Arizona SB 1070 gets no Graduation

The Goddess touched Arizona last Friday at the U of A commencement ceremony.  Associate professor Sandra Soto has come under the academic and political gun (as it were) for her speech at graduation.  She politicized and disapproved of the new AZ immigration law in her speech.  The students, for the most part, seemed to support her.  As did many of her peers.  But here, you watch:

“The audience reaction was split — along with jeers came applause — but many in the blogosphere were roiled that Soto politicized her speech. As one commenter wrote on a KVOA article about the incident: “Using a commencement address to espouse your political point of view to a captive audience is just plain rude.”

But there’s support for Soto as well. Inside Higher Ed points to a blog post by NYU Ph.D. student Marisol LeBron, who wrote that those irked by Soto’s speech are “advancing the idea that universities and institutions of higher education should be depoliticized places where one goes to learn objective truths.”

But what is really friggin’ terrifying is the notion of an ‘ethnic chauvinism’ :

Tom Horne has two degrees from Harvard University. He participated in Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington. He’s Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction.  In other words, he’s not the kind of guy you would expect to find at the forefront of a movement to eliminate a politically sensitive program such as ethnic studies. Yet there he is, blasting classes that promote what he calls “ethnic chauvinism,” calling for voters to oust school board members who support it and generally painting a target on his back for liberals and minority advocacy groups.

Supporters of ethnic studies argue that students who participate in the program do better on standardized tests and deny that the courses promote “ethnic chauvinism.”

“That’s an absolute lie,” said Augustine Romero, who heads the Mexican American/Raza studies program at Tucson Unified School District. “That’s the message used to try to fire up people against us. We have Anglo kids in our program. It’s really unfortunate that there’s a lot of misinformation about the program out there.”

The Tucson school district has three charter high schools with an ethnic studies theme that could be forced to revamp their programs if the legislation passes.

“It really affects us in that, if there’s a change, we would have to re-evaluate our purpose,” said Tillie Arvizu, vice president of Chicanos por la Causa, which sponsors the charter schools. “What makes us different is that we have the opportunity to offer Chicano studies and Mexican-American history to our students.”

That Horne is running as a Republican for state’s attorney is of no shock, eh? But Soto is fighting back.  Her commencement speech is a volley across the racism bow.

Soto told Inside Higher Ed that she has “no regrets” about her speech, despite the threatening e-mails she’s received in the aftermath:

“My work is in Chicana cultural studies, so it’s my obligation, if I am going to be up on a stage, I feel it is my absolute responsibility to address these issues.”
She said that no one who knows her could have doubted that she would speak out, and that she was prepared for some booing, but was surprised by “how vitriolic” the e-mail messages have been since the talk. She said that she will turn over to authorities those that might be threatening, such as an e-mail suggesting that the sender “hopes you don’t look both ways” while crossing the street.”

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