DAILY LOBO new mexico
Taze or be tazed see page 4
November 30, 2011
wednesday The Independent Voice of UNM since 1895
Bishop explains complaint filed against UNM by Luke Holmen holmen@unm.edu
Bishop David C. Cooper Bishop David Cooper, Senior Pastor of New Hope Full Gospel Baptist Church’s Albuquerque location, said the complaint he helped file against UNM for discrimination against African Americans is supported by UNM’s own documentation. The Daily Lobo spoke with Cooper, who on Nov. 10 filed the joint Title VI complaint with the Ministers Fellowship of Albuquerque & Vicinity and the Albuquerque Chapter of the NAACP.
Cooper said complaints against UNM include documented cases of the following: 1) Hostile Climate for AfricanAmericans 2) Compensation Disparities 3) Adverse impacts of policies upon African Americans that reduce the number of African-American role models, reduce quality of health care and reduce delivery of services to African Americans 4) Inequitable distribution of federal funding for minority health care research Daily Lobo: What is a Title VI complaint? David Cooper: We filed a Title VI complaint against the University of New Mexico, which is based on discrimination based on race, color, or national origin and the Title VI provides that no institution receiving national funds can be found guilty of discriminating on these bases. DL: How were you made aware of the situation at UNM? DC: My organization, in partnership with the NAACP local chapter,
sought to address some issues that came to our attention in April of last year with UNM, especially Health Sciences on north campus and especially considering treatment of African-American physicians. We have been in contact with Dr. (Paul) Roth (dean of the School of Medicine and chancellor for Health Sciences), and during that some of the African-American faculty on campus came to us and asked us to help them, and we began to advocate for some of their concerns. This is a campus-wide problem. To my knowledge, there is only one black full-time tenured professor on the campus. DL: How did you document this discrimination? DC: We then conducted an investigation into some of these activities. We talked to many professors and doctors who had left UNM under adverse conditions, or because of a hostile environment. I have all their names and phone numbers, which I am not divulging to the University but which I have given to the Department of Justice
Egyptian Christians vote against radicals by Aya Batrawy and Maggie Michael The Associated Press
ASSIUT, Egypt — Ahead of elections, Egypt’s Coptic Church discreetly told followers to vote for an alliance of leftist and liberal parties sponsored by a Christian tycoon. The move by a Church normally wary of inserting itself into politics showed how deeply Egyptian Christians fear that Islamists will come to power. The country’s Christian minority turned out in droves for voting Monday and Tuesday in the first parliamentary elections since the fall of Hosni Mubarak in February. Many indeed said they had “voted for the eye” — a reference to the Egyptian Bloc, the coalition that the Church pointed to. Each party has a campaign symbol so that illiterate voters can identify their choices on the ballot, and the Bloc’s symbol was the eye. In pockets where their community is concentrated, the flow of Christians to the polls was strong. In the Cairo district of Shoubra, men and women with cross tattoos on their wrists — a common tradition among Egyptian Christians — kept lines full throughout the day. White-haired elders, equipped with chairs and bottles of water for the long wait, queued with young men and women who took time off from jobs to get to the ballot box. Almost all expressed a common motivation: Stop the Islamists. “We are voting for liberal parties as a means of survival,” said Farid George, a Christian in the southern city of Assiut. “Egypt is our country. My kids were raised here and I will die here.” The prospect of an Islamist victory in the election has Egypt’s Christians, who make up about 10 percent of the population of 85 million, terrified that one day strict Islamic law will be imposed. Talk of leaving Egypt has increasingly circulated among many Christians since Mubarak’s fall, raising fears over the fate of a community that predates the coming of
Inside the
Daily Lobo volume 116
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Islam to the country in the seventh century. Islamist parties are expected to be the biggest winners in the election — likely to gain a plurality or even a majority in the new parliament. Most prominent is the Muslim Brotherhood, the best organized political force in Egypt. Christians are nervous enough about the Brotherhood, but even more daunting to them are the Salafis, ultraconservatives whose ideology is close to the puritanical doctrines of Saudi Arabia. Assiut, a rural province with a capital of the same name 320 kilometers (200 miles) south of Cairo, has the biggest Christian population in the south. It also has a strong presence of Islamic hard-liners. In the 1990s, it was a main battleground between the government and Islamic militants trying to overthrow the state. The Islamic Group, or Gama’a al-Islamiyya, a former militant group that renounced violence and is now a political party, is believed to have been behind fliers distributed in Assiut warning that Christians were trying to block an Islamist victory and that “the enemies of Islam” must be countered at the ballot box. “This is dangerous, very dangerous,” George, a prominent businessman with several car dealerships in Assiut, said while talking about the fliers with his employees. George is himself a candidate in the vote, though not with the Egyptian Bloc. “I will not have a man in a beard tell me how to dress my wife, how to raise my kids, how to run my business.” Under Mubarak’s nearly 30-year rule, Christians — most of whom belong to the Coptic Orthodox Church — complained of discrimination by the Muslim majority and of a second-class status. Their general reaction only increased their ghettoization: They drew closer to the Church and relied on Mubarak to protect them. Mubarak did little to advance Christian civil rights, but his
see Egypt PAGE 3
and the Department of Education. I can’t give you any of their contact information because many of them are in litigation or wish to have their identities protected. We also used UNM’s own documentation to show this adverse climate (UNM’s African-American/ Black Climate Review Report and UNM’s Equity Report). People in the same job with the same experience were making less. The evaluation tools said that if there is a 1 percent difference in compensation, it is discrimination. Among African Americans, the average difference was 4.4 percent according to UNM’s own report. DL: Was Dr. Roth receptive to talking about the issue? DC: Our conversations were productive in that they opened up communication, and we agreed to work on three different areas (recruitment, retention and promotion), but it’s now December and we were supposed to do something within three months.
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The full text of the UNM Equity Report and the African American/Black Climate Review Report are available at
DL Dailylobo.com
ANTIQUE CHIC
Dylan Smith / Daily Lobo This art piece sits in a back room of Christian Dimery Antiques and Oddities. Dimery says the sculpture is a ‘60s black manikin from Germany. It features Northern New Mexico prison tattoos and wears a Native American headdress. The manikin is valued at $1,000, while the headdress costs $365. The shop is located at the intersection of Morningside Drive and Central Avenue.
Economic woes abroad
Three wins isn’t luck
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