In class, I mention neoliberal policies in Pinochet’s Chile and ask the students, “Who knows what neoliberalism is?”

“It’s the reason why we can’t find any jobs, people are losing their homes, and banks have been stiffing us left and right,” one student says in a loud and angry voice.

Two pieces of good news have come in on the heels of recent discussions on this blog.

1. Saint Louis University decided to withdraw its proposal to abolish tenure.

2. CUNY’s Karen Steele has apologized for her threats to punish the members of the English department for exercising their academic freedom.

This is precisely why it is so crucial that we raise a mighty stink whenever anybody tries to infringe on our rights. Activism works, and nowadays it is especially easy to engage in productive activism because we can use the Internet to make our ideas as widely known as possible. Only this year there have been many cases where unfair and wrong policies were stopped at the very beginning by the efforts of everybody who denounced them online.

Build your blogs and social networks, stay connected, make your voice count. We have an unprecedented opportunity to fight injustice and make sure that things don’t get sneaked past us.

“You always wear such beautiful clothes,” a student told me.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You have this very chic way of dressing that makes you really stand out. Like this skirt,” the student actually tugged on my skirt. “It looks very European. You bought it in Europe, right?”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that my “European” skirt had been bought at Macy’s in St.Louis for $45, so I mumbled something.

Everything means whatever you want it to mean.

Even today, in 2012, the guy is supposed to be in charge. I see it in every heterosexual relationship I know, the acquiescence of the female. When I observe people being coupled, I see too many compromises that I don’t know that I could make or would want to make.

It’s very annoying when people turn their own shitty lives into some sort of an indictment against the universe. If you choose to surround yourself with sexist losers, that is your problem. I, for instance, cannot think of a single couple I know where “the guy is in charge.”

Every couple I count among my friends, relatives, colleagues, and acquaintances is based on a fair partnership between loving and respectful equals. I made a choice not to be surrounded by idiots. Make that choice, too, or stop whining already. At the very least, try to realize that you are promoting the very sexism you seem to bemoan by granting your friendship and company to sexist freaks. That makes you one of those very sexist freaks.

Obviously, sexists exist. But if every single person you know is a sexist, the  you are in no way better.

Why do I have to be annoyed by arrant idiots so early in the morning?

If you blogged about the breast-feeding professor but are not blogging about the unconscionable actions of CUNY’s Karen Steele and her attempts to destroy the department of English, I despise you.

If people don’t want to blog about either issue, that’s perfectly fine. I have nothing against those who are not into this kind of blogging. But idiots who promote the breast-feeding story as some sort of news and pretend not to notice egregious abuses happening within academia deserve my profound contempt.

St. Louis University is planning to turn into a total freak show:

A new faculty evaluation plan being considered by St. Louis University administrators is causing grumblings on campus along with claims that it would essentially abolish the school’s tenure system.

The proposal would add a new “post-tenure review” process in which tenured faculty would essentially reapply for tenure every six years. It’s something that critics say defeats the purpose of awarding tenure in the first place.

And here is the most offensive part of the story:

It’s unclear exactly what response the school is getting from faculty, though several professors have quietly spoken against the proposal, which would take effect in January.

Got it? Some members of this bunch of stupid losers have spoken out quietly. They are being robbed of tenure and they are still quivering there like terrified little mice. I wonder what the administrators need to do to these sorry creatures to get them to raise their voices in protest. Would shitting on their heads actually work? I have neither patience nor compassion for people who are so pathetic that they can’t even start organizing and protesting in such an egregious situation as this one.

Faculty members at St. Louis University: stop grumbling and mumbling already. Fight for your rights. You are betraying everybody in academia with your meek and disgusting silence.

Gosh, is there not a single person at St. Louis University with an ounce of self-respect?

It looks like the administration at CUNY is already catching up to how stupid and rash Karen Steele, an anti-intellectual hater of learning and knowledge, has been in her threats to destroy the English department at Queensborough Community College:

The one big piece of news to emerge in the last few hours is a Sunday afternoon email from Queensborough president Diane Call which attempted to walk back Steele’s original message to the English department.

Where Steele had described the college’s plans to slash faculty as a done deal — job searches were to be terminated “immediately,” she wrote, and the rest of the cuts were described using phrases like “we can’t” and “we will,” with no conditionals — Call now characterizes the threats as “potential consequences,” “possible outcomes,” and “a worst case scenario … we are prepared to work mightily to avoid.”

Call even opened the door to the prospect of a resolution that did not involve capitulation by QCC’s English department to the administration’s initial proposal, saying that she hoped to achieve “a constructive resolution” to the crisis “through continued communication and collaboration with our faculty.”

This means that putting pressure on the administration works. And it works fast. Later tonight, I will find the email of Queensborough president Diane Call and start writing to her, too.

Let’s remember the name “Karen Steele”, people. This person should become a pariah in the academic circles. We have a great opportunity to teach all haughty, condescending, anti-intellectual administrators a lesson here. Karen Steele will not be able to pretend that none of this happened. This outrageous behavior on her part will not be forgotten.

Colleagues, friends, readers of this blog, and all people who care about education in this country!

I’m addressing you to ask you to stand in solidarity with the educators at Queensborough Community College who are being bullied by a vicious, unintelligent administrator.

Here is what is happening. Classes in English composition are absolutely crucial for the academic success and intellectual development of students. Here is an example of how students write when they first arrive at a university:

During the time of the Black Death, a plague that killed 30-60% of the population all throughout the European countries, the fear of mortal death being at its highest. Because the fear of not knowing how the plague was transmitted and intolerance for anyone who was different, it lead citizens to finding a scapegoat. This inflamed the already tedious tolerance of the Jews and the Jewish religion.

