
Last weekend, I had the opportunity to attend and participate in the
ECAASU 2011 at UMass Amherst, the oldest and largest Asian American student conference... where some very interesting stuff went down. When I arrived at Amherst late Friday night, the conference was already buzzing about it...
Lai Wa Wu, program coordinator at MIT Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program, and Professor Vijay Prashad, Director of the International Studies Program at Trinity College, were both keynote speakers at the conference. By the end the weekend, they had both emphatically publicly called out the U.S. military, the coast guard and CIA -- "war-makers" -- and their funding of ECAASU.
This, of course, did not sit well with the conference's armed forces representatives -- many of whom were sitting in the audience, in uniform. I was present for Vijay's address, and while it was a tense moment ("awkward," as Professor Prashad put it) I felt it needed to be said, and both speakers were well within their right to speak out on this matter.
In the ensuing fallout, the military has apparently threatened not to pay their promised contribution to the conference, and ECAASU's National Board has sent out emails disassociating itself from the keynotes' remarks. Lai Wa Wu and Vijay Prashad have responded to the controversy with
this essay in Counterpunch. I'm reprinting it here with their permission:
UPDATE: The ECAASU National Board has issued a
response to Lai Wa Wu and Vijay Prashad's essay. I've also re-posted it at the bottom.