In response to the Sept. 27 Daily Forty-Niner Our View column “Forty-year-old EOP born in Long Beach,” I would like to compliment you for an insightful opinion on the legacy of EOP, and thank you for reflecting my opinions on the challenges we still face today in the CSU system.
However, while I was sincerely humbled by your kind reference to me as one of those almost 400,000 students who have benefited from EOP, I believe that as we celebrate the 40th anniversary of EOP’s founding at CSULB, the appropriate recognition of Joe L. White needs to be extensively documented as the “Father of EOP” throughout the CSU system.
He is the black professor who changed my life and conceptualized the “door of opportunity” for generations since 1967.
I am pleased that President F. King Alexander and Student Services Vice President Doug Robinson have pledged to support a major policy conference on EOP and outreach programs along with a recognition dinner in March 2008 which is being organized by an eclectic group of successful EOP “dinosaurs” from 40 years ago and many others committed to honor White for his genius and visionary leadership.
This celebration will also recognize the pioneering leadership of Sal Castro, the legendary high school teacher who led the 1968 East L.A. High School walkouts, and Paula Crisostomo, the student leader featured in last year’s film “Walkout” by former CSU trustee, Moctesuma Esparza.
Certainly, while EOP opened the doors of opportunity four decades ago, the walkouts triggered a wave of hundreds of minority students who began entering California’s higher education when almost none existed before these historical events.
Thus, we should also celebrate the beginning of “diversity” and the “integration” of our colleges and universities as institutional discrimination came tumbling down, not only as a direct result of EOP’s founding, but largely due to the militant and forceful role of student and faculty activism so direly absent in U.S. higher education today.
As we reflect and regroup to organize marking these 40th anniversaries, it is critically important that we teach as well as celebrate the historical impact that minority student activists had on our campus, throughout the state and the nation.
This is especially true given that minority student organizations also began at this time and, in the case of Chicano students, the leadership of United Mexican American Students (UMAS), later to become MEChA and now known as La Raza Student Association, led ultimately to the creation of our Chicano and Latino Studies Department in Sept. 1969 – only two years after fewer than 100 Chicano students entered CSULB through EOP.
Today, there are close to 9,000 Latino students at CSULB (about 27 percent of the enrollment) and almost 100,000 in the entire CSU system.
Yet, we are far from having reached parity in proportion to the size of the state’s Latino population. Too many of our minority students are dropping out or being pushed out by a system beset by benign neglect, and a disproportionately low number graduate after toiling for an average seven to eight years to earn a bachelor’s degree.
Do we still need EOP and outreach programs? The answer is a resounding “yes” if we are concerned with the future of California’s economy and its competitiveness as one of the top-10 economies of the world.
This is the challenge that students and faculty have today, and I dare to beckon the “good old days” of activism. Because we have become docile and complacent, faculty and staff don’t take the time to write for this newspaper – our newspaper! There are no student movements against our invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq and, very likely, Iran, or pertaining to poverty and hunger, racism and discrimination.
Perhaps this is a generational malaise that will be overcome by re-instituting “the draft,” another 9/11 or another “preemptive” attack in the Middle East.
But certainly we can start here at CSULB by addressing the issues that pertain to our campus community and go beyond the inane “Go Beach” cheerleading mentality of the last few years.
I firmly believe that today we need to repeal the highly flawed and discriminatory math and English “placement testing” system set up under Executive Order 665, which has kicked-out thousands of minority students from the CSU system during the last decade.
We no longer call the victims of this double-standard and punitive policy “remedial students.” They are now “pre-bach” students starting at being “dis-enrolled” unless they pass a remedial math and/or English course within their first year in the CSU. But close to 50 percent of all incoming freshmen fail to pass one or both of these so-called “placement tests” – systemwide.
Moreover, I strongly oppose the automatic tuition increases that students and working families face each year under the Gropernator’s “compact” agreement. That represents an annual new tax that the governor tacitly waived last year to get re-elected and should be eliminated, or should I say terminated.
At the same time, I pray that the governor will find the same pragmatic wisdom to sign into law SB-1, the legislation that would grant financial-aid eligibility to AB-540 undocumented students.
Frankly, I don’t expect that this commentary will ignite a sense of outrage other than the typical “there he goes again” and “there is no need to comment” attitude.
But I sure hope that it will trigger a sense of activism in our students that our faculty and staff begin to express their views with substantive commentaries in the Daily Forty-Niner and that we get past the emptiness of “Go Beach” as our mantra.
Armando Vazquez-Ramos is a Chicano and Latino studies lecturer and the coordinator of the California-Mexico Project.
