Freedom and Standards at CUNY: The Case of Kristofer Petersen-Overton

I submitted the following piece to Sharad Karkhanis's Patriot Returns, which goes to 13,000 CUNY employees and faculty. 

Freedom and Standards at CUNY: The Case of Kristofer Petersen-Overton

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.*

The Professional Staff Congress's (PSC's) president, Barbara Bowen, is using the rescission of Kristofer Petersen-Overton's contract to bait Brooklyn College's and CUNY's administration and for partisan jockeying. Instead, the PSC should press to uncover facts that would contribute to understanding the events preceding the rescission and to improving hiring and personnel practices at Brooklyn College and at CUNY. 

The New York Times, Inside Higher Education, and The New York Post cover the Overton firing.  There are two sides, but fact is scrimpy.  The administration states that before hearing Overton's political views they had determined that he was not yet qualified to teach.  Mr. Overton and his supporters state that the contract rescission reflected an incursion on his academic freedom.   Rejecting the possibility of any alternative to the second explanation, President Bowen condemns Overton's firing as "meddling in academic decisions" and, gasconades that "the union will defend the rights of our members if their rights have been violated."  

President Bowen's claim is not fact.  In the case of Professor KC Johnson several years ago Professor Johnson had uttered pro-Israel statements (in contrast to Mr. Overton's anti-Israel position) and found his promotion bid denied.  Rather than defend Johnson, as it is the union's fiduciary duty to do, President Bowen and other union officials, such as Susan O'Malley, publicly attacked him.  In that case President Bowen failed to live up to a minimal legal duty: the avoidance of partisanship in defending faculty rights.

Now, defending Mr. Overton's left wing anti-Zionism, Bowen claims that her support for free speech is unqualified.  This shift is consistent with a pattern whereby the PSC's leadership aims to represent those who are politically correct. 

There are a number of questions that need to be asked before anyone can conclude much about Overton's firing.   Does Brooklyn College generally hire doctoral students to teach master's students? If so, do the favored doctoral students consistently adhere to left-wing ideology?  Is there bi-partisanship in offering adjunct positions to doctoral students, or is the ratio of Democrats to Republicans 100-0? Have CUNY and Brooklyn College established best practice guidelines for the hiring of adjuncts? 

Conrad, Haworth and Millar (1993), in a book on master's degree programs, note that non-academic adjuncts play a crucial role in supplying practical experience that supplements theory.  Many master's students in political science may aim for careers in diplomacy or government.  Does Mr. Overton supply such experience?  Or is he a shill for ideologically committed advisers and their cronies in the PSC? Does the political science department ever offer adjunct teaching posts to doctoral students who agree with Bernard Lewis (2001), or is the ideological tenor monotone, the drumbeat repetitive, and the harp played only with the left hand?

*Associate Professor, School of Business, Brooklyn College.

References

Conrad, CP, Haworth, JG, Millar, SB.  A Silent Success: Master's Education in the United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Lewis, B. The Muslim Discovery of Europe.  New York: WW Norton & Co. 2001.

Minutes after I wrote the above piece,  Brooklyn College's President Karen L. Gould e-mailed that she had decided to give Overton the contract.  I guess we'll never know if any conservative doctoral students exist and if so whether they have been given teaching positions. Here is President Gould's letter:

Dear students, faculty, and staff,

Over the past several days, as a result of a provostial decision about an adjunct appointment, Brooklyn College has been thrust into a debate about academic freedom. This debate has been fueled at times by inflammatory rhetoric and mischaracterization of the facts. It is unfortunate that matters of utmost importance to our college community can be so rapidly co-opted by those with a political agenda and distorted by the media.

I stand united with you: We must never allow decisions about our students' education to be swayed by outside influence. In the matter at hand, this certainly has not been the case. On behalf of every member of this institution, I reaffirm our steadfast commitment to the principles of academic freedom, faculty governance, and standards of excellence.

Today, the Department of Political Science and its appointments committee voted unanimously to recommend Kristofer Petersen-Overton to teach a graduate course on the Middle East. Based on information that has come to light, they are confident he has sufficient depth of knowledge and the intellectual capacity to successfully lead a graduate seminar. The provost now supports their recommendation, and I am in full agreement.

Brooklyn College continues to have a strong commitment to academic freedom. As one of the most diverse campuses in the United States, we value civil discourse on even the most difficult topics. We believe that open, substantive dialogue between those with different points of view is an essential component of a 21st-century education.

Equally essential are academic standards that ensure an excellent education for all students at all levels. During this calendar year, we will work together as faculty and administrators to ensure that our graduate programs are of the highest caliber.

It is now time for us to come together as a community and welcome Mr. Petersen-Overton to Brooklyn College. We wish him and his students a productive, rewarding semester of graduate study.

