The Advocate » Blogs

Occupy CUNY Blog: November 28

Advocate Staff — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 07:46:06 +0000

Welcome to the Occupy CUNY blog. We’ll be covering the recent situation developing at CUNY around proposed tuition hikes, the protests against them, and the unacceptably forceful response from the police and university brass. We will be reporting on this crisis and related news beginning today. The most recent updates will appear at the top with a EST stamp.

6:30pm A second arrest now being reported, though still unconfirmed. Details forthcoming as they become available.

5:31pm Riot gear cops moving up on Baruch protest (h/t @RDevro):

5:30pm Word reaching the Advocate is that the Board of Trustees just approved three-year tuition hike.

5:15pmThe Grad Center’s own Sandor John addressing the crowd outside BoT meeting as helicopters hover above…

5:00pm The folks at http://www.livestream.com/occupynyc have gained access into Baruch and are looking to get into the Board of Trustees meeting!

4:52pm CUNY Distinguished Professor David Harvey spotted in the crowd, enjoying a cup of coffee!

4:51pm Party atmosphere inside the pen. Rude Mechanical Orchestra inside playing “Whose Side Are You On?”

4:50pm Ryan Devereuz reports that young man who burned his student loan bill has been arrested. Still not sure if this is the same kid our reporter witnessed being hauled away. More as it becomes available.

4:47pm City Councilperson and City College alum Ydanis Rodriguez is in the mix with protesters at Baruch.

4:45pm Chant now is “1, 2, 3, CUNY will be free.”

4:40pm Advocate’s man on the ground now reporting first arrest…Chants of “Shame!”

4:35pm Nick Pinto just now: Picketers circling on 15th in front of Baruch, but bulk of the march is clumped against barricades by the armory.”

4:30pm Penny Red reporting just now: “Two girls in crowd: ‘so this is a different movement?’ ‘No, it’s one movement with different issues.’ This gets it about right…

4:25pm Chant resounding again: “Off our campus!”

4:20pm Police giving no room whatsoever on streets for protesters to make easy forward progress. Mopeds are barricading protesters. Advocate reporter on the ground reporting that situation tense between crowd and cops…

4:15pm Penny Red tweets: Police chasing students with motorcycles at Baruch College student walkout #ows #studentstrike

4:12pm Word now coming to the Advocate protesters are marching around the Vertical Campus Building and on up Lexington…

4:10pm Ryan Devereaux just posted this picture to his Twitter feed of protesters marching to Baruch:

4:05pm For those interested, the Village Voice‘s Steven Thrasher interviews Conor Tomas Reed, one of the five students arrested last week at Baruch.

4:00pm John Knefel tweets just now: “Baruch is barricaded & closed @ 25th & 3rd. Able to enter via Lex. Huge police presence #ows”

3:00pm Barbara Bowen sends along this response, issued to Chancellor Matthew Godlstein, to Baruch President Mitchell Wallerstein’s notice over the weekend of class cancellations and administrative leaves granted to college employees after 3:00pm. It reads:

Dear Chancellor Goldstein:

I write on behalf of the 25,000 CUNY employees the PSC represents to object in the strongest terms to the cancellation of classes and denial of student access to Baruch College as of 3:00 p.m. today. It is inconceivable to us as faculty and staff that a college would cancel its primary activity—teaching—on the grounds that doing so will “ensure the safety of all students, faculty and staff during the period surrounding the meeting of the CUNY Board of Trustees,” as President Wallerstein writes. What creates unsafe conditions is not the presence of peaceful protesters on a college campus, but rather the college’s approach to policing: confining student protesters to an inadequate area and limiting access to public space at this public college.

President Wallerstein’s decision sends the message that Baruch College, and by extension CUNY, puts the desire for control ahead of the interests of education. That is the wrong message for a university—especially a public university—to send. Speaking for faculty and staff who want to continue the work of education uninterrupted, I call on you to ask President Wallerstein to rescind his decision.

The lockdown of the Vertical Campus is not about our safety or the safety of our students. It is about repressing student protest, intimidating those who wish to dissent, effectively closing an open meeting, and making Baruch a campus where free speech may take place only in designated spaces. President Wallerstein apparently believes that “the right of free expression on the Baruch College campus” must await the construction of an outdoor public plaza or the designation of specific areas in which that right may be exercised.

The right of free expression does not stop at the door of the Trustees’ meeting. Free expression as a right has no meaning if it can be curtailed whenever Trustees might be inconvenienced or embarrassed by its being exercised. Students, faculty, staff and the community have a legitimate right to engage in peaceful protest, and the PSC will do everything lawfully in our power to protect it.

The decision to reschedule classes and close administrative offices was made without consultation with the PSC representative at Baruch, and, as far as I have been able to determine, without consultation with the elected faculty governance or student leaders on campus. President Wallerstein apparently fails to recognize that many of the faculty who teach after 3:00 p.m. on Mondays, particularly adjuncts but also full-time faculty, may not be available at the time he has unilaterally declared for the rescheduling of their classes. Faculty may have other professional commitments at that time. In addition, some faculty and students participate in religious observances that prevent their being available on Friday evenings. The ability of professional staff to fulfill their responsibilities is not addressed in President Wallerstein’s message. The union will not tolerate speed-up for professional staff as a result of the closing of offices early today.

It is not too late to reconsider the decision to shut down Baruch’s Vertical Campus. On behalf of the faculty and staff who make CUNY work, I call on you to ask President Wallerstein to rescind his announcement and allow work to continue. Open the campus, open the meeting, and let this university be a university again.

Sincerely,

Barbara Bowen
President

cc: President Mitchel Wallerstein
Professor Peter Hitchcock, PSC Chapter Chair, Baruch College
PSC Membership

1:00pm In response to President Kelly’s message, students and faculty began letters in answer. A particularly good one comes from Priya Chandrasekaran, a CUNY GC doctoral student in anthropology. It follows below:

Dear President Kelly:

I am a doctoral student in Anthropology at The CUNY Graduate Center. Before I address the purpose of this letter I would like to thank you for your help with the recent commemoration for our late professor, Fernando Coronil. The event was a truly beautiful celebration of Fernando as well as to the potential depth, meaning, and joy of the academic life.

I am writing in response to your message addressing security issues at The Graduate Center. I write with both hope and a heaviness of heart. I write in response to your statement and with an honest appeal which I hope you will consider seriously. Most importantly, I write as someone of our university’s academic and political community who holds a profound sense of belonging and gratitude for this place and network we call The CUNY Graduate Center. The words that follow are shaped and inspired by my experiences here.

There are people who would admonish me for writing you such a letter. They would claim that you represent those on the other side of the blunt force that was used against us on Monday at Baruch, that this letter is wasted time, these words are wasted breath. And perhaps they are right. But unfortunately and fortunately, I am not someone inclined towards cynicism. I have my education to thank for that.

I will not go through the details of events at Baruch on Monday; for that I could direct you here: http://studentweekofaction.wordpress.com/. I can tell you that I am someone committed to nonviolence both politically and spiritually. I can also tell you I am committed to public education. I have been a public educator in some capacity for fifteen years. I was there on Monday and I saw the terror, disillusionment, anger, resolve, and defiance on student’s faces when they were assaulted with batons by CUNY security and – as substantial and reliable evidence reveals – NYPD was called into the building. I know of someone who was sexually harassed that day by CUNY security. I have heard firsthand testimonials of people who were hit and jabbed. I was grabbed roughly by my arm and I witnessed a male acquaintance being grabbed, thrown, and taken away by 2 men in uniform because he was feeling claustrophobic and leaned his body out of a packed elevator. My friend’s cell phone was smashed to bits. Another’s glasses were broken. I have colleagues who were arrested. I realize you do not know me, but I am not exaggerating. There are video and audio recordings documenting these events, which is why so many faculty – some of our most esteemed – have come forward to support us and why the petition to oust Chancellor Goldstein has already acquired over 2000 signatures. Every student I have referred to thus far is from The Graduate Center.

I am not merely being hopeful and naïve when I say the winds of change are here. As they blow – and they will blow fast – you have the opportunity to be someone who mattered to public education in a deeper, larger sense. There is much reason to believe that Matthew Goldstein’s tenure as CUNY Chancellor is over. He is not respected enough to be feared, not considered eloquent enough to be convincing or ethical enough to be trusted, and he has no credible commitment to public education. He, along with many Board members, has displayed what appears to be – deep down – terror of free thought and the racially and ethnically diverse youth and labor of this city; these are elements to be contained, if necessary with violence. But the very seclusion and elitism that has, over recent years, protected the Chancellor and the Board is now their Achilles heel. I speak for many when I say we feel no allegiance to them. It is not just that they are stirring up an atmosphere of violence and threat, but they are, simultaneously, becoming obsolete. At a historical moment when CUNY students are standing up with self-dignity, finding the right words, fueled by a sense of purpose and righteousness, and coming together in solidarity around public space and public education, neither the Chancellor’s money nor his political connections will save him. I am sure if Antonio Gramsci were alive, he’d be able to explain this better than me.

You say that you value the exchange of ideas and respect. You say you support free speech and civility. You, as much as any of us, should know that without the former the latter cannot exist. Civility in a climate of censorship and violence – economic, social, and physical – is merely a ruse that erodes the very foundation of anything that could be called an education. No step towards justice in history, recorded or unwritten, has ever been taken without deeply disrupting prevailing patterns of work and life. This is because brutality, in its most terrible form, dons the garb of normality. If those of the Civil Rights movement were concerned about enabling people to go to work and study “as usual” the institution at which you are at the helm would look far different today, and the robust intellect that fills its halls would be largely absent. My education has taught me that to be “civil” is to boldly stand up for the most humane thing, not to meekly relinquish to dehumanizing norms. With candor born of respect, I am saying that your proclamation to balance free speech and what you have called “civility” is not a substantial response to recent events ay CUNY. Regardless of the earnestness with which you may have made this call, it essentially amounts to false appeasement.

I must admit that I am deeply disappointed that – after the violence inflicted upon — NOT perpetrated by– us on Monday, you followed orders and added security on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, trying to ward off the threat of a potential “occupation.” I would have thought that your real concern, as President of our college, would have been for our safety. I would have thought you might have used that money to send security to protect us – your students – on the 28^th. I must tell you that in the eyes of the students with whom I have spoken, there is simply no good justification for this decision. I would have thought that you would have understood that the professors and students who comprise our community fundamentally believe in The Graduate Center as a place where radical thought and political discussions can and should exist. I thought The Graduate Center was a place that we, the students and faculty, did “occupy” with our minds, bodies, passions, voices, and beliefs. Isn’t that its greatest strength?

I ask that you reconsider how you respond to calls for more security to watch your students. I ask that you make a public declaration, supported by irrefutable evidence, that no NYPD will be called into our school because of a fear of “occupation.” I ask that you come out in support of your students with a commitment to protect their freedom of expression, even if that means not following orders from above. I ask, in short, that you be a leader worthy of this great institution of public higher education that I, and so many others, have grown to cherish and would risk much to defend.

Your public actions will be read as your response to issues raised in this letter.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Priya Chandrasekaran

Doctoral Student in Anthropology, The CUNY Graduate Center

Graduate Teaching Fellow, Hunter College

12:30pm The Graduate Center’s president, Bill Kelly, issued a community letter over the weekend addressing concerns about police presence on campus. It reads, in full:

Dear Friends,

I’ve received a message from the Officers of the Doctoral Students’ Council regarding security practices at The Graduate Center. I was pleased to have their thoughtful inquiry. The concerns they raised are of general import, so I take the liberty of answering in the form of a community message. I will also address security issues their letter did not raise. I’ll begin with some specifics and then turn to broader themes.

I’ve been asked whether the size of our security staff has been increased. It has not. To the contrary, staffing has been reduced in the last year by 4.2 positions. That reduction is the consequence of an over 50% increase in contract guard billing rates. Since 1999, we are down a total of seven positions. We have had some turn-over this year, so if you see an unfamiliar face, please introduce yourself.

The greater security presence in the building last Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and again on Monday, resulted from holding officers from the 7 to 3 shift over and bringing in the 3 to 11 staff early. No external personnel were involved. The cost attendant to that action will be absorbed through savings effected in our security budget in the course of the year.

We took that action at the request of CUNY central, as did every CUNY college. The request was made in response to a number of non-specific web notices concerning college occupations. We complied for two reasons: first, to insure the peace of our community in uncertain circumstances; and second — and more important — to guarantee that should the need for additional security staff arise, they would be members of our community, not people whom we do not know and who do not know us.

There was no intent to intimidate students, staff, or faculty; the dispersal of officers throughout the building, rather than grouping a larger than usual number of security staff at the entrance to The Graduate Center or elsewhere in the building was meant to avoid that very prospect. I deeply regret any perception to the contrary.

Graduate Center peace officers have been trained in first amendment rights as well as the laws of arrest, search, seizure, and the lawful use of force. They have been authorized by New York State law to make arrests for violation of NYS penal code; they may use reasonable force to protect themselves and others. They are not authorized to conduct surveillance of students, staff, or faculty. This point is self-evident to me, but I make it in deference to concerns raised about such activity at other colleges.

There are no plans whatsoever for a sustained increase in security. Should occasional need arise, additional officers would be drawn from our current staff.

Security staff regularly check on all events in the building to insure compliance with NYC fire codes and to gather attendance statistics for the Office of Special Events. They do not report on the content of those events.

Although we have only eight uniformed peace officers, our practice is to respond to Graduate Center protest activity with Graduate Center personnel. NYPD is responsible for protecting public officials attending events at The Graduate Center and for policing the sidewalks around our building. Only in an emergency would they be called into The Graduate Center.

*******

All of the above is nuts and bolts. Here’s what matters, my friends. We are a university, a community of scholars. The vital exchange of ideas is the heart of our enterprise. That’s one of the two pillars that sustain a university and underwrite its very being. The other is respect, the protection of the rights of all to pursue their work and to conduct their lives. Free speech and civility are mutually sustaining. Each is meaningless without the other. Defending both — absolutely — is the challenge we face. Thus far, we have, together, succeeded. Our security staff, under the direction of John Flaherty, has been — in my opinion — flawless in supporting peaceful protest and free assembly. They deserve our thanks. Similarly, faculty, students, and staff who have participated in the variety of activities associated with the Occupy movement have been both forceful in their expression and respectful in their exchange. I’ve been reminded again and again that The Graduate Center is a remarkable place and that I am very privileged to be a member of this community.

With respect and deep regard,

Bill

12:00pm The CUNY Graduate Center’s Manissa McCleave Maharawal has a piece in AlterNet with the inside scoop on the student movement. A quick snippet:

“We are calling on our faculty to support us. We are calling on our union to support us. We are calling on students to reject the increasing privatization of what should be a public good and join us. We are rejecting the securitization of our universities, of our education, we are rejecting the commodification of our universities, of our education. We are rejecting a model that attempts to convince us that a consumer model of education, where you pay for what you get, is the best one. And in doing all this we are, again, fundamentally challenging the model of society that we are supposed to be content in. We are demanding more, we are demanding a society where education is a right, where it is free, where everyone has access to it.

“And we have learned, once again, that this is a real challenge to the state, to the powers that be, to those who want to maintain education for the elite and for only those who can afford it. Why else would we be surrounded by cop cars when we have meeting of the People’s University in Washington Square Park? Why else would students and faculty around the country be pepper sprayed and beaten when they demand a greater voice over decisions made in these institutions, when they demand affordability and accessibility? Why else would a public meeting be in a heavily securitized building, why else would the President of Baruch cancel classes in the last weeks before finals just so that a Board meeting can occur un-interrupted? We are being met with force because we are a threat, because education as a right for everyone is a threat because we are asking for more than we have been taught to expect, because we want to stretch our imaginations about what is possible by doing so.”

11:00am From Dissent, information on an event this evening looking at OWS’s “Phase Two,” at Columbia University:

“On the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, the 99 percent poured into the streets for a massive day of protest against glaring inequalities of wealth and political power. Following nationally coordinated police raids on protest camps, occupiers face new choices about the direction of OWS. What next? On Monday, November 28, we will discuss how social movements with diverse tactics, needs, and goals grow and gain power in the face of repression.

“The conversation will feature Frances Fox Piven, an activist and scholar of social movements at The Graduate Center, City University of New York; Liza Featherstone, journalist and author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart; Nikil Saval, associate editor of n+1 and labor activist; Michael Hirsch, labor journalist and editorial board member of New Politics; and Dorian Warren, a fellow at the Roosevelt institute and professor of political science at Columbia University.

“The location is 550 W. 120th Street, Room 501, Corner of 120th and Broadway.”

10:30am NY1 has brief coverage of the protests scheduled for later this afternoon here.

10:00am Jadaliyya has run a strong statement on increased police presence on CUNY campuses penned by faculty member Anthony Alessandrini. It concludes with a number of demands:

“So: first (and I speak here only for myself, although I suspect I am far from alone in these demands), I call for the resignation of any and all officials, whether at Baruch College or elsewhere in the CUNY system, who were responsible for ordering campus security to use violence to disperse nonviolent student protesters.

“Second, I endorse the call, first written and circulated by CUNY students, for the immediate resignation of the Chancellor of the City University of New York, Matthew Goldstein, who, in the words of the student petition, ‘sat idly by through the full three and a half hours of the CUNY Board of Trustees meeting at Baruch College, on November 21, 2011, while in the same building students, faculty, and staff of his university engaging in peaceful protest were met with a violent police response and numerous arrests.’ This petition states the case clearly and succinctly, and I simply endorse it and call upon readers to sign it, and to follow it with individual phone calls and emails to Chancellor Goldstein.

“Third, I extend this call for resignation to include the politically appointed members of the Board of Trustees, who similarly sat idly by while nonviolent student protesters faced violence from campus police. Allow me, in concluding, to address the Board directly: In calling for your resignation, all I am really doing is echoing the words and example of those students who, locked out of your sham ‘public’ hearing, declared that they would simply hold their own hearing. Being literally pushed out of their own school was just the latest example of the way that an unaccountable, unelected, and irresponsible Board of Trustees has attempted to deny students any control over or input into their own education. It’s their school; you are the ones who now have to go.

“As Robert Hass put it, regarding students who have been protesting at Berkeley:

“’Whose university?’ the students had chanted. Well, it is theirs, and it ought to be everyone else’s in California. It also belongs to the future, and to the dead who paid taxes to build one of the greatest systems of public education in the world.

“This is certainly true of CUNY, another of the world’s great public education systems. It belongs to the students, the teachers, and all the other workers who make up this university. It belongs to everyone who lives in this city, everyone who has lived here and helped to build it, and everyone who will live here in the future and will become this university. It belongs to everyone except for the ones who have seized it, the ones who now must step aside. You are the occupiers, not us.

“CUNY will be a democratic, open, inclusive, and free university, with or without you. You can resign and join us, or resign and move aside. There is, I would insist, room for you among us; there is nothing written in stone that insists that we must be antagonists. There are honorable precedents here; after all, it was not so long ago that CUNY’s then-Chancellor, Joseph S. Murphy, vigorously defended the policy of open admissions, declaring: ‘We have to give an opportunity to all our people to go as far as they as they possibly can in terms of getting an education and moving ahead or we will have a highly stratified, rigid class system and we won’t have democracy.’ Even though you have chosen to police your side of this divide between us through the use of violence, there is still room for you. Again, there is an honorable precedent: City College President Buell Gallagher, who in November 1968 called in the police to end a nonviolent student sit-in, a few months later resigned in protest rather than implement budget cuts that would have effectively ended programs like the Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge (SEEK) program intended to expand opportunities for poorer students, particularly students of color, to attend CUNY. Gallagher’s words then resonate clearly today, and you have the chance to follow his example: ‘I am now asked by officers of government to stand in the door and keep students out. I shall not accede, I will not do it.’

“So there is room for you among us. But first you must resign from your unaccountable positions, and join us in a truly democratic process; otherwise, you simply must go. As millions of people, from Tunisia to Egypt to everywhere, have been telling their brutal and unaccountable leaders: game over.

“Your time is up. Our time has begun, and we are the City University of New York.”

9:30am Here’s a brief video ad for today’s protest at Baruch posted at YouTube.

Share on Facebook

CUNY News in Brief, November 2011

The Editor — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 07:43:03 +0000

St. Mark’s Bookshop Saved!

The beginning of November witnessed a major victory for independent, small businesses in New York City. St. Mark’s Bookshop, a Lower East Side institution for over thirty years, was threatened with eviction by its landlord, Cooper Union, as it struggled to scrape together monies to meet its monthly rent. The possibility of the store’s ouster by Cooper Union sparked a massive backlash from community activists, booklovers across the nation, and even celebrity personalities like Salman Rushdie.

On November 3, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who had arbitrated the dispute, announced that a deal between the bookstore and Cooper Union had been brokered which would allow the business to remain open for at least another year, and at a reduced rent. “I congratulate both sides for agreeing to new terms,” Stringer said, “and I also want to salute the small businesses, independent bookstores, artists, and activists that have traditionally made the East Village so special.”

Under the agreed upon terms, Cooper Union will slash the monthly rent charged to St. Mark’s Bookshop by $2,500, from $20,000 per month to $17, 500, and has forgiven the entirety of a $7,500 loan made to the store. The Huffington Post reports that the shop, in return, has agreed to work with Cooper Union students to devise a business plan that will allow for sustainable growth in the short, medium, and long terms, and has a year to begin turning larger profits or they’re out.

Cooper Union, who is facing a budgetary crisis of its own, was forced to back down on its threats to evict St. Mark’s Bookshop after a massive media campaign was launched to defend the local business. A petition that was sent to the school demanding the bookstore not be thrown out on the street, was signed by nearly 45,000 people. But ultimately, the store will need more than signatures to survive. St. Mark’s Bookshop has been experiencing sagging sales for years with increased competition from mega-sellers such as Barnes and Noble’s and the move by many book buyers to purchase items from online distributors like Amazon.com.

In the meantime, the store is hosting a party to celebrate both its recent victory as well as its thirty-fourth year anniversary in the neighborhood. Those interested in swinging through to grab a glass of wine (and buy a book!) can do so on Thursday, December 1 from 5:30-7:30. The bookstore is located at 31 Third Avenue (one block north of St. Mark’s Place).

DSC Issues Important Resolutions in Response to Recent Events

On October 28, the Doctoral Students’ Council released three important resolutions in response to recent events and revelations that impact CUNY students directly. The first resolution condemns New York Police Department spying on CUNY campuses and the targeting of Muslim student organizations. It expresses, in no uncertain terms, solidarity with the Brooklyn College faculty and the CUNY School of Law faculty in opposing these surveillance activities that were clearly demonstrated to be independent of any criminal investigation. Furthermore, the DSC resolved that it calls “upon CUNY’s central administration to condemn the violation of the NYPD-CUNY Memorandum of Understanding Regarding Response to Incidents and Events Occurring at the City University of New York,” which prohibits the police from spying on CUNY campuses. Of course, it has never been made fully clear if the spying was going on with or without the approval or awareness of CUNY brass. Thus, the DSC also demanded that if the memorandum was not violated, that CUNY administrators “account publicly for it role in this surveillance.” The resolution also calls upon the CUNY administration to “demand publicly that the NYPD inform these groups and individuals that they have been the subject of this surveillance and the nature of the evidence gathered,” that police commissioner Ray Kelly account publicly for these actions, and that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City Council immediately end all spying operations targeting members of the CUNY community.

The second resolution passed that day was issued in response to proposed changes in the CUNY Board of Trustees Bylaws that would significantly reduce the power of student governance to regulate student organizations and extra-curricular activity. The proposed changes are in direct violation of Article Fifteen of those same bylaws which express commitment to “student participation, responsibility, academic freedom and due process,” and were only presented to the student representatives ten days in advance before the BoT Committee on Student Affairs and Special Programs was scheduled to meet. The resolution demands that these proposals be rejected outright, and failing that, that the vote on changes be delayed “in order to allow for adequate university-wide discussion of these changes.” Finally, in an act of defiance against the Board’s power grab, the resolution reaffirms its sovereignty over student activity funds and its authority of student activities and organizations.

