Everybody welcome. Thank you all for coming out to today's Media Lab talks. Our event today is called Undocumented Students Equal Access to Higher Education and Freedom University Georgia. We are incredibly lucky to have a great group of people here. Let me just quickly say my name is Ethan Zuckerman. I teach here at the MIT Media Lab and I'll tell you a little bit more about the event in a moment. But I want to go down the line and introduce you to some of the friends that we're really happy to have here. Right next to me is Bethany Morton. She's one of the Freedom University founders. She's also a professor of history at Dartmouth. We've got Bettina Kaplan, also a Freedom University founder and associate professor of Spanish at the University of Georgia. Going further down we have Kesh Kim. She's a PhD student at Harvard. She works with Push which is Protect Undocumented Students at Harvard. Going further down we have Gustavo Magigal. He's one of the founding students of Freedom University Georgia and he is a immigration paralegal and also an immigration activist. And then our end we've got Pamela Vogel who's a Freedom University founder, associate professor of history at Dartmouth. Did I roughly get everyone's names and affiliations? Okay, awesome. That's the main thing I have to accomplish here. But I also have to tell you the ground rules of what's going on here. We have an event that is here live in the space but it's also being recorded. It's also being streamed live out on the web. People who are watching it are going to be tweeting at hashtag ML talks. If you see me playing on my phone it is not that you are not interesting. It is that I'm trying to figure out what people are saying on the web instead of bringing them into the conversation as well. That's part of my job as well. This is the first of two events. We have the live event here. We're also going to have a smaller event which is entirely off the record and that is going to be in the civic media space that immediately follows after this. And so that's an opportunity for people who aren't comfortable being on stage or may have questions or things that they want to talk about that they don't want broadcast out to the rest of the world and we have a space for that as well. But our conversation here is really about three subjects. It starts with the disobedience prize which you saw launched here at the media lab this past summer. That was an attempt to show some of the exciting things that are happening around the space of pro social disobedience. We ended up honoring four winners of that award. One of those four winners was Freedom University Georgia. We have five of the founders who are involved with that on stage with me today. And this is going to be an opportunity for us to talk about what Freedom University Georgia has been trying to accomplish but really around this larger question of undocumented students access to education and transforming the educational system so that more people have access to higher education at places like the University of Georgia and also places like MIT. And we're going to end up talking a little bit about what MIT has been doing around these issues for good or for ill as well. So before we jump in and start by putting some of the students and then the professors on the spot I'm wondering if we can go to this video and this is a trailer for a documentary that has been documenting what's been going on with Freedom University Georgia. So if we can go to that that would be great. My dream to be honored is to be an astronaut. He's stuck with a third grade dream. I'm not making fun of him. I'm not. I'm not. Okay. Just rock. Just rock. Those two. I got an education. I graduated. I've been really lucky. So there wasn't really any obstacles into now that I want to go to college. I'm a very smart student. I can mess around a lot. I'm very smart. But yet I'm here working wasting my life. My grandmother always told me to be careful and if someone wants to ask me are you illegal to say that I was a citizen that I was born here. My mom got stabbed. The cop pulled us over and found that she didn't have a license. And he said that he had to take her in. Like what's the point? I'm going to make it here. They don't want me here. We are involved in a war on terror and after all these are undocumented. That's the point really. We don't know who a lot of these people are. There are people that are purposely out to make your day miserable. Make your life less. Let me tell you when I received DACA I took a risk. Not only for me but for my family. They knew my address. So to say that they don't know who we are into life. I'm not leaving until they come and get me. I'm a Georgia boy. All I ever known is Georgia. I don't really want to leave. I'm not scared. Like I'm just not.  So we're having this conversation here at MIT at a very interesting and very fraught moment in time. We have a group of people in the United States who have grown up in this country. Have gone to school in this country who in many cases don't know their citizenship status until they're in the process of applying to college. So we're sometimes at the process of looking for financial aid. We had limited protection for undocumented people in this country under DACA through some political machinations. We are now in a state where DACA is no longer on the books, is suspended. And there are now negotiations happening between the president and Congress over the future of undocumented people who've arrived in this country as children who through no personal decision of their own find themselves in a situation where they're undocumented. And as an educator in this country this is an enormous sort of moral and practical challenge. How do we provide the education to students who want the chance to learn but who don't have the paperwork, don't have the rights in some states to go and attend those state universities? And so my friends who've been involved with Freedom University Georgia have been very insistent that we center this conversation on the experience of students who've found themselves like the students in the video looking at the situation and sort of deciding how do you go further. And so Gustavo Madrigal, I'm hoping that you might help us and sort of talk about your experience as a student and how that ended up sort of informing Freedom University Georgia. Yeah, so thank you so much. And I guess I really have to start at the end of my junior year and going to my senior year. So at the end of my junior year I thought that I was going to go to college with my friends and that I was going to use the Hope Scholarship, which is the state scholarship in Georgia to be able to pay tuition. Then I found out through talks with my counselor that I was not going to be eligible for the Hope Scholarship.  And I said yes. And I didn't know exactly what that meant, right at the time. I knew that I wasn't documented in some way, but I didn't really know what the extent of that was until I found out that I wasn't going to be able to go to college just like I had planned with my friends. And, you know, at the end of my junior year I had a 3.9 GPA, which went down to a 3.3 by the end of my senior year because my senior year I didn't really care anymore. I saw no point of, you know, keeping the work that I had been doing going. And so I sort of just stopped. Then I graduated and then in September of 2009 I had a very, very bad car accident. And when I came back, you know, I thought, okay, like, is this really what my life is going to be now? Is this really who I want to be? Do I want to give up on trying to go to college? And back then I didn't know, right? I didn't know that just like me, there were hundreds of thousands, there were millions of people in the same situation. And it wasn't until after that car accident that I, when I was recovering, I was stuck at home. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't work, which was the main thing keeping me going then. And so I did a search for illegal students on Google. And the first thing that came up was an article on the Dream Act and then a small, like, portal on the web that was a meeting place for undocumented youth from all over the country. And that's sort of when I started getting involved with the activism that was happening in Atlanta. And back then the group was called the Georgia Dreamers. And I started getting involved with them because what they were doing is they were trying to mobilize as many people for the Dream Act as possible. And then in late 2010, we actually were able to push the Dream Act up for a vote. And we got a vote and then it failed. It passed the House, but it didn't pass the Senate. And that was, I think, a lot of us credited to five Democrats who decided to vote against it and killed it by voting against it. And so I remember then there was this anxiety within the youth who were a part of the Georgia Dreamers. And that anxiety was, you know, can we do what we think is the most important work without having any limitations placed upon that work from, you know, an organization that we're a part of then. And we decided that, yes, we could do that, but that it would require having a different group. It would require having a different structure and it would require having accountability to each other. And then after, so after 2011, the Dream Act, or, you know, in 2011, we decided that the fight was no longer at the federal level. So it wasn't anymore about trying to push the Dream Act at the federal level because we were fighting against many things. But specifically in Georgia, we're fighting against HB87. And that is like the SB1070 copycat law that passed in Georgia and those laws are still in the courts. So at any point, you know, in the next few years, we could see a decision that says HB87, SB1070, these are all legals, right? So these horrible, horrible laws might actually be enforced. And so we were also fighting secure communities. And HB87, which were these programs where local law enforcement cooperates with immigration customs enforcement to try to streamline that process of deportation for as many people as possible, who end up being booked into local police stations. And HB87 was a law that could essentially require all local law enforcement to essentially act as immigration officials and demand to see people's paper. So obviously incredibly threatening to any undocumented population. When these laws came around, were you in school at this point? What happened to you after high school? You got involved with Dream Activism. Where had you wanted to go to college? Were you planning on going to the University of Georgia? Not the University of Georgia. I was planning to go to Kennesaw State University and I actually was no longer in school when I started getting involved. I graduated high school in 2009. In 2009 is where I had my accident and that's where it all began. But while I was fighting these laws, while we were fighting these laws, I was no longer in school. And so that definitely was a protection that you lose once you graduate high school.  And what are the laws in Georgia as far as attending a state university as an undocumented student? Well, so as we were fighting HV87, as we were fighting SCOM, Secure Communities and H... What is the other one? 287G. Yeah, the ban came. There's too many things. But yeah, then the ban came down which said that undocumented students could not attend the top five research universities in the state of Georgia. And it also included language that said that any college, any public school in the state of Georgia that had rejected a qualified applicant. And for the purposes of this ban, qualified meant someone with lawful status or a U.S. citizen that any institution that had rejected a qualified applicant in the last two years could no longer accept undocumented students. Now, undocumented students not only couldn't really go to these top five universities but also the ban was created so that it could spread out. And we couldn't pay in-state tuition. We couldn't pay it out of state tuition. We had to pay international rates which are four times higher than in-state tuition. And so that's sort of where the fight turned away from... Well, not away because we were still trying to fight Secure Communities 287G, HV87. But then it opened up another front which was the educational front. So here's a law in Georgia that is significantly more restrictive than a lot of states. A lot of states have essentially said for undocumented students we can't give you in-state tuition but you can pay out of state tuition. In Georgia you've gone even further and essentially said if you can get in you'll be paying the international tuition a much higher rate. But beyond that you're not admitted to the top five research universities in the state. And for the rest of the universities in the state if they have rejected anyone in the last two years you are not allowed admission because you might be taking that slot from an otherwise rejected student. What did you yourself find yourself doing at this point? You're already at this point an activist. You're already working against HV87 and then these other laws that are on the books. But I know the end of the story.  Did you get to go to college? How did this end up happening? Yeah, so I did end up going to college. So while we were fighting these things the idea for Freedom University was born I think within the professors who were here and a bigger group of people. And at that time the group that we had decided to create so that we could be accountable to ourselves and not to some higher power that could dictate what we did was called the Georgia Undocumented Youth Alliance or GUIA. And then I think then that's sort of when the professors and the groups linked up and the idea of Freedom University became a reality. And for me at least it was going through Freedom University and learning about these resources and learning about the fact that while I was no longer in school I had been out of school for years and I had also lost hope that I could continue, that I could try to do this that having this team of people behind me and working with me would help me and eventually I ended up getting a full ride to Hampshire College in Western Mass. And that's how I was able to go to college. And if it wasn't for the people here and Lordja who couldn't be here I remember it was 4 a.m. in November of 2011 she called me up and I was still half asleep and she asked me have you applied to any places and I said I haven't and she just she went off on me and she was like no I need you to get up, I need you to start applying, I need you to start writing the essays and you know at 5 I want you to send me the essays that you wrote so that we can edit them and then you can continue writing them and so that's that kind of push right? That's the kind of push that we also needed because we were so focused on all these things that we had to push back against that we forgot to push ourselves towards the goal that we wanted to attain that I think at that point became this abstract idea of if we can manage to get to a good point here I might be able to go to school but now it's more for the people who are on their way. You saw yourself needing to win the movement first and then have that opportunity and actually one of the things that Freedom University helped you do is sort of go from not being able to go to school to going to one of the most selective liberal arts colleges in the nation and now finding yourself sort of committed in the longer term here. Kish can you talk about your story about sort of how you got involved with this as well and then I want to talk to the professors about how they ended up sort of maybe meeting the other side of this equation. Right, no I think Mustafa did an amazing job laying out sort of the all the outside forces that was making us feel and being, you know sort of stuck in a certain kind of social and political space, right? So I was in a very, very similar space. I had always known that I was sort of undocumented not really knowing the repercussions of it until it was college time which a lot of the stories often go students are trying to obtain higher education or another story is about the driver's licenses things, right? Trying to access just day to day like livelihood that we sort of meet these barriers and realize that we cannot have those access. So I was very similar in that trajectory. I went into my counselor guidance counselor in Georgia trying to figure out how I can go to school, how can I afford school and his answer was that I couldn't or he doesn't really understand what should be done. So I did my own route. I applied to several state schools. I applied to all the schools that my friends were applying to Georgia State, Georgia UGA, so University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, Georgia State, a bunch of all the colleges around. I applied to a few out of state for some reason. I applied to Auburn, I applied to Emory. So that was a private university. But it ended up being down, going down to the cost. So there's how can your family who are also undocumented and working under the table nine to five or even more hours, multiple shifts, multiple jobs, for low pay to afford an international rate which is like what, 50,000, 60,000 a year. I couldn't. So my frustration- No access to loans. No access to loans.  