Month: August 2010

Introducing the Change Agency!

Welcome to the Change Agency, the new progressive activist group on campus! After a lot of hard work from a lot of talented people, the Change Agency is finally ready to go public and bring activism at Brandeis to new heights. And each and every one of us can bring our talents together and play a role in changing Brandeis for the better. Check out the Change Agency vision statement to get excited, then visit us at www.brandeisactivism.org to learn more and sign up to join our mission!

Imagine, if you will, Brandeis about a year from now.

The campus thrives with good-hearted students, all who are, in various ways, working hard to make the world a better place. A year ago, they barely knew each other, now they clasp hands as brothers and sisters when they pass each other on the roads and hallways of Brandeis.

Imagine Fred Lawrence, the new President, only a semester into his tenure, taking students seriously and treating them as equals ,making sure to consult students on every major decision. Under his tenure, social justice is not a buzzword used to generate fuzzy feelings, nor is it an adjective tacked on to every new faculty or administration initiative. Yes! Imagine a Brandeis where the term Social Justice is a clarion call to action!

Imagine a Brandeis that takes that core value seriously, a Brandeis that prepares its citizens to strive for a better future, a Brandeis that has given students the tools, skills, and connections they need to make our world a better place.

Imagine a Brandeis where changemakers of all stripes – social entrepreneurs, budding organizers, the left, the religious, the artists, and everyone else – all of them celebrating each other’s successes, attending each other’s parties, and learning trusting, growing, laughing with each other.

In this future, Brandeis alumni will visit, and pass on the torch to the next generation of changemakers. Social Justice Activists from across the land will flock to Brandeis to train, inspire, and hire these budding students.

Imagine this Brandeis. Seize this vision.

It can happen. With your help, it will happen.

We at the Change Agency believe in our hearts that this future is worth investing in. We are working night and day to make this vision happen because we want to be citizens of a Brandeis that inspires us, not just customers of a Brandeis that teaches us.

The Schuster Institute: Journalism Superheroes

In 1972, the young reporting team of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein almost single-handedly uncovered the evidence of the political scandal of the century and forced the resignation of a corrupt President.  Thirty years later, another corrupt administration lied the nation into an ongoing war with the complicity of a media that served as cheerleaders rather than fact-checkers.  What happened?  How did the grand tradition of investigative journalism  disappear in a single generation’s time?  Has the rise of the media conglomerate and the lowest-common-denominator “if it bleeds, it leads” coverage killed honest reporting for good?

The Elaine and George Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism is Brandeis’s vehicle for restoring the power of a truly free press.  The Institute will celebrate it’s birthday next month, marking six years as the nation’s first investigative reporting center housed at a university.  Its directors are well aware of the trials facing the news industry; the Institute’s website states that it was founded “to help fill the void in high-quality public interest and investigative journalism—and to counter the increasing corporate control of what Americans read, see, and hear.”  As technological advances change the way we access news, it’s important that the voids that traditional news outlets leave are filled with well-trained, ambitious muckrakers.  Rather than killing investigative journalism, the online revolution can be a restorative purge — and the Schuster Institute puts Brandeis at its forefront.

Just like the University, the Schuster Institute is built around the pillar of a commitment to social justice.  Its major projects involve exposing governmental and corporate abuses, freeing wrongly-incarcerated prisoners, and uncovering gender inequalities in society.  While it’s important that they avoid bias, journalists can maintain objectivity without losing their conscience, much like biologists who employ the scientific method while developing medications.  I’ve always considered the pursuit of truth to be a desirable end in it’s own right, but it can also be the means to building a better society — perhaps our most important goal as a species.

In short, I believe that journalism has the potential to do almost limitless good in the world, and I’m proud that Brandeis approaches it with such seriousness and humanity.  But the news is only useful if it reaches people and inspires them to action, and I’d like to help in whatever way I can.  So Innermost Parts is going to start an effort to publicize Schuster Institute reports on campus and explore ways that Brandeis’s awesome activist clubs can work to address the issues they raise.  You can check out the Institute’s archives here, and check here for opportunities to work directly with the Institute.

So you wanna learn how to mobilize people? (idk, do you?)

IF YES…..

I received this e-mail from the national Democracy for America group, one of the many causes I support and wish I was more involved with but sadly am not…Don’t let the same thing happen to you.  (I love you, Howard Dean!)

It takes three things to win elections — good candidates, good campaigns, and you.

We’ve already trained over 1,100 activists and candidates in 13 states this year and now we’re excited to announce the return of DFA Night School as a free online resource for progressive campaigns across the country.

Register for DFA Night School today!

Since it was created in 2006, DFA Night School has helped 31,382 activists write field plans, organize precincts, raise money and get out the vote. This August and September we’ll be organizing weekly trainings on our brand new interactive video-based platform that will focus on how we can get our supporters back to the polls in 2010.

Currently, the DFA online Night School, which is all free btw, offers 6 one-time sessions dating from August 18th until September 22nd, all at 8:30 pm EST.  The topics include: Messaging for Progressives, Mobilizing Key Constituencies, Creating a Positive Campaign Culture, and more. (http://www.democracyforamerica.com/pages/2428-nightschool_2010)

Now, while these workshops are intended for “progressives”, that term is just about flexible enough to refer to anyone who wants to change things for the better, so don’t let it scare you off. It doesn’t matter whether you want to go into politics or not, are liberal or conservative, or even follow the news or focus on staying out of it– these workshops are open to EVERYONE, and they seem like they’ll be interesting one way or another; if you do not learn from them, at least they will give you food for thought, or for laughter.

SO, go check out the site (once again, http://www.democracyforamerica.com/pages/2428-nightschool_2010) and look into those workshops and OH YEAH, while you’re at it, send in your RSVP to the similarly-minded Campus Camp Wellstone event we will be conducting on our very own campus, September 25th and 26th, http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=146495518696124&ref=ts#!/event.php?eid=146495518696124&ref=ts!

Are we studying enough?

The American Enterprise Institute is an explicitly right-wing organization. They have a new report out claiming that we students study an average of 14 hours a week, which is 10 hours less than people in the 60’s. Their summary:

In 1961, the average full-time student at a four-year college in the United States studied about twenty-four hours per week, while his modern counterpart puts in only fourteen hours per week. Students now study less than half as much as universities claim to require. This dramatic decline in study time occurred for students from all demographic subgroups, for students who worked and those who did not, within every major, and at four-year colleges of every type, degree structure, and level of selectivity. Most of the decline predates the innovations in technology that are most relevant to education and thus was not driven by such changes. The most plausible explanation for these findings, we conclude, is that standards have fallen at postsecondary institutions in the United States.

So I’m not sure I agree with or trust the AEI on anything. What do you think of these allegations? I I don’t keep track of how much I study per week – is 14 hours correct? Also see Ezra Klein for more.

The Giving Pledge grows in size

What could come of dozens of the nation’s richest people getting together? The options are limitless.

Bill&Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet, longtime billionaires and philanthropists, have teamed up to create a network of America’s richest people, reaching out to the Forbes 400 in order to ask for donations. However, this campaign, now known as The Giving Pledge, goes further than any have in the past, asking donors to promise 50% of their net worth to charity. Billionaires who have publicly agreed to the pledge include: NYC Mayor Bloomberg, Oprah Winfrey, David Rockefeller, George Lucas, and more. Some of the participants have already promised to give even more, such as Buffet, who pledged to give 99% of his wealth to chaitable donations.

Although the Gateses and Buffet have been arranging meetings with some of the richest billionaires in the nation for the past year, they kept the dealings top-secret until recently, and little was gleaned by the press as to what these powerful people were planning. In June of this year, Fortune Magazine printed a comprehensive story detailing the Pledge for the first time, and estimating its potential. (http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2010/06/16/gates-buffett-600-billion-dollar-philanthropy-challenge/ )

At its most recent count, the Pledge had signed on 30 billionaires. If it were to reach its goal of obtaining half the networth of the 400 richest people on Forbes List, it would mean $600 billion going towards charity. To give some perspective, people in the U.S. gave an estimated $307.65 billion  to charity in 2008, and is usually the leading country in charity donations.

Reading about this ambitious, admirable cause left me with two questions: first, no statement has been made about what charities the money will go towards, but which causes do you think are the most deserving, the most in need of this money?

