University of Texas at El Paso philosophy professor and activist…(Mark Lambie / El Paso Times)

By Adriana Gómez Licón

Simulposted with El Paso Times

2/8/2010

ANTHONY, N.M. — People have judged Steve Best many ways during his 30 years in academia.

Some have called him a troublemaker, a radical, and even a domestic and international terrorist because of his vocal and often confrontational stance on animal rights.

He said it is his tenured position that has kept him on the payroll as a philosophy professor at the University of Texas at El Paso.

But even Best knows he is gambling with his career when he protests against the school’s environmental policies with a bullhorn outside UTEP President Diana Natalicio’s office, or when he openly supports a movement that undertakes criminal activities to save animals from research laboratories and slaughterhouses.

“Hey, if Martin Luther King was not afraid to lose his life, I shouldn’t be afraid to lose my job,” Best said.

Best travels around the country and as far away as South Africa to speak about animal abuse. The United Kingdom in 2005 banned Best from its four countries for his views on the use of violence to defend animal rights.

In 2004 at the University of Iowa, Best defended the actions of the Animal Liberation Front. This was months after its members broke into the school’s psychology laboratories, removed about 400 animals and destroyed equipment.

“I don’t consider destroying property violence,” Best said. “I consider destroying animals’ lives violence.”

A U.S. Senate committee invited him to appear at a hearing on ecoterrorism in 2005, but Best declined. Despite his absence, Best was the topic of a heated discussion on Capitol Hill. The Center for Consumer Freedom criticized him for his ties to activists who have been arrested by police for attacking farms.

One of these ties is to activist Gary Yourofsky, who visits Best’s classes as a guest speaker every semester. Yourofsky has been arrested more than 12 times for animal-liberation attacks and has served six months in a Canadian maximum-security prison. And Yourofsky will be in class on Monday.

It is hard to understand Best’s radical views — the philosopher’s philosophy.

“My position is I want to make philosophy dangerous again. Philosophy is far too safe,” Best said. “Philosophy is a profession. It used to be something dangerous. Socrates got killed through doing philosophy.”

And that’s how Best lives his life — on the edge.

“I could be fired any day,” he said.

Best said a series of epiphanies led to him becoming a vegan, renowned scholar, unpopular with many professors in his department, and an advocate of a difficult cause.

Best was born in Chicago on Dec. 20, 1955. His father died of a liver disease when Best was 5. When he was 11, he survived a plane crash that killed his older brother. The two events shaped his character.

“I grew up a social malcontent. Every kid had a father,” Best said. “It made me very independent and scrappy. I felt very alienated.”

He ashamedly admits that he even once abused bees as a child by trapping them in little cups and placing lighted firecrackers inside.

“I felt bad about it,” he said.

Best grew up in the Chicago suburbs with a younger sister and three older brothers. He quickly grew bored with both his neighborhood and with school. He was kicked out of high school after paying little attention in class.

“I was generally unruly, ill-tempered, but principally I was bored,” he said.

He started working as a truck driver and played jazz guitar on open-mic nights at bars until he got tendinitis in his right wrist. He once spent a week in the Cook County Jail after a bar fight as a teenager, he said.

“I like Malcolm X’s quote, ‘I was born in trouble,’ “ Best said.

At 22, he went back to school to get an associate’s degree in arts at a community college. Around that time, he describes the day where he stopped eating meat during dinner at a White Castle restaurant.

“I was eating a double cheeseburger, and it was just so excessive, so over the top, so grotesque and hideous, so dripping with flesh and blood and violence,” Best said. “I realized for the first time in my life that I was not eating something that came from the supermarket, but something that came from a slaughterhouse.”

He spit out the meat.

Best became a vegetarian and started getting involved with human rights movements in the late 1970s.

“I was becoming very political, so I went into philosophy,” he said.

And he began to act on his beliefs, including hiding refugees from El Salvador in local churches.

Best received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1983. He received his master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1987.

His life and diet changed forever around that year when he read a book by Peter Singer called “Animal Liberation.”

“That blew my mind,” Best said. “I learned what happened at circuses, laboratories and slaughterhouses.”

Before he arrived in El Paso, he completed a doctorate degree at the University of Texas at Austin in 1993.

Best said El Paso was to animal rights what Montgomery, Ala., was to civil rights in 1955.

“El Paso would be a good place to raise some consciousness and raise some hell,” Best said he thought back then.

And he has put on a show in El Paso.

In 1999, Best was instrumental in having Sissy, the El Paso’s Zoo elephant, sent to a sanctuary in Tennessee. Zoo employees had chained the elephant’s feet and hit her with ax handles. The beating became a community scandal when a video of it surfaced. The mayor at the time, Carlos Ramirez, forced the resignation of the zoo’s director, David Zucconi.

“I don’t think any animal belongs in the zoo,” Best said. “They become bored and miserable.”

