Author: Justin Podur

Author of Siegebreakers. Ecology. Environmental Science. Political Science. Anti-imperialism. Political fiction.

Why leftists should read John Ralston Saul — critically

John Ralston Saul — author, president of the writers’ organization PEN International, and former vice-regal consort to former governor general Adrienne Clarkson — has had considerable influence in Canada and elsewhere. His unique style of writing can be recognized after just a few lines. He is hyper-educated, filling his work with references from the West in the 1600s to the present day, with the occasional leap back to the ancient Greeks or Romans. He takes a much broader historical sweep than almost any other writer who touches contemporary topics. [1]

Read any of his books, and you will come away with new stories: about a French resistance fighter during WWII named Jean Moulin, about a female contemporary of St. Francis of Assisi named Elizabeth of Hungary, about the 18th-century Corsican patriot Pascal Paoli. You can read about how ancient Greece’s civilization began to flower because of the cancellation of debts by Athenian statesman Solon, or how the current period of globalization looks from New Zealand and Malaysia.

In a series of books about Canada, he has resurrected the history of responsible government and the political leaders Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin, arguing they showed the world that you could “talk your way out of the Empire,” a method that was adopted by dozens of other countries after Canada showed the way.

JRS brings fascinating characters to life, as well as tragic statistics. From one of his books I found out that in some years Alberta brought in more money from gambling revenues than from tar sands royalties, so low were the royalty rates and so high was the stealth tax set up through promotion of gambling among society’s elderly and vulnerable. Elsewhere he describes how Canada entered a health care crisis not because single-tier public health care is unaffordable but because of a decision in the 1990s to lower the number of doctors available to the population.

A central point he returns to in all his work about Canada is the need for Canadians, especially elites, to shed their inferiority complex relative to the United States, United Kingdom, and France. Canada is an interesting place, with a basis to build a better relationship between Indigenous people and those who have immigrated here than exists in most other places. The betrayal of that relationship, and the possibilities for repairing it, the responsibility for which lies on the non-Indigenous population, is the theme of his latest book, The Comeback.

In two major critical tomes, Voltaire’s Bastards and The Collapse of Globalism, JRS criticizes Western society for being out of equilibrium. Balanced humanism, he argues, requires the exercise of six human qualities: common sense, ethics, imagination, intuition, memory, and reason. Our society has held reason above all else, leading to pathologies in every part of life, from politics to economics, from war to the arms trade, from NGO activism to academia.

Part of why it’s so valuable for leftists to read JRS is that he starts from a different place and uses different referents, yet comes to many of the same conclusions. He advocates democracy, inclusion, the public good, and egalitarianism, but eschews what he calls ideology with a phrase he constantly invokes: “whether of the left or the right.” Thinking about these values and ideas and how they relate to leftist values of equality and solidarity, about how his stories relate to the ones we constantly return to, is a valuable part of the kind of dialogue and debate that JRS advocates.
Stories untold

While the absence of almost anything leftist means there is usually a lot in JRS’s work that leftists don’t know about, it also means that he paints an incomplete picture.

The remarkable story of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez includes the exercise of many of JRS’s six human qualities. Chavez worked as an instructor in a military school, attempted a coup against a corrupt neoliberal regime, took personal and public responsibility for it and went to jail, came out and explicitly rejected the armed path to power, and helped lead a movement that has, by any definition, advanced the public good in Venezuela and in Latin America. But JRS dismisses Chavez as a “nationalist populist.”

Cuba, with its extraordinary health care system and genuine south-south solidarity in countries such as Haiti, a place where thousands and thousands of Canadians travel to as tourists every year in defiance of the U.S. blockade, is never mentioned.

Haiti, whose elected government was overthrown in 2004 in one of the most disgraceful operations Canada (and the United States and France) has been involved in recently, is also never mentioned. Nowhere in JRS’s remarkable array of stories appears the astounding history of the indemnity extracted by France from Haiti for the crime of leading the first successful slave revolt and liberating itself. Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led Haiti’s fight for freedom, does not get to be one of the characters JRS brings to light. Neither does Charlemagne Peralte or Bolivar. Too bad for us, because I bet JRS could have made connections that the rest of us missed.

