OPINION


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Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan
420 Maynard St.

Tuesday, March 21, 1989

The Michigan Daily


al

Vote far-right out of MSA

Vol. IC, No. 116

Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Unsigned editorials represent a majority of the Daily's Editorial Board. All oti ar
cartoons, signed articles, and letters do not necessarily represent the opinion
of the Daily.
Vote u Power

By Corey Dolgon
MSA's elections begin today and few
people expect voter turnout to be much
higher than the usual 12-15 percent. Yet
two recent events at MSA cause me great
concern about the future political and
moral direction of both the assembly and
the campus as a whole. The ruthless racial
attacks aimed at anti-discrimination groups

UCAR's inviting only people of color to
a few specific discussion meetings is the
same kind of discrimination as excluding
minorities or women from equal educa-
tional opportunities and equal economic
resources seems ludicrous. (Do sororities
discriminate because they don't permit
male members? Does the Engineering
Honors Society discriminate if they only

TODAY AND tomorrow, students will
have the opportunity to vote in elections
for the Michigan Student Assembly
(MSA). The Student Power Party has the
most developed position in support of
student rights and firmly maintains that
the administration recognize such rights.
While other parties emphasize fiscal, re-
sponsibility, tuition, and better
communication with students, Student
Power's platform goes beyond these obvi-
ous points.
Currently only 13 out of 42 MSA
members are women, but over half the
Student Power Party candidates are
women, including the the present co-chair
of the women's issues committee and the
president, Julie Murray. Minorities
constitute one seventh of MSA while one
third of the Student Power candidates are
minorities, including the vice-president,
Ahmar Iqbal.
Murray is the only woman candidate for
president and would be only the fourth
woman ever to lead MSA. Student Power
is a step toward greater representation for
minorities and women.
Two white men lead the Student's
Choice Party, and their party position in-
cludes nothing about women. The only
mention of minority issues is a position
against the graduation requirement on
racism. Student's Choice uses exclusive
language - "chairman" - in their
expensive advertisements, So much for
concern for women and minorities.
Bell stakes his position for the as-
sembly on fiscal responsibility, but his
own actions show he has other intentions.
Last fall term, Bell took the communica-
tions committee which he chairs out for a
$180 party at Dominicks and had MSA
fpot the bill.
Zach Kittrie's United Students Party is
similar to a piece of toast dipped in milk.
Kittrie has a record of refusing to take a
stand on controversial issues. He voted to
derecognize Tagar, but then abstained from
the vote on whether to rescind the resolu-

tion. Hc also did not vote onasking the
University for funding for AIDS research,
although he attended the meeting and lis-
tened to discussion. MSA President needs
to be able to deal with conflict and
controversy of all kinds. Kittrie has
demonstrated that he is not up to this task.
Kittrie's commitment to fighting in-
stitutional racism and his ability to chal-
lenge the administration is questionable at
best. Last year on a resolution dealing
with Dean Steiner's racist remarks, Kittrie
voted to protect Steiner by deleting the
clause demanding his resignation.
The Conservative Coalition has con-
sistently voted against resolutions con-
cerning minority student rights. It's failure
to present any worked out position except
to "purge PIRGIM" demonstrates its in-
ability to effectively represent or advocate
for student concerns.
Murray and the Student Power Party are
the only candidates who have a strong
stance against the deputization of Univer-
sity Public Safety officers. Bell has stated
that "Campus Cops should be equally
armed as regular cops," (MSA Minutes,
10/11/88), and Kittrie has justified arming
campus security by noting that Ann Arbor
police have found an increase in the num-
ber of guns on people and in cars. (Daily,
10/12/88). This alone is reason enough to
vote for Student Power. The officers who
have been deputized have a record of phys-
ical and verbal harassment of student
demonstrators, and arming them poses a
threat to student safety.
Student Power also has demonstrated a
practical concern for the escalating price of
the University: build a new residence hall.
Other candidates stress refunding students
money, but this disregards the savings to
students by securing the right to affordable
housing, through lobbying and funding
the Tenants Union. Again, Murray's party
is the only one which raises these issues.
The Daily strongly endorses the Student
Power Party and candidates Julie Murray
and Ahmar Iqbal. This party is the most
capable of representing the student voice.

the party's only goal is to destroy any
vestige of political politics on this cam-
pus and, following last year's semi-suc-
cessful, rumor-ridden smear campaign
against PIRGIM, the Conservatives be-
lieved the environmental group was fair
game. As usual, the conservatives are pre-
pared to enlist the help (and funding) of
such noteworthy reactionary organizations
as the Heritage Foundation and Students
for a Better America. By making the
"purge of PIRG" campaign their main
goal, the Conservatives expose their real
motivations: not only to thwart the efforts
of student environmental and consumer
advocates,.but to attack the only poten-
tially vulnerable progressive group on
campus. Year after year students have
shown their support for PIRGIM only to
have the Conservatives conduct misinfor-
mation campaigns to place Public Interest
groups's survival in jeopardy.

