Bullying is working (Vietnamese flag issue)

.....(See Not Really a Banner Day at Irvine Valley College in this morning's Orange County Register.)
.....In this afternoon's OC Reg:
Little Saigon protests raise questions about freedoms

.....Tien Van stands on the sidewalk outside Nguoi Viet Daily News holding a loud speaker in one hand and the South Vietnamese red-and-yellow flag in the other.
.....Behind her is a shrine that has been erected to a much larger version of the flag with a fruit offering and incense burning on a table below it. She and a dozen others are protesting the newspaper's publication of a photo that showed a foot spa bearing the flag colors. Van says the photo broke her heart.
....."Our flag is sacred," she said. "People sacrificed their lives for it. My father and brother died for this flag."
.....Anti-communist protests and demonstrations have come to be a way of life in Little Saigon, whose residents are mostly refugees who fled the communist regime after the fall of Saigon in April 1975. This area is home to the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam.
.....But the recent wave of protests against Vietnamese publications such as the eight-month protest outside Viet Weekly in Garden Grove and the weeks-long demonstration outside Nguoi Viet Daily News in Little Saigon—as well as the threat of protests against Irvine Valley College over a campus flag exhibit that included the flag of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam—has led to debates about a clash of freedoms.
.....The protests, which have been peaceful in recent years, are escalating in seriousness. Nguoi Viet's leadership has reported threats and intimidation. Merchants on Main Street in Garden Grove say they are being bullied and business is being disrupted. Nguoi Viet has fired two top editors.
.....Scott Weimer, president of the Downtown Garden Grove Business Association and owner of the Viet Weekly building, said he is worried the protesters won't stop until the newspaper shuts down.
....."If the newspaper buckles down, it means that this type of mob bullying works," he said. "I understand their feelings about communism, but it doesn't justify the use of these fear tactics—the kind the communists probably use themselves."
.....Protesters accuse Viet Weekly of taking a pro-communist stance by profiling communist leaders, publishing their interviews as well as opinion pieces that favor communists.
.....Nguoi Viet, the largest Vietnamese daily published outside Vietnam, fired two of its top editors after the controversy over the foot spa photo, which was published in the newspaper's Lunar New Year special edition. The paper's editor issued a public apology after an internal investigation, admitting the photo was an error that should not have occurred.
.....The article was about an art exhibit at UC Berkeley of a foot spa created by a UC Davis student in honor of her mother-in-law who worked in nail salons to put her through college.
.....But the protests continue even after the apology and the firings. Protesters now say that they want a public hearing. The newspaper has not responded to that request and protesters say they won't stop until that happens. In recent weeks Nguoi Viet filed a lawsuit and asked for a restraining order against the protesters, alleging that they are threatening and harassing the newspaper's employees and customers.
.....The paper's attorney, Luan Tran, declined comment.
.....Trong Doan and Ky Ngo, who are heading the protest, deny those allegations.
....."We're not trouble makers," says Ngo. "We're here because we love our flag and don't want to see anyone disrespect it."
.....Hai Phan, an editor at Viet Bao Daily News, said the issue has been tough on the Little Saigon media.
....."My friends are on both sides and I feel like I'm stuck in between," he said. "I'm thinking about a lot of different issues right now, but I can't talk about them."
.....Protesters have the constitutional right to assemble and express their dissent peacefully, but when a newspaper buckles under the pressure, it makes a dent in the First Amendment, said Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition.
....."It's easy to understand why these are sensitive issues in the Vietnamese American community," he said. "But the newspaper has the right to exercise its First Amendment rights too and when the media's voice is silenced by protesters, it's a loss for all of us."
.....The constitution protects the minority point of view and the unpopular opinion as well, Scheer said.
.....The Westminster Police Department is "caught in between" in trying to protect the rights of property owners and businesses in Little Saigon and making sure that protesters follow the law, said Sgt. Dan Schoonmaker.
.....Schoonmaker says the Nguoi Viet demonstration has been different from previous protests in Little Saigon. Officers are investigating reported threats against employees' lives and at least one reported bomb threat at the newspaper, he said.
.....Detectives are trying to determine who is responsible and what connection, if any, exists between these threats of violence and the demonstration, Schoonmaker said. Police continue to respond to disturbances outside the paper several times a week aside from regular patrol checks, he said.
....."It's unusual to have such disturbances, code enforcement violations and criminal threats associated with a protest in Little Saigon," Schoonmaker said.
.....Ron Bauer [sic], professor of philosophy at Irvine Valley College, said he believes his college was "bullied" by members of the Vietnamese American community into taking down the colorful flag exhibit.
....."It's one thing to raise a concern," he said. "But it's another thing to come in with the threat of bringing in protesters. Such bullying tactics are, I hate to say it, very un-American."
.....But Westminster Councilman Andy Quach and Garden Grove Councilwoman Dina Nguyen, who spoke with college officials on behalf of the community, said it was not a threat.
....."In Bolsa (Avenue), protests are a way of life," Quach says. "Our people love freedom because they lived without it. Protests should be done legally and peacefully, but they should certainly not be viewed as threats or bullying."
.....Nguyen said protests are a legitimate way for community members to disagree with an opposing point of view.
....."The press is a bigger machine," she said. "But these are ordinary people and it takes a lot for them to get organized and express themselves."

