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By Jennifer Gunnels
Butler University Stories

Bay Area native Terri Jett was received a Distinguished Faculty Award at Indiana’s Butler University.

Terri Jett arrived at Butler University in 1999 to begin her teaching career as an assistant professor of Political Science and Peace and Conflict Studies after earning her Ph.D. in Public Policy and Public Administration from Auburn University.

Originally from California, Jett was unfamiliar with the Hoosier state, but was drawn to the energy of the faculty and students she met at Butler and the opportunity she saw for connecting her teaching and research with the broader Indianapolis community.

More than 20 years later, Jett has excelled at the work she set out to do. Last year, she was named a 2021-22 Distinguished Faculty Award recipient for her profound contributions to Butler University over the course of her career.

In many ways, Jett has been a trailblazer at Butler, including becoming the first Black female to earn tenure, and in 2020 becoming the first Black female to be promoted to full professor. Along with her teaching responsibilities as a member of the faculty, Jett has taken on numerous additional roles over the years including faculty director of the Hub for Black Affairs and Community Engagement (the Hub), member of the Steering Committee of the Race, Gender, Sexuality Studies Program (RGSS), faculty senator, and Faculty Fellow at the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab Think Tank. She also served as Department Chair from 2007-2014, a role she has currently resumed as interim while the current Chair is on sabbatical.

Jett has developed almost two dozen courses — core, departmental, honors, and even taught in our Washington D.C. Semester Program — and is always eager to seize on opportunities to take her students beyond the borders of campus. She has led students on numerous occasions to Selma, Alabama with the Honors course Voting Rights in Black and White: The Case of the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March. She says walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge is always a moving and eye-opening experience for her students that brings the Civil Rights Movement to life in new ways.

Of the many courses she has taught, Jett says one of her favorites to teach is the Politics of Alice Walker, which she teaches nearly every summer. Prior to the pandemic, Jett also offered the course several times at the Indiana Women’s Prison and was able to bring some of her Butler students to visit her class in prison.

Jett is committed to doing good things in the world herself and is known in the Indianapolis community for her service and activism. She currently serves on the board of Indiana Humanities and is appointed by Mayor Joe Hogsett to the Indianapolis Land Improvement Bond Bank Board. She also moderates a series on local PBS station WFYI called Simple Civics, which provides short civics lessons and was nominated for a Great Lakes Region Emmy in 2020 and again in 2021.

Jett says her community activism is inspired in part by a desire to demonstrate how to be an engaged citizen for her students as well as a desire to connect her teaching and research to issues happening within the community.

“And I do it because it’s fulfilling,” she said.

Though Jett has various roles within and outside of Butler, she finds satisfaction in discovering ways to integrate her teaching, research, and service. For instance, her research focuses on agriculture and food justice, and last year she leveraged her area of academic expertise and her role as Faculty Director of the Hub to partner with Indy Women in Food in hosting the organization’s first conference on Butler’s campus focused on food insecurity in the city.

“I’m thrilled when I’m able to do that,” Jett said. “All of the hats that I wear are sort of constantly engaged at the same time, and I like that I get to work like that. I’m not running from one thing to the next, I feel like my work is layered with multiple connection points.”

This article is part of a series honoring the 2021-22 recipients of the Butler University Distinguished Faculty Award. Printed with permission.

By Mark Allen Cu
Bay City News

Outside of a Seafood City Supermarket in Milpitas, a crowd of young Filipino-Americans gathered last weekend to commemorate the 36th anniversary of the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) revolution, a march conducted to end the dictatorship of then-President Ferdinand Marcos.

The commemoration last Sunday was organized by the South Bay chapter of Malaya Movement, a national grassroots organization focused on fighting for human rights and democracy in the Philippines.

Justher Gutierrez, a local coordinator for Malaya South Bay, enjoyed marching around the plaza in Milpitas and sharing concerns about the potential return of another Marcos dictatorship through the election last year of Marcos’ son, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., commonly known as Bongbong Marcos.

Especially after the controversial rule of former President Rodrigo Duterte, which was under scrutiny by the United Nations Human Rights Council for alleged extrajudicial killings, some Filipinos are concerned that Marcos Jr. will continue to limit democracy just as they say Duterte did.

“We were there to recognize the painful history that was caused by the Marcoses,” said Gutierrez.

However, not every Filipino-American present at the commemoration was there to support Malaya’s mission.

“There was this family that stopped and they were like, ‘What are you doing? You don’t even know who Marcos is or lived during his time,'” said Gutierrez.

Gutierrez handled the situation by handing a flyer to them arguing that the Marcos regime has manipulated the media and online discourse to make a name for himself. The family left angry and unconvinced.

“We have reached a point where there’s two different realities,” said Gutierrez about the differing political sentiment amongst Filipino-Americans.

In her experience, generational lines have separated the more politically active and human rights-oriented youth and older Filipino-Americans she says are less supportive of activism that is critical of the Filipino government.

The Filipino-American community in the Bay Area continues to have robust activism and political engagement. However, anti-imperial and decolonial activists like Gutierrez continue to see the generational difference in political sentiment as an obstacle in organizing members of the Filipino diaspora to discuss the Philippines’ most pressing issues.

Bay Area activist groups have condemned Duterte’s presidency, accusing it of human rights violations such as the “war on drugs,” which the advocacy non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch says allowed for thousands of extrajudicial killings by law enforcement.

Many of these groups are demanding more freedom of speech for those critical of the government, with most censorship being the result of the Philippines’ Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020.

Most recently, Filipino-American activist groups such as Anakbayan Daly City have criticized the recent expansion of the U.S. military presence in the Philippines.

Despite many of these activist organizations being led by Filipino-American youth, Kayla Soriano, a member of Anakbayan Daly City, struggles with getting Filipino students on college campuses to organize and act.

“I think that it’s always been an ongoing challenge to find out how we can relate to Fil-Ams who are not particularly interested in these issues,” said Soriano, using the shorthand for Filipino-Americans.

However, in Soriano’s experience, educating Filipino-American college students about these political issues has prompted more of them to act.

“We’ve gotten them to engage with typhoon relief and even got some of them to come to our protests,” said Soriano.

Still, Soriano finds it difficult to reach across the generational gap, saying there is a higher concentration of “diehard” Marcos and Duterte supporters amongst older Filipinos that makes it difficult to educate them about the issues of their respective regimes.

Activist groups are not the only organizations witnessing this political disparity within the Filipino-American community. The nonprofit L.E.A.D Filipino was created to promote civic engagement, health equity and education amongst the Filipino community in the Bay Area.

Angelica Cortez, founder and executive director of L.E.A.D. Filipino, says having conversations about social justice is embraced in her organization, even if they may agitate some members of the community.

Cortez recounted times where community members have disagreed on and argued about topics such as colorism and Duterte’s policies on drug-related crime. When witnessing this disparity, she tries to encourage critical thinking and mutual understanding.

“As a nonprofit, we are not allowed to be political. However, we always encourage our community members to be critical and to value equality and justice,” Cortez said.

Through L.E.A.D. Filipino, Cortez organizes workshops and seminars to educate Bay Area Filipinos about the importance of civic literacy and engagement.

When talking about the youth activists within her organization, Cortez emphasized the privileges and protections afforded by American citizenship.

“You can go to a march and then go get boba with your friends after. It’s not the same in the Philippines,” Cortez said.

Copyright © 2023 Bay City News, Inc.  All rights reserved.  Republication, rebroadcast or redistribution without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Bay City News is a 24/7 news service covering the greater Bay Area.

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MarkAllenCu0555a03/05/23

CONTACT: Anakbayan Daly City anakbayan.dalycity@gmail.com

Angelica Cortez angelica@leadfilipino.org

Justher Gutierrez justher.g@gmail.com

EDITORS PLEASE NOTE: Image(s) related to this story can be obtained from the following Bay City News Service web link(s): https://www.baycitynews.com/images/BCN-20230304-FILIPINOACTIVISM-01.jpg

Member organizations of Bayan USA and Anakbayan USA mobilized to the Philippine Consulate General in San Francisco, on February 6, 2023. (Glenn Mercado via Bay City News)

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