paycheck since that may be their only brush with reality. Actually working and paying 20% of their wages in taxes, just like everybody else, instead of living off their investments and paying only 15% of the income in taxes.

I had a bit of janitorial experience. Occasionally, I would help clean the convent of the school I attended, just to be helpful. The nuns would feed us well; it was a win-win. But my real brush with janitorial work was when, as a college student and child of a working-class family, I used to borrow my father’s car and pick him up from his third job in the evenings. After working from 6am to 3pm as a warehouseman, he’d work from 3pm to 5pm in a gas station, and then he would go to the gas company’s corporate offices to clean up. I would meet him there a couple of days a week and empty ashtrays and wastebaskets while he cleaned floors and did other such tasks. A lifelong Teamster, he was also the shop steward in his warehouse, so he spent some evenings at union meetings. If we were lucky, we wouldn’t be too late for dinner. My father’s workday was twelve hours long. That’s what this poor child saw: My father, at day’s end, so exhausted that he would have dinner and fall asleep immediately thereafter in front of the television.

Back-breaking work is over-rated. You learn lots of things from watching your parents work twelve hours a day, especially that you don’t want to ever have to do it yourself.   I had a way out. I was in college, paying my own way without scholarships by working at my own three part-time jobs, while I lived at home.  If I had been cleaning up with no end in sight, no dreams to look forward to, it would have been a life-sentence rather than an opportunity for a paycheck.

Some years ago, an acquaintance of mine was going through a very bad depression. A child of privilege, she had grown up with the expectation that she would always be taken care of. She married a prosperous professional man but then the disaster hit: His company downsized, and he lost his job. He was at that awkward age: Too old to be seen as a young go-getter, but too young to retire. They struggled, and he got a job as a salesman—unfortunately, he wasn’t very good at it. She bristled with resentment. Her comfortable middle-class existence was undone as they struggled to hang on to their home. She obstinately refused to get a job; she would train for one thing or another and then leave it after being hired because she didn’t like the work.

She was complaining to me about her situation, and I was mystified. It seemed pretty clear to me: if they were going to survive and stay in their beautiful suburban house, she had to find work that would help bring enough money in. I remember her glaring at me: “You wouldn’t understand,” she said. “You’ve always had to work!”

That’s true. I didn’t understand: I don’t know what it’s like to be the daughter or wife of wealthy men, or to have money making money for me, sight unseen, while all I’d have to do is spend it. Even now, as a professional building a 401K, I worry about what it will be like when I am no longer able to work.  Theoretically, my pension and Social Security checks should keep me pretty comfortable, but deep down, I don’t trust they will.

So much for the supposed sanctity of hard work.  As long as America’s entertainment only depicts the well-off, politicians have little reason to understand the working-class.  They think they’re talking to an audience whose minds have been enfeebled by the Real Housewives of Whatever Hills.  They’re probably right. 

The reverse is also true – until our leaders start talking in real terms about real, working-class people, entertainment companies won’t sense that TV shows and movies should have working-class people as string, central characters.

The entertainment industry and politics as usual – those are two nuts my dad would have loved to crack.

Diego the Cat Has Friends in High Office

Diego in hiding

My friend has a big ol’ cat named Diego. When he senses that a trip to the vet is imminent, he crouches down in the middle of the living room, making himself as small as possible. He thinks he is invisible, but he is a big guy and holding his breath won’t change that. The remaining crop of GOP candidates for president reminds me of Diego. Each one has so many skeletons in the closet that he or she has to stand against the door to keep them all from popping out, but we all know they’re there, barely out of sight. Yet they think if they just don’t mention them, nobody will see them. Have they heard that tale about the Emperor’s new clothes?

In order, from most innocuous to most egregious, let us start with Michelle Bachmann. Rep. Bachmann claims that she was a government tax lawyer, formerly employed by the Internal Revenue Service. In the next breath, she claims that she has worked all her life in the private sector. Does she know that working for the IRS puts her employment history in the public sector? Moreover, by all accounts she actually worked there very briefly amidst maternity leaves. Did she work there long enough to gain a real understanding of the tax code? Furthermore, she berates people dependent on public subsidies even though she and her husband own clinics that have received tens of thousands of dollars in public subsidies. She’ll put an end to that, by cracky! Somehow she escapes the wrath of her Tea Party adherents.

Then there’s Texas’s governor, Rick Perry. His family’s hunting ranch was named Niggerhead Ranch. He claims the rock at its entrance bearing the infamous name was painted over long ago but witnesses claim it was there as recently as two years ago. Even so, whether it was two years ago or twenty, did they paint over it out of a newfound sensitivity to the sensibilities of African Americans or out of the uneasy sense that it was no longer acceptable to be so overtly racist, even in Texas?

The former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich is so weighed down with his past sins that he resembles Charles Dicken’s ghost of Jacob Marley. He is the only speaker in the history of the House of Representatives to be sanctioned and fined for ethics violations. He closed down the federal government partly because he resented his seat on a trip on Air Force One. The twice married speaker led the impeachment of President Bill Clinton even as he was conducting an affair with the woman who would become his third and present wife, Callista. Sounding rather like his old nemesis, Bill Clinton, who wanted to parse the meaning of “is,” Gingrich is at pains to differentiate that he earned millions from Fannie Mae for his services as an historian and not as a lobbyist. I’m an historian; perhaps he could do a seminar for his fellow historians to share his money-making secrets. We would all be extremely appreciative but he would have to do it as a professional courtesy because we’d never be able to afford his fees.

Mitt Romney keeps trying to convince his audiences that he’s just one of them, even as he adds a $12 million addition to his house and makes lame jokes about how he knows what it’s like to be unemployed. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

But another Texan, perpetual candidate Ron Paul wins the prize for trying to make his past invisible through his dissembling. There are caches of Ron Paul’s writings that are virulently racist. He claims that they went out under his name but that somebody else wrote them; that he was busy practicing medicine. I'm a writer, if someone put out something under my name, I'd be on them so fast, heads would spin. The thing about writing is that once it’s published, it exists. It’s no longer “he said, she said,” it’s hard copy; it’s in people’s homes and in public libraries. Once it is published, “plausible deniability,” to quote a favorite phrase of another Texan, Lyndon Baines Johnson, is lost. Ron Paul may think his past is invisible but he’s just acting like that big ol’ cat. That his followers are willing to ignore it is no great surprise; if independent voters choose to ignore it, we're in trouble. 

