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December 10, 2004
Abu Ghraib 101 at BMCC? Read all about it.
While a former New York police chief Kerik assumes control of the Department of Homeland Security, it is probably a comfort to him to know New York colleges and universities have his back. As reported by Abram Negrete, in Abu Ghraib 101 at BMCC, a proposed Security Management Program at CUNY’s Manhattan Community College is now in the process of being adopted.
He writes:
In the special Homeland Security issue of the AACC’s Community College Times (28 September), [Manhattan Community College] President Perez writes that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were the first salvo of what one observer has called World War IV. He goes on: Community colleges need to be in the vanguard of those institutions helping to prepare our nation and its defenders to respond to attacks.
The proposed 30-credit BMCC security management certificate consists of ten required courses. Top of the list is the Homeland Security course. It features a guest speaker from the New York State Department of Homeland Security and readings from Tom Ridge’s Big Brother agency. Noting that trends clearly demonstrate increased demand for investigative services and surveillance systems, the course defines national security as protecting national values, interests, and institutions. This requires understand[ing] current threats against domestic and international assets. Like what, political protests and Third World insurgencies? You bet.
Next on the list of classes is Security Management Principles, which includes Intelligence gathering and Interview and interrogation techniques. Readings include an interrogation textbook written by a top lie-detector expert together with a former FBI agent and member of the Philadelphia police. Also on the syllabus: Undercover Investigations in the Workplace. That’s the kind of investigation employers carry out against union organizing drives.
How about the CIA interrogation handbook for Central American death squads? Is that going to be on the reading list as well? Or will Col. Perrone of Guantanamo come to lecture on interrogation techniques? After all, he told Rochester TV (15 December 2003): The time to retrieve...information is generally in the first few days of captivity. He could also lecture on the use of hoods, shackles, prisoners being forced to kneel for days at a time, and other ways to retrieve information. And who will they choose for subjects for interrogation? Members of student governments who have lost elections, perhaps?
Then we come to the proposed BMCC course on Terrorism and Counterterrorism. This part of the certificate program uses the feds definition of terrorism as any violent act against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian populations, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives. So a militant labor struggle, a march against racist police brutality or protest of military recruiters can be branded terrorist. The proposed course defines counterterrorism as any act intended to combat, control, or resolve terrorism. This is the No. 1 pretext for torture in the world today, so Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib would fit right in.
As the article continues, Negrete traces the growth of this course to a national Homeland Security effort linked to participants in CIA and Mossad activities.
In a world where the religious right is attacking evolution, the military right is taking over college curriculum, and the university right are undermining unions (witness Temple University’s latest labor struggle), progressive teachers more than ever need to do more than just teach radical literature. They should join in the struggles of public school students, university students, and adjunct faculty. Such a move is underway at Manhatten Community College. Stay tuned……
Posted by sparks at 9:33 AM | TrackBack
December 5, 2004
An NCTE resolution about DP Benefits
A colleague at another institution (actually Morris Young) sent me this proposed NCTE resolution about not hosting the NCTE conference in states that have anti-gay marriage laws, specifically "constitutional amendments that ban domestic partner benefits." Should CCCC consider somethign comprable? This would mean that CCCC would not come to my current home state, Ohio, but I could live with that. Thoughts?
***Because NCTE has a history of and commitment to social justice and to speaking out against discrimination in many forms, and because NCTE supports teachers and students of diverse backgrounds, I propose the following Sense of the House Resolution.
I move that NCTE not hold its Annual Convention in states that have passed constitutional amendments that ban domestic partner benefits and infringe upon the rights of committed gay/lesbian couples and diverse families.***
Posted by jalexander at 9:16 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
December 2, 2004
Rotten Fish: Living off the Labor of Others
With the ease of a faculty now before him, former Dean/current academic Stanley Fish wants faculty to realize "how lucky they have it." In “What Did You Do All Day,� published in Careers: Chronicle of Higher Education (11/25/04), Fish writes:
One of the many complaining questions that faculty members ask, the one I used to hear most often was, "Why do you administrators make so much more money than we do?" The answer is simple: Administrators work harder, they have more work to do, and they actually do it."
After recounting the burdens of being Dean (excepting his extended summer vacations as part of that burden)," Fish writes:
The burden of those duties has now been lifted, and I come and go as I please. No one checks up to see where I am and what I am doing. I could, if I were asked, give the all purpose, expected, and perfectly acceptable answer: "I always work from home." ...
The wonder is that faculty have such a high opinion of themselves and of the nobility of what they do -- and of the rightness of not doing what they decline to do -- and such a low opinion of what administrators do, although they wouldn't last two days if they tried it.
This vision of faculty loafing about is only further affirmed by "Tireless Research Assistants" written by First Person (a pseudonym) also appearing in Careers. In this essay, the reader is allowed to witness the great lengths that a graduate student willingly goes to gain his faculty employees favor:
If a professor had asked me to locate a 19th-century graffito scrawled somewhere in the sewers of Paris, perhaps below water level, I would have had it done in 24 hours.
Luckily for the Professor, the research assistant wanted to curry favor somuch, he would misrepresent the hours worked:
If it took me three hours to verify a short quotation, I might report the time as 30 minutes.
After reading this essay, one might ask what is it about academy that produces or attracts students to imagine such a subservient and degrading role to their "teachers"? Indeed, the only criticism the RA has in response to this situation is that after all this work, faculty seem too lazy to even read what the work that has been produced -- blaming the RA for mistakes in publications.
Apparently, the academy is only full of lazy and ungrateful faculty.
What an easy target.
The truth, of course, is not quite so simple. While Fish is enjoying his summer off and his empty date book, while First Person is searching our Paris sewers, many faculty are working as part-time contingent laborers. These faculty work without benefits, without summers off, and without research assistants. Yet they do most of the teaching labor that enables Fish to succeed as both a Dean and a scholar. Their labor also insures that First Person can be freed from teaching to fulfill his own subservient role. Both are suffering, it seems, from what Donna Strickland calls the “managerial unconscious� – an inability of some to see how privilege is based upon exploitative management structures.
After these two editorials portraying faculty as slugs, Careers follows with hundreds of “career opportunities.� In that spirit, here is an imaginary add reflecting the lives of many real faculty:
Wanted: Composition Instructor to teach four to five sections of first year writing course at several different colleges simultaneously. Must be able to teach multiple syllabuses and juggle different conceptions of good writing/pedagogy simultaneously. Ability to not be noticed or speak up about working conditions required.
Fish challenges faculty to try the live of an administrator, noting, “they wouldn't last two days� if they did. So here is a challenge for Stanley Fish: Why not try two days of being a part time instructor at multiple colleges, preparing for classes while driving to the next class? Better yet, why not try living off the wages of a part-time instructor?
Such an experience might demonstrate that not all faculty live in luxury and that for many who do, they do so off the labor of part-time and contingent faculty
Posted by sparks at 9:32 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack