Incorrigible warhawks and hand-wringing sensible liberals both routinely dismiss calls for immediate withdrawal from Iraq with a wave of the hand and a grumble or two about the need for constructive suggestions. If pressed on the topic they will point out that after American soldiers withdraw things may get very, very bad in Iraq. The problem with this line of argument is that while that is true that things may get very, very bad, that could only support prolonging the occupation (whether indefinitely or for the duration of some elaborately orchestrated exit strategy) if not withdrawing would somehow make things less bad. If the presence of American soldiers is usually making things actively worse — the delusion of control notwithstanding — then the appeal is simply foolish.

But maybe the hand-wringers and the mouth-foamers have a point. If American soldiers weren’t in Iraq, then who would make sure that things like this get done?

(Via The Disillusioned Kid 2006-12-01.)

(I heard about the recent events through the Movement for a Democratic Society announcement list.)

Here is what Oliver Sacks wrote about the legacy of the 1988 Deaf President Now student strike at Gallaudet University, the world’s only liberal-arts university designed for deaf and hard-of-hearing students, and a backbone of Deaf culture in the United States. This is from his beautiful book, Seeing Voices:

All sorts of changes, administrative, educational, social, psychological, are already beginning at Gallaudet. But what is clearest at this point is the much-altered bearing of its students, a bearing that conveys a new, wholly unself-conscious sense of pleasure and vindication, of confidence and dignity. This new sense of themselves represents a decisive break from the past, which could not have been imagined just a few months ago.

But has all been changed? Will there be a lasting transformation of consciousness? Will deaf people at Gallaudet, and the deaf community at large, indeed find the opportunities they seek? Will we, the hearing, allow them these opportunities? Allow them to be themselves, a unique culture in our midst, yet admit them as co-equals, to every sphere of activity? One hopes the events at Gallaudet will be but the beginning.

–Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices: A Journey Into the World of the Deaf (ISBN 0-06-097347-1), pp. 162–163.

Unfortunately, the answer from the Gallaudet University administration and Board of Trustees–even those who were direct beneficiaries of the Deaf President Now movement–appears to be No, not yet. Here’s the story from The Washington Post (2006-10-07):

Hundreds of protesters took over the main classroom building at Gallaudet University on Thursday night and refused to leave yesterday, demanding that the board of trustees reopen the search for a president.

With trustees meeting on campus and celebrating outgoing President I. King Jordan, students pitched tents outside the entrances to Hall Memorial and blocked the doors. Inside, trash cans and desks held elevator doors ajar, and the floor was covered with sleeping bags, cans of energy drink and fliers that spread messages to the school for the deaf: THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES WON’T LISTEN TO US! and DO NOT LET ANYONE IN.

When security officers arrived early yesterday, students said, they couldn’t understand what officers were saying — that officers gave orders without sign language and did not seem to understand that the protest was peaceful. Some people were injured when officers shoved their way through and used pepper spray, students said.

A lot of people are scared, Leah Katz-Hernandez wrote on a neon yellow notepad, and some faculty members were in tears as they signed with students.

Communication with security staff is an emotional issue at the university. In 1990, a student died while being restrained by security officers; his hands were cuffed, so he couldn’t use sign language.

The administration has denied that pepper spray was used and said that officers used sign language and that no students were hurt.

… The choice of the school’s next leader has divided campus since the spring, prompting faculty no-confidence votes and protests last semester and continuing opposition by a coalition of faculty, students, staff and alumni. In a scene reminiscent of student takeovers of District universities in past decades, protesters barricaded doors and refused to compromise.

At some schools for the deaf elsewhere in the country, groups pitched tents and made signs supporting the Gallaudet protesters.

The leaders of the National Association of the Deaf issued an open letter saying the campus is in crisis and asking the board to exercise leadership and for the university to immediately cease any confrontational tactics toward campus faculty, students, and staff.

…

In May, when the board of trustees announced that then-Provost Jane K. Fernandes would be the next president of Gallaudet University, students stood up and walked out of the auditorium, climbed onto the front gates and began to protest.

They said that the search process was unfair, that Fernandes was not strong enough to lead a school often seen as the cultural backbone of the deaf world and that the board had ignored their concerns.

Because longtime President I. King Jordan swept into office after students demanded a deaf president now and started a civil rights movement, the selection of Fernandes had particular weight for the deaf community.

— Susan Kinzie and Nelson Hernandez, Washington Post (2006-10-07): Protesters Occupy Gallaudet Classroom Building

From The Washington Post (2006-10-10):

Since May, protesters say, the university has only become more deeply divided.

What is her plan? And, what is she waiting for? She had all summer to bring the community together, but as you can see, [that] didn’t happen, wrote Andrew J. Lange, president of the Gallaudet University Alumni Association, which is setting up an independent Web site because it cannot send e-mail to alumni without university approval.

The second wave of demonstrations began last week when the board of trustees met on campus. Protesters say that the way Fernandes was chosen was unfair and that the board has ignored people on campus for too long.

Last night, hundreds of students agreed to spend one more night in the classroom building. They awaited a response from administrators to a proposal that they would leave the building if the university satisfied 24 demands, including guaranteeing their right to protest in specific areas.

The students also are seeking a public apology from university President I. King Jordan, whom they accuse of making misleading statements about the protesters. The students are not backing down from their original demands to reopen the presidential search process and to guarantee that protesters would not be retaliated against.

In May, faculty members passed a series of no-confidence votes after it was announced that Fernandes, then the provost, would become president.

Trustees have said that their decision is nonnegotiable and that they have chosen the strongest candidate. This summer, Fernandes stepped down as provost to work on her transition to the presidency.

… Jordan, who is stepping down at the end of this year, said yesterday that Fernandes’s leadership since May has been outstanding.

— Susan Kinzie, Washington Post (2006-10-10): Intensity of Gallaudet Unrest Surprised Incoming Leader

From The Washington Post (2006-10-14): Dozens of Protesters Arrested On Gallaudet President’s Order:

Campus police arrested dozens of student demonstrators at Gallaudet University last night to reopen the famed college for the deaf after a three-day shutdown staged in a long-simmering protest over the appointment of a new president.

The arrests began shortly before 9 p.m., when police began carrying away students from a jeering throng that had been blocking the school’s Sixth Street NE entrance. Students hollered and signed, This is our school! By early this morning, police said, about 80 had been arrested. Witnesses said many students were still awaiting arrest.

Teams of officers, acting on orders from President I. King Jordan and aided by interpreters in orange vests, picked up individual students, who went limp, and carried them to a D.C. police van.

The students were to be taken from the school, at 800 Florida Ave. NE, to a police training facility in Southwest Washington for processing, officials said.

The arrests brought to a head a bitter dispute that began in May between the administration and students angry about the appointment of then-provost Jane K. Fernandes as the university’s next president. She is scheduled to replace Jordan, who is to step down in December.

Protesters expressed dislike for Fernandes, saying she was remote and divisive. They argued that other candidates, especially minorities, had been overlooked. And they called for her to step aside.

She has refused, saying she is the target of student extremists. And earlier yesterday, speaking to the protesters for the first time this week, she said: This has gone on long enough.

About 7 p.m., Jordan announced to demonstrators at the school’s main gate on Florida Avenue that they faced arrest if they did not disperse. I deeply regret being forced to take this action, he said. But the protesters have left me no choice.

Two hours later, after three warnings from campus Police Chief Melodye Batten-Mickens, arrests began at the Sixth Street entrance.

— Susan Kinzie and Michael E. Ruane, Washington Post (2006-10-14): Dozens of Protesters Arrested On Gallaudet President’s Order

There’s a lot of discussion from a lot of different points of view at the DeafDC group weblog. See especially the statements from Julie Hochgesang (2006-10-13): Why I’m Still Protesting at Gallaudet, Allison Kaftan (2006-10-11): Worlds Apart: Divergences in Perspectives on the Protest, and David Stuckless (2006-10-14): Today, Irving Shot the Buffalo, the criticism from Juanita Garcia (2006-10-13): This Week The World Snubbed Gallaudet and Kristi Merriweather (2006-10-14): A Fictitious Protest for Fictitious Reasons, and the proposals from Bobby White (2006-10-16): Concerned Students Take a Step Forward and Tom Willard (2006-10-16): A Few Ideas to End the Stalemate. The Gallaudet University Faculty, Staff, Students & Alumni coalition, which is coordinating the protests, offers news updates through their website. There’s also more at WikiPedia: Gallaudet United Now Movement.

