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,

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.

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If the workers took a notion they could stop all speeding trains;
Every ship upon the ocean they can tie with mighty chains.
Every wheel in the creation, every mine and every mill;
Fleets and armies of the nation, will at their command stand still.

On November 17, I marched with hundreds of other CUNY Graduate Center students from Thirty-Fourth Street to Union Square as part of a day-long series of student walkouts and demonstrations across the nation. Armed with a large “Student Strike” banner and about a dozen “book shields”—depicting the covers of such radical classics as Emma Goldman’s My Life, Ursula K Leguin’s The Dispossessed, and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, we filled the sidewalk and the streets with our bodies and our voices. Marchers chanted “Education is a Right/ Fight Fight Fight,” and “All Day all Week/ Occupy Wall Street.” Around Eighteenth Street, as we approached Union Square, the crowd passed a group of several workers dismantling one of those ubiquitous sets of scaffolding that dot the city landscape. As we passed the workers stopped their lifting, smiled and waved, and as we waved back the chant went up through the crowd, “Students and Workers/ Shut the City Down.” The workers seemed pleased with this chant as did the students. Indeed, this particular rallying cry has become surprisingly common among student protests at CUNY and within the OWS movement. I remember feeling a little embarrassed the first time I heard it shouted at a PSC rally years ago, as if such a statement were simply wishful thinking; but the more I’ve heard it repeated and the more I’ve seen young students and faculty members embracing the chant, vigorously shaking their fists in the air, the more it has come to seem like a real possibility.

Just about two weeks earlier, on November 2, protesters at Occupy Oakland had put that very idea into practice, calling a general strike among students and workers for the entire city of Oakland. This was a bold and controversial move and many in the Oakland OWS movement and the general assembly were resistant to issue a call for a city-wide strike that they knew had little chance of actually materializing. Although the vast majority of Oaklanders went to work that day, those who came out to rally and demonstrate managed to shut down a freeway and a port for the entire day, clashing violently with police throughout the night as they first occupied and then defended more spaces throughout the city. Now Oakland is calling for another (this one likely to be much more successful) massive day-long strike of all the west coast ports on December 12. This is not an unprecedented move. The west coast ports have been shut down by longshoremen strikes several times over economic and political issues that directly affect the working class. But the longshoremen are some of the most militant union workers in the country. It will be a lot harder to convince the average worker to take such action. Overall, the idea of a serious city-wide strike, where ordinary workers such as  teachers, postal carriers, secretaries, professors, students, and bus and train drivers, all refuse to work, has not yet even begun to take shape. While workers in cities, states, and even entire nations across the globe often use the general strike as a means of achieving political ends, there has not been a city-wide general strike in the United States since a spontaneous strike erupted in Oakland in 1946 as part of an effort to unionize department store workers.  So why are Americans now so afraid of the general strike?

The reasons for this hesitancy are legion. In New York and other states, laws like the Taylor Law offer stiff penalties to public sector unions that dare to take any kind of job action. But most working class people have never even heard of such laws. The plain fact is that working class people today lead extraordinarily insecure lives, where a day’s work could be the difference between buying medicine and paying the rent or having to choose between the two. And even those workers who can afford a day off have reason to be hesitant. Calling in sick on the day of a planned strike might be seen by some private employers as sufficient grounds for termination, and few workers are in a position to take that chance with their families’ futures. So what has to change? What has to happen that would protect the economically vulnerable while still radically disrupting the normalcy of day to day alienation and exploitation that define our age?

To begin with, if we are going to talk the talk we need to start walking the walk. If students and workers are going to shut any city down, they must first come together to seriously talk about combining their power in a united front. In some places this is already happening, but not nearly at the pace needed to make sufficient gains among the rank and file of such unions as the TWU, DC37, PSC, and AFT. As I’ve argued in these pages before, it is essential that the rank and file of such unions begin to create spaces for organizing outside of the union leadership structures that have, just by virtue of their reliance upon the state for their existence, compromised the real power of their members—that is, their power to withhold their labor. Further, once these channels of communication are in place, it will probably require more than a strike call from an OWS general Assembly to get people out of their seats and into the streets. More than likely it will take a crisis of one kind or another.

In 1946, in Oakland, that crisis took the form of a police crackdown on protesting department store workers. In 2011 the options are seemingly wide-open, since crisis seems to have become the permanent state of affairs in occupied America. Some possible scenarios to watch out for include a further (potentially fatal) escalation of police brutality against students or Occupy protesters; massive austerity measures that further cut essential safety net programs like Medicare, Social Security, or veteran’s health (all already in the works); or a protracted union contract battle capable of generating sentiments of working class solidarity like those expressed in Wisconsin last year. A particularly sympathetic union, if there is still such a thing, threatened by state cuts or, better, a private union being exploited for corporate profit, might also offer a potential battleground in which to again test the mettle of the general strike. The Sotheby’s lock-out is one example that actually seems to be gaining some steam. But the PSC is also on the verge of a potentially protracted and ugly contract battle.  As the PSC moves forward there will be many opportunities to frame that battle as yet another example of the one percent’s attack on the 99 percent of New Yorkers who attend or work at public schools and universities across the nation. As the negotiations over course load, class size, adjunct parity, healthcare, and job security come to a head, it is important that we seek out allies outside our own ranks by connecting these issues to the larger problems of our current economic system which favors the already grotesquely wealthy at the expense of nearly everyone else.

Without a doubt the Occupy Wall street movement has reinvigorated the left, helping to make possible previously unimaginable acts of intelligent and creative resistance. But it has also managed to create important and vital public spaces in cities and towns across the country where electrical workers and professors, janitors and art handlers, the unionized and non-unionized, can come together across different industries and recognize their common struggle. Such solidarity across sectors will continue to make radical actions more possible and the idea of an eventual general strike a lot more plausible.

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On Friday November 18 several dozen police officers in full riot gear were called by UC Davis Chancellor or “Chief Executive Officer” Linda Katehi to disperse a crowd of occupying students at her campus. These students were all that was left of a small occupation of the campus quad that had been set up the previous day in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street protesters. When the police arrived these students refused to disperse and chose instead to lock arms in defiance of the orders to leave. In response the police repeatedly doused the protesters with streams of pepper spray even as they continued to sit peacefully on the ground.

As video footage of the event plainly shows, police not only sprayed them in the face from close range, but literally sprayed the chemical irritant in their mouths. One student reportedly was sprayed so badly that he was still coughing up blood forty minutes later. Such treatment of peaceful demonstrators would be cause for alarm anywhere. That these demonstrators were an organized group of college students enrolled in the very university they were occupying, is especially disturbing. Student demonstrators exercising their democratic right to free assembly and free speech are not criminals and should not be treated like criminals.

Chancellor Katehi’s decision to set police in riot gear upon her own students, and her mealy-mouthed and unapologetic response to the police violence, show a lack of awareness, compassion, and leadership that is inexcusable. Katehi claimed that the police were there to protect the students of UC Davis and to ensure that the university would be able to continue to use its resources to achieve its core academic mission. Her decision, however, not only led to the injury of several students, but actively destroyed a learning environment more powerful than any classroom. Indeed, the students protesting at UC Davis are receiving perhaps the best education possible. They are learning how to think critically, how to work together in small groups, how to organize events, analyze complex information, celebrate cultural diversity, and act as independent thinkers capable of questioning the dogma of entrenched authority. They have been sorely wronged by the police and by their own Chancellor. There is no easy way to solve this problem and there is no way forward except for Chancellor Katehi to immediately resign, and for the university to call for a direct criminal investigation into the police brutality perpetrated against its students.

The Advocate urges all readers to write to the UC Board of Regents and demand that Chancellor Katehi resign or be removed from her position as chancellor.

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In early January the BBC reported that Mohammad Bouazazi, a Tunisian college graduate who illegally sold fruits and vegetables in Sidi Bouzid, had died from his self-inflicted burns. He had set himself on fire by dousing his body with petrol when poli

ce confiscated his produce. He didn’t have the proper permits. Public protest had been rare in Tunisia before. When he died, the BBC reported that “a crowd estimated at 5,000 took part in his funeral.” The crowd chanted the same message together, out loud: “Farewell, Mohammad, we will

avenge you. We weep for you today, we will make those who caused

your death weep.”

As the crowd marched toward the governor’s office, a cordon of police blocked them, and opened fire. The police also shot at protestors in Menzel, another town, after members of the crowd lobbed Molotov cocktails at them. Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali reacted by condemning the demonstrations and appointed a new youth minister to help solve the rising unemployment problem. But first he tried to destroy the revolution by declaring a state of emergency, and authorizing the police to fire on the crowds. Al-Abidine resigned nine days later and left the country. Reuters reported that he fled because the crowds in Tunis “were not satisfied with his promise” to step down in 2014.

The revolution in Tunisia made visible decades of seething frustrations within its population. And while all local and national revolutions occur differently, they share many of the same qualities. To be successful, crowds require masses of bodies all emotionally invested with the same singular affective sensations. The intensity of experiencing emotions publically in a crowd drowns out the fear of death. The crowds share the same social emotions—the same affects—by relentlessly attaching those shared passions to symbols, bodies, and words. The affective experience of sharing one’s body with the crowd has the effect of framing the entire world in the present moment. This is what distinguishes the time of the crowd from the planning of the movement.