I head home, take pics, in the golden light

Not a banner day (Red Emma/AT)

In this morning’s OC Register: Not really a banner day at IVC:
College removes flag display over threat of protests about including Vietnam's

By RED EMMA/ANDREW TONKOVICH
UC Irvine lecturer who taught many years at Irvine Valley College.

.....Wait till they find out that evolution is taught at Irvine Valley College. The creationists, too, will threaten to put a headlock on the community college president, taking a page from the playbook of angry citizens who browbeat him last month. The school's chief administrator acquiesced to threats of disruption, protests, who knows, what—flag waving?—by local activists who didn't like the school's display of the state banner of communist Vietnam.
.....Responding like some confused King Solomon, the chief administrator instructed staff to not only remove the objectionable standard of the evil regime but all 144 of the colorful flags of the world which for 10 years had hung cheerfully enough from the second-floor atrium of the Student Services Center. This in Irvine, Orange County, California, USA. So, under cover of darkness, absent announcement, maintenance crews removed the entire "It's a Small World"-style display of banners and set the stage for more of, well, less.
.....Soon enough the campus could expect to be targeted by Darwin-hating religious fundamentalists, and might now expect the brave president, a one-time geology teacher, to again "consult" with members of the college's Academic Senate, as he claims he did in the case of the flags, and decide, in order to play it safe, to eliminate not only discussion of evolution, but all science classes: botany, biology, anatomy, astronomy, physiology.
.....Which will no doubt encourage other groups to demand that history teachers using textbooks with actual photographs (of Vietnam, say, Ho Chi Minh or perhaps even, yes, the Vietnamese flag) replace these with, well, nothing at all.
.....Or, responding to pro-war types who object to political-science teachers using the Los Angeles Time's "Other Military Deaths" column, he might reasonably be expected to remove newspapers and news racks from campus.
.....Stay with me. That action could, of course, cause anti-choice activists to demand that the school nurse cease handing out family planning literature, condoms and birth control, which means good-bye to aspirin. Finally, some group might discover that the school library contains bibles and "Fahrenheit 451" and works by Mark Twain and Toni Morrison, prompting librarians to remove not only those particular books, but, in a sublimely proactive Fahrenheit 451-esque move, get rid of all texts.
.....Slippery slope? Reductio ad absurdum? Maybe. But recall that this little public college in affluent, educated South Orange County once famously warned instructors not to talk about the Iraq war in class. At the time, its chancellor offered no restrictions on discussing the Civil War, Spanish-American War or War of 1812. Go figure.
.....Still, there's clear precedent at Irvine Valley College for just removing whole topics, discussions, whole cloth. Which makes good sense.
.....After all, not flying the Nazi or Confederate flags has certainly stopped racism and anti-Semitism. Not teaching about human sexual reproduction has certainly reduced teen pregnancy. Not acknowledging slave labor in China or Haiti or, yes, Vietnam, has improved labor conditions with these U.S. trading partners. And burning American flags has stopped imperialism and spread international goodwill, right?
.....Let's give flag-haters the benefit of the doubt and call them human-rights activists. They correctly abhor the policies of Vietnam, of which the flag is a symbol. But if removing a symbol would help anybody in Vietnam, or anywhere, then we should, indeed, remove it and all flags including, yes, our own. I'm with the IVC president there, though I'll bet for different reasons.
.....Instead of flags, we might hang up the U.S. Constitution (while we still have it). Or display a roster of those proud U.S. corporations doing business with oppressive regimes worldwide, including Vietnam. Or go the other route, my own preference, and hang 'em all: the old South Vietnam flag, right next to that of the nasty current regime. And the flags of the former USSR and Rhodesia and the Duchy of Prussia, too, alongside the Cross of Spain and the Upper Voltan tricolor and the flag of the Ottoman Caliphate, a pageant of color and history, benevolence and brutality. More flags, not fewer.
.....We might consider these banners toward educating ourselves about our rich, difficult history. In learning, after all, less is not more. -RE

