The New School In Exile

“The show is over. The curtain has fallen on trains filled with reservists, as they pull out amid the joyous cries of enthusiastic maidens. . . . Into the disillusioned atmosphere of pale daylight there rings a different chorus; the hoarse croaks of the hawks and hyenas of the battlefield. . . . profits are springing, like weeds, from the fields of the dead.” —Rosa

It’s gratifying that the Faculty Senate managed to call Kerrey’s police repression of the April occupation “misguided”—although “violent” and “despotic” would have been better terms. At least they implicitly rebutted the letter the Board attached to the so-called “April 10 Report,” where they called Kerrey’s paramilitary attack “responsible” and warned that any further civil disobedience would be met with the same level of ferocity.

The Faculty Senate has a mania, however, for issuing pronouncements that aren’t backed up by action. Kerrey openly violated the spirit of the “Minimum Requirements” agreement meant to limit his tyrannical power, and bypassed the Advisory Committee on Speech Activities and Expression that is supposed to be consulted in such situations. What are they going to do about it?

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The one suggestion the Senate comes up with is to have a new code of conduct and disciplinary procedures. That’s nice—I just hope they will apply to senior faculty and executive administration! I’ll also wager that no codes will prevent Kerrey (or his Board-appointed replacement) from dangerously and arbitrarily asserting his power again in the same kind of way.

The Senate claims the occupation “cannot be justified on any legal, political or moral grounds.” First, let me point out that they’re basing their pronouncement on an illegitimate report. The committee to investigate the occupation included Jim Miller, the man who wrote an impassioned letter to the entire university community, comparing us to Nazis and repeating as gospel truth Kerrey’s lies about what had happened. Does the Faculty Senate believe he was the appropriate person to help organize an objective report? Ah, but wait: Jim Miller—or the Co-Chair of the Executive Committee, as he styled himself—and his cronies are the Faculty Senate.

It’s easy to recognize Miller’s handiwork—and possibly that of Roy Moskowitz, Kerrey’s lawyer, who also played an important role in the preparation of this “independent” report—in those pearl-clutching and irrelevant passages where the occupiers’ “violence” and “extremism” are described in lurid tones. It’s also worth noting that the report itself was forced to recognize its “incompleteness,” since naturally none of the occupiers would deign to be interviewed for such a farcical undertaking, especially not while their court proceedings were ongoing.

Jim Miller and his Senate seem convinced that we protesters are undemocratic; I’m not impressed by their democratic credentials. They are of course just another power center at the university, with their particular privileges, interests, comforts and status to defend. Why should Jim Miller’s opinions carry any more weight that anyone else’s? Because he’s managed to get his Mickey Mouse Club officially recognized by Kerrey and the Board? I’m afraid that just detracts from his already shaky legitimacy.

It also has to be said that the Senate’s focus is remarkably narrow. Not to exaggerate the stakes, but this is somewhat bigger than the New School and its Code of Conduct. For a bunch of liberals plainly obsessed with the rule of law and correct procedure (even their fusty old hero Rawls showed more enthusiasm for the civil disobedience of a minority—and in some cases for even more militant and illegal action!), it’s remarkable that the Senate has little to say about Kerrey’s transgressions; and I don’t mean his infractions of university guidelines. As we all know, when Kerrey was twenty-five he deliberately murdered civilians, violating the Geneva Conventions and US military law, and his recent collaboration in the planning of the Iraq War—an illegal and unconstitutional war resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths—was a violation of the Nuremberg Principles and international law. The Nuremberg Tribunal called wars of aggression the “supreme international crime.” That’s a little more serious than breaking the New School rules.

Some will say international law is a joke, and of course they’re right: unless you happen to be a Serbian or an African dictator who’s fallen afoul of NATO there’s no chance you’ll end up before an international court. But considering that some New School professors have spent their academic careers espousing some version of “cosmopolitanism,” “global civil society,” “human rights,” and other similar shibboleths, you would think they might have more qualms about Kerrey’s behavior and worry less about rowdy students.

Which brings me to my real point: It’s not interesting to rehash what happened last April. It’s revealing of the intellectual level and relevance of the Faculty Senate that at the height of the most intense class war to hit the US, indeed the world, in thirty years, they’re mumbling about “negotiation” and trying to find kinder, gentler ways to punish rebellious students. Because make no mistake: this is a war, and I’m not just referring to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where fellow humans are being bombed to pieces. An open war—one with distinctly racist overtones—has been declared on the ordinary people of the US—“Structural Adjustment” and planned austerity, in the form of mass hunger, homelessness, and unemployment have finally arrived for Americans too, along with Obama-style socialism for Wall Street bankers “too big to fail” and the resulting upwards transfer of wealth. We’re on one side, and Kerrey’s people—politicians, millionaires, university presidents and the rest of the unsavory crew—are ranged on the other.

Did it ever occur to the Faculty Senate to say something—anything!—about Kerrey’s October 11 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal—signed “President of the New School”—urging Obama to escalate the Afghan War? Have they considered the possibility that our university president should be interested in education, not in killing? I’m sure no one in Obama’s circle paid attention to Kerrey’s murderous bleating—by utterly humiliating Kerrey, New School students have insured that he will never be relevant in national politics again. But that’s not the point: we don’t want a warmonger representing our university, not even a washed-up one.

Instead of dredging up the April occupation, the Senate also might have made itself more pertinent by studying and learning from the wave of university occupations that are right now sweeping across Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Croatia, Greece, and California, USA. Maybe a year or two from now the Senate will bring itself to issue a declaration condemning them as unjustified and recommending new disciplinary guidelines.

It seems that Kerrey and university students around the world know something that the Faculty Senate has yet to grasp: War is Big Business and the human slaughter industry is purring right along—Exxon, Goldman Sachs, Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, Blackwater et al. are raking in unheard-of profits while eviction notices are being served to working people across the country. Of course New School Treasurer Robert Millard’s outfit, military contractor L-3 Communications, is also getting in on the act; their profits rose 19% this last quarter and the earnings per share for 2009 are being pleasantly upgraded (Wall Street Journal, 27 October).

We have been patient. But some of us are sick of taking it lying down, and we’ve decided the point when silence becomes complicity is already past. As Arendt once remarked, we’re not children and our obedience is no different from active consent and support; this is why we disobey—we refuse to be “good Germans” and we’ve had enough of ivory tower hypocrisy, even if the Faculty Senate hasn’t.

• Posted by: Fourierist
• Topic: Letters and Statements

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