Tag Archives: Free speech

Peter Wylie on academic mobbing at the University of British Columbia #ubc #ubcnews #ubconews #bced #highered

The account and evidence of how, when, where, and why Professor Wylie (Peter) was mobbed by UBC administrators are disturbing. It’s a travesty that he had to endure this mobbing. Faculty are tremendously grateful that he brought the facts out for an airing and hearing.

My Campus Administration, Faculty Association, Senate, and Me: A Case Study in Academic Mobbing

Peter Wylie
Faculty member, University of British Columbia

This in the author’s view is a clear case of academic mobbing. The case fits perfectly with what is argued that almost all scholars who study academic mobbing agree is its primary characteristics; it is initiated by administrators whose malfeasance was questioned or revealed though the expression of academic free speech; the target tend to be tenured professors who publicly speak out about administrative wrongdoing; it involves manipulation or misrepresentation of the facts regarding the victim’s motivations or behavior; the target’s colleagues are either poisoned against him or her, or choose not to support the victim due indifference, or a lack of conviction, and the target is left personally and professionally injured, while the perpetrator(s) goes unpunished (MacDonald et al., 2018, para. 12). To this the author would add that the kangaroo court investigation procedures of the university are merely an extension of the academic mobbing process. (pp. 206-207)

Read More: Wylie, P. (2019). My Campus Administration, Faculty Association, Senate, and Me: A Case Study in Academic Mobbing. In C. M. Crawford (Ed.), Confronting Academic Mobbing in Higher Education: Personal Accounts and Administrative Action (pp. 187-210). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Peter Wylie: My Faculty Association and Me: A Case Study in Sweetheart Unionism and Academic Mobbing

My Faculty Association and Me: A Case Study in Sweetheart Unionism and Academic Mobbing

By Peter Wylie

This paper recounts recent experiences of mine with the University of British Columbia (UBC) Faculty Association (UBCFA). I am a tenured Associate Professor at UBC, Okanagan campus (UBCO) and I began my FA role as 1st Vice-Chair of the Okanagan Faculty Committee (OFC), an executive position on this standing committee of the FA, in July 2017. The paper is couched in terms of the relatively recent concept of academic mobbing, defined as “an insidious, non-violent and sophisticated kind of psychological bullying that predominantly takes place in college and university campuses.”1 It also employs the concept of “sweetheart unionism” defined as a deal between an employer and union officials that benefits both at the expense of employees; in this case, a deal between UBCO and UBCFA that benefits UBCO management and FA Executive Director and staff in Vancouver at the expense of UBCO faculty members.

My Faculty Association and Me A case Study in Sweetheart Unionism and Academic Mobbing.pdf

Meum est or tuum est #UBC? Which is it? #ubcnews #bced #highered

The pomp of graduation, a time of calm reflection as students’ rite of passage is conferred under the mesmerizing pronouncements of the convocation speaker. And at UBC, a time to hear administrators chant tuum est, it is yours!

Reality check.

Increasingly, UBC administrators are confidently asserting meum est, it is mine!

The latest sign of meum est is the quickening process to reappoint UBC’s Chancellor Lindsay Gordon despite serious problems and reservations, such as those articulated in the 24 April Open Letter to the UBC Chancellor Reappointment Committee (signed by 110 faculty members).

The phenomenon of meum est across a variety of campuses was detailed in The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters.

I manage UBC, therefore, meum est, it is mine.

*See UBC time to change motto for a conceptual history of tuum est.

#UBC time to lay down the mace in graduation and governance #ubcnews #ubc #bced #highered

*Apologies to the medievalists. Repeated below is our semi-annual appeal to UBC managers to Lay Down the Mace:

As we count down to May graduation, can we please remove the mace from convocation and governance at the University of British Columbia? The mace had its day in the first 100 years of this esteemed University but that day has gone.

Times have changed, business as usual has been called into question, the Board of Governors is still operating under the pall of a No Confidence vote cast by faculty members last year, and this year on 24 April an Open Letter signed by 110 faculty members was submitted to the UBC Chancellor Reappointment Committee.

The days of the mace in Convocation and governance are of the past and that part of the past is no longer worth reenacting.

Last year was an emotional year for UBC. As we launched the celebration of our Centennial at UBC 100, our President resigned under a cloak of secrecy. As we began to party, we launched an investigation to discover the lengths to which a Chair of the Board of Governors and administrators might go to suppress academic freedom. As no accountability was forthcoming, a No Confidence vote was cast. As the BoG continued with business as usual, staff and students expressed serious concerns to triangulate those of faculty members.

It’s difficult to know where this University now stands or what it stands for.

It is time to retire the mace, symbol of aggression, authority, and war. It’s time to march to graduation ceremonies in late May with open and empty hands as symbolic of peace and reconciliation of controversies and roles of the President’s Office.

UBC’s mace is a relic but a relic of what? The mace is symbolic speech but what is it saying about us now?

From ancient times, this club, this weapon of assault and offence, the mace was gradually adorned until the late twelfth century when it doubled as a symbol of civil office. Queen Elizabeth I granted her royal mace to Oxford in 1589. From military and civil power derives academic authority. The rest is history and it is not all good.

Dr. Thomas Lemieux, School of Economics with UBC’s Mace at the May 2015 Convocation.

Dr. Thomas Lemieux, School of Economics, with UBC’s Mace at the May 2015 Convocation.