The intensity of the crowd excites the body to act without fear and it is this fearlessness that allows crowds to defy the police, and to walk towards gunfire. This is what makes the police useless, and when the police are useless, the state has no protection. Shared excitement in a crowd can be transmitted to others—what the Financial Times and others call “contagion.” This ex

citement is the ultimate weapon against the state. The final confrontation between state police and huge, emotionally excited crowds is a structural feature of radical political change. Crowds are the agents of revolution. They have radical political power.

The Tunisian opposition did not drive Ben Ali from power, despite years of resistance and organizing. Neither did Mohammad Bouazazi overthrow the Tunisian government. The BBC and others attribute that agency to the people, whom they simply call “crowds.” In a paradigm that can only imagine individuals, the vocabulary and analysis of crowds is under-theorized. But crowds are agents in themselves. They are physical assemblages wired to diffuse networks. They emerge from digital communications but their power is necessarily and entirely physical. This is because bodies must come together and act to assert radical political power. The movements that create crowds are well understood because one can trace documents, paper, Facebook pages. It is much harder to archive crowds. They are temporary organisms, and they have distributed intelligence. Perhaps each crowd has its own name, like a star. Perhaps the crowd at Mohammad Bouazazi’s funeral should be called “01092011-Garaat Bennour-Sidi Bouzid.”

Crowds speak together: “we will avenge you!” They move together in the same direction. They gather courage from those that died before them. Imagining the source of their common feeling excites them. Each act against them intensifies their feelings. It is not the time of dispassionate argument. It is not the time of voting and electoral manipulation. It is not the time of economic stability, of regular paychecks. It is not the time of comfort. It is the time of solidarity, the time of action. Crowds create the world for which they were waiting. They create their own sense of time, severing the past from the present, and connecting the present to the future. This is done by physically acting in ways that define the speech acts that end the past and call the future into the present. They do not transfer that power to another—to a president

, to a party, to an army. Crowds are their own armies.

These crowds might resemble the crowds at a rock concert or sports match. They all talk together. Their chants are like music; sometimes they sing. They react to symbols and rhetoric that collapse the complexity of events into simpler emotional signs. At an NFL game, it doesn’t matter how many times Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers has previously thrown a successful pass. Each time he accomplishes this it’s time to cheer, and nothing else matters except cheering. All the electronic screens in the stadium flash with stimulation. Green Bay fans know each other by their green shirts. They reinforce the intensity of victories and losses through physical proximity and the replication of the same sign: the Packers symbol, the cheesehead. They come to the stadium to be together, to share the common feelings, and to participate in an event. But political crowds aren’t mere spectators: they are themselves the participants.

Crowds represent the shadow public power in every state. They are everywhere, and everywhere their potential is political. Everywhere they must be managed. The Super Bowl goes to great lengths to associate its signs and symbols with those of the United States military. As with rock concerts and sports games, it is necessary to create and control crowds to win political elections. Elections necessitate the redistribution of crowd enthusiasm from democratic audiences into individuated tasks, like passing out leaflets or making phone calls. Voting is the ultimate way to channel the power of crowds. Voting summons crowds only to siphon them off, one by one. It transforms crowds back into individuals, who then transfer their power to representatives. These representatives then crowd together in highly organized political rituals, appropriating and consolidating that original power for themselves. Public opinion polls constantly measure shadow public power for how it feels. Lawyers and judges debate how “fair” trials can be when people “feel” bias toward events and persons. Emotional excitement is necessary to win campaigns and sometimes even court cases. But public emotions must be produced, managed, and measured constantly. They must be redirected. In this sense much of what we call politics is not “rational,” but highly affective.

And so the present wave of revolutionary insurgencies against Middle East despots has revealed a political truth for authoritarian states and democracies alike: crowds have radical power. They can overthrow governments. They are the visible force of radical social movements. They are the ever-present alternative to institutional politics. Radical political change is difficult w

ithout them. Crowds do not assemble to vote so that change can be institutionalized. This fact that crowds are a force in and of themselves explains, perhaps part of the failure of the Iraq War protests in 2003. Crowds cannot simply protest and go home. Crowds must understand that their power comes from their capacity to escalate and intensify their demands. The Iraq War crowds failed because ultimately the people participating could live with the war. Crowds only work when people decide they can’t live with the status quo.

Crowds emerge when authorities lose legitimacy. The Iraq War signaled the end of any legitimacy the George W. Bush administration may have had after 9-11, but it also showed that the United States is not a united state.  It is fragmented. Political parties depend on mobilizing broad sections of the population into narrow, winner-takes-all electoral victories. Americans don’t change this system because they make decisions everyday that suggest that they can live with it. They also believe, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, that the next regime will somehow be different.

Crowds can also drain legitimacy from authorities through their presence. The Madison crowds at the state capitol protesting Governor Walker’s union-busting bill, for instance, visibly demonstrated their opposition. These crowds made the law appear non-democratic even when it was passed through the use of “democratic” procedures. Crowds act on the legitimacy of their own authority. Their presence repeals the consent at the heart of representative or authoritarian government. They strip the law of its legitimacy by exposing the illegitimacy of state power. They create new social conditions. The law must follow the crowds, or else the state must disperse the crowds, arrest the crowds, fire on the crowds. Crowds strip away the consent of the governed. Govenor Walker’s smartest tactic was not calling the National Guard against the Madison crowds.

Crowds author revolutions, and revolutions usher in new states. Violence is the ultimate sign of this authorship. Violence is powerful and is inevitably managed by both sides. Nonviolent protest ultimately depends on the presence of crowds and state violence to succeed in its goals. Individual nonviolent protest is not nearly as effective as state violence directed against large crowds. To succeed, nonviolent crowds must go where they are not allowed. When they arrive at that point the police will

be forced to either confront them or let them pass. If the police turn on the crowd they will create martyrs and turn popular sympathies against state power.

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birmingham campaign in 1963 is a good example. In Birmingham in 1963 King arrived in the city to organize non-violent, direct action protests against the city’s segregation policies. King wanted to draw national attention. King said that the purpose of direct action was to “create a situation so crisis-packed that it opened the door to negotiation.” When the initial crowd didn’t strongly materialize and with the campaign in doubt, King invited young students to join a new march. To prepare the children, King’s contemporaries described how his speeches inspired the students by taking the fear out of the room. He made them unafraid to march.  They went to demonstrate and were hosed a

nd beaten. Media coverage of the event led television audiences to feel sympathy for the crowds. As national audiences “felt” the coverage, King immediately began to organize the March on Washington. The next year the Voting Rights Act was passed. The crowds in Birmingham and the crowds in Washington forced a crisis of legitimacy for the United States federal government.

Ultimately, all conflicts between states and crowds come down to a biopolitical confrontation: each ultimately manages life or death decisions. Governments must decide whether crowds are “the people” or whether they’re enemies of the state and crowds must decide whether or not overthrowing a regime is worth the sacrifice of their bodies and lives. Even in extreme totalitarian or authoritarian states, where freedoms are few, crowds can at least control their own bodies. They can decide to live or die.

They do not have the technological advantage. Before the Libyan rebels found weapons they were crowds who only had the power of their potential sacrifice. As in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere, they had only their bodies to sacrifice. Dying in the crowd and for the crowd is not suicide, however. It is martyrdom. Martyrdom excites new crowds because it removes the fear of death – it manages it, displaces it, and produces shared feelings more powerful than the fear of death. In Iran, Neda Soltani became a martyr. In Tunisia it was Mohammad Bouazazi.

Even Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim had his own martyr. Ghonim was the Google programmer that briefly provided American television networks with a focus during their coverage. He networked with others before the revolution by creating a Facebook page for Khaled Said, who was a businessman killed last year by Egyptian police. Murdering someone to protect state interests is so outrageous that it inspires more crowds by intensifying the passions that allow them to come together.

During an interview with

Dream 2 television, Ghonim said, “I’m not a hero…the heroes, they’re the ones who were in the street, who took part in the demonstrations, sacrificed their lives, were beaten, arrested and exposed to danger.” He was then shown video of Egyptians dying in the crowds. He wept openly and left the studio. His tears inspired more Egyptians to enter the crowd. The significance of his tears is partly how they amplified the emotions of the Tahrir crowd at a crucial moment. They legitimized the actions of the crowd. The crowd transformed. Sometimes what matters isn’t that the crowd sustains the same emotion, but that it receives constant amplifications, stimulations, and sensations. Bodies must be excited.

The passions of life and death legitimize the right of the crowd. The radical power of the crowd operates through natural right. Right is co-extensi

ve with power. This power is the law; the crowd enforces its own law as it creates it. Its law is not text, but instead it is affective, rhetorical, and corporeal.

