T U E S D A Y MARCH 4, 2003
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD Volume CXXXVIII, No. 28
An independent newspaper serving the Brown community since 1891
www.browndailyherald.com
VP candidate LaDuke speaks on activism Penn grad students vote on union BY ZACH BARTER
Don’t steal. Clean up after yourself. Don’t be greedy. Those are some of the lessons Winona LaDuke, the longtime environmental and indigenous rights advocate and former vice-presidential candidate, seeks to impart upon her seven children in her role as a mother and upon the government in her role as an activist. LaDuke spoke about the nexus of motherhood and political activism to a crowd of about 250 students and community members in Salomon 101 on Monday night. Her lecture, “Politics, Motherhood and Environmental Justice,” was the keynote for the convocation of Women’s History Month, a series of events designed to raise awareness of gender issues on campus. “What you teach your kids, what you are raised with, are all valuable things,” she said. “But when you compare that with what our society is like, there’s a total disconnect.” LaDuke, who lives on Minnesota’s White Earth reservation with fellow Ojibwe, said it was difficult to teach her children not to steal when 90 percent of her tribe’s land was in the hands of the federal government. She also said it was difficult to instruct her chil-
BY ADAM STELLA
Kerry Miller / Herald
see LADUKE, page 4
Former vice-presidential candidate Winona LaDuke spoke about activism on Monday.
Harvard prof. lectures on race Librarians face strike possibility BY JESSE CHEN
Unionized library workers’ four-month contract extension expired Friday, leaving employees and the University facing the possibility of a strike if negotiations do not proceed. Members of Service Employees Union International Local 134, which includes more than half of all library employees, gave union leaders and the University another week to make progress. Karen McAninch, business agent of SEUI, said the major battle librarians hope to win in the coming week is preventing the involuntary reassignments proposed as part of the planned library reorganization. McAninch said she thinks the University is running into difficulty in planning the reorganizations because workers are not willing to accept involuntary job reassignments. “I think (the University) is running into a few roadblocks of (its) own,” McAninch said. “The reorganization proposal sort of assumes that they’ll be able to do a few involuntary transfers.” Other issues at hand include detailed job descriptions, health benefits and the hiring freeze. McAninch said the members authorized the negotiating committee to call a strike, but she said it will not be clear how likely a picket line is until the end of the week. “But the object of it is to get the University to move” on certain issues, she said. The library workers’ three-year-old contract originally expired Sept. 30, 2002. Members agreed to an extension through see LIBRARY, page 5
Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy discussed the intricate history of interracial issues in America and the fickle definitions of race that continue to be central to modern domestic politics in a Monday lecture. During the event, Brown’s eighth annual Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture, Kennedy focused on black-white relations, citing examples from his latest book, “Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption.” Kennedy pointed out that black-white marriages remain remarkably rare — less than one percent of the total number of unions in the United States. The racial isolation of blacks on the marriage market appears to be larger
than that of other minorities. Higher numbers of Native Americans and Asian Americans marry white Americans, he said. “The conception of what constitutes race and views of whiteness and blackness change over time,” Kennedy said. “In the Commonwealth of Virginia, until 1910, you were white so long as you were not more than 24 percent black. … That was rather incredible.” But in the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, anyone with any African ancestry would not be considered white, he said. “There was a question about what to do with Native Americans. Some of the leading families of Virginia were very see KENNEDY, page 3
see U. PENN, page 3
No smoking when Underground reopens this Friday, U. says BY JONATHAN ELLIS
Smoking — and those under 21 — will be banned from the premises when the Underground reopens this Friday. The Undergraduate Council of Students discussed the future of the Underground with Dean for Campus Life Margaret Jablonski and Underground manager Ally Dickie ’03 at its meeting Monday night. As The Herald reported last week, The Underground will reopen Friday after a four-month hiatus. Only students 21 and over will be allowed to enter the pub, Jablonski told the council. For the first time, the Underground will prohibit smoking, Jablonski said. With smoking already banned in public buildings and residence halls on campus, “it didn’t seem to make sense to have one
building technically open to the public allow smoking,” Jablonski said, despite the Underground’s purchase of a ventilation system. Jablonski said she learned today that a fire marshal inspection last week in the wake of the West Warwick club fire tragedy reduced the pub’s occupancy to 70 with tables in the room. The allowable number was previously 100, Jablonski estimated. Dickie said she has heard both positive and negative comments about the new system of operations, although the nonsmoking policy has been very unpopular. Council members expressed strong support for opening the pub with as few changes as possible, airing concerns that the University is losing a major social
I N S I D E T U E S D AY, M A RC H 4 , 2 0 0 3 Scott Ewing looks at the big picture in his support of affirmative action opinions,page 7
Edward Ahn ’05 takes issue with history of Herald comics by Will Newman ’04 opinions, page 7
Graduate student employees at the University of Pennsylvania voted on whether to unionize late last week, but the results of the election are impounded pending the outcome of the university’s appeal of an earlier National Labor Relations Board ruling that allowed the vote to take place. The Daily Pennsylvanian conducted exit polls that suggested that the initiative passed. The poll found that 60.4 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots in favor of unionization, while 35 percent said they opposed it and 4.6 percent did not reveal their opinion, the Pennsylvanian reported. Penn questioned the data’s accuracy, said Lori Doyle, spokesperson for the university. Only 50 percent of voters were polled, said Ed George, a professor of statistics at the university who helped the Pennsylvanian design the poll. “You don’t know what biases there are” among the students who were surveyed, George said. The poll assumed these students constituted a random sample, which was not an assumption that George said he would necessarily make. Graduate Employees Together–UPenn, the pro-unionization group at the University of Pennsylvania, claims that the unionization initiative passed, based on a pro-unionization petition that GETUP circulated before the election. “We have every indication that we won by a comfortable and significant margin,” said Joanna Kempner, a spokesperson for GET-UP. “Now that we know for sure that the graduate students at Penn want a union, we are going to act like a union.” “By rattling around issues that are important to graduate students, we hope the university will bargain with us,” Kempner said. The NLRB ruled on Nov. 21, 2002, that graduate employees at the university could vote on unionization. The univer-
Men’s icers go undefeated, wrapping up the regular season last weekend sports, page 8
center for underage undergraduates. “We want to make this a campus,” said Representative Roophy Roy ’05. “We’re alienating people.” UCS also told Jablonski that barring underage drinkers from the Underground would encourage them to try their luck at potentially unsafe Providence bars. A supervisor from the administration will oversee the Underground’s current alcohol operations, but serving alcohol in the presence of underage drinkers would require additional paid staff, Jablonski said. She told Representative Tarek Khanachet ’03 if money were not an issue, the Underground could return to its former system, but in an economic environsee UCS, page 3
TO D AY ’ S F O R E C A S T Women’s ice hockey beats Colgate and Cornell, after losing to the Crimson last week sports, page 8
Adam Stern ’06 says the future of Brown’s men’s hoops program is bright sports, page 8
mostly cloudy high 35 low 31