It is time to retire the macebearer, whose importance is inflated every year by the image’s presence on UBC’s graduation pages leading to Convocation. In pragmatic terms, if the mace falls into the hands of the wrong macebearer or manager at this point, someone’s liable to get clocked with it.

Is UBC’s mace still a respectable appendage to Convocation?

Remember, since that fateful November day in 1997, just five months into Martha Piper’s Presidency, when student activists put their bodies and minds on the line at the APEC protest, Tuum Est adorns both the can of mace sprayed in their eyes and the ceremonial mace that the President’s Office is eager to carry across campus every November and May.

Is it not time to retire the mace?

RIP academic freedom in Education at #UBC #ubcnews #ubc100 #ubysseynews #bced #caut_acppu

Of course, turns out that parallel to all the overt puffy announcements about a new era of academic freedom at the University of British Columbia, covertly behind the scenes is a progressive decommissioning of channels and media of communication.

Symbolic of a covert erosion of academic freedom, after about 17 years of UBC’s Faculty of Education‘s shared listserv for Educ-Faculty, the forum was suddenly and sadly shut down. Out of the blue beginning last Friday (6 May) through today, a series of decisions culminated in this explicit clampdown on academic freedom. As this morning’s memo from the Dean and Associate Dean reads:

our changes respond to a significant number of complaints we have received about the utilization of EDUC-Faculty in particular, as a medium wherein individual faculty members broadcast their own perspective regarding one or more aspects of the work and trajectory of the Faculty of Education.

Ah yes, the “significant number of complaints” about the expression of academic freedom… Goodness forbid that “faculty members broadcast their own perspective regarding one or more aspects of the work and trajectory” of the University.

One might think that if indeed there was a problem with unmoderated communication, and there was not, the reasonable response would be to move to moderation of the listserv, not shut it down.

Oh yes, the memo concludes with the hypocritical “Tuum Est – It is yours.

RIP academic freedom at UBC?

Was it the petition we forwarded over the Educ-Faculty list that initiated faculty members’ No Confidence vote in the Board of Governors? Was it what we said? Or didn’t say?

 

*A technical aside is the 2014-2015 decommissioning of Majordomo at UBC. Beginning 1992, majordomo provided a user-friendly platform for listserv communication channels or media. Clean and low-tech code, majordomo hosted a range of user commands that, among other simple things, allows one to generate a list of recipients or the audience of communication (yes, this config can be turned off but most leave it open). At UBC, majordomo lists were migrated to L-Soft, a clunky web-based interface. The vast majority of L-Soft configurations of lists at UBC limit users to two commands: subscribe and unsubscribe. RIP majordomo at UBC.

#UBC time to change motto (beyond tuum est) #ubcnews #ubc100 #bced #highered

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Whereas things at UBC are too messed rather than Tuum Est, and whereas symbolic speech plays a significant role in governance, we propose that the Board of Governors change the University’s coveted motto to Potentia ad Populum, “Power to the People.”

This change would do justice to UBC President Wesbrook’s anticipation in 1916 that UBC would be the “people’s University,” which could hardly be translated into a condescending corporate brand or real estate agency. Or could it?

Each time Admin chants Tuum Est, an entire history of bad Latin is recalled in mistranslation. In context of its initial translation from Greek to the Latin Lord’s Prayer (i.e., Pater Noster) and later in Jerome’s translation of the Book of Jeremiah, tuum est refers to deference and reverence to the power, right, and glory of God’s Kingdom. In Horace’s Melpomene, it is rendered as reverent debt and duty to the muse.

A decade or so after UBC’s first President uttered Tuum Est in the 1916 Invocation, the motto was secularized with relative hubris: “It is Up to You.” Or alternatively and eventually, as in the classic Seinfeld episode, to “Master of my domain.” By the 1930s and 40s, this was perfect for advertising Felix Dry Ginger Ale. As the ad went, Tuum Est “can well be carried into business.” Nowadays, we notice that the Board and Admin are giving lip service– labellum officium or otherwise hypocrisis in Latin– to the meaning of the motto.

For the next century, how about a new UBC motto? Potentia ad Populum

#UBCclean protest disrupts #UBC Board mtg #ubcnews #ubc100 #ubysseynews

UBCcleanProtest2Feb16a

UBC faculty, staff, students, and citizens turned out in mass to protest the Board of Governors’ unaccountability and damaging lack of transparency. The message being enough is enough. We’re fed up with the the backroom politics that are pervasive enough to move a new President out of office with no review, rhyme nor reason.

UBCcleanProtest2Feb16c

UBCcleanProtest2Feb16b

After a rally in front of the Alumni building, the protest proceeded upstairs to the door of the Board meeting. The disruption was direct and effective, with a subset marching into the meeting. Chants of ‘hey hey, ho ho, the BoG has got to go’ roaring outside the door and the Board’s discomfort inside. Shockingly, the Board allotted time for a colleague to speak out at the mic!

UBCcleanProtest2Feb16d

Amazing demonstration of the grass roots on campus everyone! Next time we may move to occupy.

Protest at #UBC Feb 2, Alumni bldg. 12:30 #ubcgss #ubysseynews #ubcnews #ubc100 #bced

Protest at UBC
Protest the BoG Meeting

Why: Demand UBC management and Board accountability
When: Tuesday, February 2 at 12:30 2:00
Where: Robert H. Lee Alumni Bldg, Centre, 6163 University Boulevard, UBC
How: Faculty, staff and students will gather w/ guests & speakers, etc.

UBC faculty, staff and students will protest the upcoming UBC Board of Governors Meeting, and will publicly demand that

  • the Board of Governors stops holding secret, undocumented meetings
  • the Board honours its duty to operate in a transparent and accountable fashion
  • an external review of its past practices takes place immediately

For more background on the issues leading to this protest, see this letter from the Faculty Association of UBC, which details how the BoG has, among other things, held committee meetings that left no official record, and made decisions about personnel matters without formal assessments or performance reviews.

Please share with all interested UBC people: faculty, students, alumni.

And faculty are encouraged to wear academic robes if they have them!

We have invited MLA David Eby, MLA Andrew Weaver, Minister Andrew Wilkinson, and President Arvind Gupta to join us and speak about these issues.

More details

Letter to @UBC President: time to lay down the mace #ubc100 #ubcnews #ubc #bced #highered #caut

Open Letter to UBC President Piper:
Time to Lay Down the Mace

It has been an emotional year for the University of British Columbia. As budgets moved from Central, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada launched Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future. The residential university and college take on new meaning. As we launched the celebration of our Centennial at UBC 100, our President resigned under a cloak of secrecy. As we began to party, we launched an investigation to discover the lengths to which a Chair of the Board of Governors and administrators might go to suppress academic freedom. Now, as we march to Convocation, students and alumni launch evidence that UBC is failing to properly respond to sexual assaults on campus.

In the meantime, terrorists and terror struck Sharm el-Sheikh, Beirut and Paris while the dogs of war howl for bombers and drones to command from the skies above. Increasingly larger regions of the world live in a state of emergency.

It’s difficult to know where this University now stands or what it stands for.

To take a stand symbolic of peace and reconciliation, please lay down the mace for ceremonies and Convocation. Please put away the coat of arms and lay down the mace. If not for good, then how about for peace?

It is time to retire this symbol of aggression, authority and war. It’s time to march to graduation ceremonies this week with open and empty hands as symbolic of peace and reconciliation of controversies and roles of the President’s Office.

UBC’s mace is a relic but a relic of what? The mace is symbolic speech but what is it saying about us now?

From ancient times, this club, this weapon of assault and offence, the mace was gradually adorned until the late twelfth century when it doubled as a symbol of civil office. Queen Elizabeth I granted her royal mace to Oxford in 1589. From military and civil power derives academic authority. The rest is history and it is not all good.

Dr. Thomas Lemieux, School of Economics with UBC’s Mace at the May 2015 Convocation.

Dr. Thomas Lemieux, School of Economics, with UBC’s Mace at the May 2015 Convocation.

It is time to retire the macebearer, whose importance is inflated every year by the image’s presence on UBC’s graduation pages leading to Convocation. In pragmatic terms, if the mace falls into the hands of the wrong macebearer or manager at this point, someone’s liable to get clocked with it.

Is UBC’s mace still a respectable appendage to Convocation?

Remember, since that fateful November day in 1997, just five months into your Presidency, when student activists put their bodies and minds on the line at the APEC protest, Tuum Est adorns both the can of mace sprayed in their eyes and the ceremonial mace that the President’s Office is eager to carry across campus every November and May. That’s “too messed,” as the students say.

Is it not time to retire both?

Why we should fear University, Inc. #UBC #highered #aaup #caut #bced

Fredrick deBoer, New York Times, September 9, 2015– …I don’t mean the literal corporations that are taking over more and more of the physical space of universities — the Starbucks outpost, the Barnes & Noble as campus bookstore, the Visa card that you use to buy meals at the dining hall. Enrolling at a university today means setting yourself up in a vast array of for-profit systems that each take a little slice along the way: student loans distributed on fee-laden A.T.M. cards, college theater tickets sold to you by Ticketmaster, ludicrously expensive athletic apparel brought to you by Nike. Students are presented with a dazzling array of advertisements and offers: glasses at the campus for-profit vision center, car insurance through some giant financial company, spring break through a package deal offered by some multinational. This explicit corporate invasion is not exactly what I mean.

No, I’m talking about the way universities operate, every day, more and more like corporations. As Benjamin Ginsberg details in his 2011 book, ‘‘The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters,’’ a constantly expanding layer of university administrative jobs now exists at an increasing remove from the actual academic enterprise. It’s not unheard-of for colleges now to employ more senior administrators than professors. There are, of course, essential functions that many university administrators perform, but such an imbalance is absurd — try imagining a high school with more vice principals than teachers. This legion of bureaucrats enables a world of pitiless surveillance; no segment of campus life, no matter how small, does not have some administrator who worries about it. Piece by piece, every corner of the average campus is being slowly made congruent with a single, totalizing vision. The rise of endless brushed-metal-and-glass buildings at Purdue represents the aesthetic dimension of this ideology. Bent into place by a small army of apparatchiks, the contemporary American [and Canadian, e.g., UBC] college is slowly becoming as meticulously art-directed and branded as a J. Crew catalog. Like Niketown or Disneyworld, your average college campus now leaves the distinct impression of a one-party state….