They are only social agents potentially capable of acting outside the law. Crowds are the weird mirror of the police. Yet the police act on behalf of the state. So the crowd is really the antipode of the state. They are inverse to one another, in dialectal tension. Crowds and authoritarian states both act on the margins of the law because they both actively create it. Crowds are criminal in the same way state authorities are criminal; because their right is co-extensive with their power, they create the law in real-time. Yet the state operates outside the law because it claims to be the law. It conducts its desires through discipline and physical force. Crowds produce political change in the state through jurisgenerative acts. Crowds depend on producing passions that nullify old laws and create conditions for new ones. By creating new passions they create public feelings that expose old laws for unjust ones.

The crowd is always marching toward state capitols and the police are always meeting them there. The crowd is the only social agent capable of threatening the body of the executive. Only the crowd can take over his office. The assassin is not a social agent. The crowd is powerful precisely because its agency is distributed. You can isolate individuals in a crowd, but you cannot put a crowd on trial. This is also why crowds are somewhat beyond and beside the control of the law.

In dictatorships, the despot makes the law of the land. In an authoritarian democracy such as the United States, the President can wield “executive power” over and beyond the Constitution and Congressional law. He seems only partly bound by the threat of judicial sanction. This threat contains the distant kernel of punitive justice. Bill Clinton testified for lying about an affair, but Bush did not even have to testify under oath for the 9-11 commission. Those surrounding the executive have paid fines, gone to jail, testified under oath. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was indicted for Iran-Contra but later was pardoned by George H.W. Bush. Ford pardoned Nixon before he could even be tried. Presidential pardons perform the radical power of the executive.

Digital networks and social media may allow for communication and organization, but American technology corporations are not responsible for dem

ocratic movements. They may provide mediums that help crowds communicate, but the companies themselves are not aligned with democracy. Google openly works with the NSA and the CIA. All the telecommunication companies, except the soon to be merged T-Mobile, work directly with the NSA and other intelligence agencies. The US military actively creates fake Facebook accounts for multiple purposes, with Facebook’s implicit consent.

It is worth noting that the US government understands the radical potential of American crowds. In 2007 George W. Bush passed the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, which activates the US military for any “incident” that overwhelms local or state police. The act specifically states that the military will be used to “suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy if such…a condition…so hinders the execution of the laws.” This act, of course, is an attempt to control crowds, not terrorism.

Bush also gave life to new “executive” powers that President Barack Obama has not yet rescinded. In Presidential Directive NSPD 51/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20, Bush said that any “catastrophic emergency,” defined as “any incident” that resulted in a “disruption” to government function or the economy, could result in power solely residing in the executive.  This power presumably includes suspension of the Constitution and martial law. This “incident” could presumably include a general strike. These laws marshal the full force of state power against the radical power of crowds. It will be a fateful irony if the continued consolidation of American power into the office of the President, together with the consistent collaboration with non-democratic corporations, produced a dysfunctional American democracy that necessitated the intervention of the very crowds these laws so obviously fear.

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“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.

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Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner’s latest play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Guide to the Scriptures opened this month in New York to critical acclaim. But praise for Kushner, whom many consider the greatest living American playwright, was drowned out by outrage at the CUNY Board of Trustees’ decision to deny him an honorary degree from John Jay College.  On May 2, the board met to rubberstamp the entire group of notables slated to receive honorary degrees from the various CUNY campuses.  Before the vote was taken, trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld—no stranger to controversy—voiced his objection to Kushner’s nomination based on what he considered the playwright’s unacceptable political views as regards Israel.  The Board of Trustees ultimately removed Kushner’s name from consideration.

In response, thousands of students, faculty, and others from around the country mounted a campaign in Kushner’s defense.  The angry chorus of voices demanding that Kushner be restored to the list of honored nominees ultimately forced the CUNY’s hand. Benno Schmidt, the chairman of the board, called an emergency meeting for May 9, where the executive committee of trustees voted unanimously to overturn their previous decision and grant Kushner the award. The GC Advocate spoke with Kushner just hours after the emergency meeting to discuss the momentous reversal, the politics of free thought and expression in higher education, and the playwright’s close connections to the CUNY community.

To begin with, can you give us a sense of your immediate reaction to today’s events? Were you happy with the Board of Trustees’ decision to reverse their earlier vote, and grant you the honorary degree from John Jay?

Yes, absolutely. I am happy they reversed the decision that they made last week.  I recognize it was exclusively the result of the enormous protests mounted by the faculty and students of CUNY and of people all over, and I am very, very grateful to everyone who protested. I realize that it has a lot to do with things that are bigger than me. But I think the protests held the board to account, and really made them change their decision and I think that it is appropriate that they did that.

You originally said that you wouldn’t accept the degree even if the board reversed course. Is this still true? And if so, do you plan on speaking at the commencement ceremony?

I‘ve been contacted by several people on the faculty of John Jay, the president of John Jay and Karen Kaplowitz, president of the faculty senate, who have all asked me to accept if I am offered the degree, or I guess I should say accept for the second time, since I had already accepted the first time, and I intend to do that, yes.  I am really looking forward to being at the commencement ceremony on June 3, and celebrating everyone who is graduating.  My understanding is that we are supposed to deliver a speech at commencement.  Certainly Mr. Wiesenfeld was under this impression, and as we know he’s always accurate, so I am assuming that I will.

Jeffrey Wiesenfeld made very clear today that he has no intention whatsoever of resigning his seat on the Board of Trustees. What do you think about this? Would you like to see him removed?

My feeling is that his behavior both during that meeting and in the many interviews he has given since represents a misuse of his position as a trustee of the City University of New York. Whether or not a level of misuse that mandates his stepping down or being removed from the board of trustees, the mechanics of removal is not really for me to say.  That’s a decision for the CUNY community to make. I don’t believe his behavior is in any way appropriate and actually I think it had very little to do with any legitimate business of CUNY and had only to do with his own personal and political agenda. I don’t think that’s what a trustee should be about.  I am eager to see what happens, and I guess now that I am an honorary graduate of the John Jay School of Criminal Justice I am part of that community, and will be able to participate in those discussions.

Stanley Fish argued in the New York Times this week that the politics of honorary degree candidates should be considered by boards of trustees in deciding whether to grant the awards. Do you agree?

That’s a really complicated question.  Do I think that any political opinion is acceptable? No. I believe that there is such a thing as hate speech, I believe that there is a kind of articulation of ideas that can lead to appalling crimes. I think that we have to be very careful in parsing that kind of speech because it a very complicated business. In other instances it is sort of clear. I am not an absolutist in this regard. But I believe that in the university, freedom of thought and expression is paramount and that the trustees and the administrations, the faculties, and the students themselves at the different colleges should all be vigorous in preventing any kind of atmosphere that seems to preclude by a threat the expression of the free exchange of ideas.

I didn’t read Mr. Fish’s column. But when someone is smeared the way I was by Mr. Wiesenfeld, I do know that the board has certain responsibilities. My name was in that room entirely because I had been selected as an honorary degree candidate.  I know that Fish says it’s the right of the board to consider any person’s politics in voting on honorary degree candidacies. So there is that question. But the second question has to do with that word, “consider.” I would have had a lot less trouble with what happened to me had anyone at the board said, “Wait a minute, did you bring supporting evidence? If you are going to do this, why didn’t you print out a complete interview this guy has given, or an essay that he has written that shows us what a terrible person he is? Why are you coming here with a bunch of scattered quotes.” I think then that it would have been a whole other issue, and it would have reflected a much better light on the board if someone had just said, “I don’t think this is the appropriate way to level an accusation of this kind,”  if they had said “Mr. Wiesenfeld, if you’re not coming better prepared, you can’t really be serious.” In fact, I think he wasn’t. If you listen to the podcast of the original meeting, he doesn’t seem to have intended to do anything more than register a complaint.

Your new play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures opened in the midst of all this controversy surrounding the trustees’ original decision to deny you an honorary degree. I’m wondering, is it easier in today’s America to be a socialist than it is to be a critic of Israel? If so, why do you think this is?

Well, I would not characterize myself as a critic of Israel. That isn’t my job. I don’t feel like I am any more critical of the state of Israel than I am of many other countries including my own.  I think every responsible adult has a responsibility to hold to account their governments to pay attention to what’s going on.  I think what’s happened here is an interesting thing.  The expectation of Mr. Wiesenfeld is that when he says “This guy is anti-Israel” that the entire world will rear up in horror and run in the other direction.  And that didn’t happen this time, because people who really care about Israel, and I include myself in that number, realize it is enormously important now to start to build a policy towards a just and lasting peace in the Middle East based on reality, as to what has actually happened, based on history and not on right-wing fantasy. That’s the hope for that region, and really for the world.

It’s always been tough about this primarily because of the long and horrendous history of oppression and suffering of the Jewish people. As a result, I think we have very good reason to be anxious about public debate about Israel, and yet that anxiety, no matter how understandable or grounded in history as it is, shouldn’t stand in the way of saying out loud the things we believe are true.

Finally, can you talk about your evolving feelings concerning CUNY? Has your view on the university changed through all this?

