#higher education

Women earned the majority of doctoral degrees in 2020 for the 12th straight year and outnumber men in grad school 148 to 100

Goals:

• Equal Pay
• Remove barriers preventing women from being promoted to top management jobs especially C level positions
• Narrow the STEM Gap

The decision reflects the unfair treatment pro-Palestinian campus activists face across the country

by George Joseph

This Monday, to kick off End Israeli Apartheid Week, the Barnard-Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine hung up a banner in front of Barnard Hall, featuring a map of historical Palestine. In response, students and parents from campus organizations like Lion PAC and Columbia Barnard Hillel immediately began a concerted email campaign, demanding the sign be removed because of its “anti-Semitic” content. And so, despite the fact that SJP obtained official permission to put up the banner, even explaining the message of their sign beforehand, Barnard President Debora Spar made the decision to tear down the banner the next morning.

The banner, as shown below, depicts a map of historic Palestine to affirm “the connection that Palestinians living in the diaspora, the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and as citizens inside of Israel, feel for one another, despite their fragmentation across time and space,” said SJP organizer Feride Eralp. Nonetheless, Columbia Barnard Hillel President Hannah Spellman claimed that such a display was “offensive and threatening” because it did not include Israeli territorial markings. Yet, despite the obviously contestable meaning of the sign among the student body, Barnard’s administration promptly decided to rip off the banner, effectively violating their own space policies in order to favor the demands, and artistic interpretations, of pro-Israeli campus organizations. Did the banner, which had already been approved, become “anti-Semitic” and “threatening” in the eyes of administrators over night?

“It has been a long-standing tradition to allow any recognized Barnard or Columbia student group to reserve a space and hang a banner promoting their event,” acknowledged Barnard President Deborah Spar in an internal email to Lion PAC (SJP received no such personal email). But nonetheless, she declared, after thanking students for their demands, “We are removing the banner from Barnard Hall at this time and will be reexamining our policy for student banners going forward.” Such a response came as a shock to SJP activists, who were not even informed until campus media picked up on the story.

“People have suggested its not fair to have something so politically charged next to a Barnard logo, but if so, then there needs to be consistency,” said SJP activist and Barnard sophomore Shezza Dallal. “Feminism, Pro-life-these are all very politically charged topics, why were their banners kept up, but ours is brought down now?  You cannot just accord freedom of speech until it makes certain people feel uncomfortable.”

Another student, who wanted to go by Khan, complained that both the Columbia and Barnard administrations consistently privilege the needs and beliefs of some student groups over others. “Barnard’s conduct on this was extremely swift. We went to bed having put them up, and in the morning they were gone,” she said. “When we want to get something done, we are not considered a priority. For the Muslim Students Association it has taken two years for us to get a regular religious life advisor, but when one individual, former Hillel president or not, made a Facebook status, all of a sudden this blows up into immediate action.”

Many students felt that the censorship is symptomatic of larger structural disparities and institutional dominance. Columbia and Barnard’s Hillel Center for Jewish Student Life, for example, has its own enormous building on campus, from which it regularly hosts organizations and events explicitly justifying Israel’s occupation of Palestine and arranges hundreds of students’ free trips to Israel as part of the “Taglit Birthright” program. The program has received much criticism for the unapologetically propagandistic image it presents of the Israeli occupation, not too mention its clearly offensive premise that any Jewish American has a right to visit and live in Israel, while millions of dispossessed Palestinians continue to languish in refugee camps across the region. Yet Columbia and Barnard continue to actively support these programs and institutions every year. 

In her email to Lion PAC, Barnard president Deborah Spar claimed that the censorship was necessary because her administration’s approval of one hand-painted sign, depicting a map of historical Palestine, gives “the impression that the College sanctions and supports” SJP activities. What impression then do the multimillion dollar Birthright trips, officially associated with Barnard, give in comparison? While one student organization can’t even put up a map of many students’ homeland, another is encouraged to promote and expand programs, which normalize the oppression of the Palestinian people and strive to create a new generation of Zionist apologists.

The decision is part of a national crack down on Students for Justice in Palestine. Today, for example, Max Blumenthal reported in Mondoweiss that the Northeastern University administration suspended their SJP chapter for the year and is threatening two activists with expulsion and NYPD style interrogations for the high crime of leafleting mock eviction notices, drawing attention to the Israeli practice of placing demolition notices on Palestinians’ homes about to be bulldozed. Surprisingly, the Northeastern Hillel chapter railed against these flyers because they “alarmed and intimidated students,” but did not release a follow up statement condemning the state of Israel for the alarm and intimidation stemming from actual Palestinian evictions every day.