If students have adopted a litigious approach to regulating campus life, they are only working within the culture that colleges have built for them. When your environment so deeply resembles a Fortune 500 company, it makes sense to take every complaint straight to H.R. I don’t excuse students who so zealously pursue their vision of campus life that they file Title IX complaints against people whose opinions they don’t like. But I recognize their behavior as a rational response within a bureaucracy. It’s hard to blame people within a system — particularly people so young — who take advantage of structures they’ve been told exist to help them. The problem is that these structures exist for the institutions themselves, and thus the erosion of political freedom is ultimately a consequence of the institutions. When we identify students as the real threat to intellectual freedom on campus, we’re almost always looking in the wrong place.

Read More, NY Times

How not to run a university (Prologue + Trilogy)

Here are links to E. Wayne Ross’ commentaries on the ongoing leadership crisis at the University of British Columbia. All the commentaries have appeared on his blog and several have also appeared in the Vancouver Observer:

Threat Convergence: The New Academic Work by Petrina, Mathison & Ross #academicfreedom

THREAT CONVERGENCE:
THE NEW ACADEMIC WORK, BULLYING, MOBBING AND FREEDOM

Stephen Petrina, Sandra Mathison & E. Wayne Ross

The convergence of the casualization, fragmentation, intensification, segmentation, shifting and creep of academic work with the post-9/11 gentrificaton of criticism and dissent is arguably one of the greatest threats to academic freedom since the Nazi elimination of the Jewish professoriate and critique in 1933, Bantu Education Act’s reinforcement of apartheid in South Africa in 1952, and McCarthyism in Canada and the US in the 1950s and 1960s. In the history of education, this would be quite the claim yet the evidence seems to speak for itself. Academic work has been fragmented into piecemeal modes and intensified as academics absorbed, through amalgamation, traditional clerical staff and counseling work. The balance of the academic workforce has been reduced and casualized or segmented to an “at whim,” insecure, unsalaried part-time labor pool, the 8-hour workday and 40-hour academic workweek collapsed to 60-80 hours, and the primary locus of academic work shifted off-campus as the workplace crept into the home and its communal establishments. Academic stress— manifested as burnout through amalgamation and creep of work, and as distress through bullying, mobbing and victimization— underwrites increases in leaves of absence. Non-tenure track faculty are hit particularly hard, indicating “contingency or the precariousness of their position” as relentless stressors.

Nowadays, it’s whimsical to reminisce about work-life balance and promises that the academic workforce will be renewed as boomers retire with baited expectations, or that the workweek and workplace for salaried full-timers could be contained within the seduction of flextime and telecommuting. In many ways, the flexible workplace is the plan for boomers by boomers with both nest eggs and limits on retirement age breaking. As currency values, retirement portfolios, and savings spiral downward while dependent children and grandchildren and inflation spiral upward, incentives to retire erode. Precariously unemployed, underemployed and part-time academics aside, boomers still in the academic system are trended to face the biggest losses. As economic incentives to retire decrease, incentives for intellectual immortality and legacy management flourish with the boomers’ political leanings moving toward the center. One can hardly blame them.

Enthusiasts of anything “flexible” (learning, space, time, work, etc.) and everything “tele” (commuting, conference, learning, phone, work, etc.), academics readily workshift with additional liability but no additional remuneration— instead is an unquestioned acceptance of the “overtime exemption”— while the employer saves about $6,500 per year per worker in the tradeoff as worksite or workspace shifts from campus to home. The academic workweek is now conservatively 60 hours with many PT and FT reporting persistent 70-80 hour weeks. Perhaps academic women can finally have it all after putting in the 120 hour workweek. One reason institutions now cope with many fewer FT hires is that academics are all too willing to do the work of two. As Gina Anderson found a decade ago, “with apparently unconscious irony, many academics reported that they particularly valued the flexibility of their working week, in terms of both time and space… in the same breath as reporting working weeks in the order of 60 hours.” For most academic workers, the cost of flexibility is effectively a salary cut as overheads of electricity, heat, water, communication and consumables are shifted to the home. Carbon footprint reductions are a net benefit and for a minority, the savings of commuting and parking offset the costs of this homework or housework. What is the nature or implications of this increasing domestication of academic work and displacement of the academic workplace? For academic couples with or without children, the dynamics of housecohabitry, househusbandry or housewifery necessarily change as the academic workplace shifts and labor creeps into the home. With temptations to procrastinate on deluges of academic deadlines, academic homes have never been cleaner and more organized. Nevermind the technocreep of remote monitoring. Over the long run, although some administrators cling to the digital punch card and time stamp with HivedeskWorksnaps or MySammy, “smashing the clock” in the name of flextime and telework is about the best thing that ever happened to academic capitalism.

This is not exactly a SWOT analysis, where Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats are given due treatment. Rather, the focus is on this threat convergence as it resolves through historic displacements of the academic workplace and work. To what degree are the new policies for academic speech inscribed in academic work, regardless of where it’s done? As the academic workplace is increasingly displaced and distributed, are academic policies displaced and distributed as well? Observed at work, monitored at home and tracked in between—these are not so much choices as the cold reality of 21st century academic work.

Read More: Threat Convergence

We should have said #jesuischarlie before

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Emma-Kate Symons, Quartz, January 7, 2014– The world is rallying around satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the French people today, after masked assassins – uttering the prayer “God is Great” and invoking vengeance for the prophet Mohammed – massacred 12 in central Paris.

But the global solidarity with the heroic cartoonists, writers and editors of this struggling weekly publication, targeted and murdered by terrorists during their weekly news conference, and victims of a fire-bomb attack on their office and years of death threats from Islamists, comes far too late.

