[lbo-talk] Ignacio Chapela tenure

[Celi Ben]

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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