Not So Heroic at Brooklyn College, CUNY

I spent the subway trip last night back to Manhattan reading our two Brooklyn College student paper responses to the attacks on two of our faculty members over the summer -- Timothy Shortell, who had been elected chair of our Sociology Department by his colleagues and then attacked by one of our right wing NYC rags, the Sun, for criticisms that he had made of contemporary American religion and a young untenured member of our School of Education, Priya Parmar who had had some tangle about plagiarism and political views expressed in her class. I was not there and do not know the details first hand, but it looks to me as though these matters were most clumsily handled by our president, Chris Kimmich, who, as did President Bollinger at Columbia, set up an 'investigative committee' to examine the charges of offensive and or discriminatory teaching brought by our neo-Joe McCarthy types of late.

Recurring back to my own studies in theology at UTS with Reinhold Niebuhr, I recall his comparable concern with the emotivist approach of Billy Graham -- just getting started in 1954 with his benign seeming 'crusades':

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/124/52.0.html

Niebuhr, who had been one of the first major theologians in this country to argue that we must drop our Christian pacifism and check the Nazi horrors, saw with great foresight that knaves and fools would follow along in Graham's footsteps and so they did -- the racist Falwell and the ugly Robertson with his assassination fatwa against Hugo Chavez being our latest with their support of the most unChristian American tactic perfected during the Cold War of destabilizing emerging democratic governments (Mossadeq in Iran), Allende in Chile, suspected assassinations when that did not work, and sending in the troops as a last resort to protect American corporate interests (Cuba's Batista, Guatemala (Jacobo Arbenz who had the temerity to challenge the monopoly of United Fruit -- this latter resulting in the subsequent deaths of some estimated 200,000 since that incursion).

Let us not deceive our students about the facts of history and the shameful actions of such deeds and persons as some of those mentioned above. As a nation founded originally on genocide (of native Americans) and slavery ended only very late in the game (New Orleans being our last port of entry for same as De Tocqueville was writing his mainly admiring study of Democracy in America in 1835-40 with its caveats about our potential for "tyranny of the majority " and suppression of dissent -- topics examined by my Philosophy of Law class last evening and presumably necessary foundations for solid future reforms in our grand nation!!!!!
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"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]
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