Charlie Hebdo, which has published on and off since 1969, is proudly anti-organised religion and congenitally politically incorrect.

On a shoestring budget it has been fighting the good fight for freedom of thought and expression and a secular public space for years when many were ambivalent.

For its courage it has run into frequent trouble with local and international Islamofascists, having been forced to move its headquarters several times following threats and a fire bombing, notably after it published an edition in 2011 called “Charia Hebdo”.

Its editors had also annoyed and irritated political leaders in its native France, in Britain, and the United States.

When it bravely republished the infamous Danish cartoons mocking the prophet Mohammed in 2006, even as fundamentalist leaders incited demonstrators to violence around the world, it earned a notorious rebuke from president Jacques Chirac who condemned its “overt provocation“.

As I reported from Paris at the time, then Charlie Hebdo publisher Philippe Val hit back at Chirac, saying he was “shocked” the French head of state would accuse the magazine of inflaming passions.

It is not a provocation. The provocation began well before – the fire was sparked on September 11 in New York, and in the attacks on London and on Madrid.

When there were the attacks on Madrid, on London, did we see the Arab street demonstrating because some assassins had committed horrible crimes in the name of Mohammed? We cannot leave it to religious groups to dictate the laws of freedom of expression.

Some in the Bush administration, wary of violence across the Islamic world, joined in the chorus calling for limits on press freedom. The British foreign secretary Jack Straw deplored newspapers’ “insensitivity and lack of respect”. The elite media in these two countries was also far from unanimous in its support.

Even in Paris over the past week, leading figures in the French fourth estate have been condemning the novelist Michel Houellebecq for allegedly bringing extreme right wing ideas into literature with the publication of his incendiary novel Submission.

The book depicts a France in 2022 governed by an Islamist political party. But Houllebecq is now part of this drama having been featured on the cover of this week’s edition of Charlie Hebdo. So what do editors like Laurent Joffrin at Libération newspaper now have to say? Should the novelist, like the editorial staff at Charlie Hebdo, have held their tongues and their pens?

Horribly, the scene at Charlie Hebdo is worthy of an excerpt from a novel by Houllebecq, and eerily echoes his reading of the Koran: “The obvious conclusion is that the jihadists are bad Muslims … an honest reading will conclude that a holy war of aggression is not generally sanctioned, prayer alone is valid.”

But this is not fiction and it is too easy to dismiss the role of religion and, yes, jihadi prayer in this horror.

France has Europe’s largest Muslim population, rising support for the anti-Islam extreme right, a growing problem with homegrown terrorism, fuelled by hundreds who have fought alongside Islamic State and al-Qaeda in Syria and elsewhere, and also the strongest commitment to the secular separation of church and state of almost any Western democracy.

It has a huge job on its hands trying to manage all its internal conflicts, and the sheer shock and fury this attack has created. This is a tipping point akin to the violence that followed the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1988.

Beyond the immediate political fallout, the “greatest” to emerge from this crime expressly motivated by religious fanaticism are not God, the “avenged” prophet, or Islamist extremism – even if the death cult we associate with IS and Al Qaeda has come to the heart of the city of lights, and the Enlightenment, for centuries a refuge for intellectuals, writers, and artists.

Despite the murderers’ prayers invoking God and Allah, the heroes in this horror are the creative minds of this noble publication. Atheistic agitators, they fought literally to the death for freedom of thought and expression, the liberty to offend, and the right to be iconoclasts.

Their fidelity to the fundamental values of democracy, even as many around the world and in France found their editorial line too “provocative” or “offensive”, will long endure after these killers are brought to justice.

They died as they lived: standing up for their principles, the principles the French first fought for in the 1789 Revolution. Their only “weapons” were their illustrating pens and their words.

The martyred editor-in-chief and beloved illustrator “Charb” said it best in 2012, after years of attacks against his magazine:

I am not afraid of reprisals. I don’t have kids, I don’t have a wife, I don’t have a car, I don’t have credit. This may sound a bit pompous but I would prefer to die standing than to live on my knees.

Read More: Quartz

#Nous sommes tous Charlie #charliehebdo

Nous

Female students open letter to #Dalhousie president Florizone #highered #ubc

Photo by Stephen Puddicombe/CBC

Photo by Stephen Puddicombe/CBC

CBC News, January 6, 2015–A group of fourth-year female students from Dalhousie University’s faculty of dentistry have written an open letter to the president of the school, saying they feel pressured to accept the restorative justice process to resolve the Facebook scandal that has rocked the school.

In a two-page letter addressed to Richard Florizone and disclosed to CBC News on Tuesday, the four unnamed students say they are not willing to accept the university’s response to the Facebook page called the Class of DDS 2015 Gentlemen.

The page was created by some male students in the fourth-year dentistry class and contained misogynistic and sexually explicit posts, including a poll about having “hate” sex with female students and comments about drugging women.

The women say in their letter that they “do not wish for the sexual harassment and discrimination perpetrated by members of our class to be dealt with through this restorative justice process.”

“The university is pressuring us into this process, silencing our views, isolating us from our peers, and discouraging us from choosing to proceed formally,” says the letter.

“This has perpetuated our experience of discrimination. This approach falls far below what we expected from you, and what we believe we deserve.”

The women also say they are concerned about their future at the school.

‘We have serious concerns’

“Telling us that we can either participate in restorative justice or file a formal complaint is presenting us with a false choice. We have serious concerns about the impact of filing formal complaints on our chances of academic success at the faculty of dentistry, and believe that doing so would jeopardize our futures,” they wrote.

