Cultural Groups Unite to Raise Awareness

When Matthew Brown, CC '07, and Stephen Searles, SEAS '08, entered a suite in Ruggles in 2005, they did more than just scrawl racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic epithets on the walls-they brought together a diverse set of cultural groups on campus.

Now, more than a year later, student organizations that banded together to protest the hate crime actions, and what they described as a hostile environment on campus, have maintained the bonds they formed.

"When something happens to a community of people, it doesn't just have to be isolated to affect that community," said Bryan Mercer, CC '07, member of Students Promoting Empowerment and Knowledge, and political chair of the Black Students Organization. He said that the Ruggles hate crimes have led to the creation of the multicultural group Stop Hate On Columbia's Campus.

Now, many of those same students are working together to advance causes in which members say they have a mutual stake: increased funding and departmental status for the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, the proposed Manhattanville expansion, and the Iraq war.

Referencing the aftermath of the Minuteman protests last October, Mercer noted, "It wasn't just Latinas on campus that took that issue as a serious one." He added that the incident affected "people across different identity groups because of the relationships they had already formed through different student struggles, like SHOCC."

SPEaK members also noted that the March 17 anti-war march on the Pentagon was co-sponsored by a wide range of cultural groups including BSO, United Students of Color Council, SPEaK and Asian American Alliance.

Students have united together in the past to work toward improved awareness of cultural issues. The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race originated from a student hunger strike in 1996, and the Office of Multicultural Affairs evolved from a student sit-in in 2004.

Ryan Fukumori, CC '09 and member of AAA and SPEaK, said the influence of individual groups is enhanced by multiple groups combining their strengths. "People you never perceive as being in the same group and fighting for the same cause ... that's what's so positive about seeing this all come together," Fukumori said. "It's more powerful to fight together."

According to members of SPEaK, who represent a wide range of cultural groups on campus, meeting regularly with multiple student groups facilitates student collaboration on these issues.

"SPEaK sees itself as a multiracial organization that's challenging issues across communities of color and gender and sexuality and religion," Mercer said. "These identities aren't separated from each other, I would say. In that sense, I think there's more power being built because there's less isolation."

Despite the progress, members of SPEaK, the BSO, and the AAA have expressed doubts about the administration's commitment to addressing their concerns regarding increased support for CSER and Manhattanville expansion.

"Discussions of more resources and funding and fair faculty hiring [for CSER] have been continually tabled by the administration," said Christina Chen, CC '09, SPEaK member, and political chair of AAA. She recalled a meeting of the Undergraduate Student Diversity Committee she attended on March 19, where she said she felt administrators, including University President Lee Bollinger and Provost Alan Brinkley, skirted around the students' concerns, focusing the meeting on their own issues.

The meeting "affirmed the fact that the administration was continuing its patronizing tone towards people who have concerns about ethnic studies and expansion," Chen said. "We were talking at each other and not to each other. No real communication was being facilitated."

Administrators at CSER said that the center is indeed supported by Columbia's administration. "Administrative support is there and is there in concrete ways," CSER Director Claudio Lomnitz said, pointing to funding for large-scale events as an example. "This year we are working closely with the administration to get one new senior [CSER faculty] position for next year." He added, "That's very good, and we hope to do more."

Mercer said the likelihood of meeting his groups' demands hung on future group members' ability to join forces. "I would say that it's just a matter of mobilizing people and bringing people out to the Steps," Mercer said. "The sad part is that we have to mobilize people and bring people out to the Steps in order to be heard on the necessary things in our academic life."

Christien Tompkins, CC '08, member of SPEaK, campus liaison for BSO, and political co-chair for United Students of Color Council, said that in the past, change only occurred when students united to confront the administration through protest. "There's this realization that we have to advocate for ourselves collectively," Tompkins said, recalling the student hunger strikes of 1996 that helped create CSER. "Unfortunately, at this University, because of what it's centered upon, it's not going to happen without us pushing, pushing, pushing, constantly."