Second, how can we create an environment of selfless giving amongst our own community? By no means am I claiming that Brandeisians are akin to billionaires, and what with the recession charitable donations have become a lot more difficult for people to make, but that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be massive efforts to fundraise.

Already this past school year the student body voted overwhelmingly in favor of passing the Brandeis Sustainability Fund (http://innermostparts.org/2010/04/27/win/) electing to pay an extra fee of $7.50 per semester in order to take steps towards ‘greening’ our campus. Another great successes was the Haiti Relief Effort (http://www.brandeis.edu/haiti/ ) which raised over $30,000. So, what steps should we take towards more effective fundraising next?

Our Broken Senate(s)

I just finished a reported New Yorker article by George Packer on the modern senate. It’s multifaceted and hard to to summarize. You should read it.

Anyways, it got me thinking about our Senate. You know, the Union Senate.

I don’t think anyone has a good opinion of the Senate. Its composition seems to change almost totally every year – but the bad feelings still remain. Why?

Well, I think the big factor is rather simple – no one really knows what the Senate is supposed to do. Pass legislation? The Union can’t (or doesn’t) enforce any laws, the senate rarely votes to change the rules regulating clubs. Anything that the Union does as a body executive, the E-Board just does without the need for Senate authorization.

So, the Senate is rather useless – and clueless about what it should be doing with its time. Chartering clubs doesn’t take that much time or effort, after all. Yet, Senate meetings are notoriously long-winded and last late into the night. What takes up all that extra time. Some oversight, yes, of a watered-down kind. The rest? Drama.

All that ^ has been my traditional explanation of the situation with the Senate – it’s foibles, it’s failures. It’s a good analysis – many former senators share it.

And yet, now I think maybe I should revise that analysis a bit.

The senate has drama, yes, but perhaps because it is the most democratic of union institutions. Barring high-profile Student Judiciary Trials, it is the one institutions where “common students” can come and confront the powers-that-be.

Real life is messy – people are dramatic, talk too much, and get riled up. Shouldn’t our most democratic body reflect that? I’m not sure.

Stay tuned for part 2

On Liberalism

That EJ Dionne article continues to impress. Let me just excerpt 2 paragraphs that I found gripping:

And I must pause to praise the following sentence: “No one is more temperamentally conservative than a Manhattan leftist living in a rent-controlled apartment and holding tenure at a university; his or her way of life is inevitably bound to breed a sense of complacency that is incompatible with liberalism’s historical commitment to be open to the new.” Since many book reviews are written by Manhattan leftists living in rent-controlled apartments holding tenure at a university, that is indeed a brave thing to write.

Compared with Marxism, romantic forms of conservatism, and assertive varieties of nationalism, liberalism can seem terribly boring. For Wolfe, this is an asset, not a liability. While we all like poetic speeches, Wolfe is right to warn about the dangers of allowing poetry to define politics. “Let the passions reign in the museums and concert halls,” Wolfe writes. “In the halls of government, reason, however cold, is better than emotions, however heartfelt.” Is Wolfe channeling No Drama Obama?

I think the thing about liberalism being boring is spot-on. And Dionne/Wolfe counters this by asserting that the rationality of liberalism is what’s needed in the actual work of politics – the long and slow boring of hard boards.

That’s not really a good response, is it? For by confining liberalisms virtues to the political sphere, Dionne procludes (or conceives the lack of) a cultural liberalism, a lifestyle liberalism, the possibility for a liberal movement in the modern era. Without movement, it’s hard not to stagnate.

That’s why I might identify as a liberal if pressed, but at my core I consider myself a member of the progressive movement – something bigger than myself – and yes, somewhat romantic as well.

“Cursing the darkness only delays the dawn”

I’m reading a gangbusters book review by EJ Dionne. This passage really grabbed me:

the historian Michael Kazin has it right when he argues that American progressives have succeeded in improving the “common welfare” only when they “talked in populist ways–hopeful, expansive, even romantic.” Kazin cites the line popularized by Ralph Waldo Emerson, “March without the people, and you march into the night,” adding, “Cursing the darkness only delays the dawn.”

I think this is totally right. I think it’s time to take a more positive tone to my writing and action regarding Brandeis – emphasizing a great future we can reach, not cursing the “darkness” that exists right now.