During last night’s Associated Students Senate meeting, the Associated Students Student Advocate General Yoel Haile addressed the campus’s senators with a list of demands from the Black Student Union.
Haile presented the Senate with a broad list projects currently being initiated and requested under the leadership of the Black Student Union, with plans to eventually bring this collection of ongoing activities and projects to the attention of Chancellor Henry T. Yang. Also during Public Forum, Hani Tajsar of Students for Justice in Palestine addressed the Senate regarding an Israeli bus company that recently designated separate bus lanes for Palestinians.
According to Haile, BSU intends to make the UCSB campus more welcoming to minority students through the new proposals — which include hiring two new black psychologists on campus, gaining access to contact information for black alumni, the implementation of a permanent student activism center and holding deans of each college accountable for the recruitment of black faculty.
According to Haile, UCSB should hire two Black psychologists since it currently lacks such adequate support systems for minority students, with this deficiency due to the university’s racial demographics and general campus climate.
“The campus, as a whole, is not very friendly to students of color,” Haile said. “Our numbers are very, very low so our support services are very low.”
As an immigrant and first-generation college student from a low-income family, Haile said acclimating to life at UCSB has not been an entirely smooth experience, and said this feeling is one felt by many students on campus.
“Once [you] get here, you’re essentially taken out from your support system,” Haile said. “All of a sudden you’re in a more hostile environment than you came from.”
Another topic presented during Public Forum was a request by Students for Justice in Palestine calling for the Senate to divest from companies that can be considered supportive of human rights violations in the region, singling out an Israeli bus company that recently launched segregated bus lanes for Palestinians, according to Tajsar.
Tajsar, member of Students for Justice in Palestine, addressed the Senate and urged its members to divest from companies supportive of segregation and other infringements on human rights.
“Separate is not equal in any context,” Tajsar said. “We should all take into account human rights and justice as a huge priority … [and] divest from any company that has any sort of financial investment in [violations of] human rights.”
Thank you, very respectable journalism. Chancellor Yang is already informed of the demands and was the first step in the process and will be the last step in the process.
UCSB is not discriminatory in the least, these complaints are ridiculous and without merit. If you feel hostility here, you should examine your own behavior as a cause of that reaction. There is no logical reason why anyone should believe that a psychologist who shares a patient’s race would be any more capable of helping them deal with their problems.
im tired of these pseudo-nationalist racist trolls pushing their agenda on a public university. no one should be hired based on superficial qualities such as skin color. doing so suggests ucsb is incapable of being objective when it comes to hiring policies, and as far as i can tell ucsb does not discriminate based on race, gender, religious or ethnicity. if anything this only encourages hostility because other ethnic groups will look down on ethnic minorities who are given privileged access solely based on birth. imagine if asian, white, or mexican employees were wired not based on their abilities, but… Read more »
‘racists’ and John, do you not understand institutional racism?