Well, it’s only gotten better, and it was already incredibly high to begin with, which is why I agreed to accept the degree in the first place. I gave a speech last year at John Jay and I was just dazzled by the students. I’ve talked to students at Queens College, at the Graduate Center, at City College. I have aunts and uncles that went to City College in the 1930s. I have always believed that this is an incredible institution of higher learning and a paradigm for what a public, urban university ought to be. The way the students and faculty responded to this whole thing has been incredibly impressive, incredibly courageous and vigorous, and I think this speaks beautifully of the university. And so, I am really proud of the affiliation.

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The buzz since the CUNY Board of Trustees’ increasingly infamous meeting that tabled John Jay College’s nomination to award an honorary degree to Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner has been remarkable, for a few reasons. The speed with which the news spread and the reach of interest in an administrative decision at CUNY have turned heads.  On Wednesday evening, I met Mr. Kushner at the memorial for murdered theatre artist and activist Juliano Mer Khamis, at which time he told me CUNY administrators remained flippant about his case.  Less than 48 hours later, his assistant called me with news that the head of the Board of Trustees had called an emergency meeting for the following Monday.  Facebook Revolution?  I don’t think so.  News spreads.  And yes, New York cares about its public institutions, CUNY included.  The speed and spread of this news may be remarkable but ultimately perhaps should not be surprising.

I want to focus on two other reasons why media reactions to the tabling of Mr. Kushner’s nomination are noteworthy, especially in relation to an understanding of free speech and activism in our universities. The first starts even in Mr. Kushner’s own response to the Board’s actions.  While the playwright defends himself by highlighting his right to his own opinion, much of the letter is spent in qualifying and defending his political positions on Israel.  It is totally understandable that Mr. Kushner felt he needed to clear his name from false accusations; elsewhere, however normalizations of his political beliefs, often coupled by restating his religious identity, or by a reflection on his illustrious career have a dangerous effect.   Ben Brantley’s op-ed in the Times on May 5, 2011 is an especially good (meaning problematic) example of this type of a public reaction.  His article opens with an example of a kind of side-stepping I will elaborate on further below: “I have neither the background nor the inclination to hold forth on Tony Kushner’s political views on the Middle East” and continues, “One of our most high-reaching dramatists, Mr. Kushner is a writer of rare intellectual scope and reading in both art and politics.”

I’m not confronting Brantley on his assessment of Kushner.   However, this type of reaction completely ignores that Kushner’s case is but one in a series of devastatingly problematic decisions made by CUNY administrators against faculty or syllabi that don’t espouse the same conservative stances on Israel as held by some CUNY trustees, students, or alumni.  By highlighting Kushner the illustrious playwright, we advocate empathy for his person instead of attacking an institutional problem.  What happened to Mr. Kushner during that May 2^nd Board meeting was shameful.  Mr. Kushner at the very least deserves an apology from the Board.  But the Board’s action would not be less problematic if Kushner was a failed playwright or if his views actually were as “radical” as board member Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld claimed them to be.  If we believe in free speech, then we believe it to be free, whomever is speaking, not just for our most successful citizens, or our most moderate thinkers.  How will we defend adjuncts – up for different positions but similarly accused – whose books are still in the process of being published?  How will we garner public support for faculty who dare to stimulate alternative thinking on the Middle East but who Broadway theatre-goers have never heard of? This is a case about free speech at academic institutions.  But it’s also about free speech about Israel at these same institutions, something we must assert we also believe in.

The second remarkable feature of the buzz around Mr. Kushner’s case is, it seems to me, how much of it completely misses the point of why this defamation of Mr. Kushner is an issue academics, artists, and citizens of New York should be concerned with.  I have overheard or read countless instances of skepticism over the past few days expressed in variations of “What’s an honorary degree, anyway?”  “Who even cares if he gets it?” and/or “Yes, but it’s the board’s right to give the flimsy piece of paper to whomever they want.”  This obsession with the really superfluous details of what is actually an alarming defamation of an individual for his alleged political beliefs is indicative of a grave problem within our academies and within the larger culture of liberalism in our contemporary moment, indicative of a culture of apathetic stagnation.  Instead of remembering that holding one’s own political opinions is supposed to be a sacred right, we make excuses for why this case is specific, why this board’s actions are excusable, why this playwright may have needed a light slap on the wrist.  Instead of saying, “Holy shit.  How did this happen?  Who is the Board?  They disqualified him for having once had an idea?  Fire them.”  We stutter.  We wonder instead if Kushner’s stance on Israel is problematic.  We debate whether or not BDS (which anyway Kushner doesn’t support) is sound political strategy.  We talk about the merits of the founding of a national political entity 3,000 miles away 60 odd years ago.   What are we doing?

These efforts to “understand” the situation – driven by an increasingly brittle instinct to “contextualize,” to “check” source material, to “imagine” (in the most blasé ways possible) every subject position – are symptomatic of an increasingly frightening inability of the Left and “liberals” in the US to take stances, to state opinions, and to act.  The inability to decide (in this case) whether or not one agrees with Kushner’s views on Israel and the concurrent misconception that one must do so before one states an opinion on the issue is paralyzing us from demanding the basic tenets required for healthy universities, stimulating classrooms, and educational integrity.  Instead of jumping to defend a basic right we all believe in, we sit on our thumbs, waiting for other “experts” to weigh in. We are “unqualified” we don’t know enough “to say.” (See Brantley’s introduction above.) So we stay quiet.  Or we say, “Oh, an honorary degree?  Who cares about that anyway?  How silly.”

But the truth of the matter is that Mr. Kushner was publicly defamed for a misinterpretation of his political ideas – ideas he had and voiced long before his nomination by the John Jay faculty.  And these alleged opinions were the only reasons sited for why he was ineligible.   There is no other way of putting it: the CUNY Board of Trustees decision on Tony Kushner is simple blasphemy for an institution of higher learning in the city of New York in the United States of America.  I don’t care if the honorary degree amounts to a piece of cheese he has to share with the recipients of the same honorary degree at the 22 other CUNY colleges.

It is true that an extraordinary number of people: faculty, students, administrators, associated with CUNY and not, have already spoken up in defense of Mr. Kushner.  Which is to be commended.  Yet, on this and on hundreds of other examples of complicated discussions, I fear we as intellectuals, as students, and as “empathetic” citizens in a complex world are not speaking, not acting, not demanding, because we fear being labeled misinformed or worse, homophobic, racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, or any combination, as the case may be.  This arm’s-length identification of the complicated world in which we live in (which, yes, is the direct result of an institutional attempt to correct for centuries of devastating violence), is nevertheless decimating the efficacy of an engaged political Left.  I am not advocating rash decision-making or misinformed knee-jerk, emotional re-activism.  Simply put: we must be able to recognize the often scary world in which we live and act in it.  This takes courage.  We must reclaim the right to speak, to make mistakes, and to pontificate.  This will mean that we will offend each other, on occasion.  But we must remember how to disagree, publicly, to debate, privately, and to teach each other the truths individual experiences have taught us.

Whichever side of the Palestine-Israel conflict we find ourselves on, not hearing from others will not evaporate the existence of that disliked viewpoint or the experiences that shaped it.  Restricting opinions voiced on this conflict in the Middle East will undoubtedly have the effect of fewer creative solutions to some of the most complex international problems of this century and the last one.

We are the students and faculty of CUNY.  A grave problem in our administration is our problem.  Censoring faculty, students, or invited guests based on their political beliefs, or interpretations of their political beliefs is not for us.   Every such instance, no matter the position, degree, or award in question, intimidates others from voicing opinions on contentious material, from addressing complicated subjects, and from encouraging difficult dialogue.  This cannot be the climate in which we choose to teach and to learn and in which we invite others to do so.

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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.

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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!

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.”

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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!

8:25pm     Another critically important letter of unified support for John Jay’s decision to confer an honorary degree upon Tony Kushner on behalf of the faculty of CUNY Law.  It was also sent along to the New York Times.

Dear CUNY Trustees and Members of the CUNY Chancellery: 

We write as members of the CUNY Law School faculty, in support of the faculty of John Jay College and its nomination of Mr. Tony Kushner for an honorary degree. Specifically, we support the John Jay faculty’s request that the Board’s Executive Committee meet and approve the degree.

Honorary degrees are intended to serve as a means of recognizing the achievements of persons who have made significant contributions to the principles for which the institutions stand. Mr. Kushner’s work and his participation in public debate have advanced public dialog on a range of issues that are core to CUNY’s values, and more generally, to its academic work. As faculty members we find it deeply disturbing that the Board of Trustees would decline to approve an honorary degree for Mr. Kushner, and would be opposed if the decision were based on disagreements with particular positions Mr. Kushner may have taken. Absent a very extreme case, we would expect that the decision of a faculty and college President to advance a name, after fact-based evaluation and vetting, would be afforded deference. We also would be opposed if the decision were based on mischaracterizations or statements taken out of context, particularly in the absence of fact checking or an opportunity for the John Jay faculty to respond. That type of decision, made without a review of the record on which the faculty decision was based, contradicts the pursuit of knowledge and fact-based inquiry to which CUNY is dedicated.