9/11 and all followed

The weekend before September 11, 2001, I had been to Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire with a friend. At one of the souvenir shops, I'd bought some beautiful glass balls and a shimmering toy dragon for my granddaughter. Since I do not teach on Tuesdays, I was packaging the toys for her, decorating the box with Harry Potter pictures, saying that I was sending her the magical creature with some dragon eggs as well, and packing it for shipping to St. Louis while I listened to NPR.  


8:46am: As I printed out the mailing label, the first announcement came through, that a plane had flown into one of the Twin Trade Towers. How could that be?  I went into the other room to turn on the television. At 9:03am, as I stood in front of the television in a stupor, trying to think clearly, trying to remember if I had any friends who worked in that building, the second plane struck.  It dawned on me that we were being attacked; my heart started pounding very hard. I called my best friend in San Francisco, waking her up saying, turn on your TV! I was having an anxiety attack.  I was trying to calm down when at 9:37am, the news came of the attack on the Pentagon. I knew then that the White House would be next. At 10:03, Flight 93 crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. In just over an hour, our carefree lives ended. 


I could not imagine who was crazy enough to launch an attack on the United States.   Who would want to start a world war? Korea? Wait, using civilian airplanes? 


Then two other heart-stopping events events took place: The first one was seeing George W. Bush at Ground Zero, raising the flag with the firefighters, telling them that all America heard them; that we would be resolute in our resistance to terrorism. He must have said resolute thousands of times in the days that followed but when I heard him say it the first time, I recognized that this bubble-headed president had found his sea-legs. He now had a sense of purpose, and he had become a war-time president. We would be stuck with him for two terms. Then, when he was launching the invasion of Iraq, reporters asked him why he was invading Iraq and he responded that they had attacked his daddy. I never saw that news-clip shown again. And we invaded Iraq under the excuse of a fabricated connection with Osama Bin-Laden. 


Our lives changed forever. Now the days before 9/11 seem like a dulcet summer brought to an end by a hurricane worse than Katrina, whose effects we feel every day. Since 9/11 we have known nothing but war, financial loss, and the increasing restrictions on our civil liberties enforced by our fear of being attacked and reinforced by the financial losses that have driven 9.1% of our population--14 million Americans-- into the ranks of the unemployed. 


Fearful people are easily manipulated. We have been manipulated into spending billions of dollars in unwinnable wars, and allowing previously unimaginable intrusions into our privacy, not only at airports but in our daily lives. 


As we remember 9/11, we must think not only of the dead in the towers, in the Pentagon, in a field in Pennsylvania,  and in two hopeless wars, but of the continuing devastation of our culture and economy. Unless we find the courage to stand up to those in our country who are using our fear against us, all will be lost. 

Beyond the Pearly Gates: God and the Angel Gabriel Consider Michelle Bachmann

Scene: Somewhere beyond the Pearly Gates

Angel Gabriel: Lord, may I ask you something?  Did you send Hurricane Irene to punish New York and all those New England liberals?

God:  Did I what?

Gabriel: Send Hurricane Irene—

God: I can't believe you would ask me that! Why would you think I had anything to do hurricanes?

Gabriel: Well, Michelle Bachmann said you did; and besides, everybody knows that you use the weather to express your displeasure at human behavior.

God: That was when I was young.  Don’t you remember that I made a deal with Noah never to punish them by destroying the earth with water? The rainbow, remember? I made the rainbow the sign of the covenant? [Quoting from memory--]

"12 God added, "Here is the sign of the covenant I am making between myself and you and every living creature with you, for all generations to come: 13 I am putting my rainbow in the cloud - it will be there as a sign of the covenant between myself and the earth. 14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth, and the rainbow is seen in the cloud; 15 I will remember my covenant which is between myself and you and every living creature of any kind; and the water will never again become a flood to destroy all living beings. 16 The rainbow will be in the cloud; so that when I look at it, I will remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of any kind on the earth."  "(Genesis 9: 12-16)

Gabriel: Opps, I guess they forgot what the rainbows mean. But Michelle Bachmann said—

God: WHAT did that woman say this time? (He puts his head in his hands.)

Gabriel: She told a campaign rally in Florida, “I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?' Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending."

God: So she thinks there’s a loophole? That I’m not breaking my promise if I kill them all so long as I use a hurricane to bring the floods?  Why is she dragging me into American affairs?  They are such a quarrelsome bunch. (He frowns.)

Gabriel: I don’t think she knows you made the promise! 

God: But she goes around “quoting” me all the time.  Do people think I actually talk to her?  I haven’t concealed myself in a burning bush to talk with humans for several millennia. I don’t get involved in politics. Besides, Jesus said to them, “Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”  (Luke 20:25) It’s all there in the Bible. Doesn’t she read the Bible?

Gabriel: She says she does. I heard her tell another campaign rally that “I just take the bible for what it is, I guess, and recognize that I am not a scientist, not trained to be a scientist. I'm not a deep thinker on all of this. I wish I was. I wish I was more knowledgeable, but I'm not a scientist.”

God: (LOL) Ain’t that the truth. You need a brain to be a scientist. Gabe, check our records—make sure I gave her a brain.  There could have been a mistake on the assembly-line.

Gabriel: But Lord, you don’t make mistakes.

God: I don’t but the assembly line isn’t perfect; it gets backed-up now and then. Just check, would you?  Y’know, I think the problem is the microphones at their campaign rallies.  They get up there with those microphones in their hands and LIE! The whoppers I hear them tell!  Why, I—

Gabriel: (Giggling) Excuse me for interrupting, Lord, but did you hear what she said about $2 per gallon gas? She said that when she becomes president, she’ll roll back the price of gas to $2 a gallon!

God: (God is laughing so hard, tears are rolling down his cheeks) $2 per gallon gas!  (He falls off his throne and rolls on the floor.)

God: (Choking with laughter) Not in my lifetime!

Where The Help Is: A Latina Perspective on Hollywood

Much debate has ensued after the release of “The Help,” the new film about black maids and their relationships with their white employers in Mississippi during the 1960s. The setup for the film is that a white college girl comes home from school and interviews the family maids about their lives.  At first they are reluctant but she succeeds in persuading them to speak and gradually draws out others in the town. The Association of Black Women Historians has issued a statement that takes to task many elements of the film. That a movie that seems to be black-positive and portrays positive interactions between blacks and whites has drawn such fire from some in the black community is a mystery to many people. Yet if you dig just below the surface, the justification for this critique becomes clear.