Andrew Tonkovich

The perfect Sturm und Drang

.....EACH COLLEGE'S accreditation progress report is due on October 15. That's just seven months away. But, of course, a progress report is a report on progress, and any progress, naturally, must occur before the reports are written.
.....—Unless, of course, we wanna get tricky—you know: describe our progress first and then do what we gotta to make the description seem plausible.
.....That's strictly Bush league.
.....Now, unless the report writers plan to wait until the last minute to write their reports, whatever progress that “we” make needs to be made by, say, August or September. Even earlier.
.....And don’t forget that, traditionally, faculty are virtually incommunicado during the summer months. If they figure into this "progress," it had better be made by May.
.....We're in the middle of March.
* * * * *
.....How will this work exactly? As I said, progress report committees are now forming. Will still other committees now be organized to actually make the progress—i.e., the progress to be reported by the committees now forming? It seems not. Evidently, the committees now forming are “the” accreditation committees. The idea seems to be that these committees will make the progress—or somehow cause the progress to be made—and then, having accomplished that, will set about to report on the progress.
.....It's crystal clear.
.....Perhaps we will rent Irvine's big fucking orange balloon, tie it up at the colleges, and paint on it: MAKING BIG PROGRESS.


.....The committees will be large and diverse. Evidently, Trustee Don Wagner, the board president, will serve on each college committee. I hear the Gary Poertner, too, will be on the committee, at least here at IVC. Plus a few administrators. Plus some faculty, the number not yet determined. Plus some classified. Here at IVC, Wendy and Jerry will also be on the committee.
.....Gosh. One thing about big and diverse committees, they really know how to focus.
* * * * *
.....I keep hearing that NO faculty at Saddleback are willing to serve on their college’s accreditation committee. After the way Mathur and Wagner messed with the last report, Saddlebackians are fed up.
.....That's gonna take the starch out of the Saddleback effort, for sure.
.....And then there’s this: it looks like negotiations between the district and the faculty union over the faculty contract have ground to a halt, or are threatening to do so. The word is that the district is seriously low-balling the faculty. (Keep in mind that the only solution to our 50% problem is to increase the proportion of district expenditure devoted to faculty salaries and benefits.)
.....I hear that union officials are contemplating a “work action” according to which faculty will do only the work that is identified by the faculty contract.
.....Naturally, that work is less than the work that faculty presently do.
.....But here’s the clincher. Were a work action to occur, it may, of course, affect these accreditation committees—well, not Saddleback’s committee, which can’t scare up faculty anyway. But if, for whatever reason, faculty refuse to be on these committees, it seems unlikely that these groups will succeed in their modest aims.
.....Imagine the ACCJC receiving a progress report that faculty refused to participate in. "Promising!", they'll shout.


.....It gets worse. Right now, owing to the Chancellor’s monumental screw-up regarding the 50% Law (by the way: we seem doomed to being in noncompliance with it, despite efforts now underway), about 40 search committees are gearing up to hire new faculty. It’s an all-out effort to increase “instructional” expenditures without resorting to, oh, raising salaries. Can’t have that. So saith certain trustees, namely, the ones who got us into this accreditation fix by bullying and insisting on their man Mathur, the screw-up.
.....But what if faculty, or even most faculty, refuse to do this work—this work for which they are not compensated?
.....(By the way: I don’t know any colleague who isn’t on one or more of these hiring committees. Thus far, everyone seems quite happy to do this work.)
..... Given the existing hiring policy, those searches will simply have to shut down, for the policy requires a certain number of faculty per committee. And if the searches shut down, the faculty don't get hired, which puts us even further below the 50% line.

.....Yikes.



UPDATE:

Today (3/13), at the IVC Academic Senate meeting, President Roquemore came to explain progress made in the formation of the Accreditation committee, which will be meeting some time soon after Spring break. Reportedly, he answered Senators' questions to their satisfaction. He also updated faculty on developments at ATEP, which seem to be taking an upturn.

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "peace comes dropping slow"

At some moments, Rebel Girl feels like she must have done something right. For some summers, high in the Sierra, she has listened to Galway Kinnell recite this Yeats poem and it is as if Yeats himself is in the small room with the dark wooden walls, crowded with poets. He isn't, of course, his words are though and almost chanted or sung in the company of people who recite them with eyes closed or nearly so, and that is close enough, that is closer than she ever imagined she'd be to anything that felt like that.

A few years back Rebel Girl read a story in the NY Times about how Kinnell showed up when Stanley Kunitz was in the hopsital and recited this Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." Everyone thought that Kunitz, then 97 or 98, was dying, but he didn't - he lived to go back home and garden and write and read for a couple more years.

