[lbo-talk] Ignacio Chapela tenure

Celi Ben cpthron at hotmail.com
Fri May 20 16:07:52 PDT 2005


If you followed the case, UC Berkeley finally gave Chapela tenure yesterday, on the last day of finals, several years into the conflict, and a month after he filed a lawsuit. Here are my pictures of an ongoing event this week; this is in an adjacent department to me. I like his style. The timing of this is really bad for anyone hearing about it at 8pm after everyone goes home, but I like that we are biking around with flags showing owls from deGoya's nightmare images rather than employing a bullhorn. He is personally very impressive, and has his students starting the lecture with reporting news from the int'l press, and he has worked in about 5 different areas, and brings in books from many areas and will refer to frankfurt school writers and artists - and in my opinion, a PhD can easily be less-well read than normal people in outside subjectss due to the pressures on their time. He is right about the bioengineering building - while some critics have a blanket phobia of anything under the 'biotech' umbrella, many more moderate people could see that the economy cannot easily afford to increase it's allocation to health care costs or agriculture - so how is this going to pay for itself?? -- via more debt, or reallocating money for this research from other areas. The example Chapela gave was the space shuttle hype in the 1980s where everyone was enthuasiastic about the neat experiments that were sure to have great results because they were carried out in the weightless environment of space, but really it was mostly a fun thing that society decided to fund, and nearly equivalent things could be done far cheaper. People in the dept. where I'm a student have named two new vertebrates recently, and botanists probably have done many mmore than that - for just gas money. or.. generally it is the case that few people have the power to identify stuff- someone walking through an indonesian market found a coelacanth, but they were not the one to catch it, but to register it. The professor who blocked his tenure recently became the internet link of the day with a clip of his lecture where he was threatening a student who had stolen his laptop. Anyway, they're going to broadcast the event tonight 8 or 9pm http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/05/1738450.php http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/05/1738090.php

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