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February 21 , 2003
Front-Page
News
Affirming
Affirmative Action Mount Holyoke has joined other leading
liberal arts institutions in an Amherst College-led effort to
support the University of Michigan in its Supreme Court battle
to preserve affirmative action in its student recruitment and
admission procedures, according to a February 12 story in the
Daily Hampshire Gazette headlined "Amherst's
Gerety musters schools to back Michigan.” Among the schools
joining MHC and Amherst in an amicus brief, or friend-of-the-court
brief, supporting Michigan are Bowdoin, Hampshire, Carleton, Macalester,
Pomona, Colgate, Hamilton, Swarthmore, Wellesley, and Williams
Colleges, and a number of other institutions of higher learning.
In the Supreme Court case, Michigan is defending practices to
increase minority enrollments in an undergraduate program and
its law school against three white students who feel they were
unfairly denied admission. In a statement issued last Friday as
part of a press statement on the amicus brief by Gerety and other
presidents, President Joanne V. Creighton said: "Mount Holyoke
is proud to join in this important effort to protect the ability
of colleges and universities to enroll students that reflect the
diversity of our society. At Mount Holyoke, our commitment to
enrolling students of color—and students representing diverse
backgrounds of all kinds—has resulted in an educational
environment that is culturally rich and intellectually vibrant.
It is important that educators stand together to defend the right
of the University of Michigan—and all colleges and universities—to
open opportunities to excellent students from groups which have
traditionally been denied access to higher education because of
race, ethnicity, or poverty. If we are not able to do so, we will
not be serving the best interests of this nation.” A piece
by Jenna Russell, in the Boston Globe of February 15,
focused on the large number of colleges submitting briefs to the
court in support of the University of Michigan and affirmative
action and what motivated institutions to participate. Writes
Russell, "By Tuesday's filing deadline, the number
of friend-of-the-court briefs submitted on behalf of the University
of Michigan could reach 100, among the most ever on one side of
a Supreme Court case, observers said.” Among the large group
briefs mentioned by Russell is the Amherst-led one that includes
Mount Holyoke as a cosigner. According to experts quoted in the
piece, the high volume of briefs could either sway or overwhelm
the justices.
Taking Their Lead Participants in last fall's Take
the Lead, MHC's annual leadership program for high school
juniors, are making the media sit up and take notice. A feature
article in the February 14 edition of the MetroWest Daily
News of Framingham, Massachusetts, focuses on Caitlin Gorski,
a high school student in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and her Take
the Lead action plan: organizing a job fair for Boston's
homeless men and women. "Caitlin exhibited commitment, passion,
and compassion when articulating her desire to reach out to the
homeless,” Patricia VandenBerg, director of the program
and MHC's executive director of communications and strategic
initiatives, told Daily News staff writer Elizabeth Sembower.
Vanessa Megaw '04, Gorski's mentor, added, "She
has phenomenal drive and a passion to make this world a better
place.” Another Take the Lead participant, Susan Sparrow,
was cited by Holly Mullen, a columnist for the Salt Lake City
Tribune, as an example of a teen making a difference. Sparrow,
who was mentored by Edana Kleinhans '03, and two of her
fellow students at Rowland Hall-St. Marks School in Salt Lake
City lobbied the Utah legislature to launch a study of the relative
pay of male and female state workers. "Last summer I went
to Mount Holyoke College to something called 'Take the Lead'
conference,” Sparrow told Mullen. "It made me think
twice about what I'm doing to change the world. You hear
about teenagers being apathetic, but we have found so much to
negate that.”
Expanding Options When Pitzer College announced earlier
this month that it had launched a three-year trial of an SAT-optional
admission policy, the Los Angeles Times on February 8
noted that Pitzer had joined the ranks of two dozen selective
liberal arts colleges nationwide, "including Bowdoin in
Maine and Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts,” that have adopted
similar positions on the controversial test. The Inland Valley
Daily Bulletin of Ontario, California, turned to Jane Brown,
MHC's vice president for enrollment and College relations,
for comments on the College's experience. "We wanted
to cast a wider net in our search for qualified students than
the SAT at times allowed us to,” Brown told staff writer
Will Matthews in the paper's February 10 edition. "One
thing we know is that the SAT is not a very good predictor of
the success that one will have in life. It is the sum of a number
of things that predicts success in life, and we want to be very
intentional about taking into consideration all of the factors
that produce a good student.” Since Mount Holyoke's
decision to go SAT-optional gained national attention two years
ago, Brown has become a frequently cited source for comment on
the SAT.
Ganging Up
Mount Holyoke history professor and New York expert Daniel Czitrom
was quoted in a piece titled "Critics Gang Up on 'New
York,' ” by Ron Howell, that appeared in Newsday
February 16. The article focuses on historians' contention
that the film romanticizes the experience of Irish immigrants
and ignores the anti-black violence that took place during the
Irish-led Draft riots of 1863. In the article, Luc Sante, the
film's historical consultant, was among those described
as defenders of director Martin Scorsese's right to pick
and choose from history, since the film's story was fictional.
"African Americans weren't the subject of the movie,
which was really about the relationship between the Irish-Americans
and other Americans,” Sante is quoted as saying. Other scholars,
among them Czitrom, argue that because Scorsese's film is
being presented as story that sheds light on history, it is fair
game for historians' critique, the article notes. "The
Irish hatred of blacks was perhaps in some deep psychological
way tied up with the desire to be white,” says Czitrom in
the piece. "When the first wave of famine Irish came, it
was a contested issue as to whether they were even white people.”
Writes Howell, "Czitrom and others said that given this
background of racial animosity between blacks and Irish—a
conflict that lasted into the early 20th century—Scorsese's
portrayal was 'implausible.' ”
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