In 2001, right before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, police arrested Best and four other people for a disturbance in a Wendy’s restaurant on the West Side. Protesters accused the chain of buying its chicken from a supplier that abused birds.

Best said he opened the door of the restaurant and saw the police and security were ready for them. He knew he had about three seconds to climb onto the counter, open his jacket to show his T-shirt that read, “This place is closed for cruelty.”

In 2007, Best was among a group that unsuccessfully tried to send two other elephants, Savannah and Juno, to Tennessee. But a 6-2 City Council decision kept the elephants at the El Paso Zoo.

Best has used his position as a professor to encourage students to join him in protests and has taken students to council meetings. In 2000, he organized a protest of about 200 people, most of them students, outside City Hall to demand a new animal shelter.

“I wanted to show students not just how to think, but how to act as citizens, because we are trained to be taxpayers and consumers. We are not trained to be citizens and critical thinkers,” Best said.

He said his supervisors have asked him to stop encouraging students to engage in civil disobedience. At a Senate committee hearing in 2005, the Center for Consumer Freedom alleged that Best uses his position as a professor to recruit students for the Animal Liberation Front.

“I’m lucky if I get my students to come to a potluck for free food. Now, join criminal underground organizations?” Best said

Although Best said he has not committed any crimes with the group, he is listed as an adviser and speaker for the North American Animal Liberation Front.

“I’m the only academic in the whole country who supports this criminal organization,” Best said.

Lawmakers who fear such activists modified a federal law in 2006 to give the Department of Justice more authority to act against animal rights groups. The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act now protects academic and commercial places that use or sell animal or animal products.

Best said all the animal-rights commotion was too much for UTEP. He became chair of the philosophy department in 2000. Faculty asked to remove Best as the chairman, and he was replaced in 2005.

Howard Daudistel, dean of liberal arts at the university, said the department chair assignments rotate and are not permanent positions.

“If the department wishes to make a change, it’s very common to do that,” Daudistel said. “The faculty recommended a change.”

Although Best gives himself a B-minus as a department chair, he said he did not deserve to be removed. He felt betrayed and alienated by the department.

“I was deposed for political reasons by colleagues who pretended as if this was an administrative problem, when it really was a political problem,” he said.

Philosophy chair Jules Simon said Best was too distracted with the movement to lead the department.

“Part of the reason is he got to be very busy with his activities, work and research and animal rights activism,” Simon said. “That was probably the main motivation.”

Best has applied to be promoted from associate professor to full professor. He said university officials told him he needs more community work to get the promotion. Best said they also lost a large box with all his materials.

“I don’t feel I’ve been treated fairly at UTEP,” Best said.

Natalicio, UTEP’s president, was out of town and could not be reached for comment. Daudistel said he would not comment on Best not being promoted.

“Administration likes people who are passive and who produce money for the university and who do safe scholarship,” Best said. “So I assume they are not too thrilled with me.”

These days, Best takes care of eight cats in a house with an open patio in Anthony, N.M., or a “cat utopia,” he said.

The house, painted white and blue, is old and filled with eclectic artifacts from places such as Egypt and England. He has framed photos of animals hanging on every wall.

Best never married and said he never will, though he has had girlfriends.

“I’m a committed bachelor. I’m a philosophical bachelor. It’s part of my commitment to freedom,” he said. “And who would have me?”

Best said he did not want to have children, and that’s why he had a vasectomy about 10 years ago.

“I don’t like kids. I like cats,” he said. “There’s too many people in this planet.”

In the classroom, students pay close attention to what he says. Best often raises his voice and uses his hands to emphasize points.

Ydali Cervantes, who is enrolled in his ethics class, said she enjoys and likes participating in the class.

“I like the subject matter,” Cervantes said. “He encourages you to think for yourself.”

From an auditorium in UTEP, to schools in South Africa, Best will continue to preach animal rights around the world. Forget the hate mail and death threats.

“Whatever happens I’m prepared for it,” he said.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

ADDENDUM:

As he did back in September of 2009, Gary Francione, a law professor, pseudo-abolitionist charlatan, and dogmatic pacifist, has again leveled a personal attack, including unfounded and serious accusations, against Dr. Steve Best.

For details, read his 2/8/10 Twitter exchange with Ian Erik Smith (published with the permission of Ian Erik Smith):

(Posts that begin “@garylfranione” were authored Ian Erik Smith, and posts that begin “@IanErikSmith” were authored by Gary L. Francione.)

@IanErikSmith (1/3) Best is deeply confused. As long as demand exists, supply will continue. You can shut down 10 abattoirs today but if

@IanErikSmith (2/3) demand continues, 10 more are built. The pro-violence agenda, like the welfarist approach, focuses on supply. We need

@IanErikSmith (3/3) to recognize that change can come only by educating the public. And many pro-violent types aren’t even vegan.