The stories of blacks and Latinos that make it into the movies are usually the ones written by whites about their positive interactions with nonwhite people. African Americans are weary of stories about black maids, nannies, whores and gangbangers. Stories written by African Americans about their own experiences do not necessarily have a kindly white person easing the way. Americans value the white, middle-class perspective in a way that they do not value a black or Latino's own story. In a nutshell, American society prefers to think of itself as kinder and more beneficent than our history shows us to be.

Hollywood has created movies about heroic black characters, but more often than not, the primary perspective in these stories is that of a white person. Take the most iconic of these stories, “To Kill A Mockingbird.” The story is primarily of a young white girl, Scout, learning about racism, and of her modest, heroic father, Atticus Finch, and his efforts to stop an injustice against an innocent black man accused of rape. Do you remember his name? Do you remember who played him? I thought not. Tom Robinson was played by Brock Peters, a character actor who went on to have a long and successful career. Atticus Finch was played by the great Gregory Peck; no matter what else he went on to do in his career, his image as the upright Southern lawyer in a white suit is what everyone remembers.

In “Ghosts of Mississippi,” Alec Baldwin plays Bobby DeLaughters, the heroic prosecutor who finally brings the killer of civil rights leader Medgar Evers to account. DeLaughters sacrificed his political aspirations and lost his marriage in his pursuit of justice. DeLaughters, not the dead leader or his wife Myrlie Evers (played by Whoopi Goldberg), was the hero of the film.

“Cry Freedom,” about South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, focused on a white South African journalist (portrayed by Kevin Kline) whose views about Biko changed after they met. Then he sets out to investigate Biko’s torture and killing at the hands of the police. He was forced to flee South Africa when he wrote a book about his findings.

Even in a story like "Something the Lord Made," with rapper Mos Def as the true-life lab technician turned heart surgery pioneer, Vivien Thomas, the black character’s achievements take place within the narrow window society allowed because an arrogant white cardiologist pushed his own prejudice aside a wee bit to make the black character's achievements possible.

Did you ever hear of “Sarafina?” It was one of Whoopi Goldberg's finest roles, but it was in the theaters for perhaps five minutes.  She was central to the story; there was no white facilitator. In that story, the only white characters were the police who tortured her. It did not get much of a white audience because most whites don't want to see--or face--the abuses perpetrated by their own.

The public at large, like you, may go to see a film or a show out of interest in the subject matter or because you want to show your children a broader view of the world; all good motivations, but Hollywood does not trust that ethnically or racially authentic stories will sell.

Consider the story of the black Baltimore Ravens football player Michael Oher in the film “The Blind Side.” I read about him originally in New Times magazine in September 2006, in “The Ballad of Big Mike,” and was so moved by the article that I cut it out and shared with friends; I cannot remember the white woman’s place in the story; it was really focused on Oher’s own trek.  “The Blind Side” was more about a Southern white woman doing something good and noble, and Sandra Bullock’s portrayal of the woman justly won an Academy Award for best performance. I wonder if Hollywood would have made that movie if Oher had been rescued by a middle-class black family, or if the player had told his own story. Would it sell? Or was the image in the ad for the film, showing the massive Oher walking with the small woman’s arm protectively around his shoulders, just too good to pass up?

How many blacks are allowed to be heroes in our society?  A black man becomes President, and the Republicans declare that they will do everything to defeat him; they unite to oppose everything he proposes, even when he takes up their own proposals! But they insist that racism is not their main motivation. Nope, no racism here.

Which black stories get wide coverage? Martin Lawrence or Tyler Perry's parodies of black families where grandma is played broadly by a man in drag. To me, Perry's comedies are little better than the old minstrel shows, with blacks shucking and jiving for our entertainment pleasure.

Yet African Americans influence American culture deeply in less
conscious ways. Just as the culture as a whole has absorbed jazz, which has its roots in native African musical forms, young people have absorbed hip-hop, black clothing and hair styles. The impact of black culture goes much deeper than we can imagine.

It is almost painful to talk about how Latinos are portrayed in the cinema and on television. How many Latinas do you see in movies or TV who are not whores, gangbangers, busty bombshells, or maids?  How many Latina professors, doctors, lawyers, or roles as other professionals do you see Latinas play? 

Thank God for Jennifer Lopez--she is beautiful, elegant, smart, accomplished, and she is doing something besides a stereotypical role. She has played a wider variety of roles than most Latina actresses, such as in “Out of Sight,” where she played a U.S. Marshal in pursuit of George Clooney as a bank robber; “Angel Eyes,” where she played a police officer; or “The Wedding Planner ,“ where she played the eponymous role. None of these characters have a Latino name or any hint of Latino culture. Is her acceptability to the general American audience somehow better if she is laundered of her Latina identity? When she turns up in a Latino role, aside from the tragic “Selena,” she is playing—SURPRISE!—a hotel maid in “Maid in Manhattan.”   I am proud that J-Lo is Latina and I am reminded of earlier Latina actresses who “could pass” and were forced to give their names in pursuit of stardom, like Rita Hayworth, née Margarita Carmen Cansino, whose father was of Jewish-Spanish background and her mother of Irish-English descent. Thankfully Carmen Miranda and Rita Moreno weren’t stripped of their identities to star in the movies.

I know that other Latinas share my extreme weariness with the trash that most Latinas play in the movies; on television, we’re virtually invisible. Then there’s George Lopez, but he’s the subject for another kind of rant.


[published on MyLatinoVoice 08/30/2011   http://www.mylatinovoice.com/film/67-movie-news/2987-where-the-help-is-a-latina-perspective-on-hollywood.html]

A Historian Sees "Nabucco" for the First Time

Being a historian and loving opera can be very challenging. After going to the Jane Pickens Theater in Newport to see Nabucco, simulcast live from Taormina, Sicily, I have come to the conclusion that even though I love Giuseppe Verdi best, logic wasn't his strong suit. Ah, well; one can’t be good at everything.

Nabucco, has a very convoluted plot; not as weird as Il Trovatore but strange nevertheless. It is very peculiar watching an opera about Jews (as compared with the Egyptians and Ethiopians in Aida, for instance, or Turandot's Chinese ice maiden-princess). Periodically, the chorus would sing about killing the Jews: “Kill the Jews! Kill the Jews!” Honestly, I never thought of that phrase as a chorus’s refrain. I didn't know the plot in advance so I was sitting there wondering if a wide-scale massacre was about to take place; Nabucco was the star, after all. About halfway through, I realized that I had no clue what was going on--and I was wide awake. I even had an ice coffee at the beginning of the opera. 

