Author: Sahar

So did you catch the latest Justice? This issue is one of the good ones.

I particularly like the article “Semantics over substance: Shifting language confuses Rose decision” by Hannah Kirsch and Mike Prada.

But while the language of the initial decision may have changed, the University’s intentions have remained the same. The Rose will still transition from a public museum to a teaching space for the school, and the University will still sell the art if necessary in order to help alleviate its financial troubles. The confusion that has permeated the Rose situation lies in the University’s words, not its intended actions.

This is perhaps the strongest stand the Justice has taken in calling out Berstein-Marcus in my memory. The rest of the article mostly catalogs the contradictory public statements and the existence of public forums throughout the Rose art debacle.

This article also has a neat info-graphic:

The Justice also has an informative article on what the CARS committee is up to, as well as how the University is trying to change Massachussetts policy so that it can draw more money out of the endowment.

Louis Brandeis’s ex-niece has sent out an open letter to Jehuda and the administration. She quotes Louis Brandeis to show that in his work building the University of Louisville, he absolutely considered an art museum essential.

Second. The beginning of an art collection. Living among things of beauty is a help toward culture and the life worthwhile. But the function of a university in respect to the fine arts is not limited to promoting understanding and appreciation. It should strive to awaken the slumbering creative instinct, to encourage its exercise and development, to stimulate production. …

Here’s Michael Rush reading out the whole of her letter:

The conclusion:

I hope the above makes apparent, by assessing the art collection as merely a disposable financial asset rather than as the culturally and intellectually valuable ensemble that it is, your university’s trustees and your administration have proposed to act not only without full appreciation of core objectives of any university, but against those that Justice Brandeis himself most actively fostered. I therefore urge you to abandon any plans of selling any portion whatsoever of the art collection of the Rose Museum, or of diminishing its role.

Louis Brandeis would be ashamed of any University selling art in his name. What a sad sight.

Continue reading “Louis Brandeis’ Great-Niece Speaks Out”

I’m in Washington, D.C. at the moment, at the fabulous YP4 National Summit, surrounded by well over a hundred brilliant, accomplished progressive youth leaders from across the country. It’s pretty humbling.

I’ve actually explained Brandeis’ situation to most of them. I said that due to financial worries, we have to restructure the university, and we figured we might as well go whole-hog and make other changes as well. The faculty have expressed an interest in integrating our Social Justice values into the curriculum, but no real concrete details have emerged.

I’m going to ask these passionate social justice students this: “What’s your vision for a Socially Just campus? Academically, with admissions, in terms of internal democracy, whatever,” and report back what I heard.

But hey! Do you back home have anything else you want me to ask? These are the sort of people who started nonprofits, who have accomplished much already on their campuses or in their communities, or done some other outstanding thing. The real cream of the crop. These are the sorts of people who have Social Justice on the brain. What would you like to ask them?

As interpreted by one of the leading Brandeis biographers of any age, Melvin Urofsky:

Read it in full in the New York Times. A snippet:

For Brandeis, regulation was not supposed to be a restraint on innovation or the entrepreneurial spirit, but rather a check on unbridled greed. He believed in a free market, but one in which the government enforced rules of fair competition so that the most talented could succeed. Clear rules would help ensure that business was conducted fairly and openly.

“Other People’s Money” can help us navigate the new era of regulation that we are likely to enter. It would be wise for Mr. Obama to heed Brandeis’s advice before imposing stricter rules on banking and the stock market. For these plans to be effective, Brandeis would caution, they must be more than cosmetic. Government should oppose banks’ purchases of stock brokerages, for example, to avoid the problems that Brandeis exposed. Furthermore, new rules won’t accomplish much without effective watchdog agencies. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, seems to have abandoned its oversight responsibilities during the Bush years, and now, we are paying the price.

As we reel from the financial crisis, “Other People’s Money” and similar indictments of immoral banking behavior will likely find a new audience. Some of the trouble-making bankers will, perhaps, be temporarily chastened. But before we know it, they will once again be complaining about regulation’s “interference” with the market. Don’t listen to them. Good regulation will keep us from losing sight of the importance of those same principles that Brandeis emphasized so many years ago — honesty, openness and a fair playing field.

Remember the Combating Hate Fundraiser? We were raising money to help rebuild a black church that was burned down on the eve of Obama’s electoral victory.

Well, the fundraiser was so successful that the organizers had to turn away people from the door. At a fundraiser! Mad kudos to Andy Hogan for working tirelessly on this, and the whole community for donating money / showing up to the event.

We raised $2,000 from straight-up donations as well as from the fundraising event itself.

Continue reading “Fundraising Success”

Michael Rush, the Director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, is not letting his beloved museum go down without a fight.

Check out his official statement, posted on http://www.brandeis.edu/rose/

Some excerpts:

History will record this as a desperate action that flies in the face of all intellectual and ethical standards. Brandeis is putting its intellectual capital and very credibility as an institution of higher learning on the auction block. No one wins here. Even the expected buyers of this dearly held art will be purchasing tainted goods marked with the blood of this ill begotten action.

Many forms of protest are currently underway, most especially with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office. Brandeis, a truly inspiring university, built on the foundation of social justice and commitment to the highest pursuit of human understanding and dignity, has temporarily betrayed this vision for supposed short-term gain, which may, in the end, prove unattainable in any case.

This is all, may I remind you, hosted on brandeis.edu/rose . Rush is hosting this on Brandeis’ own servers. I wonder if it’ll be taken off once people notice.
Continue reading “Michael Rush has big brass balls”

Last Thursday, I waited patiently outside a secret, closed-door faculty meeting, holding a sign that said “Students Need to Be Part of the Discussion” and surrounded by like-minded folks holding similar signs.

When the faculty streamed out, they seemed very pleased with themselves. I got thumbs up and calls of “you got everything you asked for”.

Well, cool.

Today the Board of Trustees met in an emergency session. After the meeting I got a call from Jacob Bockelmann, the Senior Representative to the Board of Trustees. I was told that students, graduate and undergraduate, were promised seats on every committee dealing with the crisis. I was told that the Board of Trustees had a meeting that closely paralleled the BBCC meeting a few days earlier, with Board members excited about using this opportunity to strengthen Brandeis and to increase, not merely preserve, our commitment to Social Justice.

Students on the Steering Committee! Board members talking about Social Justice. That all sounds great.
But let’s match words and deeds.

There’s a strong rhetoric of transparency here. But at the end of the day the decisions that are reached – selling off the finest Modern Art collection in New England, reneging on financial aid promises (for study abroad) without so much as an apology – don’t conform to the rhetoric.

The data:

*If the Junior and Senior Student Reps to the Board were consulted, they still weren’t given a vote or any sort of formal way of gaging student sentiment on the subject.

I’m tired of being told how in theory we have a lot of transparency at Brandeis and how students have a say here. Hell, faculty don’t even have a say about selling off the Rose Art Museum. Are we being put on to all these committees for tokenism or are we actually respected?

With these arbitrary/autocratic acts are coupled with rhetoric of inclusiveness, it’s hard not to imagine that the powers that be are simply taunting us.

In our quest to promote productive campus dialogue, Innermost Parts is inviting all faculty to send us their plans and proposals for
a. dealing with the budget crisis
b. innovative ideas that make Brandeis SEXY

Here’s the first:

Statement from Prof. Leonard Saxe (Heller/Hornstein)

Colleagues,

To those who have argued that we should not rush to make academic changes, recall President-elect Obama’s post-election comment that it was necessary to move with “deliberate haste”– with equal emphasis on “deliberate” and “haste.” These are not ordinary times. In only nine weeks this Fall, the stock market lost 40% of its value. The implications for Brandeis are profound: Our endowment is down by nearly 25% and many of our current and prospective students can no longer afford tuition. As faculty, there’s not much we can do to alter macro-economic forces, but we do have the capacity to improve our educational programs and make them more attractive, as well as effective. If the current situation forces us to agree on the outlines of a strategy in a mere six weeks, so be it. The alternative is worse. Continue reading “Prof. Saxe’s statement”

The following is a press release sent out by the Student Union e-board. Continue reading “Andy Hogan appointed Director of Community Advocacy”

An important Budget Cut Committee Meeting will be happening tonight at 9:30 in the Castle Commons. Make sure you come!!! Bring your friends! We’ll be talking about a wide variety of budget cut issues, and if you’re at all concerned about these things, this is a vital meeting.

We’ll be receiving a report from the Junior Representative to the Brandeis Board of Trustees, who will tell us about the outcome of today’s Board meeting. We’ll also be presenting a special opportunity, and learning about the activities of our various subgroups.

Again, if budget cuts concern you, be sure to show!

Why are we here?

