Category Archives: General

Anachoresis

The name of a movement from villages or cities to the country, when taxation and other aspects of social life became unbearable in antiquity, especially in Roman Egypt, and people abandoned their legal home for extended periods of time, to withdraw from the reach of official power. Let’s go anachoretic, up to the country! But…. we are already up in the countryside! Ok, let’s go catachoretic, down to the country where a multitude will reconstitute another life of learning, work, and devotion.

UC regents vote for increase

Just home from a day of meetings and talking to students about papers, Latin, and other matters. I opened my email and read the following (email at 17h35):

An open letter to the UCSC community:

Today the UC Regents voted to increase student tuition by 32 percent. Over the past six months, tuition has increased almost 40 percent, pricing more and more students out of the UC system–which was once free for California residents. This increase is linked to a state-level de-prioritization of education. Today, California spends three times as much per prison inmate as it does per student in higher education.

Across the state, students are taking action to demonstrate our unwillingness to accept this state of affairs. The administration expected us to protest today, to ‘blow off steam’. But they think that, when all is said and done, we will quietly accept this massive fee increase. We will prove them wrong by taking back what is rightfully ours.

Today at UCLA, where the Regents held their meeting, thousands took to the streets. A group of students occupied Campbell Hall. At UC Davis, students are currently occupying an administrative building. And here at UCSC, several hundred students are occupying Kerr Hall, the building that houses top-level administrators. They are preparing a list of demands and refuse to leave until they have been met.

This action is part of a growing student movement across California and in Europe. At this very moment, hundreds of thousands of students all over the world are taking action to challenge both the privatization of education and, more generally, the implementation of policies that force students and workers to bear the burden of economic crisis. These tactics have worked in the past, and they will work now.

Students at Kerr Hall need your support immediately. We call on all students, workers, and community members to come join us. We have the power to change the university.

See some pictures and list of demands on Santa Cruz Indymedia. I repeat here what I just sent students in two classes a little while ago: I’m dismayed but not surprised by the decision the Regents took, down the political tree, to increase fees so massively, and in such a devastating way. Now we need all the courage, hope, wisdom, and—allow me even to use this old-fashioned word—the love of others we can muster (both ways) in thinking through what is going on and acting in the best way we can, no matter how grim things may look further down the road. We cannot wait for others to do it for us.

News

See this Democracy Now feature, 43 minutes long, about the strike called for tomorrow, November 18, as the Board of Regents is about to vote on a major tuition increase (32%) tomorrow morning. It is also, and more importantly, discussing fiscality, the rapidly increasing inequities in the distribution of wealth, privatization of profits, and socialization of losses.

Why UC regents shouldn’t even consider higher tuition

So-called ed fees are redistributed by UC in grossly unfair ways. The formula for this redistribution is wrong and completely unequal. So for instance, UCSB and UCSC retain about 80% of these ed fees locally. UCLA and more massively UCSF profit from the formula. Whatever these two campuses do with the money doesn’t seem to be redistributed to the system. I say “doesn’t seem”, because I’d like to know more about how much money flows back to UC central admin from the myriad of federally funded research projects. Perhaps much more money comes back to UCOP from these professional schools than is put in? How much and what is done with it? Read about it here (94kb pdf). Conclusion: in the absence of transparency and fairness in the distribution of the fees, especially now when they are becoming a more important source of revenue than state support, and the inequity in the distribution is exacerbated, it is important to oppose any increase.

US Secretary of State uses innocent blood to baptize USS New York

The new USS ship New York apparently contains 7.5 tons of steel taken from one of the Twin towers, melted down and turned into part of her bow. The New York is part of about 600 ships or so that ply the seven seas. To defend what exactly? In asking that question, I’m thinking especially of the 40 + US nuclear submarines, 30 of which perhaps are operational at any given time, each with more power to kill people indiscriminately than many or all of our present potential enemies put together.

I cannot get dewy-eyed about the USS New York and her steel rostrum. I was moved when I watched the terrorist attack unfold on my TV screen on 9/11. I was moved because I knew that this terrible destruction of human lives didn’t have to be. It didn’t have to be because violence serves no good. It didn’t have to be because, as this catastrophe was about to happen, many of the financial and insurance mechanisms served by the offices located in those buildings did not serve the good of the people. I’m not thinking about the people in those two buildings, but about the mechanisms. No one can separate the good from the evil with any finality. But the extraordinary returns that investment funds expect as a matter of course in the frenzy of competition called the market depend in the end on the manipulation of labor and natural resources that should be treated with justice always in mind. And one may recognize part of oneself in them: ordinary salaries and pensions are tied to those operations. So, when I hear that the same stuff that went to make buildings serving universal greed is now part of a military ship, I think: how logical. Whether the steel is in the tower or in the ship, its purpose has not really changed. If anything, it has been clarified and become unalloyed in a new kind of crucible.