In his report on the administrative crackdown at Northeastern, Blumenthal explains, “The suspension of Northeastern SJP is the culmination of a long-running crusade against the group led by powerful pro-Israel outfits based in Boston,” including Charles Jacobs, the founder of the anti-Muslim non-profit Americans for Peace and Tolerance. In the past, Jacobs has claimed that Students for Justice in Palestine are “anti-Semites, Israel haters” attempting to “justify a second Holocaust, the mass murder of Jews” and possessed with “an irrational, seething animus against the Jew of nations, Israel.”

“I stand with the SJP students at Northeastern,” said Columbia sophomore Ferial Massoud. “This is a part of a larger agenda on the part of universities to crack down on pro-Palestinian activists, which is preposterous not only because of the unjust bias of the administration, but more importantly because the university is one of the only places today where students are supposed to have freedom of expression.”

At Barnard and Northeastern, SJP activists were disappointed by this absurd rationale for their censorship, but nonetheless refused to be silent. In the last few days alone, Northeastern SJP students have raised thousands of signatures to drop the absurd charges against the two targeted students, and at Barnard students have decided to go out onto campus everyday to share their experiences with the larger community. “As long as injustice exists we’ll continuing speaking out, because we refuse to be censored,” declared Barnard first year and SJP organizer Jannine Massoud. “It is our duty to speak out because so many Palestinians cannot still to this day.”

 Follow George on Twitter @GeorgeJoseph94!

by Maya Wegerif

I am a Black student at Mount Holyoke College, the first of the seven sister schools, which was started because no other American colleges accepted women. Mount Holyoke women are taught to be bold, to never fear change, and to speak up against injustice… unless you’re a student of color. 177 years later white male privilege still reigns supreme here. And it is actively reinforced by campus police.

I spent the early hours of Saturday morning at the South Hadley Police Department having been arrested at Mount Holyoke for “breach of peace.” This is how the story begins.

My boyfriend Sam came to visit me on a whim so I took my blankets and my things to an unoccupied room in the dorm where my friends and I often hang out. I have a roommate who I couldn’t kick out on such short notice so I set up the other room for Sam and I to hangout. On Friday night Sam and I were drinking in that room with some of our friends when suddenly two officers from campus police showed up.

A few of my friends simply disappeared. Sam was in the bathroom and so they only found me and one of my friends in the room. Without telling us what we had done wrong the officer demanded our student IDs which we gave to him and he told us that he was writing us a dean’s referral. I asked him what we were being referred for. He said that he had received a noise complaint, and from what he could see we were drinking and smoking weed. Firstly, there is a lot to be said about the Mount Holyoke “community” when students do not try to talk to their neighbours about noise but immediately resort to calling campus police. Campus police should not come and intervene if there hasn’t been any attempt by the students to come to a solution. Secondly, at the age of 21 drinking is perfectly within the law. As for the weed, the room did not smell like weed at all. I do not smoke weed and my friend and I were asking not be sent to the dean for something we had not done. My friend left soon after seeing that there was no use in talking to the officers, it seemed that their minds were already made up from the moment they walked in. I would have left too except that all my belongings were in the room.

When Sam came back from the bathroom the situation was still calm. One officer asked if we knew each other which I said we did. The officer shook Sam’s hand, introduced himself and apologized that they had to meet in these circumstances. When the officer realized that the room was not assigned to me he asked me to leave. I began to take my pillows and he told me to put them down. Everything was to stay there because he couldn’t confirm that I wasn’t stealing the property. I resigned then to just taking my phone and my laptop. But the officer would not let me take my laptop because he assumed that I was stealing it, they would have to take the laptop with them, he said.

There were very easy ways to check if the laptop was mine. I showed him the user name on the laptop and it obviously matched the name on my student ID, still this was not sufficient. And yet as a white man, although not even a student, Sam was allowed to take his bag and laptop out of the room without having to prove anything to anyone. When he takes stuff he is just taking his things, when I do, I am stealing.

He could have walked out with any number of things and never have been seen or heard of again. He could have even walked out with my laptop and that would have been fine. I am assumed guilty and not given a chance to prove myself innocent. Sam is assumed innocent and has no need to prove anything. The only only thing he needed, to prove that he wasn’t stealing, was to be white. Whereas they know that I am a Mount Holyoke student, they had my ID, they saw the username was mine and they know where I live.