Liza here, interviewing some random participants in the protest. Their exact words are below…

Nathan Robinson: “I am here because I am incredibly concerned about the possible implications of the budget cuts. With valuble faculty and resources potentially eliminated from our university, I want ot make sure that students have a say in the decision-making process, and that whatever we end up cutting, we stay true to our ideals as a university founded on social justice.

Guy Rossman: I really believe in the principles of democracy and participation, and that those that are affected by decisions should have a role in forming them.

Chia Jorento: Students should be aware of where their money is going, and we should be a part of the most important decisions that Brandeis makes.

Susan Paykin: I really care what hapens to the curriculum and overall University experience. I want to show my physical support, and that there are alot of studens who want to be more of a part of the dicussion.

Noah Braiterman: I want to show support to the faculty, and also to hear exactly what’s going on. As a student, I am a part of Brandeis’s future, but the finances behind it are as important as my presence here at all.

Supreetha Gubbala: As a senator, I feel I should support this. I even got out of class for this, and told my teacher, “sorry, this is more important than UWS.”

Rachel Sier: As a paying member of this institution, it is my right that I should be consulted with these decisions. However, I am not against the principle of having a faculty meeting about the budget issues. What I am against is the manner in which students who are actively invested in their education were treated. As a Brandeis community it is important that the entire community is consulted.

Cheryl Liebowitz: I decided to come see what was going on. Transparency is really important, and there should definitely be student say in something that is going to affect our future and the value of our education.

There is currently a group of students assembled outside of a closed faculty meeting in Olin-Sang, in which budget cuts are being discussed. A few students were stopped by the campus police for trying to enter the meeting. We are now protesting for greater transparency and student input. If you want the opportunity to speak out about the academic funding of YOUR school, come to Olin-Sang in Rabb now!

Read this and come back. “Long-term academic changes proposed”

The administration and the Faculty Senate Council have suggested a major overhaul of the undergraduate academic curriculum to account for a sustained $10 million gap in the University’s budget beyond fiscal year 2010, according to a Jan. 14 faculty e-mail sent by Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe and Faculty Senate Chair Prof. William Flesch (ENG).

The proposal calls for replacing the current 43 majors and 47 minors offered to undergraduates with a much smaller number of interdisciplinary meta-majors, increasing the size of the undergraduate student body by 12 percent, requiring a summer semester to be completed before junior year and decreasing the number of Arts and Sciences faculty by 10 percent. The curriculum changes will begin with the students entering in the fall of 2010.

How come the students at large learned about this from The Justice instead of firsthand? And least we’re being informed of proposed changes, unlike in the boneheaded decision to shaft students on Study Abroad without so much as an apology. Again – why did the student body at large learn about all this through a leaked email?

Seriously? What else is going on that they aren’t telling us? Are they planning on abolishing all majors next? Oh, wait.

The new curriculum would need to be described in general by this spring so that the Admissions staff could begin marketing it to current high school juniors, Jaffe said.

The administration, in the light of a short-term fiscal crisis, is trying to make by long-term administrative and academic changes. This will probably not end well. Deliberation, due deligence, rational thought – all is being sacrificed on the altar of printing brochures by April. There is simply not enough time to conceptualize and study any such radical change, much less decide to implement a raft of them.

There was a 20% drop in applications last year. For the class of 2014 (the ones that are high school juniors now, and to which all proposals are targeted), Brandeis wants to increase enrollment. So –
– Decreasing Size of Applicant Pool
– Increasing Enrollment
– Cutting faculty
This is not a good sign for the academic pillar at Brandeis.

There’s a saying, “You never want to let a good crisis go to waste.” Let’s make sure that we’re not using this crisis to push through ill-thought out, hasty plans, simply because some administrator says we should. A draft PATRIOT Act was sitting in an FBI file cabinet for years and years before the crisis of 9/11 gave the government the opportunity of enough fear and confusion to pass it. Let’s make sure a similar thing – approving confusing plans without time to study due to fear and confusion- doesn’t happen here.

This is Pete Seeger’s banjo, emblazoned with the phrase “This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces it to Surrender”

For me, one of the most romantic stories of my musical education at Brandeis has been the rediscovery of “This Land is Your Land.”

We all know the opening stanza to the song –

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

Most people don’t know the last, famously “lost” stanzas –

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I’d seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

Puts a new spin on things, huh? This Land is Your Land was actually written as the liberal counterpoint to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America”

And here’s Pete Seeger, the folk muse of the land, reteaching the common history of America to millions of people, for President-Elect (but not for long) Barack Obama’s pre-inaugural musical celebration:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg0wiOHc9tI[/youtube]
Continue reading “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender”

Our beloved Student Union Vice President, Adam T. Hughes, is resigning from his position as Student Union Vice President, effective some hours ago. He’s also leaving the Brandeis campus for the next semester, for personal and unexpected reasons.