The Zapatistas explicitly used “their word as their weapon,” and their uprising was one of the first and most original and powerful indigenous uprisings to repudiate globalization. The solidarity movement included thousands of Canadians, including many Indigenous people. Yet in his book The Collapse of Globalism, JRS dismisses the Zapatistas as having launched “an old fashioned bloody uprising in Chiapas.” Couldn’t we expect more respect for an uprising that was all about the power of words and the dignity of Indigenous people from the president of PEN, someone who is trying to argue to Canadians that Canada needs to change its relationship with First Nations?

Can a discussion of the collapse of globalism proceed in an informed way without any of these reference points? It evidently does. But there is a great deal lost in the process, and the result, one might say, is unbalanced.
A calculated monstrosity

The ethical imbalance shows up in JRS’s discussion of military issues, which runs through several of his books and was put together in his famous 2004 lecture at Canada’s military college, “A new era of irregular warfare?” Insurgency and counterinsurgency are the mainstream form of conflict in today’s world, he argues, because of the vast superiority of Western armies and the consequent inability of those who face Western armies to meet them head-on. Western armies continue to ignore this and prepare for WWIII, not thinking about how to deal with insurgencies, including addressing root causes and looking at political solutions. (These latter points are more implied than directly made by JRS).

And sure, it is certainly possible that the West’s bloody campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Israel’s wars against the Palestinians and Lebanese, proceeded without careful thought about insurgencies, without much thought at all about the political and human costs of Western actions in those countries.

But it might also be possible that Western counterinsurgents have thought about this a lot and act with indifference to civilian lives, in order to secure their interests in those parts of the world. Reading Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land, or Breaking the Silence’s recent report about how the Israeli army fought in Gaza in August 2014, you don’t get a sense of people who haven’t thought about counterinsurgency.

You get the sense of people who have thought a lot about how to be aggressive against defenceless populations. You get a sense of people who have applied their minds and their vast resources to precisely that problem, with precisely the monstrous results that we see.

Of course, JRS barely ever touches Israel or Palestine, as to do so would be to drive himself straight out of the mainstream. (He did, in 2013, add his name to an open letter signed by Canadian writers opposed to Israeli evictions of South Hebron Palestinians and Negev Bedouin.) It’s too bad, because his writing on the subject would be interesting.

Applying his values and arguments to the Israel-Palestine conflict might have him arguing for a bi-national state, or an inclusive solution that treats everyone like human beings. He might find obscure stories in Jewish or Arab histories of hope, or examples from other parts of the world of a “positive nationalism” that could override the “negative nationalism” currently deployed to devastating effect against Palestinians.

None of this would help him against the organized pro-Israel forces that would go after him, forces that include most of the Canadian political class including its prime minister and challengers. But as the president of PEN, which advocates for freedom of expression, and as an author who has repeatedly talked about the importance of courage for writers, he could be expected to take a stand, at the very least, against Israel’s very detailed and constant war against Palestinian writers and culture.

JRS, or at least readers who rely on him, ignore Israel and Palestine at their peril. In The Comeback, JRS argues that the inevitability of history is on the side of Canada’s Indigenous people. They are making a demographic, civilizational, and political comeback, and non-Indigenous people can accept it gracefully or disgracefully, but they are going to have to accept it. (This position on the inevitability of history is one JRS made fun of in The Doubter’s Companion, specifically making fun of Marxists, lumping them in with neoconservatives).

But that isn’t true. Canada could treat Indigenous people as a military threat (read Douglas Bland’s novel Uprising for a fictionalized scenario along these lines) and try to contain them, denying their rights while stealing ever more of their land and resources. There was a time when Canada, Israel, and South Africa shared information and ideas of how to suppress indigenous populations. South Africa has exited the club, but it didn’t disband it — and Israel and Canada are closer today than they ever were.

Even if Canada’s approach to Indigenous people does not worsen, JRS’s ideas may be insufficient to make it better. Radical critics of The Comeback, Hayden King and Shiri Pasternak argued in the Literary Review of Canada that while “to a large extent” JRS “gets it,” his proposed remedies at the ballot box and in the courts have so far led mostly nowhere and will continue to lead nowhere for Indigenous peoples unless there is a “Canadian comeback” that allows society to move away from “the mythologies of liberal capitalism.” They contrasted JRS’s ideas with those of Indigenous scholars Glen Coulthard, Audra Simpson, and Leanne Simpson, whose recent books offer a deeper re-envisioning of the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous in this country. [2]

When JRS discusses the Rwandan genocide and the Democratic Republic of Congo, he does so in a fairly schematic way, taking the perspective of Canadian general Romeo Dallaire. He concludes that the West’s slowness to act was the problem. But Alan Kuperman, in his book The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention, argued that a small intervention could have saved lives, but not prevented the genocide. Meanwhile the West’s unconditional support for Rwanda’s ruler, Paul Kagame, since before the genocide was a contributing factor in what happened and the decisive factor in the mass deaths in the DR Congo from 1996 on.