As an undocumented person, who do you have access that can be a co-signer to a $120,000 loan? Nobody. Nobody. Even with papers, even as a citizen. So I met that barrier. I also graduated in 2009 and I went into a bad place where one, I couldn't get a job. I was helping my parents. I was working at a flea market. I was frustrated. I was really scared. I felt that my parents' whole reasoning coming to the U.S. was sort of down the drain. And that was a lot of burden that I carried on my part. I was naive. I was determined to go to school. So I started doing like solo studying, which looking back now wasn't very effective. But I tried to redo the SATs. I tried to read more. I tried to do all these test preps on my own for a year and a half until I started organizing. It was not a good place to be. And the whole premise on that for me was, you know, once in a while you would see in your local ethnic newspapers, so my Korean newspapers about success stories of like students who didn't have papers, but went into Harvard or went into some super prestigious school and got a full funding. And I think that was my ultimate goal. I think, yeah, but that's not sustainable. So I also reached out to a national organizer. I think at that time it was Perna Law who was undocumented at that time who is doing amazing work in UC Berkeley being the legal counselor and staff attorney there was. And I reached out to them and was like, hey, I'm undocumented. At that time we would use the word illegal. I use the word illegal. I was like, I'm illegal. I want to go to school. I need to go to school. Can you help me? And they had connected me to a fellow organizer and comrade Georgina who was a stronghold in Georgia. And that's when I had gone to the first meeting that led up to being the Georgian Documentary Youth Alliance School, yeah. Yeah, and how we got involved with Freedom U is I think it was in culmination of everything, right? With SB, I was going to say 1070, with HB87, with policy 416, with all these legal pressure that's happening, with a lot of students getting arrested, a lot of students being detained, putting in deportation proceedings, and we were trying to fight them, right? That the professors were also concerned about their own students that were around them. That we're suddenly getting pressure to one scope out and then to kick out. Or one day they lost funding because of the policy 416. The institutions are figuring out who were undocumented and start requesting higher funding, right? They need to pay certain bills and they had reached out to GUIA to ask for some advice, right? Right. So this had literally affected people who were in school at that point for whom tuition might go up by a factor of four because suddenly their citizenship status became critical as far as how it was going. For you, you were not in school but you were starting to get involved with the undocumented rights movement, with the dream movement. Let me now sort of bridge over to my friends who were teaching at University of Georgia at this point. And I'm sort of curious how you sort of ended up meeting and connecting at that point. So maybe Bettina, can I go to you first on this? Okay, okay. So in 2010, when the resolution against, the ban against undocumented students passed, many of us started considering ways in which we could protest or oppose to the ban. At that time, Pam and Bethany were already very well connected and they can tell a little more with students organizations who were protesting against the rates of tuition and they were going up and the scholarships were going down were shrinking. So there was a group of students in UGA mostly upper division and graduate students who were very engaged with access to higher education in my department. We had recently hired Lord Jagarcia Peña as the specialist in Latino studies and we only wanted the entire state, right? Most likely, yes. Now it has changed a little bit, but at the right time, yes. And it was a long fight to get this position opened and there was a group of us within the department who were thinking that the Latino students, student body was growing and that we were not offering anything to them. So we were pushing for this to happen. We got it, Lord Jagarcia was there and then we have this horrible news that would affect mostly, not only, but mostly Latino students. So I remember once talking to Lord Jagarcia in a corridor and saying, what are we going to do? This is affecting us. This is against us. And at the same time, I think Pam invited me to a meeting with students and community members and in that meeting we just started brainstorming on how to react directly to this ban. I was following the student movement, what they were doing. I was following in the news how young people were putting themselves to arrest and I felt horrible that as a grown-up person responsible for educating these people was not doing anything. So at that point we met and there was a community member, Beto, who very naively said, well, you three are teachers, or we four, I think there was someone else there. Why don't you teach them? They cannot go to college. Why don't you teach them? And after that we started thinking in options and playing toying with the idea and immediately we decided that we couldn't plan anything without asking the students what their needs were and how this idea of teaching a class would go with them. So that's when we met with a group of GUYA students and Kesh was there and we decided that it was the way to go and we started as a protest and also as a way to support this group of students. So Pam, my understanding of this is that this wasn't just a solidarity action although it was certainly a big piece of that but it was also a very practical, educational, how do we help students get to the point where they can find the resources to find a school that's willing to accept them and that they can afford. How did this actually work? Did you have a classroom? Did you meet? What did you teach? How did this work out? I remember during these organizational meetings, Kesh in particular and Gina who she referenced, we're really pushing to say what we want is to be in a college classroom and I think if I'm not misreading this that GUYA was saying this would be politically incredibly useful to have this kind of, it did attract an incredible amount of media and so we taught that class and because of Lorgia Garcia-Pena we were able to offer a kind of Latinx studies class as well as Latin American literature and culture and U.S. immigration from a more, from a less Latinx kind of perspective or a broader perspective perhaps and one thing became really clear is that while we were fighting the ban and while the students in the class were at the absolute cutting edge of that fight there were people who would like Gustavo and Kesh who had already graduated from high school two years before and were really ready to go to college and wanted to do that and what we saw when we began to do things like SAT prep we needed SAT prep books and so the level of solidarity nationally was amazing stacks and stacks of books not only for this American studies, Latinx studies class we were teaching but also for SAT prep books and then the kind of solidarity that came out of places that you that were actually under resourced like Tugalu College in Jackson, Mississippi a historically black college and university there was an undocumented student there that went into the admissions office and said no, there's a lot more people like me who are being banned across the south and especially in Georgia and South Carolina you need to open up these scholarships you need to open up the fellowships and so one of the biggest receiving institutions that we found was one of the poorest colleges in the country and the second one that was really fabulous was Berea College who in the 19th century was one of the first colleges to integrate along racial lines and along gender lines and in fact in the 1920s the Supreme Court came in and shut that down and said you can't be integrated along racial lines and so Berea stepped up and said especially when DACA passed and people were able to work because it's a work study school that they were able to provide scholarships the alumni at Hampshire led by a woman who was herself a first generation student organized to come up with the money for Gustavo's four year scholarship so what we saw was a lot of intense organizing and incredible solidarity coming from the HBCUs coming from Berea and coming from organizations in Athens like we mentioned Beto who was the head of the immigrant rights organization from the African American women who ran the economic justice coalition and already had networks so this is logistically to run something like this you need drivers it's always the issue in social movements in the south is public transportation so we had these teams of drivers who were coming out of the economic justice coalition we were receiving death threats from the Klan and people like that and so the economic justice coalition provided someone who was out in the parking lot while the students were meeting on Sundays for these three hour intensive classes to watch and not to call the police because that wouldn't do any good so we had our own kind of protection system out of these pre-existing solidarity networks and some of the people doing the drivers were teamsters action center in Atlanta there were lawyers that came in from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Southern Center for Human Rights that took on some of these cases because some students broken tail lights and things like that had police records and so if they're going to leave the state to go to college that had to be addressed in courtrooms and things so one of the interesting things about Freedom U was this incredible level of solidarity from these under-resourced colleges and from these existing activist networks so when we think of this as four professors got together in an undisclosed location and held free classes for undocumented students we're seeing like the tip of an iceberg of organizing that includes how