The Nation magazine has an interesting article about how the Coca Cola Corporation is increasingly finding itself the target of student protests and boycotts on many college campuses around the country. The primary allegations against Coca Cola revolve around their alleged complicity in the murders of several union leaders in their bottling plants in Colombia. As the article explains,

So far, six colleges and universities in the United States -- including Carleton, Oberlin and Bard -- have responded to a call by the Colombian beverages union for a boycott, either by canceling contracts or banning vending machines. Campaigns are active at about ninety more, making this the largest anticorporate campaign since the one against Nike. . .

The campaign has rattled Coke, which has dispatched representatives from its headquarters in Atlanta and from its subsidiary in Colombia to campuses to argue its case. . . Reflecting a trend in the anticorporate globalization movement to draw connections between disparate issues, other groups adding their voices to the campaign are accusing Coke of child labor in El Salvador, failure to provide healthcare for workers with HIV/AIDS in Africa and even childhood obesity in the United States.

There is a movment here at UMass Amherst to get the university to cancel their contract with Coke as well. However these events turn out, it is very encouraging to see that at least judging by this particular campaign, progressive student activism is still alive and well on many college campuses around the country. In other words, the George Bush, John Ashcroft, and the Republican ideological machine has not destroyed the liberal fighting spirit in many of us yet.

It saddens me to hear that Johnnie Cochran died yesterday from an inoperable brain tumor. I had the pleasure of meeting Johnnie Cochran in 1998 when I was working to help organize the annual convention of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association in New York City. Mr. Cochran was a good friend of my boss, attorney Glenn Lau Kee and was the keynote speaker at one of the event’s evening banquets.

As the picture here shows (that’s me on the far right), several of us were able to briefly meet and hang out with him and we all found him to be very approachable, generous, and friendly. My wife even told me that she rode up the elevator with Mr. Cochran and chatted easily with him and was surprised to find him without any bodyguards.

As the news article points out, Mr. Cochran was most well known for successfully helping to acquit O.J. Simpson of double murder charges and unfortunately, many people are still rather resentful toward him for that. However, as my boss introduced him as the keynote speaker, he took care to also describe the other kind of work that Mr. Cochran is known for. They include winning several early and high-profile cases against the Los Angeles Police Department in regard to police brutality and misconduct.

In other words, Johnnie Cochran was not just a criminal defense attorney but also one of the best civil rights attorneys in history. That is how I will remember him, along with his pleasant demeanor and friendly, casual style. Thanks for fighting for us, Johnnie.

The Washington Post has an article that discusses one of the most vexing issues that Asian Americans contend with -- situations where highly qualified Asian American college applicants are rejected to the top schools in favor of other applicants of color who have objectively lower qualifications. In other words, many Asian Americans apparently find themselves to be the victims of affirmative action, in much the same way that Whites have claimed:

Asian American students have higher average SAT scores than any other government-monitored ethnic group, and selective colleges routinely reject them in favor of African American, Hispanic and even white applicants with lower scores in order to have more diverse campuses and make up for past discrimination. Many Asian Americans and some educators wonder: Is that fair? Why shouldn’t young people of Asian descent have more of an advantage in the selective college admissions system for being violin-playing, science-fair winning, high-scoring achievers? . . .

Many Americans, including some of Asian descent, have grown accustomed to seemingly irrational and unfair admissions decisions by selective colleges and shrug off the Asian numbers as something that can’t be helped. . . But Arun Mantri, born in India with children at Fairfax County’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, said he thinks the system should change. Asian American applicants’ chances “would improve dramatically if race was not used as a factor in admissions, perhaps at the cost of the white applicants, something that only a few selective schools have dared to do,” he said.

This kind of issue is not new -- the article discussed the Asian college admissions controversy of the late 1980s where several top universities around the country were found to have unfairly rejected Asian American applicants at disproportionately high rates. It’s a very complicated situation for sure. On the one hand, fairness would dictate that applicants should be judged solely on academic merit, rather than racial/ethnic identity. On the other hand, we still live in an unequal society and still have to make up for past discrimination committed against Blacks and other disadvantaged groups.

Does this mean that some (maybe even many) Asian American students who have objectively higher qualifications are necessarily rejected in the interests of promoting diversity? It’s a very hard call to make but I would still have to say yes. Addressing the history of systematic disadvantage and promoting campus diversity should still be the paramount priority for universities. Further, as the article described, where’s the diversity when so many Asian American applicants want to major in math or engineering and are good at playing the piano?