I have no particularly strong opinion on the groups, the individuals, or the actions involved in the student strike and lock-in at Gallaudet. How would I know? I’m not deaf (or Deaf), I have no personal connections with Gallaudet or anyone there, and I haven’t done research beyond reading through news stories, Op-Eds, and weblogs for an hour or two today. But I do have some experience with abusive power-mongering and cronyism from University Trustees and administrators. I also do know enough to know that these issues are particularly sensitive for Deaf students, many of whom are sick and tired of being ignored, patronized, and manhandled by know-it-all suits connected with the established power structure. From what I can see, it looks to me like Fernandes had damn well better step aside in light of the vocal opposition to her from students, faculty, and staff.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-03-30: How not to argue against worker co-ops

It seems that the new thing in higher education, since 2001, is the development of Homeland Security curricula. Many Universities not only have multidisciplinary academic programs organized around Homeland Security, but are even starting to offer Master of Arts in Security Policy Studies and Master of Homeland Security degrees. Peter Klein just posted to the LRC Blog about how he was recently asked to help develop the curriculum for a new Master of Homeland Security degree at the University of Missouri.

The first step toward challenging the horror of politics in our age is to demand that people have the decency to call things by their proper names. Maybe sometimes violence, even killing, is necessary; but when or if it is, then you ought to at least admit that that’s what you are advocating. So let’s cut out the Heimat bullshit and call this what it is: a Master of War degree.

Cue the Bob Dylan.

The Great Conservative Cultural Revolution is a great revolution that touches people to their very souls and constitutes a new stage in the development of the conservative revolution in our country, a deeper and more extensive stage. At present, our objective is to criticize and repudiate the reactionary far-left academic authorities and the ideology of the far-left and all other exploiting classes, and to transform education, literature and art, and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond to the Republican electoral base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the conservative system.

And in her heroic quest to smash the old world, Great American Debbie Schluessel has uncovered another enemy of the people lurking in the halls of academe. Behold the running-dog of the far left and the corrupter of our youth, Dr. Alaistair Norcross, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rice University!

Now, far be it from me to stand between the Red State Guards and their patriotic duty of shaming dissenting professors for their incorrect thoughts. Still, Alaistair Norcross happens to be an acquaintence of mine, so I have some personal interest in the matter. And while I find his visceral loathing for deontological ethics unwholesome, his utilitarianism profoundly mistaken, and his criticism of virtue ethics barking mad, I can’t say I recognize anything of substance about his views, or his arguments for those views, or his personality, or his teaching, or his conduct, in this column. So I have a few questions for Ms. Schluessel, since I have also been unable to find any discussion of the content of Dr. Norcross’s essays, or of the content of his courses, or his methods of teaching them, or any indication of having so much as read anything he’s written or talked with someone who has taken a course from him. I’ve posted these questions directly to the comments section on her weblog, but who knows what the moderation system will make of them? Thus, you can also find them here.

Ms. Schluessel, have you:

1. Taken one of Dr. Norcross’s classes?

2. Spoken with anyone who has taken one of Dr. Norcross’s classes?

3. Spoken with Dr. Norcross about his views on animal ethics?

4. Read “The Animal Ethics Reader”?

5. Read the “Killing and Letting Die” anthology that he (co-)edited?

6. Made any effort to discover (by conversation or by reading) how, as a co-editor of an anthology on the topic, his views relate to those of the contributors to the anthology?

7. Heard the presentation or read the paper on “Torturing Puppies, etc.”?

8. Read his comments in response to somebody else’s paper on “Disability, Marxism, and Ecofeminism”?

9. Noticed from the CV that those are in fact assigned comments on somebody else’s paper for a conference, rather than a topic Norcross wrote on himself?

10. Taken Dr. Norcross’s class on the Simpsons and Philosophy, or talked with anyone who has taken it, or talked with Dr. Norcross about it, or read the book by the same title, or, for that matter, heard of the concept of “humor”?

11. Noticed that the PhotoShop of his head onto President Bush’s body is actually a joke about Kantian ethical theory, not about the war in Iraq?

12. In general, done absolutely anything to discover what Dr. Norcross’s views are, or what his arguments for those views are, or what his courses are like, or what he’s like as a person, other than skimming very quickly over his faculty website and speculating on the titles of papers you found in his CV?

I ask, because if you have done any of these things you offer no evidence of it anywhere in your column. But if you haven’t done any of these things, then you simply have no idea what you are talking about when you speculate on what his courses are like, what he demands of students, what he’s like as a person, what he believes, or what sorts of arguments he gives to defend those beliefs. But if you don’t know what you are talking about, then why are you talking about it?

