New New School Brou-Ha-Ha

Never thought I would root for "occupiers," but this New School crew changed all that. A protest at Parsons W. 12th St entrance is scheduled for more or less right now, in solidarity with the dismissed Parsons adjuncts.

You'll remember that I asked more than a week ago "Where are the Parsons adjuncts?" Presumably here. What I meant, in sum, was that it's not enough to agitate for the dismissal of people you simply don't like very much, a la the "occupation" against Bob Kerrey. A protest with a material end, I'm postulating, has a better chance at success.

And the Parsons press release seems to prove it, chalking up the pink slips to failed communication, in the manner of: We didn't fire more than a dozen adjuncts, it was six, and we offered them teaching posts in other areas. Already the institution is running damage control, rather than just calling the NYPD.

It still amazes me how little real information has come out about the Parsons firings. Has anyone been non-tendered for next year? Really and officially? Who and how many? One-third of faculty? One-half? 20? Six? What does teaching another area mean? What saith ye, Parsons Pink Slips?

Also, how come Lawrence Hegarty and Peter Drake are the only two dudes willing to be photographed for the cause? Viz.,this in the NYT and this on the Parsons blog:
Has the university -- to concoct an example, since none exists -- offered printmakers jobs in 3-D digital rendering or suchlike, knowing full-well that the current crop of printmakers lacks that skillset, and that shifting a current instructor's area is tantamount to reopening the position to outside applicants, i.e. firing?

Finally, as an example to us all, Columbia faculty are meeting to support academic freedom in Palestine; this is a protest without fashionable accessories, built to redress tangible grievances, namely, Israel will not let Palestinian academics attend conferences in their fields. A simple thing like the right to a comp'ed lunch calls into question borders, sovereignty, rights of movement and return, usw, all the giant problems in miniature...
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Who's Got the One-and-a-Half?

Muammar's got the one-and-a-half state solution. Now, when the unelected leader of Libya promotes this, it doesn't have the same aura as when Eyal Weizman does. If Muammar had actually been able to say something like "Shoah and Naqba are flip sides of the same coin...there are not two catastrophes, but one shared catastrophe," then we might have believed him.

Quick read: it sounds like Qaddafi is out to sugarcoat the idea of a Palestinian majority in Israel by explaining that, don't worry folks, Arab Israelis will still be in the fields picking dates. The implicit trade for a one-state solution is some kind of political second-class citizenship, and this is because Muammar is obsessed with right-of-return. Right-of-return means Palestine becomes minority-Jewish; with voting rights for all, that puts Hamas in the Knesset, that makes the IDF defunct. Now, without voting rights for all, we're talking about a minority-rule state with an all-minority police force, like the RSA. And that's one and a half states, not one.
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