We ask you to respect the judgment of the John Jay faculty and allow Mr. Tony Kushner to join the students and larger community as a member of John Jay’s graduating class of 2011.

Sincerely,

Penny Andrews

Sameer Ashar

Beryl Blaustone

Paula Berg

Caitlin Borgmann

Rebecca Bratspies

Angela Burton

Janet Calvo

Douglas Cox

Frank Deale

Dave Fields

Raquel Gabriel

Mercer Givhan

Astrid Gloade

Julie Goldscheid

Natalie Gomez-Velez

Victor Goode

Yasmin Sokkar Harker

Babe Howell

Carmen Huertas

Jeff Kirchmeier

Donna Lee

Stephen Loffredo

Degna P. Levister

Susan Markus

Alizabeth Newman

Ruthann Robson

Joe Rosenberg

Rick Rossein

Nicole Smith

Richard Storrow

Liliana C. Yanez

Deborah Zalesne

Steve Zeidman

7:30pm     Hugely important letter from Karen Kaplowitz, president of the faculty senate at John Jay College, to the CUNY Board of Trustees.  It follows below:

Dear CUNY Trustees and Members of the CUNY Chancellery, 

I write to you on behalf of the faculty of John Jay College of Criminal Justice and on behalf of its Faculty Senate, which nominated Mr. Tony Kushner for an honorary degree.

The Faculty Senate nominated Mr. Kushner because he is both a major artist and a brilliant public intellectual who engages both in his art and in his public discourse issues of vital importance to our nation and our world.   We nominated Mr. Kushner not only to honor him but also to honor John Jay’s graduating class of 2011, at whose commencement ceremonies he would have participated and spoken.  Mr. Kushner did not ask to receive an honorary degree; rather, the faculty of John Jay asked that we be permitted to honor him.  In rejecting Mr. Kushner’s candidacy, the Board has not only maligned Mr. Kushner without just cause but has disrespected the faculty of John Jay, who acted in good faith and in confidence that the Board of Trustees would carry out its responsibilities in a manner that befits our great University.   

But the harm to Mr. Kushner and to John Jay College, although grave, is not beyond remediation.  The Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees exists to act on behalf of the Board between its scheduled meetings.  Because the Board’s next meeting is not until June 27, weeks after John Jay’s June 3 commencement ceremony, I request that the Board’s Executive Committee meet to revisit and reverse its action.  The Board’s May 2 vote to table the candidacy of Mr. Kushner permits such action.

The following is the nominating letter to our College’s faculty Committee on Honorary Degrees, which the Committee then sent to our Faculty Senate, when it recommended Mr. Kushner for a degree.  This nominating letter was co-written by two members of our faculty:  Professor Amy Green, a scholar of the theater and of dramatic literature, and Visiting Professor Michael Meeropol, an economist:

“Playwright Tony Kushner has created a body of dramatic literature that has revitalized the political conscience of the American Theater through his unique brand of magic realism.  In 1993, Kushner’s stunning, two-part Angels in America: a gay fantasia on national themes forced a Broadway audience to confront AIDS as a moral, spiritual, civic, and aesthetic crisis as well as a devastating epidemic. But Mr. Kushner’s cultural and intellectual realm of influence goes beyond the stage.  Over the past two decades, he has emerged as one of the leading literary figures in this country and abroad. Salon Magazine described him as “- a man who will talk just as easily about Roseanne or Gingrich as O’Neill or Ibsen. In an age when the American theater has grown increasingly divorced from public life, Kushner, like a latter-day Arthur Miller, stubbornly insists on the playwright’s role as political provocateur.” In light of his stunning achievements in dramatic writing, cultural and literary criticism, and the quest for social-justice, we nominate Tony Kushner for an honorary degree from John Jay College.

“Angels in America garnered Kushner two Pulitzer Prizes in Drama (for Part One: Millennium Approaches in 1993 and for Part Two: Perestroika in 1994), the 1993 and 1994 Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding New Play; the 1993 and 1994 Tony Awards for Best Play; and an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie or Dramatic Special, for the 2004 HBO all-star adaptation, which was directed by Mike Nichols and featured Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, and Jeffrey Wright. 

“Since the landmark Angels in America, Mr. Kushner has written original plays and significant adaptations that have been produced on Broadway and at the nation’s leading regional theaters.  Homebody/Kabul (2001), a prescient depiction of life in Afghanistan under the Taliban, written before September 11^th. Caroline or Change, about the relationship between a young Southern boy and his family’s black maid, is animated by singing laundry appliances and won Kushner the 2007 Lawrence Olivier Award for Best New Musical.  The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures premiered at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 2009 and had its New York premiere at the Public Theater in the spring of 2010. His award-winning adaptations include A Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds (S. Ansky); The Good Person of Setzuan (Brecht), and The Illusion (Pierre Corneille). Kushner wrote the screenplay for the 2005 film, Munich, and is working with director Steven Spielberg on a film about Abraham Lincoln.

“Tony Kushner’s oeuvre includes numerous reflections, articles and essay collections, including Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue: Essays, A Play, Two Poems and a Prayer (Theater Communications Group, 1995), Save Your Democratic Citizen Soul!: Rants, Screeds, and Other Public Utterances for Midnight in the Republic (The New Press, 2003), and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, with Alisa Solomon (Grove, 2003).

“Mr. Kushner was born in New York City in the late 1950s but was raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana (the setting for the autobiographical Caroline or Change.  He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Medieval Studies from Columbia University and a Master of Fine Arts in Directing at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, where he is now on the faculty.

“Kushner is the subject of Tony Kushner in Conversation, edited by Robert Vorlicky, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), James Fisher’s The Theater of Tony Kushner (Studies in Modern Drama) (Routledge, 2002),., Tony Kushner, edited by Harold Bloom (Chelsea House, 2005), and of the 2006 documentary film Wrestling with Angels.

“There is one more thing to recommend Tony Kushner for such a high honor from John Jay College.  In March 2010, Mr. Kushner appeared as a featured speaker in the College’s public lecture series, Justice and Injustice in 1950’s America. As expected, the audience was impressed and charmed by Mr. Kushner’s wide-ranging knowledge and thoughtful explanations of his work.  What made the strongest impression on those of us who were present, however, was Mr. Kushner’s response to the students in the audience.  During the official Q & A, he listened attentively and provided patient and detailed answers to the students’ questions.  At the conclusion of the event, autograph-seeking students, paperbacks in hand, approached him as he descended from the stage.  Mr. Kushner not only signed their scripts but spent a long time talking to each student about his or her major and ambitions.  We practically had to drag him out of the theater.

“Thus it is with great pride and enthusiasm that we put forth Tony Kushner for a Doctorate of Philosophy, honoris ausa, at John Jay College’s 2011 Commencement ceremonies.”

In addition to Mr. Kushner’s credentials as presented in the nominating letter, I ask that you also note the fact that Mr. Kushner has received honorary degrees from 15 colleges and universities, a compelling record of recognition, respect, and celebration:

Bard College                                             June 2004

Brandeis University                              May 2006

Columbia College Chicago                  June 2003

Columbia University                            May 2010

The Cooper Union                                 May 2004

Denison University                               May 1997

Juilliard School                                       May 2010

McNeese State University                  December 1993

Northwestern University                    June 1998

Occidental College                                 April 1999

Pace University                                      May 2004

School for Visual Arts                          May 2010

State University of New York           May 2008

University of Minnesota                     May 2009

Wesleyan University                            May 1999

Also relevant are the Board’s criteria for the awarding of honorary degrees, which Mr. Kushner surely meets.  The following is the Board’s own statement:

Honorary degrees are intended to serve as a means by which the University can recognize the achievements of persons who have made significant contributions to the progress of the University, or to its colleges and to the principles for which the institutions stand or to their academic or professional disciplines. . . . In general, candidates for honorary degrees should fall in one or more of the following categories:

            1.   Persons of national or international reputation in an academic discipline that holds a significant place in the curriculum of the awarding college;

            2.   Persons who have made significant contributions in either thought or action to American Higher Education or in a professional field closely related to an academic interest of the University or the awarding college;

            3.   Persons who have made significant contributions over a sustained period of time to  the development of major  programs at the University or at one of its colleges;

            4.   Persons who have given long and distinguished service to the University or one of its colleges including those who have been in its employ and who have been retired or  otherwise separated from the University or one of its colleges for a period of at least three years;

             5.   Persons  who have made major contributions to furthering principles which are at the center of the University’s purpose and mission.

I ask you to please consider the values of our University and its reputation as well as your relationship to the faculty of CUNY and especially to its students, who are being denied the signal honor of having Mr. Tony Kushner join them as a member of John Jay’s graduating class of 2011.