do people get there how do you protect the people who are there how do you think about this larger question of what the goal is of this and it sounded like very early on the goal was not an alternative to being able to go to a university it was the opportunity to get in there and you have to realize that the initial organizing act was this Gina that Keisha has been talking about GUIA comes out and does an organizing workshop for students in the Athens area and Gina's first thing was everybody who's over 30 and everybody who's a citizen out of the room organizing that was GUIA who was pushing this and was doing the logistical work because social movements are the reproductive labor and so this was the group doing that labor and having that vision I think and they were the ones that were connected to these activist networks in Atlanta and things and so put together this kind of took the fuddled professors and said now look, this is what you need to do I think that's real because I don't know about you Gustavo but I think a lot of us, yeah you were too dated and then very dated and the perspective of being in a classroom or going to college was far from our minds I think there's a reason why Lord said to call you at 4am 5am and to ask you to write a paper an application in an hour right so I think even when Freedom University before we actually claimed and embraced that name we were just like what does the classroom actually look like what is it actually supposed to do and when we were using our networks to let the word out so that students actually were attending and actually taking up space for this classroom there was a lot of hesitancy and confusion of what this was supposed to be and Kish what did it end up being I mean when people were coming to these classes what was getting taught was it about doing a college level class in Latin X and American studies or was it about thinking about what it would mean to be someone who was going into higher education so there was a I think in the beginning there was a lot of confusion it was very amorphous there was a lot of questions people were asking for all kinds of classes for me at that time I was very dead set on having an actual classroom like a college level classroom was and that was my personal investment and so that definitely shown through that that was what I needed so that's what we had stated looking back now I remember in our first meeting Kish was very eloquent and she said something like I have lost my personality as a student and I want to be a student so after that in the class she insisted that she was already again a student that was a big gain yeah so looking back now from where I am now it's really ironic and funny there was a syllabus that was being drafted and compiled over the summer like just multiple drafts 17 pages it was a very rigorous I still have it with me and it was a very rigorous it was beyond graduate school it was actually beyond graduate school and now that I know that it was beyond graduate school level the funny thing was I think a lot even the naming of the classroom there was a lot of power and intention behind it so the classroom the class that was offered was titled as American Civilization and this was a little wink at Harvard and it was an American Civilization program at that time we had then since then changed our name to American Studies we still have a lot of work to do but the classroom the syllabus and the class was titled American Civilization what happened actually behind and inside the syllabus was amazing powerful critiques on empire about statehood sovereignty about and it was American Studies at its core we were reading really reading graduate level readings we were reading George Lipsis we were reading Korty Gonzalez May 9 right so I see Bethany laughing hard about this and Bethany of course is an activist historian it's thought a lot about labor history and about different social movements within the Americas how did you find yourself thinking about this sort of going into the classroom were you approaching this as a scholar were you approaching this as an activist how were you bringing yourself into this I think what Bettina said at the beginning I remember the day that we opened the New York Times and there was the picture of Gooyah activists who had sat down on the street in front of the Georgia Capital to protest the spate of laws and you see these young people in their graduation gowns from high school sitting down and being dragged off by the same beefy cops that we're all familiar with from 100 years of Southern iconography and the reaction is wait a minute this is my institution that is now being directly conscripted into this particular form of injustice there has to be something strategic that you can do with your own imbrication in the committing of this injustice and so reaching out to the people who were risking and continue every day every minute that they're up here to risk far more than any of us could risk by doing this and just saying is there any way in which our institutional location could be useful because none of us wants to participate in executing this particular ban and to put this in context it was the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of the University of Georgia and so having fought that tooth and nail the white state establishment at the time was now patting itself on the back very publicly for the open access to the plantation style campus that was at the heart of this and so using those realities strategically we wanted to know if the activists who were in fact risking something could see a use for that right but when Cache came back with actually the thing that would be useful for us would be if y'all would do this as a civil disobedience demonstration project and actually do it like you would do it you know the fact was that this fight against undocumented students and racialized students was part of the whole move to ban an entire branch of knowledge from public universities right that while Arizona was passing these laws that Georgia was running along and copying it was also trying to throw ethnic studies out of its institutions of higher learning so it wasn't accidental that Latinx studies was really a focus of this this was in part what you were trying to fight for exactly that American studies and Latinx studies ethnic studies generally African-American studies these are all branches of human knowledge that had to literally fight in the streets for inclusion in publicly funded education and so there's an awareness in the room where these things happen that that knowledge is dangerous and I think it's fair to say that no one in the class had encountered the histories we were collectively constructing presented in any fashion that that is part of the move and so for us it was really powerful to get to participate in that knowledge creation with people who were actively liberating our country at the same time I want to say that one of the effects of having such a powerful ethnic studies professor like was that not only did we have the four of us teaching we had people fly in Mark Overmire Velazquez, Yolanda Martinez, San Miguel Achio Bejas Laura Gutierrez flew in on daily times oftentimes to give classes at FreedomU so arguably we had the best ethnic studies curriculum with the country at the time and without no budget essentially we were using sometimes the University of Georgia but this was an intellectually just over the top stimulating kind of experience to have this level Juno Diaz, the famous Juno Diaz MIT professor, you know, skyped in and Keish got up and went after it it was but you know, I mean people were empowered in dialoguing and this was really a magnet for like it said a kind of demonstration project in Libertory Knowledge that lots of people wanted to participate in I'm sure the students so like in the class we are just soaking it in we don't we were coming in because we have said and dedicated our time into the space we don't know how at what scale we're meeting these professors like we don't know what their positions are where they are in their like legal I mean scholarly genealogies we do not know these things what we were promised and this was a constant push that we still have to do is actually get it accredited so when it was the idea was brewing the importance was getting the classroom accredited so that if we were to transfer or go to a two-year college a community college or even a four-year college that the experience and the classroom that we were actually sitting on was being recognized as a actual class which we didn't still right we still haven't and that sort of morph and that push was happening while the application like deadlines are coming up and we start then really pitching ideas of okay what does it mean for us to try to apply because now that we have access to professors of a university could they write us recommendation letters so these ideas are just forming as time went by so there's an open question about could Freedom University turn into something that could have accreditation could help people get credits that they might be able to transfer and bring somewhere else you've built this program