Thursday, April 30, 1998
Mike De La Rocha
GRO
We as Praxis believe that students have a responsibility to
ensure that our university becomes more accountable to the greater
Los Angeles community. In a time where Proposition 227 threatens to
destroy bilingual education and Proposition 226 threatens to
dismantle the power of labor unions, we as students have a
responsibility to ensure that these attacks on the working-class
and people of color stop. While we face a time of intense
neoconservatism and regression from all the gains made in the past,
we as students have a moral obligation to stand up against the
corporatization, privatization and increasing death of education as
we know it.
However, organizing does not happen in a vacuum, and students
and community must work together as in the past to strengthen our
ethnic studies centers and libraries, change the admissions
criteria to bring more students of color to this campus, and fight
for more Cal Grants and financial aid. Through my experience
working with community organizations, I feel that I can help
continue and strengthen our relationships with the community.
Working with the general representatives’ office, we will have
quarterly roundtable discussions in which students will have a
chance to learn and work with community members on such issues as
privatization, educational access and globalization. We as Praxis
do not simply plan on conversing about these issues, but rather
acting upon our reflections and helping to transform not only this
university, but also the greater society at large.
Mike De La Rocha