Lately the eyes of the world have been focusing on Brown president, Ruth Simmons, the first Ivy League president to be descended from slaves, and her decision to investigate whether (or more accurately, how) Brown should make amends for its past association with slavery. More recently, however, a new issue has come to the fore, and this one may tend to tarnish the image of what is probably the most “progressive” of the Ivies. Indeed, based on the appearance of this editorial in the Yale Daily News that Dave Huber sent me a couple of days ago, it appears that in practicing racial exclusion even as it takes halting steps to terminate one racially exclusive program Brown is on the verge of becoming the laughing stock of the Ivy League.
Brown has long had an orientation program, oddly and inappropriately called the Third World Transition Program (TWTP), for incoming “students of color.” A TWTP web site justifies the name:
Students first began using the term “Third World” over “minority” because of the negative & perjorative connotations of inferiority and powerlessness with which the word “minority” is often associated. Although the term “Third World” may have negative, socioeconomic connotations outside of Brown, Third World students here continue to use the term in the context originating from the Civil Rights Movement. Frantz Fanon, author of The Wretched of the Earth [1961], urged readers to band together against oppression and colonialism, adopting “Third World” as the new cultural model of empowerment and liberation.
Indeed, the very purpose of the program, suggests another TWTP site, is “to create a more unified Third World community at Brown.”
I can certainly see why this would be thought necessary, since it is highly unlikely that many middle and upper class blacks consider themselves third world brothers in arms of the wretched of the earth when they arrive at Brown for indoctrination.
Brown officials became nervous, however, about the presence of a racially exclusive university program.
“Like every other college and university, we’ve been looking at all of our diversity programs to ensure they are compliant with the changing legal environment,” said Interim Vice President for Campus Life and Student Services David Greene. “TWTP has just been part of a larger process.”
In addition to addressing legal concerns, the acceptance of white students to TWTP aligns the program with the University’s general mission, Greene said. This involves “having programs in general that are open to all students,” he said.
Brown apparently opened TWTP to white students in 2003, but then neglected to tell anyone and continued to send invitations and other material only to “students of color.”
The decision was “probably motivated” by Supreme Court rulings in June 2003 on affirmative-action policies at the University of Michigan, said Karen McLaurin-Chesson ’74, Third World Center director and associate dean of the college. The decision held that schools must accept and reject students not as members of any ethnicity but as individuals.
“I didn’t think it was necessary for public announcement,” McLaurin-Chesson said. Looking back on this decision, she said there “probably should have been an announcement.”
White students in the Class of 2007 did not receive invitations to the pre-orientation program, although they would have been admitted if they had requested to attend. McLaurin-Chesson said she is unsure whether white students will receive invitations this fall.
Brown officials are obviously put out by the inconvenience of abandoning racial exclusion.
But explicitly inviting white students raises economic issues the University needs to address, McLaurin-Chesson said. Depending on the response of future incoming classes, TWTP might not be able to budget for or accommodate all interested students, given its current resources.
“We can’t afford to have a TWTP for the entire incoming class,” she said. “We don’t have the capacity.”
Admitting white students also poses ideological problems, McLaurin-Chesson said. Although all students can attend, the program primarily addresses issues concerning students of color.
Admitting white students will change how TWTP is both described and marketed to students, Greene said.
Non-discrimination also appears to be unpopular with Brown students. The Brown Daily Herald has been running a poll asking students whether they “believe all students should be invited to the Third World Transition Program?” (The poll question is in a box in the left margin.) As of today when I checked, of the 954 students who had voted, 26% said yes, 34% no, and 34% wanted to eliminate the program entirely. 5% were unsure.
Were Asians included before? It leads to an interesting dilemma: many Asians are genuinely from third world countries (Japan is the only Asian country not considered “third world”. see http://www.netscout.net/oneworld/third_world_countries.htm) However, many schools (I’m not sure if Brown is one of them) openly discriminate AGAINST Asians to prevent “over-representation”.
