Part-Time Pundit

Campus Community? What Campus Community?

Universities like to celebrate how diverse their campus community is. They’ll have culture houses for this minority and that minority. At the University of Illinois in Champaign they even have an African American Homecoming which is a distinct and concurrent celebration during the normal homecoming on campus. There is no campus community; there are several different communities that occupy the same chunk of land.

If diversity means having a bunch of different groups who don’t really associate with each other in the same general area, than these types of programs are a resounding success. However, if these programs are supposed to create a community in any sense of the word, they are a dramatic failure. As with most race-based programs, all the gets produced is more division.

What all these culture houses, cultural programs, and race-based admission policies do is take people by race, group them together, and make sure everyone realizes that they are distinct. The inherent meaning of African-American homecoming is that the African-Americans have their own events and the white students have theirs. Having a Latino culture house, a Japanese culture house, an African-American culture house, and a LGBT culture house means that those houses become a sanctuary for people to only associate with their “group.” Far from creating diversity, it creates division and makes the student body pick up the tab. It makes administrators feel good about promoting “cultural awareness” while all but ensuring the divisions remains firmly in place.

Communities are created by having a common element to rally around. Universities tend to inherently have that element whether it is the common academic institution or the sports teams or the general campus culture. Instead of bringing people together with diverse backgrounds and letting everyone mutually share in those backgrounds, the campus “diversity” programs ensure that those cultures retreat into their own corners. In the name of bringing unity, segregation has been manufactured. A diverse campus community? Hardly.

October 12th, 2006 Posted by John Bambenek | Chambana, Politics, University of Illinois | no comments

DI Column Up: Giraldo Rosales’ Property Taxes and Residency

A few days ago, an anonymous commenter on Illini Pundit started hyping the fact that Giraldo Rosales, a Champaign City Council Member has not paid his property taxes. Additionally he hasn’t actually lived in Champaign for almost 2 years. There were Republicans who seemed to be hyping this to the DI and News Gazette.

Today, scooping the News-Gazette on the story, the Daily Illini wrote a news story to go along with my column on the issue. In short, the Rosales’ property tax problem is a non-issue. So is the residency.

I reviewed court records, tax records, voting records, building permit records, and spoke to about a half-dozen people. Anyone who wanted to know about the abatement could have made one phone call. One can criticize Rosales for waiting until September to file for the abatement (1 month before his late taxes became public) for making a bad PR move. However, the opinion of the Board of Review and Treasurer is not a binding requirement. That is why I used the word opinion. Illini Pundit (or more specifically Gordon Hulten) my try to make an issue here and parse words or why he waited, but I talk to Ruth Wyman (Rosales’ attorney on the matter) and I’m satisfied. Maybe he could of done things better, but legally his fine. Now, if the issue is still open when he files for re-election in December, that could be a problem, but his attorney said if the abatement isn’t ruled on by October 26th, they’ll just pay the bill and get a refund. Oct. 26 is the day that the county formally goes to court and declares a property tax payer in default.

Yes, he hasn’t been in his house for over 2 years, but the delays are legitimate. He has a currently open building permit that was filed in mid-September for even more work. Tens of thousands of dollars have been spent. The house that’s currently vacant is 6000 sq. ft and pretty damn nice. There are no liens on the property of note. Would you live in a 2000 sq. ft. rental house in Urbana and leave your 6000 sq. ft. house vacant without a really good reason? Neither would I.

Instead of trying to make mountains out of molehills, I got a crazy idea…. let’s talk and campaign on issues instead.

UPDATE: See also Kiyoshi’s comments on the matter.

UPDATE 2: Congratulations to the News-Gazette for getting the story 2 days after we got it.

October 12th, 2006 Posted by John Bambenek | Chambana, Elections, Politics | no comments