This is how English speakers write in the only language they know. The faculty members of all English departments in this country work extremely hard to make sure that students learn to write better. However, some administrators do not believe in the value of the Humanities and do not appreciate the hard work required to teach students to write well. This is what happened at one college as a result:

On Wednesday the English department at Queensborough Community College voted not to adopt a policy of the City University of New York to reduce composition course credits from four to three. In so doing, they rejected the CUNY Pathways initiative, a proposal for streamlining and centralizing CUNY curricula which many faculty regard as antithetical to students’ needs.

Just think about this, people! The administration of this school is trying to force the faculty members to change their English program and reduce the number of hours English composition is taught because some brainless bureaucrat believes that English is not important. When the scholars refused to participate in the attempts to dismantle their program, the administration retaliated:

In an email sent to the department chair yesterday QCC Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs Karen Steele announced that because the English department insists on granting four credits for composition courses, those courses will no longer be offered by the college and QCC students will be sent to other CUNY campuses to fulfill their composition requirements. Since composition represents such a significant portion of the department’s offerings, moreover,

• All searches to fill full-time positions in the department will be cancelled.
• All English department adjuncts at Queensborough will be fired.
• And the appointments of all current full-time faculty in the department will be “subject to ability to pay and Fall ’13 enrollment in department courses.

Ms. Karen Steele is shamelessly threatening to destroy the entire English department in her attempt to wage a war on the academics’ right to self-governance. This is unheard of.

175 of the English department’s 206 sections this semester are in composition, which means that the administration is planning to eliminate nearly 85% of the of the department’s current offerings. Given that English has a total of 26 full-time faculty listed on its departmental page, and given that the full-time CUNY community college courseload for three-credit courses is 4/5, the elimination of composition would mean the firing of nearly three-quarters of the department’s full-time faculty even after the termination of all part-timers.

This means that even tenured faculty are at risk of being fired for daring to have an opinion on how to run their own program. This is unconscionable!

Please consult the extortionate email sent by this irresponsible and anti-intellectual administrator at Queensborough Community College to the Chair of the English Department here.

And here is the most recent update on the situation so far.

We need to step in and tell Ms. Steele – and all other administrators who want to destroy learning and knowledge – that we will not stand for this.

My friends, we cannot just sit there passively and let this happen. Once a precedent is set, any administrator will be able to bully scholars into doing anything by threatening them with collective dismissal and the destruction of entire departments in case they dare to have an opinion on anything. Ms. Steele is forgetting her place and is getting dangerously close to turning herself in to a small-scale dictator at Queensborough Community College.

Here is what I propose we do:

1. Ms. Steele’s email address is: KSteele@qcc.cuny.edu. We need to inundate her with emails, telling her of our outrage. It is important that these emails come from many different places in the world and from people in different walks of life. Here is a tentative letter I came up with:

Dear Ms. Steele,

It is with great concern that I have heard of your plan to eliminate the composition program at Queensborough Community College, dismiss all Queensborough English department adjuncts, and immediately cancel all job searches in the department. Such measures will be extremely detrimental not only to the QCC but to the image of CUNY in the academic community. I sincerely hope that you will reconsider your decision to punish the faculty members of the English department at Queensborough Community College for exercising their academic freedom and professional judgment. It is still not too late for you to stop the destruction of the English program at QCC and avoid doing irreparable damage to CUNY’s reputation.

It is admittedly not brilliant but I’m too angry to write anything cogent, yet still at least marginally polite. If you can create a better text, please do so. I will be very grateful for any help with this.

2. Let’s make this story as widely known as possible. If Karen Steele’s superiors realize that she is causing great damage to QCC and CUNY, they will have to do something. Please re-blog and re-post this story on your own resources. The goal is to ensure that the story comes up in search engines any time people search Karen Steele, QCC, and CUNY. There is no blog or website that is too small to take part in this effort. Just copy, paste, and press “Publish.”

If you do decide to re-post this story, please let me know. I want to make a collection of links to all resources that choose to protect academic freedom in this country by making this egregious situation widely known. This is a strategy that worked before, and I’m confident that it will work now.

Thank you for standing in solidarity with educators!

I’m preparing my lecture on Chile and Pinochet and I have arrived at a conclusion that the Cold War had nothing to do with what happened. The Soviet Union disliked Allende as much as the CIA did. The USSR’s greatest hatred was always reserved not for capitalists, imperialists, or even fascists. No, the Soviet leadership hated the most those who dared to offer an alternative version of communism / socialism to the one practiced in the USSR. Allende, a politician who committed the unpardonable sin of getting elected democratically and who tried working within the democratic model, could never become acceptable to the Soviets. This is why the USSR refused to give him any help and rejected his pleas for assistance.

So if the US didn’t need to fear a rapprochement between Chile and USSR, why did it help the military coup to destroy democracy in Chile? I have an answer for you:

After Pinochet came to power, senior policymakers appeared reluctant to criticize human rights violations, taking to task US diplomats urging greater attention to the problem.  US military assistance and sales grew significantly during the years of greatest human rights abuses.

Before you start huffing and puffing, I want to point out that this quote comes from the official version of events as accepted by the CIA. I got this statement from the CIA’s website.

The Cold War rhetoric was always a cover for financial dealings. Today, certain political forces are working hard to resuscitate this rhetoric. I wonder why they are doing it this time.