@garylfrancione Do you think that Best would disagree with your claim that “As long as demand exists, supply will continue” – I suspect not

@IanErikSmith (1/2) I don’t know. Best is confused about many issues. If, however, he would agree, then focus on instl suppliers makes no

@IanErikSmith (2/2) more sense in the violence context than it does in the welfare reform context.

@IanErikSmith (1/2) I should also say that I think it is remarkably irresponsible for Best to be engaging in criminal solicitation of

@IanErikSmith young or otherwise impressionable people. They will end up going to jail because of his chest pounding/heavy breathing.

@garylfrancione (1/2) are you claiming that Best is actively recruiting for the ALF and/or inciting individuals to commit criminal acts?

@garylfrancione (2/2) as opposed to a philosopher arguing that it is moral (perhaps requisite) to break the law on certain occasions?

@IanErikSmith Yes, I am.

@garylfrancione that strikes me as wreckless but perhaps you are privy to much that I am not – either way it is a bold claim

@IanErikSmith It is not bold at all. It is absolutely clear.

@garylfrancione it’s certainly not clear from the El Paso Times article – I’m not sure what you are relying on to make this assertion…

Dr. Steve Best is TPC’s Senior Editor of Total Liberation. Associate professor of philosophy at UTEP, award-winning writer, noted speaker, public intellectual, and seasoned activist, Steven Best engages the issues of the day such as animal rights, ecological crisis, biotechnology, liberation politics, terrorism, mass media, globalization, and capitalist domination. Best has published 10 books, over 100 articles and reviews, spoken in over a dozen countries, interviewed with media throughout the world, appeared in numerous documentaries, and was voted by VegNews as one of the nations “25 Most Fascinating Vegetarians.” He has come under fire for his uncompromising advocacy of “total liberation” (humans, animals, and the earth) and has been banned from the UK for the power of his thoughts. From the US to Norway, from Sweden to France, from Germany to South Africa, Best shows what philosophy means in a world in crisis.

For more information and to read numerous essays by Dr. Steve Best click HERE

Thomas Paine’s Corner wants to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to receive them, type “TPC subscription” in the subject line and send your email to willpowerful@hotmail.com

For the latest updates on the animal liberation movement, visit NAALPO

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Watch the video and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC.

To join the Global Anti-Hunting Coalition’s crusade to end sport/trophy hunting and the abominable practice of wildlife “culling,” go to GAHC and email our president, Anthony Marr.

A recent post by Joshua Kim, blogger at InsideHigherEd.com’s “Technology and Learning” section, noted that he had not been allowed to progress through the University of Phoenix’s online instructor course.  In short, he was told he was not UofP material.  I think he should wear that as a badge of honor–you have a soul, dear sir, and we don’t want that sort around here…

Here is what I said:

The UofP is not interested in academics.  They are a business and business succeeds on conformity, of following orders, of passing the item on down the line.  Or at least that is one version of the business model, which is the one promulgated by the UofP.

Don’t feel poorly about not being let it–it is not a club you would much care for.  They don’t like free-thinking, will over-monitor your class, and, over time, suck your free-thinking spirit from you (watchOffice Space for some pop-reference insight).

The students at the UofP, at least the older ones (and there are a lot of non-trads) know the system, probably better than you, and a class can often twist into a management of policy (did I log in enough, did I write enough, my group didn’t do any of the work…).

Consider it a dodged bullet.

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• 367 reviews of University of Phoenix Online (rateitall.com)

The National Post report that the Canadian Association of University Teachers has issued a report criticizing Trinity Western University for requiring its faculty sign a statement of Christian faith. The Association concluded that this requirement violated academic freedom. It also announced that it will investigate three other Christian institutions. See the article for detail and background to the dispute.

[The National Post via The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, Religion News]

It’s time to share some good news with respect to the attempt to eliminate the Department of Economic and Policy Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Here’s the text of the second resolution passed by the Faculty Senate at last week’s meeting:

II. The Case of Economics at Notre Dame

In 2003, the Department of Economics at the University of Notre Dame was renamed the Department of Economics and Policy Studies, and a new department, called the Department of Economics and Econometrics, was created in the College of Arts and Letters. Since then, Economics and Econometrics has grown in size, now including about eighteen T&R faculty members, roughly half of whom are tenured. Economics and Policy Studies has contracted in size, now including eight T&R faculty members, all of whom were tenured at Notre Dame prior to 2003 in the original Department of Economics.

A proposal is currently being considered which would change the status of these two departments as follows:
(1) The current Department of Economics and Policy Studies would be dissolved.
(2) The current Department of Economics and Econometrics would be renamed the Department of Economics.
(3) Current faculty in Economics and Policy Studies would be affiliated with other academic units in the University. Some might join the new Department of Economics, subject to that department’s approval; it is expected that no more than two or three would do so. Others might join other departments or academic units such as institutes or centers, subject to those units’ approval. If no other institutional home can be found, faculty will retain tenure at large in the College of Arts and Letters.

