Leftists set to address graduates
Sole conservative speaker faces opposition
By Matthew Vasquez
From the May 2007 Print Edition
It’s that time of year again: graduation. While many of us are staying for at least one more year, for a few of us it is time to leave after four (or five) years at Cal. Parents from all across the state will be flocking to campus in a few days to see their children’s commencement ceremonies. At each ceremony there will be a speaker who addresses the graduating class for that department. The speakers stand at opposite sides of the political spectrum, but only one of them is facing heavy opposition from some Cal students.
Boots Riley: Black Graduation
Riley has been involved in leftist causes from an early age. For a time, he served on the central committee for the Progressive Labor Party. According to its Web site, the Progressive Labor Party advances the communist cause. On February 3, 2006, Riley was quoted in a San Francisco Chronicle article as saying, “I definitely think the Bush regime is way more fascist than we’ve seen in a long time.”
In addition, Riley has continued to support leftist causes through music, mostly through hip-hop and rap. He is a co-founder of The Coup, a hip-hop group established in the early 1990s. The group performs raptivism, which is activism through rap and hip-hop. Their songs have an overt political message to them. A song titled “5 Million Ways to Kill a C.E.O.” in an album released in 2001 contains the following lyrics: “Toss a dollar in the river and when he jump in / if you can find he can swim / put lead boots on him and do it again!” The album, Party Music, which this song is from was named best rap album of the year by Rolling Stone and Village Voice.
Gayatri Spivak: Gender and Women’s Studies
Spivak is a professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She was born in Calcutta, India, where she attended the University of Calcutta. After completing her undergraduate education in English, she completed he graduate work in comparative literature at Cornell University. She has written many books and articles discussing postcolonial theory focusing on the subaltern or marginalized classes in society. Her works seem to embody an odd mix of Marxism, feminism, and deconstructionist thought. In one of her most famous works, Can the Subaltern Speak?, Spivak claims that post-colonial intellectuals (most of whom follow in the Western tradition), in trying to speak for the subaltern groups, reinforce colonialist bias. Thus, she seems to be defending a relativistic point of view.
Following from this, it does not come as a surprise that she is forgiving of suicide bombers. According to Edward Alexander, writing in the Jerusalem Post, Spivak said during a June 2002 speaking engagement at Leeds University, “Suicide bombing ¾ and the planes of 9/11 were living bombs ¾ is a purposive self-annihilation, a confrontation between oneself and oneself, the extreme end of autoeroticism, killing oneself as other, in the process killing others.... Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through. It is both execution and mourning ... you die with me for the same cause, no matter which side you are on. Because no matter who you are there are no designated killees [sic] in suicide bombing.... It is a response ... to the state terrorism practiced outside of its own ambit by the United States and in the Palestinian case additionally to an absolute failure of hospitality.”
Ted Cruz: Political Science
Berkeley students do not seem to mind a radical leftist, but do not have similar feelings toward conservatives. Ted Cruz currently serves as the Solicitor General of Texas, appointed in 2003 by Attorney General Greg Abbot. He has won the Best Brief Award by the National Association of Attorneys General for three consecutive years (2003-2005). Since 2004, Cruz has taught at the University of Texas School of Law as an adjunct professor. Out of the 21 decided cases that Cruz has argued, he has won 19 and lost only two.
Cruz attended Princeton and Harvard Law School, where he was a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review, an executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and a founding editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review. In 1996, Cruz served as a law clerk to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. He served as domestic policy advisor for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 1999 and 2000. Cruz helped assemble the Bush legal team and devise legal strategy during the Florida recount. Cruz also served as the director of the Office of Policy Planning for the Federal Trade Commission, and as associate deputy attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice.
Despite Cruz’s impressive record, some students are protesting his invitation to be the commencement speaker. According to their Facebook group, “Mr. Cruz stands for everything that the fine institution of higher learning, UC Berkeley does not.” Some of the actions that these students find disagreeable include: “Successfully defending the constitutionality of the Texas Ten Commandments monument before the Fifth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court” and “Authoring a U.S. Supreme Court brief… successfully defending the words ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance.”
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