The Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) last night voted to provide a campus student group at Wesleyan University with the $2,000 it had requested from the student activities budget for a proposed appearance at the Middletown, Conn., campus of militant Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan of the Chicago-based Nation of Islam group.
After meeting for two-and-a-half hours, the WSA approved by a vote of 14 to 10 the funds for Ujaama, a Black student group. The vote was on the entire budget of more than $250,000 for some 84 Wesleyan student groups. It will provide Ujaama with $1,000 toward a Farrakhan appearance and another $1,000 as a loan, which could be repaid from proceeds from the event.
Ujaama, as of this morning, had yet to issue a formal statement to the press or react to the WSA vote. They have still not indicated whether or not they will issue a formal invitation to Farrakhan, whose anti-Semitic utterances during the Democratic Presidential primaries caused an uproar throughout the country.
The WSA vote followed several weeks of controversy which peaked with the student body voting to reject a referendum on the entire student budget proposals because of the Farrakhan allocations. The budget was then brought back to committee where the WSA issued an advisory opinion urging that the committee retain the funds for Ujaama, thus overriding the popular opinion of the student body as expressed in the referendum’s outcome last week.
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