It contained an extensive note by Manny Ness, who has been more directly involved with the Center. FWIW.
Julio
From: David Laibman <dlaibman at scienceandsociety.com> Date: Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 9:53 AM Subject: [S&S] The petition in support of the CWE To: S&S Ed Board <scisoc at googlegroups.com> Cc: Manny Ness <manny.ness at gmail.com>
Dear S&S editors all,
Regarding the letter/blog from Corey Robin, urging people not to sign the petition in support of the Center for Worker Education at Brooklyn College, now under attack, I shared my summary of the situation with Manny Ness, whom you will know as Editor of Working USA, and author-editor of major works on labor, workplace organizations, and immigration. Manny has been affiliated with the CWE for a long time. He endorses my statement (which you have), and contributes his own, with far more detail. This is appended, below; Manny asks me to share it with you.
Students and alumni of the CWE are forming a website, which will collect all of the information available and the various responses, including Manny's and mine. As soon as I have a link, I will share it with you.
David
========================================================================== Those of us who are aware of the factual evidence must educate those who do not recognize the clear factual inaccuracy and deception in the document that asks us not to sign the petition. Each point is either inaccurate or not relevant to the project of educating CUNY working students.
Here's one example of the deceptive reasoning: The program was evaluated by Josh Freeman, Stephanie Luce, among others, as having no labor content. The program, as we well know, is not a labor research center but a worker education program that was modeled to educate working people seeking to advance their credentials and earn advanced degrees to serve the people of New York, on the model of Ruskin College at Oxford University. Sure it was not well resourced, but it does a great job nonetheless. BC-GCWE has had a consistently strong record and was evaluated, both independently and through the department of political science, as filling an important role effectively. If one reads the program materials, each class should incorporate an understanding of working people, where necessary. Worker education is not a labor studies program like the Murphy Center. Courses do not focus on collective bargaining, organizing 101, labor relations, union strategies, and corporate campaigns. This is just one point among all the distortions.
I don't even know of the report's existence, and don't know anyone besides Corey who does. If so, they should say so. Has anyone read it? The report on the program seems like a top secret government document hidden in the NSA archives and we may need to depend on Edward Snowden to release the information.
If the program is being dismantled on the basis of a secret report, it is one that contradicts external evaluations of Middle States, one of the BC-GCWE and the other of the Political Science Department. Both concluded that the GCWE was serving an excellent function and fulfilling its mission, but that it required more funding. No faculty were assigned to the program full time. I worked for free advising students. I challenge anyone to weigh the Middle States reports against the secret report, where, apparently, no one was interviewed. The Middle States reports are available and in the public domain and I am requesting them from those who have electronic copies. One of the three external evaluators was Rogers Smith, the dissertation sponsor of the writer of the blog. People should ask Dr. Smith, who now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania why he thought the program was doing a good job, despite its lack of resources. In fact, perhaps the department that is dismantling the program, now more than 30 years old, isn't interested in fulfilling CUNY's mission to educate working people but seeks to compete with Columbia, NYU, Yale, and Princeton for students. But if that's the case, even Harvard has an excellent worker education program that is administered by Dr. Elaine Bernard, who signed the student and alumni petition.
I don't remember any vote in the political science department that the GCWE should close and be turned into an in-house urban administration program. In fact, the department rarely met in the spring semester and then only for a few minutes, to the chagrin of frustrated faculty.
Taking the program to the Brooklyn College campus, rather than near where our students work, will change the program and will not help working students and the New York residents whom they could ably serve in the future.
I unequivocally support our students' efforts to save the GCWE program, as do all but Corey Robin's friends and those not privy to real information. I could convince them of the justice of the student cause too! Their petition was released as students felt frustrated and sought out faculty members, labor union leaders and activists in our communities to help them mobilize support for the program . I hope they prevail and restore the program. The faculty to whom they refer are the adjuncts who had been dismissed over the last two years, plus some retirees who teach not for the money but out of a commitment to working-class education: Stephen Leberstein, Dominic Tuminaro, Gregory Wilpert, and David Laibman, just to name a few. The full-time faculty in political science can always teach in the program and the blog is inaccurate about some kind of cabal seeking to return for unknown perks. That's simply untrue.
Taking the program back to the main campus will prevent the predominantly African American, Caribbean American, and Latina/o students who have benefited from a program near their workplaces from advancing their education and professional careers.
I also think it is highly inappropriate to discuss a case of financial malfeasance that should remain confidential, even if I can tell you that most observers consider it to be baseless, a witch hunt against the former director who was not even referred to by name. But even if it were true, why should working students be punished by depriving them of a program that has been integral to the lives of so many of them, for more than three decades?
Dr. Emmanuel Ness Political Science, Brooklyn College
--
--- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Science & Society" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to scisoc+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.