They began to converse with him politely, discussing my situation with him like I wasn’t in the room, like Sam was the student here, like I was not the one being (wrongly) accused, or like Sam was my father and they were discussing with him the actions of his dependent. Or they were just fellow white men discussing the audacity of a Black person to not accept racist treatment.

Officer: “She just needs to calm down.”
Sam: “I hear you.”

Then Sam proceeded to come to me to tell me I needed to more cooperative. Cooperative to being accused of smoking weed and stealing? Cooperative to having my things confiscated while he keeps his? He again told me to relax and in a slightly higher voice I explained that he needed to stop telling me that. The officer called the dean on duty.

I was happy to have a dean come to the room. I knew that she would see how ridiculous the situation was. Besides, having a woman in the room would be helpful (it was becoming unclear whether it was my race or my gender that warranted this treatment.) I waited calmly, but Sam kept coming to me, telling me to calm down. I told him to leave me alone about six times in the presence of the officers. They said nothing.

When the dean got there she was the first person who tried to listen to my side of the story. I explained that I was not smoking weed and asked her if she could even smell any weed. “I am not trained to,” she said, because there wasn’t even the faintest trace of weed smell in that room. But if the story got to the dean of students she would say it was my word against campus police’s and she would shrug and say she has to go with campus police’s word. Maybe it would be useful if the deans on duty were equipped to verify the accusations they allow to be passed on us.

The officer interjected on my conversation with the dean to add that I was refusing to leave. I asked him in front of the dean, “Was I or was I not trying to leave when you told me to?” Three times he refused to answer my question. And I pleaded with the dean, to the point where I was in tears, to see how unjust the situation was. I was not refusing to leave I was refusing to leave without my things. I was getting very frustrated that nobody was hearing me.

Sam came up to me yet again, in front of the two officers and the dean, telling to calm down. They all saw me ask him for the seventh time to leave me alone. Even though they could see that it was upsetting me, they did not ask him to respect my wishes and my personal space. At some point I was saying, “Please, please leave me alone” in tears. They watched him continuously come into my face. And then I finally said: “You do not go here, you do not face the same consequences that I am facing right now.”

The whole time I was saying this both Sam and the cops were repeatedly speaking over me saying “Maya, Maya.” And “You need to calm down right now.” I said to Sam, “You can’t be serious. He can introduce himself to you, shake your hand. He had no such courtesy with me.” Again the whole time as I am speaking to him the officers and the dean are in the background repeatedly saying “Maya, Maya.” Sam said “No, you don’t understand.”

Me: “I can’t believe this. I actually cannot believe this.”
Sam: “Let it be done right now!” he says raising his voice. Nobody tells him to calm down.
Me: “Wow, I cannot believe this, I actually cannot believe this.”
All four of them” Maya, Maya”
Officer: “If you don’t calm down, I’m placing you under arrest do you understand that?”

I told him that it would not be the first time white people refused to see their own privilege. Then Sam came and put his hand on me.

I shouted, “Sam if you don’t leave me alone I swear!!”
Sam, in a soft condescending voice: “Maya, Maya you need to listen to me.”
Me: “Sam-“ He tries to grab my arm, I move it away. “Sam-” He grabs my arm. Shouting, “Sam you are aggravating me to a point that I don’t want to get to!”
Officer: “Turn around!” He turns me toward the wall. “Place your hands behind your back.”

I did not fight them off or resist at all.

Officer: “You’re under arrest, ok? Breach of peace…You know I really wish it did not come to this but we have no choice, Maya.”
While I was in handcuffs crying quietly the officer had a conversation with Sam and the dean.
Officer: “We are transporting her down to South Hadley PD. If she has $45 she can probably make bail.”
Sam: “I’ll see her out.”
Officer: “But right now she’s…she’s…she needs to calm down.”
Dean: “I agree.”

I have been quietly crying in the corner.

Officer: “If she doesn’t calm down we can’t bring her back.”

I was transported to the station in handcuffs, I was searched, had mug shots taken, and slept in a cell till the bail clerk arrived. I had refused to pay bail and was ready to spend the weekend in jail. But when the bail clerk heard their accusations he could not see the seriousness of my offense. He told them to drive me back to school and to bring me to court on Monday. Not once were my rights read to me.

