Monday, August 08, 2005
Don't walk too far
Remember Chelsea Collonge? She's the one who couldn't even imagine walking for one hour. Anyway, she has some exciting criticism of the Regents and nukes.
During the public comment period, I listened as students from several UC law schools described to the regents how fee increases were destroying their ability to pay for school, as well as their faith in the UC system. Surrounded by security guards, we listened to each other speak as regents shuffled papers, whispered, and interrupted us during our paltry one minute of allotted free speech.
Yet another person who has no clue what "free speech" is.
Whereas the university was founded to be a place of independent social critique and pursuit of knowledge, for decades it has been compromised by its involvement with research funded by the military, and now increasingly by corporations.
You might want to clarify your history a bit, Chelsea. It was not founded to be a place of "independent social critique and pursuit of knowledge," it was founded as a land grant university. From Wikipedia:
The mission of these institutions, as set forth in the 1862 Act, is to teach agriculture, military tactics, and the mechanic arts, not to the exclusion of classical studies, so that members of the working classes might obtain a practical college education.
The mission of the land grant universities was expanded by the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 to include cooperative extension - the sending of agents into rural areas to help bring the results of agricultural research to the end users.
That is, they wanted a university that would help people eat better, kill people better, and make stuff better. In this context, the nuclear weapons research is very much a part of the original mission of the university. But that's a fact, and we don't want facts to interfere with our high-minded ideological ideas of what a university should be founded for.
You can honor the memory of Hiroshima at the August 6th Seeds of Change rally at Livermore Nuclear weapons lab (www.trivalleycares.org).
That's helpful, when published August 8th.
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