“The reason we have not filed formal complaints is also the reason we have not signed our names to this letter.”

Read Letter: Open Letter to President Richard Florizone

 … We are writing this open letter to inform you that, after considering the information that was presented in that meeting, we do not wish for the sexual harassment and discrimination perpetrated by members of our class to be dealt with through this restorative justice process or under the Sexual Harassment Policy. We feel that the University is pressuring us into this process, silencing our views, isolating us from our peers, and discouraging us from choosing to proceed formally. This has perpetuated our experience of discrimination. This approach falls far below what we expected from you, and what we believe we deserve….

Read More: CBC

Lilia D. Monzó & Peter McLaren on Red Love: Toward Racial, Economic and Social Justice #handsup #highered #criticaled #race

Lilia D. Monzó & Peter McLaren, Truthout, December 18, 2014– Racism is exacerbated by a capitalist production process that teaches us that some people have a God-given right to pursue their economic and social interests without regard for other people’s right to thrive, free of fear for their own survival. The antidote is red love.

The Slaughter-Bench of Race

It seems that it is an everlasting open hunting season in the United States and the kills are Black men. The senseless killing of unarmed Black young man Michael Brown by a White police officer and the grand jury’s decision to allow the officer to walk without facing a trial through a faltering prosecutorial process (that aims to defend when the target of indictment is a police officer) has brought Ferguson, Missouri, and other communities across the country to their feet in loud and incendiary protest.

Approximately 50 protesters on a 120-mile march from Ferguson to Jefferson City decrying the shooting death of Brown were met with counter-protesters all along the route. Especially stomach-churning was the reception given to the protesters in the sleepy hollow of Rosebud, where the caterwauling and public scouring was most intense as 200 residents screeched at the protesters to “go home and get jobs” along a route littered with 40-ounce beer bottles, watermelons, Confederate flags and fried chicken, and where at least one concerned citizen was wearing a makeshift white hood, redolent of the vile knights of the “Invisible Empire.”

While the corporate media has suggested that the violent response by some protesters – property damage and looting in some instances – diminishes the authentic call for “change” – i.e., a demilitarization of the police, improved police-community relations, urban job creation, increased sensitivity training regarding race among police force recruits – it is hard to ignore the storied observation by Frantz Fanon that violence is oftentimes the only possible response by communities that have lived through centuries of violence – slavery, joblessness, poverty, police profiling, the school-to-prison pipeline and a military-industrial complex that thrives upon the deaths and killing of Black and Brown young men.

In the wake of this blow to the Black community, we have seen a string of similar White police killings of unarmed Black men and an unwillingness to indict them. These include the killing of Eric Garner who was caught on video repeating the words, “I can’t breathe,” 11 times as a New York Police Department officer had him in a chokehold that has been banned by the NYPD for years; the killing of Rumain Brisbon in Phoenix, Arizona; the killing of a 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, who was holding a toy gun in a park and shot within two seconds of police arriving on the scene; and the killing of Akai Gurley, a young man who was fatally shot by a rookie NYPD officer in a dark public housing stairwell in Brooklyn. With the growing confidence among White police officers that Black men are fair game for killing without consequences, how many more of our Black children’s lives will we lose?

In the cases of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and Akai Gurley, the police did not make any effort to assist their dying victims. In the case of Gurley, the officers who shot him – in true “cover your ass fashion” – decided to text their union representative while ignoring calls from the police and medics. Six and a half minutes went by before they finally radioed for assistance. It wasn’t until a detective and FBI agent arrived at the scene of the Tamir Rice slaying that the victim received any first aid. In Eric Garner’s case, numerous police officers stared at his unconscious handcuffed body for seven crucial minutes instead of performing urgent CPR or frantically seeking professional medical assistance. In the case of Michael Brown, we know that his body lay lifeless on a Ferguson street for four hours before it was carted off to the local morgue. While some have attempted to justify police killings of Black men as a function of the job demand for quick decisions and their own survival instincts, this unconscionable and merciless failure to attempt to save these men’s lives, points to something much deeper.

Astonishingly, we are now hearing backlash against protesters that Black men must be suicidal since they are acting in ways that are surely to get them killed. It seems no matter what the circumstance, the narratives shift in order to maintain the sanctity of the White cop. The institutionalized and pretentious discourse of conservative talk show hosts now includes remarks to the effect of: “If Garner can say ‘I can’t breathe’ 11 times, then he can breathe” (obviously these self-proclaimed “critics” don’t realize that being pinned down by police may prevent lungs from re-expanding, forcing out the functional reserve capacity of air while the expiratory reserve volume – which is not oxygenated and basically exists as carbon dioxide gas – still permits vocalization). This vicious insensitivity from the frenetic ranks of these racist prodigies have ripped away any cosmetic prostheses hiding the seething subterranean animus of the White population who have inherited a historical proclivity to blame Blacks for their own suffering and who continue to do so with an increasingly smug impunity.

Given the rancid history of racial violence in the United States, should we be aghast at the audacity of White police officers who continue to shoot first and show little restraint prior or remorse after, and at the imperviousness of prosecutors and grand juries that see only through the dominant lens, justifying the growing epidemic of Black killings by White cops as a “natural” reaction to fearing for their lives? Protesters are demanded to show restraint in a country that has shown no restraint in killing Black communities and other communities of color – physically, psychologically and economically. While we do not advocate for violence, we understand how centuries of pain and humiliation can result in a pent-up rage that eventually explodes.

