so much for a calm end of the quarter

the last few days on campus where agitated...

In the beginning of the week the University decided to issue an official bulletin condemning a themed "ghetto party" that a bunch of kids (undergraduates, I presume) decided to throw at their places. This was not a University sponsored event, but being this the Black history month the idea of throwing a ghetto party was a little bit unthoughtful, to say the least! They called it "Compton cookout" (this Wikipedia article is being considered for deletion, so better hurry up!!). In my humble opinion this whole party thing was just a bad taste joke. Nothing more than that! A lot of young kids with a lot of free time on their hands. Any event, the University decided to publicly censor the event, and rule on some penalties for the organizers. So much for the freedom of speech, some argued...

Later in the week things turned even uglier.

A noose was hanged in the library, and the police was called for. To the best of my knowledge this constitutes a crime of hate, so things were getting clearly out of proportion...
Recall that the noose is a symbol used by the Ku Klux Klan to mark someone for death. This is way over past the threshold of "just a bad joke".


It seems that the kid that pulled off this noose stunt already turned him/herself in, but there is still a lot of racial tension on campus. You can see rallies and meetings to debate minorities concerns everywhere. It's even more disturbing as UCSD, being a public University, has one of the lowest ratios of african-american students in the whole UC system.

To me this came as a surprise. I thought they were long past this racial issues. I guess not!
UCSD has been on the news lately... not for the best of motives though!
Here is a chronicle of the events so far: http://www.10news.com/news/22682950/detail.html

I just run into this link with an agenda for next week's demonstrations: http://stopracismucsd.wordpress.com/


NOTA- agora para algo completamente diferente: foi com uma lágrima ao canto do olho que vi o último programa do prof. Marcelo na RTP1, meu podcast habitual e que agora me fará tanta falta!