Students rally for National Day of Action

By Tiffany Maggard

Daily Staff Reporter

Although the University prides itself for efforts to maintain a campus with multicultural diversity, School of Social Work student Claire Seryak said she doesn't think the campus community fully understands the meaning of multiculturalism.

"I am awake enough to know that many people can say and write and pronounce the word multicultural and at the same time, have no idea what that word means," Seryak said as she addressed a crowd of more than 100 affirmative action supporters in the Diag yesterday.

The first Day of Action to take place at the University was held in February 1997 and was just one of several events happening at campuses across the country.

Members of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary said the University is in a "vulnerable" state as a result of the attacks on its commitments to underrepresented minority students and plans to keep pressure on the University to increase minority enrollment. The University defines underrepresented minorities as blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans.

BAMN member Shanta Driver, who also serves as coordinator for United for Equality and Affirmative Action, recalled the power of the civil rights movement and the Supreme Court's 1954 ground-breaking case Brown v. Board of Education that stuck down earlier separate-but-equal laws.

Driver said the University's drop in minority enrollment exemplifies the fact that the United States is still not a place where integration is practiced rightfully.

"At the highest moment of its authority, the Supreme Court said that where there is separate, there can never be equal ... In the 1960s, the fight to integrate higher education had never been inferiority-based on science, but on social inequality," she said.

Rackham student William Copeland initiated a 19-second silence period followed by a 19-second cheering session to recognize each day the Students of Color Coalition has occupied the Michigan Union Tower in protest of the senior honor society Michigamua.

Copeland said the University's passivity in resolving the SCC's concerns surrounding Michigamua represents the University's stance that "it has more pressing issues than answering to the public folk."

But first-year Law student David Boyle said he believes yesterday's rally to fight for affirmative action is not entirely a reflection of SCC's attack on Michigamua. "It's not exactly the same issue, but it is related to the amount of respect that the University is paying to minorities," he said.

Boyle added that the tower occupation may be the result of the University's failure to respond to students' concerns about minority issues.

"If the University paid more attention to the drop in minority enrollment, the tower takeover may not have happened in the first place," he said.

After the rally members delivered a petition signed by 2,500 students demanding increased enrollment of underrepresented minorities as well as an agenda of concerns for the University to address.

Included in their agenda was Michigamua's right to exist as a student group at the University and the fact that black enrollment for incoming freshmen dropped 10.4 percent in Fall 1998 to Fall 1999, according to University records.

DAVID ROCHKIND/Daily

LSA freshman David Lempert, Engineering freshman Sean Hallady and LSA freshman Sergei Tsimberov cheer during the Day of Action rally on the Diag yesterday.