Students Win $1 Million Settlement in UC Davis Pepper Spray Incident

September 26, 2012 in Civil Liberties, Governance, Litigation, Police, Student Power | by | 1 comment

The University of California has agreed to make payments of tens of thousands of dollars each to the two dozen students hit with pepper spray at UC Davis last November, and to provide the students with individual written apologies from Davis chancellor Linda Katehi.

The settlement, filed in federal court this morning, provides for $30,000 payments to each of 21 named defendants, and a pool of $100,000 to be divided among other students who may come forward. Attorneys for the students will receive $250,000, and the ACLU will be given $20,000 to conduct a review of university policies on demonstrations.

The University of California had already spent more than $1 million to conduct its own investigations of the incident.

Although Lt. Commander John Pike, the primary sprayer, has been fired by UC Davis, and the campus police chief at the time of the incident later resigned, no officers or university administrators were charged with crimes as a result of the incident.

Chancellor Katehi survived a no-confidence vote by faculty early this year, and remains in office.

Out and Around: The Presumption of Literacy

September 25, 2012 in Access, Disability | by | 5 comments

My sister can’t read.

Her disability usually isn’t obvious when you meet her. And when she’s home visiting my parents, she spends a fair amount of time out in the city on her own. She takes the bus, she shops, she goes to restaurants. She gets her nails done.

My dad gives her her walking-around money as five-dollar bills to limit how much she can lose if someone decides to cheat her when giving change.

But like I say, mostly her disability is invisible. And when folks do notice, they’re usually cool about it.

(I remember once, years ago, I was out with L and we got into some sort of awkward situation. I wanted to explain to the woman we were inconveniencing, and so I said “she’s…” And then I wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence. The woman said “a little slow.” It wasn’t a phrase I’d ever use myself, and I cringe a little typing it, but she said it with love, and when she said it I felt my shoulders loosen. We were among friends.)

But here’s something I wish I could tell everyone in the city: Not everyone can read.

I see it a few times a year, when I’m out and around. Someone on the subway or the street or in a shop will ask a question. “Is this 14th Street?” “How much is a Big Mac?” “What kinds of iced tea do you have?” Usually, whoever’s asked will answer appropriately, but too often they’ll glance up and say “read the sign.”

My sister will take a menu when she’s offered it. But she can’t read.

She’ll flip through a magazine when she’s bored. But she can’t read.

She has a library card. But she can’t read.

She’s 38 years old, and she looks like any other 38-year-old on the subway. But she can’t read.

My sister is good at keeping her disability to herself. She likes keeping her disability to herself. When she’s out on the street, away from all of us who know and love and worry about her, she’s just another New Yorker. But every once in a while, she could use a little help maintaining her public face.

As we all could.

Today is Blogging Against Disablism Day, and you can read. Go read.

(Note: This is an old post from back before I started SA.net, and today is not actually Blogging Against Disablism Day. It came to mind because of something that came up in class, and figured I wouldn’t wait until May to repost it. The link is to the BADD roundup for 2012, and you can find the roundups for 2011, 2010, and 2009 here, here, and here, if you’re interested.)

Party Politics, the Post Office, and the Common Good

September 22, 2012 in Class, Politics | by | 5 comments

I spent a few days in Missouri last week, giving a talk and hanging out with local campus activists. They’ve got a fascinating senate race in Missouri this year, between Todd “legitimate rape” Akin and embattled incumbent Claire McCaskill.

We talked a bit about the race while I was in town, my hosts and I, and so when I stumbled across a lifestream of the campaign’s first debate yesterday morning, I watched a bit of it. As it turned out, one of the first questions was on the post office.

The mail is one of a relatively short list of government services that are explicitly mandated in the constitution, but both Akin and libertarian challenger Jonathan Dine took aim at the USPS, arguing that its current financial setup is unsustainable. (Akin argued that postal rates need to go way up and Dine said he’d be happy to see the end of Saturday delivery and the closing of a bunch of rural post offices.)

Only McCaskill was willing to stand up for the mail, and to say that the current “crisis” in the postal service is a fiction. Here’s the deal:

Until 1970, the Post Office was a regular government agency, funded both through paid services and government appropriations. But Congress began the process of phasing out government support that year, and by the late ’80s federal funding for the mail had all but disappeared. In 2006 Congress went even further, passing a law that mandated that USPS — alone among all federal agencies — completely pre-fund all its retirement benefits. At a cost of billions, and with no help from the taxpayer, the postal service was required to set aside funding for the pensions of postal workers who haven’t even been born yet.

This was a dumb idea in 2006, but it became catastrophic after the financial collapse of 2008, as declines in postal revenue shattered the assumptions on which it had been based. In the last four years, the USPS has run up a deficit of some $20 billion, entirely as a result of this wrongheaded law. Repeal it tomorrow, and the financial prognosis for the USPS is transformed overnight.

Now, the politics of the mail are complex. The 2006 law arose out of previous federal budget shell-games, and there are corporate pressures on USPS policy from a huge number of sectors of the capitalist economy — advertisers, publishers, private delivery companies, even insurers, convenience stores, and winemakers. Postal policy is a mess in a lot of ways, and not all of those pushing to weaken USPS have been Republicans.