Normally, when a department is eliminated, the affected faculty must be scattered across the University, and may (as noted above) even be dismissed in the absence of a suitable home. But normally, when a department is eliminated, it represents a move by the University to abandon its concerted efforts in a field. In this case, by contrast, the University maintains a strong interest in economics and continues to sponsor work in this field. Should the above proposal be adopted, its net effect is that a cohort of faculty who were tenured members of the Department of Economics at Notre Dame in 2002, and who will still be called Professors (or Associate Professors) of Economics, will nevertheless in 2010 have been involuntarily excluded from the Department of Economics. The fact that this exclusion will have taken place in slow motion does not make it any less of an abridgment of the usual protections of tenure. Nor does the undoubted fact that the nature of the Department of Economics will have changed substantially over this time justify this exclusion. Departments routinely shift, often dramatically, as the nature of their fields and institutional aspirations change, and this does not negate tenure awarded earlier in the department.

Therefore, the Faculty Senate holds that, should a Department of Economics be reestablished at Notre Dame, faculty members tenured in the original Department of Economics should be allowed, if they so choose, to be members of that department.

I’d call that a touchdown.

A Jefferson County Public School student was banned from mentioning the name of his website in a Search Engine Optimization class offered through the school’s online continuing education program.  His URL: www.olbastard.com.  His context: he sells bastard files.

He attempted to post comments to the online forum, but because his URL was the subject of his questions, his posts were blocked due to use of “profanity.”  NCAC sent a letter to the school, explaining:

While we sympathize with the goal of discouraging gratuitous profanity or disruptive comments in the classroom, removing “bad” words mechanically with no consideration of context or meaning itself disrupts the educational process. In this case it has caused serious harm to the student, preventing him from learning in the course. It has also displayed the imprecision of the web filter.

The filtering mechanism used by Ed2Go would not only eliminate any mention of an acclaimed book like Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison, it would censor a conversation about architecture or gemstones. To arbitrarily delete or block comments due to a word, while disregarding its meaning as used in context, interferes with students’ abilities to have open conversations within the context of the learning objectives set by the instructor.

The school has agreed to refund his tuition for the course.  But what about the filters? Internet filters have traditionally blocked students’ access to information; it’s now clear that what students (adult students, at that) can post in the online classroom is also at risk.

According to today’s Observer, the University of Notre Dame student government has decided the dissolution of the Department of Economics and Policy Studies is one of the “issues of most pressing concern” to students, and communicated just that to a committee of the Board of Trustees.

Here are excerpts from the article:

Students are concerned by College of Arts and Letters Dean John McGreevy’s lack of transparency as he moves to dissolve the Department of Economics and Policy Studies, student government chief of staff Ryan Brellenthin said.

“The decisions were made without student input and the process was not revealed to the student body,” Brellenthin said.

“It was almost as if they were hoping students weren’t paying attention,” he said.

Students are concerned that closing the department will narrow the economics education at Notre Dame, Brellenthin said. They are also concerned that this decision sets a precedent that students will be excluded from future academic decisions.

“Very little attention has been focused on the 400 students who are economics majors,” Brellenthin said. “No efforts have been made to engage student opinion on the topic.”

Schmidt said he is an economics major, but he first heard about the plans to dissolve the department from The Observer.

“We weren’t told about it,” Schmidt said.

The dissolution of Economics and Policy Studies will be voted on at the next meeting of the Academic Council, Brellenthin, who is one of the four students who serve on the academic council, said. “We can make statements against the dissolution, and we certainly will, but it has been on the agenda to dissolve before we could put it on the agenda to discuss,” he said.

Brellenthin said faculty members are also concerned about the dissolution of the department.

“They are asking what will happen if professors who teach something that isn’t the mainstream theory are pushed out,” he said.

“The fear is that the academic council is just going to be a rubber stamp” on McGreevy’s decision to dissolve the department, Schmidt said.

One trustee expressed her surprise after Weber ranked the dissolution of the department as the second most critical issue for students, but the issue is about students’ wanting to be respected, according to Brellenthin.

Brellenthin cited reports that McGreevy described the dissolution of the department as “too sensitive an issue for debate.”

“We respect the administration and the professors as top-tier educators, but we want to be respected as top-tier students,” Brellenthin said.

Gilles Raveaud, a cofounder of the Post-Autistic Economics Movement and currently Assistant Professor of Economics at the Institute for European Studies, University Paris 8, has a new article on “Pluralism in economics teaching–Why and how?” (available here).

Some excerpts:

In fact, the field of economics today is still characterised by some pluralism. But as far as teaching is concerned, it is no longer presented as a multicolour field. All courses have the same grey colour of neo-classical economics – even if modern textbooks use fancy colours to present it. . .