Adam, we’ll miss you. I hope everything works out in the end.

Continue reading “Vacancies in the Student Union”

So Ted Sorenson has come and gone. He had some nice anecdotes, some nice turns of phrase. Most memorable? “If we had the 24-hour news cycle back during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we probably would have bombed those Cuban installations and started a Nuclear War.” It was nice to see a sort of montage of memorable inauguration speeches preceding his remarks. He was sometimes funny, always interesting.

You know what’s really cool? He’s on the Board of the Ethics Center (or something). Cool! I want to know more about that. Maybe he can use his vaunted connections to recoup the 400 thousand dollar shortfall in the Ethics Center Budget.

I did ask him a question at the end. It went along the lines of “Obama talks a lot about Post-Partisanship. What does that mean to you? For us liberals, it seems to be remarkably similar to “centrism” or moving to the right. Can you assuage those fears?”

His response was something along the lines of “stop whining, trust us.”

I trusted the government once. I’m disinclined to do that ever again.
Continue reading “Ted Sorenson liveblog”

What if, four days before the inauguration, a national coalition presents President Obama with a request from Brandeis – please, end extreme poverty by 2015.

It’s possible.

The MCN posted an idea on change.org for how Obama should end extreme poverty by 2025.  Change.org will present the 10 most popular ideas to Obama at the national Press Club on January 16th.  This is an immense chance to bring ending extreme poverty to the forefront of the policy arena.

The idea states that Obama should fund the Millennium Development Goals as a way to end extreme poverty.

The MCN = the Millennium Campus Network, a Brandeis-founded network of “university student groups in the Boston area committed to supporting the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to eradicate extreme poverty.”

The idea is that we take the MCN idea – written by Brandeis students Rachel Berman-Vaporis and Allyson Goldsmith – and vote it up on Change.org so that it turns into one of the top 10 ideas, which will then be presented to Obama.

Please take 30 seconds to vote for this idea to elevate the importance of global poverty and show that students are engaged. The voting ends on January 15th.  Thank you for your time and support.

http://www.change.org/ideas/view/end_extreme_poverty_by_2025

Steps to vote:
1. Click on the blue vote box
2. Create an account (they won’t send you tons of e-mails)
3. Click on the link in the confirmation e-mail
4. Click on the blue vote box again to record your idea

Apparently it’s already a big deal that “a Brandeis organization has made it so far in a national non-collegiate contest and could possibly go further,” according to Rachel. Cool!

As we ring in the new year, I’d like to thank everyone for sticking with us and reading Innermost Parts – even during break!

So thanks for reading, I appreciate it.

As we enter the new semester, I want Innermost Parts to take the next step in journalistic evolution. We’re going to professionalize, have weekly meetings, hopefully become chartered, etc.

To that end, we need more writers. Passionate writers. The fact that you’re reading Innermost Parts right now is a pretty good indicator that you have the right drive and interests. The fact that you’re in college means you have the writing skills.

Work for us. Join us!

Innermost Parts brings on a new coterie of writers each semester. Right now we’re taking applications for Spring 2009. Writing fellows are given great freedom and flexibility, but also take on a fair share of responsibility. To a great extent, we’re all equal – veterans and people on their day as well.

In our founding documents, we set out to fill “a vacuum at Brandeis, a need for an unfettered and free-flowing discussion of the forces, both on campus and around the world, which affect us as students.” We wanted Brandeis to be a “space for intellectual honesty, a place for honest communications, a model of democratic government, a center of freedom of expression.”

Innermost Parts aims to be a center for progressive discussion based in Brandeis University. Our goal is to promote the progressive movement on campus, and spread the principles -and actualization- of social justice.

If you think we’ve got a good thing going, come join us! If you think we’re not living up to our potential, help us reach it.

Please email the Innermost Parts team at

So apparently foreign ships are dumping nuclear waste and illegally fishing off Somalia’s coast.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it.” Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to “dispose” of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: “Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention.”

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: “If nothing is done, there soon won’t be much fish left in our coastal waters.”

And the fish that are left will be radioactive mutant fish.

The article suggests that piracy in Somalia is in part a reaction to the “European attack.” Huh.

I was talking to a friend today. This friend did not want to write certain things for fear of being put on a no-fly list in a certain country.

Being put on a no-fly list is a pretty big deal. Getting in and out of the country changes from a routine annoyance of half-a-day’s time to a potentially crippling train ride out of the country to the nearest airport.

Imagine planning a trip to Europe with friends when one apologetically declines. The UK thinks he’s a terrorist threat. Your trip may be worse for the loss. His trip is canceled. The way you think of him, or more importantly the way he thinks you thinking of him, might never be the same.

Anyways, I guess everyone knows about the extraordinary hassle being put on a no-fly list is. But when it happens to someone you know, it feels more real, all of a sudden.

Read this in the New York Times

. Witness the unusual suggestion made in early December by the chairman of the faculty senate at Brandeis University, who proposed that the school’s 300 professors and instructors give up 1 percent of their pay.

“What we are doing is a symbolic gesture that has real consequences — it can save a few jobs,” said William Flesch, the senate chairman and an English professor.

He says more than 30 percent have volunteered for the pay cut, which could save at least $100,000 and prevent layoffs for at least several employees. “It’s not painless, but it is relatively painless and it could help some people,” he said.

I think that 30% figure is news(!) about us(!) in the New York Times(!).
There’s two ways to think about it:
a. We’re famous enough to be in the NYT
b. The whole world gets to know about the machinations regarding the budget before we do.

Or of course maybe everyone but me knew about this already. To be clear, I mean the news that 30% of faculty have signed up for the voluntary cut, not that any have.

In any case, now we know.

So there’s a certain shithole of a website that people are trying to ban.

Now, I’m very much an opponent of banning websites. The sort of opponent that gets angry at phrases like

“It’s important to question whether our First Amendment rights should trump our morality. We’ve fought for these rights, and we value them, but where do we draw the line?”

Still, I keep hearing more and more cases of people being absolutely devastated by the people writing gossip on the site. There have been, I bet, many secret trips to the Dean’s office, psychologists, or health center.

It’s important that the problem is not the technology, but the vicious knot of people who use anonymity as a sword instead of a shield. Still what are we going to do?

Seriously. I’m against banning websites, but the status quo is horrible. What can be done?

What with the latest unpleasantness going on in the Middle East, I figured Brandeis’ in-house Think Tank, The Crown Center for Middle East Studies would have, you know, thought up something to say.

Instead their latest publication is about “A Landscape of Fragmentation in Saudi Arabia“. Which, you know, is probably important. It probably took a while to write, research, etc. There’s no objection to academic outfits doing legwork rather than just chasing what’s popular.

The thing is, the Crown Center as an institution has said nothing about the current war so far. Individual members have done interviews or been quoted in the media, but nothing from Crown itself.

Well, that’s not too big a deal. I mean, the individual scholars are probably doing feverish research, maybe some diplomacy, to deal with the situation. They have lives and other professional obligations, I’ll bet. But still. This seems pretty highly unusual.

The obvious guess is that Crown is cowed, unable to articulate a position or draw an analysis that won’t upset a potential donor. Donors are rather precious right now.

I don’t think that’s the case, however. Not with the Crown Center; I have a heap of respect for those guys. Still, the guns roar, the rockets fall, the children scream, and yet they are silent.

Afterthought: Of course, if anyone from Crown wanted to come to the blog and educate us on the issue, that’d be much appreciated. If my tone didn’t come across right, let me state it now – “I’m dying to know what the people at Crown think. Come on, let us read the goodies!”

The Obama Transition Team wants to set up a “National Day of Service” on January 19th, the day before Inauguration day (and, also, during Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend). You can find events in your area using the inauguration website, which is set up a lot like My.BarackObama.com.

Currently, there is none such event in Waltham. The closest is a training on energy conservation in Newton.

Come on! Waltham Group, this is your moment to shine! Everyone else – this is the perfect time to start meeting President Gray’s challenge for every club to have a community service component.

Also – smart famous people think that Obama is Laying Groundwork for Post-Inaugural Citizen Service with the robust tools on the website. Be warned.

My friend Rivka, who knows so much more than I do about American politics, tells me to be excited. Here’s why:

From “Ask not…” to “Yes we can” — JFK’s Speechwriter on What Makes Inaugural Addresses Great

Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Time: 7-8:30pm
Location: Shapiro Campus Center Theater

As special counsel and chief speechwriter to President John F. Kennedy, Theodore “Ted” Sorensen helped author one of the most memorable inaugural addresses in American history. An early supporter of Barack Obama and Chair of the board of the Ethics Center, Sorensen will discuss his career, the inaugural speeches of presidents Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton, and how Obama might best introduce his presidency to the world.

Faculty respondent Peniel Joseph. Cosponsored by the Student Union and Gen Ed Now

I note with approval that my old prof. Joseph is still undisputed king of faculty panels at these events. Go team!

A while ago the New York Times Magazine had a college essay contest. “In the turbulent late ’60s and early ’70s, college campuses played a major role in the culture and politics of the era. Today, according to author and historian Rick Perlstein, colleges have lost their central place in the broader society and in the lives of undergraduates. ”

The contest has long expired. The prompt essay, by Rick Perlstein, is still up.
Wow. Here’s something that get’s you thinking critically about your environs.

You really should read the whole thing, but here’s a tasty morsel:

There is something that these very different students share. Just as the distance between the campus and the market has shrunk (perhaps not that surprising at Chicago, home of the market-based approach to almost everything), so has the gap between childhood and college – and between college and the real world that follows. To me, to Doug Mitchell, to just about anyone over 30, going to college represented a break, sometimes a radical one – and our immediate postcollege lives represented a radical break with college. Some of us ended up coming back to the neighborhood partly for that very fact: nostalgia for four years unlike any we had experienced or would experience again. Not for these kids.

Hamilton Morris, with his hip, creative parents, is an extreme case of a common phenomenon: college without the generation gap. (As I write this at a coffee shop near campus, a kid picks up her cellphone – ”Hi, Dad!” – and chats amiably for 15 minutes. ”When we went to college,” a dean of students who was a freshman in 1971 tells me, ”you called on Sunday – the obligatory 30-second phone call on the dorm phone – and you hoped not to hear from them for the rest of the week.”)

Morris is an exaggeration too of another banal new reality. You used to have to go to college to discover your first independent film, read your first forbidden book, find freaks like yourself who shared, say, a passion for Lenny Bruce. Now for even the most provincial students, the Internet, a radically more democratic and diverse culture – and those hip baby-boomer parents – take care of the problem.

…

Why aren’t people paying attention to the campuses? Because, as a discrete experience, ”college” has begun to disappear. My radical, alienated friends brought up the University of Chicago’s marketing materials: bucolic images of a mystic world apart, where 18-year-olds discover themselves for the first time in a heady atmosphere of cultural and intellectual tumult. But college no longer looks like that. They wondered how long the admissions office thought it could get away with it before students started complaining they’d been swindled. I posed the question to a brilliant graduating senior, someone I’ve been friends with for years. ”They’re assuming that the marketing is for students,” he explained. ”It’s not. It’s for parents.”

Ryan McElhaney, current Director of Community Development, is resigning. His office has been changed to “Director of Community Advocacy” and is currently unfilled. More information about how to apply for that position available by “the second week in January to be nominated by January 25th”.

The Office of Student Rights and Advocacy (OSRA) will have it’s director join the executive board. Pursuant to a confirmation by the Senate (which I expect will happen), expect current director of OSRA, Laura Cohen, to join the Union Executive Board.

Lastly, Andrew Brooks is the new Executive Senator, a position that entitles him to join the Union E-Board and chosen by a majority vote of the senate. (Or is it plurality? Someone tell me in the comments please).

Brandeis University president Jehuda Reinharz just sent out an email letter to the entire campus titled (and regarding) “Brandeis and the Economy update”.

There’s not much news there. Yes, Brandeis has been suffering. Yes, l’affaire Madoff has not damaged the endowment directly, but, “sadly, Brandeis’s most staunch and generous supporters suffered major losses.” There will be more budget cuts. Since students need more financial aid, but tuition is pays for about half of operating costs, we’re in a bit of bind.

Here’s the most interesting graf –

The Special Faculty Advisory Committee and the Student Advisory Committee have provided important and thoughtful insights and information to the senior administration in order to help us identify, examine and optimize the university’s core strengths and strategic assets. Based on those discussions, the University Budget Implementation Committee, which includes four university trustees, is working closely with the administration and is making substantial progress. As we begin the new semester, we will continue to work collaboratively with the student and faculty committees, which are helping us navigate through the financial crisis. And, we look forward to strengthening working relationships with the Faculty Senate and other faculty and student leaders. It is clear that the university will be forced to examine proposals for additional cost reductions to address anticipated and unanticipated budget shortfalls, and we will reconvene discussions with the appropriate working committees at once. The speed and intensity of this financial crisis is unprecedented, and it will require the university to respond to events in an extraordinarily abbreviated timeframe.