Last week, someone out there in the blogosphere requested some Yeats, so here it is, for you, anonymous one, and for Rebel Girl's friend, who has been struggling mightily this last year and half with cancer and is finally home now and forever, where his peace, she hopes, is dropping slow, with friends and family in Echo Park. Soon, she knows, her friend will arise and go. Yeats wrote this poem after reading Thoreau. The "purple glow" is the heather. He was 23.

THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Quaker oaths

•.....Gosh, I remember having to sign a "loyalty oath" back in the late 70s when I worked for UC. Most of us took great offense to that.
....."What if we don't sign?"
....."Then you don't work."
....."Oh."
.....We signed.
....."Waddya gonna do?" we said.

From the San Francisco Chronicle: Pacifist Cal State teacher gets job back:

.....A Cal State East Bay math teacher and practicing Quaker who was fired for refusing to sign a state-required loyalty oath got her job back this week, with an apology from the university and a clarification that the oath does not require employees to take up arms in violation of their religious beliefs.
....."It's the best possible outcome," said Marianne Kearney-Brown, 50, a graduate student in mathematics who was teaching a remedial class for undergraduates. "My concerns have been addressed."
.....As a Quaker, Kearney-Brown is committed to nonviolence and was unwilling to sign the state oath of allegiance that required her to "swear (or affirm)" that she would "support and defend" the U.S. and California constitutions "against all enemies, foreign and domestic." She tried inserting the word "nonviolently" in front of the word "support," but was told by university officials that altering the oath was unacceptable.
.....…In a grievance hearing Thursday conducted in a telephone conference call, an attorney for the California State University chancellor's office presented Kearney-Brown with a statement saying in part, "Signing the oath does not carry with it any obligation or requirement that public employees bear arms or otherwise engage in violence."
.....With that statement stapled to the loyalty oath, and a promise by the university to present the clarifying language to other new employees, Kearney-Brown said Friday that she felt comfortable signing the form and returning to work.
....."We're very happy with the results," said Clara Potes-Fellow, a spokeswoman for the CSU chancellor's office. "The university would very much like her to be an employee. ... We were acting in good faith, and we wanted to resolve the situation in a positive way."….

College Republicans: making the world safe for louts & racists?

• From yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle: S.F. State GOP group wins free-speech case:

.....To the relief of a campus Republican group, the 417,000 students at California State University's 23 institutions no longer face the possibility of discipline for failing to be civil to one another.
.....The change was part of a settlement approved by a federal magistrate in Oakland this week in a lawsuit by the San Francisco State College Republicans, whose members were subjected to a disciplinary hearing after some of them stomped on two flags bearing the name of Allah during an anti-terrorism rally in October 2006.
.....The flags represented the militant organizations Hamas and Hezbollah and had "Allah" written on them in Arabic. A student later complained that the College Republicans had engaged in "actions of incivility" and had tried to incite violence and create a hostile environment.
.....A panel of students, faculty and staff held a hearing in March 2007 and found no violations of university policy. But the College Republicans and two of their leaders filed suit four months later, challenging the speech and conduct codes that led to the disciplinary proceedings.
.....One line in the policy manual that applies to all 23 campuses says students are expected to be civil to one another. University officials said the manual didn't set disciplinary standards or authorize punishment for incivility, but U.S. Magistrate Wayne Brazil said the Republican group at San Francisco State had been investigated for precisely that reason.
.....…This week's settlement includes a systemwide ban on punishment for incivility, along with revisions in the standards for student conduct at San Francisco State.
.....…[T]he university agreed to pay $100 each to the College Republicans and two of its leaders, and $41,500 in fees to their lawyers.
.....The settlement is one of a series of victories won by conservative legal groups against college speech codes.
.....…The San Francisco case is "a great victory for free speech," said David Hacker of the Alliance Defense Fund, a lawyer for the College Republicans.
.....State university students, Hacker said, "are now more free to speak on issues that matter to them."
.....Although the civility standard may seem innocuous, he said, "speech codes like this are consistently enforced against Christian and conservative students across the country merely for expressing their beliefs."….

Photo from Golden Gate XPress
(2nd photo from Neandernews.)

"All that makes existence valuable to anyone depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. Some rules of conduct, therefore, must be imposed—by law in the first place, and by opinion on many things which are not fit subjects for the operation of law." —Mill

Watch what happens when a Republican Presidential Candidate dares to suggest that we are being attacked, not because of what we believe (our freedoms, our values), but because of the nasty things we do (e.g., installing dictators, building military bases, etc.):