a6

'Members of the Conservative Coalition have constantly voted
against any resolution or group representing people of
color....'

and the dishonest, reactionary campaign
launched against PIRGIM must be
stopped. But we need your help.
Last Tuesday, members of Conservative
Coalition co-sponsored a resolution to
derecognize the United Coalition Against
Racism (UCAR) because certain portions
of their People of Color Conference were
devoted to strategy workshops for people
of color only. Although the precedent for
traditionally oppressed groups to close
meetingsto the general public has been
well established (women's groups, Les-
bian and Gay Men's groups, etc.), the
Conservative Coalition used the UCAR
conference as an opportunity to attack
both the organization and the anti-racist
movement in general by crying "reverse
discrimination." This may not be the time
or place to demythologize the term
"reverse discrimination," but to claim that
Corey Dolgon is a Rackham graduate
student.

select engineers?) The only way to under-
stand the ridiculous attempt to make such
a comparison is to examine the sponsors
of such a resolution. Members of the


'Go to the polls and let the Conservative Coalition know that
they can take their racist attitudes and far-right foundation
funding elsewhere.'

Conservative Coalition have constantly
voted against any resolution or group rep-
resenting people of color including a
multi-cultural center for the Trotter House
and Central American Awareness Week.
These blatant attacks must be stopped.
But we shouldn't be surprised at the
Conservative Coalition's activities when
we hear Aaron Williams (the party's
presidential candidate) make the primary
focus of his campaign to "abolish the
Public Interest Research Group." Clearly

On March 21 and 22, you will have the
opportunity to stop this nonsense.
Whether or not you consider yourself
"political," I urge all of you with a sense
of decency, who believe that the anti-racist
movement must go forward an who be-
lieve that the students should have the
power to choose which organizations they
fund and which ones they don't, to go to
to the polls and let the Conservative
Coalition know that they can take their
racist attitudes and far-right foundation
funding elsewhere.

0


An Interview with Christopher Hitchens:
Mass m--edia makes

Fund PIRGIM:
Yes on question 1

Do YOU support the University of
Michigan Chapter of PIRGIM by a
$2.00/student/semester MSA fee in-
crease, for a two year period
commencing fall 1989? Any student
who chooses not to support U-M PIRG
may request and receive a refund.
Students should vote to re-establish the
Public Interest Research Group in Michi-
gan (PIRGIM) as a student-funded organi-
zation. PIRGIM serves the public interests
of students as a lobbying and educational
group and deserves financial support.
Toxic waste and solid waste disposal
are major institutional problems requiring
not only organization but also funding and

legislation. A decision by students to lend
support to constructive solutions to these
problems - to tax themselves voluntarily
- would give PIRGIM the ground-up
boost it needs to be effective.
Since the rise of Public Interest Re-
search Groups on college campuses in the
early 1970s, the organizations have served
to represent the views of students on a
broad range of issues - from the Freedom
of Information Act to the current waste
crisis. For a voice in local, state and na-
tional governments on important social
and environmental issues, students should
vote for PIRGIM.
Vote yes on 1.

Christopher Hitchens is a regular
columnist for The Nation, The New
Statesman, and The (London) Times
Literary Supplement. His latest book,
Prepared for the Worst, is a collection of
Hitchens's best essays. He has also edited
with Edward Said, Blaming The Victims,
a collection of essays on spurious
scholarship and the Palestinian question.
Hitchens, who will be speaking today on
"The Palestinian Revolution" at 6pm at
100 Hutchins Hall in the Law Quad,
spoke earlier to Daily staffer Jonathan
Scott.
Daily: You've said that the United
States is "insulated from dissent." Could
you explain how an open society like ours
is shielded from dissenting political
views?
Hitchens: Well I think it's partly by
convincing itself that it listens to "all
sides." If you remember the various mo-
ments of protest during the Reagan period,
particularly, I would say, over the attempt
to criminalize the nuclear freeze move-
ment, and the movement against interven-
tion in Central America as foreign-inspired
and disloyal and so on. What you got was
the equivalent of being told, this is a
democracy where you can say what you
like, so shut up! And that was, in a sense,
the style.
So I think people are far too sure of the
fact that they live in a democracy and far
less of actually exercising democratic and
first amendment rights. Now this may
seem just like a teasing paradox, but I
think it is the way a lot of people think
and are encouraged to think.
D: You are regarded as a unique political
commentator in that you possess a writing
style that incorporates works of literature
and philosophy into an analysis. Regard-
ing journalism today, how impoverished
is the field for original work?
H: For original work'?
D: Yes. What I mean is work that, for
example, includes thoughts from Camus,
or includes some ideas that Sartre pre-
sented, into current politics, as you some-
times provide in your journalism.
HH. nriainl mwork- I mean that's a verv

