by Angela Davis
I join with the many students, faculty, labor leaders and elected
officials who call upon Brooklyn College President Karen Gould
to restore the Graduate Center for Worker Education to its full
academic glory as a leading graduate program for New York's working
class. The GCWE developed generations of labor, legal, academic and
political leaders and activists for over 30 years.
The recent tragic destruction of the Graduate Center for Worker
Education and the wholesale purging of progressive faculty, staff and
graduate students is an unconscionable assault on an invaluable urban
working class institution. Brooklyn College also ended its support for
the Center's esteemed peer review journal "Working USA". Reminiscent
of the McCarthy era, under the pretext of administratively prosecuting
Professor Joseph Wilson, and tellingly, without any substantiated
legal or administrative findings, Brooklyn College used the attack as
a cover to dismantle the Worker Education program.
The long list of distinguished scholars associated with the Graduate
Center for Worker Education makes this attack even more outrageous.
Prolific public intellectuals including historian Gerald Horne, legal
scholar Genna Rae McNeil, labor scholar and activist Bill Fletcher,
award winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson, journalist Juan Gonzalez, and
Immanuel Ness, pathbreaking editor of the International Encyclopedia of
Protest and Revolution, are part of the extraordinary radical worker
education legacy CUNY and Brooklyn College seeks to sully and erase.
I recall with great pride my participation, a few years ago, in the
hallmark Worker Education conference "Black Woman and the Radical
Tradition" . The conference attracted scholars from around the U.S.,
Europe and Africa. We need to insure that the Graduate Center and the
rich intellectual activism giving rise to this tradition is defended
and restored.