Innermost Parts

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!

At a secret faculty meeting, Alex, Sahar, and Danny went with an anonymous student photographer to the upstairs door, which was locked. They went downstairs to try to access the front door, and were bounced out by a bouncer. She [Alwina Bennett] asked Alex if he had to call anyone, and Alex said “ok!”

Shortly thereafter, police showed up. Alwina Bennet came back out and said that the students were trying to access a secret faculty meeting. Bennet claimed Alex hurt her hand as she tried to open the door. Apparently the interaction was entirely nonviolent. The police said that the students could potentially be charged with assault and battery, though it seemed this was an empty claim.

Ed Callahan explained that everyone should be allowed to have private meetings. Then they spoke with the police, who made a report.

Jason Gray arrived to talk with them.

Now, a group of students are assembled at the top of the Rabb steps, waiting for the faculty to exit.

Sahar Masachi, Alex Melman, and Danny Cairns have attempted to enter the faculty budget meeting in Olin Sang, and police have been called in by Alwina Bennet to forcibly remove them. STudent Union President Jason Gray has arrived to fuse the situation.

UPDATE: Alex, Danny, and Jason have exited Olin-Sang.

No word from Sahar.

So according to an arcane section of the Student Union Constitution, (Article IX, section 8, clause 6),

There shall be no mid-term election for the positions of President or Vice-President except as provided for in Article III.

The relevant section (7) of Article III states,

If all positions of Union Executive Office mentioned in this Constitution shall become vacant, new Executive Elections shall be held.

So unless the President, Vice-President, Secretary, and Treasurer all get snuffed in one fell swoop, there is no new VP if the current one resigns mid-term.

And thus ends my hypothetical candidacy for Student Union Vice-President =). This means that Senate meetings will now be chaired by Andrew Brooks, and other VP responsibilities will shift around to the remaining E-boarders.

Lets do some quick summary:

The University is short tens of millions of dollars over the next few years. As such, they will be cutting lots of shit. Majorly. Some such shit has already begun to be cut – renovations have been stopped, financial aid has been cut, pools haven’t been rebuilt, professors aren’t being rehired, and I’ll bet that there will be less pretty flowers plopped in the ground for Accepted Students Week. 

But soon, we are really, really going to be seeing some really, really big changes, for real. The entire academic structure of the University may well be turned on its head – see Sahar’s last post. But we need to make sure that the changes which are made – however shattering they may be – are the best possible ways to save money while preserving the University’s dedication to social justice and its academic excellence. 

Everyone agrees, or should agree, on this basic premise, whether it be the students, administration, or faculty. Since we all have the same goals, it makes clear sense that there should be close collaboration and openness about the changes being discussed among all parties. Continue reading “Why not trust us?”

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.

So its pretty clear that disallowing merit scholarships for study abroad is all-around a pretty bad, unfair idea. Hopefully, the Student Union will have this resolved in the coming few days. As for the issue of Vilage-only housing for study abroad-ers (both Fall and Spring), here’s some low-down on what is developing to be the low-down: Continue reading “Study Abroad / Housing Changes – some clarification”

The passage of Question 2 does not seem to have settled the question of marijuana’s legal status in Massachusetts. While it is currently decriminalized across the state, several municipalities are looking to roll back this development. Some are considering vastly increased fines for smoking in public places, and others seek to impose jail sentences. This clearly goes against the will of 63% of the voters in the state, and ought to be stopped. I will expand upon the case against recriminalization, as well as provide more info about these counter-democratic efforts, in a post tomorrow.

However, right now I wish to inform everyone who wants to preserve this hard-fought victory about a pair of protests tomorrow, January 20th. At the Quincy Town Hall and the Methuen City Hall, rallies are being held to tell their respective representatives to keep marijuana decriminalized in Massachusetts. The Worcester city council has already voted 7-4 against recriminalization. We need to let the drug warriors know to stay out of our state!

Information about the rallies below the fold.

Continue reading “Rally Against Recriminalization!”

This weekly feature, which will essentially recount what happened during every Sunday’s Senate meeting, should make the Senate more accessible to their voters. I’ve decided that our student government could use more rapid transparency. Though the Student Union is open to its voters, there isn’t anything directly informing the student body of what their senators are doing  from week to week.

Continue reading “Student Senate in a Nutshell: Resignations, Elections, Administrative Clash”

 

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”

You all may have seen the email sent by the Director of Study Abroad, Mr. Van Der Meid, several days ago. With little apology or consultation with those wishing to study abroad next semester, the letter announced that all students studying abroad in Spring 2010 would be housed in the Village. It further announced that any merit-based scholarship would not be transferrable to pay for study abroad. Whoah.

The administration provided only allusions to the reasons for these changes. It seems they plan on housing all of the study abroad kids in the village in order to “continue to house the incoming mid-year class together.”

I wonder – does this mean they plan on putting all the mid-years in the Village vacated by the study abroad kids? That would be the simple switch-up. Or is there some other housing shuffling shenanigans in the works of which we are unaware? I don’t understand this at all – people studying abroad already are gone from campus for one semester. Now, they will all be put in the Village, seperating them from their on-campus friends for the fall semester as well!

Even worse in my mind, however (and I am a bit biased), is the non-transferrability of merit scholarships. Students who received these scholarships in their acceptance letter were specifically told that they would be transferrable to study abroad – if you doubt me, here’s my scholarship letter (click for bigger): Continue reading “Anger at Study Abroad Changes”

As a Jewish American I find myself struggling to find a place in the anti-war movement against Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip. Last evening I went with a small contingent of Brandeis Students to attend a demonstration in front of the Israeli Consulate which then marched over to the Massachusetts State House. I wanted to go to voice my opposition to attacks. Personally I believe that the strike on Gaza has killed far too many innocent civilians and is ultimately bad for Israel’s long-term security (though it undoubtedly has a short-term benefit).

Even though I knew what I would find when I got there, I still found the protest very disturbing. I was bothered when the marchers freely chanted about ‘genocide’ and ‘holocaust’ in the Gaza Strip, but I was willing to stay in the march because I still agreed with the goal of ending the war. I became really uncomfortable when the chanters with the megaphone began to yell, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free!” I support the State of Israel, proudly. I’m a Zionist, I believe that it is important for the Jews to have a homeland; and even if I weren’t, I would still recognize that six million Jews live in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and they aren’t going to go anywhere. The lesson learned from the creation of the State of Israel should be that no one people can control that entire land; which is why I, like most other Jews, support the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the occupied territories.

I left the march finally after a new chant began “Free Palestine! Long Live Palestine! Long Live the Intifada! Intifada Intifada!” I oppose the Intifada for the same reason why I oppose the attacks in Gaza; we have to create peace by peaceful means and not by war. The anti-war movement needs to welcome Jews and supporters of the State of Israel into the fold. There are countless Jewish organizations (Rabbis for Human Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace, to name a few) that support peace and oppose the occupation.

I don’t know exactly how to conclude this, so I’ll put in a plug for an event. Brandeis Students for Justice in Palestine are holding a vigil for the victims in Gaza, this Tuesday (Inauguration Day!) at 6 PM in Upper Usdan. I’d urge everyone who supports peace to attend.

Few people know, unless they’ve had a class with Gordie, that he was invited onto the O’Reilly Factor shortly after 9/11.  After seeing the video, I was astonished that it wasn’t on youtube so I just recently got the dvd from him, converted the video files so they were youtube friendly, and put it up for everyone to see.  Check it out!

Part 1 here

and Part 2 here!

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”

Please welcome guest poster Jon

On January 2^nd, Question 2, the Massachusetts imitative to decriminalize marijuana possession, came into effect. As (co-)President of Students for Sensible Drug Policy on campus, I am, of course, in favor of any steps that can end the senseless damage the War on Drugs has wreaked on our communities. This is why the November passage of Question 2 was such a satisfying victory.

However, it now appears that a loophole in the initiative has all but legalized marijuana in the state. As passed, Question 2 reduces the penalty for possession (up to one ounce) to a $100 fine, plus mandatory drug counseling for minors. However, police chiefs across the state are essentially giving up on enforcement altogether:

…in what is likely a clever sleight of hand by legalization advocates, the law, by pulling arrest off the table as an option, deprives police officers of any means to compel people caught with marijuana to show identification. Anybody willing to say “Donald Duck” to a cop who nabs him with a joint and asks for a name can escape even the $100 fine.

Marijuana is now not only de facto legal in a few Massachusetts communities because police find the requirements of decriminalization too demanding, it is now effectively sanction-free in the entire state for anybody willing to face down a cop.

Continue reading “Did we accidentally legalize pot?”

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.

Has anyone else been telling their families that we have no admissions building and the Shapiro family lost all their money? Well… The Justice did an article on it, posted online December 26 here. Notice how Brandeis itself hasn’t released anything…

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.

Well, it’s 2009, which to me translates as, “Oh G-d, Spring semester starts soon and I don’t have my books!!!” And as the price of postage goes up, shipping costs rises–and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to pay $4 shipping on a $3 used book. Thus, I have come to share a webesite with you: TextbooksRUs. The quality of their prices vary (some books are really cheap, some are insanely overpriced), but shipping’s always $1. Check this website against Amazon; sometimes you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

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.