That was alarmingly vague. In what ways are faculty, staff, and students consulted and involved? Do they meet once a week or once ever? What powers and access to information do students and faculty have, exactly? Without these concrete details, we have nothing but the fragile soap bubble of good sentiments.

Here is the full letter:
Continue reading “Jehuda’s note on fiscal troubles”

I found this and thought it was funny. It’s a mashup of Sesame Street and V for Vendetta.
“What happens in a futuristic world where the consumption of cookies is controlled by the government?”[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9rzMaAucI4[/youtube]

The race to replace Rahm Emmanuel’s seat in Congress (IL-5) will be intense. But here’s something cool – Thomas Geoghegan, mensch and hero is reportedly in the running.

Who is Thomas Geoghegan?

To the extent Tom is known publicly, it’s mainly because of his books, like Which Side Are You On?, The Secret Lives of Citizens, and In America’s Courts. These really are masterful and original pieces of thinking and writing, which most writers would be content with as their entire contribution to the human endeavor during the period Tom has turned them out. Which Side, which was published in 1991, begins this way:

‘Organized labor.’ Say those words, and your heart sinks. I am a labor lawyer, and my heart sinks. Dumb, stupid organized labor: this is my cause.

The remarkable thing is that in Geoghegan’s case writing has been a sideline. Day by day for several decades he has been a lawyer in a small Chicago law firm representing steel workers, truckers, nurses, and others employees whose travails are the reality covered by abstractions like “the polarization of America” and “the disappearing middle class.” Geoghegan’s skill as a writer and an intellectual are assets but in themselves might not recommend him for a Congressional job. His consistent and canny record of organizing, representing, and defending people who are the natural Democratic (and American) base is the relevant point.

Admirers have raised $10,000 already in anticipation of his bid. If he ends up running this is big news. If he ends up winning it’ll be a huge win for Americans everywhere.

I was reading an article by Chris Hayes that I think you might like.

People like me, lucky enough to go to fancy schools, get taught that from a very early age that we can do anything, and that whenever we have an idea, people are going to want to listen to it. But there are millions of people in this country who go through life with people–their bosses, or spouses or parents–saying “Who cares what you think?” And one of the most profound effects of union organizing is to help people believe that others should care what they think.

Read it all here.

Two nights ago, Talie, Shelly, and Sahar Massachi rejoiced. Their parents were gone for the evening, so the children would spend a night out on the town eating hibachi, then in the warm , blanket-covered confines of their home watching two rented movies. One featuring a machine with the soul of a man, the other featuring a man encased in the shell of a machine.

“Iron Man is a scathing critique of American imperialism…a fascinating character study, a compelling Cold War critique, a subtle plea for liberal internationalism, and a defense of a series of theses presented to the world in America’s founding documents.”
“Iron Man, who represents an imperial America, can only win Pyrrhic victories. ”

Interested in the argument behind those quotes? I’ve been meaning to watch Iron Man ever since I read Spencer Ackerman’s brilliant essay, “Iron Man Versus the Imperialists”, back in May.

Iron Man represents the evolution of American psyche throughout the Vietnam era. Originally a straightforward symbol of American technological advances leading to military might, Iron Man was used as a straightforward thrasher of the Vietnamese. As doubt about the war mounted at home, his authors re-evaluated his persona. Iron Man, a symbol of the military-industrial complex, explored structural critiques of imperialism, the nihilism of hedonism, the dangers of mixing wide-eyed ideals with military adventure.

Iron Man is a superhero. Cold-War product or not, Marvel couldn’t very well turn him into a villain. Writers in the 1970s and 1980s solved the problem in two creative ways. First, the comic adopted the New Left’s structural critique of Vietnam — the war was the inevitable product of a systemic belief in unrestricted capitalism, American exceptionalism, and racism — by making Stark Industries an enemy of poor Tony Stark, who had unleashed malevolent forces he couldn’t control. Thus Iron Man’s nemesis became a black-mirror version of himself: the ruthless metal juggernaut (another metal-suit weapon) subtly named Iron Monger, controlled by rival defense-industry bloodsucker Obadiah Stane. More cleverly, Stark’s best friend Jim Rhodes became a second Iron Man — but one sent into a paranoid frenzy of destruction by the armor’s inability to interface properly with his brain. Rhodes’s secret identity? War Machine.