Are we about to turn a corner in Iraq, or should we just cut our losses and get out now? How much longer should we let things play out before we take a decisive step towards disengagement? Let’s ask Tom Friedman, the New York Times’s resident Sensible Liberal and global brain. Apparently, we need to let this play out for a while before we do anything rash. The next six months are critical. Give it until November or December of 2006. Then we’ll know:

Well, I think that we’re going to find out, Chris, in the next year to six months–probably sooner–whether a decent outcome is possible there, and I think we’re going to have to just let this play out.

–Thomas L. Friedman, Hardball, MSNBC (May 11, 2006)

How much longer should we let things play out before we take a decisive step towards disengagement? Let’s ask Tom Friedman, the New York Times’s resident Sensible Liberal and global brain. Apparently, we need to let this play out for a while before we do anything rash. The next six months are critical. Give it until March or April of 2004. Then we’ll know:

The next six months in Iraq–which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there–are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time.

–Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times (November 30, 2003)

We should let this play out for a while before we do anything rash. The next six months are critical. Give it until December of 2004 or January of 2005. Then we’ll know:

What I absolutely don’t understand is just at the moment when we finally have a UN-approved Iraqi-caretaker government made up of–I know a lot of these guys–reasonably decent people and more than reasonably decent people, everyone wants to declare it’s over. I don’t get it. It might be over in a week, it might be over in a month, it might be over in six months, but what’s the rush? Can we let this play out, please?

–Thomas L. Friedman, Fresh Air, NPR (June 3, 2004)

The next six months are critical. Give it until April or May of 2005. Then we’ll know:

What we’re gonna find out, Bob, in the next six to nine months is whether we have liberated a country or uncorked a civil war.

–Thomas L. Friedman, Face the Nation, CBS (October 3, 2004)

Give it until June or July of 2005:

Improv time is over. This is crunch time. Iraq will be won or lost in the next few months. But it won’t be won with high rhetoric. It will be won on the ground in a war over the last mile.

–Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times (November 28, 2004)

We’re in the end game now. Give it until March or April of 2006:

I think we’re in the end game now…. I think we’re in a six-month window here where it’s going to become very clear and this is all going to pre-empt I think the next congressional election–that’s my own feeling–let alone the presidential one.

–Thomas L. Friedman, Meet the Press (September 25, 2005)

Give it until March or April of 2006:

Maybe the cynical Europeans were right. Maybe this neighborhood is just beyond transformation. That will become clear in the next few months as we see just what kind of minority the Sunnis in Iraq intend to be. If they come around, a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible, and we should stay to help build it. If they won’t, then we are wasting our time.

–Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times (September 28, 2005)

June or July of 2006:

We’ve teed up this situation for Iraqis, and I think the next six months really are going to determine whether this country is going to collapse into three parts or more or whether it’s going to come together.

–Thomas L. Friedman, Face the Nation (December 18, 2005)

July to October of 2006:

I think that we’re going to know after six to nine months whether this project has any chance of succeeding. In which case, I think the American people as a whole will want to play it out or whether it really is a fool’s errand.

–Thomas L. Friedman, Oprah Winfrey Show (January 23, 2006)

We’re in the end game now. We’ll see by sometime around May to July of 2006:

I think we’re in the end game there, in the next three to six months, Bob. We’ve got for the first time an Iraqi government elected on the basis of an Iraqi constitution. Either they’re going to produce the kind of inclusive consensual government that we aspire to in the near term, in which case America will stick with it, or they’re not, in which case I think the bottom’s going to fall out.

–Thomas L. Friedman, CBS (January 31, 2006)

We’re in the end game now. We’ll see by sometime around September to December of 2006:

I think we are in the end game. The next six to nine months are going to tell whether we can produce a decent outcome in Iraq. –Thomas L. Friedman, Today, NBC (March 2, 2006)

We need to let this play out for a while before we do anything rash. The next six months are critical. Give it until November or December of 2006. Then we’ll know:

Well, I think that we’re going to find out, Chris, in the next year to six months–probably sooner–whether a decent outcome is possible there, and I think we’re going to have to just let this play out.

–Thomas L. Friedman, Hardball, MSNBC (May 11, 2006)

Next month: Tom Friedman thinks that we’re going to find out whether it’s time to leave Iraq in the next six months! Give it until January 2007…

Be sure to bear in mind, in case you are confused, that there are always more corners to turn when you are lost in an endless maze.

(Quotes thanks to FAIR 2006-05-16. Link thanks to Dominion Weblog 2006-05-16.)