Adding Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, Rene Lemarchand, Mahmood Mamdani, and Fillip Reyntjens to his reading list would round it out enough for JRS to see that the problem was not speed, but an intervention into Rwanda’s civil war and then Rwanda’s proxy wars that was guaranteed to produce mass deaths but which, because it did no harm to Western interests, was, for the West, free of consequence.

JRS’s military analyses have two problems. First, as discussions of whether the counterinsurgency strategies and interventions work or don’t work, they ignore the illegitimacy, the criminal nature, of these interventions and their unavoidable devastation of civilian populations. Second, they lead to some pretty weird political places. Instead of a straightforward anti-war or anti-imperialist view, JRS’s readers might end up demanding of their elected officials improved counterinsurgency doctrine and practice.

Such demands would be to the benefit of no one, the public good least of all.
A fictional view of capitalism

Another imbalance in JRS’s writing is in his discussion of economic matters. Unlike most writers, he is able to discuss taxes with minimal rationality, without the kinds of crazy taboos that surround most discussion of taxes. I think that his persistence in discussing taxes this way over the decades (along with others such as Linda McQuaig) has played a role in the fact that politicians can finally start to make arguments about taxes in public.

JRS criticizes the West for letting the Third World debt continue, despite how simple it would be to write off. He criticizes the West for creating an arms industry for export, creating an economic incentive to feed violence all over the world. He criticizes narrow views of society, what he calls the “economic prism” approach, which see people as essentially self-interested.

In Canada, he criticizes the elite for stealing the wealth of indigenous lands and denying Indigenous people the benefits of that wealth. These failings he attributes mainly to a narrow form of reason and to what he calls managerialism. The economy is run by managers, he says, not by real owners or capitalists.

Capitalists, as opposed to managers, take risks, and with their own money. They expose themselves to the market and to competition. Managerialism has marginalized these real capitalists, JRS argues. But this view of capitalists is fictional, perhaps one of JRS’s “positive myths.”

When JRS quotes such “real owners,” he quotes people like Peter Munk, whose Barrick Gold is currently making fortunes despoiling indigenous territories in various parts of the world, and whose board has a revolving door for Canadian politicians. At one point JRS quotes Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, who analyze the behaviour and strategies of real capitalists, who are, as theories from two centuries ago predicted, primarily interested in accumulating fortunes at society’s expense, not making useful products, creating wealth, or exposing themselves to competition.

Nitzan and Bichler also analyze what they call the weapondollar-petrodollar coalition, an economic bloc involving flows of weapons from the West, oil from the Persian Gulf, and dollars back and forth, which JRS also has written about in different ways since the 1990s. His criticism of countries including Burma has been stronger and more direct than anything directed at Saudi Arabia. A friend recently pointed out that JRS seems to avoid criticism of Saudi Arabia despite its competitiveness with ISIS for beheadings, its misogyny, its suppression of free expression, and its recent bombing of civilians in Yemen. [3]

This leads to one of JRS’s fundamental points about elites. They can be responsible or not, but in his view, they are always present. But this, too, puts apples in with oranges for comparison.

Leftists, especially anarchists, and indeed any real democrats, seek a society where the only elite is one of esteem, people who might be admired for the exercise of their talents for, well, the public good. Such an elite would be completely different from today’s 1%, with their net worths equal to small countries, pay scales hundreds of times those of the average worker, elaborate webs of deceit to avoid taxes, backhanded benevolence through charity (which JRS rightly criticizes), and ability to influence politics through corruption and patronage.

Calling both of these groups “elites” is confusing and narrows what we might imagine to be possible. JRS would surely not want to limit our ability to use our imagination, to imagine a better, more equal world?
The Supreme Court and Indigenous rights

JRS makes several rebukes against leftists, some of which are well taken. In his discussion of NGOs, he argues that by remaining outside of electoral and democratic contests, NGOs are implicitly arguing that they don’t believe in democratic legitimacy and don’t seek it. He makes an interesting comparison with pre-WWI union-based reformers, who had incredible influence but did not translate it into institutionalized power.