The second way Marvel subtly readjusted Iron Man for America’s post-Vietnam sensibilities was to reveal that the reason Stark could control neither his company nor his relationships was that he couldn’t control himself. Stark’s booze-soaked, womanizing lifestyle was cleverly reinterpreted as rampant alcoholism and self-loathing. His drive to save the world was nothing more than a martyr complex born of a callow solipsism. It was a brilliant maneuver by the writers. Iron Man began to ask America: Would you trust such unfettered, unaccountable power to someone this messed up? The introduction of War Machine took the critique a step further, showing that the very act of donning the armor makes you messed up. Some exercises of power are too dangerous to be left in the hands of one man. The writers never turned Iron Man into a villain — that would have been the easy way out. Instead they presented a fascinating character study, a compelling Cold War critique, a subtle plea for liberal internationalism, and a defense of a series of theses presented to the world in America’s founding documents. It helps that Iron Man also blows stuff up.

Really, read all of it. Then read about the Superman Approach to Foreign Policy.
Continue reading “Iron Man”

One week ago, US Airways put me on 4 cancelled flights and took 14 hours to turn a 1 hour flight to Rochester into a 1.5 hour flight to Buffalo, with an attendant 2-hour drive to Rochester. I spent the next day trying to track down my luggage. It turns out that in my haste not to miss my original flight, I forgot to pack the charger for my laptop.

Bereft of music, I’ve been relying on Last.fm. It’s great! It has a feature where it tracks every song you play on your desktop media player, and the online last.fm player automatically chooses which tracks to play based on that history.

Now, the world has the “gift” of Google Chrome’s porn mode, isn’t it time for last.fm to have one too? Spare the embarrasment of having Justin Timberlake or Duffy blasting from your “reccomended” station when friends are about.

It’s perfect and I don’t see why it doesn’t exist already.

So I’d like to introduce the idea of “break blogging”, where, during a break, all bets are off and we write about whatever pops to mind. But as soon as school starts, we’ll go right back to being Brandeis-focused.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m on a bit of a holiday break. Expect light posting ’till school starts etc. etc.

Here’s some holiday reading!
Flathead and The Datsun and the Shoe Tree.

Here at Innermost Parts we’re big fans of the nutrition listserv.

The latest email probably helps to explain why I’m always so sleepy:

For many college students, exams, followed by the holidays and semester break result in behaviors that foster regrets. The common denominator? Impulsive and chaotic eating. Not to say that you have to be strict with your regular eating pattern, but it’s not a bad idea to apply some structure and commitment. Take time to check your schedule and plan for meals and/or snacks every 3-5 hours. Limit your caffeine and sugary foods. And include protein for added “brain power”. An overindulgence in carbs can end up making you sleepy….Good luck with finals and enjoy your break!

Subscribe to the nutrition listerv! Email logara@brandeis.

So this video is making the rounds. It’s a very simple story: Bush gets attacked by shoe-wielding journalist, Bush has unexpected ninja-like skills, liberals get cheap bipartisan cred for praising Bush on said skills.

It seems to me that we’re forgetting something – the nefarious shoe-wielding assailant is screaming by the end of the video. The New Times has more:

Mr. Maliki’s security agents jumped on the man, wrestled him to the floor and hustled him out of the room. They kicked him and beat him until “he was crying like a woman,” said Mohammed Taher, a reporter for Afaq, a television station owned by the Dawa Party, which is led by Mr. Maliki. Mr. Zaidi was then detained on unspecified charges.

Other Iraqi journalists in the front row apologized to Mr. Bush, who was uninjured and tried to brush off the incident by making a joke. “All I can report is it is a size 10,” he said, continuing to take questions and noting the apologies. He also called the incident a sign of democracy, saying, “That’s what people do in a free society, draw attention to themselves,” as the man’s screaming could be heard outside.

Beating the shit out of dissenting citizens. Truly, a hallmark of our enlightened democratic order.

update: free Muntadar!
Continue reading “That shoe-wielding assailant”

They allow workers to stand up for their rights. Unions don’t take no shit from no one. In this situation, a company tried to file for bankruptcy, and not pay their workers their pensions, healthcare, back pay, etc. That’s illegal. They would have gotten away with it, too, except the workers occupied the factory and demanded what they were legally owed. The union provided the solidarity and organization for that to happen.

The Labor Beat video group is putting together a documentary about the victorious occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago. The filmmakers were—unless I’m mistaken—the only media group given constant access to the inside of the factory during this action. They’ve put up a ten minute selection of footage on YouTube: