I’m utterly flabbergasted by this story, from the afternoon update of the Chronicle of Higher Education:

MIT Student Sporting Circuit-Board Artwork Is Arrested in Airport Bomb Scare

Police officers arrested an MIT student at gunpoint this morning when they thought she was carrying a bomb into Logan International Airport, The Boston Globe reported.

The student, 19-year-old Star Simpson, walked into the airport at 8 a.m. with a circuit board affixed to the front of her sweatshirt. The circuit board displayed green LED lights and trailed wires running to a 9-volt battery. When an airport employee asked her about it, she did not respond, the Globe said. Police officers wielding machine guns quickly surrounded her. They determined that her prop was harmless, but arrested her for possessing a hoax device and for disturbing the peace.

The back of Ms. Simpson’s sweatshirt said, in gold handwritten letters, “socket to me” and “Course VI,” the nickname for the program in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, the Globe reported. She told the police that her garment was an art project.

“I’m an inventor, artist, engineer, and student,” Ms. Simpson says on her MIT Web site. “I love to build things, and I love crazy ideas.”

Law-enforcement authorities weren’t too crazy about her latest idea. “I’m shocked and appalled that somebody would wear this type of device to an airport,” Maj. Scott Pare of the Massachusetts State Police told the Globe. “Thankfully because she followed our instructions,” he said, “she ended up in our cell instead of a morgue.” —Sara Lipka

Thankfully? My assumption is that Ms. Simpson is the one who is meant, in this statement, to be thankful, displaying an appropriate level of gratitude for not having been shot for wearing a sweatshirt with flashing lights on it. Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the question of whether a battery-operated sweatshirt constitutes a “hoax device,” and therefore whether Ms. Simpson should have ended up in that cell at all (though I’m compelled to ask whether my grandmother would be arrested for disturbing the peace if she attempted to enter Logan Airport while wearing her Christmas sweatshirt on which Rudolph’s nose blinks). What I really want to know is in what universe would an actual bomb-carrying terrorist go through airport security with a prominently displayed, flashing-lighted circuit board attached to his or her chest?

That this story exists at all seems to me prima facie evidence that “they hate us for our freedom” is cynical, disingenuous nonsense. Perhaps they, whoever they are, hate us because our state apparatus is willing to shoot its own citizens for wearing a piece of blinking circuitry, which, if you ask me, is pretty much the opposite of freedom, thanks.

I’m quite behind the times on this (appropriate for mon état, quand je souffre du décalage horaire), but the talk of the lefty blogosphere a couple of weeks ago was the much that was being made of W’s having been spotted drinking what his advisors insisted was a non-alcoholic beer (and, of course, the Beeb’s somewhat tickled connection of that beverage to the “stomach bug” that apparently knocked him out of commission the next day. One might also note the gleeful reminder of H.W.’s stomachal gift to the prime minister of Japan back in 1992).

Here, however, what’s being circulated with equal schadenfreude is the video of an apparently drunken Nicolas Sarkozy in a G8 press conference. His advisors insist that Sarko never drinks, and that he simply wasn’t used to the long hours and late nights of negotiating, and that lack of sleep produced his wooziness. It’s hard, however, to imagine a late night with Vladimir Putin that could conceivably end in sobriety.

On the other hand, if I’d been asked to give a morning press conference yesterday, I might have looked much the same. Today, after a full night of sleep (though one admittedly produced with a bit of prescribed assistance), I’d be a little more on my game.

(cross-posted from making MediaCommons)

No doubt like many of you, I spent much of my evening last night glued to my television set, flipping between CNN and the networks, trying to keep apprised of developments in the election as best I could.  I also kept my laptop nearby, in order to keep an eye my favorite political media blogs (such as Crooks and Liars), in order to get a sense not just of their reaction to the events, but of their reaction to the coverage of the events.

I’m a bit dazed by it all as yet, and what thoughts I have are obviously pretty unprocessed.  But I’m interested this morning in the impact that the internet has clearly had on the outcome of this election.  This is nothing terrifically new; the last few election cycles have all been affected by the presence of the blogosphere.  What’s new, for me, is the circulation and discussion of political ads via the network.  Ads that were once tied to local or regional television markets—unless something went very wrong, and they got picked up by the network news departments—have suddenly become visible across the country, via YouTube and other video-sharing systems.  Of the ten best political ads of this season (according to Salon’s Video Dog), most, like Michael J. Fox’s ad for Missouri senator-elect Claire McCaskill, which took top honors, came to the attention of a much wider audience through their wide online distribution and discussion.

One of the truisms of recent political life has held that “all politics are local”; I’ve got to wonder whether this will continue to be so in an age in which media products are so widely dispersed—and, even more, in an age in which those who consume such products are able to respond.

Senate races in Ohio, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania appear to have gone to the Democrats.  I am, however, not counting my chickens as yet.  I’m still waiting for the after-10-pm-PST-election-day surprise, which has bitten us in the ass too many times in the last decade…

Good lord, but this is depressing.

So depressing, in fact, that I can’t even comment any further.

On another note:  what the New York Times looks like to the Right, courtesy of the Huffington Post.  Make sure you roll over the masthead a few times.  (Hat tip:  Scott.)

This update on the strike at NYU, today, from GSOC:

Jerrold Nadler, Congressman from New York, 8th District, has written an open letter to the United States House of Representatives, asking his colleagues to sign on to a letter to John Sexton calling for negotiations between NYU and our union. GSOC members can aid in this effort by calling or emailing their representatives and urging them to sign. You can find contact info for your representative at: http://www.house.gov/writerep/

Nadler’s letter follows a similar letter from New York Senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton, urging all US Senators to sign a letter to Sexton demanding negotiations. The Schumer-Clinton letter can be viewed at: http://2110uaw.org/gsoc/clinton_schumer.pdf

You can find contact info for your senators at:

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

We encourage all GSOC members to contact supporters across the country about these legislative letters, as they are an effective way to keep pressure building on NYU to negotiate over the summer.

The text of Nadler’s letter and his sign-on letter to Sexton are below the fold.
Read the rest of this entry »

This update on the strike at NYU, today, from GSOC:

New York Senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton have written an open letter to the United States Senate, asking their colleagues to sign on to a letter to John Sexton calling for negotations between NYU and our union. GSOC members can aid in this effort by calling or emailing their senators and urging them to sign. You can find contact info for your senators at: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Calls and letters from concerned non-GSOC members would no doubt be helpful as well.

The full texts of both Shumer and Clinton’s open letter to the Senate and their letter to Sexton are below the fold.
Read the rest of this entry »

This is one of the scariest things I’ve read in quite some time.

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

“It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source told us in an in-person conversation.

Scary enough, but not the part that really sends chills up my spine.  Read the comments, an alarming percentage of which cheer the administration on in its efforts to silence the media.  The media, which is at least in theory trying to report on the administration’s illegal activity.  It’s positively Orwellian:  the problem is not the right’s violations of the Constitution but the attempts by a Constitutionally protected free press to report on those violations.

There’s a fair bit of discussion on Unfogged today about resistance—both the historical Resistance in Vichy France and its implications for life in the U.S. today.  It’s these kinds of attempts on the part of the right to control the nation’s discourse—and worse, the level of success they’ve had in the last six years, regardless of what the approval ratings seem to suggest—that make me despair.  Is resistance even possible?

Dear President Sexton,

As an alumna of New York University (Ph.D. English, 1998), I receive the usual set of appeals for donations, both from the university’s annual giving fund and from other fundraising bodies within NYU. In the past, I have given, not much, but happily—both to the Friends of Bobst Library and to the annual fund—but I feel it is important to let you know why, until things change, my response to any and all such appeals will be not just “no” but “hell, no.”

I was admitted to NYU in 1993, as a post-master’s Ph.D. student. I was given absolutely nothing in the way of funding during my first year—no fellowship, no assistantship, no tuition remission. Poor advising and a real desire to be in New York led me to make a decision I now counsel all of my undergraduates against—I enrolled anyway, supporting myself through that first year on loans and freelance work. Because of this decision, I graduated from NYU $21,000 in debt, a debt that was accumulated at your institution alone.

That I managed to hold my debt to $21,000 was due in part to the teaching position I applied, interviewed, and was hired for in the Expository Writing Program (EWP) in 1994. At EWP, instructors—all of us post-master’s Ph.D. students, from across the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences—taught two courses a semester. This is, of course, the same teaching load as that of full-time faculty at NYU. These were, furthermore, student-contact intensive positions, as we were teaching required first-year writing courses, and we instructors thus spent countless hours not simply in the classroom, in class preparation, or in grading, but in student conferences, in faculty development programs, and in the evaluation of required writing proficiency exams. For this work, we instructors were given tuition remission (those of us still doing coursework, in any case) and a stipend of less than $10,000 per year.

In New York City. For more than forty hours of work per week. Less than $10,000.

Needless to say, nearly all of us held down a second job as well, simply in order to eat. Many of my colleagues picked up teaching at other institutions around the city; some worked in publishing; others did tutoring or worked corporate jobs. All of this, of course, in addition to both being full-time graduate students and to teaching a full 2-2 load. I was lucky enough to find freelance work in electronic publishing, work that has not only helped me in my career since graduation, but that was sufficiently highly-paid that I was able to make ends meet.

In fact, during my fifth and final year at NYU, as I was on the academic job market, my freelance work had become lucrative and enjoyable enough that I decided to leave EWP. I made nearly $60,000 that year. (Of course, I took a significant pay cut when I landed an assistant professorship. But that’s another story.) More importantly, I spent no more than 40 hours per week working for pay, freeing up many hours for my own work. Given that ability to maintain better control of my time, I was able to finish my dissertation that year, spending a total of a year and a half on it.

The point of all of this history is to make clear exactly how the treatment of graduate instructors and teaching assistants affects their lives. All of us struggled to make ends meet. Most of us graduated in serious debt, debt that our future salaries—if we were lucky enough to land full-time professorial positions—would not easily cover. And many of us were put in the position of having to sacrifice our own studies, our coursework, our exams, and our writing, to our teaching. If we did so, it was because it was our job to do so, as employees engaged in the core mission of the institution—the education of undergraduates.

Things changed somewhat after I graduated: the English department moved toward a policy of accepting only those Ph.D. students to whom it could grant funding, for one thing. And the graduate students organized, and won recognition for their union (the Graduate Student Organizing Committee, or GSOC), successfully bargaining for a contract that dramatically improved their working conditions. I was enormously proud to have graduated from the first private U.S. university to recognize and bargain in good faith with its graduate employees union, and I was thrilled to think that students who followed behind me might not have to make the same difficult choices that I did, compromising the quality of their studies or taking on insupportable debt in the pursuit of a degree.

This pride made it all the more heartbreaking when it became clear that you were going to take advantage of the National Labor Relations Board’s politically motivated 2005 ruling in order to refuse contract-renewal negotiations with GSOC, and that, worse, you were going to use ugly strike-breaking and retaliatory tactics in an attempt to bust the union. That you still, months later, refuse to negotiate with the graduate employees, even when urged to do so by both U.S. Senators from your state, is an appalling display of pigheadedness on your part, and begins to suggest to me that NYU has become less educational in function—that “private university in the public service” that I put myself in debt to attend—than, as detailed by NYU Exposed, a giant corporation, one working to undermine job security through an increasing turn to underpaid adjunct labor, while simultaneously (and underhandedly) overcompensating its senior executives.

I did not go $21,000 in debt and work two full-time jobs in order to receive my doctorate from Wal-Mart.

With this letter, I want to add my voice to the many others, including not only many of your own faculty but also thousands of professors and graduate students around the world, as well as untold numbers of sympathetic citizens, urging you to resume good-faith negotiations with GSOC.

But I also want to note, very clearly, that until such time as you do, what modest donations I would have made to the university will instead be sent to the GSOC Strike Hardship Fund. Moreover, I’m going to urge my fellow alumni to do the same. And I will advise my undergraduates, 75% of whom go on to grad school in some form, not to apply to or attend NYU. They will certainly receive a better educational experience at an institution that values their labor appropriately.

Sincerely,

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Associate Professor of English and Media Studies
Pomona College

P.S. A video detailing the history of the GSOC’s strike can be found here.