Then it turns out that the Assyrian princess, Fenena, daughter of Nabucco, (the true-life Babylonian King Nabucodonosor, or as we call him in English, Nebuchadnezzar) who has been taken hostage by the Jews, is in love with the Jew, Ismaele, nephew of the High Priest Zaccharia. Ismaele was the Judean ambassador, to the Assyrians in Babylon. Assyrians in Babylon?  Yes, Babylon conquered Assyria but the events with the Jews were ten years apart. I started getting a headache at this point. 

Wait a minute. Jews had diplomatic relations with their enemies? The ones who conquered them and then moved them en masse to Babylon where they languished in exile? THEN it turns out that her sister, Abigaille, is also in love with the Jewish ambassador. She will spare his people if he stays with her. (I found myself wondering if Abigail Adams knew the origin of her name.)

Nabucco tells her that she, Abigaille, isn't really his daughter, a princess, but is actually a slave. She then grabs the document proving this and tears it to pieces. In the meantime, Fenena converts to Judaism. What?  Nabucco condemns the Hebrews to death, spurred by the jealous Abigalle.  Then Nabucco has a nervous breakdown. I did, too.  Abigaille seizes power while he is, er, indisposed.  Later, he recovers his powers completely and declares himself for the Jewish God. What???  Who's writing this stuff?  The author of Star Trek? It has a happy ending. The Jews are saved and the evil Abigaille dies.  It was a very weird death scene. ("I'm melting!! Melting!!")

I'm not making this up. I'll spare you the rest of it. Suffice it to say that sometimes it's better just to close your eyes and listen to the music. The most memorable aria from the opera is:
 "Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves," Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate / "Fly, thought, on golden wings." It is one of the rare arias that the Met permits an encore of. They did an encore here as well. Gorgeous.

Someday, I want to go to see the opera in August, in the ampitheater in Taormina, in Sicily.What a beautiful place; it takes your breath away. Halfway through the opera, the moon came up, and you could see lights outlining the Sicilian coast. It was spectacular. http://www.villaducale.com/taormina-events-2011.html

Starting anew

I stopped writing the blog last year; I was having shoulder troubles that culminated in surgery, a sick leave during the fall semester, and a long and painful recovery over the winter and spring. I'm over all of that now so I thought I'd start it up again.

Classes start for me on September 7, now only two and a half weeks away. Who knows where the time goes?!

Enjoy what's left of August; as they say, for teachers, August is one long Sunday night.

Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall

It was the first day of classes at the University of Rhode Island, where I teach.  One young man, his eyes rather rheumy, approaches me to sign a form acknowledging that he will be away for two classes due to soccer team away-games. I keep myself from exclaiming, “My God, you stink of alcohol!” As he walks out of the classroom, I feel like fanning the fumes away.  The first day of classes!  A Wednesday!

I am not much of a drinker; most people think I am a teetotaler. I’m not, but a beer or a single glass of wine can hold me for a whole evening. I don’t mind the taste of alcohol, I just cannot stand the side effects of getting drunk. I have seen too many people embarrass themselves by getting sloppy-drunk; or hitting on somebody  because their inhibitions are down; or getting sick on somebody’s lawn. I have taken car keys away from friends, and have driven more people than I care to remember home after a party. I detest all of that and would never allow myself to behave in that fashion, and I stay away from people who do.

The idea of showing up for class (or work) plastered simply disgusts me. I immediately wrote him an e-mail:  “I don't know if you were aware of how strongly your breath reeked of alcohol, but it did. Before I became an academic, I worked on the street with homeless people, many of whom were alcoholics; thus, it is a familiar smell to me. It is inappropriate to come to class drunk or nursing a hangover. This is a serious class. If you cannot BE serious, please drop it.”

I mentioned it to my colleagues. “Boy, you’re hard,” said one.  Maybe I am, but I find such behavior completely unacceptable.

Then I mentioned it to my daughter, who is now 30 years old. She said, “I’d bet most of your students were drinking heavily over Labor Day weekend.” But why? “First time away from home; first weekend away from being home with parents all summer; time to party.”

Oh my God. It suddenly occurs to me that some of the confrontations I’ve had with unruly students could have been alcohol-fueled. I never realized it. Last fall, I had one student who missed every single Friday class of a Monday-Wednesday-Friday class; he had a string of excuses and learned the hard way that I may believe the first few but after a while, I catch on. Then I start getting mad.

Why would anyone spend $13,000 for tuition and fees per year, plus housing and living expenses, to flush it all down the toilet with the dregs of last night’s wine?  Then again, why would anyone blow thousands of dollars up their noses with cocaine? I don’t understand. I suppose that in some cases, parents are paying the bills, but everyone in this economy is staggering under the weight of tuition, the high prices of books, and other expenses associated with going to college. I read about students graduating with unbearable burdens of debt.  They know how much it is costing their parents or will ultimately cost them—how can they treat their education so carelessly?

When I was a college student, I worked 30 hours a week, juggling three jobs to make ends meet. I lived at home but my family did not have the money for my college education; I either paid for it myself or I would have had to give it up. My education was too precious to throw away.

The first week of classes, Rock, the frat boy who had led my orientation group, saw me in the library studying. He came over to tease me. "Everybody’s like this the first couple of weeks; you’ll get over it.” I remember having that prickly reaction I get when I want to fight with someone and I hold my tongue. “You’ll see,” I said to myself.

Rock was a junior and very active in campus organizations. It was a small school and his reputation got around: Mr. Party-time. I’ve often wondered what happened to him. It’s been many years since I was an undergraduate and I didn’t understand it then either, but at least drinking was confined to the weekend—Friday and Saturday. It didn’t begin on Thursday night, as it does now, apparently. My colleagues report that they have students who come to school on Monday hung over from having drunk away the entire weekend. This leaves me speechless.

Until last year, we had a dry campus. Our former president, Robert L. Carothers, had gone to great lengths to curb the students’ drinking. I didn’t agree with him about many things but in this regard we were in perfect accord.  When the new president took over, he immediately lifted the ban on alcohol on campus. I only wish he had to be in the classroom with the professors when they’re dealing with drunk or hung over students. One cannot force students to stop or to realize the great harm they are doing to their education, to themselves, and to their livers, but from now on, when one of these alcoholics-in-training complain about the price of their textbooks, I am going to ask them how much they spent on booze last weekend. I bet it was more than on my class textbooks.


This appeared on MyLatinoVoice the week of September 20, 2010

The Dangers of a Mosque Near Ground Zero

In our country, there is racial and ethnic prejudice that bubbles just beneath the surface, showing its ugly head on occasion. There is also real, palpable race hatred in this country, and we must face that reality. We cannot ignore the very real dangers to the Cordoba congregation and their building, of locating an Islamic center near Ground Zero.

It is such a complex situation! On one hand, I agree that our First Amendment freedom of religion is an inalienable right. On the other hand, I wonder why they would want to build a mosque in that particular place when it is so dangerous. Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf, the head of the Cordoba House project, claims that the project will foster better relations between Islam and the West. Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement is more confrontational: "The time for a center like this has come because Islam is an American religion," she says.

Survivors and relatives of the victims of the 9/11 attacks regard it as an affront and a way for Islam to trumpet its victory over American culture. I even read a letter from an Iranian-American, herself a Muslim, who believes that it is wrong to build it the Cordoba Center in that location.
While the Muslims have the right under our Constitution to build there, I regard it as an instance of whacking a hornets’ nest with a stick. I have no doubt that the center will become a target for violent backlash. They will spend a good part of their budget painting over the racial slurs that will be graffittied on the building. Its members will be at risk going and coming.

Our country has a violent history: synagogues are regularly desecrated. When I lived in Sunland, a suburb of Los Angeles, the doors to our synagogue were firebombed. They had been spray-painted with racial slurs many times. After we moved to the East coast, the Northridge Valley Jewish Community Center where my daughter had been in an after-school program, was attacked by Buford O. Furrow Jr., a self-professed white supremacist, who sprayed the center with bullets injuring an elderly receptionist and several children, and killing a Filipino mail carrier.

For many years, African American churches were targeted for destruction, sometimes with people in them, and not just during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Even as late as the George W. Bush administration, the burning of black churches was a regular occurrence. As recently as November 2008, a church being built for a black congregation in Springfield, Massachusetts, was destroyed by arson.
Considering that we are still at war in two Arab countries and that relations with Islam are very rocky, it seems to me that the wiser course would be to build someplace that would not draw the wrath of the bigots and race haters.

Sad to say, the publicity around the Cordoba Center will very likely draw hatred towards other Islamic institutions around the country. While I am glad that both New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York Governor David Patterson have done the right thing by being supportive of the Cordoba Center and that the building commission has cleared the way for them to build, I fear for the congregation. The law is on the side of the Muslims; the government is making all the appropriate moves but if I were a Muslim, I would stay away from it because the haters are the wild cards.

Do not underestimate the haters. Sometimes they are organized, sometimes they are singular, but too many of them have guns and malevolent intent. Remember Timothy McVeigh: his fury was so deep, he bombed a government office and killed hundreds of people including babies in the child care center. He was a lone wolf—a very dangerous lone wolf.

So what is the answer? Should we live in fear? Should we curb our plans so as not to draw the haters? I know many will disagree with me, but I counsel waiting. Time heals all wounds. We must be realistic: the haters are out there and many of them have guns. I am sorry to say that I doubt that the building can be built without incident. And if they manage to raise the building, it will be a sitting duck. Listen to me: go build somewhere else.

Published by MyLatinoVoice, August 23, 2010.
This column drew a lot of disagreement. To read the comments,go to
http://www.mylatinovoice.com/politics-and-us/24-politics/2080-the-dangers-of-a-mosque-near-ground-zero.html

Immigration: Waiting For Obama To Pull Rabbit Out Of Hat

In November 2008, we elected a young, visionary president who we believed was going to fix everything, but he encountered a few problems. His predecessor did not tell him how bad things really were. He did not know that the greed-mongers on Wall Street were running wild. He could not have known that the economy was almost in ruins and the actual costs of the war were higher than we had been told.

Barack Obama is eloquent and very, very smart, but guess what? He isn’t Superman. Heck, he’s not even Spiderman. Eighteen months into his administration, he has stacked up an impressive list of accomplishments, but we still have over 9% unemployment. The GOP does everything it can to block anything he does, then they cry foul when anyone points out THEIR guy was the one who made a mess of things. Immigration was one of Obama’s stated priorities but you would not know it if you looked at what he has been doing. Then again, keeping our economy from slipping into a greater depression, the long and difficult struggle to get universal health care passed, and trying to cope with the disaster in the Gulf were not on his original list of things to do.

It is seems cold to counsel patience to the unemployed, the people who are losing their houses and businesses, or to immigrants who live in fear of being discovered and deported, but he can’t do everything at once and in the case of immigration, part of the problem is that the Republicans are so divided. You may be surprised to learn that the GOP talks out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to immigration.

Have you ever thought about why George W. Bush was so keen to pass immigration reform, or why it went nowhere even though he was able to pass huge tax cuts for the rich and start two wars?

Without question, the GOP is the party of the rich and of the business interests. Proudly, it is the incarnation of capitalism. I know I will sound like a “commie-pinko” when I say this but capitalism depends on cheap labor and on the exploitation of the poor, and that is one of the main reasons we will never have immigration reform if we wait for the GOP to act.

Think about the clothes we wear. Look at the labels: where were they made? If they were made in China, Thailand, Mexico, or most any other country outside of ours, you can be sure that the workers who made them are barely making a living wage, and they are not getting paid what United States union workers would get.

Why have so many American businesses have gone off-shore? Because they can get cheap labor and pay few or no taxes. Then we go to Walmart or K-Mart or Target and pay a few dollars for a commodity that, if made in this country, would cost at least twice as much.

One of the main sanctions in any serious immigration bill would punish employers for hiring undocumented workers. In other words, passing such a sanction would poke a finger in the eyes of GOP contributors; businessmen who depend on cheap labor to produce what they sell to Americans. But that’s only half of the problem.

There is a faction of the GOP comprised, in part, of the Tea Party Patriots who follow the nativist traditions of the most conservative parts of the Party. Because of the negative connotations of the term “nativists,” they prefer to call themselves “patriots.” They place the interests of the established population over those who are new to country. Typically, they are bitterly opposed to immigrants, especially those who are here illegally. They are determined to block any immigration reform that would allow the undocumented workers to remain here. They would rather spend millions to round up and deport 12 million undocumented workers and their children than allow them to be normalized, even though this approach makes no sense and spends even more money than they lose in allowing them to stay. They claim that undocumented workers take jobs that otherwise would go to real Americans and use public services and medical resources while paying no taxes. Meanwhile, the defenders of undocumented workers point out that they are doing the jobs that Americans will not do. The arguments are familiar and irresolvable.