Finally, the DSC issued a resolution proclaiming solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement. Sighting its ability to bring national attention to income inequality, social injustice and corporate influence in politics—the very issues affecting the welfare of CUNY students and the communities of New York City more broadly—the DSC registered its support for the OWS movement and reasserted the rights of students, and all citizens, “to peaceably assemble, demonstrate, and petition businesses, the government, and CUNY for a redress of grievances.” For more on recent DSC action, and the full text of resolutions discussed above, please visit http://www.cunydsc.org/resolutions

Occupy CUNY Graduate Center

On the afternoon of November 17, as New York City was in the midst of a day-long series of actions protesting the unacceptable conditions of our nation’s—and indeed the world’s—organization of power, over one hundred CUNY students gathered in the lobby of the Graduate Center in midtown to join in solidarity, share their stories, and march as a group to a gathering in Union Square. According to eyewitness accounts, the assembly was the most inspired and meaningful moment of collective action at the Graduate Center in recent memory. Students delivered impassioned, elegant statements of hope, outrage, and solidarity as their colleagues, GC faculty and staff, and NYPD and private security officers looked on in support and approval.

“Masses of Arab youth have turned to face that ugly stereotype of the backward Arab street, and they have spit poetry in its face,” said Rayya El Zein, an Arab-American student at the Graduate Center and a faculty member at the City College of New York. “In the exact same way, in this country, you all, we all have turned and faced that sticking, that stinking accusation of apathy and we have spit in its fucking face. When we say today that ‘we are the 99%’ and that we are occupying our public spaces and our public schools, we are saying that we are individuals who think, who feel, and who know better about our societies. And that we are not too weak, that we are not too afraid, to say: This shit is wrong and it will not continue in our names. When I look at us now, at all of us—here, there, everywhere, I see an international community of engaged, aware, and conscious young people. And that is an incredible thing.”

“I have a different story,” said one woman, who described herself as having been “a member of the one percent. “I used to work for Goldman Sachs. I moved to India for them, and I relocated a lot of jobs there and I saw how racist the organization was, by making the assumption that we could re-colonize India, with our ideology, with our jobs, making [Indians] work hours we would never work….Seeing you all here gives me hope.” Faculty and staff also spoke. “You know the faculty is supporting you in large numbers here at the GC,” said one GC staff member. But I also want you to know that staff are supporting you, too.”
At 2:30, the group left the Graduate Center and marched down Fifth Avenue from 34^th Street to Union Square. As the nearly two hundred students entered the square from the north, it was met hundreds more students from New York University, the New School, and Hunter College marching from the south, joining together in the square center for a student general assembly at 3:00. Soon after, the human microphone resounded with the proclamation that “Now, as students, we march!” And march they did down to Foley Square for an extraordinary evening of music, speeches, and the seizure of the Brooklyn Bridge by some 20,000 protesters demonstrating their dissent from the status quo.

Share on Facebook

Occupy CUNY Blog: Day One

admin — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 01:39:45 +0000

Welcome to the CUNY Crisis blog. We’ll be covering the recent situation developing at CUNY around proposed tuition hikes, the protests against them, and the unacceptably forceful response from the police and university brass. We will be reporting on this crisis and related news beginning today. The most recent updates will appear at the top with a EST stamp.

7:30pm A general strike of students everywhere is being planned for next Monday, November 28. For more information on how to get involved, click here.

7:00pm The PSC has formally called for an investigation into the police response to nonviolent student protest at Baruch last night. The group’s president, Barbara Bowen, had this to say: “The City University has a proud history of student activism and protest. Some of its most important advances have occurred because of collective action by students, faculty and staff. We have made it clear to the university that violent response to non-violent students protest is not acceptable. Students, faculty and staff must be allowed to exercise their First Amendment rights of free speech and free assembly. We call on the university to conduct a full investigation of the police conduct last night. The results of the investigation should be immediately made public.”

6:30pm The Advocate has just received an open letter from the Doctoral Students’ Council at the Graduate Center, CUNY to the president of the school, Bill Kelly, in response to the increased presence of security personnel on campus–an increase without explanation. It reads, in full:

November 22, 2011

Dear President Kelly,

Over the past week we have heard from students expressing their concerns and questions related to the increased presence of uniformed security guards at the CUNY Graduate Center. What has been especially disconcerting is the disproportionate increase in security forces in areas of the building devoted to student study, governance, and socialization. The large number of security personnel patrolling our hallways and outside our classrooms signals to many that you believe there is a threat to the Graduate Center. Indeed, the presence of these security forces in student spaces, not at the established building entrance checkpoints, suggests that you believe the threat is internal.

We have chosen to address this issue with you in a public letter because this is a public issue and requires a public response.

In light of recent security and police actions toward peaceful student protests on CUNY campuses and at other public universities, it has become especially difficult to believe that deploying additional security personnel without notice does anything but intimidate students and faculty and create an environment of fear. The Graduate Center community must be informed should some imminent danger require you to make the decision to mobilize security forces.

You have assured the Doctoral Students’ Council that peaceful protest and assembly will be allowed on our campus. Indeed, a number of events related to student and faculty protests have gone exceedingly well and without incident from security forces for those peacefully assembled. We thank you in advance for your continued support on this matter and hope you will join the students, faculty, and staff in participating at future events.

On behalf of the students of the CUNY Graduate Center, but for the benefit of the entire community, the faculty and staff included, we request the following information:
(1) a community notice explaining the choice to increase security presence on campus, with reference to specific safety concerns;

(2) an outline of the policies and protocols for responding to student protests, including details on the levels of force that Graduate Center and CUNY security is currently authorized to use, and an overview of how security officers have been trained in responding to these issues;

(3) a report on security actions taken, observations made, and any other pertinent information on public safety officer activity, including an open disclosure of the Graduate Center budget for additional security; and

(4) a clear timeline of when the Graduate Center will draw down the increased security presence.

We thank you for your attention to these matters and anticipate your response.

Sincerely,

Officers of the Doctoral Students’ Council

Colin P. Ashley, Officer for Funding
Annie Dell’Aria, Co-Chair for Business
Anne Donlon, University Faculty Senate Liaison
Nicole N. Hanson, Officer for Outreach
Sarah Jordan, Officer for Student Services
Eero Laine, Co-Chair for Student Affairs
Christina Nadler, University Student Senate Delegate
Jared Simard, Co-Chair for Communication
Patricia Stapleton, Officer for Technology and Library
Monique Whitaker, Officer for Health and Wellness

6:00pm Video of the CUNY Board of Trustees meeting being mic checked at Baruch last night, in two parts—here, and here.

5:30pm CUNY students have issued a statement deploring the use of coercive force to put down protests being conducted by their friends and colleagues, both last night at Baruch and moving forward. It states in no uncertain terms that, “we condemn the use of police violence against CUNY community members who were protesting peacefully at the public Board of Trustees Public and Budget Hearing at Baruch College on November 21, 2011. We also reject the official statement released by the administration of the City University of New York regarding those events.

“Students, faculty and staff peacefully entered the Baruch lobby to attend the public meeting of the Board of Trustees and were immediately met by a line of police carrying large wooden truncheons and blocking access to the building. Students who were on the official roster of speakers were also denied access. At no time did the students, faculty, and staff attempt to push past the massed police officers, nor to confront them physically in any way. The police directed us to the first-floor overflow room where the meeting would be televised live. Knowing that our voices would not be heard in the broadcast room, we decided that we would hold an assembly in the lobby and allow people to tell their stories and testimonies of experiences as students at CUNY. Most of us sat down on the ground so that speakers could stand and be heard.

“The police attacked us shortly after we sat down and began pushing us toward the wall, responding to our peaceful, lawful protest with physical confrontation. The suggestion provided in the CUNY administration’s statement that anyone ‘surged forward toward the college’s identification turnstiles, where they were met by CUNY Public Safety officers and Baruch College officials’ is a categorical lie, and this is documented in video footage of the events. As the officers continued to push us away from the public meeting, they blocked all exits from the lobby but a single, revolving door, through which we were forced to walk one at a time. Many of the peaceful protesters were shoved violently by the campus police, jabbed and struck in their ribs with wooden truncheons, and left badly bruised. At least one student was struck in the face. It was a miracle that no one was more seriously injured. Those who refused to leave were told that they would be arrested; when one person identified himself to officers as a CUNY faculty member and asked on what charge he would be arrested, he was not given an answer. Another officer blurted, “Because it’s a riot!”

“We deplore the use of violence against peaceful protesters. We deplore the criminal charges made against peaceful protesters exercising their Constitutional rights of free speech and peaceful assembly. We also deplore the CUNY administration’s misrepresentation of the events at Baruch, devised to obscure its complicity in violent action against its own students, faculty, staff, and community.

2:00pm Boing Boing, whose been all over the student protest actions in recent days, has a piece on police bullying last night at the Board of Trustees meeting at Baruch College.

1:30pm In case you missed it, there is a petition going around calling for the resignation of CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein in the wake of last night’s confrontation at Baruch. It reads: “The Chancellor of the City University of New York, Matthew Goldstein, sat idly by through the full three and a half hours of the CUNY Board of Trustees meeting at Baruch College, on November 21, 2011, while in the same building students, faculty, and staff of his university engaging in peaceful protest were met with a violent police response and numerous arrests. Chancellor Goldstein (who is responsible for many of the policies currently being protested, such as the ending of open admissions in 1999, and increases to student tuition costs of over 20 percent) neither offered any condemnation of this attack on his students when he was made aware of it, nor did he intervene to prevent the continuation of the violence or to ensure his students’ safety. Members of CUNY cannot have any reasonable expectation that they will be able safely to exercise their rights to free speech and protest as long as a chancellor complicit in violence against them remains in office. We thus call for his immediate resignation.”

The petition can be signed by interested parties here.

1:00pm The OWS People’s Library blog has an excellent piece on violence against students and faculty at CUNY which is well worth the read. Among other things, it asks “why CUNY has a police force and who do they work for? I work at CUNY, inside the Mina Rees Library, (though not for the library) and I interact with CUNY Public Safety officers every day. I’ve watched them save the life of one of my colleagues. I’ve taken First Aid classes from them. In my workplace, they have been part of the CUNY family. But now, CUNY has ordered them to take up batons against students and the officers at Baruch have complied.”

It concludes that “CUNY is the nation’s largest urban public university system and consists of 23 educational institutions here in New York City. In the past, CUNY was literally the People’s University, offering open and tuition-free education to the poor and working class. However since 1975, CUNY has charged tuition and has increasingly made admission and attendance more and more difficult. The CUNY Board of Trustees has repeatedly voted to increase tuition, making access to this public institution more difficult. Campuses that used to be open to all have installed security barriers and turnstiles, and partnerships with corporations are privatizing this public educational space. At the very first CUNY General Assembly, held at Hunter College – CUNY Public Safety officers were ordered to deny entry to CUNY and Hunter students, faculty and staff who sought to enter the building and have a peaceful meeting, even though they all had proper ID. This denial of entry was based entirely on the political character of their speech. This disturbing trend at CUNY must be stopped before the people lose their university completely.

12:30pm Another video of last night’s protest has emerged which offers clearer evidence of what went down. Students sit down after the 2:00 minute mark and police action follows shortly thereafter. It’s hard to find a CUNY security officer that is not holding a baton with two hands but officers are aggressive with the baton’s use, shoving and sometimes striking students with them. This is especially evident with about 15 seconds to go from the end, when an officer in the upper right of the screen hits some students especially hard.

12:00pm The Daily News published a brief report on the protests last night. Perhaps the most notable part of the piece was the interview with Hunter College student Josh Godar who said he and about 15 other students were shoved into a room when cops moved in to quash the demonstration. “I’m an Army veteran. I didn’t serve five years in the military to come here and see civilian people threatened this way,” said Godar. “This is a complete disgrace to the ideology behind this country.”

11:00pm The Occupy Wall Street site has a brief statement with video of went went down last night at CUNY.

10:30am An important statement from CUNY faculty on last night’s police response to peacefully protesting students, which is signed by a lengthy list of the university’s most prominent teachers:

“We faculty members of The City University of New York (CUNY) express our outrage at the police brutality against nonviolent student and faculty demonstrators at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of California-Davis.

We declare our support for the opening of spaces for protest, political dissent, and, when necessary, nonviolent civil disobedience on our campuses. We support the CUNY student movement in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, including the student strike organized by our students on November 17, along with the protests on November 21 against the prospect of tuition hikes to be decided on by the Board of Trustees, and any future non-violent protests.

We call upon the CUNY administration to look upon these student protests not as a threat that must be monitored, policed, and repressed, but as an opportunity for a discussion across our community about the future of the City University of New York as a public institution meant to serve all those who live in this city.

Therefore, we the undersigned:

1) Deplore any use of violence against nonviolent student protesters, anywhere.

2) Call upon the CUNY administration to support and engage respectfully with those students, educators, and community members who are working to open up spaces for protest, dissent, and discussion.

3) Declare that the use of any violence whatsoever against nonviolent student protesters will never be tolerated at CUNY.

4) Insist that administrators at both the CUNY-wide level and at individual campuses not call upon any outside police forces, including the New York City Police Department, or any other city, state, or federal law enforcement agencies, in order to disperse students who are engaged in nonviolent protests.”

10:00am The official statement from CUNY, issued last night, in response to the events at Baruch, reads, “While a public hearing was being conducted by the CUNY Board of Trustees at Baruch College, at which more than 95 speakers had signed up to present their views, a group of protesters entered the first-floor lobby. Because the hearing room was filled to capacity, some of the protesters were directed to an overflow room equipped with the live video of the ongoing hearing. Some of the protesters refused to proceed to the overflow room and instead surged forward toward the college’s identification turnstiles, where they were met by CUNY Public Safety officers and Baruch College officials. The protesters were asked twice to exit the lobby or return to the overflow room. They refused, creating a public safety hazard. In order to ensure that public safety and access to the building was maintained for students who were attending classes this evening, the CUNY Public Safety officers secured the space and removed the protesters. One Public Safety officer was transported to a hospital for chest pains and two others received minor injuries. Fifteen protesters were arrested and processed by CUNY Public Safety officers. Throughout this time, the public hearing as well as the college’s classes and other business functions continued.”

So, students were arrested to keep students safe? Hmmmm….

Share on Facebook

Andean Odyssey: A Discussion with Michael Jacobs

Michael Busch — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 19:11:30 +0000

For those who have travelled extensively throughout South America, the astonishing majesty of the continent’s Andean mountains is surely etched in the imagination. From the lush jungles in northern Colombia and the lunar salt plains of the Bolivian heartland, to the snow-covered peaks of Argentina’s southernmost tip, the breathtaking diversity of the world’s longest, and perhaps most glorious, mountain range is as wondrous as its history is rich. The mountains have served as the backdrop for the rise and fall of great civilizations, offered scientific discoveries that changed the face of human understanding, inspired masterworks of art and literature—not to mention political revolution—and have witnessed centuries of unspeakable slaughter. Michael Jacobs’ Andes, an account of the author’s journey across South America by way of the 4, 500 mile-mountain chain, is as expansive and enthralling as the geography it covers. Beginning in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and finishing up in the heart of Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego, Andes masterfully details the history, art, geography, personalities, and politics that have defined and been given shape by life in the region. I recently spoke with Jacobs about his book and the art of writing on the road, Latin American politics, the legacy of Bruce Chatwin in Argentina, and what lies ahead for one of the truly great stylists of the modern travel memoir.

I was hoping we could begin by discussing what compelled you to undertake the arduous task of journeying across the entire length of South America’s Andean spine.

I was first drawn to the Andes by childhood tales of my English grandfather, a railway engineer who worked in Chile and Bolivia. When following in his footsteps to those countries, and experiencing the extraordinary contrasts between, say, the Atacama Desert and the ice fields of Patagonia, I thought how wonderful it would be to follow the whole length of the world’s longest mountain range, and see such an unparalleled range of extreme and spectacular landscapes. I also conceived the idea of following the mountains as if unraveling the course of a human life, beginning in the Tropics, where the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt had located the life force, and ending south of Tierra del Fuego, where Humboldt’s great pupil Darwin believed that life barely existed at all.

Talk a bit more if you would about Humboldt who serves, in many respects, as your loadstone throughout Andes. What was his importance to you (and in general) and in what ways did his experiences in South America shaped your own?

Humboldt was certainly the guiding spirit behind the whole book. He inspired me in the same way as he inspired hundreds of other travellers in the 19th-century. Charles Darwin would probably not have taken up the offer of a job on the Beagle had it not been for a reading of Humboldt’s account of his South American travels. Nor would the great American artist Frederick Edwin Church have travelled to Ecuador to paint what are certainly some of the most ambitious landscape canvases in the history of art, notably “Heart of the Andes.” Humboldt was a pioneer in so many ways. He was the first great scientific popularizer, able to turn a book on the cosmos into one of the great nineteenth-century bestsellers. He was a pioneering ecologist who foresaw the damage to the planet caused by the felling of trees. He was an outstanding mountaineer, who, in climbing almost to the summit of Ecuador’s Chimborazo (then considered the highest mountain in the world), climbed higher than any known human before him. He was an early supporter of indigenous rights, and was violently opposed to slavery. Above all, for a travel writer, Humboldt’s importance lies in his extraordinary ability to induce in the reader a sense of the wonder of nature. Writers like Christopher Isherwood and Paul Theroux have written funny books chronicling their grumpiness as travellers, with Theroux going even so far as to dismiss the Andes because he suffered continually from altitude sickness. But personally I prefer the relentless energy and enthusiasm of Humboldt. They kept me going throughout my hugely ambitious journey, and during the writing of the book. I began to see nature through Humboldt’s strangely innocent eyes, and to perceive as he did the “irrelevance of man in the face of the natural order.”

Despite the fact that roughly half of the Andean chain runs throughout Argentina and Chile, most of the book takes place in the north and central heartlands of the mountains with comparatively little about the Southern Cone. Does this reflect your own geographical preferences, the exhaustion of a long journey, or something else?

In terms of the actual travelling I spent probably as much time in Argentina and Chile as I did in the rest of the Andes. But when it came to the actual writing I realized I was going to be well over length before even reaching the south! I love the southern Andes as much as I do the central and northern ones, and I was by no means exhausted when I got there. In fact I had reached that point in travelling when you feel you could continue forever. Similarly, in the writing, I had built up by then an impetus that was allowing me to write for up to eighteen hours a day. The book’s last one hundred pages were written in a frenzy of inspiration, and my own favorite section is from Mount Fitzroy southwards. I cut out an enormous part from the book’s first half, and could have cut even more in the interests of creating less of an imbalance. But ultimately the imbalance reflects my vision of the Andes as a developing human life. You begin slowly, thinking that you have all the time in the world, and then reach your middle years realizing that you still have so much to do and see but so relatively time to achieve this. The speed of the book’s last pages is intended also to convey the literal and metaphorical race to reach the continent’s southernmost tip before the winter sets in, making travel impossible.

I’m interested in picking your brain about politics, briefly. Andes, especially the first half, is very much wrapped up in the world of the Bolivarian revolution and its discontents, and yet the book is almost entirely apolitical. Is this a reflection of your own political worldview, or do you consciously remove your private political judgments and analysis form the narrative. And if so, why?

That’s an excellent question, and difficult concisely to answer. I am fascinated by South American politics, and travelled through the continent at a time of great political change, what with the recent advent of Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, and the region’s general swing to the left. I am also highly conscious of how relatively little is known (in Europe at least) about the political situation there. However, I thought that to give a proper political assessment of each of the countries I went through would detract too greatly from the book’s principal theme—the impact of the Andes on travellers. It would also have made the book become rapidly outdated, and would have been much better done by serious political commentators such as Jon Lee Anderson. A long section on Chávez is included, as well as a chapter on Morales’ Bolivia because these touch on another of the book’s uniting threads—Bolívar’s vision of a united South America. For me Bolivar becomes an increasingly interesting figure the more he turns into a hero from a Shakespearian tragedy. Though the book is apolitical, it does in a sense reflect my disillusionment with politics. The last part of the book hopefully conveys an idea of grand ilusions and ideals coming to nothing. My interest in politics ultimately boils down to an interest in individual case histories, such as that of the tragic young Ecuadorian who is betrayed by corrupt individuals in his desperate attempt to get a visa.

Turning to the more technical side of things, I was wondering if you’d share some about your process of travel writing. One of the things that stands out to me about your experiences is that unlike, say, a Theroux, you’re constantly on the move and often on little sleep—touring by day, indulging in the nightlife after dark. How do you find time to write while on the road? Or do you not?

Though I have written books based on long stays in a place (i.e., The Factory of Light, which is about my adopted Spanish village of Frailes), I take the Stendhalian view that you either spend a day or two in a place or several years. Often, as with judgments of a person, your immediate impressions are the ones you go back to. If you get to know somewhere too well, your judgments can become too complex and confused. And someone such as Theroux seems to spend much of his time in a place reading books, or complaining how uninteresting somewhere is! I love intense short stays when travelling, even if it’s always sad to be constantly moving on, especially after making friends. To make the most of somewhere you need to be constantly active which is why I never write when travelling (other than notes), and only use hotels for sleeping in. I always carry lots of books with me, but invariably never read. I’m either sightseeing, being with people, or absorbing every moment of a journey, whether listening to my fellow passengers, or else enjoying the changing landscapes. I am never, ever bored. I always write up a trip when I get back, when you have a better over-view of your experiences, and can see more clearly what might be interesting to others and what is not…Fortunately I have a good memory, and can mentally reconstruct for a long time afterwards every day of a journey, however long the journey.

Bruce Chatwin comes off particularly bad in Andes, having left behind in Argentina an awful reputation with the locals he encountered in Patagonia. You note, somewhat tongue and cheek, that Chatwin basically did what travel writers do: “exploit confidences, publish material without permission, misrepresent, exaggerate for literary effect, use people, and promise to stay in touch and then go away, never to be heard from again.” Is this really how you see yourself as a travel writer? If so, did the anger of the Argentines that had known Chatwin in any way affect your own reflections on how you approach the craft of traveloguing? Or is Chatwin’s work fundamentally at odds with your own?

First, of all, for the record, I’m a huge fan of Chatwin as a writer, and he had an impact on travel writing greater than anyone else of his generation. I love his effortless fusion of past and present, and his ability to transform the ordinary into the mythical and the magical (which has always been my ambition!). But the fact that he was an immensely original stylist doesn’t mean that he was either a particularly attractive person, or particularly original in what he had to say about Patagonia (which in no way detracts from his greatness as a writer, just as the Spanish poet Garcia Lorca is in no way diminished as a poet by having a view of his native region heavily influenced by romantic stereotypes). I never met Chatwin, but I suspect that he was one of the many Englishmen who can be absolutely charming when it served his purpose, and not so endearing in his everyday treatment of people. What I certainly learned after Andes was published was that you can’t be in the slightest bit negative about him without incurring the wrath of fans of his, such as Chatwin’s excellent biographer Nicholas Shakespeare. This is very unfair, as I clearly stated that Chatwin’s failings were those of all travel writers, myself included. One of the great drawbacks of the genre is that you’re bound to offend someone, however hard you try not to. The anger of so many Argentines towards Chatwin did not affect me in the slightest, as I have seen exactly the same reaction to other writers in whose footsteps I have followed, for instance the Nobel-Prize Winning Spanish author of the classic Journey to the Alcarria, Camilo Jose Cela who is almost universally disliked in the region. My own books on Spain have earned me law suits and death threats, even though I write about people with a fundamental love for them. The irony of my style seems often misunderstood. However, I have to add that the villagers in my adopted Frailes took, in general, remarkably well to the recent publication in Spanish of The Factory of Light. People told me that they couldn’t complain about my portrayal of them because that was exactly what they were like. If only others were so tolerant and enlightened!

Your mention of Chatwin’s ability to turn the ordinary into the magical makes me think of Gabriel Garcia Márquez and the world of Colombia more generally. I was intrigued by your experiences in the country: you entered with a certain amount of foreboding considering the country’s (now undeserved) reputation for lawlessness and insecurity, but by the time you left, I sensed that you were especially fond of it, perhaps more than the other countries on your itinerary (with Peru a close second). Is this accurate? And if so, what was so attractive to you about the place? If not, was there a place or region where you felt particularly at home, or fell in love with?