Are we to believe that this piece of steel became holy by its proximity with the victims of the attack on the twin towers? And that molding it into the prow of a military ship makes all of the military operations now going on in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Irak, Persian Gulf, somehow holy and therefore beyond discussion? Like pieces of Jesus’ putative cross placed as relics in all the altars of mediaeval Christendom? Who would have thought that many Christians in this country would condone the trafic of relics? Can’t they remember at least that the tomb of Jesus was found empty and that the source of holiness is nowhere to be touched and approximated? Who would have thought that a “liberal” US secretary of State, surely aware of all of this, and who knows her Isaiah, would go along and say at the commissioning of the ship, somewhat in the style of John’s gospel: “In that steel, burned but unbroken, lives the spirit we saw on 9-11. Sometimes our pain can lead us to purpose”? What purpose?

The public operation is clear: to draw political power magically from innocent victims, to transform an object that was near them into a holy relic and hope to sacralize an aimless war machinery (a transport ship in this case), from the bow to the rest of the ship, sailors, navy, army, Pentagon, and political establishment. And rope all of us in the same devotion. I do not want to be part of this kind of synecdochic, fraudulent transport of the senses. But then, how do I show respect to the victims, all the victims, and resist the violent, all the violent? I believe there are other ways…. As for politics, nothing new under the sun: much of Washington’s power derives from the proximity of monuments to mostly young innocent lives sacrificed (in many cases at least) for the good of the people. As does that of the Kremlin, with its heroes buried in its walls, and a still unburied, spectral, embalmed Lenin being visited by crowds. One could go on and on, beginning with the story about Abraham who was tested on that very thing, the need to use innocent victims to build institutions and capital. That is where we are now: we do not have an ounce of rationality left in the defense of economic interests run amok and we resort to all tricks, including the religious shenanigans of a Constantine and successors in the 4th c. CE.

For memento, Isaiah 2.3c–4:

For out of Zion shall go forth the law,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations,
and shall decide for many peoples;
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;

One final word on this subject: the distance from sources of wealth, be they workers and employees or natural resources, is constitutive of financial instruments. The symbolisation inherent to money since the 6th c. BCE, towers as tall as can be, the marvelous symbolization of symbols (derivatives), everything spells distance, as well as a fascination with leveraging and the miracle of making things happen from afar, almost effortlessly. That distance is the opposite of the nearness and physical presence sought in sacralizing the instruments of power which permit and defend the overpowering controls and injustices that distance precisely allows and fosters. There is a proper use of distance and leverage, as there is of nearness and presence, but we have lost sight of it here and now.

Prisons or schools?

Jeff Bleich, recent trustee of the California State University system and chair of the Board of Trustees for the past two years gives a kiss and tell story in a Nov 4, 2009, LA Times opinion. He rightly deplores the unraveling of public higher education in the state.

I’ll believe the stats he gives regarding the evolution of the state budget. The master plan of the sixties for higher education has been abandoned, he says. I say: it has been destroyed, and willfully. More below on this evil will. In any case, here are the broad numbers he gives on prisons and higher education. In the 1980s, 17% of the budget went to higher education, 3% for prisons. Now, 10% of our budget goes to prisons (24 new prisons built recently, how many for or by private companies?), and 9% for higher education institutions. Note that the share of the budget represented by those two expenditures of public money has remained constant, about 20%.

So Mr. Bleich now shouts from the mountain tops: Hear ye, this must stop, shame, let’s go back to greatness and promise. Ok, but where is the analysis of why this happened? Well, he does go a bit in the political choices made by the people of California and their political leaders, but not very far. He explains that

To win votes, political leaders mandated long prison sentences that forced us to stop building schools and start building prisons. [….] Leaders pandered by promising tax cuts no matter what and did not worry about how to provide basic services without that money. [….] To remain in office, they carved out legislative districts that ensured we would have few competitive races and leaders with no ability or incentive to compromise. Rather than strengthening the parties, it pushed both parties to the fringes and weakened them.