If you put the two parts of the GOP together the result is inertia and it explains why John McCain, former presidential candidate and a long-time Senator from Arizona, is straddling the fence. On one hand, he is the self-proclaimed maverick who has taken pride, in the past, on working with Democratic senators on legislation. On the other hand, he is a Republican with deep ties to business interests in his state. Still, on yet another hand, he represents Arizona, now ground zero for the anti-immigration ferment. Once, he worked for immigration reform, now he is not so sure because the Tea Party Patriots are on his right flank, dogging his steps. How will he satisfy the competing interests in his party? How will he hang on to his seat as he fails to satisfy anybody?

President Obama said last week that the only way that there can be immigration reform is with bipartisan cooperation. I hope somebody tells him that so long as the Republicans are bitterly divided, and funded by business interests, there will be no bipartisanship on this issue. The Democratic Party will have to go it alone.

*Photo courtesy of the Seattle Weekly
Published on MyLatinoVoice
http://mylatinovoice.com/politics-and-us/24-politics/2019-immigration-waiting-for-obama-to-pull-rabbit-out-of-hat.html

Is This the Way the World Ends?

As the Gulf oil catastrophe goes on and on, I wonder if we are approaching the end of time as we know it. Already, between 26 million and 42 million gallons of oil have surged into the Gulf of Mexico, destroying the coastal economies of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, threatening to round the Florida Keys and make their way up the eastern coast of the United States.

Television and the print media are filled with gut-wrenching pictures of gulls, pelicans and other cormorants soaked in oil, trapped in it as completely as the mastodons and saber tooth tigers of Oligocene (40 to 35 million years ago) until the close of the Pleistocene Epoch, about 11,000 years ago, were trapped in the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits. So far, over 900 animals—birds, turtles, dolphins—have been reported killed by the gusher. As biologists and volunteers race to cleanse them and spare their lives, the reddish goo continues to creep across the globe. 

Dead zones are appearing in the Gulf, starved of oxygen, where no fish can live.  The so-called “plumes” of oil are 3300 feet deep in some places.  78,264 square miles of the Gulf are closed to fishing.

Soon the hurricane season will start in earnest and where the goo will go is anyone's guess. How long will it be before the Gulf Stream current carries the oil and 1,143,000 gallons of poisonous chemical dispersibles across the Atlantic to despoil the beaches of Portugal and Spain?  Before Ireland’s lovely west coast of Connemara with its moody gray skies, finds the awful grease destroying its gray-green beauty?  And what about Morocco and the western coast of Africa; the Canary Islands and Cape Verde Islands?

I have a frightening thought—what if the hurricanes can suck up the oil?  Will it then rain down hundreds of miles away, poisoning everything it touches like toxic rain does? Is that possible? Who can I ask?

I was thinking about the Gulf Stream, when I looked at a map and the obvious thing I had overlooked smacked me in the face. Omigod…what about Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic? What about Jamaica, the Bahamas, and the Lesser Antilles? What if it takes until August before they can finally seal it off the gusher?  What will become of all the island peoples?  What power will they have to force the oil oligarchs to pay them for the damage to their lands? Will the Gulf of Mexico become an empty, tub of empty dirty water?  And what will become of them? What will become of us?

I find myself eating more fish and shrimp as the ban on fishing spreads while I wait with dread for the day when seafood from the Gulf can no longer be fished at all.  How soon will “Gulf Shrimp” become an extinct delicacy?  

BP’s executives have promised to pay “all legitimate claims,” even as they drag their feet to recompense the fishermen whose lives have already been destroyed forever. In the meantime, BP’s value has dropped by half. How long before they declare bankruptcy and slip out of the grasp of their creditors and the people whose lives they have ruined?

Tony Hayward, BP’s CEO, may want his life back, as he says, but I will be happy only if the life he gets back is not in his mansion in Britain but in a spare jail cell where he will be forced to contemplate his recklessness for the rest of his life. No death penalty for him; just solitary confinement with subscriptions to Audubon Magazine, Natural History, Sierra Club, and National Geographic. I’ll even donate one of them.  He is fifty-three now; several consecutive life sentences will suit me just fine. If a person can go to prison for life for destroying one human life, how many years is just punishment for destroying an entire eco-system?

Perhaps the Maya were right. Wouldn't it be ironic if 2012 did indeed mark the end of the world? Suicide by oil: Mother Earth finally drowning its destructive and self-destroying children in the black gold we craved. 

Or as T.S. Eliot wrote,

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but with a whimper.

Our Stars Shine on Commencement Day

Published as "A Professor's Reflections on the Last Day of School" in MyLatinoVoice.                   http://www.mylatinovoice.com/politics-and-us/23-education/1923-a-professors-reflections-on-the-last-day-of-school.htmlhttp://

Today is the last day of the school year for me. While I still have a stack of exams and papers to grade, for the next few weeks I am freed from the performance, wrangling, cajoling and occasional haranguing that is teaching.

I love teaching but it is exhausting. If I was one of those professors who lectures then disappears into their own world, it would be less stressful, but real teaching requires engagement. It requires making sure that the students are following your lead; running to the back of the line to pull along the stragglers, without losing the ones who are soaring ahead of the pack.

This semester, I had my share of unique students. One young woman stopped coming to class about mid-semester because she suffers from migraines. I got a note from her doctor but I frankly doubted the consistency of the malady—half a semester? Yes, her written work was decent but I require students to attend class and am rankled by the seven week-long flat line.

A young man missed many classes in the first weeks of school because of depression and acute anxiety attacks. After I wrote him a long letter describing my own experience with depression and suggesting some of the techniques I have used to deal with it, he connected with me and didn’t miss another class for the rest of the semester. We were lucky; he made a real contribution to the class.

An older woman audited one class. The wife of a science professor, she took the class for half the semester in preparation for going with her husband on a research trip to Chile and Argentina. She asked if she could audit another of my classes when she returned. It would have been nice if she could have stayed for the whole semester.

One student handed every single assignment in late. He had a host of excuses: I wonder if he had any idea that after the second excuse, I watched him with a gimlet eye. Finally, I said to him, “Do you EVER hand anything in on time? I mean, not to me, obviously, but to anyone?” A torrent of excuses followed. I interrupted him: “If you handed your work in on time, you wouldn't have to spend all that energy concocting excuses, being embarrassed, and aggravating your professors.” The next time, late once more, he started to make an excuse saying that since the last time, I had been so upset—. I interrupted him: “I wasn't upset at all; it ISN'T MY problem. It's yours. I have a job. As you may have noticed, when the clock strikes the hour, I am standing at the podium, ready to do my work. But then, you were never on time so you wouldn't have noticed. You are the one who is going to have problems if you don't clean up your act.”

My best student this semester is a young Cambodian man who has taken several classes with me and now plans to become a Mayan archaeologist. On a day when some students were mumbling and shuffling because they'd missed a class and didn't know about the assignment (and hadn't tried to contact me), he handed me a report he'd done on the whole book because he'd missed that class so he went ahead and reviewed the entire book. His enthusiasm made up for all the dissembling mumblers surrounding him. If only they could hear themselves! How utterly lame they sound. I hope they grow up to be more responsible adults than they are students. 

My friend, also a history professor, says that they are trifling with us. I have to remind myself that the lazy ones, the time-wasters, the excuse-makers, the mumbling shufflers and triflers are but a small percentage of my students. Most of my students show up to class on time, turn off their cell phones, and do their work. It's too bad that they are overshadowed by the rest. 

In a couple of weeks, I will have a pleasure reserved to few: I will don my academic cap and gown to attend commencement and watch these young people, good students and not-so-good-but-good enough students, graduate. For some, I will shed a tear of joy, knowing that they will go out and make the world a better place. I will meet some parents, introduced as, “This is my favorite professor,” or “This is the professor I told you about!” The parents will shake my hand warmly and thank me for my efforts. If only they knew how those words sustain us as we deal with all the layabouts, loafers, and excuse makers. On commencement day, the triflers fade from memory: Only the stars shine.

Latinos in Higher Education: Too Few to Celebrate

Rosie with Bola Akanji, a visiting scholar from Nigeria,  & Jody Lisberger, chair of URI Women's Studies Program

In MyLatinoVoice.com:  

http://www.mylatinovoice.com/politics-and-us/23-education/1836-latinos-in-higher-education-too-few-to-celebrate.html

In 1974, not long after I finished my bachelor's degree, I visited a friend who was in graduate school at Iowa State University in Des Moines, Iowa. It was the first time I had ever gone to the Midwest and I knew absolutely nothing about it. It never occurred to me that people would be any different from my hometown of San Francisco. Yes, I know; I was very naive.

My friend took me to a favorite restaurant; she wanted me to try the pork chops, cut thick like a steak, the likes of which I had never seen. The waitress came to our table, took one look at me and said, “You aren't from around here, are you?” I stuttered, “ Uh, no…” and I looked around the room. Every other person in the room was several shades whiter than I; it didn't help that it was midwinter when no one in the room would have seen the sun for a couple of months. My hair, coal black, long, thick and curly, really stood out in contrast to the blond and light brown hair of everyone else in the room. I felt vaguely embarrassed; I guess I don't belong here, I thought.

People are not usually as direct as that waitress but I have had many, many experiences like this; veiled, implied, hinted at, but clear, nevertheless. In fact, I still experience it even though my hair is going gray and worn short. The difference is that now I am acutely aware that this situation should have changed more than it has.

I was thinking about this when I went to the open house our new university president's residence. Looking around, I saw everyone there was white except for me. I still feel a brief pang of panic in that kind of situation, but I have been there a long time; I'm sure they have forgotten about my difference. But I can never forget; I was nearly overcome with the desire to go to the president, who was standing by the door amiably greeting all the visitors, to say, “Hi, I'm one of your 12 Latino faculty!” But it was not the time or the place to call attention to myself, although there is never a good time or place for this issue.

This is my seventeenth year at the University of Rhode Island. According to the university's own Fall 2008 statistics, there are five Latinos in the College of Arts and Sciences. Overall, URI has 699 faculty members: only twelve, or 2%, are Latinos or Hispanic; nineteen, or 3.2% are African or African Americans. Four hundred ninety-eight are white.

The Latino or Hispanic statistic has a kind of hidden trick to it: several are from Spain or the Latin American countries; perhaps half are United States-born and/or raised Latinos. What difference does that make? It means that the real numbers have not changed in a substantive way during my years here. The Latino population is increasing exponentially in the United States, even here in little Rhode Island, but Latino students are not getting into the higher education pipeline. Faculty members born in Latin America tend to be from privileged backgrounds because the majority of the people in the region are poor; if one has the money to go to college, there is money for other things as well.

It is only in the United States that Latinos have the upward mobility to go from working-class to university. At least, that’s the way it has been in the past; California’s economic collapse will have a great impact on the ambitions within the Latino community because California has been the state that has turned out the highest number of educated Latinos. California’s disaster is a disaster for all Latinos in the U.S.

The disaster ignited a few years ago with the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996. Proposition 209 ended affirmative action in admissions to the university system, including the University of California, the state’s flagship university and one of the most distinguished and important in the Wiith theworld. My doctorate is from UCLA.

The California university system had to come up with a different way to diversify its student body, and it did, but the long-term effects have included a dramatic drop in the number of Latino and black students. In 2006, marking the ten-year anniversary of the passage of Prop 209, The Nation magazine noted that the incoming class had only 100 African Americans out of 4,802 new students. Latinos are not mentioned.

Rosie with the chair of our History Department, Marie Schwartz

This year, here at the University of Rhode Island, our Talent Development Program, which runs a pre-matriculation session during the summer for disadvantaged students of all colors, is expecting a drop in its enrollment of about 50%. The TD program, like every other part of the university, is suffering from the severe cuts in funding. These developments mean that my classes will be whiter. The cuts in funding and the reduction in scholarships also mean that many young people will not even attempt to go to college.

One disturbing trend I've noticed is how much students are working at full-time jobs. I have run into students who work the night shift and come in barely able to stay awake in class. I made a comment to a student the other day noting the early hour of her e-mail to me, and she said that she read her e-mail just as she got off work at 5:30 in the morning.

A couple of weeks ago, I was standing in a grocery store line, waiting impatiently as the clerks scrambled to find a price for yucca for the customer in front of me. Suddenly, a young man's voice called to me, “Dr. Pegueros—let me help you over here.” The clerk was a student I'd taught a couple of summers earlier, a Latino. I asked him how his studies were going. He'd had to quit, he told me. It just got too expensive, but he was planning to come back. I chatted with him for a bit, my heart squeezed in my chest. I hope that he will get back but I have my doubts. Latinos have the lowest rate of retention; if they actually drop out, as this young man did, the chances of their return drops dramatically.

