Category Archives: Advocacy

Greenwood Commonweath: VSU: ‘No confidence’ in Newman
The Mississippi Valley State University faculty Senate voted “no confidence” in president Dr. Lester C. Newman at a meeting Tuesday, according to several university sources.

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Daily Free Press: Intellectuals must speak out, prof. says

When New York University European studies professor Tony Judt called on academics to speak their minds on controversial subjects no matter the consequences, he quickly found his audience took his words to heart last night at Boston College, as he defended his well-documented history of negative statements against Israel.

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Inside Higher Ed: Boycotting a Magazine’s Boycott Issue

In the annals of academic conferences, few may have been more ill-fated than the aborted conclave on academic boycotts planned by the American Association of University Professors.

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The Chronicle News Blog: ‘Academe’ Boycott Hits AAUP’s Journal Over Failed Conference

It seems that the American Association of University Professors can’t do anything about academic boycotts without angering one side or the other. The AAUP tried to hold a conference in Italy last spring on the issue, but those plans melted down.

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The Chronicle: Scorching the Grass Roots?

A Columbia University sociologist who once canvassed for progressive causes now says her research shows the method is unhealthy for liberals and democracy. Her new book, Activism, Inc., which describes operations at a pseudonymous canvassing network, is drawing scholarly praise and scorn — and she and the group she studied are trading accusations of intimidation and bad faith.

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MRZine :U.S. Out of the Middle East

To endorse the following statement, please send your name, location, affiliation and title (if any) to nyclaw@comcast.ne, or NYCLAW, PO Box 3620166, PACC, New York, NY 10129.

U.S. Out of the Middle East
New York City Labor Against the War
August 11, 2006

For weeks, Israel has turned Lebanon into a killing ground, slaughtering and maiming thousands of people, destroying the civilian infrastructure, and turning a quarter of the population into refugees in their own land. At the same time, it continues to brutalize Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Israel’s crimes are carried out with U.S.-made F-16s, Apache helicopters, and cluster bombs. These high-tech lethal weapons are part of $5 billion that Israel gets each year from the United States, courtesy of the Republican and Democratic parties, with enthusiastic support from Neo-cons and right-wing Christian fundamentalists.The U.S. does not arm Israel to “promote democracy” or for “self-defense.” Even Zionist historians now admit that Israel’s origins are rooted in dispossession of the Palestinian people — whose labor then built the Israeli economy — through an unrelenting campaign of ethnic cleansing: exile, squalid refugee camps, imprisonment, torture and murder.

Since the 1970s, Israel has also pursued territorial expansion by repeatedly invading and devastating Lebanon, as exemplified by the slaughter of thousands of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatilla in 1982. That occupation lasted until 2000, when Hezbollah forced Israel to withdraw.

Since then, Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians, taken thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese political prisoners, and tried to strangle the democratically-elected government of Hamas. When Hamas and Hezbollah responded by capturing a few Israeli soldiers, Israel unleashed a new, bloody, long-planned attack on Lebanon; only then did Hezbollah respond by firing crude rockets at Israel.

Behind its empty platitudes, the U.S. government supports this Israeli racism and state terrorism because, along with dictatorships in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, it is a cornerstone of U.S. domination over the world’s most important oil-producing region.

Now, with the Iraq war in shambles, the U.S.-Israel partnership seeks to break Lebanese and Palestinian resistance, while recklessly provoking confrontations with Syria and Iran. The U.N. has done nothing to stop this war of empire — what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sickeningly calls “birth pangs of a new Middle East.”

It is not surprising, therefore, that Hezbollah has won tremendous support in and beyond the Arab world, even amongst those who question some aspects of its ideology or tactics. For this spiraling cycle of oppression and resistance evokes Iraq, Afghanistan, Soweto, Vietnam, Algeria, the Warsaw Ghetto, or David and Goliath.

Horrified by the images from Palestine and Lebanon, international labor has strongly denounced Israel’s attacks.

On July 10, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) urgently called for sanctions and boycotts against the “apartheid Israel state,” which it branded worse than the former racist regime in South Africa.

On July 31, the General Union of Oil Employees in Iraq issued an “appeal to all the honorable and free people of the world to demonstrate and protest about what is happening to Lebanon.”

On August 5, major British trade unions supported a massive London protest against Israel’s attacks. Even before the current escalation, several labor bodies in Britain, Canada and elsewhere called for divestment from Israel.

In the United States, however, nearly all labor bodies either support Israel or say nothing at all.

State employee retirement plans and union pension funds invest hundreds of millions of dollars in State of Israel Bonds. In April 2002, while Israel butchered hundreds of Palestinian refugees in Jenin, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney spoke at a “National Solidarity Rally for Israel.” The American Federation of Teachers has specifically embraced Israel’s new assaults.