One needs to go further and explain why they “pandered”. The appeals to security are used precisely by the kind of politicians who need to hide their service to greed (e.g. by dismantling public energy companies, farming out of health and education to private companies, opposition of regulatory agencies concerning commerce, banking, insurance, real estate interests). Their appeal to security, public order, and mouthing of “unassailable freedoms”, are simply gross tricks and hypocritical covers. And all too often, too many of the representatives who don’t share these views still go along with the program, namely the dismantling of public services.

Divine mobility, monotheisms, and empire

On Tuesday, November 17, 2009, 2:00 to 4:00pm, in Rm 520 of Humanities I, I’ll be giving a talk in the Works in Progress Lecture Series of the Department of History. The topic is: Divine mobility and imperial power.  Was the notion of a mobile, single divinity as presented in Ezekiel 1 (vision of the throne-chariot) and Ezekiel 10-11, as well as in Exodus, a new development in the exilic period? If new, can it be explained satisfactorily as an atypical response to the Babylonian and Persian empires?  Or can it be understood as an episode in a general capacity that cultures have to borrow and translate religious stories and practices from each other?  I will argue for the first, while being mindful of histories of monolatry and monotheism that have been offered in recent years (among which those of J. Assmann, R. Albertz, A. Lemaire, R. Gnuse, Keel and Uehlinger, J. de Moor, W.H.C. Propp, M.S. Smith, M.L. West, J. Soler). It could be a commentary on this 6th c. BCE coin from the Persian period (Gaza):

Gaza Yehud coin
Gaza Yehud coin

UC students’ tuition and UC bonds

Has the money raised by UC tuition, which is going up as state support is decreasing, been used for other purposes than instruction and student services? Professor Meister, President of the Council of UC Faculty Associations and Professor of Political and Social Thought at UC Santa Cruz, argues that this is so. Specifically, student tuition and certain fees have been pledged as part of the collateral for projects funded by General Review Bonds. In other words, UC’s capacity to build more facilities is increased by this novel and heretofore unjustified use of student tuition and fees. Protecting bond ratings is becoming more important than education, especially undergraduate education, no matter what the communication specialists say.

Please read the article by Professor Meister, They pledged your tuition, and his response to faculty questions.

There is a public meeting on campus this Thursday, Oct 29, 2009, at 7pm, in Classroom Unit 2, to discuss the current financial situation at UC. Professors Meister, Glantz, Connery, and several others will be leading the discussion.

Yudof and UC

One of the sentences I just read in Yudof’s interview with student media (see City on the Hill of Oct 22, 2009, p. 5) made me cringe:

We have to get the bigger message out there that [….] we are enormously important to the quality of your life, and we’re enormously important to the success of the university of California. Great research universities are a magnet for talented people. And if they come here and they stay, it benefits our population and it ultimately leads to more jobs and so forth.

True, research universities are a magnet for talented people who come from all over the world and are drawn especially to advanced programs (doctoral programs, post-docs). But two aspects of this question have become problems in my view: the structures built by universities such as the UC system, and which are so attractive, are in no small part funded thanks to the large population of undergraduates that UC has a mission to educate at the highest level but struggles more and more to do so. Second, the graduate schools, especially in technical fields, are populated by foreigners who have been selected by a complex process (social, educational, etc.) and have cost nothing to this state or nation. That is, about half of our graduate students (more in certain fields) come here in their early or mid-twenties after benefiting (very often) from a state-based education, a tax-payer paid education. It’s all benefit for this country and state indeed, as Yudof is claiming. It is also beneficial to the individuals involved, obviously. But what of the countries of origin? Perhaps the movement of transfer of wealth should reverse itself more than it is doing, and if it is not done on grounds of rationality and justice, what will do it?

Capitalism, a love story

Quickie on this film which I saw last night. The cruelties that greed may bring, I was aware of, but the detail is always fascinating: insurance policies taken out by companies on employees, unbeknownst to them apparently…. The film doesn’t dare take on Roosevelt or Obama: no remark or reflection on the role of war in the greed machinery. Yet, the social gains the film attributes to Roosevelt and unions (to be fair), aren’t they due also to the fact that so many millions worked for the war effort and it would have been hard not to reciprocate a little in terms of education, basic union rights (oh, not too far, the cold war helped a lot here to pull the rug from anything SOCIALISTIC), social security, etc.? Interesting to see this film as the quality of education is under attack (dropping really), fees are going up, hopes of good jobs a little uncertain these days, research centers working hard on the next capital-intensive engineering techniques.