TONIGHT – William C. Rhoden, of the New York Times and that ESPN snoozefest Sports Reporters fame, is appearing tonight at Brown for a discussion regarding race and sport in America. He will appear alongside former Bears and current Oregon State University (way to mess that one up, PC) men’s basketball coach and certifiable “next-big-thing” Craig Robinson, as well as Brown junior student-athlete Nicole Burns.

The panel discussion will be moderated by Brown prof Jim Campbell and begins at 7 p.m. in the Andrews Dining Hall. The talk is free and open to the Brown community, as well as communities of other colors (that is, the general public).

If you have at least a passing interest in both sports and race relations, you should probably go… who knows, there may even be snacks.

March 18th at Brown. (Always fun to realize that a lot of Brown students probably don’t know the background.)

Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, Jr. served as the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island from 1975 to 1984 and again from 1991 to 2002. Widely considered to be one of the most exciting and charismatic leaders in the City of Providence’s history, Cianci’s 21-year tenure as mayor made him the longest-serving American mayor of a city of 100,000 or more. Not an uncontroversial figure, Cianci was indicted in April 2001 on federal criminal charges of racketeering, conspiracy, extortion, witness tampering, and mail fraud. Acquitted on 26 of 27 charges, Cianci was found guilty of a single charge of conspiracy and was sentenced to serve nearly five years in federal prison.

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Something cool at Brown this Wednesday for Women’s History Month:

“Women in the Labor Movement”
4:30pm on Wednesday, March 5
Petteruti Lounge in Faunce House
75 Waterman St.
Providence, RI
Featuring Roxana Rivera
RI Director of SEIU Local 615 and workers from Brown

Learn about the role of women in leading and joining the labor movement. Hear Roxana Rivera’s perspective on being a female leader in what remains a male-dominated movement and workers from Brown speak about being part of the union.

Sponsored by the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center and Women Students at Brown and the Student Labor Alliance as part of Women’s History Month 2008: Women Inside/Outside Tradition

Partly to remind you about our Parade for Accessible Education tomorrow at Brown (right) and partly because my friend Mike Da Cruz is really articulate, here are six reasons why Brown Students for a Democratic Society is calling on the Brown Corporation to freeze tuition:

1) High tuition sticker prices, even when they are defrayed in actuality by aid discourage many lower-income people from applying to universities at all.

2) At a time when the asking price for a year Brown exceeds the US median household income by thousands of dollars, it seems unreasonable to continue to raise tuition only to increase aid, if fully half of Americans couldn’t afford to go to Brown even if their families live in their dorms and ate on meal plan without massive aid. Brown is in a position to stop asking for money the vast majority of people don’t have.

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As members of the Brown corporation descend on Bruronia’s fair campus for their semesterly meeting this Saturday, join Brown students and our allies in a parade calling for a “More Open and Public Brown.” Festivities start at 10AM:

Education is a Right! Join a Parade, Marching Band, students, and community members to call for:

Grants not Loans!
A Tuition Freeze!
Expanded Finical Aid!
Brown Support for Public Funding of Education!
Expanded Brown Programs for Providence Community Members!

Sponsored by Brown Students for a Democratic Society

Oh my God. Oh my God. This is the best thing Brown has ever done. Get ready for some Galang Galang, because the love of my life M.I.A. is coming to Brown the weekend of April 11th:

Spring Weekend will be headlined by rapper Lupe Fiasco and Sri Lankan music sensation M.I.A., the Brown Concert Agency announced today. Mashup artist Girl Talk, cardigan-wearing indie rock darlings Vampire Weekend and the progressive rock jam band Umphrey’s McGee will also perform. . . .

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Lost to Temple last night. Lost to Mass, and barely beat Fordham. And only 6-4 in the Atlantic 10. They’re still 20-5 over-all, but uh-ohs…

PC is miserable. But Brown’s second in the Ivies, and within striking distance. Are they the dark-horse RI candidate to make the tourney?

Also, what’s with Cornell leading at 6-0, with Penn and Princeton in the middle of the pack? The last time neither Penn nor Princeton won the conference was 1988. And the last time before that was 1961.

This has been a 3-year fight by the Brown Student Labor Alliance and other activists:

Brown just agreed to sign onto the Designated Suppliers Program, which needs to be in place in order to effectively fight sweatshops and provide a decent labor standard for those who make university apparel.

Brown was actually an early leader in anti-sweatshop work, having been the first school to sign onto the Workers Rights Consortium, the organization that first brought together schools who pledged to fight sweatshops, and spun off the DSP. But the WRC has been ineffectual, for one key reason:

The capital that funds the production of apparel is incredibly mobile. So when workers agitate for better conditions, or universities or other more benevolent entities insist on better conditions, the capital from the multi-nationals (Reebok, Nike, etc) flies away to cheaper shops. Leaving the factories in question without enough contracts to survive.

The DSP tries to solve this by having colleges and universities direct their contracts to specific factories, providing them with the critical mass of contracts needed to stay afloat.