which you know even just in the first seminar is this sort of you know extraordinary Latinx studies and you're doing this on Sunday mornings completely with volunteer labor at an undisclosed location so that the clan the fucking clan doesn't show up to disrupt your activities so I assume the University of Georgia was thrilled with this and was honoring the extra service I assume they got rid of some of your teaching requirements for this Bethany or Pam so I've noted that three of the four of you are no longer teaching at the University of Georgia but Tina how did UGA react to this? At the beginning especially the press was trying to put us against each other and they would go to the UGA speaker and ask them what do you have to say about this and the answer that the speaker gave was the first answer was our faculty can teach whatever they want outside their schedule and some professors teach Bible school and we don't care about that which is true so they pretty much put it in those terms and gave us some in a way freedom so we didn't need to respond to that but that's not exactly wholeheartedly embracing it let's be clear there was plenty of retaliation but up next to what other people had on the line in this situation it was not worth worrying about honestly and I will say it's important to remember that the faculty at University of Georgia the student body at the University of Georgia same at Georgia State same at multiple other universities around the state voted resolutions against the ban in support of Freedom U or other actions that a larger immigrant all university councils all university forums have at least one resolution against the ban where faculty were involved and the interesting thing was that the administration wouldn't go to the Board of Regents meetings and say these things and so there were the guya activists confronting the Board of Regents without these sort of cowardly administrators not saying anything just sitting in the audience while younger people took on this fight and when we have the discussion in UGA with the University Council we proposed a resolution against the ban we have a very strong reaction against the language that we were using in the first proposal we were using the word discrimination and our colleagues who were supporting Freedom University who were against the ban they reacted very badly to the word discrimination they couldn't tolerate that they were able to change that language in the resolution past but I think that speaks a lot about the position of faculty even when they are supporters how they do not want to make connections with the past history of the state and that creates a lot of trouble for them. Although a specialist in specifically in the history of living through segregation in Georgia was one of our most effective collaborators who came and spoke and made those connections herself Barbara McAskill who runs a standalone project at UGA about the history of anti-black discrimination at UGA had no trouble at all making those connections right? So I want to open this up to the audience in a moment but I just want to ask one specific question to everyone with Kish I know that everyone who's been involved with Freedom University is both very proud of it but also very insistent that it is not the only intervention maybe not always the right intervention that there's a need for a huge number of interventions to deal with these questions of access to education so Kish you're very involved with Push at Harvard can you tell us a little bit about that and I'd just love to go sort of down the line and hear what each of you is involved with right now and maybe if there's anything you want to urge us as an audience both here and online to get involved with and Pamela when we get to you we're going to pull up the website associated with it I think I think Freedom University as well as GUIA is still both ongoing things have gotten worse right in many ways both of us have went into different trajectories of different academic institutions pursuing different interests but our both of us haven't fixed our statuses yet and while our scale and our network of people that we're interacting with and engaging with are expanding the core issues and values are still the same so for me currently being an American Studies PhD student at Harvard after the recent elections it was actually again working closely with Lord Jack Garcia Benia who's currently a faculty there it was her classroom where we met after it was actually one of her again one of her amazing powerful undergraduate classrooms held Monday Wednesday so and on Monday before the election results there was a very powerful performance on campus performance of students sort of doing these murals and decorating the John Harvard statue of just doing this really amazing and powerful resistance acts and then we got the election result on Tuesday went to class and I had went in to be with the students and we saw our full moments one we had to sort of console each other and recognize each other's pain and secondly that's when we started writing drafting a letter to our president and to our deans of what we needed and that sort of became what protect undocumented students at Harvard sort of became and we had multiple fronts of ask which still have not been met unfortunately that had to do with having an actual like a physical location an office that is above ground that had actually invested money into students protecting undocumented students this meant in multiple fronts not only allocating funding to support of emergency financial aid that not only covers DACA but maybe other funds maybe our parents are being deported or being detained and then deportation proceedings maybe we need to help our parents sustain themselves because our mom and dad are detained right there's multiple fronts where financial need is actually needed that people do not always recognize it's always the $495 for DACA renewals but there's so much more that goes beyond that what if we had mixed that a lot of the students were mixed status so the students themselves may have papers but their parents their brothers and sisters who may not have papers so our needs were not only the funding it was not only the legal legal need of having a very radical and powerful and insistent and stubborn attorney a criminal and both immigration attorney who's capable of pushing certain envelopes right and making things happen we needed an attorney we needed multiple attorneys we needed a collection of attorneys who's able to do certain things we wanted access to mental health we wanted a capable mental health counselor and a therapist who's able to meet the needs of not only lgbtq low income first gen students but unknowing various backgrounds of like what it means to be undocumented so these were some of the fronts that we needed we will actually ask for more hiring of ethnic studies like professors and scholars multiple funds were asked so it's a huge set of needs and just thinking about how enormous these needs can be and also how enormous these populations are I was reminded when we were sitting down over lunch that you know not only do we have the 800,000 people who have applied for DACA status or granted DACA status we have 1.3 million people who are eligible since DACA is not currently on the books we have people who would be eligible for DACA but who are now sort of falling through the cracks and then as you're mentioning you have an even larger set of students who have mixed families so the students have papers one or both parents doesn't have papers and you find students in a situation where and I find this as an educator I have a student who will drop off the map and what may actually be going on is that the student is working full time to keep her parents from being deported or to figure out what to do with the rest of the family if parents do end up getting deported this whole set of needs becomes something that as educators we have a responsibility to address up till the point that our government finds a way to address this better than they're currently addressing this now Gustavo what about you how are you involved with this at this point do you continue to be involved with FreedomU or are you involved with other parts of the movement in New York at this point so I am not really involved with FreedomU anymore and in terms of organizing efforts I've taken a step back but one of the motivations for when I first got involved was if I'm gonna go out I'm gonna go out with a bang right like I'm gonna make some damage I'm gonna have an impact before they take me out and I think that has translated into my work as a paralegal where I'm not necessarily working with people who are highly skilled workers for whom there is demand and they want to bring them over I'm working with people who are escaping all kinds of violence are escaping poverty are running away from these puppet governments that the US installed and you know the sacking of the resources of their countries and they're coming here for a better life they just want to work as we all do and lead a good life and I think that's sort of where it's translated for me now there are so many