I made a voice recording of everything that took place leading up to my arrest, which is how I can quote everyone verbatim. At some point while Sam was conversing with the officers, my laptop started playing “say something I’m giving up on you.” A hilarious moment fit for the big screen. But he did not say something. He failed to act. As loving and kind as Sam is, and as much as he considers himself an ally to people of color, on that day he stood firmly on the side of white oppression. His whiteness alone guaranteed him their attention, he could have asked them to afford me the same courtesy. On the recording it is clear that every single time I spoke, the dean, the officers and Sam were interrupting, interjecting and talking over me. The best thing he could have done would have been to point out to campus police that they were wrongly accusing me and that they were treating him, a complete stranger, better than they were treating a student. And when Sam saw that I was being arresting for finally reacting to his insistent provocation he needed to tell them that “She did tell me to leave her alone and I kept approaching her.” Because I did repeatedly ask him and at one point begged him to leave me alone, but they watched him and allowed him to ignore my wishes.

A Black man in the same context would have never been allowed to keep harassing me. And if he grabbed me, that would have constituted as assault and aggression. And certainly a Black man would have never been allowed to leave that room with a laptop without having to prove that it was his. I understand that Sam was not aware of the dynamics at play. But that is what makes white privilege so lethal. So-called allies of people of color, acknowledging your white privilege means realizing that you are not being treated respectfully because you are a better person, you are being treated differently because you are white.

Mount Holyoke campus police, your job is to protect Mount Holyoke students, even if they are Black. You not only wrongly accused me of smoking weed, you accused me of theft and then allowed a man to continuously harass me in front of you. Mount Holyoke campus police and the dean on duty watched a man put his hands on me, and then arrested me for shouting about it. It seems as a Black person your only option is to allow yourself to be mistreated. To be wrongly accused and harassed. A white man can go as far as grabbing your body. It is your crime to not allow him to.

*The names in the story have been changed.

This article was originally published at Double X Chromosome.

by Eric Ginsburg 

Hundreds of people, primarily students with a strong showing of faculty members, staged a walkout at UNC Greensboro today against budget cuts. We’ll have complete coverage of the protest, as well as planned action at the board of trustees meeting tomorrow morning, soon. For now, here are several photos of the demonstration.

Click here to watch a video of part of student organizer Juan Miranda’s speech: 120219-web-UNCGwalkout-eg3

“It seems to me that the people that run this university forgot a long time ago…who their students are,” Miranda said, referencing rising costs for mostly working-class students. “Today we’re not asking, we’re demanding.”

Click here to watch the end of interior architecture professor Hannah Mendoza’s speech:120219-web-UNCGwalkout-eg4

“I’m not going to take one more step down the road to dismantling your education, my job, your future, my future and the future of North Carolina and this country,” she told the crowd.

Mendoza said she suggested a walkout three years ago in response to rumblings about budget cuts. The action marked the current peak of rising public student and faculty resistance to budget cuts, a planned $91 million recreation center and the cost of education.

This article was originally published by Triad City Beat. 

by Nicole Ouimette

The revolution will not be cited. It will not have a bibliography, or a title page. The revolution will never happen in the seclusion of the ivory tower built by racist, sexist, and classist institutions. Professional academic researchers in the social sciences of many colleges and universities exploit the struggles of oppressed peoples. Oppressed peoples are left stranded with little to no resources after researchers leave their communities high and dry.

Researchers steal value from oppressed peoples by making them the subjects of theoretical research without lending them access to information that could better help their communities. Articles, books, and dissertations written about marginalized populations are written for academics, not working people, and as such have little impact on the people whose lives are the subject of this research. Liberal academics and social scientists are more concerned about developing the wealth of academic literature than addressing the immediate material concerns of the communities they research.

Penelope Herideen is a Sociology researcher in Western Massachusetts (MA) and a professor of Sociology at the local community college from which I recently graduated. Herideen has written about the importance of critical pedagogy in community colleges. “Policy, Pedagogy, and Social Inequality: Community College Student Realities In Post-Industrial America” was the title of Herideen’s research discussing the realities that community college students face as they navigate their social and academic worlds. Herideen’s research is important, and yet, she was hardly involved in student organizing campaigns against budget cuts that affect low-income students. Community college students need resources developed through research like Herideen’s. This is a major flaw in academic research in the social sciences.

Liberal academics and social scientists need to understand their effect on the communities and people they study. Oppressed people who are put under the magnifying glass of academic research have to live with real consequences after the researcher leaves. This is especially true in the field of women’s and ethnic studies – where class, gender, and race consciousness are a part of the research process. Researchers leave behind a stranded community with little to no resources to help them organize movements that will create real change.