More recently, African-Americans face the grim new reality of moving from the super-exploited sector of the working class to being even more marginalized as capitalists switched from drawing on Black labor in favor of Latino/a immigrant labor as a super-exploited workforce. As a result of increased structural marginalization, African-Americans are subject to what William Robinson describesas “heightened disenfranchisement, criminalization, a bogus ‘war on drugs,’ mass incarceration and police and state terror, seen by the system as necessary to control a superfluous and potentially rebellious population.”

Racism is not a natural phenomenon, but one that has been produced within each and every institution of our society. Racism is exacerbated through a capitalist production process that teaches us that some people have a God-given right to pursue their own economic and social interests with little regard for the right of every human being and other living organism to thrive in the world free of fear for their own survival and with dignity and freedom. Racism stems from a world that has lost its ability to recognize its social nature and absolute need to love one another. While we must work to make people safe today, we must also consider the long-term goal of anti-racist struggle, which in our view is one and the same as class struggle, such that a new world order, one free from class and founded on love, interdependence, social responsibility, equality and freedom can thrive.

Read More: Truthout

Symposium: Public Engagement and the Politics of Evidence in an Age of Neoliberalism and Audit Culture #highered #criticaled #caut #aaup

Public Engagement and the Politics of Evidence in an Age of Neoliberalism and Audit Culture

July 23-25, 2015

Faculty of Education, University of Regina

This symposium will examine accelerating trends in higher education: neoliberalism, the politics of evidence, and the audit culture. In an age in which value is often equated with accountancy, we will examine the place in the academy for public intellectualism, community-engagement, Indigenous epistemologies, and how the impact of our scholarship is, and ought to be, justly assessed. Invited presenters will provoke lively discussion, but going beyond discussion, and blurring the lines between presenter and audience member, participants will be invited to engage actively with other presenter/participants in attendance for the purpose of effecting changes at their home institutions. Opportunities will be available for reconsidering and strategizing academic issues such as faculty criteria documents, measurement rankings, traditional impact factors, and other academic matters affected by the politics of austerity, neoliberalism, and new management technologies. Action will also be encouraged through submissions to a special issue of in education (the University of Regina Faculty of Education’s journal), potentially collaborating on an edited book, TED-style dissemination videos, producing a list of recommendations, developing examples of inclusive faculty criteria documents, possibly developing a community impact factor as an alternative to journal impact factor metrics, and further actions as collectively discussed at the symposium.

Questions to be explored include:

  • What counts as scholarship and why?
  • How do we achieve accountability in an age of accountancy?
  • How do we measure research impact, (i.e., journal impact factor vs community and policy impact)?
  • Impact for whom?
  • Who and how do we determine whose evidence and what research is legitimate?
  • What can be done? How do we effect change to university practices?

Talks moving forward despite police attacks on #HongKongStudents #scholarism

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James Legge, The Independent, October 19, 2014–Pro-democracy demonstrators returned to the streets of Hong Kong on Sunday night, undeterred by two days of violent clashes with police.

Some came equipped with helmets and home-made foam arm protectors to defend them against police batons. “I will continue to stay here until C Y [Leung, the city’s chief executive] resigns,” said Lap Cheung, 40, who left his IT job in the United States to return to Hong Kong for the protests. He added he had no hope of a breakthrough tomorrow at planned talks between student leaders and the authorities. The negotiations will be televised live.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, officers used pepper spray on demonstrators in the shopping district of Mong Kok, parts of which have been closed to road traffic by the demonstrators since the end of September.

The protests were sparked by anger over Beijing’s proposal for electing the city’s next chief executive in 2017. The plan, set out in August, dictates that all candidates require majority approval from a committee of mostly pro-Beijing members of the city’s elite. But Mr Leung suggested yesterday one area where the protesters might find concessions is in the make-up of that screening committee. He said: “There will be plenty of room for us to talk about how we can structure a nomination system so that we have genuine choice of candidates come 2017.”

He maintained that certain things remain off the table, reiterating that civic nomination, under which Hongkongers would put up their own candidates, would run contrary to the Basic Law – the mini-constitution under which Hong Kong is governed from Beijing but maintains greater freedoms than the mainland.

During the two-hour talks, Carrie Lam, the city’s chief secretary, will lead the government team, and five members of the Hong Kong Federation of students – including Lester Shum and Alex Chow – will represent the protesters. Both Mr Shum and Mr Chow have become well-known spokesmen for the mostly leaderless occupations, which are focused on the city’s political and financial power centre.

This is the third time both sides have agreed to meet for talks, but looks like being the first meeting actually to take place. The first was called off by protesters after violence from a counter-protest, and the second was cancelled by the government after it accused students of trying to use the meeting to rally more demonstrators.

On Sunday in Mong Kok occupiers attempted to grab territory on the arterial Nathan Road. Scuffles erupted before police surged forward with riot shields, forcing the protesters back. Dozens of people, including at least 22 police, were reportedly injured in the two consecutive nights of clashes going into yesterday morning.

The police chief superintendent Hui Chun-tak said the crowd included “activists from radical organisations as well as trouble-makers” and that four men were arrested.

He said protesters “charged the police cordon, trying to occupy the road junction. Repeated warnings were issued to stop charging the cordon. However, they were all ignored.”

Mr Leung said authorities would continue trying to clear the streets “in parallel” with the dialogue. This two-pronged strategy has fanned protesters’ anger further, with many major voices in the movement claiming that the continued attempts at clearance call into question Mr Leung’s sincerity in offering the talks.

In Mong Kok, protesters appeared defiant and also angry that the city government was portraying their campaign as increasingly radicalised and violent. Igloo Novas, a student, told Reuters that Hong Kong leaders must tell Beijing the “truth”, that the majority of Hong Kong people wanted to choose candidates in elections freely. “This is one compromise I can accept from the government,” she said.

Read More: The Independent

Police removing #HongKongStudents barriers #scholarism

CBC, October 12, 2014– Hong Kong police began on Monday to remove barricades erected by pro-democracy protesters who have occupied several sites around the Chinese-controlled city for two weeks, according to protest group Occupy Central.

At the main protest site, around government offices in the downtown district of Admiralty, scores of student protesters faced off with police who were massing in the area, a Reuters witness said. The Hong Kong government has said the demonstrations are illegal.

On Saturday, student leaders issued an open letter to Chinese President Xi Jinping, urging him to consider political reforms in the city and blaming the city’s unpopular leader for the demonstrations.

The letter, issued by two student groups leading the protests, said Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying was responsible for a civil disobedience campaign that has seen tens of thousands of people throng the semi-autonomous city’s key thoroughfares over the past two weeks.

Thousands of demonstrators showed up in the main protest zone on Saturday, two days after Hong Kong’s government called off scheduled negotiations with students who are demanding voters have a greater say in choosing the city’s leader in 2017 elections.

The protesters have vowed to keep up the demonstrations until the government responds to their demands.

“Students walked out of classes and are occupying different places now because Leung and others have repeatedly ignored what the people want,” the letter read. “If the central government is confident, it should not be afraid to let Hong Kong people elect their own chief executive.”

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said Friday that he was confident Hong Kong’s government can preserve “social stability.” He did not directly mention the protests, but stressed that Beijing won’t change its “one country, two systems” approach to running Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, a Chinese state-run newspaper blamed the United States for being behind the protests — a claim the U.S. State Department strongly rejected.

Read More: CBC

#HongKongStudents increase pressure, government backs out of talks #scholarism

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Daniel Schearf, Voice of America, October 12, 2014– Pro-democracy protest leaders in Hong Kong have vowed to continue their occupation of city streets after the Chinese territory’s leader soundly rejected their demands. Hong Kong’s chief executive also called their movement “out of control” and said it could not last very long.

Protesters Sunday voiced defiance after Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying said there was ‘zero chance’ of meeting their demands.

In an interview with TVB, Hong Kong’s Beijing-approved leader said China would never rescind its decision against open nomination of candidates for the chief executive post.

Leung also dismissed protester demands that he resign for allegedly failing to uphold Hong Kong’s constitution, the Basic Law.

Criticizes decision

Lester Shum, deputy secretary-general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students and a protest leader, said, “What C.Y. Leung, the chief executive, said, showed that the Hong Kong government still refuse to take the responsibility to face the political issue made by, or caused by, the Hong Kong government.”

Hong Kong is to hold a much anticipated first direct election for chief executive in 2017 as part of the Chinese territory’s unique “One Country, Two Systems” status.

But China’s National People’s Congress in August set out a plan that allows Beijing-leaning officials in Hong Kong to choose the candidates the public would be allowed to vote on.

The limitation on the former British colony’s democracy sparked students to boycott classes and lead the occupation of city streets, now in its third week.

Talks canceled

The number of protesters had declined in recent days, but got a boost Friday night when thousands answered a call to rally at the main demonstration site next to government offices.

Authorities had canceled a dialogue on constitutional reform with protest leaders Friday after calls for a new wave of civil disobedience.

Despite the boost, Shum acknowledged they are struggling to maintain the momentum of the movement as it is challenged by those disturbed by the barricaded streets.

“Yeah, I believe this movement has come to face a very difficult problem,” Shum said.

“It’s that … the government use every tactics to wish to delay our movement, to wish us to come home or give up our occupation. So, what we are going to do, or what we are facing is how we can convince the Hong Kong citizens and students to support us, to still support this occupation movement,” he said.

Groups of people opposed to the occupation, including taxi and truck drivers, have demonstrated against it. There are also sporadic arguments and fights with protesters.

Protesters add tents

Nonetheless, demonstrators over the weekend added new tents to the streets around government offices in a show of defiance and determination to develop a genuine democracy.

The protest became known as the “umbrella revolution” after protesters used umbrellas to peacefully defend themselves against police tear gas and pepper spray.

People hung notes of support shaped like umbrellas to a large, wire sculpture of an umbrella and added post-it notes to those already plastered on a nearby wall.

Frankie Lam, who brought his two children to see the demonstration, said Hong Kong authorities should stop making excuses for not allowing them to directly elect their leaders.

“They can do it. Just whether they are willing to do so. So, I think, for now, the Hong Kong people will try to … cooperate with each other, to try to fight …  (against) this unfair treatment,” Lam said.

When asked whether he thinks the protesters will succeed, Lam replied, “I don’t know. But, if you never ever try, you will never ever know. Just try our best to do something for our … for the next generation.”

Lam’s elementary school-aged son posted a note that read “Do Not Give Up” in Chinese characters.

Read More: VoA