immigration cases out there there's clean cut ones where there's no criminal record there's ones that are very complicated and those are the ones that I like to work on I like to work on the ones that anyone who could just sort of look at the surface details of it and say no well this is not someone we want in this country but it's not so black and white right and so that's where I am now I eventually want to be an immigration attorney and I want to keep working on this project of people have rights and people are eligible for immigration benefits under the INA it may not be pretty it may not be easy there's going to be a lot of digging a lot of fighting a lot of advocating for people but as someone who as of this point doesn't really have doesn't have a path to legalization my mentality still I want to go out with a bang and what that means is making sure that as many people who can't adjust who can try to obtain legalization do that and that's where my energies are now and I think that eventually down the line what I would like to do and one of the biggest goals for me is to be able to influence or write legislation that would go into the INA more humane and not just necessarily look at people as what kind of economic contributions can you make to this country but what does this country owe you what does this country owe your family how can we repay that and and that's sort of the impact that I that I want to have down the line there's a law school about two stops away on the red line I've got some friends over there they often watch these events so they may want to get in touch with you they do some good work there Pamela what about you you're now up at Dartmouth College a noted hotbed of liberal activism what's your involvement with the movement at this point with freedom of view I've, like Gustavo who was being too modest have helped a little bit with tours of students coming through educational work at places like Smith and and Hampshire Gustavo actually organized a tour of freedom use students a couple years back in the Pioneer Valley and they were able to you know tell people what was going on freedom use ongoing it's being run now by a young woman named Laura Mica Soltis who's doing an absolutely fabulous job and freedom use students are sort of leading not only the undocumented student movement in Atlanta but you know our major leaders in a larger kind of network of students who've done some pretty powerful civil disobedience actions not only at the University of Georgia but at the Board of Regents and so what we do at Dartmouth which is sort of a a place that probably is not quite where MIT is yet in terms of undocumented admissions is educational work and a lot of working with students whose parents are in deportation hearings and getting professors to write letters that go to courtrooms in Georgia or Nebraska or Texas or wherever it is that talk about that student so that the judge might give a judge pause kind of thing but freedom use is very much an ongoing kind of ongoing concern and continues to offer classes on Sundays and SAT prep and I really want to encourage people to go to the website and it's an organization that really could use your support and if we can just pull up the website and what's the URL for that I think it's www.freedomuniversitygeorgia.com or .org maybe there it is and it's I would connect there's MIT professor Juno Diaz on the Colbert Report getting his FU Georgia t-shirt a sweatshirt I was going to ask whether the name was intentional but I know Bethany well enough to know that the name absolutely was intentional that we had no idea apparently like those stupid adults gave us but I've known you for a really really long time and I know that FU Georgia was something that probably argued that we wanted to be a freedom school to kind of come full circle to the freedom schools of the 60s but everyone's like but if we're FU we get to shout FU Georgia at the demonstrations which was cathartic so anyways I would really encourage people to touch base with them to donate if you can as you know most sort of donations to 501C3 organizations go to the left coast and not to the south so there's some of the most incredible political activism is going on in the US south with absolutely no resources taking students in a van to Berea college to interview there with admissions officers is a $3,000 venture $3,000 seems like nothing at a place like MRT or Dartmouth but it can go so far books you know materials artist materials for demonstrations all of that transportation getting people on a plane to get to Hampshire to do a workshop so I really want to encourage people if you can give to give share it on social media if you get connected with them volunteer if you're in the Atlanta area it really is like we were saying it's a social movement as much as it is a single class on Sundays now and it's a social movement that grew with incredible solidarity from people all over the country people flying in people buying books students organizing in Atlanta with GUI so I actually want to open up at this point before we lose some of the wonderful guests that we have here and we're going to keep going on with this conversation both in a sort of open Q&A here we're also going to move into into my space in Civic to keep talking a little bit further on but let me just open this up a little bit anyone have anything you want to ask these remarkable folks the students the professors so on and so forth don't leave me hanging here with the question here you know how much I desperately want to throw this at people within the audience that was a mic thank you Joy oh my gosh oh hi I'm Joy I'm part of the Center for Civic Media earlier you mentioned that when you use the word discrimination you got pushed back from faculty and in my own experiences of talking about issues within institutions language comes up so much in terms of what people are willing to engage with so I was one curious about how you thought about the language based on the push back and what language would have wanted to use and I'm going to cheat just for a moment and brag on Joy for a second Joy is a PhD student in my lab and has been doing really remarkable research demonstrating some inbuilt biases in computer vision systems and this is work that gets very tricky because it makes people uncomfortable no one likes to be called out on biases built into systems but it's incredibly important to show what these biases are so that people have a chance to address them and make those systems better so language and how we talk about this is something that's a big subject within our lab we were certainly aware that we had a limited number of effective scripts available to us for the public leveraging of this and that one of them was frankly do-getter befuddled white teacher just wants to help the kids get books you know that that had an audience and we talked a lot about the trade-offs involved in playing to some of these scripts the stand and deliver script that says that there's a category of innocent deserving no fault of their own immigrants who came here as children who are still effectively children and therefore it's not their fault and it contra the sort of insistent responsibility neoliberal narrative that whatever befalls you you have asked for it here's one category of people this narrative says that we can point to and say okay well we'll give them special consideration right and they're real dangers and I think it's true in general that a lot of the dreamer movement has been incredibly ethically rigorous about refusing that narrative and not throwing other undocumented immigrants under the bus in pursuit of that particular I think the problem that it sounds like you're the expert on is how the technology of raceless discrimination is specifically designed to make it impossible to call out the elephant in the room you know and so for me it was very important that we spent time with immigration history and looked at the ways that immigration has been specifically structured around race everyone's been completely aware of it at the time the discussions in Congress are all about how can we keep the country white and yet not use the word race in this legislation and when they figured out they all pat each other on the back you know over and over again 1924 1952 1965 they're thrilled that they figured out a way to make sure that quote the unwashed cotton tots will not be coming here to take jobs from good wholesome Americans literally I mean I think that's verbatim right out of the 65 debates so the challenge is enormous to undo and refuse and not leave any space for that kind of deliberate erasure of what everyone knows is actually being talked about here and I don't think any of us has an answer on that we would probably be coming to you for guidance it's really interesting to think about the ways in which university managed to position itself I think very successfully as oh my god who could be against college professors getting together on a Sunday giving a chance for kids you got me right we ended up supporting this through the disobedience prize very much around that narrative what's been so great in sort of having