Tim Wise, a well-known anti-racist writer and activist receives thousands of dollars for speaking at various colleges and universities about the impact that white privilege and white supremacy have on communities of color. Wise has yet to give back to these communities in any real or substantial way, such as offering resources and support to the various communities he speaks of in his writings.

Researchers in the fields of women’s and ethnic studies entering oppressed communities without any desire to change serious inequities are in direct contradiction of their supposedly “progressive” fields. Women’s and ethnic studies were created out of the social movements of the 1960s. The aims of the people who started these fields of study were to catapult a movement of better access to education for people of color, poor people, and women.

These goals were met in conflict with a desire in academia to concentrate knowledge among groups of specialized elites, instead of a focus on popularizing this knowledge for the greater good. Try reading any academic text from your local women’s studies, ethnic studies, post-colonial studies, or anthropology department. The texts are almost always written so that only academics can understand. Some students and scholars call it “acadamese.” It is writing that needs to be decoded before it can be understood. This is what inaccessible language looks like in academic texts written about oppressed groups, but not for them.

Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy discusses the importance of “ordinary language” in social justice work in her speech given at Hampshire College in 2001:

I think it’s vital to de-professionalize the public debate on matters that vitally affect the lives of ordinary people. It’s time to snatch our futures back from the ‘experts.’ Time to ask, in ordinary language, the public question and to demand, in ordinary language, the public answer.

Roy purposefully writes for oppressed groups of people by writing in “ordinary language.” Ordinary language becomes extraordinary when groups of people who have been historically “othered” are able to read something that connects to their lives. Academics who use “ordinary language” are able to encourage oppressed groups to consider their own agency in the fight for social, economic and political justice. Their advisors and colleagues constantly berate academics that attempt to write in ordinary language because their writing is “too accessible.”

Academics use academic language and jargon to centralize knowledge and power in their hands. Academics would lose a certain amount of power if everyone had access to the same knowledge that they do. The division of labor in the ivory tower reinforces capitalist modes of production through individualized research and study that is hardly ever shared with those it most affects. This is how academia operates knowledge in the form of transactions that create restricted, instead of shared knowledge.

Liberal academics become gatekeepers of knowledge by reinforcing ideas that knowledge should be bought and sold instead of shared among communities that are studied. In turn, serious activists who wish to create a world without capitalism and other forms of oppression are secluded from their communities through work in the non-profit sector. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence Collective's’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded” touch upon the issue of revolutionary praxis among intellectuals in Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO):

Progressive NGOs use peasants and the poor for their research projects, and they benefit from the publication - nothing comes back to the movements, not even copies of the studies done in their name! Moreover, peasant leaders ask why NGOs never risk their neck after their educational seminars - why do they not study the rich and powerful? Why us? The NGOs should stop being NGOs and convert themselves into members of socio-political movements.

The fundamental question is whether a new generation of organic intellectuals can emerge from the burgeoning radical social movements which can avoid the NGO temptation and become integral members of the next revolutionary wave.

It is time to stop depending on NGOs and academia to create revolutionary praxis for us. They won’t. It’s up to us, the oppressed peoples of the world to demand resources for our communities that are being studied by those whose lives are spent in ivory towers. The revolution starts from below and works its way to the ivory tower. Only then will education be free and accessible for all.

notkatniss:

notkatniss:

hello!

I haven’t posted here in a couple of years now. a lot of things have changed! I’m logging on now to ask for your help, if you’re willing to hear me out.

I was recently accepted to one of the top research universities in the world (U of Helsinki) to continue my studies as a graduate student. as a first-generation college student from a low-income family, I never imagined this could happen. I’ve worked incredibly hard to get here, including grinding in a full-time job though undergrad, but now I’ve found that I cannot afford tuition. please consider sharing and donating if you can! support your local queer latina!

https://gofund.me/7cc1a6bd

Help Martha Attend Graduate School, organized by Martha Madrid

I’m finally going to college, it may not be some prestigious school, but I’ll be studying with passion nonetheless. 

Pssst: America’s private colleges have an idea to stop, and even reverse, their big annual increases in tuition. They say it would help ensure financial aid goes to the students who need it most.

All they want is for you to trust them.

(Photo: Butch Dill/AP)

However, the issue is more complicated than that. The federal government bans consultation about prices and discounts among competitors in any industry. Meaning that schools can’t talk to each other about tuition costs, but here they say, is where the issue is.

