Norman Finkelstein resigned today from DePaul University, a wrenching decision given what he has faced and endured. An earlier letter of protest follows:

September 4, 2007

The Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, C.M.

President

DePaul University

1 East Jackson Boulevard

Chicago, Illinois 60604-2287

Dear President Holtschneider,

            We write to you today as colleagues from a neighbor institution, and we write in the spirit of dialogue and tolerance which is so central to the Vincentian tradition that you and DePaul University hold dear.  We write in the hope that in the midst of what must seem to you at times like a firestorm, you can find a space of serenity and peace to reflect on the larger meanings and implications of events unfolding now at DePaul, locate those events in the context of increasing attacks on speech and open inquiry in the academy, and, finally, stand up unequivocally for intellectual freedom and for justice.

            We refer, of course, to the controversy swirling around Professor Norman Finkelstein’s tenure and promotion case, and the University’s decision to deny tenure to him and another highly-regarded professor, Mehrene E. Larudee.  Tenure and promotion is rarely an open affair, but these particular cases have entered the public square with force and velocity.  In part this is because the University reversed the Political Science Department’s recommendation regarding Dr. Finkelstein, reached through a time-tested peer review process, and in part it’s the result of the noisy campaign by Alan Dershowitz, a prominent Harvard University law professor, to undermine and demonize Dr. Finkelstein and his work.  Professor Dershowitz publicly promised that he would see to it that Norman Finkelstein would never be granted tenure, and, as events continue to unfold, as standards, rules, and rights seem to topple before him, it’s increasingly believable that Alan Dershowitz’ troubling and bullying threat has come true. 

            But perhaps the decisive element igniting this case is that Professor Finkelstein’s scholarship is at the vortex of one of the most complex and vexing areas in the world today: Israel/Palestine.  His work is controversial without doubt, always provocative, sometimes gut-wrenching.  It is also courageous, for he has little concern for who he offends or who he supports.  He follows the evidence wherever it leads him, and he speaks in a singular voice without regard to any orthodoxy whatsoever.  His record is stellar: five published books with a variety of academic and trade publishers, a range of scholarly articles, reviews, and papers.  His work is widely read, cited, debated. 

            There are many areas of inquiry and debate that are fairly straight-forward; Israel/Palestine is not one of them.  It is, rather, a dynamic and complex area full of emotion, conflicting claims, ideology, fear, anxiety.  But our universities are uniquely organized so that these areas, too, can be at the center of its discourse, even when they cause misunderstanding and hurt, anger and hostility. 

            The primary job of intellectuals and scholars is to challenge orthodoxy, dogma, and mindless complacency, to be skeptical of all authoritative claims, to interrogate and trouble the given and the taken-for-granted.  The growth of knowledge, insight, and understanding depends on their kind of effort, and the inevitable clash of ideas that follows must be nourished and not crushed. 

            Teachers have certain fundamental responsibilities, chiefly to organize classrooms as sites of open discussion, free of coercion or intimidation.  By all accounts Professor Finkelstein meets this standard.  His classes are fully enrolled, and students welcome the exchange of views that he encourages.  Students should always recognize that a classroom can only be relatively safe, that arguing about ideas cannot be risk-free.  Feeling uncomfortable about one’s beliefs—students and teachers alike—is a matter of course in good classrooms.

            Reverend Holtschneider, your decision in this matter will have an impact far beyond Norman Finkelstein himself.  The dismissals of Professors Finkelstein and Larudee threaten to undermine the role of the university as a foundation of democracy and as a forum for ideas and debate on the critical social issues of our time.  They impact the life of the university as a whole by casting a chill on classroom teaching, the selection of research projects, and the tenure and promotion process.  All of your students are watching to see how a leader responds to a crisis, and what role principle plays.  Young scholars and teachers are watching, weighing what is worth knowing and experiencing, studying and pursuing.  The larger society is watching, many of us hopeful that you will strike a blow for the right to think, which is today in doubt.

                                                                                    Sincerely,

The tragic consequences of Bush and Cheney’s scam war must some day be accounted and paid for. Impeachment Now!!

Their puppets in Karachi and Baghdad are now being blamed for US failure in both Pakistan and Iraq, and they’re learning a fundamental lesson about empire: a primary responsibility of being the front man is to take the fall so the  evil puppet masters can live to kill another day.

where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe….   Frederick Douglass

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REVIEW

Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade.

by Linda Perlstein

Henry Holt and Co.

2007

reviewed by Rick Ayers
I knew a man from a small Mayan village.  He said something that has always stayed with me.  “When you look out at the ruins of Tenochtitlan, with its massive buildings and straight avenues, perhaps you see evidence of a great civilization.  What I see is a fascist nightmare.” 

I couldn’t help thinking of that phrase again and again as I read Linda Perlstein’s Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade.   Perlstein, an education reporter for the Washington Post, has spent a year in a low-income elementary school in Annapolis, Maryland.  Specifically, she was looking at the impacts of testing, of No Child Left Behind and the Maryland School Assessment (MSA) on children’s lives.  What she found, while not always fascist, was certainly a nightmare.

Perlstein has done what hardly anyone else has in the current policy debates on education and testing:  spent time in a real school, with real people, for enough time to get a feel for the daily life of children.  At Tyler Heights Elementary School we meet youngsters caught up in a frenzy of test prep and drills – driven by a principal and superintendent who are obsessed with meeting the MSA test levels so their school won’t be punished. 