So congratulations to the student activists who made this happen!!! It was an arduous process, that included disruption of a million meetings — and at least one naked raiding of the main green and Ruth Simmons’s office. (That, in typical Brown fashion, was briefly derailed by a semi-nude a cappella performance that was accidentally scheduled for the same time and place…)

TPM has the scoop:

A prominent civil rights leader has told the Democratic National Committee that refusing to seat delegates from Florida and Michigan would disenfranchise both states’ minority communities. In a Feb. 8 letter to DNC Chairman Howard Dean, NAACP chairman Julian Bond expressed “great concern at the prospect that million of voters in Michigan and Florida could ultimately have their votes completely discounted.” Refusing to seat the states’ delegations could remind voters of the “sordid history of racially discriminatory primaries,” he said.

Bradley Portnoy, a junior at Brown and Michigan native, says, “As a nominal resident of Michigan who actually voted in the election and supports Obama, I would at this point feel *more* disenfranchised if the delegates were seated.”

Matt covers them here. Interesting results, not all of them expected.

Clinton’s still up over Obama, but not by much anymore.

Carcieri and Cicilline saw significant drops in their approval ratings. Rhode Islanders generally support taxing the wealthy and maintaining or increasing education funding. But they’re split on raising the capital gains tax (which overwhelmingly benefits the rich) back to its historic level of 5%.

Separate from this week’s conference at the Watson Inst., the Bolivian president will be speaking in Salomon 101 on Feb 26, 4-6 pm.

He’s the first indigenous Bolivian elected to the presidency. And seems a very gentle soul — check out his appearance on the Daily Show last year.

Linc Chafee and James Green introduce it in the Projo, with a great op-ed:

Although mostly it is the presidents of each country that garner media attention — particularly Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales — there is much more to the picture than presidents. In the 10 years of the Chávez government in Venezuela, literacy has increased from 85 percent of the population to 99 percent. Health clinics now appear in even the poorest neighborhoods, granting access to free treatment. While these programs are not perfect, they represent a return to focus on social development, rather than exclusively economic development, a trend that is becoming increasingly popular in the region.

Explaining these trends as authoritarian populism, as some critics do, is insufficient, and it suggests that Venezuelan and Bolivian voters are unsophisticated dupes. American editorialists and political leaders too often fail to take seriously Bolivians’ and Venezuelans’ criticisms and deep frustration with the failed economic and social policies that have put their countries under stress and deepened inequality. The current governments are offering an alternative, whether we agree or not with the form it takes.

There’s info on the conference here.

In Providence, Juan Williams, senior correspondent for National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, will speak about the upcoming presidential election at the Central Congregational Church at 7 p.m.The church, at 296 Angell St., is at the corner of Cooke Street.

The speech is one of a series of lectures on religion and politics, sponsored by Darrell West, director of Brown University’s Taubman Center for Public Policy. The event is free and open to the community.

Here’s news all policy makers should take to heart: Firm evidence that even small co-pays substantially decrease the likelihood that women will have regular mamograms. With the corollary that more people will get sick and die, and that long-term costs will rise. And it’s pretty easy to envision a whole slew of analogues, relative to other diseases.

PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island (Reuters) - Requiring even a small co-payment dramatically reduces the likelihood that women will get regular mammograms to detect breast cancer, researchers reported on Wednesday.

Screening rates from 2001 through 2004 were nearly 11 percent lower for women who had to contribute a co-pay as low as $12, compared to women whose mammograms were free, researchers from Brown and Harvard universities found.

It may be my imagination, but I think this installation is getting a wee bit saggy. Erected in October 2006 by Patrick Dougherty and a crew of mystical magical elves, it was supposed to be ‘on view’ until October 2007. I don’t know about anyone else, but I can still see it.

To go there: head into the rising sun, up College Street to Prospect where you will pass through the Van Wickle Gates (Rowling-esque name if ever there was one) and turn right. There you will meet a wizard named Tim and you will have to answer his questions three.

One… Do you speak Mandarin?

Two… Have you erected at least one clinic in Nicaragua?

Three… Spell ‘Leelee Sobieski’.

Answer correctly and you’re in.

Matt reminds us that this Tuesday, from 7-9pm at 64 College St, rm 120, (Brown’s List Art building) there will be a discussion with M1 from dead prez called, You Can Kill A Revolutionary But You Can’t Kill the Revolution!:

M 1, aka Mutulu Olugabala, is evidence of the resurgence of political action in the Afrikan (Black) community. As one of half of the fully automatic rap duo dead prez, M-1 and his partner stic.man have been hitting hard with albums like Let’s Get Free, Turn Off the Radio Vol.1, Turn Off the Radio Vol.2: Get Free or Die Trying, and RGB: Revolutionary But Gangsta. He also organized and became the local president of the Brooklyn Chapter of the National Peoples Democratic Uhuru Movement and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. In addition, Olugabala has worked with Friends and Family of Mumia-Abu Jamal, the Hands Off Assata organization, and participates in the annual Black August Celebration.

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