Sincerely,

Karen L. Gould
President

2008 Financial Crisis Due to Ostrich-like Democrats

Prior to the derivative meltdown, the Democrats were saying that there is no problem in the mortgage market while the Republicans were saying there was.  So much for the double talk I heard from the president of the Labor Management Relations Association meeting earlier this month.  Academia has become so politicized that instead of talking about workplace issues, the president's speech revolved around a partisan pro-Democratic interpretation of the financial crisis.

Sustainability Is a Conservative Ideology

The totalitarian left has long disingenuously misapplied words such as liberal, progressive, democratic and rights.  Liberal means a supporter of freedom, but the left uses it to mean a supporter of authoritarian state control.  Progressive means support for progress, but the left uses it to mean advocacy of policies that squelch progress. Democratic means popular power but the left uses it to mean elite power, especially its own.  Rights imply legal protection from violence, but the left uses it to mean the violent attainment of ends of which it approves.

The latest term that the the totalitarian left has corrupted is sustainability.  Dictionary.com, defines to sustain as to support or bear the weight of; to keep from giving way; to keep up or keep going, as an action or process; and in a number of other ways.  The notion of to keep up or keep going means the same as conserving, which is defined as preventing decay, waste or loss and using natural resources wisely, preserving or saving, as in conserving the woodlands.

The earliest version of environmentalism was called conservation, a term linked to sustainability.  Only fools would fail to conserve resources but to make such conservation or sustainability the main point is niggardly.  The main point is liberty, on which American culture is based. Liberty may imply conservation or conservatism but more often it has implied improvement, change and progress.  Most Americans have come to enjoy the fruit of the experimentation to which liberty has led. Experimentation led to material and spiritual progress, not to conservativsm, reaction and sustainability.

At its heart, the left has always been a conservative movement. It aims to reinstate the tribalism of ancient times and, in the context of today's global society, to do so through  re-institution of the medieval world:  a global secular church, the United Nations; a federal Empire; a banking aristocracy;  and an academic priesthood.  The left's reactionary faith is not humanism but sustainability.  Human beings are the problem and their eradication, their murder, is its ultimate goal.  

Liberty and experimentation lead to discovery.   The innovation of new technology permits humanity to improve its standard of living as it uses resources.  Discovery permits humanity to make use of new resources in new ways.  Human beings do not need to fear scarcity so long as they are free to improve their lives, especially in the context of markets that allocate resources so that they are distributed among their best uses.  But if liberty is curtailed, as has occurred here since 1908, experimentation is reduced and progress stalls.


We can do better than sustainability.  Sustainability is for the hunting grounds of kings and princes; the backwaters of pre-industrial and ancient societies; for the frontier of 14th century Europe.  A nation based on freedom thinks in terms of improvement, progress and growth.  It is surely a sign that Progressivism has finally failed that its admitted aim is sustainability and conservation, not progress.

Key to Sustainability: Kick the UN out of the US and Get the US out of the UN

Glenda R. McGee sent me a Daily Caller blog about the UN's crackpot Agenda 21, which has caught on in a wide range of US governmental bodies ranging from county environmental departments to the Obama administration. Daily Caller's Jim Simpson points out that the terminology that the radical left and the UN have adopted, such as "sustainability", are code for radical social reorganization along Spartan lines (the Spartans had the kind of collectivist, highly controlled society that today's left advocates, with the Obama-Emanuel youth training movement very much in the Spartan communistic tradition).  Daily Caller does a good job of dissecting the code, much of which amounts to fear and loathing of freedom, human happiness and economic progress.  Given the environmental movement's staunch opposition to progress and technology, claiming that it is "progressive" is perhaps a worse abuse of language than calling authoritarian left-wingers "liberals."

The notion of "sustainability" is vacuous.  A way of life is sustainable if the participants conceive of a way of sustaining it.  Technology has proven remarkably inventive not in sustaining but in expanding standards of living. Such expansion has been stalled by the kinds of policies the environmentalists advocate.The chief enemies to sustainability are regulation, government, the Federal Reserve Bank, the United Nations, and authoritarian environmentalism.

As Simpson's article makes clear, UN Agenda 21's land control theme is a form of totalitarian communism that is more radical than Stalin's and Mao's. Environmentalism is a violent totalitarian movement very much in these extremist traditions.  Which is not to say that the environment is not an important concern.  The rule of law and private property are much better at maintaining the environment optimally than regulation and social reorganization.

It is frightening that the United Nations, which was founded on the premise that it would contribute to world peace, has become an organization that advocates human resettlement and mass murder.  It is time for the United States to rethink its involvement in the United Nations.  There is a place for a multilateral peace organization, but not for initiatives like UN Agenda 21 and the reactionary environmental movement.  The UN should be kicked out of the US, and the US needs to resign from the UN.