Case Study: Undergraduate

Interview with an Undergraduate
This is a “state project that’s brought down to the university”

There needs to be a realization of the university as an arm, extension of the state we live in. The University of California Riverside will reproduce that which is state-sanctioned as we have seen throughout the university in the past few years (every day policing on campus, police violence incidents across UC campuses, the increase in tuition, racist actions, policing of homeless, homophobic incidents/sexual harassment incidents and silence within the university, etc).

Different forms of Violence: Intersectional 

· Physical
· Sexual
· Emotional
· Psychological
· Spiritual
· Cultural
· Verbal
· Financial
· Neglect

Diversity, Multiculturalism, and Intersectional Approach 

• Heteronormativity cannot be segregated from other (isms)
• Example 1: eating spaces on campus (Ability, Class, Race, Ethnicity, Gender)
• Example 2: Gender Preference Changes in the Classroom 
• White Chancellor approval 
•  Comfort vs. Discomfort 
• White student population
• Hierarchy of Importance: gender neutral bathrooms (choose which one is more important)
• Institutional violence, you have to have an identifiable gender
• Example 3: Smoking on Campus
• Who smokes? 
•  Why do people smoke? 
• Who is more likely to get criminalized? 
• Who has the power to pollute? Where is all the pollution the university emits going to?

Classroom: Theory and Practice There’s no actual serious discussion on these topics or how to turn theory into to actual organizing and programming on campus. Instead conversations of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, nationality happen primarily in the Humanities, and in specific nitches within the class, centering on one specific topic instead of all of them at equal importance.

The Cultural Centers 

• Muslim and Arab Cultural Center 
• The LGBT Center: 
• “Organizing with the center is weird.” Its all about inclusion and although there are resources for students, who actually feels comfortable coming inside? 
• The fact that we need a Center “as an isolated space” means that all conversations about heteronormativity will happen here, therefore saying that the “the campus is heteronormative” 

The Student Organizations

• Queer People of Color: What can you actually do as an organizer? 
• Rebel vs. be recognized by the university 
• Financial dependence, capitalist production system.
• You have to be organizers “in a certain mode of production…you have to express that you are being productive in terms of an economically productive organization” and you have to bring get 25% of the income 
• The Radical: If you are radical, that’s a personal confliction you have to go through “what does it look to be doing anti-institutional work and have to reform myself because then it becomes on not how to destroy the educational industrial complex and actually stay alive to function order to actually work against 
• QPOC is a “survival space” 
• Similar to the Non Profit, when have we reached a “shadow state”? 
• Chicano/Latino Organizations
• La Familia got created after MECHA, got fed up
• Exclusion of QPOC (examples in post: "Homophobia at UCR")
• Do we really need the space? (identifiable gender and dismissal of responsibility)

The University of California, Riverside

Diversity Programs 

• You have to fall into what falls under diversity and that means multiculturalism and if the case is to articulate your own culture : monoculturalism
• All of a sudden its not safe for everyone else
• It invisiblelizes at white supremacy
• There’s no hierarchy? Yes there are hierarchies everywhere 
• Academic logic 
• POP Organizing: direct history of what comes from universities....Free speech? 

Graduate Programs 

• 1 POP, 1 out of 2 queer person
• what is diversity? Queerness in graduate school?

Students of Color 

• SOCC is a statistic, we are not suppose to be here funded by the UC Regents because its not actually doing anything 
• Why the fuck do you have to wait for a conference to name something that’s anti-hegemonic to one moment that doesn’t carry on after that? 
• The UC paid for it, allows them to use this 
• Statistic for UCR to bring in more folks 
• “isolate these one moments that don’t carry on”
• We ended up being a Diversity statistic, we ended up being a diversity  

International students: bring in world market, beneficial to reproduce global citizens

• Chancellor’s letter, its not only ethical but also productive while marginalizing those students once they get on campus, those people then are marginalizing, “they’re all fucking terrible” 
• 80 – 20 goal of international students 
• safe and unsafe areas
• Its not about the riverside community 

Sexual Harassment at UC Riverside 

• Gender and Sexuality cannot be autonomous, assumption that we can work in different fields 
• Sexual Harassment is decriminalizing through Techniqualities 
• Statistically not represented 

UCR response was that we didn’t want to deter people from applying 

The City of Riverside - What Statistics are and are not presented? 

• Conversation about academia is only a question in the academic world 
• Riverside one of the worst places to get a job  
• criminalization of the city and in contradiction to that, you stay in the university à that’s your identity, your role, and if you step out of that you are in danger 
• homeless? Criminalized 

The State of California - The Nation State

• Multicultural and diversity programming does is that if you accept this programming 
• You are on the campus you are to be protected by them
• UCPD Police: look at what they do outside, they protect one of the most diverse campuses in the university, while creating actual killing outside of this space 
• You are the protected person of color you are the protected racialized citizen 
• The political suppression and actual killing of POP 
• Ally seminar for the police department? 
• What does it mean to be a sensitive police officer? 

The queer who shouldn’t be here and are here, are seen as example/leader/exceptional racialized citizen, exceptional queer that enables the racialization and delegitimization