For me, pluralism is the central issue. In fact, taking pluralism seriously would answer all our criticisms. First, engaging with debates and controversies would necessarily reduce the place of formal models because one would have to deal with the ideas developed by various economists, not only the mathematical models they have written down (or not) to express them. Second, questioning the relevance of different theories can hardly be done without looking at the facts.

On top of that, a pluralistic curriculum would actually be more, not less, theoretical than the current one. The current curriculum does not focus on theory, but on technique. Today, students spend hours calculating ‘marginal rates of transformation’, ‘optimal inter-temporalallocation of resources’ and ‘equilibrium prices’, but this does not lead them to understand what the underlying theory is. A curriculum that would systematically confront each theory with the others would force teachers to be more specific. In each case, they would have to specify which assumptions are made, which mechanisms the theory focuses on, to which predictions these mechanisms lead, and so on. . .

That is, it can be argued that many economics departments have managed to discourage enquiry, to downplay knowledge. They have become agencies of ignorance and/or diffusion of a biased vision of the world. A crucial agent in this process are the introductory textbooks. These textbooks can be criticised in two major respects. First, they limit themselves to mainstream theory, with no mention of other theories. Second, they frequently omit many of the internal problems and inconsistencies of mainstream economics, under the guise of ‘simplifying’.

Any of the students who have taken my courses over the years will certainly recognize the kind of approach Raveaud is calling for. And many more people will recognize this is exactly the way of teaching economics the dean is seeking to eliminate at the University of Notre Dame.

Inside Higher Ed has a “quick take” on the unanimous resolution passed by the La Sierra University’s Faculty Senate in defense of the biology department, which was criticized for teaching evolution. La Sierra is a Seventh-day Adventist university. See the short post for more detail and a link to the resolution.

The editorial staff of the Orion, the student newspaper at Chico State University, have written an article entitled “Academic Freedom Not a License to Say, Do Anything.”

They write:

Professors should have the freedom to push the envelope to get students thinking instead of letting them fall asleep and drool on the desks during class. But there are some teachers who overstep their bounds. [...] Students are here to learn, but they shouldn’t come to class worrying about being verbally attacked or harassed by their instructor.

I disagree with their next statement which asserts that students are customers. They may pay a fee for a service, but students are students, not customers. But overall, bravo Chico student writers. It’s good to know that students are understanding the true meaning of academic freedom.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), the Canadian counterpart to the AAUP, thinks so. We at NAS disagree.

The process of eliminating the Department of Economics and Policy Studies at the University of Notre Dame is quickly moving forward.

The university’s Faculty Senate is meeting this evening, and the dean’s proposal to eliminate ECOP is one of the items on the agenda. Then, the dean is planning to present his proposal to the College Council, on 23 February, and to the Academic Council, on 25 February.

The decision rests with the Academic Council. According to the way university governance is currently constituted, the Faculty Senate has no decisionmaking power; the only power it has is to place items on the agenda of the Academic Council. And the College Council only has an advisory role.

However, the Faculty Senate is concerned about faculty affairs and university governance, while the College Council is concerned about the impact of the proposal on the College of Arts and Letters. It will be interesting to see how the members of the two bodies respond to the dean’s proposal in terms of the issues it raises: academic freedom, university governance, and the quality of the conversation about economics at the University of Notre Dame.

Apparently, the dean’s proposal is currently circulating among the members of these various bodies. However, the members of the department that may be eliminated have not yet been officially informed of or granted access to the actual proposal. Students—both past and present—have been similarly shut out of the process.

FOLLOW-UP

Yesterday evening, the Faculty Senate approved two resolutions that call into question the dean’s proposal to eliminate ECOP

The first holds that tenure includes protection against involuntary removal of a faculty member from his or her department, barring demonstration of serious cause for removal, while the second holds that, should a Department of Economics be reestablished at Notre Dame, faculty members tenured in the original Department of Economics should be allowed, if they so choose, to be members of that department.

The State of the University, Ashley Thorne, NAS

What President Obama’s State of the Union address means for the future of higher education.

Howard Zinn, Silent, Peter Wood, NAS

Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, has died.

Early Vacations and Entitled Students, Glenn Ricketts, NAS

Has self-esteem education gone way too far?

Rubik’s Cube or Kaleidoscope? The AAUP’s Academic Freedom Scholarship, Ashley Thorne, NAS

NAS congratulates the AAUP on the launch of its new Journal of Academic Freedom.

Core Curriculum for Civic Literacy, Erin O’Connor, Critical Mass

On Donald Lazere’s proposal for a collegiate core curriculum training undergraduates in civil literacy.

So Your Freedom-Loving Child is Going to College, Part 1
So Your Freedom-Loving Child is Going to College, Part 2, Steven Horwitz, the Freeman

How do you pick the right school?

