Wow, reading all these letters by NYU faculty to the office of the president is quite something. Do read them all. Highlighting one by History Professor Steven Hahn, as it encapsulates everything (in one screenshot). #Gaza#campusprotests
@pvonhellermannn Thanks for sharing. I think we professors in the US have to take a moment to realize what the power of tenure is and why the political right wants to take it away from universities. So many of my colleagues viscerally fear using it when university administrations become long arms of governments trying to eliminate #DEI funding, harassing certain research fields, or squelching protest. I am happy to see these sternly worded letters to university presidents, but there are bigger uses of tenure, like turning classes into teach-ins until situations are remedied, not teaching, etc. But to do it we need solidarity. That has been lacking due to fear.
@Brad_Rosenheim@pvonhellermannn
Turning classes into teach-ins is rad in ALL of the ways. 🙌🏻 💗 And yeah, solidarity makes so much more possible. When we all risk together, we lose less and potentially gain everything.
So many times since March 2020, teachers across this country--from preschool to postgrad--have had good reason to band together and simply stop providing labor until whatever current flavor of nonsense gets deflected or changed. (Pay, tenture, DEI, guns, research funding, testing, book bans, etc.)
And yet... fear (and significantly, the desire not to do harm to young people) has kept any meaningful solidarity of action from happening. I get that, too.
I always wonder (as with our lack of gun laws) what it would take. How many professors have to be led away in cuffs and/or suspended?
Perhaps more importantly, how late is too late--when will monied leadership and police military force be powerful enough to crush any and all future attempts at resistance? Or is it already too late, and we're all just fooling ourselves? I'm thinking here of Hong Kong, and just HOW HARD the students fought. Didn't change the outcome one little bit, because China, because monied power, because extreme surveillance state.
Thanks for bringing up tenure. I am a full-time lecturer but not on a tenure track. At my age, I can't risk losing this job.
However, to some extent, every class can be a teach-in. For example, I teach game programming. So I ask my class what they would do about the industry being so unwelcoming. I teach digital media. So I tell my students about the infamous "Lena" picture, why it became pervasive, and that it still circulates.
Brother, that is all the solution there is. Fortunately, it is also all the solution we need.
Forget about persuasion, argument, debate, or even logic, facts, or evidence. The folks out to make America a feudal state (most of whom don't realize they'd be vassals) are beyond the reach of anything so quaint as reason. We only have one path, but it does reach our goal:
Yup, that's how they work. Choose the outcome you like, then support it with either rational or emotional energy, whichever works best.
It is ugly, isn't it? He found a way to bring the worst of America into the mainstream. Now, things people would never say in public are becoming commonplace. Guess we should be glad it's on such open display. Maybe there's still time to contain it.