MCarthyism at CUNY!
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--
Don't panic. We don't have much in the way of Joe McCarthyism at CUNY any more. I am talking about the Charlie McCarthy version -- the puppet of Edgar Bergen, comic entertainer of my youth:
http://www.old-time.com/otrlogs2/charlie_mg.html
The above dire directive comes to me when I try to post to our single CUNY-wide email system run by a group of elderly ladies of both genders who (mis)function as our CUNY Faculty Senate. These types are elected out of our various college senates and no one in his/her right mind now undertakes this pointless, do nothing labor. However, the power of the powerless is the power to deny -- and so this group does its thing along this line -- influenced by some of our most right-wing faculty members who hang in there and squelch any commentary that criticizes or even raises the political issues that so impact upon our society and our terribly under funded universities. We have about 200 out of 4 or 5 thousand full time faculty members who are members of the nasties (NAS with its CUNYAS subsection): http://www.nas.org/
I know some of these types all too well, as they were once colleagues of mine at Hunter College. I had returned to Hunter from Vassar because I had gotten hooked on CUNY while working with kids excluded from it in West Harlem and had a productive 3 years there during which I did my first papers and articles and put together my major field text, Law and Philosophy, (See Edward Allen Kent on Google) which was needed to fill a gap in my renewed field at that time, philosophy of law. In my last year at Hunter, I declined the offer to serve as chair, helped the students organize an anti Viet Nam war conference with my mentor, John Bennett, President of Union Theological Seminary, where I had studied as principal speaker, served as department representative to the Hunter Senate, philosophy major advisor, and was voted out of the department by my colleagues with guess which nastie then as chair? I was glad to get out of the place, as students were being abused by such practices as lumping together 3 introductory philosophy classes in a lecture hall (counting for 3/4 of a teaching load and allowing my nasty colleagues to absent themselves to the Graduate Center where their hearts really lay).
I have always believed in speaking out against injustices and to hell with the consequences. I had, as an undergrad at Yale and editor of the student paper and de facto student government in one person, blown the cover of Yale's anti-Semitic policies -- rare Jewish appointments to the faculty and an anti-Jewish quota for admission of students (especially no Eastern Europeans wanted), special admission for 40 dumb sons of wealthy alums, tolerance of drunken group rapes in frats and dorms (e.g. DKE which sponsored "Pig Night," sending pledges to drag in 'ugly' town girls to be told how it really was at midnight when they were tossed out on to High Street. This was Bush's frat where his glad hand and nicknames for every one got him elected to his first presidency -- apparently the only thing he did or learned to do at Yale).
Back to CUNY -- I had been warned against teaching there by my own mentor and dissertation advisor, Columbia University Professor Ernest Nagel, one of the distinguished students of Morris R. Cohen of CCNY who had taught brilliant Jewish students from Brooklyn (excluded from the Ivies) who went on to be the leaders in our field -- including Sidney Hook, Paul Weiss (also one of my teachers). Nagel suggested that people who went into CUNY then disappeared. Conditions were, indeed, horrible. Teaching loads were oversized, the McCarthy era, so the old timers told me, had divided the faculty into three categories: former Communists, friends of former Communists, and those secretly reporting the first two groups to J. Edgar Hoover. The atmosphere to put it mildly was fearful -- good people ducking and weaving like sheep. And the only worse thing then than being in one of the first two categories above was to be gay -- as we discovered were both Joe McCarthy and his minions and Hoover!
Leaving Hunter was a blessing for me. My next year was a delightful one as visiting prof at Barnard, teaching their honors majors course and also a grad course at Columbia on Church and State. I also enjoyed immensely moon lighting my philosophy of law course at CCNY where mine was the only class in the department allowed by SDS to complete the spring revolutionary semester and where I got to award the Morris R. Cohen prize to the best student paper -- a hard choice with many excellent ones. Thereafter I had my choice of CUNY colleges and picked out Brooklyn as having the strongest philosophy department and what looked like an harmonious one. It immediately blew up and I found myself chairing it. I had accepted an Associate Professorship there, but as soon as I had turned down other offers the sneaky dean at the time claimed that he had plumb run out of Associate lines so I would have to accept his promise of promotion the next year (not honored) and Assoc. Prof. pay. Thereafter a really corrupt, weak president (eventually fired) removed me from the chair several times to which my colleagues reelected me, as we built the strongest department between Princeton and Harvard, which we are once again doing. I was also went to work with Carlos Russell ("Thinking It Through" these days on WLIB after midnight) putting together a new School of Contemporary Studies downtown:
http://www.wlib.com/bevan.htm
I am good at academic problem solving and have done a good bit of it at Brooklyn where I see my students as wider family.