In the antiwar movement, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), which consistently segregates the Palestinian cause, has organized no mass response. U.S. Labor Against the War, which promotes union resolutions against the war in Iraq, remains disturbingly silent.

Fortunately, growing protests have been organized by the Arab-Muslim community, people of color, anti-Zionist Jews, and other activists who recognize that Lebanon and Palestine are inseparable from Iraq and Afghanistan.

New York City Labor Against the War (NYCLAW) is part of this grassroots movement, and with Al-Awda New York, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, a cosponsor of Labor for Palestine .

NYCLAW believes that the labor and antiwar movements in the United States have a special obligation to speak out and demand:

1. End the U.S.-Israel war against the Palestinian and Lebanese people.

2. No aid for Israel.

3. Boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

4. End Israeli occupation, and fully implement the Palestinian right of return.

5. Out Now from Iraq and Afghanistan — No timetables, redeployment, advisors, or air-war.

NYCLAW Co-Conveners (other affiliations listed for identification only):

Larry Adams
Former President, NPMHU Local 300

Michael Letwin
Former President, UAW Local 2325/Assn. of Legal Aid Attorneys

Brenda Stokely
Former President, AFSCME DC 1707; Co-Chair, Million Worker March

Visit New York City Labor Against the War’s blog at www.traprockpeace.org/nyclaw_blog/.

To join the NYCLAW’s mailing list, go to groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/.

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InvestmentNews.com: TIAA-CREF fund jettisons Coca Cola Co.

TIAA-CREF has removed The Coca-Cola Company from its Social Choice Account, as well as the screening index the financial services firm uses – KLD Research and Analytics’ Broad Market Social Index – following a campaign by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Child and the Make TIAA-CREF Ethical coalition.

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The Jerusalem Post: Academic boycott debate returns to UK

The academic and cultural boycott of Israel debate is likely to return this month as the trade union conference season, that began in April and culminates with the Trade Union Congress in September, continues.

The Association of University Teachers (AUT), which last year passed a motion calling for a boycott of the University of Haifa and Bar-Ilan University before it was eventually overturned, holds its conference this week.

It is believed the AUT will not have a boycott motion on the agenda, however a commission, set up by its Special Council after the overruling of the boycott motion, will propose that a boycott be used as a last resort and only implemented when requested by a trade union at a university or college concerned.

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The Chronicle: Students May Tune Out Professors of Opposing Political Views, Scholars Tell Pennsylvania Panel

Students’ perceptions of their professors’ political views affect whether students consider the professors to be good teachers, two researchers told Pennsylvania lawmakers on Wednesday. They spoke at one in a series of public hearings investigating whether the state’s public colleges indoctrinate students in left-wing ideology.

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Inside Higher Ed: Uniting Against Horowitz

When David Horowitz’s new book attacking academics — The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America — was published last month, a coalition of academic and civil liberties groups announced that they were joining forces to combat the conservative activist’s campaign.

At a press briefing Thursday, leaders of the coalition, Free Exchange on Campus, announced their specific plans for the months ahead. While the Academic Bill of Rights has failed to become law in any state, it has caused considerable controversy. The measure says that colleges should provide a variety of viewpoints in classes and that professors shouldn’t discriminate on the basis of ideology. While most academics have no problem with such ideas, they do object to legislating them and say that the bill could lead to professors being sued or forced to cede classroom time to views such as Holocaust denial or creationism.

Megan Fitzgerald of the Center for Campus Free Speech, one of the groups involved in the coalition, said that one of the major efforts would be to organize students to appear whenever hearings are held on the legislation. Students were at hearings in Kansas this week and will be in Pennsylvania next week and “wherever this horrible proposal is rearing its head.”

Other efforts being planned include:

A new blog on the Free Exchange on Campus Web site.

An outreach campaign to conservatives, who may disagree with the views of some of the coalition’s members, but who agree with their opposition to government regulation of what takes place in classrooms.

As for Horowitz, he said that the new campaign reinforced his views. He said that the group was dominated by unions and was “obviously designed to stifle discussion and shut down the free exchange of ideas,” adding that it was “just another episode in the long sordid history of Orwellian agitprop.”

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The Chronicle: 8 Colleges Sign On to Antisweatshop Proposal, With Caveats Over Possible Antitrust Violations

The success of the latest phase of the college antisweatshop movement hinges, in part, on whether college officials can be assured that supporting it will not get their institutions into legal trouble.