You’re absolutely right about Colombia. I went with apprehension, and fell in love with the country from the moment of crossing the frontier! I only regretted afterwards that I did not take greater risks, and visit the then more problematical parts of the Colombian Andes such as the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy, or do the overland journey from Cúcuta to Bogotá. Since that first trip I’ve been back to the country four times, and have gone almost everywhere. I spent two months in Colombia earlier this year, travelling the whole length of one of South America’s most important rivers, the Magdalena. I was researching my next book, provisionally titled The Robber of Memories, whose starting point is a chance meeting in Cartagena with García Márquez. It’s being modestly promoted as a cross between One Hundred Years of Solitude and Heart of Darkness! I certainly spent two of the best months of my travelling life doing the journey, even though I had a terrifying three day encounter with guerillas in the middle of the jungle (they were absolutely charming, and were keen that I should help them in their goal of promoting tourism to the region!). The appeal of the country? First of all the people, the friendliest in the world. Secondly, the place instantly reminded me of the Spain of my childhood, with its old-fashioned courtesies, hugely atmospheric colonial towns, and extraordinary hospitality towards foreigners. Thirdly, it’s a place that for me sums up the essence of South America, with some of the oldest ruins in the continent, some of the best preserved colonial towns, and every possible type of scenery, from desert to Amazonian jungle, to the Andean moorland. I’m convinced that it will soon become one of South America’s most important tourist destinations. Despite what happened to me on my last visit, safety is improving all the time.

Last fall Foreign Policy magazine ran an online forum of articles debating the current state of travel writing literature, with some writers pronouncing the genre the dead, others arguing that it is alive and well, and still others staking out territory somewhere in between. What’s your own feeling on the question? Do books like Eat, Pray, Love represent the decline of travel literature, or was there never a golden age as is sometimes pretended?

From 2008 to 2010 I was chairman of the only serious travel book award in Britain, the Dolman Travel Book Award. I had to read about eighty books a year, only about five of which were really worthwhile. But that doesn’t mean that travel literature is in a bad state. If you had to read eighty novels, you would probably come to a similar conclusion. People often look back to the so-called “golden age” of travel literature inspired by Bruce Chatwin—but that was essentially an invention of a group of friends at Granta magazine. I believe that travel writing today is as healthy/unhealthy as it has ever been. What has happened is that the good travel books tend now to cross genres. Some of the best travel writing of recent years has fallen into an indeterminate category between travel writing and reportage or memoir. There is also a current fashion in Britain for “nature writing,” headed by such interesting authors as Robert MacFarlane. Books such as Eat, Pray, Love are not favorites of mine, nor are “good life abroad” books, with their romantic, cliché-ridden evocations of charming Provencal peasants, and Tuscan olive farms. But there has always been a market for those books, and their success allows publishers to bring out more adventurous works. Finally, people often say that the internet will be the death of travel-writing. Access to a huge amount of information about a country obviously makes redundant that type of Victorian book full of statistics about a country’s commerce, politics etc. But good travel literature will be unaffected, because it does something a computer cannot do: give a poetic interpretation of reality.

Finally, what’s next? You mentioned in our earlier correspondence that you were working on a new book? Any chance you’d be willing to pull the curtain back a bit and let us in on your upcoming projects?

My next book is provisionally titled The Robber of Memories. It’s going to be one of those hybrid travel books I mentioned—a mixture of a travel book tracing my journey up Colombia’s Magdalena river, from Barranquilla to the source in the Paramo de las Papas (where I had my ‘encounter’ with guerillas), and a book about memory and memory loss (my father died of Alzheimer’s and my 92-year-old mother is in an advanced state of dementia). The prologue centers on my chance meeting with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose rapidly fading memories of life are concentrated on the river. The bulk of the book takes the form of a journey by tug boat up the river, the boat eventually getting stuck on a sand bank, in the middle of territory still controlled by paramilitaries. On the way I enter Oliver Sacks territory by visiting some of the villages with the highest incidence of Early Onset Alzheimer’s in the world. A doctor who went to investigate the phenomenon got kidnapped, but then helped the kidnappers when one of their parents got affected by the disease. The ‘Robber of Memories’ is what they call the disease in rural Colombia.

That sounds fascinating. We’ll look forward to it. Thanks so much for your time!

It’s been a pleasure.

Share on Facebook

CUNY News in Brief

Advocate Staff — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 22:42:45 +0000

Adjunct Healthcare under Attack—PSC Members fight back

The start of the new academic year could mark the beginning of an adjunct healthcare bloodbath if the rising cost of insurance, CUNY’s “meh” attitude, and the city’s blind eye to the welfare of adjuncts aren’t successfully confronted. For the time being, the PSC has been successfully been pushing back against the potential loss of health care for more than 1,700 CUNY adjuncts, but there is still plenty of work ahead

At its heart, the threat to adjunct health care is simple. At the very moment that the CUNY system develops an increasing dependency on adjunct labor, it has scaled back its fiscal commitments to part-time laborers, most glaringly in the case of healthcare coverage. At current, CUNY only contributes about 20 percent of the total cost of adjunct health care through contributions to the PSC Welfare Fund, a cost which has jumped dramatically in recent years. As the basic health insurance premium has more than doubled in the last eight years—from $3,461 per member in 2003 to an incredible $8,061 in the current year—the amount that CUNY contributes has actually decreased almost $1,000, from $2,583 in 2003 to $1,675 in 2011.

The attempt to force CUNY to take a greater share of responsibility in devising a solution will be an uphill battle, however. While university brass have recently indicated a willingness to work with the union to achieve a structural solution to the problem of rising healthcare costs and the startling increases in the part-time labor pool, its actions have not been as encouraging. In the past decade, PSC reps have asked CUNY to work with them on a compromise solution that will shift some of the fiscal responsibility from the Welfare Fund to the university system and away from the individual laborers whom CUNY has come to rely upon.

CUNY, however, says that in fact it has not underfunded adjunct health insurance but instead has lived up to its obligations as outlined by past agreements with the union. As Pamela Silverblatt, The Vice Chancellor for Labor Affairs argues, “the union has raised the issue of health benefits for adjuncts in prior rounds of collective bargaining, and it has consistently agreed to settle its collective bargaining agreements at the specified funding levels. Despite the fact that the costs have escalated—by the Welfare Fund’s estimates adjunct health insurance will cost about $14 million in the upcoming year—the PSC has over many years and several rounds of bargaining agreed to the specified contributions to the Welfare Fund, and the University has consistently made the mutually agreed-upon payments.”

The Union, for its part, argues that Silverblatt’s response misrepresents the real issue, when she claims that CUNY has not underfunded adjunct health insurance.

“While CUNY has met its contractual funding obligation to the Welfare Fund, that is not the issue. The real issue is that CUNY, as the employer, has consistently resisted its responsibility to provide adequate, ongoing funding for adjunct health insurance for its eligible adjunct employees. Adjunct health insurance costs will grow to $14 million this year; yet CUNY will provide only $2.8 million of this cost. The union’s position is that we should work together to solve the real problem, and we urge the University to join us in this effort.”

Thus, CUNY adjuncts find themselves once again in the unenviable position of being stuck between two organizations, neither of which seems fully-committed to protecting their interests. It is imperative, therefore, that adjuncts put pressure on the PSC not only to defend the welfare fund, but to also push for meaningful advances in the extension of part-time employee protections and benefits, including permanent and stable health insurance for all adjuncts, significant wage increases, and real job security. What pressure organized adjuncts have placed on the union leadership has paid off.

On September 26, hundreds of adjuncts and other, vocal and supportive members of the PSC hit the pavement out in front of the Board of Trustees headquarters to protest the dismal state of health coverage for part-time labor. The protest was another spirited reminder that adjuncts and their supporters won’t take the deteriorating conditions of their professional, and therefore their personal, lives sitting down.

Those gathered received a small treat for their labors and willingness to come out and stand united behind part-time claims for equal treatment. Barbara Bowen, president of the PSC, announced to the crowd (and, in fact, made the crowd repeat the announcement in unison) that Chancellor Matthew Goldstein had assured her that the board had requested that Albany provide full and permanent healthcare coverage for all adjuncts in the CUNY system.

While it has taken huge amounts of effort to get the Board to simply make a request of Governor Andrew Cuomo which in all likelihood will be laughed out of Albany, if we look at the numbers, the idea of full and permanent healthcare for part-timers isn’t so nuts. Said one HEO at the protest, “New York City has a budget of $66 billion and the state has a budget of $132 billion. $14 million for adjunct insurance is chump change in the bigger scope of things.” Asked why he was coming out for adjunct rights, he expressed solidarity, as well as a touch of healthy, self-interested pragmatism. “This is an assault on labor, and we feel that if they are coming for the adjuncts in the morning they will come for [the rest of us] at night.”

In Solidarity: LIU Faculty Hit the Streets to Protest Austerity

As CUNY campuses begin to organize for another academic year under the pressures of fiscal crisis, other local faculty unions are embroiled in their own fight against the administrative squeeze on labor. On September 7, hundreds of faculty and staff at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University (LIU), as well as a healthy showing of PSC representatives, took to the streets to protest a ten-year wage freeze and dwindling benefit packages.

The protests came a day after negotiations between LIU and the faculty union, the Long Island University Faculty Federation—an affiliate of the AFT/NYSUT—broke down after the administration’s latest crappy offer was rejected by union representatives. Reportedly, the university offered its part- and full-time staff a five-year deal where the wage freeze would remain intact for the first three years, followed by a paltry 2 percent raise in each the final two years.

The strike, which lasted for roughly a week, shut down 95 percent of the college’s classes, effectively bringing university life to a halt. In the end, administrators returned to the table with a slightly better offer that was accepted by the striking workers. The new plan calls for a freeze in the first year of the new contract, a 1 percent base pay raise in the second, a 1.5 percent increase during the third, and then a 2 percent increase in the final two years of the deal. In addition, faculty members were promised additional payments in the final four years of the contract, between half a percent and 2 percent if the university tuition revenues increase by more than 3 percent.

The Clarion reports other gains as well. “The contract has some significant other gains—including the first ever paid office hour for LIU’s adjunct faculty: one paid office hour for those who teach more than nine contact hours per semester.” On top of this, LIU has promised to make matching contributions to adjunct pensions for the first time ever. The union scored another significant victory by forcing a cap on the number of non-tenure track appointments to the university, which are no longer allowed to exceed more than 15 percent of the total full-time faculty lines.

File Under “Sorry, What?!?”: Anonymous Email Gets Department Chair Fired

An anonymous email sent to Medgar Evers College President William Pollard alleging inappropriate sexual relations between a faculty member and students led to the knee-jerk firing of Zulema Blair, chair of the school’s public administration department. The unsigned email, sent from a Yahoo! account belonging to “DisgruntledSue” cuts right to the chase, accusing Blair of having sex with students, having a student’s baby, and being a member of the “elite Medgar Staff Slut List…You can’t turn a whore into a housewife,” the email concludes, “but you can definitely turn one into a Dean.”

Apparently Pollard was convinced by this reasoning. Two weeks after the email was sent, Pollard revoked the college’s tenure-track offer to Blair and axed her shortly thereafter. CUNY refused to comment on the situation, and would not answer inquiries as to whether an official investigation had been launched to determine the validity, or lack thereof, of the claims leveled in the anonymous message.

For her part, Blair is irate. “This e-mail is slander. It’s horrific, and I want whoever sent this out to be punished,” Blair told the New York Post. “This is character assassination. This does not speak to any work or any of my accomplishments at Medgar Evers College.” Indeed, New York State Senator Eric Adams recently honored Blair with public recognition of her contributions to academia and society more broadly. “Her academic activities spill out into the community, where she chairs the Black Brooklyn Empowerment Coalition, an organization committed to the political, economic, and social empowerment of Brooklyn residents of African descent,” Adams recently wrote. “Her role within this organization has motivated her to work collaboratively with other area leaders to empower members of the Central Brooklyn community via voter registration drives, political campaigns, education of formerly incarcerated individuals with respect to their voting rights, and more.”