This is a major problem for our community. We are running way behind the pack, and the less education our children get, the greater disadvantage they will be at as we become the largest minority in the country.

"Let reverence for the laws become the political religion of the nation."

The controversy over inviting evangelical theologian Greg Boyd to give the keynote address at the inauguration of URI President David Dooley.

The University of Rhode Island inaugurates a new president on April 8. David Dooley, a biologist by training, is described as the son and husband of Baptist ministers. I did not give this detail a second thought; after all, Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, was a Baptist minister. Then he announced that evangelical theologian and pastor Gregory Boyd, known for his opinions on gays (“I have to regard homosexuality as “missing the mark” of God’s idea”) and divorced women (“adulteresses”) would be delivering the keynote address. 

What could President Dooley have been thinking to have invited him? New England is one of the bluest regions in the union; Rhode Island, the most Democratic state.

President Dooley invited Boyd who, he says, is a friend of the family. This worries me more than anything I’d heard about the new president thus far. On one hand, it feels rather like the Obama/Reverend Jeremiah Wright controversy during the presidential election. Obama distanced himself from the pastor as the race progressed. At the time, I remember thinking that Obama must have learned Wright’s controversial opinions over the course of attending his church for twenty years, and seen from the perspective of the black community, his opinions were justified: He claimed that God should punish America for its racism. Could a black person, enduring what blacks have had to endure throughout our history, feel any differently? Slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynching; school segregation; discrimination; general abuse—how could any reasonable person believe differently? Yet Obama must have realized that to white America, his association with him would cause a firestorm, and it did.

Nevertheless, Obama withdrew from the church and, in the opinion of many, threw the Rev. Wright under the bus. But then, he was running for president of the United States. Loyalty fell aside in favor of the pragmatism of winning an election.                                   

President Dooley stated that he chose Gregory Boyd because he had read a great deal by Boyd and felt that his writing had much to offer as a message of hope to the university community. Did it never cross his mind that he would be alienating and marginalizing whole segments of the university community? Or did he consciously choose to throw US under the bus in favor of a Wonder Bread message of hope?

We have major problems at URI. The diminishing financial contribution of the state has forced us to find more and more monies outside of the state budget, and to lean on students for greater and greater fees. Student retention is poor; minority student retention is worse. Programs are slashed; tenure lines are reduced, with department heads having to vie with each other for the lines that open when we lose a member of the faculty to retirement or death. But the new president choose Boyd's vision of hope. For me, his beliefs about women and gays invalidate anything he will say: I have no desire to contemplate the musings of a bigot.

In every organization I have ever worked for, “white, straight, and Christian” have been the default settings. Sometimes an administrator was acutely aware of this and acted to change it, but in most cases, they considered complying with the laws pertaining to discrimination and affirmative action as a nuisance, at best. Sometimes it came down to a discomfort around what to do about Christmas in a non-religious setting. At other times, there were greater stakes.

In the 1980s, I worked for a progressive organization that, in preparation for a major push across the United States, hired large numbers of organizers. Every week, they would take a new staff picture. There were two minorities on staff: A black woman and me. Every week, the two of us would look at the picture and wonder when they would do something about the unrelenting whiteness of the expanding staff. Finally, we posted a note under the picture (by this time there were over 100 staffers) that read, “What’s wrong with this picture?”

Nobody figured it out. We watched as people stared at the picture, trying to divine the “trick” and finally, turned away. They never saw anything wrong with having only one brown and one black face in the sea of white faces.

If any institution is identified with equal opportunity for all, it is the state university. “All” includes a vast sea full of humanity: Jewish, Christians, Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan, atheist, agnostic, gay, straight, and so on. Christianity should not be the default setting here.

Why shouldn’t an evangelical theologian be the keynote speaker at an inauguration? What about his right to free speech, you may ask. It's not about his rights. It's about setting the tone for the future of a pluralistic institution, a state university.

URI is a public institution; separation of church and state should be respected here more than in any other institution in our country. A theologian brought as a speaker in another situation would be fine; students, faculty and staff would be free to come to listen or to protest or to ignore the whole event. But the inauguration of a president is a unique occasion where the new president lays out his vision for the institution. It is disturbing that he would bring in a speaker who narrows rather than expands that vision.

Would the inauguration of the president of a Baptist college be strange if God were left out of it? I would think so because God is at the center of instruction; why else have a Baptist college? It is the adherence to religious principles that sets it aside from other institutions. But the heart of a state university is adherence to constitutional principles; constitutional government is what finally broke the monarchies of the old world. Our public persona should be blind justice; we should maintain an arena where everyone is free to practice their own religious beliefs, or have none at all, and not be compelled to listen to a religious message on an occasion of state .

To bring an evangelical theologian to give the keynote speech at the inauguration is a betrayal of the separation of church and state precisely because they espouse prejudice-ridden religious dogmas that discriminate that against many people. It declares that it is not enough to draw inspiration from the august body of laws and the secular culture that animates our republic. Religious leaders usually use their Gods to inspire and manipulate their followers. And when they are not followers? Then they are POTENTIAL followers; one must just play the right chord to drag them in.

Abraham Lincoln declared, "Let reverence for the laws become the political religion of the nation." If it was good enough for Lincoln, should be good enough for us.

I doubt that President Dooley intended to proselytize his religious beliefs at his inauguration but it is disturbing to see that he does not realize that that is what the proposed speaker's message is likely to be. A message of hope? In what? In whom? Why pick a speaker who, by his own admission, has never spoken at a secular event? How will a speaker whose life is constructed around the message of the Gospels give a message of hope that does not involve hoping and trusting in his God? Is he even capable of delivering his message without alluding to God?

In the wake of this controversy, President Dooley has issued a statement declaring his belief in diversity. Words. More words. We want deeds; so far, his choice of a keynote speaker indicates his real beliefs far more than his reassuring platitudes.

Periodically, articles and studies appear that claim that the faculty of universities tend to be liberal. I would say that this incident shows “liberalism” at its squishiest and most spineless in its inability to protect itself against those who threaten it. As for having “some speakers who make us uncomfortable,” how about this: Let us begin with one who says we should vote on YOUR marriage.

I feel betrayed. Whatever hope I had in the new president faded when I learned how his mind functioned as shown by this signature choice and his apparent inability to see the insult he has slapped us with. We may not have had a choice in the speaker but we can choose not to participate in a new era of self-deception.