Sharad Karkhanis, RIP

Sharad Karkhanis, a political scientist, a librarian and a professor emeritus of Kingsborough Community College, has died.  According to Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, Sharad will be cremated in accordance with Hindu law.  At CUNY Sharad was the spearhead of resistance to union incompetence and corruption. He published a newsletter, The Patriot Returns, that he had snail mailed (paying significant mailing costs out of his own pocket); with the advent of the Internet, he emailed it to, he estimated, 13,000 CUNY faculty.  His newsletter featured biting humor that more often than not induced out-loud laughter.   Sharad pulled no punches in lambasting the Professional Staff Congress, CUNY's inept, corrupt, and extremist faculty union.  At one point Susan O'Malley, a PSC officer,  whom he crowned the Queen of Released Time because she spent little time teaching, sued him for libel (also here and here).

Sharad assembled a network of activists, both within and outside of CUNY, and he often served as a lynchpin for resistance to the PSC's bizarre initiatives.  He was a supporter of Israel.  As well, he attended the Ron Paul event in Manhattan with me and another friend in April 2011.

Sharad was a fighter who cared about what was right.  He visited me at my home in Town of Olive several times, making a long drive from Brooklyn. He was thoughtful and generous.

Sharad, you will be missed. RIP.

PSC Bungles Rangel's Tangle

Sharad Karkhanis's Patriot Returns just published my article "PSC Bungles Rangel's Tangle."

The Professional Staff Congress (PSC), a union that purports to represent CUNY's faculty, has allowed City College's (CCNY's) public relations calamity involving the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service to spin out of control without voicing the slightest concern or faculty perspective. CCNY's ethical and public relations breaches are attracting national attention while the PSC pontificates about a litany of dogmatic pieties concerning the Afghan War, the Bush administration, the Iraqi War, the Tea Party and the Republicans' sub-prime lending policies. Likely, the PSC's flower child president, Barbara Bowen, and her New Caucus band of Merry Pranksters find potential ethics breaches at CCNY as too "off the bus" to warrant their time, which they see as best spent praising sociopaths like Hugo Chavez, Syed Hashmi and Sami Al-Arian.

In an August 10th article, Inside Higher Education writes that CCNY exercised questionable ethics with respect to Congressman Rangel's fundraising. Paulette Maehara of the Association of Fundraising Professionals says that "higher education fund-raisers are ethically bound to disclose conflicts of interest and they should also ensure anyone working on their behalf is similarly free of conflict." Not all experts agree. Moreover, the article points out that CUNY's fundraising policies do not prohibit obtaining gifts unethically. But it requires a fetishization of bureaucratic rules and an indifference to bad ethics to claim that a CUNY policy gave former CCNY president Gregory Williams and his staff latitude to entangle the university in Congressman Rangel's corruption. The New York Post began reporting on this story in 2007. It involves use of Congressional letterhead to raise millions of dollars from Verizon, AIG, New York Life and Nabors Industries, all of whom were asking for quid pro quo legislative favors from Mr. Rangel, possibly while CCNY's representatives were in the same room.

Ought not a faculty union provide a moral voice for the faculty it purports to represent? And if so, why is the PSC deafeningly silent about Democratic Congressman Charles B. Rangel's corrupt "monument to himself" at CCNY? Instead of honoring dishonorable politicians who serve in the PSC's partisan clubhouse, the Charles B. Rangel Center and its associated conference centers and libraries ought to be renamed as the Centers for the Study of Ethics in Public Service. As well, CCNY should refuse Mr. Rangel's papers. If Riker's Island has no room for them, perhaps Mr. Rangel can strong arm a donation for a new wing to its jailhouse.

My Piece Too Politically Incorrect for Karkhanis's Patriot Returns

My good friend Sharad Karkhanis publishes a newsletter that goes to about 13,000 City University of New York faculty and employees called Patriot Returns. To give you an idea as to how controversial Patriot Returns is, Sharad just settled a multi-year libel suit by one of the union officers whom he had ruthlessly satirized for years.  Sharad has asked me to write for him a number of times, most recently concerning David Seidemann's law suit against the faculty union and concerning the Charles Rangel Center at the City University of New York (forthcoming). 

But even Patriot Returns is too tame for some of my stuff.    I had submitted a piece to him concerning an article in the faculty union's newsletter, the Clarion.  Karkhanis told me that it is simply too controversial even for Patriot Returns.  The New Caucus is the extreme left-wing "party" that runs the CUNY faculty union. I suppose my claim that the CUNY faculty is more racist than the membership of the Tea Party is simply too hot for anyone in academia to handle, even though it is true.