That’s because of a self-destructive cycle in which they vie for students by offering bigger and bigger discounts they can’t afford — including to families that may not need them. This pushes up the sticker price for everybody else, shifts money away from students who need it most and threatens the survival of the smallest and most heavily tuition-dependent private schools.

If they could talk to each other, leaders of these private colleges say, they could rein in those discounts.

Check out the rest of their plan:Colleges say they could lower tuition — if only they could talk to each other about it

Sci-Fi Literature class was sidetracked today. It started with the professor arguing with the class about what art really is, and how tradition has dictated what is art and it got into some philosophical discussion about metaphysics and somehow landed on the decline of male enrollment in colleges and universities. While all of this is interesting providing a learning experience, it is intriguing…

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Being raised in America, I caught the “American Dream” virus that was spread by teachers. In elementary school and middle school, I never knew what it meant to be undocumented; all I knew is that I had a passion to learn. I was exactly like the student sitting next to me learning about the values this country was founded on, believing that those who work hard can succeed in America. As sappy as it may sound, obtaining an education felt like my calling. The teachers must have seen my thirst for knowledge and recognized the eagerness in my non-verbal and verbal expressions because they always encouraged me to learn and achieve at my full potential.

My accomplishments read like a grocery list. I have been on the Honor Roll since kindergarten. In middle school, I won academic medals through my participation in MESA and Science Fairs. For every year that I was in high school, I volunteered an average of 300 hours, raising funds for March of Dimes, breast cancer research, and UNICEF. I took on an average of five honors and advanced placement courses a year. I gained the respect of the student body, teachers, and administrators through my dedication and desire to be a hardworking student. I graduated in the top five percent of my high school graduating class. I was accepted to CSULB,
CSUMB, CSULA, CSUF, UCLA, UCSC, and LMU. At the conclusion of my senior year I
accumulated more than $10,000 in scholarships from private donors ranging from $250 to $1,500. I was unable to qualify for financial aid, so I chose to pursue my undergraduate Business Administration degree with a minor in Speech Communication at CSU, Fullerton. In May of 2005, I became the first person in my family to graduate with a bachelor’s degree. On October 1, 2011, I will submit my application for the masters in Speech Communication with emphases in Intercultural and Organization Communication to CSU, Fullerton.

The challenges faced by undocumented students are unique, but nevertheless, humbling. During my first year at CSU, Fullerton I commuted by public transportation, traveling two hours to campus. Thankfully, my teachers and scholarship donors believed in me enough to provide funding for my education. I had enough to comfortably finish my first year without having to worry about paying tuition. Nonetheless, I still had to scrape together the funds for the following year. I found a job that paid minimum wage and I saved every penny by cutting my expenses to the bare minimum. My paycheck had the federal, state, and local taxes withheld. Like everyone who works in this country, I always had taxes due to Uncle Sam. I would forgo any desire for material possessions because the desire to have a degree from a university was more important to me.

I am not a criminal. I am a productive member of society. I am educated. I am hard working. Given chance or opportunity, I will make a difference. By continuing to be Undocumented, America is being robbed of its opportunity to increase the productivity of companies; to have communities inspired, to experience significant change, and to have another humble public servant because if given the opportunity, this country would find all of these things in me. Research shows that individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds are more prosperous. I want to give back to the community that nurtured my growth and development. Education is the light that I shine down the dark tunnel, to urge, challenge, and undermine the fear of not knowing my obscure future. I want to serve as a mentor to the youth in disadvantaged communities and encourage them to pursue a college education. I want to show those like me the door to success and hopefully they will be courageous enough to walk through it.

There are thousands of Undocumented college students who want to give back to the only country they know; their only home, the United States of America. People find it easy to say, “Deport them all!” To me that would mean leaving the only country that I know, leaving my mom and dad, leaving my four sisters, leaving my ten nieces and nephews, and leaving my friends, leaving behind an opportunity to make America a better place.

Immigration is a global issue affecting the lives of people everywhere. This is not just an issue for Mexicans, Central Americans, or South Americans; this is an issue for Asians, South Asians, Pacific Islanders, Australians, and anyone else who works hard and fights for the opportunity to selflessly give back to the only community they know.

We all have a choice. I choose to become a part of a higher purpose: to get the DREAM Act passed and make the world a better place. My aspiration to make a difference starts here.

guerrillatech:

I mean, yes it’s contradictory bullshit, but I’d far sooner be in a classroom than at a party. Besides, in my classrooms, there’s at least a metre between everyone, but we all know drunk people at parties won’t be doing any social distancing.