At least eight institutions have publicly endorsed the principles behind a proposal that calls for colleges to require that apparel bearing their logos be made only at factories that pay employees a living wage and that have legitimate unions. But those colleges have stopped short of backing the proposal to the letter.

At issue is whether doing business with certain factories, while freezing out others that do not comply with the new rules, is a violation of antitrust laws.

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Burlington Free Press: Faculty union opposes UVM plan to cut positions

A group of about 200 students, faculty union members, University of Vermont staff and members of labor and justice organizations gathered at the entrance of Morrill Hall on Main Street on Thursday evening to oppose a UVM decision to eliminate six full-time faculty jobs in the university’s education department.

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Duke University will limit the number of factories that are permitted to manufacture merchandise and apparel with the university’s name and logo on it, university officials announced Monday. Duke administrators said the move would make it easier for the university and anti-sweatshop groups to monitor working conditions in the factories that produce Duke-themed material.

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The Chronicle:
POINT OF VIEW
The Power of Academic Citizenship

By MILTON GREENBERG

American colleges and universities prepare a large proportion of the leaders and major participants in the worlds of business, industry, government, and the learned professions but do little to prepare their own faculty members (and eventual administrators) for the world of higher education. This reflects the academy’s well-honed sense of dread at the idea that higher education is part of the world at all. One of the academy’s core values is institutional autonomy, treasured as an enclave free of political and economic concerns. In many cases, faculty members can barely see beyond their own discipline or narrow specialization, viewing even that as independent of their own campus issues. The time and place to change this pattern are in the preparation of the professoriate and through the provision of professional outlets for faculty members’ continued development as academic citizens.
Unfortunately a major professional outlet, the American Association for Higher Education, announced last year that it was closing after more than 40 years of service. While most associations are based on institutional membership representing specific sectors or limited professional interests, the AAHE was unique as a major individual membership organization whose programs, projects, and publications attracted faculty members, administrators, government bureaucrats, think-tank scholars, and association leaders from every sector of higher education. Their meetings directed attention to the professoriate as a core national enterprise with shared professional interests and obligations irrespective of academic disciplines or institutional rankings. Together members studied and talked about teaching, student life, general education, and the academy’s responsibility to a changing nation and world.

The AAHE played a leading role in virtually all major recent reforms of the academy, giving rise to the idea that we need to take teaching seriously, to be concerned not only with what was taught but with what is being learned, to explore faculty roles and rewards with emphasis upon student achievement, and to establish public trust in higher education’s effectiveness. The announcement of the AAHE’s closing noted that for several years it had experienced a decline of revenues from membership and conferences. That the AAHE could not recruit adequate numbers of members or attract sufficient numbers of participants to its unusual conferences while the size and influence of higher education have exploded says a lot about our profession, and the message is disturbing.

That message is that an insufficient number of faculty members (as well as many midlevel administrators) know or care about issues facing higher education. It often takes the simple form of frequently expressed negative feelings by faculty members to the effect that “our university is unappreciated by political leaders or by potential financial supporters; our working conditions are poorer than at good universities; our leaders are incompetent and think like corporate hacks.” These kinds of complaints emerge largely out of ignorance of the condition of higher education and partly out of fantasies about life in the Ivy League and flagship graduate schools. It is easier to view professional problems as reflections of single campus defects and poor leadership independent of national issues affecting higher education.

American higher education is declining in the international competitiveness race while expending almost all of its energy on a domestic internecine prestige war among institutions, which only exacerbates a range of problems from financial aid to social mobility. The academy’s response to every issue appears to be “we need more money” rather than “let us see how we can harness the enormous resources we have in human capital to address identified national educational issues.”

The American Council on Education and other associations have started a campaign to win public understanding of and support for higher education, but some of that energy might better be directed to winning faculty understanding. The faculty controls the academic agenda through which positive reform rather than defensive postures can be achieved. To put it another way, if the faculty believes, as it does, that it must have a say in most universitywide policies, then it behooves professors to have more than a passing acquaintance with the issues that affect the well-being and the responsibilities of higher education broadly conceived.

This issue is made all the more urgent as American higher education is caught in an unparalleled environment in which traditional political partisanship has affected issues such as academic freedom, student access, and international competition. The prolonged and contentious debates over renewal of the Higher Education Act by Congress as well as the Senate inquiry into the governance and financial operations of the nonprofit sector reflect the intensity with which higher-education issues affect the broad spectrum of American life. In many states, legislatures hover over financial and governance issues at colleges and universities, and public universities are already being held to account for graduation rates, job placement, and other measures. These events are inevitable for a sector of society that has such a vast impact upon the lives and fortunes of the voting public — and they will not abate.