Sincerely,

Karen Kaplowitz 

6:45pm     Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University, and always a stand-up figure in these sorts of moments, weighed in early with this letter sent to the CUNY Board of Trustees yesterday:

Dear Board Members,

I literally gasped when I read this morning that you had decided not proceed to grant an honorary degree to Tony Kushner as a result of the partial and misshapen report of his views about Israel by one member of your Board.  As Board members, you have a responsibility to proceed based on reasoned considerations and assessments of an individual’s achievements in scholarship and public life, as well as a responsibility to sustain and protect vibrant speech about subjects that are controversial.  Mr. Kushner’s views fall well within the legitimate spectrum of democratic discussion.  Of course, no one need agree with him or like the prose he uses or find his political engagements praiseworthy.  These are matters for legitimate debate.  But as university trustees you are duty bound to secure and honor free expression, pay tribute to individuals for their accomplishments, and eliminate from consideration only persons who traduce the commitment to open inquiry and spirited discussion on which all decent universities depend.  So as a proud citizen of this wonderful city, full of diverse persons and views, I am ashamed, as you should be, of the course you have taken.  On reflection, I hope you will see the harm you have done to your institution.  I very much hope your will show the courage to acknowledge and rectify a serious error. 

Sincerely,

Ira Katznelson

6:40pm     Take a moment to read this terrific and pitch-perfect letter from Celina Su, associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College, CUNY.

Dear CUNY Board of Trustees:

I am writing to protest your recent decision to override John Jay College’s decision to offer Tony Kushner an honorary degree.

Tony Kushner received an honorary degree at my undergraduate institution, Wesleyan University, and his speech at my commencement made a sea of students and parents stand on chairs and give him a standing ovation. The speech was galvanizing rather than polarizing–for, although not everyone in the audience shared all of the political opinions evident in his speech, it was his conviction and his commitment to social justice and academic freedom that shone through.We should all be able to share such convictions, even as we disagree on the best paths towards social justice.

I am proud to be a CUNY professor, and of course, my classes are filled with students from around the world and across the political spectrum. It’s hard work to make the them engage other in civil debate and substantive reason-giving. I cannot imagine allowing my students to exclude others as you have Mr. Kushner. What if I were to take the easy route and follow your example, tabling the opinions that make me bristle?

I urge you to restore Mr. Kushner’s honorary degree. It is the honor that the John Jay administration and faculty bestowed upon him, and it belongs to him. To override this is to tar the great public education at the heart of CUNY’s mission and legacy.

Sincerely,

Celina Su

6:30pm     Steven Lukes, professor of sociology at New York University issued this sharp rebuke of the CUNY Board of Trustees decision to deny Tony Kushner an honorary degree:

To the members of the CUNY Board of Trustees:

The news of your collective decision to table–and thus effectively block–the award of an honorary degree to Tony Kushner is deeply shocking and very serious. I am a British (and Jewish) professor teaching at NYU, with a long-lasting involvement in issues of academic freedom. I taught for two decades in Oxford, then in Italy and London and now in New York and I have been a visiting professor in Jerusalem. This decision of yours–though it is, some might say, ‘merely symbolic,’ since no-one’s liberty or career is in jeopady–is very serious precisely because it is a symbolic attack on the very idea of the free flow of ideas and criticism. That idea is at the very heart of academic life of which you are the trustees. You have, from all that I have read about what you have done, violated that trust.

Yours sincerely,

Steven Lukes

6:15pm     Another prominent voice has issued a letter of disgust to the CUNY Board of Trustees.  Robert Vitalis, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania,  sent the following earlier today:

To The Trustees of the City University of New York:

It appears that, by your recent vote to stop the award of an honorary degree to the profoundly thoughtful, creative writer Tony Kushner, you have contradicted not one but two values basic to the university’s mission. The first and most important is to recognize, protect, and encourage the free exchange of ideas, in particular those that may challenge one’s own beliefs. It is hardly necessary to stress that Kushner has always expressed his views on political questions with great care. The second value you have contravened with your rash decision is the careful weighing of sources and close reading of evidence on which all rational deliberation and persuasive argumentation depends.

This is a sad day in the history of your institution and for intellectual life in the United States.

Believe me,

Robert Vitalis

5:30pm    PSC President Barbara Bowen issued the following call to arms in defense of Tony Kushner:

Dear Colleagues,   

Last Monday the CUNY Board of Trustees voted down the unanimous recommendation of the faculty of John Jay College to award an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner. The vote followed a one-sided attack on Kushner’s political views that distorted them beyond recognition.   

Many PSC members have already voiced their opposition to the Board’s actions.  If you would like to join them in calling on Chairperson Schmidt and Chancellor Goldstein to reverse their action and offer Mr. Kushner the degree, we invite you to send this message.  Please add your own message to our letter, if you wish, in the space provided.  All members of the CUNY community are welcome to use the letter.   

The websites listed below provide additional information.   

Report on Trustees’ action:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/nyregion/cuny-blocks-honor-for-tony-kushner.html 

Letter from Tony Kushner to Board of Trustees:
http://www.thejewishweek.com/tony_kushner_responds_cuny_board_decision 

Yeshiva U. prof. to return honorary degree in protest;  PSC statement cited: http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/05/05/cuny_kushner_honorary_degree_update/index.html 

Ed Koch, others express outrage at Trustees’ action:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/nyregion/cuny-vote-not-to-honor-kushner-is-criticized.html?ref=tonykushner  

Facebook page established by a number of CUNY faculty:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tony-Kushner-Good-Enough-for-a-Pulitzer-but-Not-for-City-University-NY/202175726488394

Tony Kushner has never hesitated to use his voice to oppose an injustice; now it’s time to use ours.   

Barbara Bowen

5:15pm     The New York Times must know something.  Their most recent posting received a headline makeover, from “CUNY to Consider Restoring Award to Tony Kushner” to “Reconsidering, CUNY Likely to Honor Kushner.”

5:00pm     Official announcement by the Board of Trustees that they will meet on Monday night to reconsider their previous actions in the Kushner affair.

Text reads simply:

“The Excecutive Committee of the Board of Trustees shall meet to consider an honorary degree, on Monday, May 9, 2011, at 6:00pm, at 535 East 80th Street, New York, New York, in the Robert J. Kibbee Conference Room (Room 104).”

4:45pm     Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and distinguished professor of history at Brooklyn College Edwin Burrows registers his discontent with the Board of Trustees in a letter sent today:

Dear Board of Trustees:

It has been my privilege to serve on the faculty of Brooklyn College for nearly four decades, and in all those years I cannot recall a time when the university to which it belongs has done more damage to the core values of higher education. The scurrilous, half-baked accusations against Tony Kushner were bad enough; that they were brought by a trustee who reportedly believes that some people are less than human is outrageous, appalling, and contemptible. In the name of simple decency, please make this right.

Sincerely,

Edwin G. Burrows
Distinguished Professor of History
Brooklyn College

4:30pm     Another letter of support from John McCormick, professor of political science at the University of Chicago:

Dear CUNY Board of Trustees:

As a CUNY alumnus (Queens College BA, 1988), I am shocked and appalled that the Board of Trustees voted to overturn a decision by John Jay College to award Tony Kushner an honorary degree.

The decision is clearly based on disinformation, ideological bias and guilt by association; factors that are unacceptable anywhere in the American academy, let alone in one of the premier public institutions of higher education in the United States and the world.

I urge you to reconsider and reverse this decision that has embarrassed the City University of New York and anyone who has loved, respected, served and been served by it.

Regretfully,

John P. McCormick

4:15pm     The editor of the New York Times editorial page, Andrew Rosenthal tells the Advocate‘s Michael Busch that the Paper of Record will be running an editorial on the Board of Trustees “boneheaded” decision in tomorrow’s edition!

4:00pm     The Village Voice ran an article in today’s paper on the Kushner situation at CUNY. The playwrite met with CUNY students and faculty outside the premiere of his new play, “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism With a Key to the Scriptures.”

According the the article, Kushner said, “I’m incredibly touched.”

3:45pm     The New York Times has issued the transcript of Jeffrey Wiesenfeld’s denouncement of Tony Kushner at the recent Board of Trustees meeting.  Judge for yourself the worthiness of Mr. Wiesenfeld’s presence in CUNY leadership. Oh, and by the way, one of the other board members didn’t even know who Tony Kushner was before this week.  Way to keep it classy, CUNY.

3:40pm     The leadership of the Open Society Foundations, all of them recepients of CUNY honorary degrees worte a very strong letter to Benno Schmidt of the Board of Trustees, warning against their decision in the Kushner affair.

Dear Benno:

As past recipients of honorary doctorates from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, we write to protest the decision of the Trustees to bar the College from awarding such a degree to Tony Kushner. Mr. Kushner is one of New York City’s, and the country’s, most distinguished creative artists.  We believe that his inclusion among those receiving such recognition would have added luster to the list of previous recipients. 

Apparently, this matter was decided by the Trustees without extensive consideration on the basis of accusations against Mr. Kushner of no discernible relevance. Neither Mr. Kushner nor anyone representing him was given an opportunity to respond.  Accordingly, we call on you to use your authority as Chair of the Board of Trustees to bring this matter back before the Board in circumstances in which it can be considered in a fair and deliberate way.