Chavistas in Venezuela, Lavalas in Haiti, Palestinians running for national elections and inside the Israeli Knesset, and the Zapatistas in Mexico have all struggled with this issue intellectually in life-or-death situations. What are the limits of staying outside? What happens when you try to get inside? What is the price of one or the other? Can you keep your integrity?

Another rebuke to the Canadian left and the activist community is the failure to realize the significance of decades of recent Supreme Court decisions that have the potential to change the relationship between First Nations and non-Aboriginal people in Canada. If JRS is right, more of us should be thinking about how to use these judicial decisions as tools to expand indigenous sovereignty. His historical criticisms of 19th-century Canadian leftists Papineau and Mackenzie and their errors are also well worth considering.

An implicit critique comes from JRS’s basic philosophy. Because society is imbalanced, he argues, we have become obsessed with structure instead of content. By content, he means ideas. Most leftists, whether consciously or not, believe in some variation of Marx’s idea that ideas flow from one’s material situation and material interests, and they consequently look for structural problems and solutions.

JRS rejects this view. His books are full of structural critique and, in later books, policy suggestions. But he views bad structures as flowing from bad ideas, while most of us believe the reverse. The difference may not matter very much, since we have to battle with both ideas and structures all the time, but it is there.

JRS has much to offer leftists. The ability to see historical examples in today’s events, to revisit history for both inspirational and cautionary tales, and to weave them into “positive myths” could enrich our thinking. The idea of a balance of human qualities, of egalitarian societies that can bring out the best in all of their citizens — these are as much leftist ideals as anyone’s.

To the extent that his readers can find historical context, or common sense, or surprising facts or stories that help them to resist the mind-numbing propaganda we are all subjected to daily — whether about the latest terror threat or the need for poor people to suffer more to enrich those already wealthy — there is an opening for left values of equality and solidarity to take hold.

So, yes, leftists can learn a lot from JRS. But one of the effects of people like him is to make us look even crazier than we already do. If someone who is willing to criticize everything from the arms trade to the Third World debt to managerialism to our society’s irrational views on taxes, who criticizes the West for its failures in the former Yugoslavia and Burma and Nigeria, who argues for a transformation of Canada into a reciprocal relationship between indigenous and immigrants (and implicitly for an abolition of the settler category), if such a person still won’t criticize Israel, capitalism, Canada’s role in Haiti, or Rwanda’s role in the DR Congo, if such a person can’t see anything interesting in Venezuela, Chiapas, or Cuba, then those of us who do must really be crazy.

Too bad for us? Maybe. But maybe too bad for the elusive public good, too, if leftists and genuine public intellectuals like JRS can’t meet somewhere.

[First published at Ricochet: https://ricochet.media/en/447/why-leftists-should-read-john-ralston-saul-critically]

Notes

[1] Noam Chomsky is an exception. So was Eqbal Ahmad.

[2] King and Pasternak titled their article “Don’t Call It a Comeback,” and in his response JRS didn’t seem to catch the LL Cool J reference. It seems that his encyclopedic knowledge did not encompass Mama Said Knock You Out, an album that came out two years before Voltaire’s Bastards.

[3] There is some indirect criticism though. In a discussion about Ottawa (on pg. 248) in A Fair Country, JRS points out that “Two ugly embassies of dictatorships and one ugly condo… now stand side by side on Sussex Drive with Rideau Hall, 24 Sussex, the National Gallery, Foreign Affairs and the embassies of our closest democratic allies… One of the dictatorships is a particularly fine model of repression when it comes to free speech and women’s rights.” The Ottawa Citizen, reviewing the book, listed Sussex Drive embassies: France, South Africa, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The dictatorships on that list are Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and the “fine model of repression” is almost certainly, by process of elimination, the Saudi Kingdom.

We are all Farkhunda

On March 19, a 27-year old woman named Farkhunda was leaving the Shah-e Doshamshira mosque, the shrine of the King of Two Swords, in Kabul. The shrine is a place where people all over Kabul, and indeed Afghanistan, go to make wishes, to ask the saint, who is said to have brought Islam to Afghanistan, for favour.

Farkhunda was a religious studies student and taught at the mosque. She was there as part of a religious ritual common in Kabul (though not necessarily common elsewhere the Islamic world) where the mullah would sell charms, sometimes including bits of text from the Quran written on paper and folded tightly. People could take the charms for good luck, protection, or making a wish. Some say that she was upset because the charms had not worked for her. She may have told others to stop buying the charms – a source of business for the mullah and for men who hung around outside the shrine (1).

