Poor word choice: loutish Feds scare foreign students shitless

.    From the New York Times: Blunt Federal Letters Tell Students They’re Security Threats

.    A German graduate student in oceanography at M.I.T. applied to the Transportation Security Administration for a new ID card allowing him to work around ships and docks.
.    What the student, Wilken-Jon von Appen, received in return was a letter that not only turned him down but added an ominous warning from John M. Busch, a security administration official: “I have determined that you pose a security threat.”
.    Similar letters have gone to 5,000 applicants across the country who have at least initially been turned down for a Transportation Worker Identification Credential, an ID card meant to guard against acts of terrorism, agency officials said Monday.
.    The officials also said they were sorry about the language, which they may change in the future, but had no intention of withdrawing letters already sent.
.    “It’s an unfortunate choice of words in a bureaucratic letter,” said Ellen Howe, a security agency spokeswoman.
…..
.    Mr. von Appen, 23, one of at least four oceanography students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who received identical letters, said he was stunned by its language.
.    “I was pretty much speechless and quite intimidated,” said Mr. von Appen, whose research is supported by a $65,000-a-year grant from the National Science Foundation.
.    A British student at M.I.T. who was rejected, Sophie Clayton, 28, said that at first she was amused at what appeared to be a bureaucratic absurdity. But as she pondered the designation, Ms. Clayton said she grew worried. “The two words ‘security threat’ are now in the files next to my name, my photograph and my fingerprints,” she said….

U.C.I. 1st Amendment case concerns college governance

.....A friend sent me the following post (A faculty speech/1st Amendment case), by Rachel Levinson, AAUP Senior Counsel. It appeared late last month in the Higher Ed Law Prof Blog. (See also Not So Free Speech in College Governance [Inside Higher Ed, 3/24]):

.....Imagine that you are teaching at a public university that not only supports but encourages your participation in institutional governance. You speak up on several matters that you think undermine the faculty role or your students’ experience—and for your trouble, you are denied a raise, saddled with additional work, or even fired. Do the university’s actions violate the First Amendment?
.....The AAUP and the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression recently filed an amicus (“friend of the court”) brief in such a case. The brief, which was filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, supports the appeal of Dr. Juan Hong in his First Amendment lawsuit against the administration of the University of California, Irvine. The case could have significant implications for faculty members at all public colleges and universities—and, ironically, could have the strongest negative impact on faculty that are encouraged to participate in university governance.
.....Dr. Hong, a full professor at UCI, allegedly angered university administrators by opposing certain faculty hiring and promotion decisions and the university’s use of lecturers in place of professors. After Dr. Hong was denied a merit salary increase and given an increased workload, he filed suit, claiming that the university violated his First Amendment right to free speech.
.....A federal trial judge in California rejected Dr. Hong’s claim. The judge reviewed Garcetti v. Ceballos, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment did not protect public employees from discharge for statements made “pursuant to their official duties” but declined to decide whether its ruling extended to “speech related to scholarship or teaching.” The judge in Dr. Hong’s case concluded that Dr. Hong’s participation in faculty governance was “pursuant to his official duties,” and that the university’s retaliation therefore did not violate the First Amendment. The court failed to acknowledge, however, that the Garcetti decision explicitly set aside the question of protection for academic speech, and held that “UCI is entitled to unfettered discretion when it restricts statements an employee makes on the job and according to his professional responsibilities.”
.....The AAUP’s amicus brief focuses on the unique status granted to academic speech, and its relation to shared governance. The brief notes that faculty speech has been accorded special First Amendment protection by the Supreme Court since Sweezy v. State of New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234 (1957). The hallmark of such cases, the brief notes, is the recognition that academic freedom merits distinctive First Amendment protection against repressive action from within or outside the campus community. The AAUP brief argues that participation in faculty governance is part and parcel of professors’ First Amendment-protected right of academic freedom to speak without fear of retaliation. The brief also observes that the court failed to distinguish between faculty rights and responsibilities, and argues that the court’s decision will empower universities with strong policies in favor of shared governance to discipline faculty members who annoy administrators through their involvement in university governance.

Oakley Hall: OK Corral meets Arthurian joust

Oakley Hall, novelist and professor, died yesterday, Monday May 12 at his home in Nevada City, California. Rebel Girl studied with him way back when in the program he founded, the MFA fiction program at UC Irvine, and then came to work with him at the Community of Writers conference at Squaw Valley. He was dear to her in many ways.

His novel, Warlock, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 and was recently reissued by the New York Review of Books with a foreword by Robert Stone. It's a western, yes, but a western written by a man who fought in WWII and came home and saw the rise of McCarthyism and began to write this book. Oakley and Rebel Girl would often talk about which era was worse for America: McCarthy or Bush. Oakley would say that he couldn't imagine anything worse than McCarthy - but had to sadly concede that recent times under Bush had surpassed that. Here's an excerpt:

From Warlock, chapter 67: Journals of Henry Holmes Goodpasture:

It is four in the morning by my watch. Mine is the only light I can see, the scratching of my pen the only sound. Here astride the dull and rusty razor's edge between midnight and morning, I am sick to the bottom of my heart. Where is Buck Slavin's bright future of faith, hope and commerce? What is it even worth, after all? For if men have no worth, there is none anywhere. I feel very old and I have seen too many things in my years, which are not so many; no, not even in my years, but in a few months – in this day.

Outside there is only darkness, pitifully lit by the cold and disinterested stars, and there is silence through the town, in which some men sleep and clutch their bedclothes of hope and optimism to them for warmth. But those I love more do not sleep, and see no hope, and suffer for those brave ones who will fall in hopeless effort for us all, whose only gift to us will be that we will grieve for them a little while; those who see, as I have come to see, that life is only event and violence without reason or cause, and that there is no end but the corruption and the mock of courage and hope.

Is not the history of the world no more than a record of violence and death, cut in stone? It is a terrible, lonely, loveless thing to know it, and see – as I realize now the doctor saw before me – that the only justification is in the attempt, not in the achievement, for there is no achievement; to know that each day may dawn fair or fairer than the last, and end as horribly wretched or more. Can those things that drive men to their ends ever be stilled, or will they only thrive and grow and yet more hideously clash against the other so long as man himself is not stilled? Can I look out at these cold stars in this black sky and believe in my heart of hearts that it was this sky that hung over Bethlehem, and that a star such as these stars glittered there to raise men's hearts to false hopes forever?

This is the sky of Gethsemane, and that of Bethlehem has vanished with its star.

Thomas Pynchon on Warlock:

"Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880's is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK Corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity...It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall's to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall."