A Justice Site
A Justice Site
Talking Heads Do Not Plain English Speak
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FACULTY ASSISTANCE: Letters of Recommendation - Susan - jeanne
UWP Criminal Justice Dept. - CSUDH Dept. of Sociology
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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: October 6, 2006
Latest Update: October 6, 2006
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Several semesters of experimenting with visual sociology have led us to what Michael and Pat and Susan and I would call the Naked Space, an informal forum where are all are free to express their feelings and opinions, support collaboratively those beliefs, feelings and opinions by information from many perspectives and authorities, and come to know how and why different people have chosen different positions on things that matter in the world we live in. (We call this illocutionary dicourse that leads to our awareness of the human nature we share.) Michael and Pat are the graduate students at CSUDH who play pivotal roles in cheering us down these new paths, and keeping the experiment going. Susan and I are the Faculty at CSUDH and UWP who simply can't walk away from a teaching philosophy to which we are both intensely committed.
So today I'd like to tell you a funny story of how we got here. It started thirty years ago when Susan was a student of mine at CSUDH, and I found myself newly in an urban university that, in response to the Watts Riots in Los Angeles of 1965, had moved from the elite environment of Palos Verdes, to Dominguez Hills, bordering on Compton, California..
Civil Rights legislation had just opened the door to education that could no longer legally separate out racial groups. The Watts Riots were saying that education wasn't responding nearly fast enough, and so the State University moved down from the "hill" to ameliorate that.. . .
Continued October 7, 2006: Now, a week later, I've caught up to myself and would like to go on with our story.
I came here out of politics. The McGovern campaign. I didn't plan to stay here long. I wanted to go to Washington and make changes in the dominant discourse and the infrastructure that had led to Vietnam. I bought a Chief printing press to print the McGovern literature we needed, in 1972, because the local party members just kept forgetting to give the literature out or losing it. Gee, I'll bet that didn't have anything to do that we were registering blacks all day long everyday. I was invited to run for office, but I balked at the nefarious negotiations that went on in the party, and opted instead for teaching.
I fell in love with the lawyer who got my divorce from another very nice guy, and after a while, I married him, the lawyer, hat is, and it was no longer feasible to go to Washington. His practice was here. And in many ways I no longer felt the need to find a new home for my political activity. I liked the people I met here. Students who had nver had much of an educational chance, many from the South, where police had threatened to arrest us when we invited black students from Xavier to the Tulane campus. Of course, they tried to arrest us in the Methodist church, where we were meeting. Speak of violence in our infrastructure.
No matter. Don't blame it all on the South. Gary Colboth, the Campus Legal Officer, came to arrest us when we held our first child care center in the Social and Behavioral Science Building. Without the appropriate permission, of course. Ten little kids and Carol and me and Sandy. And Sandy's husband came to give us a card telling us in English and Spanish what to do when we were arrested. We threatened him with mayhem, but I really had said goodbye to my Manhattan Beach apartment that morning, figuring I'd be in jail by nightfall.
Gary dutifully appeared and read us our Miranda rights, which was hysterical, because only police have the power to arrest in the name of the State. I guess he was ready to cart us off, but a civilian arrest doesn't include the Miranda rights. Only when the police take you over and put you under arrest does Miranda come into play. In all the confusion, our colleagues joined us and notified the papers and TV stations about what was going on. They were ready to film it if we were led out in cuffs.
The VicePresident summoned me to the Peace Room, the President's conference room on the fifth floor of the library. I still have fond memories of that place. We contacted each of the parents and sent the children home, except for one little girl, whose mother we couldn't find. We took her with us, me and Carol and Sandy, and Vincent, Sandy's husband with the infamous Miranda card, and dozens of faculty. The President was still in Sacramento, where he never knew that what had prompted the "sit in" was a statement he made at a Sacramento party, where some of my friends happened to be. The statement made it clear that he did not intend to grant us a child care center, making something more drastic necessary, like civil disobedience. And so . . .
We had made the politically astute move of turning the child care center over to parents before the "sit in." None of us, faculty or student, who had been lobbying through the student body association, had any children of child care age. The administrative member in charge of the committee for the committee of the committee on child care, came to the Peace Room equipped with a humungus three ring binder with every piece of paper that had ever been exchanged over the child care center. We simply continued to say that no amount of paper (there were no e-mails in those days) mattered. All that mattered was that students, enabled by recent civil rights legislation to get an education, needed child care. That mattered. And we gestured to the little girl who had fallen peacefully asleep on the Peace Room floor.
We became the "bad guys" whose fault it was there was no child care center because we were so radical and loud and demanding. Within a year the calm and "ever reasonable" parents to whom we had turned over the child care group, had a Child Care Center, that has remained on campus ever since.
I still remember that dear child asleep on the floor of the Peace Room with something like angelic support for our argument. The image of her needs said more than we could ever put into sound bites on the right to an education. Someone put a note in my personnel file saying that I had behaved inappropriately for a first-year faculty member. I thought my behavior was both appropriate and competent, considering how scared I was, but they never asked for my opinion on that score.
* * * * * Now for my moral interpretation of the tale:
I didn't have any children. I could have shrugged my shoulders and ignored the problem. But that kind of reaction belongs in a libertarian world in which one believes that if each individual fends forcefully for herself, the world will be better off. Problem is, that ignores that we are interdependent creatures, interdependent both with each other and with the world we live in. We're not free roaming bits of matter. We're social creatures. There can be no wondrously appropriate "outside" perspective, because we can't get outside the constraints of our senses and the our own unique perspective of the world that imparts those senses to us.
This predicament doesn't provide easy answers. Would the world be better off if I took more of the time I need to write and publish, and less time for family and friends and my community? It's a delicate balance, with no "right" answers. Each to her own choice, but within the limits of doing no harm to others' freedom of access and innovation and the fundamental good and safety of the community itself.