As we believe you must realize, this episode puts the City University in a very bad light.  It is reminiscent of a shameful moment in the history of the City College of New York in which the appointment of Bertrand Russell as a Professor of Philosophy was revoked in 1940 because of objections to some of his opinions.  Whatever Mr. Kushner’s opinions on the policies and practices of the State of Israel, and whatever one thinks of those opinions, they do not diminish his qualifications to receive the honorary doctorate that John Jay College wished to confer on him.

We were greatly honored to be selected by John Jay College as recipients of honorary doctorates.  It is a college we admire for its focus on issues of great importance and for its significant role in New York City in bringing together rigorous scholarship, openness to intellectual exchange and dedication to the improvement of public policy and public service.  The manner in which Mr. Kushner has been treated sullies that honor.  We hope that this matter will be resolved by the presentation of an honorary doctorate to Tony Kushner.  Even if Mr. Kushner will no longer accept such an award because of the manner in which he has been treated, we call on the Trustees to apologize to Mr. Kushner to John Jay College and to the City of New York.

Sincerely,                                                        

Norman Dorsen
Stokes Professor of Law and Counselor to the President,
New York University

Aryeh Neier
President
Open Society Foundations

David Rothman
Bernard Schoenberg Professor of Social Medicine and Professor of History

Herbert Sturz
Senior Advisor
Open Society Foundations

3:30pm     Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham’s letter renouncing his honorary degree from CUNY was posted earlier, but for whatever reason disappeared between site crashes.  Here it is again. Powerful stuff:

Dear Dr. Schmidt:

Like many others, I was shocked and dismayed to hear about the treatment Tony Kushner received at the hands of the CUNY Board of Trustees on May 2.  Jeffrey S. Weisenfeld’s opposition to Kushner’s honorary degree was not only malicious and inappropriate, it was based partly on untruths and partly on phrases taken out of context.  The fact that a majority of the board members – the fact that any board members at all – supported Weisenfeld turned an unfortunate incident into a shameful one.

An academic institution as generous and venerable as CUNY should not countenance the public humiliation of any artist, let alone one of Kushner’s caliber and courage.  Kushner has done more than most of us to combine high art – many of us consider it great art –with profound and vital socio-political sentiments.  Kushner’s plays have done what so few of us have managed in our own work:  it has helped raise public consciousness, without ever descending into agitprop or screed.  To deny him an honorary degree because certain members of the board disagree with some of his political views is a chilling indictment of the freedom of expression CUNY has always championed.

I was on the faculty at Brooklyn College for six years, and have always felt honored to be a member of a great institution.  I received an honorary doctorate in 2009, of which I have been enormously proud.  I feel, however, that in the light of the incident on May 2, I have no choice but to return it.  I do so with real regrets.

It is a sad day indeed.

Sincerely,

Michael Cunningham 

3:15pm     A very strong letter of support from Andrew Sabl, associate professor of public policy and political science at the University of California, Los Angeles:

Dear distinguished members of the Board of Trustees:

I am writing to express my strong opposition to your board’s tabling of a proposal to grant an honorary degree from John Jay College to Tony Kushner.

As far as I can tell, the facts of the case are not disputed.  Mr. Kushner, like many others, was put forward for an honorary degree.  The quality of his literary work and the academic basis for the degree were not, and have not been, questioned.  One board member, however, decided to denounce Mr. Kushner alone, for his criticisms of Israel.  The denunciations were in part accurate but irrelevant: the things he accused Kushner of saying about Israel are perfectly within the bounds of respectable opinion, morally and factually, though certainly controversial. In part the denunciations were slanderous, in that they blamed Kushner for belonging to a group that supports the boycott of some Israeli companies, even though Kushner has explicitly dissented from the group’s policy on that score (nor, again, is the peace group’s own position morally beyond the pale, though I have strong doubts about it). The board member’s claim that “If Kushner’s libelous statements against Israel were made by anyone outside the Jewish community, that person would be correctly labeled an anti-Semite”* is false and outrageous.  There is nothing remotely anti-Semitic in anything that even Kushner’s opponents accuse him of saying—let alone what he has actually said.  The claim that moral criticism of Jews or the Jewish state is anti-Semitic betrays every principle of open debate for which universities, and free societies generally, should stand.  I might add that, far from protecting Israel, this claim has greatly damaged it.

Though a Democrat, I am not a ubiquitous signer of left-of-center petitions.  Nor am I blind to anti-Semitism, a defender of academic political correctness, or an enemy of Zionism (as I understand it).  I am not only the son of a Jewish refugee from Vienna but the heir to a family tradition of Zionism.  (My father’s family was able to come to New York from Europe largely because my grandfather’s cousin was a figure of some prominence: Felix Frankfurter.) I sponsor a speaker series that has brought prominent libertarians to campus, and teach in a Great Books-style seminar series favored by many conservative students—not unreasonably, since their ideas are given fair hearing, as does not always occur at UCLA.  Some have suggested that political opposition to Kushner was legitimate because the granting of honorary degrees has itself become a political process.  If so, the solution is to reform and broaden the process of considering honorary degree awardees, not to make a travesty of a flawed process through ad-hoc browbeating by board members, without warning and without the person attacked having the chance to respond. I fervently hope that David Mamet or Mark Helprin, outstanding writers and also prominent conservatives whose views on Israel are the opposite of Kushner’s, would be considered for honorary degrees on the same basis Kushner was. If that is demonstrably not the case, I would be happy to write another letter to John Jay’s faculty protesting that as well.

Mr. Kushner has said that if the Board’s decision were to be rescinded and the degree re-offered, he would decline.  If so, that is out of your control.  What you can control, and what I urge you to effect, is a reversal of your short-sighted decision to give in to the worst kind of political correctness—which, though customarily not called that when coming from the Right, in this case bears all the hallmarks of its more famous left-wing cousin and does all the same kinds of damage.

Sincerely,

Andre Sabl

3:10pm     Gordon Rogoff, from Yale University’s School of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism, weighs in on the Kushner affair at CUNY.

Dear Chairperson Benno Schmidt and Trustees of CUNY:

I can’t do better than the letters you’ve already received from Tony Kushner himself, Professor Ellen Schrecker, Mayor Koch, my own former student from the Graduate Center, Seth Baumrin, Alisa Solomon, and no doubt many others.  This issue should be what is festively called  a “no-brainer” these days, yet it turns out that CUNY is suddenly thrust into the spotlight with no brains in evidence, many of you asleep at the switch when challenged by Mr. Wiesenfeld to march straight back to the dark days of McCarthyism and all its lunatic discontents.

All your critics are demonstrably correct in reminding you of everything from academic freedom to constitutional rights.  Yet it may be that we are also missing another root cause of this disaster:  the accepted wisdom concerning those who belong — and do not belong — on Boards of Trustees for our educational institutions.  I write now as a Professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the Yale School of Drama, but also as a veteran educator, theatre critic, director and producer, appalled all these years at my own silence when compelled to be “governed” by Boards or (as at Yale) Corporations without any kind of democratic representation or diversity, Boards composed mainly of the wealthy with not a poet, playwright, artist, novelist, or poor person in sight, not even a token figure for “show.”  Add to that the notable absence of other possible constituents, such as Gay women and men, and it’s easy to see why you, the CUNY Trustees, could be so tone-deaf when faced with Mr. Wiesenfeld’s ignorant charges and demands.

I cannot remember when I was ever on the same page as Mayor Koch, but I join with him now in asking for Mr. Wiesenfeld’s immediate resignation.  That would be the first step in recovering your own honor, though you may yet have done more damage than even I can imagine.  As it stands now, you are quite plainly not qualified to award anything resembling “honorary” degrees; for that matter, you’re also putting all your academic degrees into serious question.  I took pride in the opportunity to teach at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, but now I can’t help thinking of Groucho Marx’s (the real Marx!) observation that he wouldn’t be a member of any group that would have him as a member.  I can’t take back by my Professor Emeritus titles, though if you persist in this insult to Kushner and to our intelligence, I promise that I won’t ever again sign a letter with those identifications.  More to the point:  please go beyond that first step by recruiting at least five artists and gays to replace the hapless Mr. Wiesenfeld.

Sincerely,

Gordon Rogoff 

3:00pm     The Graduate Center’s own Jack Jacobs, professor of political science at both the GC and at John Jay, speaks out against the CUNY Board of Trustees decision in the Kushner affair.

Dear Mr. Wiesenfeld,

At first glance, we have many things in common.  I, like you, am the son of Jews who survived the Second World War in Europe.  I, like you, am a proud graduate of the Bronx High School of Science.  I, like you, am deeply committed to Yiddish cultural institutions and am concerned about the fate of the people of Israel.  Most significantly in the current context, I, like you, have longstanding ties to CUNY.

These apparent similarities notwithstanding, I disagree rather strongly with the course of action you took at the last meeting of CUNY’s Board of Trustees.  I would note, first of all, that, your attack on Tony Kushner unfairly misrepresented his opinions.

Moreover: I see no reason why there ought to be a political litmus test of the kind you implicitly proposed for those nominated for honorary degrees by CUNY’s constituent colleges.  Kushner was nominated by John Jay College primarily because of Kushner’s enormous, very widely recognized, artistic accomplishments.  He has spoken at John Jay in the past, and has, thereby, aided the college and its students.  Granting an honorary degree to Tony Kushner would have reflected very well on CUNY.