Losing Liberal Arts, Valerie Saturen, In These Times

“If a liberal arts education becomes a luxury, the implications for civil society are profound.”

Athey Creek Middle School in West Linn, Oregon has taught its eighth grade students a First Amendment curriculum for ten years, addressing the controversies surrounding commonly-banned books and reading the books in class. The unit drew no major criticism until early last month, when librarian and teacher Michael Diltz faced ire from several parents. He had written two common “obscenities” on the board and allowed students to say them aloud.

In an email message to parents, principal Carol Eagon explained that the use of the words “was meant to provoke student understanding and experience how words, taken out of context, can lose their significance. When taken out of context, an author’s words can move a community to ban that author’s book from a school library.”

In a comment on a School Library Journal article, Diltz said he did not read from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five as alleged. Instead, he used a page from a pro-censorship group’s website to demonstrate how readers should not “be distracted by words when the greater meaning and message of the book is what they seek to discover.” Diltz does not say which page he cited, but this one on the group’s site exemplifies his point that a list of the profane words in  Slaughterhouse-Five is a gross simplification of the meaning of the work.

By protesting the explicit use of the two words in class while dismissing the lesson’s intent, the objecting parents proved Diltz’s point. “There’s some irony there,” said district superintendent Roger Woehl.

Woehl has defended Diltz and the overall curriculum on banned books, but his two concessions—that Slaughterhouse-Five will never be taught, and that the teacher will not use profanity in class—are overkill. It would have been enough, as the school district also promises, to inform the parents about the curriculum before it takes place. That way, parents who object can choose to make their own children read alternate books, while the rest of the students remain able to take part fully in this important unit.

The lecture at Ryerson U. on Jan.21st, Erosion of Academic and Civil Freedom, was inspiring. Despite some of the usual academic jargon in these settings, which usually makes me feel like an impostor, I was struck by a number of remarks by  Andrea Smith which made me want to jump up and yell “Yeah!” such as:

• Our educational system is a colonial, capitalist structure
• The system produces a standardization of qualifications
• It encourages a system of power and domination
• It produces intellectual commodity which can be bought and sold within the academic system
• It produces and reinforces an elite class
• It conditions people to accept hierarchical levels of academia

…..Ahhhhhhrrrrgggg!

Ya, perhaps we know all this, but lumped into one speech made it quite intense! Now, what to do? I’ve returned to to University for a MFA with the intention of teaching in this system one day–a system I have so often clashed with throughout my academic career. Andrea may be part of this system but she does not bury her activist activities under the desk. I now look forward to following her inspirational thoughts and actions in the years ahead.

Meanwhile, I have some web reading to do: INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, the site she co-found and, to satisfy my interest in alternative education, I’ll be exploring AnarchistU for some clues on teaching styles, content, and free education.

In passing, if the subject of violence against women has been a concern of yours, Finding Dawn, a film by Christine Welsh, documents the story of the numerous Aboriginal women who went missing in BC for over 30 years along Highway 16 (also known as the Highway of tears) You can see a clip from the film and similar stories here.

Lastly, if alternative education interests you (the way it does me!), you’ll enjoy discovering this 1966 film clip about Summerhill, a boarding school where young people learn ‘organically’.

AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom:

With this issue we introduce a new online project—the AAUP Journal of  Academic Freedom. Scholarship on academic freedom—and on its relation to  shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining—is typically scattered across a wide range of disciplines. People who want to keep up with the field thus face a difficult task. Moreover, there is no one place to track the  developing international discussion about academic freedom and its collateral issues. Edited collections and special issues of journals have helped fill the  need for many years, but there has been no single journal devoted to the subject. Now there is. It is published by the organization most responsible  for defining academic freedom.

Publishing online gives us many advantages, the first being the ability to  offer free access to everyone interested. A link to this inaugural issue will go  out by e-mail to nearly 400,000 faculty members. We hope they forward it to students and colleagues everywhere. Online publication also gives us the  freedom to publish quite substantial scholarly essays, something that would be much more costly in print.

We invite people to submit essays for our next issue. Whether the journal is published as an annual volume or twice a year will depend in part on the  number of quality submissions we receive. We will also maintain a continuing  relationship with the AAUP’s annual conference on the state of higher education, itself founded in 2009. We are publishing four essays from the  2009 conference but expect to increase that number next time. This first  issue is devoted to essays solicited by the editor, with members of the
editorial board checking essays for historical errors. The next issue will be  conventionally refereed. Neither the editor nor the board members are ex officio. All were appointed on the basis of their publishing history and expertise.