The faculty constitutes a huge national resource, a virtual army of about a million people whose voices can be enormously effective in explaining the fluctuating missions of higher education and the diversity of institutional types. They can also convey the impact of national educational issues pertaining to population changes, financial aid, decreasing state support, skyrocketing tuition, athletic excesses, research policies, competition from for-profit education, accreditation, and technology.

How can we MEET this need to educate and enlist the support of faculty members? The process is deceptively simple. Doctoral training for faculty positions has long concentrated on research skills with sparse attention to the other facets of university life and obligations. Only in the last decade or so has any serious nationwide effort been undertaken to prepare doctoral students for the other responsibilities that most will undertake as faculty members. Through such projects as “Preparing Future Faculty,” a joint undertaking of the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the Council of Graduate Schools, and the University of Washington’s program on “Re-envisioning the Ph.D,” most major graduate programs have added a teacher-training dimension for their students. Increasingly those programs have been extended to include discussion of professional issues such as tenure, service, consulting, and publishing. Most universities now offer centers for teaching assistance to all faculty members, young and old. Sessions on teaching and professional life are now part of national disciplinary conventions. It took a long time to reach this point.

Still missing from most faculty preparation and professional development is the place of higher education in the nation and the world, the underlying and pervasive social issues that affect it, and the great potential of the power of academic citizenship.

We can begin by adding the subject of higher education per se to the various doctoral training programs that are under way. I recently gave a talk on contemporary issues in higher education to a group of doctoral students in a teacher-training seminar whose questions revealed an understanding that their own careers are likely to be affected by change and a concern with how they might contribute to some needed reforms. I believe that a substantial amount of interest in such issues exists on most campuses, but that interest is easily diminished by neglect and other pressures of academic life. At the very least, future faculty members must be aware that, because of the enormous diversity of American campus life and the politicization of the academy, the kind of professional life they will lead will differ from that of the faculty generation now dominant in the academy.

Arrangements can easily be made for campuswide discussion of higher-education issues through the regular forums for campus discourse. Presidents and provosts who frequently address the faculty should use the opportunity to put campus issues in broader context. College retreats or mini-conferences for deans and department heads dedicated to discussion of national educational issues featuring guest speakers can be salutary in discussion of universitywide matters. Faculty senates and departmental or college meetings of faculty members can and should from time to time discuss “how do these national issues affect us and what are we doing about it, alone or in concert with other institutions?”

The abundant literature on higher education can be made conveniently available on the campus. Many campus units, for example, subscribe to The Chronicle and circulate it among department members, but now the entire campus can be given online access to The Chronicle through a site license. The major higher-education associations have magazines for their members, which could be acquired for departmental reading rooms, while libraries could exhibit periodic special displays of these publications.

National and regional meetings of professional disciplines now often feature sessions on teaching. Why not hold sessions on how national educational issues affect specific disciplines and how faculty members can clarify issues requiring cooperative endeavors among several institutions?

Most important, the spirit of the AAHE’s work can and should continue. Other major higher-education associations should take on the responsibility of engaging more faculty members in their programs. That would not only strengthen the academy broadly but also give additional support to the missions and political lobbying activities of the associations. (A quick guide to the 50 Washington, D.C.-based higher-education power centers may be found at http://www.whes.org.)

None of these suggestions is extraordinary, but recall that not too long ago we believed that teaching could not or need not be taught. We have shown that to be a false premise and relatively easily remedied. I suggest that future faculty members will react favorably to efforts to bring them into the big-stakes game of serving the higher-education needs of the American people.

Milton Greenberg is a professor emeritus of government at American University, where he served as provost and interim president.

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 52, Issue 22, Page B20

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The Michigan Review: Coalition Kills Coke on Campus

SINCE THE UNIVERSITY cut its contract with the Coca-Cola Corporation in December 2005, a heated debate about the decision has swirled around campus. With students and activists on either side, a spirited campus-wide debate has begun, but little knowledge has emerged regarding the circumstances behind the University’s decision.

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The Chronicle: Antiwar Protests on 8 Campuses Appear on Pentagon List of ‘Threats’ to National Security

ntiwar protests at eight colleges have made a Pentagon watch list of “suspicious incidents.”

The 400-page list, which was obtained by NBC News, includes information on 1,500 “threats” to national security that occurred over a recent 10-month period, and characterizes them as either “credible” or “not credible.”

The campus protests, all of which were aimed at military recruiters, occurred at New York University (twice), the State University of New York at Albany (twice), Southern Connecticut State University, City College of the City University of New York, the University of California campuses at Berkeley and at Santa Cruz, an unspecified campus of the University of Wisconsin, and “a New Jersey university.” Only one of the events, the protest at Santa Cruz, was cited as a “credible threat.”

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