pers are not themselves part of the politi-
cal process.
D: Well, when I say journalism is
lacking in originality, I guess I should be
more specific. Noam Chomsky and Ed-
ward Herman, in their new book on the
mainstream media, Manufacturing Con-
sent, say that journalists, for the most
part, reflect in their reporting the agenda of
the state and rarely deviate from this line.
H : Well I must say I haven't read
Manufacturing Consent, but I've disagreed
in print with Professor Chomsky on this
matter, who I very much admire, because I
think he fails to draw one crucial distinc-
tion, which is between journalism and the
press.
It may be true that the press has a self-

realit fit
real journalism is done behind closed
doors...
H: Well, I'm saying that to define quite
how it- is -that talking to fellow
journalists in El Salvador is almost a
completely different experience from read-
ing what they write as it's delivered on my
doorstep - is something that I'm not
certain I can define. I know that there is
that contradiction. I don't think it's sim-
ply systematic. But I do know that it's
true.
The reason I became a journalist is so I
wouldn't have to rely on the newspapers
for information. And no journalist I know
does rely on the press for information and
would laugh at the idea of doing so. If
they were as ignorant as they make their

6
6

'I think the way to define the mass media is it's an industry, and
it produces a commodity, which is partly news, partly in-
formation, partly entertainment, and partly ideology.'

Fair representation for minorities:
Yes o question 2

SHOULD THE MSA Constitution be
amended so that the Chair of the Mi-
nority Affairs Commission is elected
by the members of the Commission?
The Minority Affairs Commission
(MAC) is set up to do what MSA too of-
ten does not do on its own - serve the
needs of minority students. MAC is com-
posed of representatives from a range of
minority student groups on campus. The
commission consults with MSA and

sponsors resolutions dealing with minor-
ity student concerns. The chair has a vote
on MSA's Steering Committee.
Currently, MSA members elect MAC's
chair. But MAC is not meant to represent
the Assembly. It is meant to represent
those not represented on the Assembly.
To maximize MAC's ability to accurately
and effectively represent minority students,
MAC members should elect their own
chair.
Vote yes on 2.

conscious role as guardian of consensus in
the country, and is defining what the rules
of the game are and making sure that the
boundaries of that are quite narrowly
defined. And I would say that. But it is
also true that the media are themselves an
area where that argument takes place. For
example, without naming any names, I
can tell you that if you talk to the re-
porters in El Salvador, the people who ac-
tually do the work down there, you get an
almost 180 degree different impression of
the situation than you do from the news-
papers and TV and radio stations that they
provide work for. Now the interesting
thing to me is how that actually happens.
Chomsky and Herman don't think this is a
problem, or they don't seem to.
I think the way to define the mass media
is it's an industry, and it produces a com-
modity, which is partly news, partly in-
formation, partly entertainment, and partly
ideology. It is all of those things, but has
classes, and tensions, and rivalries, and so
on within it. It is not, in other words, a
system for the deception of people. But it
has the effect of leaving people, I think,
confused and ill-informed. And it does give
a special privileged weight to the value of
anvthini vsid by the state.

readers, it would be impossible to produce
a daily paper. But I regard that as a contra-
diction, not as a systematic symptom.
That's the difference between me and
Noam. I don't want to seem to be de-
nouncing here at all, but I think it's
something he doesn't quite account for.
D: The model Chomsky and Herman set
up doesn't in any detail get into the rela-
tionship between editors and reporters and
how many good journalists have their
work suppressed and distorted by editors.
This is a relationship in the mainstream
media that clearly needs exposure. And
then there are cases of journalists like
Raymond Bonner who was fired by the
New York Times for doing serious report-
ing in Central America.
H: Oh yeah, there are horrendous cases
of that sort which remind people what can
happen. And in a way they are necessary. I
mean, that happens in order that other
journalists know without admitting that
they know what the limits are. They don't
want to end up like Ray Bonner; yeah,
that's true. In my opinion, also, there was
some state intervention in the case of
Bonner. My understanding is that the
state department actually made an effort to
apt the New Vrk Time to'chana its

Keep MSA accountable to students:
No on question 3

0
6

SHOULD THE MSA Constitution be

enfrancise the student vote.