Here’s the Table of Contents of the first volume:

Volume One Contents
Essays
Professionalization as the Basis for Academic Freedom and Faculty
Governance
By Larry Gerber

The AAUP, Academic Freedom, and the Cold War
By Phillip Deery

The Eroding Foundations of Academic Freedom and Professional Integrity:
Implications of the Diminishing Proportion of Tenured Faculty for
Organizational Effectiveness in Higher Education
By Ernst Benjamin

Ward Churchill at the Dalton Trumbo Fountain: Academic Freedom in the
Aftermath of 9/11
By Ellen Schrecker

The Last Indian Standing: Shared Governance in the Shadow of History
By Cary Nelson

The Demise of Shared Governance at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
By Nancy D. Campbell and Jane Koretz

Paranoia and Professionalization: The Importance of Graduate Student
Academic Freedom
By Dan Colson

Toward an Autonomous Antioch College: The Story of the Nonstop Liberal
Arts Institute
By Jean Gregorek

Hidden (and Not-So-Hidden) New Threats to Faculty Governance
By Jan H. Blits

Conference Proceedings
Rethinking Academic Traditions for Twenty-First-Century Faculty
By Judith M. Gappa and Ann E. Austin

Institutionalized Attacks on Academic Freedom: The Impact of Mandates by
State Departments of Education and National Accreditation Agencies on
Academic Freedom
By John M. Elmore

The Corporatization of American Higher Education: Merit Pay Trumps
Academic Freedom
By Robert P. Engvall

“I Have No Idea What You Do Out Here”: Community Colleges, Academic
Freedom, and the University as Global Marketplace
By Libby Garland and Eben Wood

“The American Association of University Professors has started an online journal focused on academic freedom. The first issue of The AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom made its appearance this week. It is the first journal entirely devoted to the subject, according to the AAUP …” (more)

[Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, 26 January]

“Controversy continues to surround John Yoo, a tenured law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who held roles in the Bush administration in which he justified actions widely viewed as torture. Many of his critics have said he is unsuitable to teach law – a stance rejected by Berkeley officials as antithetical to academic freedom …” (more)

[Inside Higher Ed, 26 January]

If you are a double major in Classical Languages and English Literature at the University of Wyoming, you are saddled with a required diversity class on “literature by and about women, not men.”  The course that Marine Lance Corporal Aaron Graham wants to transfer, my Literature By and About Men class, thus does not meet the Cowboys’ standards for diversity.  Remarkably, Wyoming describes itself as a “welcoming community.”  Welcome, Lance Corporal, to institutionalized sexism in academia where men cannot be studied, only opposed; men cannot be analyzed, only condemned; men cannot be understood, only mocked and despised.

Wyoming is no maverick.  I had a fight just getting my course approved.  The University of California bridled at accepting a course about men and uniquely male experience.  That’s understandable because anyone raised on Family Guy, The Simpsons, American Dad, beer commercials, sitcoms, gender feminism, and the glut of misandristic Hollywood films (misandristic appears not even to be a word in most dictionaries) naturally thinks that males must be roped, tied, and broken of their stupid, pathetic, and predatory ways.

Aaron, however, read serious literature by David Lloyd, Faulkner, Sam Shepard (“The Real Gabby Hayes”), Amy Clampitt, Philip Larkin, Christina Hoff Summers, Hemingway, Camille Paglia, Harry Crews, Steven Pinker, Homer, Harvey Mansfield, Isaac Clemens, Leonard Gardner, Thomas van Nortwick, Robert Hayden, James Dickey, Leonard Sax, Vergil, Harvey Swados, Tennyson, Joan Didion (“John Wayne:  A Love Song”), et al.  Aaron viewed Seven Samurai, Ghost Dog, Deliverance, Fight Club, and “I am the Lord thy God . . .” from Decalogue. Aaron studied lessons about “Boys,” “Fathers,” “Sons,” “Men and War,” “Male Codes,” “The Man of Letters,” “Love and Marriage,” and “Manly Aging, Manly Death.”

Too bad, pardner!  Those readings, those films, those topics are not worthy of study at the University of Wyoming because Wyoming has an agenda:   “. . . women, not men.”  This is not welcoming, not inclusive, and not education; it’s galloping gender discrimination.

The same day I heard of Aaron’s dilemma, I also heard of a new academic direction for men:  male studies.  As one of my gender feminist colleagues frequently asserts:  “Equity must be addressed!”  How right she is.  Cowboy up, Wyoming—time to plant this locoweed up on Boot Hill.

Last night, the London School of Economics hosted a public debate, with Geoffrey Hodgson and Paul Ormerod, on the question, “What kind of economics should we teach?”

Here is a link to a pdf version of Hodgson’s slide show. His main point:

Students should be trained to question assumptions and adjudicate wisely between competing explanations.

And for that economics education needs to include philosophy, the history of economic thought, and economic history. Otherwise, students are taught a set of neoclassicals principles and formal models as a common sense, as a single representation of the economy.

The debate held at the LSE is happening around the world. Unfortunately, it’s exactly the kind of debate that is going to be eliminated at the University of Notre Dame (for more, see here and here).