The situation has not been resolved as the GC Advocate goes to press. Meanwhile, Blair’s attorneys have filed suit to force Yahoo! To disclose the identity of the person registered as “DisgruntledSue,” an action the email provider has thus far refused. It doesn’t take a genius, or even an academic labor activist, to draw some fairly obvious conclusions about what may likely be in play. According to Blair’s lawyer, the context is clear. “The obvious conclusion according to the papers that were filed is that the e-mail was a motivating factor not to grant her tenure.” Thus, the identity of the sender could offer a critical clue in understanding whether this is really about Blair’s supposed relationships with students, or whether a much pettier and cutthroat motivation may lurking behind the accusations, a motivation that has nothing to do with keeping students safe.

Brooklyn College Faculty Condemn NYPD Spying on CUNY Campuses

By now you’ve likely heard that the New York Police Department has been making a regular habit of spying on—you guessed it!—Muslim students across various CUNY colleges and beyond in recent months. The story was first broken by veteran police investigative reporter Leonard Levitt at the start of September. According to Levitt, “The New York City Police Department has been spying on hundreds of Muslim mosques, schools, businesses, student groups, non-governmental organizations and individuals [targeting] virtually every level of Muslim life in New York City, according to a trove of pages of Intelligence Division documents.”

Of particular note to the CUNY community, Levitt revealed that “The NYPD has also been monitoring Muslim student associations at seven local colleges: City, Baruch, Hunter, Queens, LaGuardia, St. John’s and Brooklyn. The department calls the two student groups at Brooklyn and Baruch colleges “of concern” and has sent undercover detectives to spy on them, the documents reveal.” On top of that, a “lecturer” at Brooklyn College was identified as a “person of interest,” one of forty-two targeted around the city.

In response, faculty at Brooklyn drafted and passed a resolution condemning the NYPD actions, arguing that the snooping operation violated students and faculty rights and academic freedom more broadly. “The use of undercover police agents and the cultivation of police informers on campus has a chilling effect on the intellectual freedom necessary for a vibrant academic community,” the resolution stated.

The Faculty Council passed the resolution unanimously on September 13 after learning that undercover police officers were attending classes and meetings of campus organizations while pretending to be students. Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn and author of the resolution told the Associated Press that “That’s what’s so troubling here: this was a giant fishing expedition,” an accusation the NYPD denies. “That seemed to be really beyond the pale of acceptable behavior, especially on a college campus,” Said Vitale. And it also may be against the law. As it turns out, the spying was part of a CIA-sponsored endeavor to collect domestic intelligence on possible threats to national security, efforts that very well may violate laws that bar the agency from spying in the United States.

Share on Facebook

Democracy Now! Reinventing the CUNY Board of Trustees

The Editor — Wed, 11 May 2011 18:49:55 +0000

“Underlying recent attacks on the university is an attempt not merely to counter dissent but to destroy it and, in doing so, to eliminate all of those remaining public spaces , spheres, and institutions that nourish and sustain a democratic civil society”

—Henry Giroux The University in Chains

The recent controversy over an honorary degree for acclaimed playwright Tony Kushner has once again revealed the highly undemocratic and ideologically-charged nature of the CUNY Board of Trustees. And once again, the members of the board, especially Trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted to defend or uphold even the most basic principles of academic freedom and the exchange of ideas upon which all academic practice is founded.

The board’s refusal on May 4 to grant an honorary degree from John Jay College to Mr. Kushner was, to put it bluntly, a stupid decision. This decision was made worse, however, by the fact that none of the members of the board seemed to understand the importance or the potential repercussions of their failure to properly discuss and debate the issue before rushing to a vote. Instead, the board members, including Chairman Benno Schmidt, seemed merely eager to be finished with the business at hand so that they could adjourn and, as they must have imagined at the time, put the matter behind them. Their blatant disregard for due process, their utter lack of intellectual curiosity, and their seeming inability to muster even the most perfunctory defense of Kushner against Wiesenfeld’s ridiculous and politically biased accusations, were not just stupid, but represented a real dereliction of their duties as trustees.

Although the board later reversed its decision in an emergency Executive Committee meeting on May 9, the damage to the reputation of CUNY and the climate of intellectual inquiry at the university was already an accomplished fact. The message has been sent that any current or future member of the CUNY community should be careful about what they say and publish about Israel. As long as Wiesenfeld is on the Board of Trustees, you can bet that he will do everything in his power to remove or silence the opinions of those who fail to conform to his narrow political views. Because of this, and the many other abuses of his position to date—including his extraordinarily inappropriate meddling in the hiring decisions of Brooklyn College last January—it is clear that Wiesenfeld should immediately resign. Any failure to do so must be met with a vigorous and sustained campaign to force his resignation. But the issue, unfortunately, is much bigger than Jeffrey Wiesenfeld; and although it would be nice to see him go, his Zionist rants and racist characterizations of Arabs are unfortunately just the public face of a much deeper problem inherent in the structure and functioning of the board itself, a problem that can only be fixed by either abolishing or radically reimagining its structure.

To begin with it should be clear to everyone at CUNY by now that the BOT is an inherently anti-democratic institution. Composed almost exclusively of political hacks and corporate raiders—the great majority of whom received their appointments as awards for political loyalty from Republican Governor George Pataki and billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg—the board does not represent the interests of the electorate or of any of the university’s core stakeholders. Instead, it represents only the needs and ideological interests of the right-wing politicians who have made most of the appointments. Indeed, a quick survey of the board’s website reveals that of the fifteen current appointed members, nine were appointed by Pataki, and four were appointed by Bloomberg. Together, that means that thirteen of the sixteen voting members of the board were appointed by just those two. Allowing two ideologically right-wing white men to essentially choose the entire governing board of a university as economically and racially diverse as CUNY is an insult to any theory of democracy and cannot possibly be good for the institution or the many hundreds of thousands of people whom the university serves.

Perhaps worse than this lack of democratic representation, however, is the fact that the board’s members simply do not seem to care about the vitality or heath of CUNY and do not take their charge seriously. Indeed, most of the board members have little or no experience teaching or working within academia, and none of them seem to have any real understanding or appreciation of the value of the intellectual work that is done at the university. Their clear and continued negligence and their utter lack of vision, intellectual curiosity, and foresight is an insult to all of us who work, study, and teach at CUNY and who do our best to improve the university on a daily basis. From the several merely ignorant, to the many passively and actively apathetic, to the few downright malicious and venal, these board members have displayed an inordinate lack of leadership, and as the Kushner affair has made plain, are incapable of even holding a debate within their own ranks, much less capable of considering, debating, and acting upon the many pressing issues that impact the future of the university.

The CUNY Board of Trustees is not unique in this regard, however. It turns out—no surprise!—that boards across the country are packed—just like CUNY’s—with politically appointed corporate managers, who see the university as just another kind of corporation. Indeed, over the last three decades, university governing boards have played a vital and enabling role in the slow destruction of the American system of higher education. Rather than using their political influence and connections to fight for the institutions which they have been charged to defend, they have instead done what comes naturally to business elites and have used their skills to remake their respective universities into models of corporate efficiency.

By simultaneously increasing student tuition and drastically reducing the costs of instruction through the use and exploitation of low-paid, part-time instructors, these boards have helped their right-wing counterparts in government shift the costs of higher education from the public back to the individual students and employees of the universities they govern, effectively undermining, through this process of privatization, the very principles, and often the very charters, of the institutions they were tasked to uphold and honor. In part because of these boards, the once great promise of the American university system, which made it possible for so many underprivileged and economically disadvantaged Americans to better themselves through the pursuit of higher education, has been reduced to a mere shadow of its original self. From California to New York more and more students are being priced out of the chance to get a decent education, even as those who can are forced to take larger classes taught by increasingly underpaid and overworked adjuncts.

Clearly it is time that the students, faculty, and staff at CUNY, and indeed, at all the nation’s universities recognize that any struggle to improve their schools has to include a strategy to change the institutions that govern them. The students, faculty, and employees of CUNY should naturally have a voice in the decisions that directly affect their well-being and the future of the university. Towards this end the CUNY community, including the Professional Staff Congress and the student and faculty senates, must come together and begin to demand serious and extensive reform of the Board of Trustees. Such reform should, no doubt, involve a significant amount of discussion and debate, but should include at the very least a radical increase in the number of student, faculty, and staff representatives on the board. As I proposed back in February of 2010, in addition to the current seventeen members of the board, there should be at least one elected faculty member, one elected staff member, and one elected student representative from each of the University’s current seventeen campuses. This would significantly shift the balance of interests from the politicians to the stakeholders, while still allowing for a significant amount of public representation on the board in the form of some kind of reformed public appointment system—perhaps one in which trustees are chosen by the state legislature instead of the governor and the mayor. Such an expanded, democratic, and diverse board, representing all of the major stakeholders of the university, as well as the interests of the state taxpayers, would be much better prepared to find intelligent and creative solutions to the problems that face the university while still respecting and nurturing the true pursuit of intellectual excellence that defines any great university.

Share on Facebook

Kushner Crisis Day 6

admin — Mon, 09 May 2011 18:46:23 +0000

Welcome to the Kushner Crisis blog. We’ve been covering the recent situation of political purging at CUNY involving Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrite Tony Kushner, who was denied an honorary degree from John Jay College by the CUNY Board of Trustees. It would seem that Kushner does not have politically correct-enough views for the BoT with regards to the state of Israel. We will be reporting on this crisis and related news beginning today. The most recent updates will appear at the top with a EST stamp.

If you haven’t already done so, please make sure to “like” the FB page dedicated to making the CUNY Board of Trustees overturn their ridiculous decision. Thanks!

9:30pm BREAKING: Tony Kushner was kind enough to call the Advocate for an interview, which will run in its entirety tomorrow afternoon at this site and in the hardcopy edition. We are very glad to report now, however, that Mr. Kushner has decided to accept the honorary degree from John Jay, and will speak at the commencement ceremony at the end of May. Very thrilling news!!!

6:35pm Goldstein’s official comments just released by CUNY Central. They aren’t wasting any time putting this behind them. We’ll see soon if this story has legs or not.

“Mr. Chairperson, I would now like to take this opportunity to voice my strong support for the proposal by John Jay College to grant an honorary degree to Tony Kushner. Indeed, from the time the proposal was first sent to me for approval—a proposal I readily endorsed—I have consistently expressed that Mr. Kushner’s extraordinary body of work and enormous artistic contributions should be recognized by this University.

“A playwright and writer, he is probably best known for his two-part play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Other plays include A Bright Room Called Day, Homebody/Kabul, Caroline, or Change, and his latest, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism & Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. He has also written screenplays, books, and translations.

“Among Mr. Kushner’s many awards are a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, two Tony Awards, an Emmy Award, three Obie Awards, an Oscar nomination, an Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Laura Pels Award for a Mid-Career Playwright, a Spirit of Justice Award from the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, and a Cultural Achievement Award from The National Foundation for Jewish Culture.

“The titles of his plays alone indicate what so many people have praised about them: they are wide-ranging, complex, emotional, dark, intelligent, and funny. Similar to Angels in America, which considers and complicates issues like AIDS, religion, politics, the supernatural, and gender roles, his works as a whole bring together many points of view. They celebrate a struggle for meaning and truth, a curiosity and sensitivity about a world that often seems contradictory, harsh, unfair, and wondrous, all at once. I think this is the best that we can ask of our artists, that through their art, they move us to reconsider what we thought we knew and to pay close attention to the lives of others. That gift is what connects us all.

“As anyone who has experienced Mr. Kushner’s work knows, he is not afraid to provoke, to reveal emotion at the gut level, but always to the higher purpose of creating for audiences the chorus of voices and complexity of intent that define our collective humanity. His expression is grounded in compassion, empathy, and intellectual rigor. In the spirit of all great artists, he challenges orthodoxy, confronts assumptions, and tests certainties, and, in so doing, ignites our imaginations, illuminates issues and ideas, and expands our vision—whether or not we agree with him, whether or not we take exception to some of his conclusions.

“I believe that in many ways this is also the highest ideal of the university—a search for knowledge and understanding that values questions, dialogue, and dissent. We do not shy away from the difficult, the unpopular, the mysterious; rather, these are the areas that most deserve our careful scholarly attention and our deepest humanity. At an institution like The City University of New York, woven together by disparate voices and diverse interests and connected by our shared search for meaning and our respect for the individual answers to these questions, honoring an artist committed to the highest purposes of art can only elevate our own historic mission. Mr. Chairperson, for these reasons, I urge this committee to approve an honorary degree for Tony Kushner as part of the slate of honorary degrees proposed to the Board of Trustees. Thank you.”

