Border-crossing journalism from the Sacramento Valley
by Leslie Layton
Chico State staffers were gathering this morning on a campus walkway in an effort to prevent any more altercations over the tactics of the campus Republican club. But today, instead of noisy protesting, a video posted on social media showed a group of protesters dancing to music as they faced the club’s booth.
by Anna Blackmon Moore
commentary
When I was 16, I was watching a sitcom on my 8-inch black and white TV. Outside my bedroom window, the sun had set. At the start of a commercial, it occurred to me that I was wracked with fear and dread. By the commercial’s end, the dread had anchored itself inside my body— my chest, my limbs, my temples.
by Richard Roth
When Europeans arrived in the Americas, they applied their mouldboard plows to the prairies, to soils that were rich, dark and black. That soil was steaming with mineral and organic carbon — with soil life so small it was invisible to the human naked (unmicroscoped) eye and, hence, to our consciousness. So we ripped into them with gusto, mining this flesh of earth.
by Leslie Layton
Racist, homophobic and sexist graffiti was used to deface faculty bulletin boards, photographs and office doors in Butte Hall during the April 6-7 weekend, according to police and faculty.
The Chico State University Police Department (UPD) released a brief statement that says it’s investigating the graffiti incident as a hate crime and “seeking to identify suspects.” UPD estimated the damage and clean-up cost at $400.
by Leslie Layton and Denise Minor
When Vickie Nailing first came to Chico to pursue a master’s degree in 2015, she was taken aback by how friendly people were. She loved the community’s “hippy vibe” that reminded her of the 1970s.
“When I would pass strangers they would look me in the eyes and smile,” said Nailing, a graduate student in the Teaching International Languages program. “I’m from L.A. I wasn’t used to that.”
by Tony Waters
“Together we WASC” has been the tagline coming from the Chico State administration in recent months. It is even featured at the bottom of some emails.
This refers to the accreditation process of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, a private organization from Oakland, which is given the right to accredit all schools and colleges in the western United States by the U.S. Department of Education. Everything from Stanford University to universities in the South Pacific to secondary schools in Myanmar are reviewed.