“the first Ivy League president to be descended from slaves”
This is almost certainly untrue. Given the relatively large number of generations since the invention of slavery, its relative pervasiveness, and the social and economic mobility of recent Western European culture it’s likely that most of the Presidents of Ivy League schools are descended from slaves.
R. Fliehr, minor quibble, but China and North Korea are Second World nations.
–adopting “Third World” as the new cultural model of empowerment and liberation.–
Why, yes, because they’ve been so successful in the areas of empowerment and liberation since 1961.
—
North Korea’s a 2nd world nation? Not when the world gets a good look at it, I would think.
Well, this shows how much I know. I always thought it was Old World and New World, and the Third World was the rest of the planet: usually developing nations seem to be referred to. What are First and Second World countries? What does that mean?
The terms were invented to divide the world into 3 groups: the 1st world indutrialized democracies, the 2nd world communist bloc, and the 3rd world countries left over.
People got confused and thought it meant the economy. If there are enough of them, that changes the deinition.
I’m happy to see that 34% simply did not want to go the stupid program, but even happier to see that another 34% wanted it eliminated entirely. In sum 2/3 of the respondents saw the program as useless (maybe the students are doing a better job of resisting their indoctrination that I give them credit).
It is nice to see Franz Fannon as the their spiritual leader. He advocated having individual oppressed persons killing individual oppressors in his book Wretched of the Earth. Not just to remove the oppressor individual, but to give the oppressed individual a much needed ego boost. I am not making this up.
Shouldn’t these programs be killed off by:
1. Benign Neglect
or
2. Mockery
Perhaps the whites should set up an orientation program just for whites. Call it the First World Orientation Program.
Joel
SC, I’d always thought the “Second World” was the more-or-less industrialized Communist bloc, i.e., the USSR and Communist Eastern Europe. I didn’t think it ever included, say, Ethiopia or Nicaragua. But then no one ever spoke of the “Second World,” so you had to define it more or less by what it wasn’t.
Michelle,
The 1st World, 2nd World, 3rd World classification began in the 1950s, before Nicaragua or Ethiopia were communist. At the time, I’m pretty sure people who used the expression Second World meant to include all countries whose governments had been installed by the Soviet Union or who seemed allied to the Soviet Union: the Comecon countries of eastern Europe, Albania and Yugoslavia, Mongolia, PR China, and N. Korea.
Fairly quickly, though, no one seemed to use the expressions First World or Second World. A numbered World was only used for the Third World, the countries that were “in play” in the Cold War.
But over time the meaning of Third World itself changed. Originally, it had been what was left over after you took out the industrialized countries allied with the USA and the countries allied with the USSR. But it came to mean countries that were poor (“underdeveloped,” later “less developed”).
Thus, as Taiwan or South Korea industrialized, they could be said to be no longer Third World or even going “from Third World to First World” status.
I want people to know that Nathan Newman, friend of Ramsey Clark, has been deleting posts that refer to the obits of the 4 men murdered in Iraq (you know: the men that the definitionally challenged Mr Newman calls “mercenaries”). I think that the sensitive Mr Newman gets more exercised about people who take down “Vote Union” fliers in the break room at Wal-Mart than he does about the gruesome murder of 4 innocent individuals.
I’m in agreement with mj. It long has been the notion of neo-Leftists that slavery was a white European invention. That, of course, is totally false; in fact, the Arabs were enslaving Africans well before the Portugese finally figured out that you wouldn’t fall off the end of the world at the southern tip of Africa. However, slavery is a practice that goes back to time immemorial among all cultures, world-wide. So, mj is almost certainly correct in asserting that this is not the first university president to be descended from slaves. What sloppy thinking.
“Third world” was coined by Alfred Sauvy in the early 50s to refer countries that are neither capitalist nor communist. It corresponds to the “third estate” — commoners. If non-whites are “third world,” then whites are presumed to make up a privileged class. Race and ethnicity have become proxies for social class at Brown.
Lately the eyes of the world have been focusing on Brown president, Ruth Simmons, the first Ivy League president to be descended from slaves
You mean to tell me that there were no Jewish Ivy League presidents?
Happy Passover!