6:25pm More from the PSC on the union’s call for Wiesenfeld’s resignation and reform of the BOT

FACULTY UNION CALLS FOR TRUSTEE WIESENFELD’S RESIGNATION

CALLS FOR REFORM OF TRUSTEES SELECTION PROCESS

New York— “Reversing the decision on Tony Kushner’s honorary degree is good, but it does not address the fundamental problem, “ said Professional Staff Congress President Dr. Barbara Bowen at a news conference held outside CUNY headquarters.

She spoke just minutes before a special meeting convened by the Executive Committee of the CUNY Trustees to consider reversing the full Board’s earlier decision to block the playwright’s honor, which overrode the decision of the Faculty Senate and president of John Jay College and the the unanimous recommendation of the college’s honorary degree committee. The Trustees dropped Kushner’s name from a list of honorary degree recipients after Trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld attacked Kushner with a distorted account of his views on the Israel/Palestine conflict, based on a few out-of-context quotations. Neither Kushner nor the faculty of John Jay College was given an opportunity to respond.

“The attack on Kushner represents an attempt to narrow public debate, disregard recommendations of the faculty, and limit the range of views that CUNY students are entitled to hear,” said Bowen, president of Professional Staff Congress, the union representing faculty and staff at The City University of New York (CUNY). “In bowing to that attack, the Trustees’ decision was an offense against open intellectual discussion and freedom of thought, and it is essential that it be reversed.”

But Bowen said that the incident also highlights a more fundamental problem with CUNY governance: trustees are political appointees who are not required to have any real experience or knowledge about higher education. Simply awarding Kushner an honorary degree does not address that problem, she said, and also leaves Trustee Wiesenfeld in a position to impose his political views inappropriately on the University again.

“Jeffery Wiesenfeld has abused his position as CUNY Trustee on numerous occasions,” said Bowen. “He should resign immediately and the trustee selection process should be reformed so that the Board is composed of qualified people with genuine expertise in higher education, who will respect the faculty, staff and students in whose interests they serve .”

The Professional Staff Congress/CUNY, affiliated with NYSUT and the AFT, represents the 22,000 faculty and professional staff at the City University of New York. It works to advance the professional lives of its members, enhance their terms and conditions of employment, and maintain the strength of the nation’s largest, oldest and most visible urban public university.

6:20pm Voting: resolution passes unanimously!!!!!!!!!

The honorary degree nomination is passed. Kushner will receive the award!

6:19pm BREAKING NEWS

THIS JUST OUT: CUNY FACULTY UNION TO CALL FOR
TRUSTEE WIESENFELD’S RESIGNATION

The Official PSC Press Release: “Professional Staff Congress President Dr. Barbara Bowen will call for CUNY Trustee Jeffery Wiesenfeld’s immediate resignation before a special meeting of the Executive Committee of the CUNY Board of Trustees. The meeting has been convened by the Executive Committee to consider reversing the full board’s earlier decision to block the playwright Tony Kushner’s honorary degree. The Trustees dropped Kushner’s name from a list of honorary degree recipients after Trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld attacked Kushner with a distorted account of his views on the Israel/Palestine conflict, based on a few out-of-context quotations.”

6:15 pm Floor now open for trustees to comment.

Trustees now taking turns reiterating Goldstein’s comments about why Kushner deserves honorary degree.

Trustees also falling all over themselves to cover their asses by noting how they supported Kushner’s award all along. Hilarious.

Trustee who originally objected now realizes that she trusts the faculty of John Jay and always has and now sees the error of her ways in the previous vote.

6:10pm Goldstein: from now on, the procedure will be different. Nominations will be vetted by standing committee before advancing to BOT.

Goldstein: I reaffirm my support for Kushner again here tonight.

Goldstein now giving BoT lesson in who Kushner actually is.

Attendance is at capacity. Barbara Bowen and I are watching proceedings on closed caption in the overflow room.

6:05 pm: Motion officially presented to board: Chancellor Goldstein now addressing the board.

Goldstein: asked to gather the executive committee because we have unfinished business.

Chancellor Goldstein now boring the crap out of everyone with a history of honorary degrees at CUNY.

Goldstein: I was quite supportive of Kushner receiving this degree (!!!)

6:00pm The Special meeting of the Executive Committee of the CUNY Board of Trustees is just beginning. Stay tuned for more details as the meeting takes shape. Posts are also being sent via twitter so consequently will be les than 140 characters each. Please bear with us.

1:30pm Inside Higher Ed has another, quite lengthy, piece on the Kushner affair at CUNY which provoked quite a bit of reaction from readers as evidenced by the comments section.

1:00pm Another letter of support for Tony Kushner sent on Friday came from Dr. Hatem Bazian, chairman of American Muslims for Palestine and professor of Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. It reads:

Dear Chairman Benno Schmidt:

I am writing to express our deep concern about the comments made recently by Trustee Jeffery Wiesenfeld concerning the honorary degree for playwright Tony Kushner.

As you know, Mr. Kushner was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in drama for his seminal work, “Angels in America,” which positively contributed to the national dialogue on AIDS, bringing a new level of understanding about the disease and those stricken with it.

Reports indicate that CUNY may reverse its decision and bestow the award anyway. That is good. However, my reason for writing goes beyond the honorary degree.

We find it deeply troubling that the prestigious Board of Trustees would include a member whose views on Palestinians are deeply bigoted and racist.

According to a May 5, 2011, New York Times article by Jim Dwyer, Trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld said there is no “more equivalency” between Palestinians and Israelis. He went on to say terribly racist, egregious things about Palestinians which, were they said about any other ethnic groups, never be tolerated. We are calling for Mr. Wiesesnfeld’s immediate resignation.

Referring to Palestinians, Mr. Wiesenfeld told the reporter, “People who worship death for their children are not human …They have developed a culture which is unprecedented in human history.”

Furthermore, in the transcripts from the Board of Trustees meeting, Mr. Wiesenfeld shows either a total lack of knowledge and understanding about the Middle East or a propensity to obfuscate facts on the ground to promote a biased and untrue viewpoint.

According to the transcripts published on May 6, 2011, by the New York Times, Mr. Wiesenfeld said, “… State of Israel, which is our sole democratic ally in the area sits in the neighborhood which is almost universally dominated by administrations which are misogynist, anti-gay, anti-Christian and societies that are doing today to the Christians what they did to the 500,000 Jews who lived in the Arab world in 1948 at the time of the creation of the State of Israel, dispossessing them, murdering them, deporting them.”

These characterizations are patently untrue as a review of any number of historians on the Middle East – including Israeli academics such as Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe – will show, and the board’s silence on the matter is also deeply concerning.

As the Board of Trustees is charged with setting policy and procedures for the City University, we are frankly concerned about Mr. Wiesenfeld’s comments in that they could potentially help create a hostile environment under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act on your campuses for the many Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students. Mr. Wiesenfeld’s comments also call into question his ability to act fairly on issues that may pertain to Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students, and such a perception sullies the reputation of the entire board and the university system itself. A university should be a place that welcomes diversity not one that makes decisions based upon the fallacious and bigoted opinion of one board member.

Respectfully,

Dr. Hatem Bazian

12:45pm Clyde Haberman at the New York Times points out that one of the positive byproducts of this whole mess may be a systemic reconsideration of the CUNY governance structure, a structure that centers around the Board of Trustees. The piece quotes the art historian Diane Kelder who notes that the Kushner affair “calls the whole process into question…Who are these people on the board? How do they make judgments? And when someone like this man stands up and hyperventilates, why is he given so much credibility?”

12:30pm WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show did a segment this morning on the Kushner affair at CUNY. Pretty weak tea, though some interesting enough points were raised. For some quick reactions from listeners, please visit and join the Facebook page, “Tony Kushner: Good Enough for a Pulitzer, but Not Enough for CUNY NY?” Also, it’s curious to note that someone claiming to be Jeffrey Wiesenfeld left comments at the Brian Lehrer page in reaction to the show.

12:00pm It’s heartening to see that the British Guardian newspaper continues to report on the Kushner crisis at CUNY. This morning, the paper posted an update on the situation. It can be accessed here.

Share on Facebook

Kushner Crisis: Day 5

admin — Sun, 08 May 2011 16:29:12 +0000

If you haven’t already done so, please make sure to “like” the FB page dedicated to making the CUNY Board of Trustees overturn their ridiculous decision. Thanks!

6:00pm The singer Dar Williams weighs in with her support for Tony Kushner.

Dear Members of the Board,

Tony Kushner has given our country an impassioned, morally questioning, transcendent voice, one that I am proud to point to and say, “This is what I think of when I think of America.” There is so much unilateral bullying associated with our country. The fact that there are voices that question, reason, and widen the debate is a saving grace for our national identity.

Please give him an honorary degree. CUNY has created an opportunity for people of so many different backgrounds and viewpoints to speak with intelligence and clarity. It would be tragic and it would send an unfortunate message to pull the microphone from a lucid, humane voice just because it had a spark of political controversy.

Best Wishes,

Dar Williams

5:00pm Another letter has arrived in the Advocate inbox, originally sent to the CUNY Board of Trustees. Joao Hwang, a US Army veteran of of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, wrote a strong letter reminding the Board of their duties and responsibilities, duties and responsibilities that they seem to have forgotten in the name of political ideology.

To the City University of New York Board of Trustees,

My name is Joao Hwang and I studied International Studies at the City College of New York and served in the US Army for close to seven years, where I deployed to Afghanistan (2003-2004) and Iraq (2005-2006). I fought in two wars for this country with full faith and confidence that I was safeguarding our democratic values and our way of life consistent to the laws of this country. I believe that many of us who served felt the same way. It is precisely for this reason that I write to you today, as I find the latest actions of the Board of Trustees to be offensive as well as inconsistent with the values of academia, much less the values that so many of us fought to defend.

I write to you in protest of the Board’s decision to deny Mr. Tony Kushner an honorary degree on the basis of his political beliefs. This is not about agreeing or disagreeing with his political beliefs. It is irrelevant. Since when does a PUBLIC academic institution require individuals to be judged by their political beliefs? What would you say about the foreign students and faculty members, of which there are many in the CUNY schools? Are their academic achievements to be thrown aside because their primary affinity might not be the United States of America? Is the purpose of ANY educational institution to profile anyone’s political loyalties? Is it not to educate? To foster open discussion in an effort to better understand our world and seek solutions where possible?

This is why I find the Board’s decision to be an exceptional insult to all those who served as I did. The Board, and specifically Mr. Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, is exhibiting a disturbing pattern of behavior. By running a PUBLIC institution as a clearinghouse for political conformity, you violate the rights of free expression and intellectual freedom by promising denial of recognition for others.

Ladies and Gentlemen, you spit on our oath to fight NOT for what is being said, but the RIGHT to say it. I implore you to do the right thing and not only reconsider your decision to grant Mr. Kushner anhonorary degree, but also a public apology to let it be known that the Board of Trustees will not conduct themselves in such a manner again. This is not the first time this has happened, and I fear that this will not be the last.

Sincerely,
Joao Hwang
2nd Infantry Division (South Korea)
10th Mountain Division (Afghanistan, Iraq)

12:30pm: We are happy to announce that we can now add the acclaimed novelist Toni Morrison to the growing number of prominent literary voices who have come to the defense of Mr. Kushner. Below is the full text of her letter to the CUNY Board of Trustees.

***

Dear members of the City University of New York, Board of Trustees:

Please regard this letter as my urgent request that you reconsider and approve the awarding of an honorary degree to Tony Kushner. Censure, whether subtle or blatant, of any artist—let alone one with the stature of Mr. Kushner as well as his creative and intellectual power–should be anathema in the Academy where the free exchange of ideas is its raison d’etre.

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I read about this “controversy” with some amusement. It seemed to emerge right out of an Oscar Wilde or Bernard Shaw play: a policing body thwarting an artist for views unapproved by that body, views which the artist neither held nor advertised. But my amusement quickly disappeared when I learned that the decision to remove Mr. Kushner from the list of candidates for the honorary degree was not theater, and that some board members appeared to have taken Plato’s exile of poets [artists] from an ideal state seriously.