An argument started with the mullah. The mullah, rather than taking this up as a matter of discussion, decided to incite a crowd of men outside the mosque by telling them that Farkhunda burned the Quran. The crowd formed a mob, who killed Farkhunda horribly over a period of minutes, in a scene captured on numerous cell phone video cameras and uploaded to the web. Police were on the scene – the shrine is a site of importance in Kabul – and did not intervene to save her.

Up to this point, the story is one of religious conservatism, misogyny, mob hatred, incitement, police inaction, and it might be explained away as an eternal problem of Islam, or of Afghanistan, or both.

But the popular reaction to Farkhunda’s murder does not fit into these frames. Instead, what occurred was a sustained mobilization exponentially larger and more powerful than the gang of misogynists who murdered her.

It was quickly explained by her family and widely understood after her murder that Farkhunda was religious and would never have burned the Quran. But, while many protesters chanted slogans about Farkhunda’s innocence, others were saying things like “so what if she burned the Quran?” And while there were those who tried to protect the mullah and the killers, the movement was using the cell phone videos and social media to track down each of the people in the mob who played a role in her death.

The Afghan authorities were forced to move. The police were suspended, many of the killers arrested. Islamic scholars publicly repudiated the attack. Those religious leaders and government leaders who defended Farkhunda’s murder if she had in fact burned a Quran found themselves facing the wrath of the movement as well, and quickly backed down (2).

A two-day long trial in May brought death sentences for four of the accused, eight were sentenced to 16 years in prison, and 18 were acquitted. 19 police officers are still on trial for neglect of duty (3). The Farkhunda movement was unsatisfied, as were her family, that some of those who desecrated Farkhunda’s body after her murder and others who stood by and did nothing were acquitted.

They are right to be disappointed and angry, but they also should not forget that their mobilization in Farkhunda’s name has brought about such justice as there has been. In the process, they have sent a message that Afghanistan has changed, and that the Afghan people won’t allow men to murder a woman in broad daylight without consequences. They forced a response from official Afghanistan, forced the justice system to arrest, try, and sentence the killers according to the law. They forced the system to censure (and possibly punish) the police for inaction. They forced the mullahs who defended murder to back off. These are remarkable achievements for a spontaneous organization in one of the most conservative societies in the world. For those outside Afghanistan who are willing to listen, the movement should challenge the view of Afghans as trapped in an eternally conservative, misogynist interpretation of Islam.

To reiterate this point: Farkhunda’s killers were Muslim. Farkhunda was a Muslim. The people fighting to bring Farkhunda’s killers to justice are Muslim, the judge that sentenced the killers is Muslim. The stereotyped view of Muslim societies propounded in the West cannot accommodate the idea that there are struggles within Muslim societies. But there are.

Afghanistan has not always been legendary for its conservatism. This whole incident would not have occurred at all in the Kabul of the 1960s or 1970s. The decades of war starting at the end of the 1970s brought Islamists into power whose narrow, violent interpretation of religion came from Saudi Arabia via Pakistan with US sponsorship. These Islamists, the mujahadeen, were followed in power by the Taliban (who had the same Pakistan and Saudi sponsors), and then, when the US and NATO took over in 2001, they brought the mujahadeen back. At that time, US commentators talked about the need to invade Afghanistan to save Afghan women from the Taliban. The invasion and occupation didn’t save Farkhunda. If women are saved in Afghanistan in the future, it will be by Afghans and led by women, like those who have mobilized in her name.

Originally published at TeleSUR English: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/We-Are-All-Farkhunda—-20150513-0031.html

Notes

(1) Mughda Variyar, International Business Times, March 24, 2015. “Was Farkhunda Killed for Standing Up to Mullah? Lynching Shows Fate of Afghan Women Who Speak Out”. http://www.ibtimes.co.in/was-farkhunda-killed-standing-mullah-lynching-shows-fate-afghan-women-who-speak-out-627098

(2) Sayed Jawad, Khaama Press, March 22, 2015. “Kabul cleric under fire for endorsing murder and burning of woman”. http://www.khaama.com/kabul-cleric-under-fire-for-endorsing-murder-and-burning-of-woman-9956

(3) Sune Engel Rasmussen, UK Guardian, May 6, 2015. “Farkhunda murder: Afghan judge sentences four to death over mob killing”. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/06/farkhunda-afghan-judge-sentences-four-to-death-over-mob-killing

What should the West do about dictatorships? Profit from them, of course.