But here’s the thing: The mail is the mail. It’s an unsexy but essential component of the government safety net. It’s a public service we need, one that’s used most by folks with the fewest resources — the elderly, the poor, people with disabilities, people with limited internet access.

If you screw with the mail, you’re screwing with people in need. You’re screwing with the common good.

On that stage in Columbia, Missouri yesterday, only one of the three candidates was willing to stand up for the mail, and it’s no accident that it was the Democrat.

Claire McCaskill is no leftist. She’s not even particularly liberal. Her ads boast that she stands at the exact center of the Senate as its “most moderate Senator.” But she’s liberal enough to believe that the postal service is worth protecting, and her opponent isn’t.

And it’s stuff like that which keeps me voting for Democrats, in spite of the drones and Manning and everything else.

Because until the revolution comes, I want six-day delivery.

What’s the Point of This, Exactly?

September 20, 2012 in Civil Liberties, Police, Religion | by | 7 comments

A startling number of the supposed terror plots broken up by US law enforcement officials since 2001 have been the result of goading by undercover cops, who’ve encouraged American Muslims — often young, often mentally unstable — to become involved in plans that had no chance of coming to fruition.

The latest example of this practice, and one of the most disturbing, comes out of Chicago, where FBI agents arresed 18-year-old Adel Daoud after he pressed the fake detonator on a fake car bomb they supplied him. According to court documents, and reporting from TPM, the FBI jihadists succeeded in getting Daoud to continue in the face of strong discouragement from his father, his former accomplice, and a local Muslim leader.

That’s right. The only “Muslims” encouraging Daoud in his ersatz plot were the phonies on the FBI payroll. Every actual Muslim in his life who got wind of the plan told him it was a lousy idea, and did their best to talk him out of it. And every time they did, the FBI was there to egg him on, rebut his concerns, and provide him with fake explosives.

And now an 18-year-old is facing decades in prison. For what?

Update: The crime the FBI talked Daoud into committing, and provided him with the means to commit, carries a life sentence. Daoud was seventeen years old when the FBI first contacted him.

CUNY Administrator Apologizes to QCC Campus for English Dept Threat

September 18, 2012 in Access, Campus Communities, Curriculum, Faculty | by | 9 comments

After the scandal surrounding a CUNY administrator’s threat to dismantle the Queensborough Community College English department broke wide in the academic media yesterday, that administrator — a QCC vice president — sent a letter of apology to the department’s chair. That apology, and an accompanying letter to the college’s faculty, went further than a Sunday letter from the QCC president to disavow her initial threat, and to pledge greater respect for faculty involvement in governance in the future.

In her letter to faculty, QCC vice president Karen Steele expressed “deep regret” for last week’s missive, saying it was “over-dramatized” and “sent in haste.” There are, she said, “no plans to enact” the “hypothetical” cuts to the department she threatened, and she pledged to “work mightily … to ensure all our classes are available for students” and to ensure “continue[d] … support” for the “innovative work” of the QCC English department.

Aside from one sentence nodding to the college’s “responsibility to comply with the Board’s responsibility to comply with the Board’s policy and the guidelines issued under it,” there was no hint of the combativeness that had characterized her previous communications with the department, both in print and in her appearance at last week’s faculty meeting.

This isn’t a complete capitulation, since no final resolution to QCC’s Pathways dispute has yet been reached. But it’s a big step in that direction.

The full text of the Monday letter follows.

From: Steele, Karen B.
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2012 5:20 PM
To: _Faculty (Including CLT’s); _Adjuncts; _HEOs
Cc: _Cabinet Members; _Deans
Subject: Regarding my memo

Colleagues,

Yesterday I wrote to the English Department chair, Dr. Linda Reesman, apologizing for the email I sent her last Thursday regarding English Composition courses.  I deeply regret having sent the original email, primarily because it was needlessly hurtful to members of the English Department and to other faculty as well.  It was an email sent in haste, out of an over-dramatized fear of the possible impact on the department.

I would like to make clear that the items listed in the email were hypothetical, and there are no plans to enact them, and to echo the President’s letter:  we will “work mightily” to ensure all of our classes are available for students, that faculty members in our English Department have plenty of classes to teach, and that they continue to have support for their innovative work.

At the same time, as a member of CUNY, we have the responsibility to comply with the Board’s policy and the guidelines issued under it.

It is the tradition at Queensborough for all groups at the college to work together to solve problems.  My memo was not aligned with that tradition, and going forward I recommit to Queensborough’s outstanding tradition of the administration and the faculty striving together towards common goals.

As most of you know, the College community has been actively involved in work on restructuring our curricula to align with the CUNY Pathways Common Core, as approved by the Board, and with the Pathways majors.  The first principle that we have all followed has been to preserve the standards of our existing programs, and faculty in all departments have expended tremendous effort preparing.  It is my hope and expectation that we can continue to work together to accomplish this task that is so important for our students.

Karen

About This Blog

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

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