Letter to the Editor: USG responds to nationwide racial violence
May 31, 2020
Tulanians,
We hope this finds you safe and well. Undergraduate Student Government is committed to ensuring the safety and well-being of each and every one of our students during this precarious time. We’d like to address the string of current events that have impacted our community these last few weeks.
There has been a rise in the national coverage of police brutality and violence against Black people. We recognize that this could be stressful and anxiety-inducing for various members of our community. We as a student government would like to highlight that cases like these, particularly against the Black community, are ever-present and a constant struggle, yet we as a campus must be adamant and unwavering in our approach to denounce these acts of violence. Using this platform, we’d like to take time to acknowledge the lives lost to racial violence, including but unfortunately never limited to Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. Our thoughts are with their families and hope that they find peace and justice during these tragic times.
It is crucial that we as a student body are strong and share a similar mission to uphold the academic, social and personal experiences of all of our community members. We should especially do our part to uplift and support the experiences and safety of Black people on and off our campus because truthfully, we’ve failed to do so in the past. We cannot stand by and watch while unarmed Black people are murdered across the country – and we won’t.
We want to enable all of our students to be better bystanders, better allies and better friends. Our country faces unprecedented challenges at this point in time, but as highlighted by former President Barack Obama, the deaths of Black people shouldn’t be “normal.”
In the face of racial violence, there is no neutral ground. We’d like to commend the various organizations that are working to end racial violence in America and uphold our collective safety in the face of harm. Tulanians have always worked to support and uplift each other. We should strive to understand the grief and anger many of us feel during these times, and work to alleviate that pain as a community, so that we may all stand together.
These are trying times for all of us, yet it’s imperative that we remind ourselves that we are not the first generation to experience or witness such violence. Together, led by those who have long been oppressed we can craft a future that erodes the generational trauma many of us carry, and make way for institutional change, impactful growth and above all else, love.
Adolfo García, USG President
Reagan McKinney, USG Executive Vice President
Deja Wells, USG Director of Diversity, Inclusion, & Equity Council
*This statement is sponsored by Director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs Sienna Abdulahad
Bill McNutt • Jun 14, 2020 at 5:16 pm
Texas A&M took in 6 Tulane Athletic Teams during the fall of 2005. It is time for Tulane to repay the kindness showed to them by the Aggies (and SMU, Texas Tech, Louisiana Tech, Rice and other school that took in teams) by offering the same to these three California schools who are looking at closed campuses this fall
Thanks for Listening!
Lee William McNutt
William Wilson • Jun 5, 2020 at 9:23 am
Hello,
I am an SMU grad and college sports fan, and I would like a moment of your time.
It is hard to believe that 15 summers have passed since the Tulane athletic teams were dispatched to places like Texas A&M, SMU, and Louisiana Tech to compete while the Tulane campus was shut down following Hurricane Katrina.
Attached is a fresh, original, and timely article we hope you will run.
If you have any questions please telephone Tulane Graduate Morris Kahn who co-wrote the article at 504 913 5424 or you may call me.
Thank you for your consideration of our request.
Shutdown Could Open Door for Repayment of Our Katrina Debts
The State of Louisiana, New Orleans, and Tulane and the University of New Orleans have an opportunity to repay the athletic kindness and generosity bestowed upon them 15 years ago when the devastation of hurricane Katrina slapped our world.
The decision by the California State University System to only operate online this fall has put a big question mark in the football and athletic programs at San Diego State, Fresno State, and San Jose State. NCAA President Mark Emmert said: “If you don’t have a college campus open, you can’t have college sports.” Already reeling from the cancellation of spring sports, the thought of no women’s soccer, volleyball, or lacrosse, and men’s soccer, along football, is a painful kick in the shins to student athletes, alumni, students, and sports fans.
We call on Tulane and UNO to welcome refuges and become home to one of these California based athletic programs that are in jeopardy of losing an entire season. As the SMU football program learned in 1986, even a single year without competing can take two decades or more to repair.
All this brings back the indelible memory of the August 2005 when Louisiana heard the news of the upgrade of the Katrina to category 5 and its subsequent devastation of our state. For today’s college students, ages 3 to 6 at the time, they have little to no memory.
When Katrina struck, Tulane president, Scott Cowen, determined that a closed campus would not mean no sports, accepted the amazing invitations by other universities to take in all their sports teams to allow them to compete. UNO was a similar beneficiary.
First Southern Methodist and then Louisiana Tech took in the Green Wave football team and other teams found homes on other campuses. UNO’s basketball teams were housed at the University of Texas-Tyler.
The NFL was also damaged. The Saints played their first “home” game at the Meadowlands. Forced out of the Superdome. The team played the rest of its home schedule at San Antonio’s Alamodome or LSU’s Tiger Stadium.
Louisiana is a quintessential patriotic state, home to National WWII Museum.
But unlike our last half dozen wars, the battle with the CV-19 is not a remote affair. At one point we rivaled New York as the epicenter of battle. All the more reason for a generous outreach to these California brothers and sisters. They need an athletic home just as Tulane and UNO needed one in 2005.
Tulane, UNO, and perhaps LSU, UL, and other colleges should extend a lifeline to one or more of the California schools to offer their facilities for them to train and their stadiums for them to play. All of this assistance is much easier than in 2005, when the Tulane and UNO athletes had to enroll and actually attend class at the schools who hosted them. Today, these student athletes can continue to take classes online from their universities.
There seems to be a fundamental disagreement about what’s possible – or appropriate – at the top levels of college athletics in the Coronavirus world. Louisiana must innovate, lead, and adapt.
We call on Tulane and UNO to return the favor they received 15 years ago, to offer the football teams from one of these three stranded college programs refuge for this coming semester.
The doubters and naysayers have already written off the women’s and men’s athletic programs at Fresno State, San Diego State and San Jose State for this fall, just as it looked like Katrina has finished off New Orleans. But that sentiment is premature. Help should be on the way.
In his famous press release late on an unbelievably hot and humid Friday afternoon in August of 2005, President Cowen said although no classes would be held on the Tulane campus during the Fall semester, the Green Wave teams would continue to compete, to “carry the torch, be the face and represent the name” of Tulane University while its students, faculty and staff were displaced around the country.
And they were.
Football and athletics at Fresno State, San Diego State, and San Jose State this Fall will not be about winning and losing. It will be about perseverance. For millions of people affected in the CV-19 world, each time these teams take the field, it will give the most important thing in any crisis. Hope. Let us give each other, and well as these institutions that hope.
Morris Kahn, is a 1978 graduate of Tulane University
Bill McNutt, is the National Chairman of the State Funeral for World War II Veterans, New Orleans
Student • May 31, 2020 at 4:53 pm
Hopefully these words turn into actions……..