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R E C E N T L Y

Battling stag/nation
By Jill Priluck
Radical hag Mary Daly stands up to Boston College for forcing coed classes
(03/17/99)

Pimps and Ho's
By Isaac Zaur
One college's theme party is another man's ethical dilemma
(03/17/99)

The fabulous kingdom of gay animals
By Susan McCarthy
A biologist offers the first vision of a tantalizingly diverse natural world: Not all animals are straight arrows
(03/15/99)

To sir, with love?
By Susanna Stromberg
It looked like sex, but maybe it was just old-fashioned teaching
(03/12/99)

The monk, the philosopher and the cynic
By Chris Colin
Christopher Hitchens torpedos the harmonious dialogue between philosopher Jean-François Revel and his son, Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard
(03/10/99)

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RAGING AGAINST "THE MACHINE" | PAGE 1, 2, 3
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Why would anyone care so deeply about a student government election that a majority of students don't even bother to vote in?

"Student government becomes the springboard for state politics," explains associate English professor Diane Roberts, who has written about the UA Greek system. "It's not just a little line on your CV. This is the elite university of the state." As evidence, she notes that Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman belonged to Delta Kappa Epsilon, reputedly a Machine fraternity, and was student body president.

Cedrick Rembert, an engineering student and president of UA's Pan-Greek Council, the governing body for black fraternities and sororities, believes that Zinga -- whose campaign slogan was "Rage against the Machine" -- may have been targeted because of his vocal stance against the coalition. Opposing the Machine is "a very strong issue," he says. "That's the underlying message of anyone who runs in the election, but [Zinga] is the only one that has directly said it."

While the Machine may be part of the controversy, the racist nature of the alleged harassment suggests that Zinga's skin color is also an issue.

The Congolese student isn't the first to accuse the university's white Greek system of racism. In 1986, someone put a burning cross on the lawn of Alpha Kappa Alpha when it was the first black sorority to move into Sorority Row. In the early 1990s, fraternity members booed a black homecoming queen while sorority women made headlines in the New York Times when they appeared in blackface and Afro wigs to a "Who Rides the Bus?" social.

"We have 16,000 students and occasionally one of them decides to do something stupid," says Bob Sigler, professor of criminal justice and chair of the student and campus life committee. He calls such incidents "rare" and says the students involved in the cross-burning incident were suspended.

But English professor Pat Hermann is less willing to see such incidents as anomalous. He criticizes the university for not making public the results of an investigation that looked into racist charges made by a house mother at Alpha Alpha Omicron Pi sorority. Gertrud Breier claimed she was dismissed for allowing black house workers to eat in the kitchen, rather than the usual maintenance room. Hermann has also denounced the university's white Greek system for never having admitted a black student, labeling it "100 percent apartheid." University of Alabama is one of only a handful of schools in the Southeastern Conference that has never had a black member in its white Greek system, although some black fraternities have had white members in the past and some white fraternities have admitted Asian-American members.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Student resistance to integration