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Volume 51, Issue 109 | wednesday, march 29, 2017 | ndsmcobserver.com
Polarizing author lectures on new book Charles Murray reflects on the political climate of America
Students rally to protest invitation of ‘Bell Curve’ author
By SELENA PONIO
By MEGAN VALLEY
Associate News Editor
Assistant Managing Editor
Political scientist, writer and libertarian Charles Murray spoke at McKenna Hall on Tuesday afternoon on the themes in his book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” The event was sponsored by the undergraduate minor in constitutional studies, and professor of political science Vincent Munoz opened the event by stating the purpose of inviting Murray to Notre Dame. “The University believes in the pursuit of truth and the protection of freedom of speech,” Munoz said. “Please know that the event
Thirty minutes before sociologist Charles Murray was scheduled to speak in McKenna Hall on Tuesday, students began to gather outside the building; some carried signs with slogans protesting Murray, and many were dressed in black. “We’re out here to let students know that not everyone on this campus believes what’s written in Charles Murray’s books and articles,” fifth-year Rachel Wallace said. “ … We want to present an alternative narrative to what he’s proposing.” Murray — best known for
see LECTURE PAGE 4
MICHAEL YU | The Observer
The undergraduate minor in constitutional studies sponsored a lecture by libertarian, political scientist and writer Charles Murray at McKenna Hall on Tuesday, discussing political climates.
Lecture explores voting rights By MARIE FAZIO News Writer
ND Votes hosted this semester’s third installment of Pizza, Pop and Politics, which explored voting rights in the U.S., on Tuesday. The discussion was led by professor Jennifer Mason McAward, an associate professor of law and director of the Center for Civil and Human Rights at Notre Dame, and professor Jason Pierce, an American studies professor who specializes in American history and civil rights. Pierce began the discussion by giving the audience a historical perspective on voting rights, specifically those of African Americans. In 1864, a group of African Americans created a list of demands for the union after the Civil War, including the abolition of slavery, full citizenship rights for all African Americans, voting rights for African American men and land redistribution, he said. “Voting was a political right because it was a preservative of all rights … the court recognized that voting was a political act,” Pierce
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said. “Politics is about power, and voting allows power to be exercised. So central to the AfricanAmerican reform effort has been the right to vote — not land reform, not reparations, but the right to vote. It shows how powerful it is, but it shows how contested it is. Voting restrictions allow power to be retained.” They received almost all of their charges through the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments between 1865 and 1870, Pierce said, but in 1898 the Mississippi court upheld that voting restrictions, such as a poll tax and literacy tests, were reasonable. “Americans think that voting is a privilege and a right, but those two things don’t necessarily go together,” he said. “That which is a privilege and that which is a right — not to be politically oxymoronic, a right is not something that you earn, it’s something that you gain because of your standing as a United States citizen. A privilege, it may be an honor to vote, but it’s not a gift.” see VOTING PAGE 3
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Forum discusses labor improvement attempts By LUCAS MASIN-MOYER Associate News Editor
In the early 1990s, amidst growing concerns over sweatshop labor in the developing world, University President Emeritus Fr. Edward Malloy convened a subcommittee to study the factories where Notre Dame licensed gear was produced. The subcommittee eventually settled on freedom of association for workers as the goal all manufacturers would have to follow, banning manufacturing in 11 countries — China included — which did not allow worker organization. Tuesday evening, in the auditorium of the Eck Visitors Center, the Worker Participation Committee, convened by executive vice president John Affleck-Graves, spoke on attempts to reform their manufacturing policy and better address workers’ rights. Affleck-Graves said the recommendation to make changes came from a University partner in protecting labor rights. “What the Fair Labor
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Association was pushing me on was to move less to a countrycentric approach and more to a factory approach,” he said. “I guess that was the seed of where this came from — it was pressure from our partner at the Free Labor Association.” In order to resolve this problem, the University set up a test program in Chinese factories with the fair labor group Verite, in order to test how these factories fared on a case-by-case basis. “We asked our licensing companies if they had factories that would want to participate in the survey, and six factories were nominated and Verite did surveys of those factories and sent the results back,” Affleck-Graves said. “Two met our criteria, two were close but needed to do some work and two did not meet our criteria.” After this experience, the committee came up with three options to pursue in terms of their policy towards foreign labor. First, maintain the same policy. Second, continue to work with Varite in a select number of factories. Third,
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join with another compliance company, Summera, to join universities together to focus on labor rights. The panel stressed that none of these options had been chosen yet and that they were considering hybrid options. Christine Cervenak, committee member and associate director of the Center for Civil and Human Rights in the Eck School of Law, said one of the biggest challenges in their assessment was applying labor standards across countries. “[Our problem was] distinguishing between what we, first world people in South Bend, might believe to be [our] own standards,” she said. Cervenak said this was most evident in their visitation of Chinese factories. “When our team visited the dormitories of migrant labor factories in China, there was a slight sense of being appalled,” she said. “Our community came to understand that they were really not so bad, and much better than even see LABOR PAGE 3
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