The YDN reports on the powerful rally held Friday by Yale retirees demanding that Yale deal justly with the men and women whose lifetime service made the University function.
Author Archives: Josh Eidelson
The Republican National Committee has now begun providing TV stations “advice” against running MoveOn ads criticizing the President. How…conscientious of them.
The Washington Post today manages to write an entire article about the suffering of the Hmong people since the Vietnam War without mentioning the role of Agent Orange in inflicting it. At least they offer this helpful reference point:
Pa Sy Herr wandered the mountain jungles of Laos for a quarter-century, barefoot, his hair waist-length, dodging government soldiers, because he and his family feared being killed. Until four years ago, he had never seen a television, a car or a telephone.
As if wandering in the jungle in fear for your life wasn’t bad enough…
This afternoon I’ve headed off for a spring break trip to Orlando – no, not that kind of spring break trip to Orlando…I’ll be organizing low-income folks to vote in the Florida primary and training to spend the summer doing similar work for the November election. So at a reader’s request (all right, it was my Dad), this is a warning that posting may be sparse or non-existent until the 15th. Not to worry – that’s what all the links on the right are for. Peace out.
The Hartford Courant argues that Yale has a real chance to make the news for its progressivism rather than its conservatism:
The judge who took the lead role in striking down the law banning gay marriage in Massachusetts is one of three people being considered for an open seat on Yale University’s governing board, the Yale Corporation.
The election, open only to Yale graduates, has the potential to turn into a referendum on how one of the nation’s oldest universities feels about making an even older institution – marriage – more inclusive. At stake is the very definition of Yale’s values.
Margaret Marshall, chief justice of Massachusett’s Supreme Judicial Court, is up against two lesser known figures: David Jones, managing director of Chrysalis Ventures in Kentucky, and Frederick Terrell, founder and CEO of Provender Capital Group in New York.
Were I a Yale alum, Marshall could count on my vote. It should be noted, however, that this nomination by the Association of Yale Alumni, which last made the news for its feverish campaign to keep petition-candidate David Lee off the Corporation, follows a long trend for this and other institutions like it to stake out sometimes brave left-wing stances on national issues while nurturing an ugly conservatism in the governance of the university and the use of its economic and institutional power locally and around the globe. If anyone has any evidence that Marshall, Jones, or Terrell might challenge Yale’s relationship to its workers, its city, or its students, please send it my way – but I suspect that the folks at AYA who vet the candidates would have found it first.
Progressive voices among Yale alumni, Yale students, and the New Haven community will have to keep fighting for a Corporation with room not only for Margaret Marshall but for David Lee – and for its own students as well.
David Corn offers a solid defense of Kerry’s progressive credentials – his investigations of Iran-Contra, BCCI, and Vietnam POW/AWOL rumors, and his votes against DOMA and for Clean Elections. He sets out consciously to tell the good parts of the Kerry narrative, and he articulates them well. Corn may very well be right that
there have been times he has shown courage, devotion to justice and commitment to honesty, open government and principle-over-politics. There are few senators of whom that can be said. A full assessment of the man ought to take these portions of his public service into account.
There remain, unfortunately, other portions to be taken into account as well. Alex Cockburn, also in The Nation, a few weeks back summarized some of the major alarms Kerry should be setting off for progressives. But that said, I’m still closer to David Corn than to Cockburn or to this headline from LWB-Idol Sam Smith on this one.
Nick Confessore put together (scroll down to March 4) one of the more judicious assessments I’ve seen of Kerry’s record and various attempts to paint it:
He is pro-welfare reform, a deficit hawk, a good environmentalist, doesn’t want to privatize Social Security or Medicare, supports labor, is basically a free-trader with some occasional gestures towards less-free trade, supports civil unions but not gay marriage, and is a liberal internationalist on foreign policy. In other words, he’s your basic moderate Democrat — not too liberal, not too conservative. That was always his perverse strength. On a scale of one to ten, few Democratic interest groups would give him a ten, but most would give him a seven.
That, as they say, is the good news and the bad news.
The New York Times explores how pollution won the war on pollution in the Bush administration:
The battle engaged some of the nation’s largest power companies, which were also among the largest donors to President Bush and other Republicans. They were represented by Mr. Barbour and another influential lobbyist, Marc Racicot, who also would later become chairman of the Republican National Committee.
In an administration that puts a premium on keeping its internal disputes private, this struggle went on well out of the public’s view. But interviews and documents trace the decisions in which the Bush administration changed the nation’s approach to environmental controls, ultimately shifting the balance to the side of energy policy. Senior officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, including Mrs. Whitman, became isolated, former aides said, and several resigned.
Last month, Washington U. graduate students voted on whether to be represented by the Graduate Student Employee Action Coalition/ United Auto Workers (GSEAC/UAW); the results are to be tallied in twelve days.
Unless, that is, Wash. U.’s administration goes the route of Penn, Brown, and Columbia:
Intemann said she was optimistic about the outcome of the election, but expressed concern that the University is considering appealing the Public Employment Relations Committee (PERC) decision.
“PERC ruled that there was a group of teaching assistants, research assistants, student and staff assistants, readers, tutors and graders, and some trainees and fellows who were eligible,” Intemann said. According to Intemann, the University is contending that research assistants are not employees.
As GET-UP chanted last week: We have the right to say yes.
On today’s YDN op-ed page, Grayson Walker begins by arguing that dollar for dollar, your money does more good going to an anti-poverty organization than directly to someone who asks for it on the street – a position I generally agree with, with the caveat that most people who make that argument don’t end up giving money to either. Unfortunately, he goes downhill from there, recognizing that Yale has a vested interest in ameliorating the appearance of poverty in New Haven but not that Yale has a vested interest in substantive change in the plight of New Haveners or in real partnership with the larger community. The only partnership he suggests is
a coalition that includes Yale administrators and students, local businesses, New Haven city officials, and social welfare advocates
which sounds all well and good – unfortunately this coalition is charged not with addressing the structural inequality whose victims are in the thankless position of asking for money on the streets of New Haven, but with finding more creative ways to police them.
Conveniently laid out next to his piece is one from the head of Yale’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs, Mike Morand, which beneath more artful rhetoric also attempts to absolve Yale of responsibility for real partnership in New Haven. Specifically, he argues that restricting Yale’s tax super-exemption would threaten Yale’s financial solvency without really helping New Haven because the state would respond to any move by Yale to shoulder its own tax burden on its profit-making properties by proportionately scaling back Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) to New Haven from the state. The problem with his argument, besides the irony of New Haven tax payers subsidizing Yale’s exemption, is that the state government has under-funded PILOT consistently over the past years, and thus the percentage of Yale’s tax exemption it compensates has steadily decreased. What would keep PILOT funding secure would be for Yale to step up and pay its fair share and for ONHSA to join CCNE in lobbying for increased PILOT. Unfortunately, that prospect seems to be about as attractive to Levin as joining forces with GESO to fight for international student visa reform.
Urban Outfitters reached a new low recently with its “Voting is for Old People” T-Shirt, a subversively pro-establishment, pro-disenfranchisement whose impact would be, unsurprisingly, to leave Urban Outfitters’ wealthy Republican CEO that much better off. And it’s ugly, too.
Now the Bus Project is offering an alternativ: Vote, F*cker.
The Senate’s head law enforcement officer confirms it:
The report released yesterday by Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William H. Pickle noted that two former Senate GOP staff members — including the Republicans’ top aide on judicial nomination strategy — were primarily responsible for accessing and leaking computer memos on Democratic plans for blocking some of President Bush’s judicial nominations. Pickle made no recommendations about whether to pursue criminal prosecutions in the case, but he cited several federal laws that might be considered, including statutes involving false statements and receipt of stolen property.
Pickle and his investigators said forensics analyses indicated that 4,670 files had been downloaded between November 2001 and spring 2003 by one of the aides — “the majority of which appeared to be from folders belonging to Democratic staff” on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said at least 100 of his computer files were also accessed by the GOP aides.
The YDN on the administration’s response to yesterday’s “Dissertation Derby”:
An estimated 300 graduate and undergraduate students rallied on the steps of the Hall of Graduate Studies Thursday to protest what they claim are overly stringent Graduate School registration policies and pay inequities.
…Butler, who will assume the Graduate School deanship this July, said the current extended registration policies are designed to help students. “It is to every student’s advantage to complete a superb dissertation as efficiently as is possible,” Butler said. “History is imposing no new time deadlines and it’s erroneous to suggest otherwise.”
But according to an internal History Department memo obtained by GESO and released to the News Thursday, Yale’s largest department may require graduate students to submit half of their dissertations to proceed to the seventh year. “[Students] can petition for extended registration [after their sixth year in] the Graduate School in exceptional cases where unique personal circumstances or substantial difficulties in obtaining archival sources have prevented normal progress,” the department’s policy proposal reads.
What’s in every graduate student’s best interest, as a student and as an employee, is to have the full institutional support of the University for the full duration necessary – given the challenges dramatized in yesterday’s street theater but unfortunately undiscussed in the YDN’s write-up – to complete their academic work, and assistance in attaining gainful employment afterwards. That’s what GESO’s fighting for, and what Butler and Salovey should be working for as well, rather than working to accelerate the casualization of academic labor at one of the wealthiest and most prestigious universities in the world.
Oh – and then there’s this picture, with this caption:
A baguette-wielding man attends a GESO-rally…
Um, Weapon of Mass Destruction, anyone?
Josh Eidelson 