Needless to say, I have a few contributory comments for to make to CUNY collagues on the basis of having taught in 3 of its colleges (Hunter, CCNY, and Brooklyn) since 1966. But as you can see from the above, I am one of the many banned from posting to our one and only CUNY-wide list. I have set up a number of alternative ones, indicated below my signature. These continue to grow and include many CUNY students and faculty and thousands of others to which I report, as I will do with this posting, by blind copy. I am one of those liberated from administrative responsibilities for vulnerable junior colleagues, senior enough to tell off even our presidents when they goof up. I have a number of distinguished contributors as advisors to my student list to which this report will go as well as to other lists.
What is wrong and right with CUNY now?
1) Our board appointed mainly by a parochial college grad (Giuliani) and right-wing Ivy Leaguer (Pataki) is starving us for funds and forcing us to do increasing percentages of our teaching with part-timers. It is NOT fighting with Albany for funds, but sitting on its posteriors, smugly missing meetings and in the case of its chair, Benno Schmidt, making out like a bandit with his Edison endeavors (he sold off millions of his Edison stock just before they went bust).
We have an extraordinary Chancellor, Matt Goldstein, a CCNY grad, himself, who keeps us running, almost single-handedly.
We have dedicated faculty hard at work with their excellent teaching and scholarship.
2) We are horribly abusing our part-timers and our junior faculty who cannot afford to live in NYC and raise families here. We are going to lose more of the best of them who either do not have wives making big bucks or parents helping out.
3) Our pathetic University Senate is blocking essential communication among our various constituencies -- families of students, students, alums, faculty, and the many others such as Ron McGuire who has been dealing with abuses of students by the few uncontrolled campus security operations (e.g. Hostos and CCNY). I know all about these as I conferred extensively about the abuses and the responsibility for them of the college administrators who allow them with Jose Eliques, our former head of CUNY security (ex-FBI) who quit in disgust.
4) We have an excellent, dedicated, hard-working union, PSC (Professional Staff Congress), but it is blocked by the board and pols as mentioned above and we cannot strike without massive penalties from the Taylor law designed to keep police and fire on the job, but applying to us as well as public employees. It is cruel to use our love of our students to abuse our underpaid junior faculty this way. The above mentioned Faculty Senate ladies, of course, have built up healthy pensions from our better days and are collecting Social Security on top of that! Shame on them!
There is more to be said about good things. We have extraordinary students now from all over the world -- we have about 140 philosophy majors at Brooklyn College alone now heading towards careers in the various professions.
So it goes at CUNY.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp
--
Don't panic. We don't have much in the way of Joe McCarthyism at CUNY any more. I am talking about the Charlie McCarthy version -- the puppet of Edgar Bergen, comic entertainer of my youth:
http://www.old-time.com/otrlogs2/charlie_mg.html
The above dire directive comes to me when I try to post to our single CUNY-wide email system run by a group of elderly ladies of both genders who (mis)function as our CUNY Faculty Senate. These types are elected out of our various college senates and no one in his/her right mind now undertakes this pointless, do nothing labor. However, the power of the powerless is the power to deny -- and so this group does its thing along this line -- influenced by some of our most right-wing faculty members who hang in there and squelch any commentary that criticizes or even raises the political issues that so impact upon our society and our terribly under funded universities. We have about 200 out of 4 or 5 thousand full time faculty members who are members of the nasties (NAS with its CUNYAS subsection): http://www.nas.org/
I know some of these types all too well, as they were once colleagues of mine at Hunter College. I had returned to Hunter from Vassar because I had gotten hooked on CUNY while working with kids excluded from it in West Harlem and had a productive 3 years there during which I did my first papers and articles and put together my major field text, Law and Philosophy, (See Edward Allen Kent on Google) which was needed to fill a gap in my renewed field at that time, philosophy of law. In my last year at Hunter, I declined the offer to serve as chair, helped the students organize an anti Viet Nam war conference with my mentor, John Bennett, President of Union Theological Seminary, where I had studied as principal speaker, served as department representative to the Hunter Senate, philosophy major advisor, and was voted out of the department by my colleagues with guess which nastie then as chair? I was glad to get out of the place, as students were being abused by such practices as lumping together 3 introductory philosophy classes in a lecture hall (counting for 3/4 of a teaching load and allowing my nasty colleagues to absent themselves to the Graduate Center where their hearts really lay).
I have always believed in speaking out against injustices and to hell with the consequences. I had, as an undergrad at Yale and editor of the student paper and de facto student government in one person, blown the cover of Yale's anti-Semitic policies -- rare Jewish appointments to the faculty and an anti-Jewish quota for admission of students (especially no Eastern Europeans wanted), special admission for 40 dumb sons of wealthy alums, tolerance of drunken group rapes in frats and dorms (e.g. DKE which sponsored "Pig Night," sending pledges to drag in 'ugly' town girls to be told how it really was at midnight when they were tossed out on to High Street. This was Bush's frat where his glad hand and nicknames for every one got him elected to his first presidency -- apparently the only thing he did or learned to do at Yale).
Back to CUNY -- I had been warned against teaching there by my own mentor and dissertation advisor, Columbia University Professor Ernest Nagel, one of the distinguished students of Morris R. Cohen of CCNY who had taught brilliant Jewish students from Brooklyn (excluded from the Ivies) who went on to be the leaders in our field -- including Sidney Hook, Paul Weiss (also one of my teachers). Nagel suggested that people who went into CUNY then disappeared. Conditions were, indeed, horrible. Teaching loads were oversized, the McCarthy era, so the old timers told me, had divided the faculty into three categories: former Communists, friends of former Communists, and those secretly reporting the first two groups to J. Edgar Hoover. The atmosphere to put it mildly was fearful -- good people ducking and weaving like sheep. And the only worse thing then than being in one of the first two categories above was to be gay -- as we discovered were both Joe McCarthy and his minions and Hoover!
Leaving Hunter was a blessing for me. My next year was a delightful one as visiting prof at Barnard, teaching their honors majors course and also a grad course at Columbia on Church and State. I also enjoyed immensely moon lighting my philosophy of law course at CCNY where mine was the only class in the department allowed by SDS to complete the spring revolutionary semester and where I got to award the Morris R. Cohen prize to the best student paper -- a hard choice with many excellent ones. Thereafter I had my choice of CUNY colleges and picked out Brooklyn as having the strongest philosophy department and what looked like an harmonious one. It immediately blew up and I found myself chairing it. I had accepted an Associate Professorship there, but as soon as I had turned down other offers the sneaky dean at the time claimed that he had plumb run out of Associate lines so I would have to accept his promise of promotion the next year (not honored) and Assoc. Prof. pay. Thereafter a really corrupt, weak president (eventually fired) removed me from the chair several times to which my colleagues reelected me, as we built the strongest department between Princeton and Harvard, which we are once again doing. I was also went to work with Carlos Russell ("Thinking It Through" these days on WLIB after midnight) putting together a new School of Contemporary Studies downtown:
http://www.wlib.com/bevan.htm
I am good at academic problem solving and have done a good bit of it at Brooklyn where I see my students as wider family.
Needless to say, I have a few contributory comments for to make to CUNY collagues on the basis of having taught in 3 of its colleges (Hunter, CCNY, and Brooklyn) since 1966. But as you can see from the above, I am one of the many banned from posting to our one and only CUNY-wide list. I have set up a number of alternative ones, indicated below my signature. These continue to grow and include many CUNY students and faculty and thousands of others to which I report, as I will do with this posting, by blind copy. I am one of those liberated from administrative responsibilities for vulnerable junior colleagues, senior enough to tell off even our presidents when they goof up. I have a number of distinguished contributors as advisors to my student list to which this report will go as well as to other lists.
What is wrong and right with CUNY now?
1) Our board appointed mainly by a parochial college grad (Giuliani) and right-wing Ivy Leaguer (Pataki) is starving us for funds and forcing us to do increasing percentages of our teaching with part-timers. It is NOT fighting with Albany for funds, but sitting on its posteriors, smugly missing meetings and in the case of its chair, Benno Schmidt, making out like a bandit with his Edison endeavors (he sold off millions of his Edison stock just before they went bust).
We have an extraordinary Chancellor, Matt Goldstein, a CCNY grad, himself, who keeps us running, almost single-handedly.
We have dedicated faculty hard at work with their excellent teaching and scholarship.
2) We are horribly abusing our part-timers and our junior faculty who cannot afford to live in NYC and raise families here. We are going to lose more of the best of them who either do not have wives making big bucks or parents helping out.
3) Our pathetic University Senate is blocking essential communication among our various constituencies -- families of students, students, alums, faculty, and the many others such as Ron McGuire who has been dealing with abuses of students by the few uncontrolled campus security operations (e.g. Hostos and CCNY). I know all about these as I conferred extensively about the abuses and the responsibility for them of the college administrators who allow them with Jose Eliques, our former head of CUNY security (ex-FBI) who quit in disgust.
4) We have an excellent, dedicated, hard-working union, PSC (Professional Staff Congress), but it is blocked by the board and pols as mentioned above and we cannot strike without massive penalties from the Taylor law designed to keep police and fire on the job, but applying to us as well as public employees. It is cruel to use our love of our students to abuse our underpaid junior faculty this way. The above mentioned Faculty Senate ladies, of course, have built up healthy pensions from our better days and are collecting Social Security on top of that! Shame on them!
There is more to be said about good things. We have extraordinary students now from all over the world -- we have about 140 philosophy majors at Brooklyn College alone now heading towards careers in the various professions.
So it goes at CUNY.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp
posted by Ed Kent at 12:01 PM
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