Roosevelt and Whitman

This break, while I sit with semi-decent cups of Senseo coffee at my parents' kitchen table, I have about two things on my mind at any given time. The first, coming after passage of the RUDE Act in November and subsequent conversations with President Bridges and other college administrators, is the political and campus-wide dimension of discrimination and a non-discrimination policy. The politics of non-discrimination has a deeply academic provenance, and for this reason it is easy to subscribe to such an idea 'in theory' or in written policy, and the trickiness of pinning down an actual definition for the word 'discrimination' attests to the potential manipulation of a still fungible concept.

With so many libraries closed over the winter holiday, my resources have been largely electronic. While perusing sites like Wikipedia and investigating the policies of the colleges in the Panel of 14 (Grinnell, Knox, Carleton, et al), I was reminded of the second thing on my mind: the recent phenomenon of the Roosevelt Institution, a burgeoning national student think tank with over 30 chapters. I had been a part of an earlier effort to initiate a chapter at Whitman, one that was lost in a haze of senior seminar and general confusion that is always consistent with the beginning of the year. Since then, the institutional phenomenon had grown quite considerably, lacking only the word "Whitman" between "Wheaton" and "Yale" under the heading 'Chapters'.

In the next week, as I return to tundra-like Walla Walla with very few academic things to do, I will be making efforts toward founding the Whitman College chapter of the Roosevelt Institution. Whitman, with its unending waves of pseudo-meaningful activism and protest in which I was complicit, has long been a home for student-based research on current political issues, as it was the very first college to require comphrehensive written and oral examinations in the United States. For instance, Professor Apostolidis' Politics 402 class published a comprehensive report on the state of racism towards Latinos in Washington and held a successful and well-attended forum for its release.

Fusing the elements of political disillusionment with Whitman students' capability for thoughful research is a perfect task for a chapter of the Roosevelt Institution. Even more, the publications produced by such a chapter would add a new dimension to student activism to clubs such as Campus Greens, Whitman Civil Liberties Union, and even the Sweet Onion Co-Op, to name a few.

Better yet, it might give me a more practical and thoughtful outlet than a run-of-the-mill blog. It just might.