We as Asian Americans should strive to diversify our interests as well, not just for the purpose of helping us to stand out from the other Asian American applicants, but also to enrich and diversify our community as a whole. It’s fine to be doctors, engineers, and scientists, but our community also needs more artists, teachers, professors, activists, etc. We are more than a one-dimensional group of people in so many ways. It’s time to apply that to our majors and occupations as well.

I’m glad to report that it finally appears that spring is here. Today there’s a steady rain which should wash away most of the snow that’s still on the ground. Also, the temperatures are supposed to get near 60 degrees this week, so after several weeks of below average temperatures, it looks like we’re finally on our way out of winter.

And what a winter it was. I don’t have the exact numbers, but my impression is that this was one of the “snowiest” winters in several years here in this area. I actually heard that Boston received the fifth highest snowfall it’s ever had this past winter. Combined with those killer storms in southern California earlier, apparently this was a winter for extreme weather on the coasts.

Whatever the case may be, it is a shame that spring seems to last the shortest -- everything comes into bloom relatively late and then it gets real hot too soon. Oh well, such is life in the northeast . .

Liberals like me frequently bemoan the inequality of the U.S. health care system -- it is the best in the world if you have the money or insurance to pay for it. But for a growing number of Americans who have no health insurance at all (around 50 million at last count) or who have inadequate health insurance coverage, receiving quality care is a distant dream. Many of us point to Canada as a model of how a publicly-funded healthcare system can work.

But as this CBS News article points out, Canada’s health care system apparently isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. In fact, in many ways, it is experiencing a major crisis that includes skyrocketing costs, long waits for certain procedures, and lack of doctors and nurses. As the article describes,

The average Canadian family pays about 48 percent of its income in taxes each year, partly to fund the health care system. Rates vary from province to province, but Ontario, the most populous, spends roughly 40 percent of every tax dollar on health care, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. The system is going broke, says the federation. It calculates that at present rates, Ontario will be spending 85 percent of its budget on health care by 2035. . .

Canadians can buy insurance for dental and eye care, physical and chiropractic therapy, long-term nursing and prescriptions, among other services. But according to experts on both sides of the debate, Canada and North Korea are the only countries with laws banning the purchase of insurance for hospitalization or surgery. Meanwhile, the average wait for surgical or specialist treatment is nearly 18 weeks, up from 9.3 weeks in 1993. . . The average wait for an orthopedic surgeon was more than nine months.

An estimated 4 million of Canada’s 33 million people don’t have family physicians and more than 1 million are on waiting lists for treatment, according to the Canadian Medical Association. Meanwhile, some 200 physicians head to the United States each year, attracted by lower taxes and better working conditions. Canada has 2.1 physicians per 1,000 people, while Belgium has 3.9, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The World Health Organization in 2000 ranked France’s health system as the best, followed by Italy, Spain, Oman and Australia. Canada came in 30th and the United States 37th.

Pretty eye-opening. I had always thought that Canada’s system was far superior to that of the U.S. But apparently, they are also suffering from the ever-increasing costs of providing medical care. However, it does sound a little strange that Canada actually forbids private its citizens from having private health insurance.

It seems to me that once again, there needs to be a balance. On the one hand, a virtually all-private system like the U.S.’s produces extraordinary inequality between those with money and those without. On the other hand, a virtually all-public system like Canada’s seems to produce long waits and shortages of services.

Perhaps France’s hybrid system is the best of both worlds -- apparently it must be for the WHO to rank it the best in the world. But does that mean that Canadians me would end up supporting some of Bush’s proposals to reform healthcare? Blasphemous!

Many of us may have an idealized image of European society -- very open, tolerant, and multiethnic/multicultural. However, a new survey apparently finds that increasing numbers of Europeans are growing intolerant of immigrants, as reported by Reuters through Yahoo News:

The study, based on pan-EU opinion surveys between 1997 and 2003, found a significant increase in support for the view that there were limits to a so-called multicultural society. . . The center’s analysis of the data found:

60 percent in the former EU of 15 states and 42 percent in the 10 mainly east European states that joined the EU last year believed there were “limits to multicultural society.” Nearly 40 percent across the EU opposed granting legal immigrants full civil rights.

Fifty percent expressed “resistance to immigrants” and 58 percent saw a “collective ethnic threat” from immigration, meaning they answered yes to questions including whether immigrants threaten jobs and a country’s culture, add to crime problems and make a country a worse place to live.

Pretty surprising and unsettling results. It makes me wonder -- if so many Europeans, who are supposedly known for being more open-minded than Americans, can have these blatantly xenophobic and nativist sentiments, what kind of example and message are they sending to us across the pond, where there are plenty of examples, historical and contemporary, of anti-immigrant ideology already in existence?

The Contra Costa Times reports that the University of California, which operates the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (one of the country’s most important military laboratories), has just agreed to settle a lawsuit in which hundreds of Asian American engineers and scientists alleged systematic pay and promotion discrimination against it, for the amount of 1.2 million dollars. However, as the article notes, several of the original plaintiffs opted out of the settlement:

Under the tentative settlement, UC will pay $15,000 each to four of the nine class representatives, up to $765,000 to be shared by the rest of the class, and $350,000 in legal fees and costs. Five of the nine class representatives who originally filed the suit, including Ling, have already decided not to participate in the settlement and are continuing with the lawsuit.

“Our people opted out because it’s a bad deal for them, and they think it’s a bad deal for the class,” said Richard Hoyer, a San Francisco lawyer who represents the five employees. “You’re talking about decades of discrimination and the class members are getting something like $1,500 apiece for all that. For our clients, that’s much less than they deserve.”

The article also mentions that this settlement follows on the heels of a similar settlement brought against the U.C. for gender discrimination:

Last year, UC settled a class-action lawsuit alleging gender discrimination. UC agreed to pay $9.7 million to more than 3,000 women and to spend $1.7 million to raise the salaries of all women at the lab by 1 percent. The lab and UC admitted no wrongdoing in that case either. Of the 3,200 women included in the class, 161 opted out of the settlement, retaining their rights to sue the lab individually.

Absolutely incredible. Here you have an institution of higher learning (the University of California), representing perhaps the most diverse and multicultural state in the union, and who apparently has systematically dicriminated against its workers on the basis of gender and Asian American ethnicity. These workers apparently worked in conditions that amounted to a white collar sweatshop -- disposable labor who the company’s executives thought that they could easily exploit like some cheap third world peasants.

The University of California needs to clean up their act, big time. I hope the few plaintiffs who did not settle take the U.C. for everything they’re worth.

The Washington Post has an interesting article about how many professors are increasingly using wikis in their courses as a way to facilitate interactivity with the material outside of the classroom. If you’re reading this blog, you probably know what a wiki is already, but if you don’t (and don’t feel bad if that’s the case), a wiki is like a collaborative blog or a way for many people to collaborate on a certain online project.

The best example of a wiki is Wikipedia, a collaborative encyclopedia where anyone can post or modify an entry (after their post is reviewed and approved by editors). In fact, Wired Magazine just did a feature story about Wikipedia. Some excerpts from the Washington Post article:

“Students keep pushing for more interactivity, often in ways I hadn’t thought of yet,” said Mark L. Phillipson, assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Phillipson’s students can go to a wiki he designed and highlight a phrase in a poem such as John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” From “tender is the night,” for example, they could create links to their own essays, a scanned image of the ink-blotted original manuscript, artwork, something about the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel with that title -- anything.

Sometimes wikis don’t click. But at their best, wikis are provocative, inspiring, funny and addictive. Some course sites read like journals, some like debates and some shimmy in and out of topics with music, photos and video pulling readers along. One of Phillipson’s students drew a picture of a poem; another made a movie.

Wikis can encourage creativity, remove the limits on class time, give professors a better sense of student understanding and interest and keep students writing, thinking and questioning. Early e-mail lists, newsgroups and chat rooms were ephemeral, like a passing conversation, said Steve Jones, a communication professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Now computers and networks are fast enough that many people can share text, videos, sound and art and work on them together, he said, building a body of knowledge over time. Wikis, including interactive encyclopedia Wikipedia, have been around for several years but they’re just on the cusp of becoming mainstream; as the technology improves, they’re popping up in a few classrooms and offices, and people are finding all sorts of uses for them.

The march of technology continues, transforming (or at least influencing) whole social institutions along the way, in this case education and higher learning. I just might have to figure out how to incorporate wikis and blogs into my own courses.