Our Entire Campus, Our Entire Nation is Free Speech Area (Unsigned Editorial)

Art by Adrian Martinez

“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
– George Orwell

After a pitched, four-year battle on the Southwestern College campus to throw off a previous administration’s strangulating “Free Speech Area,” some folks on campus have inexplicably resumed referring to the little patch of concrete west of the cafeteria by the same name.

Seriously.

When warriors fight and bleed to win freedoms, nothing infuriates them more than having someone else casually give them back. Warriors feel insulted. And why not? They are being insulted. The message is, nothing you did then matters to us now.

During the turbulent years of the Chopra regime, “Free Speech Area” was used to describe the covered patio just west of the cafeteria. It was also the way administration segregated students from society and took away their rights. To protest, speak out or register students to vote, we were sent to the “Free Speech Area.” If we wandered away, they would come down on us hard.

College Needs to Remain Transparent (Unsigned Editorial)

Art by Carlos Magana

*Written by Albert Fulcher and Nickolas Furr

Southwestern College’s season in Hell is over, but the door of Hades has been left cracked open. Three new trustees are working feverishly to close it once and for all.
Norma Hernandez, Tim Nader and Humberto Peraza have the courage and vision to end SWC’s suffering and steer the college into an age of rebirth. Part of their wisdom is their understanding that the college has to come clean and put all of the misdeeds of the past out into the light before SWC can really be free.

Our college suffered on all levels – academically, administratively, publicly and politically – when SWC’s previous administration chose to erect walls of secrecy and chicanery. Backed by a dysfunctional 4-1 governing board majority, the prior administration’s lack of transparency and blatant secrecy from 2007 – 2010 disgusted the entire community, leading to a toxic atmosphere that has proved epically destructive.

Chief Chartier is the Wrong Man to Lead Campus Police

Winds of change have buffeted Southwestern College and show no signs of abating. With the governing board elections of 2010 tipping the power balance to a pro-education stance, and the resignations of Superintendent Dr. Raj K. Chopra and Nick Alioto, fiscal services vice president, it is clear that no position is exempt from change and any college leader might need to justify the job they do to those who matter most: the public.

Given the inconsistent, secretive and often questionable actions the campus police have taken recently, one must ask whether campus Chief of Police Brent Chartier should continue.

In March, a campus police officer stopped a female adjunct instructor to cite her for driving while talking on a cell phone. He handcuffed and arrested her for allegedly resisting arrest. It is still not clear what crime she had committed to be handcuffed in the first place.

Rob Unger, the SCEA grievance chair who was involved in the early stages of the incident, said the woman’s story is that she was handcuffed and had her head slammed into the hood of her car. When the officer pinned her to the car he became sexually aggressive, she reported, pressing his crotch to her rear. She asked him to change positions and he pushed harder against her. She then yelled for him to stop.

“He may have taken that to be resistance,” Unger said.