 New Caucus Racism

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D. *

Recently, William Tabb, professor emeritus of Queens College, made accusations of racism against the so-called Tea Party in the pages of the Clarion, the newsletter of the CUNY faculty union.  In fact, the Tea Party is a highly decentralized and diverse group that is scattered across thousands of locales around the country. Racism may exist in some locales, just as racism may exist in some quarters of CUNY.   I have attended eight meetings of the Kingston/Rhinebeck Tea Party near my home town as well as one or two in my home town of Olive, New York.  I did not detect a single instance of racism.  There is more racism on the CUNY faculty than in the Kingston/Rhinebeck Tea Party.  I very much doubt that Professor Tabb or the NAACP have done any research as to whether there is actual racism.  I am a former contributer to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which made similar kinds of irresponsible allegations. I voiced my concerns to Morris Dees, the founder, directly, and have ceased any involvement with that organization.  

Competent academic research poses hypotheses and then attempts to falsify them through evidence.  Professor Tabb offers no evidence. Rather, he asserts unfounded, lynch-mob style accusations.  This disturbs me.  Professor Tabb is a distinguished professor from Queens College.  If his standards are so low as to make wild, ungrounded accusations about Tea Party racism one must wonder about standards among the New Caucus in general.

 In response to Professor Tabb's allegations of racism, I did an informal survey of the Professional Staff Congress's representation of various minorities.  I counted the number of African-Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans, Asians and South Americans in its leadership group.  My finding is that the proportion of minorities who are officers of the Professional Staff Congress is lower than the proportion of minority group members who have have attended the Kingston/Rhinebeck Tea Party.  In other words, the evidence is that Barbara Bowen, Steve London and the rest of the New Caucus are MORE RACIST THAN THE TEA PARTY.

My affirmative action plan is straightforward. The CUNY faculty needs to replace PSC's president, Barabara Bowen.

*Mitchell Langbert is associate professor of business at Brooklyn College. He blogs at http://www.mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com.

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.

Bowen's Boondoggle

According to Sarah Garland of the New York Sun, in 2006, the New York City schoolteachers negotiated a contract that will expire in 2009. The contract gave the teachers a 7.1% annual raise over 2008-2009.

The Sun quotes the United Federation of Teachers' President Randi Weingarten:

"Pointing to a total increase in teacher salaries of more than 40% since 2002, Ms. Weingarten said, "Finally we are making real progress."

In contrast to 40% gains in teacher salaries, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the union that represents the faculty of the City University of New York, in the last contract that ran from 2004 to 2007 negotiated a 6% increase over three years.

On June 23, 2008 Barbara Bowen, the PSC president, released a letter describing a new contract that runs from 2007 to 2010. It includes the following increases:

****3.15%, effective September 20, 2007
****4.00%, effective October 6, 2008
****3.00%, effective October 20, 2009

In other words, the Barbara Bowen and the PSC negotiated increases at about half of what New York City's schoolteachers received. And this on top of increases less than half of what the schoolteachers received in the last contract as well. In comparison to the 40% from 2002-9, the PSC has won 16% from 2004-10, about 40% of what the teachers have won.

Despite this dismal performance President Bowen writes in her letter:

"The tentative contract is a principled, creative settlement that combines increases throughout the salary scale with special increases at the top and the bottom. It includes a breakthrough on parental and family care, introduces a system for sharing sick days with those in need, adds a hundred new Lecturer lines reserved for experienced part-time faculty, and holds the line against management's agenda of corporatizing the University. The tentative settlement also includes new equity features, such as a salary differential for College Laboratory Technicians and Assistants to HEO with relevant masters or doctoral degrees, and an extra increase in each step of the Lecturer title. The tentative agreement comes with the strong support of the PSC negotiating committee."

Just a few days before the deal's announcement, the indomitable Sharad Karkhanis in his Patriot Returns newsletter expressed dismay at the union leadership's performance; its inept management; and governmental officials' indifference to the union leadership. He exhorts Bowen:

The PSC's propaganda paper (Clarion) boasts of your trips to Albany and your meetings with the mighty and powerful. But it seems to us that all this is baloney. Neither the New York media nor government authorities consider you relevant or powerful. You can be safely ignored, laughed at, forgotten. We wouldn't care, except that also forgotten, as a consequence, are the people you represent. No wonder you cannot get a good contract for CUNY faculty. Your tactics have deemed you irrelevant to the real media and those in decision making positions in the state. You are a failure in the eyes of the membership. They will not return you to that office again next year, Barbara.

For how long will the CUNY faculty be willing to tolerate the PSC leadership's incompetence?