Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Sharad Karkhanis on CUNY's Red Union

Sharad Karkhanis is a "patriot" in the sense that many on this blog mean the word. The City University of New York (CUNY) has long been dominated by anti-American, left-wing extremists. Recently, for instance, an anonymous poster on the website of the CUNY graduate center issued a detailed diatribe attacking the university's trustees for working for private companies, as though this were some kind of crime. The poster went on to fondly quote Lenin, murderer of hundreds of thousands and founder of a Soviet state that likely murdered in excess of 65 million. This and other extremists have come to dominate much of faculty life at CUNY.

Karkhanis, along with several other courageous intellectual non-conformists such as Professors David Seidemann and Dorothy Lang, has stood firm against the hate-filled ideologues who dominate CUNY's faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC). Karkhanis issues a newsletter, Patriot Returns, which he e-mails to 13,000 current and former CUNY faculty. He has done this for decades at his own expense, for many years prior to the advent of e-mail paying for 13,000 postage stamps out of his own pocket.

In response to his courageous investigations of extremism in the CUNY faculty union, one of the union's lackeys, Susan O'Malley, has filed a harrassing law suit against Karkhanis claiming "defamation". O'Malley has public stated that she considers the issue "silly", yet with the PSC's conservative-baiting bigots cheering her on, O'Malley has pressed forward with her case, costing Professor Karkhanis significant out of pocket expenses.

In the current issue Karkhanis takes on the willingness of various officers of the PSC to allow the illegal use of CUNY's e-mail for political purposes. He also criticizes the PSC for failing to follow up grievances in a timely manner and for using political criteria to select whose grievances they will follow up.

Let us roundly applaud Professor Karkhanis's courageous efforts.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Prof. Langbert!

Prof. Karkhanis is indeed a patriot and that is apparently reason enough for the parasitical far-left academics represented by the likes of PSC-parasites Susan O'Malley and Barbara Bowen. Instead of tolerating these and other irrational hatemongers--many of whom use their censoring power to intimidate and silence anyone with the temerity to criticize their actions--the CUNY Board of Trustees should make it clear that union leadership exists to support the professional interests of its membership. Political advocacy is not the proper sphere for an academic union. For starters, I'd like to see them reduce the horde of underpaid, overworked adjuncts by creating more tenure-track positions. They have serious work to do and need to put their blinkers on before their self-imposed distractions splinter their efforts and worsen the already deplorable reputation of the PSC union.