BAMN organizers held a small press conference outside Sproul Hall Friday evening to speak out regarding their occupation earlier this month of the campus Office of Undergraduate Admissions.
The conference — attended by local middle and high school students and UC Berkeley applicants who were denied admission — was held to address concerns following the occupation of the campus admissions office on May 4, when protesters demanding the campus increase minority enrollment refused to leave the office in Sproul Hall.
Yvette Felarca, a national BAMN organizer and activist, said the conference was held primarily to discuss the fallout of the occupation, after which a UCPD officer allegedly visited one of the student protester’s homes and questioned the student and her family regarding her involvement with BAMN.
“We will do this every day if we have to,” Felarca said at the conference. “The police and administration don’t understand us … this is a fight for public education.”
Berkeley High School senior Hannah Albaseer, the student who claims the UCPD officer came to her home, also spoke about her right to protest at the conference.
“We were acting in a tradition of Rosa Parks and the Occupy movement,” Albaseer said. “Is it fair to get arrested for standing up for what I believe in?”
About 25 BAMN organizers and UC Berkeley applicants originally protested at the campus admissions office to appeal their rejections and ask for the number of minority students accepted to UC Berkeley and UCLA be doubled.
Ten protesters — eight of whom were not UC Berkeley students — were cited for trespassing and later released, according to UCPD spokesperson Capt. Margo Bennett. Bennett also said the non-UC Berkeley students were issued seven-day stay-away orders from campus.
Felarca and fellow BAMN organizers will submit further application appeals to the campus admissions office Monday and plan to occupy the UCLA admissions offices on June 1.
Anjuli Sastry is an assistant news editor.
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Pathetic Ms. Albaseer and her busted pals should understand that we have just laws now, not the sort which led to the arrest of Rosa Parks. BAMN and Albaseer aren’t fit to even utter the name, “Rosa Parks.”
And by the way, Albaseer and Felarca, you really should have just enough brain power to realize that if “you do the crime, you do the time.”
Perhaps these minority applicants could have worked harder in school, gotten better grades (pretty easy when you are in a bad school) and test scores, and maybe even taken a few AP tests. None of this requires any special resources other than hard work. Then they almost certainly would have gotten in — pretty much every university is desperate for minority applicants (even if they have no official affirmative action policy).
What do they do instead? They disturb the peace at the admissions office in an effort to get them to lower the standards. Why work hard when you can just pull out your race card? If they could have done something more childish and immature, I don’t know what it would have been.
BAMN is a racist hate group. No different than the KKK.
Fail.
There are so many legitimate criticisms of BAMN one could easily make… so why didn’t you do that?
Guest is absolutely correct, “FailingMeSoftly.” BAMN supported inviting Louis Farrakhan to campus and if rthat isn’t reflective of a “hate group,” I don’t know what is. Ditto their “bros” in the Black Student Union and Black Studies Dep’t.
And, of course, BAMN’s advocacy of so-called Affirmative Action is racist by definition…
If you don’t consider racism legitimate, I would like to hear what your legitimate criticisms are.
Rosa Parks would spit on BAMN.
sure, Chris/Stan/Tony… or dare I say ‘Mo’
lazy troll is lazy
No, the people who didn’t study hard enough to get into Cal are “lazy.”
Instead of a racist agenda, BAMN should focus on improving admissions of students from low income areas. That way all the disadvantaged get help instead of only those with the correct skin color.
Nice fit for BAMN
A National Association of Scholars’ report for the regents of the University of California points out that, not only has the leftist tilt in their faculty continued to grow over the years; it’s become more extreme in nature to the point where it’s impossible to find alternate views in critical areas of education. The skew is prevalent across all disciplines, and educators now openly talk of their role as activists instead of educators. Complaints of such bias are growing in number and volume across a population that looks to the University of California as a key option for its children’s higher education.
That’s the focus of a recent Los Angeles Times editorial and very likely applies to many education institutions and systems across America today.
At UC Berkeley, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans even in the hard sciences had grown to 10 to 1 in 2004, many times what it was 30 years ago, according to a study by Daniel Klein and Andrew Western. In the humanities and social sciences, the ratios were 17 to 1 and 21 to 1, respectively.
To have a university’s students so predominately vote for one political group does make me question the university’s ability to really educate the students for the real world. There is a reason that people become more conservative as they get older, and that is because they learn things they didn’t when they were younger. I think that university professors are not getting exposed to those same life lessons that would allow them to critically evaluate the positions they hold. I don’t think professors are liberal because they are more intelligent. It seems that they are just insulated from much of real life issues that would make they question the appropriateness of many liberal ideas.
That’s a pretty good point, but, speaking as a scientist, I can tell you that Republicans pandering to anti-scientific right wing irrationality hasn’t made it easy to love them. Sure, the Left has plenty of scientific illiteracy (homeopathy comes to mind), but the Democrats haven’t given the lunatic fringe nearly as much power as the Republicans have. As far as “insulated from real life” goes, spend some time trying to get funding from NIH so that you can make a payroll and avoid firing your dedicated staff before you assume that profs don’t have to struggle with real-world issues. If you’re a woman, try struggling to get tenure just as you start to have kids. And what about those legions of un-tenured lecturers that are paid far less than profs and have no security at all? The Ivory tower myth is just that. Academics deal with real world problems all the time. It’s a great gig, but it’s hardly easy, and it isn’t insulated.
Let me use you as an example. As a university scientist, you are putting a lot more emphasis on a small group of anti-scientific members of the right than you should. The right is not run by people who think the world was created several thousand years ago. The pro-science side has a much stronger influence on the Republicans. I see and they see it by interacting with scientists in Silicon Valley outside of Berkeley and in Massachusetts. These scientists are working to expand science through the private sector. They don’t even notice the anti-science people in the Republican party, and those people don’t have any influence. That is why Romney even got the nomination. The anti-science group is not a fan of the Mormons.
I would expect your funding and public service stresses would also push you to the left, since you are more dependent on government than the private sector. I do believe that you are insulated, because your view is so focused on a public supported economy. Of course, I also believe that the right is often insulated from the needs of the public sector, because they get all their funding from the private sector. I just think it is unfortunate that so many Cal workers are supporting the same politicians who have cut so much funding from the UC and other California education. I have also been influenced from seeing how public K-12 education failed so many students. My friends from private schools had a much better education. The only friends who really benefited from public education were those who went to magnet schools like Lowell in San Francisco, where the talented and hard working are given lots of resources, while those less well off are given the leftovers. I blame the Democratic legislature for your stresses and the failings of California public education, which used to be one of the best in the nation.