The year starts with a buzz of excitement because Tyler Heights has scored well, very well, in the previous year in the tests.  The anxiety now was to be able to repeat the results. “Scores were posted throughout the school and recited at meetings, a constant reminder of the ultimate goal.”  Teachers were held to scripted curricula, required to make academic progress every day.  On day one, first graders were drilled on the difference between consonants and vowels.  By now, independent reading, and rich imaginative play were out the window. 

In this brave new world of schooling, students don’t simply respond to a piece of writing.  They must learn (in third grade) to create a “brief constructed response” – which has an acronym like everything else, it’s a BCR.  Students are taught to use BATS, to borrow from the question, answer the question, use text support, and stretch.  These students must do five BCRs per day, in their practice for the March testing days.  They must also answer the question, “why is this a poem?” with such inane (and wrong) comments like, “I know it is a poem because it rhymes and has stanzas.”  Don’t tell Allen Ginsberg about this.  Stories are reduced to the “message” – devoid of wonder.  My writing teacher in college told me, “Only Western Union sends messages.”

Some schools, the ones that make a fetish of test prep, indeed make improvements in test scores.  But is this good education? At Tyler Heights, physical education, art, music, play, and even science are pretty much set aside.  And whatever small amount of art or exercise they do is justified because it might help math scores, not because it has value in itself.  What kind of citizens are we making here?

So, you might wonder, what if we are miseducating the kids a bit, making them stupid in the short run so they can perform higher tasks later?  At least they are learning, right?  But you have to look more closely.  Students are required to sit in a “learning position”:  with feet on the floor, back against the chair, hands on desk, head up and forward.  Students are criticized, harped at, intimidated, and threatened. 

During an attempt to cram geography factoids into a group of third graders, one teacher became frustrated with the squirming and distraction of the kids.  “‘Put your papers away in your social studies folder and put your heads down,’ Miss Johnson said.  ‘I’m done teaching for today.  I’m not talking any more.  You don’t want to get smarter, that’s your problem.  If you don’t pass third grade, if you don’t pass your report card, if you don’t pass the MSA, you can explain to your parents why not.  If you want your third grade to be awful and miserable, keep doing what you’re doing.’”  (p. 49)  Wow, sounds like a lot of people are confused about their responsibility. 

This horror is not for all kids, of course.  Don’t believe the children of politicians suffer these tortures – most of them go to wealthy suburban or private schools where independent thinking, critical reflection, and free play are the norm. Even at nearby Crofton Elementary School, with a white middle-class population, test scores were always pretty good and students were treated to projects, field trips, and creative writing. The tests, you see, are calibrated to white middle-class discourse and approaches so the achievement gap is in place before the students ever arrive at school.

One of the most disturbing discoveries Perlstein has made in her investigation is the host of consultants and packaged education programs that buzz around schools, selling them pre-packaged curricula and test-boosters.  Like the war profiteers who respond with glee to the Iraq quagmire, these companies make literally billions in the currently constructed education crisis.  Some of the catchy names that show up at Tyler Heights include the Open Court reading script from McGraw-Hill (for which the district paid $7 million for just one year), Saxon Math, Corrective Reading, Soar to Success, SpellRead, Brain Gym (who present a new age set of exercises called Education Kinesiology, I’m not kidding, that costs a pretty penny), Second Step (violence prevention), Ace Your Test, Polishing the Apple, Total Quality Management, and the Positive Behavioral Intervention System.   The latter has teachers writing on turkey decoration during Thanksgiving:  “We are thankful for great behavior!”

Perlstein’s account makes the reader shudder and wonder how we let education “reform” become such a mess.  My one quibble with her is that she tends to repeat the misinformed prejudices about the inadequacies and deficits of the poor, mostly African American and Latino, community.  The stereotype that the community is rife with crack, abusive parents, malnutrition, and constant television is belied by real data (there is often more cocaine, alcoholism, divorce in nearby wealthy communities – yet kids are doing well in school).  Pathologizing the poor instead of looking for ways to make education institutions more relevant is an old game in public policy.

As Wisconsin education professor Gloria Ladson-Billings has pointed out, we should not define the problem as an “achievement gap” as much as an educational debt that has accumulated as a result of centuries of denial of access to education and employment – which is exacerbated by deepening poverty and the lack of funding for schools.

One comes away from Tested with a sad sympathy for the people involved.  The children, of course, who endure this official abuse; the families who are marginalized and detested by the schools; even the principal and the staff, who are working hard every day on this impossible project.  After all, just because it is wrong does not mean it is not a lot of hard work.

Rick Ayers is the author of Great Books for High School Kids:  A Teacher’s Guide to Books That Can Change Teens’ Lives

Tough being an imperialist— you give and give, sacrifice and sacrifice, and the little colored natives never seem to get it right. This attitude is the screaming subtext in the ongoing discussion among the idiots who pass for political leaders in the US, perfectly captured in a headline in the  liberal pro-imperialist New York Times on June 13, 2007—“Iraqis Are Failing to Meet Benchmarks Set by US.” It’s all their fault! The US did what it could for those people, but the Benchmarks for god’s sake, they can’t meet them!