The conservative view is that those who have been successful (success by 2006 being defined as accumulating great wealth, without too many questions about precisely how that was managed) should govern. The liberal view is that the ruling group should never engage in governing in such a way that any given group of people within the group will be disadvantaged unfairly by that governing. (Rawls.)
Such complication, recognized by all disciplines today, means that we need to question what we believe to the extent of knowing our sources, accepting their values, and basing our own support on those values, or by interpreting the sources on our own. Since we live in an age that can no longer accept a neutral out-of-awareness of whatever, to investigate and understand why we believe what we believe means that we can comfortably "own" what we believe. No need to say, well, I didn't mean that, or I didn't know, or no one told me. We want our representatives and corporations to be ethical and accountable. Our infrastructure is not sustainable without that. So we, too, must be ethical and accountable. Our local communities, and ultimately our society, are not sustainable without that.
References:
- Watts Riots In Wikipedia. Remember that Wikipedia is an open encyclopedia and the sources may be incorrect. But most of the time it will give you a good quick introduction to topics that people are still concerned about. jeanne
- Civil Disorders By: Norman Coombs. The Black Experience in America. Chapter 12 The Black Revolt. Originally published by Twayne Press in 1972 as part of The Immigrant Heritage of America. On the California State University, San Marcos website. I haven't personally checked all the cites; I'm assuming general correctness because of the source, CSU, San Marcos. jeanne
- >A Journey Into The Mind of Watts By Thomas Pynchon, a recluse novelist whom many claim deserves a Nobel Prize for Gravity's Rainbow.
A Community College Website on Thomas Pynchon.
NEWS, Announcements, and
Current Events Discussion Topics:
- Plans for Wednesday, October 11, 2006.
- Critiques of Work from Week 6, Wednesday, October 4, 2006.
- Community Building Preparations:
Consider how art work in progress can be used to stimulate conversation on current events of major importance to you. Remember that you don't want to use the academic language of theories with friends and neighbors who are unlikely to have encountered them. Instead, our goal is simply to make people aware of current issues in plain English. You might want to look at the list of topics on the syllabus for ideas.
Remember that these are conversations, not classes. Find simple, brief messages. Things likely to stick in your head, like Juliette's "opium of the mases." When possible make a simple card you're willing to part with. Little pockets with words that will bring the dialog up in memory are a great idea. For example, Tony, I'd love to see you make a simple little card you could leave with those you talk to, on which there's a little pocket out of which you could pull the word, "Taliban." It's not on TV enough for most folks to remember how it's spelled. But seeing it on your card, by interactively pulling it out, could help people recognize it when they see it. Since Afghanistan is heating up again, that seems like a good idea.
- Index of Art Project Instructions
Neil Jones/ReutersIn Blackburn, England, where these women were Friday,
Jack Straw says he first thought Muslim veils work against cohesion in society.Veiled Women
- Assimilation of cultures with crisis displacement of whole groups of people. British Official Criticizes Muslim Veil By Alan Cowell, NY Times. Published: October 7, 2006. Backup . . . Discussion Questions.
All Praise Prof. Alan Dershowitz By Tony Blankley. February 22, 2006. On Dershowitz' book on Preemption.
Check out the story-telling we are beginning to do. Some of the stories will work with kids; some with friends; some with family. Stories are great ways to begin conversations about things that matter.
- My Theory of Everything - jeanne's serial novel. Three stories in the works, in concjunction with my conceptual drawing and painting. Link to the Table of Contents for recent stories. jeanne
- Pat's concerns over the Bush Administration led to this etching on Wednesday, October 4, 2006:
Application of triangles to issues involving President Bush
by Patricia AconeI went roughly over the etching with white, so you could see what Pat was thinking. President Bush is represented by the figure on the left, right in the finished print (don't forget, as we obviously did, that prints reverse the image) and there's a poor little detainee who's been lassoed by the Bush figure. There's a huge bull's eye behind the Bush figure, who has just dropped the fish he was holding in his right hand (left in the final print). That leads to the OOPS ! that we forgot to reverse.
What do the icons, the triangles, the science fiction-like cartoonish images, the fish, the lasso, the detainee figure, the bull's eye and the signature triangle all represent from Pat's perspective?
Can you help me figure out how Karl Rove would interpret this copper plate and its print? Trust me, he can find a positive story to tell that will be plausible for half this country's population, even if that wasn't what Pat meant to do. Extra points for Karl Rove interpretatins. jeanne
Just in case you've been on Mars or Venus, who is Karl Rove? Karl Rove "News about Karl Rove, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times." He's President Bush's leading political advisor.
Rove Fight Escalates Washinton Times. (conservative news).
Left/Right Perspectives - Cursor - New York Times - The National Review
Arts and Letters Daily - The Economist - The Sierra Club - The Guardian
Wall Street Journal - The Weekly Standard - The Nation - The Cato Institute (Libertarian)
BBC NEWS | Americas - truthout - Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles
Los Angeles Times - Chicago Tribune - La Opinion - The Washington Post
Cursor's Al Jazeera Archive - Ha'aretz - Palestine Monitor - Palestine Report
The American ProspectMemorandum, Political Web - Diggs - College Network of New York Times - New York Times Learning Network
The American Enterprise Institute
Indymedia - Mother Jones - BBC News - New Profile - KPFK Progressive Radio
Progressive Sociologists Network Environmental Working Group - Mirror of JusticeTheory, Policy, Practice of a Career by jeanne and Susan.
Digital Dissertations, with abstracts online. Has search mechanism with keywords, author, etc.
Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Online articles.
Evangelical Philosophical Society
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)
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