It may be relevant to point out that I have served, in the past, on John Jay’s Honorary Degrees Committee, and can attest to the fact John Jay’s faculty has historically given close scrutiny to those nominated for honorary degrees.  I have every reason to believe that the current members of the College’s Honorary Degrees Committee gave the relevant portions of Kushner’s record comparable scrutiny.  In my opinion: the Board of Trustees ought to have demonstrated their trust in the faculty and administration of John Jay by endorsing Kushner’s nomination.

While I believe that Kushner’s views on Israel ought not to have played a role in the decision as to whether or not to award him an honorary degree, I would add that I do not object to major components of his views on Israel insofar as I am familiar with them.  I have served as a Fulbright Fellow in Israel, during which period I taught at Tel Aviv University.  A significant portion of my family lives in Israel at this time.  I have been to Israel a number of times.  And I (like Kushner) believe that the continued occupation of the territories captured by Israel in 1967 is both wrong and destructive.  Does this view, in your opinion, make it unsuitable that I teach at John Jay, and have taught at the College for decades?  If so: perhaps we have less in common, after all, than my opening paragraph suggests.

Sincerely,

Jack Jacobs

2:45pm     An excellent letter from Barbara Weinstein, Silver Professor of History at NYU, Fulbright Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and former president of the American Historical Association denouncing the CUNY Board of Trustees’ action against Tony Kushner.

To the CUNY Board of Trustees:

I write to express my deep distress at the decision to refuse an honorary degree to Tony Kushner.  Although I am not on the CUNY faculty, as someone whose mother and siblings attended CUNY schools, whose daughter is currently a student at Borough of Manhattan Community College, and whose courses regularly include doctoral students from the CUNY Graduate Center, I feel that I have a strong stake in the continued intellectual vitality of the CUNY system and its standing as a leading public university system.  I cannot imagine a decision that would be more damaging to CUNY’s reputation that the move to refuse Tony Kushner an honorary degree on the grounds of his expressing opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that are widely held within and beyond the Jewish community, and his reference to historical events that have been thoroughly documented.  I am myself a former Fulbright lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and consider myself strongly pro-Israel—that is, I want Israelis to be able to live in a just, peaceful, and secure society.  Like many people who are pro-Israel, I regard this as only possible if there is a fair and just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Needless to say, trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld does not agree, and that is his prerogative.  It should not be his prerogative to declare his position the only legitimate one.  I personally abhor Mr. Wiesenfeld’s position, but the appropriate response in an open scholarly environment is to debate that position, not to silence it through the abuse of authority. 

I urge the CUNY Board of Trustees to reconsider its decision and grant Mr. Kushner an honorary degree from John Jay College.  It is not only a matter of mitigating the insult to Mr. Kushner, but also of repairing the damage to CUNY’s reputation.   If you do otherwise, what kind of message are you sending to students graduating from John Jay and other CUNY schools?  In the end, the refusal of an honorary degree is not just an insult to Mr. Kushner, but to all of us who value critical thinking and the free exchange of ideas.

Sincerely yours,

Barabara Weinstein

2:00pm     The Advocate has received Barbara Ehrenreich’s letter to the CUNY Board of Trustees, joining Michael Cunningham and Ellen Shrecker in renouncing their honorary degrees from the university.

Dear Trustees of CUNY,

In 2004 I was proud to receive an honorary degree from John Jay College in recognition, as I recall, for my work exposing poverty and promoting social justice. At the time, it did not occur to me to question John Jay’s qualifications for awarding such an honor. But today, having read of the Trustees’ vote to deny a similar honorary degree to playwright and activist Tony Kushner– as well as Jeffrey Wiesenfeld’s comment in the New York Times suggesting that Palestinians “are not human”—I do have to question both your qualifications and the legitimacy of the honorary degree I was given.

Hence my decision to renounce my own honorary degree, which I will return to you if I can find it. Please expunge me from your record of past honorees.

Sincerely,

Barbara Ehrenreich

12:15pm     Harold Bloom weighs in! We just received a copy of his note to the CUNY Board of Trustees:

12:00pm     A wonderful letter from Joel Berkowitz, Director of the Sam & Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies and Professor of Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee:

Dear Board of Trustees:

I am writing to object in the strongest terms to your appalling decision to overturn a vote to award an honorary degree from John Jay College to Tony Kushner, one of this country’s most distinguished playwrights, essayists, and public intellectuals.  You will by now have received many letters reminding you of Mr. Kushner’s numerous accomplishments and awards, the fine institutions of higher learning that have seen fit to bestow similar awards on him, and his vigorous public support of the CUNY system and its mission.  Rather than reiterate those important details, I’d like to offer a personal anecdote to illustrate what a champion CUNY has long had in Tony Kushner.

When  Angels of America made its Broadway debut in 1993, I was an adjunct instructor of English at the College of Staten Island, and working on my PhD in Theatre at the Graduate Center.  Like countless others, I was dumbfounded by that play, and when I had the chance to meet Mr. Kushner that summer at a conference, I invited him to visit one of my fall classes to speak to students about it.   His reaction could not have been more gracious, and though it took some doing for his assistant to find a free evening in Mr. Kushner’s schedule, he ultimately came to campus (after refusing the modest honorarium I was able to get from my department chair).  A colleague’s class joined mine for the visit, and Mr. Kushner was, unsurprisingly, eloquent, funny, and insightful.  That evening remains one of the high points of my thousands of hours in the classroom, and I have no doubt that it was similarly memorable for my students.

This is the person whose honor you have now rescinded.  However painful this episode may be for Mr. Kushner, I am sure it will do him no long-term damage.  I cannot say the same for CUNY.  What you have voted to do puts politics over ideas, and gets the educational mission of the CUNY system exactly backwards.  It is also a slap in the face to someone who does not feel that his long list of accolades, honors, and prizes makes him too important to take time to talk to a group of typical CUNY students. 

I urge you in the strongest possible terms to reconsider your wrongheaded vote, offer Mr. Kushner the honor that he so richly deserves, and try to restore the piece of CUNY’s reputation that you have so badly tarnished by your actions.  Though the graduate education and professional experience I gained during my years in the CUNY system laid the foundation for a successful career, I will no longer respond favorably to requests for alumni contributions unless and until this vote is reversed.

Sincerely,

Joel Berkowitz
Director, Sam & Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies
Professor, Foreign Languages and Literature
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Curtin 904, P.O. Box 413
Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413

11:45am    The Nation’s Naomi Klein continues to tweet the #KushnerCrisis.  The latest: ”@NaomiAKlein: If Kushner did support BDS this would be equally unjust. Asserting his “good Jew” cred legitimizes the litmus test. Stop it. #kushnercrisis”

11:15am     Nicholas Kristof tweets: “The Tony #KushnerCrisis leaves me thinking CUNY needs new trustees, yesterday. Blocking his degree was a mistake.”

Twitter users: Please tag Kristof (@NickKristof) in your requests to have him write about it in his New York Times column. It would be a huge boost to have his voice behind us in this mess.

11:00am     Great, strong letter from the New School’s Nancy Fraser to the CUNY Board of Trustees!

Dear CUNY Trustees,

Until now, I have always been proud to be an alumna of the CUNY Graduate Center, from which I received my PhD in philosophy in 1980. But my pride has suddenly turned to shame upon reading about your decision to deny an honorary degree to Tony Kushner. This decision, based on spurious
mischaracterizations of Kushner’s views, is reminiscent of McCarthyism. It is unworthy of a major research institution dedicated to the free play of ideas.

I urge you to reverse your decision and restore my pride in my alma mater. Failing that, I intend to cease financial contributions to CUNY.

Sincerely,
Nancy Fraser
Henry A. & Louise Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics
New School for Social Research
6 E. 16th St., Suite 711

10:30am     A letter from Kristofer Peterson-Overton, no stranger to Jeffrey Wiesenfeld’s bully tactics, to the Board of Trustees calling on them to reverse their decision.

Dear members of the board:

10:00am     A very nice letter from Carolina Bank Muñoz, associate professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the Grad Center to the CUNY Board of Trustees. Short, sweet, and to the point.

Trustees of CUNY,

I am outraged and dismayed by the handling of Tony Kushner´s honorary degree. I am writing from a Fulbright in Chile, where even here, we have reached news of this outrageous behavior. As a CUNY professor, I am embarrased for our institution. Not only do you owe Tony Kushner an apology, you also owe CUNY an apology for betraying its mission. This action is being viewed (nationally and internationally) as a gross attack on academic freedom. Your actions have hurt the reputation of CUNY. I urge you to issue an apology to Tony Kushner immediately.

Carolina Bank Muñoz
Associate Professor of Sociology
Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center-CUNY

9:30am     A letter of support for Tony Kushner from Jocelynn Olcott from Duke University’s departments of History and Women’s Studies.

Day Two of the Kushner Crisis blog can be accessed here.

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