The stifling of debate that is the hallmark of fear should never be tolerated. Mr. Kushner’s compassionate and revelatory challenges to conventional wisdom are to be praised as the healthy signs of a democracy and the signature of an intelligent, gifted artist.

Yours truly,

Toni Morrison

1:45pm: The civil rights attorney and Legal Director of the National Center for Gay and Lesbian Rights, Shannon Price Minter, has threatened to return his honorary degree from the CUNY Law School unless the Kushner decision is overturned.

***

May 8, 2011

Dear Dr. Schmidt:

I was honored to receive an honorary degree from CUNY Law School in 2004 in recognition of my work on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their families. I was shocked and dismayed to learn that the CUNY Board of Trustees had blocked the offer of an honorary degree to Tony Kushner. I understand this was the first time in the history of the institution that the board intervened to prevent the offer of an honorary degree.

The Board of Trustees’ treatment of Mr. Kushner is a grave assault on the university’s role as protector of the free exchange of ideas. Rather than modeling reasoned, informed debate, the Board of Trustees leveled public charges against Mr. Kushner that were uninformed and deeply offensive. No one deserves such treatment, but least of all a person with Mr. Kushner’s history of accomplishment and commitment to promoting tolerance, mutual understanding, and respect.

As a longtime supporter of CUNY, I have attended many conferences at the Graduate Center, published with CUNY faculty members, mentored CUNY students, and worked with CUNY alumni. I am saddened that the reputation of CUNY has been so badly tarnished by this recent uncharacteristic action.

I sincerely hope the CUNY Board of Trustees will act quickly to reverse its decision and approve the decision of John Jay College of Justice to offer Mr. Kushner an honorary degree. If not, I will, with deep regret, have no choice but to join other past recipients in returning my honorary degree.

Yours truly,
Shannon Price Minter

Share on Facebook

Kushner Crisis: Day 4

admin — Sat, 07 May 2011 18:57:36 +0000

If you haven’t already done so, please make sure to “like” the FB page dedicated to making the CUNY Board of Trustees overturn their ridiculous decision. Thanks!

10:00pm Writing from Jerusalem, Elissa Bemporad, Jerry and William Ungar Assistant Professor in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust in the department of history at Queens College, expresses her dismay at the CUNY Board of Trustees actions with regard to Tony Kushner.

Dear CUNY Board of Trustees,

I am writing to protest the recent move to override the decision made by the John Jay College (CUNY) to offer an honorary degree to Tony Kushner.

As a newly appointed professor of history at Queens College (CUNY), who teaches about Jewish history and the Holocaust, and as a believer in the important role that education and academic freedom play in a democratic society, I feel that this decision has damaged CUNY’s reputation, both nationally and internationally (I am currently spending a semester in Jerusalem, Israel, and read about this incident in the Hebrew language newspaper Ha-aretz).

As a proud member of the CUNY faculty, I call for the honorary degree being conferred on Tony Kushner, a distinguished American playwright.

Sincerely,

Elissa Bemporad

9:45pm Yet another letter of support from Amitav Ghosh, an honorary degree recipient of the City University of New York, to the CUNY Board of Trustees, deploring their previous actions.

Dear Chairman Schmidt and members of the CUNY Board of Trustees:

It was with great dismay that I read of the CUNY board’s decision to revoke the decision of John Jay College to grant Tony Kushner a honorary degree. Speaking as a former member of the CUNY faculty and a recipient of an honorary degree from Queen’s College, I believe this is a disaster for the entire CUNY community. Tony Kushner is a playwright of such stature that this action will do him no harm at all. It is CUNY that will be harmed, in the eyes of the world, and of its own students and faculty. For the board has, in effect, told the student body that their own degrees might be jeopardized should they presume to hold an opinion contrary to that of anyone who happens to serve on the Board. CUNY faculty will also take heed of that message. In sum this action will serve only to impede CUNY’s pedagogical mission.

Moreover this action sets a deeply worrisome precedent. New York is a huge and extremely diverse city. Everyone has some pet cause. If a single board member is allowed to have his way in such matters, then we can be sure that many others will use CUNY institutions as a means of bringing attention to their causes.

The sooner you reverse this decision the sooner will CUNY be able to return to its proper business – that of opening minds, not closing them.

Sincerely yours,

Amitav Ghosh

9:30pm Another letter of support, this one from Isaiah Sheffer, founding artistic director of Symphony Space, to Benno Schmidt of the CUNY Board of Trustees.

Dear Dr. Schmidt,

As the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Brooklyn College, CUNY, in 2006, I am writing to join in the growing protest against the hasty, injudicious, and profoundly unfair handling by the Trustees of the proposed honor to the playwright Tony Kushner. This was a poor decision which should be reviewed and reversed.

In addition to the serious and significant issues of academic freedom raised by this mis-handled affair, reversing this unfortunate action will send a signal that in the civil discourse that should characterize American society, criticism of certain actions and policies of the government of the State of Israel does not constitute anti-Semitism or a hate crime. Attention should be paid to the virulently racist statements of some of Tony Kushner’s opponents. I may not agree with many of the playwright’s views, but I am appalled by the inhuman opinions of those who have sought to withdraw his well-deserved honor.

Very truly yours,

Isaiah Sheffer

1:00pm The league of distinguished faculty at CUNY issued a strong, united call for the Board of Trustees to reverse their earlier decision in the Kushner affair. It reads:

As Distinguished Professors of the City University of New York, the most democratic university in the most democratic city in the country, we are anguished and disheartened by what seems to be the decision of the Board of Trustees to deny an Honorary Degree to Tony Kushner, the foremost playwright of our generation. Based on a distorted and perverse presentation of Kushner’s alleged views on Israel, the Board voted to table John Jay College’s recommendation to honor him. Kushner’s views on Israel are not the issue. The reputation and traditions of CUNY are. We abhor this attempt to silence controversy, to limit the range of acceptable ideas – when the very purpose of a university is to foster conversation and debate.

As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “the opposite of good is not evil, the opposite of good is indifference.” We cannot be silent. Therefore, we appeal to the Board in the interest of our great university to reconsider its action and to affirm John Jay’s decision to honor Tony Kushner.”

Andre Aciman, Distinguished Professor, Comparative Literature, Graduate Center

Ervand Abrahamian, Distinguished Professor, History, Baruch College.

Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor, Sociology, Graduate Center

Meena Alexander, Distinguished Professor of English, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

Eric Alterman, Distinguished Professor, English, Brooklyn College

Stanley Aronowitz, Distinguished Professor, Departments of Sociology and Urban Education, Graduate Center

Laird Bergad, Distinguished Professor, Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies, Lehman College

Marshall Berman, Distinguished Professor, Political Science, CCNY

Emily Braun, Distinguished Professor, Art History, Hunter College

John Brenkman, Distinguished Professor, English Department, Baruch College

Edwin Burrows, Distinguished Professor, History, Brooklyn College

Marvin Carlson, Departments of Theater and Comparative Literature, Graduate Center

Billy Collins, English Department, Lehman College

Blanche Wiesen Cook, Distinguished Professor, History Department, John Jay College

Vincent Crapanzano Distinguished Professor, Departments of Comparative Literature and Anthropology, Graduate Center

Joseph Dauben, Distinguished Professor, Lehman College

Michael Devitt, Distinguished Professor, Philosophy Department, Graduate Center

Morris Dickstein, Distinguished Professor, Departments of English and Theater, Graduate Center

Stuart Ewen, Department of Film and Media Studies, Hunter College

Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor, Departments of Psychology and Urban Education, Graduate Center

Nancy Foner, Distinguished Professor, Sociology Department, Hunter College

Frances Fox Piven, Distinguished Professor, Department of Political Science and Sociology, Graduate Center

Nicholas Freudenberg, Distinguished Professor of Public Health, Hunter College

Daniel Gerould, Distinguished Professor, Departments of Comparative Literature and Theater, Graduate Center

David Greetham, Distinguished Professor of English, Graduate Center

Kimiko Hahn, Distinguished Professor of English, Creative Writing & Literary Translation, Queens College

Jeffrey M. Halperin, Distinguished Professor, Department of Psychology, Queens College

David Harvey, Distinguished Professor, Anthropology, Earth and Environmental Sciences, and History, Graduate Center

Samuel Heilman, Department of Sociology, Queens College

Wayne Koestenbaum, Distinguished Professor, Department of English, Graduate Center

Richard Kramer Distinguished Professor of Music, Grad Center

Jane Marcus, Distinguished Professor, English Department, CCNY

Gerald Markowitz, Distinguished Professor Department of History, John Jay College

Uday Mehta, Distinguished Professor, Department of Political Science, Graduate Center

Judith Milhous, Distinguished Professor, Departments of English and Theater, Graduate Center,
,
Nancy K. Miller, Distinguished Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, Graduate Center

John Mollenkopf, Distinguished Professor, Departments of Political Science and Sociology, Graduate Center

David Nassaw, Distinguished Professor, Department of History, Graduate Center

Elizabeth Nunez, Distinguished Professor, Department of English, Hunter College

James Oakes, Distinguished Professor, Department of History, Graduate Center

Steven Penrod, Distinguished Professor, Department of Psychology, John Jay College

Rosalind Petchesky, Distinguished Professor, Department of Political Science, Hunter College

Robert Reid-Pharr, Distinguished Professor, Department of English, Graduate Center

David Reynolds, Distinguished Professor, Department of English, Lehman College

Carl Riskin, Distinguished Professor, Department of Economics, Queens College

Ruthann Robson, Professor of Law & University Distinguished Professor, CUNY School of Law

Morris Rossabi, Distinguished Professor, Department of History, Queens College

David Savran, Distinguished Professor, Departments of Theater and English, Graduate Center

Sarah Schulman, Distinguished Professor, Department of English, College of Staten Island

Thomas Sleigh, Distinguished Professor, Department of English, Hunter College

Neil Smith, Distinguished Professor, Departments of Anthropology and Geography, Graduate Center

Michael Sorkin, Distinguished Professor, Department of Architecture, CCNY

Stephen Steinberg, Distinguished Professor, Department of Urban Studies, Queens College

Katherine Verdery, Distinguished Professor, Department of Anthropology, Graduate Center

Mike Wallace, Distinguished Professor, Department of History, John Jay College

Mac Wellman, Distinguished Professor, Department of Theater, Brooklyn College

Catherine Widom, Distinguished Professor, Department of Forensic Psychology, John Jay College,

Joseph Wittreich, Distinguished Professor, Department of English, Graduate Center

Jock Young, Department of Criminal Justice, Graduate Center

12:00pm The GC Advocate has received a copy of a letter sent to the Board of Trustees this week from Linda Charman, associate artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop. It follows below:

Dear Board of Trustees:

I am writing to protest your vote to overturn John Jay College’s decision to award an honorary degree to Tony Kushner. Mr. Kushner is America’s Playwright and our Arthur Miller. He has received a Pulitzer Prize; is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; has been awarded honorary degrees from Juilliard, Columbia, and Brandeis University. Awarding him this degree is less an honor for him than it is for CUNY. I ask you to rescind immediately your decision and to grant him this degree. Anything short of that will dishonor CUNY and yourselves.

Sincerely,

Linda S. Chapman

10:30am As we reported yesterday, the New York Times ran their editorial on the Kushner affair in this morning’s paper. In a strongly worded piece, the Times argued that

“If Mr. Kushner were a lesser artist, it still would have been outrageous for CUNY to deny his honorary degree for political reasons. And the particulars of what Mr. Kushner said are not so important. (His comments were not all that remarkable, though we disagreed with them.) The point is that a public university is supposed to nurture free speech and free thought, not quash them.

“The CUNY chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, should have spoken out forcefully on this issue. And Mr. Wiesenfeld, who told The Times’s Jim Dwyer that some Palestinians are not human, should resign.”

Share on Facebook

The Advocate » Blogs

Top Ten CUNY News stories of 2011

Occupy CUNY Blog: November 28

CUNY News in Brief, November 2011

Occupy CUNY Blog: Day One

Andean Odyssey: A Discussion with Michael Jacobs

CUNY News in Brief

Democracy Now! Reinventing the CUNY Board of Trustees

Kushner Crisis Day 6

Kushner Crisis: Day 5

Kushner Crisis: Day 4