you here and hearing about this is the ways in which this was student led movement that essentially identified something that students needed and wanted and then we're sort of able to go out and reach out to some professors who are willing to do it but it was the students identifying that this was a missing part of the experience a part of what people were being denied at that point in time I would like to point out to another struggle that I think youth movements also have and we as organizers of freedom university and now I'm in a different organization you lead Athens we still have and is this idea of the good immigrant and the bad immigrant and how these kids who want to come to MIT are the good immigrants but their parents or their younger sibling who did not pass the AP test is the bad immigrant so I think from the perspective of the organizer or coordinator of an organization that worked with undocumented students that is a big struggle and I think you lead Athens is working ongoing around that just by working with mixed status students and working with the students who were the last one in the classroom and never had an advisor who said yes you're doing well we're going after particularly that student because people shouldn't have to be as extraordinary as these two people already were at 16 and 17 and 18 in order simply to not wake up every day with this you know we weren't right this is not about finding the just the hyper qualified incredible stand out human being and the people who build this movement are very clear that it's not about that you do not need to be super stellar to go to college just to clarify and you can add on we weren't I wasn't I wasn't either so he went the process of at least for me I know my process of the more my access to my undergraduate degree which was at Syracuse University another private institution was actually a very strong and powerful network of transnational feminists transatlantic mohanties there with Linda Cardi who were pushing their administrators to open up a private fund a grant a private grant so these are happening in multiple levels right we're not only pushing for policies against like in the public space but also happening back doors too so like it really really means a lot for like administrators, faculties to gather up a coalition to like come up with funding to support students if your institution doesn't publicly allow undocumented students to come through so just recognizing that it's really really important and advocating for students who are who does not have the 4.0 GPA who does not have the perfect SAT score I wasn't that student but I had people who were advocating and advocating for me so I'm going to come back to that question about what universities can do around this and I'm going to put some of our friends from the admissions office on the spot but let me just give you a chance to ask a question here there's a warning label on the bottom of this that says I should read the user manual before using it and I just want to be clear I haven't read the user manual for the microphone this is the media lab none of us have ever read a user manual ever it's actually they write the user manuals my name is Griff I want to thank each of you for being here it's so clear that you have a lot to teach folks who are looking to support undocumented students but it's also clear listening to each of you that you have so much to teach you know folks working in higher education and universities across the board and listening to you speak about the ways that you know learning needs to be found in solidarity with the labor that is supporting learning through you know building relationships with drivers the way you talked about co-constructing curriculum embracing learning as a political act I mean you were mentioning earlier how you didn't know where the professors were on their scholarly journey because they were treating you like people I mean there's just so much that you talked about that just seems like every university in this country is failing at and so I would just love to hear from the perspective of faculty who have been affiliated with big universities and also students who probably grew up with understanding of what university was you know what are some of the lessons that you know really every university should be trying to take from your experience well I'm actually going to merge that into a question that I'm going to throw to my friend Jessica which is I'm going to ask her to just talk sort of briefly about what MIT is doing well around this and then maybe turn this into an open question about what we feel like the universities that we know and love whether we're at them now or whether you know Proud Hampshire grad what these can be doing to sort of transform and work in solidarity with this movement but Jessica I'm going to ask you first if you can so that was a high hard one there that was I had more love when I was going to Joy but it's hard when you're sitting do I speak into oh just speak hi I'm Jessica from the MIT admissions office and first I just want to thank all of you for sharing your experiences and stories they're incredibly humbling and inspiring for all of us to hear so I do want to thank you all as for what we're doing at MIT MIT is one of the five schools in the country that offers need blind admissions need based financial aid and full need financial aid to students regardless of citizenship again that's one of five in this country there are other private institutions some of the institutions you all named private institutions some state institutions that will provide financial aid to undocumented students or documented students but the rules around this are pretty inconsistent it can be really hard to navigate and find this information so as you can imagine there are a lot of questions that undocumented students have to think about that other students don't have to think about navigating the college application process so the media lab has collaborated with us over the last few months to think about ways that we can mobilize resources at MIT and around Boston to serve local undocumented students obviously Boston is a place that's really rich in educational resources there are so many educational institutions in the area so we've been trying to think about how can we how can we serve this population here in Boston and the greater Boston area some of the broad goals that I have for the work that we're doing together is to mobilize resources at MIT to build a network in the greater Boston area and to boost visibility around these movements and these resources so we've been collaborating with local organizations like the Student Immigrant Movement which is a activist organization that serves undocumented students in local high schools we've been working with unafraid educators which is a part of the Boston Teachers Union which mobilizes educators to support undocumented students a program that we're putting on or working with the Boston Teachers Union to put on is a guidance counselor training they're hosting a day long training for their guidance counselors in Boston public schools we're working with them to host a discussion and panel around serving undocumented students working with an immigration attorney to talk about what are the options for students working with guidance counselors and student activists to talk about their journeys through education and what are the options for students and increasing some visibility around these issues knowledge around these issues so that those guidance counselors are then better empowered to work with the students and so the three big ideas came up as we were talking earlier today one was looking at guidance counselors as a real point of impact on this it was really interesting to hear both of you talk about not getting terrific guidance from your high school guidance counselors about where to go and how to go with this a second point and I thought this was particularly interesting is that Chris Peterson, a friend of many of ours in this room often ends up seeing applications from people sometimes undocumented, sometimes simply students who just didn't have as much of a chance in high school as some of us did who clearly would be right for MIT had they taken the classes they needed to get into a place like MIT and so there becomes this really interesting challenge of for those of us here who are grad students, for those who are undergrads is there a way that we could be involved in sort of reaching out to populations who could have the opportunity to be here have this amazing opportunity to be here need blind, citizenship blind if they have the qualifications of it and then the third that I was really blown away by was this realization that in the same way that your movement was building everything from teamsters trying to figure out how to drive people there to people protecting and people thinking about but lawyers we need lawyers you know we need to help support students and their families when they're going through these issues even if the students are fully documented but they're in a mixed family where that becomes I mean imagine the level of stress if you find yourself simultaneously trying to manage an MIT course load and possibly being the only person in your house who's bilingual helping your parents try to figure out how to stay in the country for all of you we'll have this as the last question what should universities be doing more what can we do better at MIT and what can we push the other universities that we love and care about to do better on this issue well I think probably the thing that I haven't seen because I've seen schools add another tab on their website where you can get information for undocumented students and the way that I see it there's two sides one side is the undocumented students looking to go to college the other one is the universities and there's a few universities that say yeah we have some resources but and something you had asked earlier who could be against students learning you'd be surprised a lot of people can be against that and are against that between those two sides those are the people that are blocking access to those resources and so I think more so than just adding another tab more so than just creating a pamphlet I think you need to be actively recruiting undocumented students because the same way that you actively recruit other students who have a breath of knowledge based on their lived experiences we also have something to contribute and going back to your question about the biases that are written inherently into the system I think that's where these knowledges these systems of knowledge that we have derived from our lived experiences from our contacts not just with government but state institutions of all kinds I think we can bring those into this place and we can make good things with it but I think you need to be able to step above and step beyond those people that are trying to block the access by actively recruiting and being public about it because not a lot of places are public about their admissions policies when it comes to undocumented students and when it comes to financial aid and so I think that once you become more visible to the students who are already taking huge risk by becoming visible themselves I think that's I think the very first step that you can take completely agree that's so important that is so important I think that's what's lacking at Harvard honestly though this is a really interesting audience for me to speak to because oftentimes the things that we have to highlight is I mean we are already in a I'm part of Harvard and we're at MIT it's already a very like prestigious like very how you guys have a lot of funding and we're oftentimes talking to like community college like students who can't even go to for community college so recognizing that recognizing that right recognizing that I think Gustavo's point is really really important for these elite institutions and private institutions who do have the funding to step it up so one thing one sad thing to recognize is that once Nancy Cantor with Syracuse Chancellor left and we had administrator change they stopped funding in documented students so they stopped receiving in documented students through their private grants so that's another avenue that's been closed and a lot of the things that I pushed while I was there was to go public but that was there was resistance to that so recognizing the and also recognizing the labor of a Georgia who's not here and all the faculties who are here there was a lot of risks and a lot of labor a lot of time that they put it on top of their obligation as like the only ethnic studies professor at UGA right the only like woman of color one of the few who have like how many students that they're advising that they had opened up their space to dedicate their time to make a space for you know freedom of university I think that needs to happen at MIT I think that needs to happen at Harvard I think there needs to be a step up of investment and a coalition building and a little bit more of courage to like to contest and to stop telling us what the rules of what how how complex these bureaucratic and academic institutions and red tape so I really know that that there are red tapes and we're asking you to step up administrators need to step up students and grad students need to step up I think one of the most disheartening things that I've actually experienced organizing at Harvard has been this constant separation between undergraduates and graduate students so undocumented I mean I'm still undocumented I'm in the graduate program but there's been constant separation between the investment I mean investment within the needs of an undergraduate students and graduate students and our needs are different but they're still the same like what does it mean to to have bring in undocumented student as graduate students what does it mean for them to be teaching fellows when they don't have DACA like these questions need to be asked and the only ways you're going to get answers and insight is as Gustavo said center and invite undocumented students and actually hear what their needs are and advocating for them because there's still a lot of anxieties that even someone who might have the perfect GPA and might have the extra curriculars there's a lot of anxiety because you just don't know you don't know and I think that part of being public I think would also work on this other front that I think has been very very lacking and I don't know if people have actually thought about it or brought it up but you know shaming these other institutions into coming and living in the present not staying in the past not staying in this way of thinking where okay education still needs to be segregated somehow because that makes us feel like we still have power over the systems that be and I think that a place like MIT with the cloud that it has and if it starts being public and if it starts actively recruiting undocumented students I think that can also have a domino effect or a shaming effect upon these other big institutions to step it up themselves because if there's anything that I learned about higher education is that no institution wants to fall behind another institution. So one of the things we talked about a little bit over lunch was the ways in which MIT will often do things right but very quietly and this is a place where we're doing things right we are by being need blind and by being citizenship blind that's the right step we need to go a step further and we need to be open and affirming about this I will openly affirm that I welcome and encourage undocumented students to apply to my group here at the media lab I hope that others will do that as well but beyond that this is something that we as MIT should have a lot of pride in we should actually be talking up and actively recruiting around on a bunch of different. I think all of us who inhabit more secure positions in these institutions need to help shift the perspective and make clear that there is not a neutral space when what you're seeing people like y'all are carrying the brunt of 40 years of deliberate constriction of access to higher education in this country and you can either counteract that process or you can simply shrug your shoulders and enable it but there's not actually there's no moment where it holds still this was a deliberate political move to make it harder for that vast expansion of access to education everyone had a full ride in California in 1960 if they could get into college right and that's no longer how we do that because it stopped being simply available to white Americans and that was a moment where it started to contract and any of us who work in these institutions owe it to the people who are taking the heat to figure out where our institution is in that history and what steps we can take from within to counteract that I'm going to do the last word to Bettina and then we're going to welcome anyone who wants to stick around, we're going to go and have a smaller discussion over in MySpace and Civic, but Bettina I just want to support what Gustavo and Keish were saying and I want to add to that that undocumented students are not at risk for an institution, they are the best they bring in a lot of experience and they turn out staying in college in ULIT Athens we had help around 50 students to get into college from those 50 as far as I know only one left all of them are in school they're continuing struggling, some of them are taking two classes per semester three classes per semester but they don't withdraw and I think that is something that all colleges have to have into account, there are more secure than other students that might not finish, might not end up graduating so I just want to thank my guests for coming out talking about these issues I just want to congratulate you all for the incredible work that Freedom University has done I want to thank everyone who came out in the audience everyone who's watching us online we're going to continue this conversation we're hoping to have a very practical conversation about what we can do better here in Boston for people who are still engaged with us, coming over into the civic space, we'll be there in a couple of minutes but thank you all for coming out and being part of this