Carrie Feldman reads a statement outside Davenport Federal Courthouse Tuesday morning at a rally for her and Scott DeMuth. The two have been subpoenaed before the grand jury and are refusing to do so. November 17, 2009. (Larry Fisher/QUAD-CITY TIMES)

Simulposted with Green is the New Red

12/7/09

The following is a guest essay written by David Naguib Pellow, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota and faculty advisor of Scott DeMuth:

On November 17, 2009, Scott DeMuth was jailed for contempt of court, since he refused to answer questions posed to him by a federal grand jury in Davenport, Iowa. They were interested in questioning him about his knowledge of an unsolved Animal Liberation Front action in 2004 at the University of Iowa. Scott is a University of Minnesota graduate student and Dakota language student. Scott took a principled stand against the grand jury and paid for it with a contempt charge and, two days later, a charge of conspiracy to commit “animal enterprise terrorism.”

As a sociologist and Scott’s faculty advisor at the University of Minnesota, I am concerned about this case for many reasons. Scott is being targeted because he is a scholar who does research on some of the most important social movement struggles in our society and because of his affiliations with many such activists. In his work, he has researched and/or interviewed numerous activists from Native American struggles for sovereignty and land, and environmental and animal liberation movements in the U.S. Unfortunately, Scott is only the most recent scholar facing state repression whose research focuses on peoples’ movements. The U.S. boasts a long and shameful history of silencing and disciplining academics whose research and teaching emphasize the importance of collective efforts to effect radical social change. In recent years, professors studying various peoples’ movements (including the ones Scott focuses on) have been censored, demoted, fired, and jailed here in the U.S. This is an issue of academic freedom and I believe we should support scholars like Scott because of the importance of this kind of work for rethinking our history and for reimagining what kind of futures we can create for ourselves.

My own research on movements for racial justice, labor rights, environmental justice, and animal and earth liberation suggests quite clearly that the state and corporations spare no expense and rarely hesitate to engage in surveillance, infiltration, and other efforts to neutralize the power and reach of these groups. As a publicly outspoken scholar and activist, Scott DeMuth is at the center of these dynamics and is quickly becoming a force for common ground among people across various movements, organizations, and universities who believe that government power should always be checked and that scholars, citizens, activists, and ordinary folks must enjoy basic rights and freedom from coercion and repression. Support Scott, protect academic freedom, and let’s work to abolish the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act!

Sign a petition supporting Scott Demuth and academic freedom.

David Naguib Pellow is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota where he teaches courses on social movements, environmental justice, globalization, immigration, and race and ethnicity. His books include: The Treadmill of Production: Injustice and Unsustainability in the Global Economy, Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice, and Garbage Wars.

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Cross posted from NAS.org

From time to time we cite without comment various items from articles, books, websites, and other sources. We don’t comment on these items (at least in words), but our readers may have something to add. Today’s No Comment item is a newspaper clipping from 1962, entitled “Social Role of the University Discussed.“ The newspaper is a publication of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, and it refers to St. Dunstan’s University, a Roman Catholic institution which closed its campus in 1967.

Excerpts:

What is the university’s fundamental social obligation? The university’s obligation, he said, is to see that the individual has the opportunity to develop himself by providing a suitable climate for academic freedom which entacts the ability to choose what is good between alternatives.

[...]

The university, he said, has the obligation to set high academic standards and it does not have the obligation to educate all men of society. The fact that knowledge has increased in an unprecedented way requires excellence from its students and teachers, and a lowering of standards to educate all men is but a Marxist Utopian attitude.

From Facebook:

Subroto Roy  surmises that the Govt of India’s prominent economists (& their acolytes and flatterers) may be so far behind that he and they will run out of years before he can go back and show them the road any more than he has done. On the other hand, they have accumulated more wealth and TV exposure than he ever will might ever do.

Subroto Roy  doubts whether the economic officials of either China or India are measuring economic growth (or savings) properly. Economists at least must define economic growth with care — what is referred to *must be* annual growth of per capita inflation-adjusted Gross Domestic Product. (Per capita National Income or Net National Product would be even better if available). W Germany & Japan had the highest annual per capita real GDP growth-rates in the world economy starting from devastated post-World War II initial conditions. What were their measured rates? W Germany: 6.6% in 1950-1960, falling to 3.5% by 1960-1970 falling to 2.4% by 1970-1978. Japan: 6.8 % in 1952-1960 rising to 9.4% in 1960-1970 falling to 3.8 % in 1970-1978. Thus only Japan measured a spike in the 1960s of more than 9% annual growth of real per capita GDP. Now India and China are said to be achieving 8%-10% and more year after year routinely! Perhaps we are observing an incredible phenomenon of world economic history. Or perhaps it is just something incredible, something false and misleading, like a mirage in the desert.