May 27, 2005
Indiana University Labor Studies Under Attack
Dear Union Sisters & Brothers, Colleagues & Friends,
Ruth Needleman, Professor of Labor Studies
(rneedle@iun.edu)
Just this week, six employees of the Indiana University Division of Labor Studies were terminated: three faculty among them. The reason given was a budgetary crunch resulting from legislative cuts in our funding and university demands for increasing income annually. As you may know, a Republican governor and Republican control of both houses of the state legislature have
made Indiana a very union unfriendly state. Public sector unions were thrown out of government agencies, a right to work law threatens on the horizon, and now the labor studies program has come under the knife.
Even though a faculty budgetary committee developed an alternative budget that would require no faculty layoffs, the Director went ahead and implemented his budgetary proposal, closing down the South Bend office,laying off two tenure track faculty, Paul Mishler and Cathy Mulder, and faculty member Rae Sovereign, who has just completed her Master’s Degree as required by her contract.
Indiana University is a public university with a clear mission to serve constituencies in the state, especially under-served constituencies like adult working people. Increasingly public universities are functioning like private ones, forcing every unit to generate income above expenses, and setting budgets every year higher than the previous year’s income. It works like gain-sharing has worked in many workplaces—forcing workers to become ever more productive every year in order to meet the rising standard.
And why wouldn’t universities feel the same pressure of corporate competitiveness and privatization? Not only were tenure-track faculty terminated, but part-time, temporary and less credentialed employees were kept. The decision on whom the ax would fall did not follow IU policy; it ignored seniority, credentials and faculty governance. Welcome to Wal Mart University!
We are asking you for letters of support for maintaining our regional offices that serve working people where they live and work, in this case, the South Bend office. We are asking for support to reverse the arbitrary and discriminatory termination of Rae Sovereign, Paul Mishler and Cathy Mulder, three of our top faculty. Finally we ask for your support in opposing hiring and firing procedures that violate university academic policy, and that promote contingent, part-time jobs over fully-funded, skilled jobs. We cannot let WalMart become the model for universities as well.
Please send your letters in support of the Division of Labor Studies at Indiana University, to Executive Vice Chancellor & Dean of Faculties William M. Plater, IUPUI, Administration Building 108, 355 North Lansing Street, Indianapolis, Indiana 46202-2896. You may also e-mail him at wplater@iupui.edu. Please send me a copy, and also William Schneider, IUPUI AAUP, whschneider@iupui.edu.
Posted by sparks at 10:00 AM | TrackBack
April 21, 2005
Police Crackdown on Student Free Speech Rights
New Brunswick, NJ April 19, 2005
On Monday April 18, 2005, at the University of California-Santa Cruz, the city police engaged in a brutal suppression of students' right to assemble, their freedom of speech, and their basic human rights. University of California-Santa Cruz students had organized Tent University Santa Cruz, a week long encampment in coordination with the Tent State Universities at University of Missouri-Kansas City and Rutgers University-New Brunswick, to support the full funding of higher education and oppose the Iraq War. As UCSC students peacefully set up tents on their own campus for the night police rioted, violently dispersing several hundred campers, arresting near twenty, and injuring dozens. These injuries included but were not limited to bruises, dislocated shoulders and one student who had been attacked so severely he was rendered unconscious.
Tent State University of New Brunswick, NJ, condemns the barbaric and authoritarian disregard for the health, safety, and well-being of UCSC students and calls for the immediate recognition of the rights of UCSC students as well as a halt to any and all oppressive actions of the University and city administrators and police. We stand in coast-to-coast solidarity with our brothers and sisters at Tent University-Santa Cruz.
For More Information Contact:
Amanda Troeder
www.tentstate.com
info@tentstate.com
Posted by sparks at 8:55 AM | TrackBack
January 13, 2005
Another Strike at Academic Freedom
Ignacio Chapela, a member of the Cal’s department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management faculty, appears to have been denied tenure for performing the basic research that should mark a faculty member’s career. As reported by Richard Brenneman, The Berkeley Daily, Chapela’s final class “marked the end of the latest chapter of his battles for academic freedom and his challenges to an increasingly corporatized academic culture.�
Brennenman framed Chapela’s situation as follows:
“When Swiss biotech giant Novartis (now renamed Syngenta) struck a five-year $25 million deal with the College of Natural Resources’ Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, Chapela was quick to criticize, citing the obvious potential of conflicts of interest and corporate control of research. His frankness did nothing to endear him to college Dean Gordon Rausser, one of the architects of the agreement. But the crowning blow followed from a discovery made by Chapela and one of his graduate students, David Quist, one of the founders of Students for Responsible Research. A native of Mexico, Chapela has remained deeply involved with his homeland, conducting research and helping indigenous people work toward economic self-sufficiency.
Quist and Chapela discovered strands of genetically modified DNA in the genome of native strands of corn cultivated in the heart of the region where maize was first domesticated. Chapela and Quist submitted their findings to Nature, the British scientific journal which remains the world’s preeminent scientific publication. Their publication in November 2001 ignited a firestorm.
Their discovery wasn’t the first instance of artificial genetic intrusion. Reports have surfaced of strands of DNA conferring resistance to the pesticide Roundup finding their way into the weeds the herbicide was designed to kill. But the Chapela/Quist discovery was especially troubling to the agribusiness giants whose patented strains of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are being spread throughout the world and generating huge profits. The implicit threat their research raised was of homogenized crops, of a reduction of genetic diversity that could render crops far more vulnerable because diverse varieties with a wide range of resistances would vanish into a giant genomic blender.
The attack was instant and fierce. A British web site posted scathing critiques from non-existent scientists who turned out to be creations of a corporate advertising and Nature received letters, one from a UC Berkeley colleague of Chapela, who questioned the scientists’ methodology. the end, Nature published a partial retraction—the first in the publication’s history—that advised readers to make their own interpretations of the findings.
Chapela was already up for tenure when the Nature furor erupted, but the flap didn’t prevent department members from voting 32 to 1 in favor of tenure, followed by tenure recommendations from both his department chair and the dean of the College of Natural Resources. On Oct. 3, a five-member Campus Ad Hoc Committee voted unanimously in favor of tenure. The first blow came on June 5, 2003, when the university’s budget committee made a preliminary vote against tenure. Then, on Nov. 12, the vice provost asked the ad hoc panel chair to reevaluate tenure in light of a new critical letter, prompting the resignation of the chair.
After another negative vote from the budget committee, Chancellor Robert Berdahl denied tenure on Nov. 20, 2003, despite repeated tenure recommendations from the chair and dean.�
Coupled with Meranto’s case, the question becomes where are the professional and political organizations which are effectively battling the conservative and corporate forces which increasingly mark academic life?
Posted by sparks at 9:51 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
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……