In 2008, a Libyan graduate student at the Arab Academy for Maritime Transport was arrested, deported, blacklisted, and banned from Egypt on suspicion of “homosexual practices”. On April 14, 2015, an Egyptian court upheld the decision, preventing him from re-entering, on grounds of protecting the public morality (1). Last December, a TV presenter named Mona al-Iraqi led a televised raid on a bathhouse in Cairo, which led to mass arrests, “compulsory medical examinations”, and prison sentences.

On April 16, 2015, Egyptian-Canadian Khaled al-Qazzaz, who was an advisor to the Muslim Brotherhood-led government of Mohammed Morsi, was at the Cairo airport with his family, having been released after nearly two years in an Egyptian jail, awaiting deportation on medical grounds. They had been promised that Khaled had been cleared of all accusations, was not under investigation, and they could leave the country – Khaled, who had been in jail since 2013, and his wife and children, who had come from Canada to get him. They were detained at the airport for seven hours, their passports confiscated, and left the airport with no information (2).

On April 11, Egypt’s famous “hanging judge”, Nagy Shehata, sentenced 14 Muslim Brotherhood members to death, and 36 others to life in prison, including US-Canadian citizen Mohammed Sultan (3). Shehata is quite a countenance, pictured always in sunglasses. Human rights researcher Priyanka Motaparthy summarized Shehata’s methods in a tweet (4) “#Egypt judge Shehata sentenced 204 people to death & 534 ppl to 7395 years in prison in just 5 rulings. Probably w/o removing his sunglasses.”

Back in February, Egypt’s president Sisi gave an interview to Der Spiegel, which provides insight into his mind (5). Given that power in Egypt is concentrated in Sisi’s hands, his beliefs have consequences. This exchange, in which Sisi explains his massacre of hundreds people in terms of a “civilizational gap” is remarkable:

SPIEGEL: What happened on Rabaa Square was a massacre in which at least 650 Morsi supporters were killed by security forces. Those events represent an abuse of power.

Sisi: I reiterate that you are judging us based on your criteria. The number of victims at Rabaa could have been 10 times higher if the people had stormed the square. And the Egyptians were prepared to do that. The sit-ins were allowed to continue for 45 days and people had to look on as one of the main squares in our capital city was totally paralyzed. We had repeatedly called on the protesters to clear out peacefully. Would something like that be allowed in your country?

SPIEGEL: Our police would not fire live ammunition. If possible they would use tear gas or water cannons. And in our country, the interior minister would have to resign after a massacre like that.

Sisi: I am not ashamed to admit that there is a civilizational gap between us and you. The police and people in Germany are civilized and have a sense of responsibility. German police are equipped with the latest capabilities and get the best training. And in your country, protesters would not use weapons in the middle of the demonstrations to target police.

In the same interview, Sisi was asked about three al-Jazeera journalists, who were still in jail after many months. His response: the judiciary is independent and must not be interfered with. The interview was published in the February 7 issue of Der Speigel, and it’s unclear when it was conducted. What is clear is that earlier that week, one of the three al-Jazeera journalists, Australian Peter Greste, was deported to Australia – freed, in other words, through some opaque process of negotiation, from the Egyptian prison system and from its ‘independent’ judiciary. Curiously, the independent judiciary could not manage the same feat for Canadian Mohamed Fahmy, who is of Egyptian origin and renounced his Egyptian citizenship because he was promised this would lead to his release. Nor of course could it manage that feat for Egyptian journalist Baher Mohamed.

Fahmy and Mohamed are out on bail and are being retried by the same vaunted ‘independent’ judiciary that put them in jail in the first place and that sentenced blogger Alaa abd-el Fattah to five years in jail (6). Since his release on bail, Fahmy has avoided any criticism towards Egypt’s government, and wondered why Canada couldn’t get him home the way Australia had done for Greste (7). Egypt’s authorities have not shown Fahmy the same consideration.

As for Canada’s government, it is primarily interested in doing a certain kind of business with Egypt. Export Development Canada is a government institution dedicated to financially supporting Canadian companies to do business overseas. It’s Egypt country page says that the EDC has assisted 65 Canadian companies, insured 89 international buyers, and done $141 million CAD of business. The disclosure page shows the companies assisted this year: the African Ex-Im Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, and Transglobe Petroleum International, Inc. (8, 9).

In other words, the same Canadian authorities that have found themselves unable to facilitate the release of a Canadian journalist arrested for doing his job, have found themselves able to facilitate a few tens of millions of dollars of business – all the while claiming implicitly that they have insufficient leverage to influence the situation in Egypt. Just enough leverage influence to profit from it, presumably.

Scott Long of paper-bird.net is a blogger who has chronicled Egypt’s descent into totalitarianism. He tells a story of how he was approached at a cafe and asked about his interest in human rights. He gave the man his contact information, but afterwards, he writes, he “cringed inside”, because he wondered whether he had just helped someone or endangered his own security (9):

Other people, foreign passport-holders among them, have been arrested for “political” conversations in public places. You don’t know if the person who approaches you is victim or violator, survivor of torture or State Security agent; or both.

That suggests more clearly than any headline how Sisi’s regime is achieving totalitarianism – something Mubarak’s clumsy and inept authoritarian rule, his iron fist of five thumbs, never managed, perhaps never imagined or tried. I see now that totalitarianism is less comprised in how the state controls your private life than in how you do. Ordinary emotions such as sympathy or compassion cease to be modes of solidarity and become dangerous betrayals, self-revelations to be regulated with sleepless scrupulosity, as though they, and not the people you suspect, are the real informers. Mistrusting yourself comes first. Mistrusting others is merely the consequence. But the self-hatred self-suppression brings – and I hated myself for my fear – demands other objects, a wider field of play. To be foreign to yourself is to apprehend foreignness all around you, to fear the stranger in the land of Egypt.

Egypt’s increasingly totalitarian dictatorship is not described that way by the countries that do business with it, even if countries have citizens who have suffered at its hands. But look at its “hanging judge”. Listen to its president explain away mass murder in terms of a “civilizational gap”. Look at its bans for “homosexual practices” and its bathhouse raids, its jailing of bloggers and writers, its murders of activists like Shaimaa el-Sabbagh, its new laws on protests. For North American governments like Canada’s, who send bombs to other countries in the region on the basis of “civilizational gap” type arguments, what is this dictatorship? A place to make money.

Notes

(1) See Mada Masr, “Court Grants Interior Ministry authority to deport ‘foreign homosexuals'”, April 15, 2015. http://www.madamasr.com/news/court-grants-interior-ministry-authority-deport-foreign-homosexuals.

(2) Khaled al-Qazzaz’s family’s website, April 16, 2015: “653 Days – FREEKQ – Khaled and his Canadian family allowed to leave Airport after 7 Hours” http://www.freekhaledalqazzaz.com/home/2015/4/16/653-days-freekq-khaled-and-his-canadian-family-allowed-to-leave-airport-after-7-hours

(3) CTV News, April 11, 2015: “US-egyptian citizen gets life behind bars, 14 sentenced to death”. http://www.ctvnews.ca/world/u-s-egyptian-citizen-gets-life-behind-bars-14-sentenced-to-death-1.2322395.

(4) https://twitter.com/priyanica/status/592229159612653568

(5) Der Spiegel February 9, 2015. “Interview with Egyptian President Sisi”. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-egyptian-president-sisi-calls-for-help-in-is-fight-a-1017434.html

(6) See the UK Guardian February 23, 2015. “Egyptian activist Alaa abd El Fattah sentenced to five years in jail.” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/23/egyptian-activist-alaa-abd-el-fattah-sentenced-five-years-jail. See also Omar Robert Hamilton’s blog in London Review of Books, “The Verdict”: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/02/23/omar-hamilton/the-verdict/

(7) UK Independent February 13, 2015. “Freed Al-Jazeera Journalist: Why can’t Canada get me home?” http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/freed-aljazeera-journalist-why-cant-canada-get-me-home-10045889.html

(8) EDC’s Egypt country page: https://www.edc.ca/EN/Country-Info/Pages/Egypt.aspx. Disclosure page: https://www19.edc.ca/edcsecure/disclosure/DisclosureView.aspx.

(9) paper-bird.net: “Deport me!” April 18, 2015.

First published on TeleSUR English: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Profiting-from-Dictatorship-20150429-0019.html

The Filimbi Affair and #Telema

In January of this year, protests erupted in Kinshasa, the capital of the DR Congo, against President Joseph Kabila. He came to power in 2001 as acting president when his father, Laurent Kabila, was assassinated. He was affirmed as president by a 2002 peace accord, and he was elected in what was probably a fair election in 2006. He was re-elected in what was probably a stolen election in 2011. His second, and final, term is up in 2016. The protests, called the #Telema (the word means “rise up” in Lingala – the language spoken in the capital and elsewhere in the DR Congo) movement, followed the announcement by Kabila’s government of a proposed law that would delay the 2016 election until a census could be completed. In the DRC, a census could take years, a fact that Kabila was no doubt aware of when the law was proposed.

The protests were started at the University of Kinshasa and the initial demand was for the removal of the offending article of the law that required the census before the election. But over the next few days in January, the demands started to escalate to the removal of Kabila. The armed forces attacked the protesters, with tear gas and live fire (1). An African human rights group gave figures of 14 people killed on the 19th and 28 on the 20th, all by security forces, while the government claimed a lower death toll of 15 people, supposedly looters killed by private security forces (2). Human Rights Watch gave an estimate of at least 21 people killed by security forces (3).

With 42 student protesters killed, ongoing arrests, and a mass grave found in Kinshasa just days ago, the DRC has its own Ayotzinapa.

In the years leading up to these protests, Kinshasa has been the site of a police campaign of social cleansing that left 51 people dead, murdered by masked police on suspicion of being “gang members” in what was called “Operation Likofi” (4). According to HRW’s summary of the operation, “uniformed police, often wearing masks, dragged kuluna, or suspected gang members, from their homes at night and executed them. The police shot and killed the unarmed young men and boys outside their homes, in the open markets where they slept or worked, and in nearby fields or empty lots. Many others were taken without warrants to unknown locations and forcibly disappeared.”

The largest number of protesters were killed on Tuesday, January 20, but the protests continued. By Friday January 23, the government had reconsidered. The bill was amended as the protesters had asked (5). In early February, a spokesperson for Kabila said “President Kabila will end his mandate in 2016. You’ll see” (6).

The student youths that were major players in the Telema protests of January continued to mobilize to try to defend the 2016 election, fearing that Kabila would continue to try to find ways to hang on to power. One of the main pro-democracy youth groups is called Filimbi (“youth for a new society”). In mid-March, they held a two day long workshop, inviting pro-democracy activists from Burkina Faso and Senegal to discuss the movements in their countries. At a press conference at the end of the workshop, the Congolese military swept in and arrested everyone at the meeting – foreign and Congolese alike, thirty people in total. They continue to make targeted arrests of youth activists, and while the foreigners have been released, many of the Congolese arrested in March – and, indeed, in January – remain in custody (7).

An aside here is in order, because while Filimbi is an independent organization, one of the co-sponsors of the event on March 14-15, called FNJE (forum nationale des jeunes pour l’excellence, or the national forum of youth for excellence), was financially supported by the US pro-democracy programs. A USAID official, Kevin Sturr, was arrested at the event and later released. The US Embassy defended the event and its support for it. For those who have seen the damage done to democracy by USAID and similar programs in Venezuela and Haiti, the presence of USAID in this event is cause for caution. But Filimbi and the pro-democracy movement deserve support from everyone concerned with democracy, especially at this early stage, in spite of the presence of USAID at the event. They deserve support because, unlike some of the organizations supported by USAID, NED, and IRI in places like Haiti and Venezuela, their cause is just – they are seeking to uphold the very fragile democratic institutions that are available to them – and they are doing so through popular mobilization and civil resistance as opposed to seeking the violent overthrow of the government.

As Ben Kabamba of Filimbi, now forced to operate underground, said in an interview, “today we are considered enemies of the state, but if we had taken up arms and killed people, we would be rewarded with ministerial posts.” (8) Indeed, the chosen US vehicles for influence in the Congo are not traditionally pro-democracy students, but the armed forces, business groups, private armies, and armies of the DRC’s neighbours, especially Rwanda and Uganda. While the US leaves no stone unturned in the search for influence and does target civil society organizations, it is much more likely that it sees the Congolese pro-democracy movement, and especially its civil and political – as opposed to military – nature, as a threat. It is also unlikely that the US is looking to overthrow Joseph Kabila, who has done nothing against US interests in his 14 years in power.

Even though most political commentators (myself included) have focused on the Congo’s wars, the Congo has a very long tradition of civil, pro-democracy activism. The Congo’s independence was won by such people, and Patrice Lumumba and his companions who won it were also among the first martyrs of the pro-democracy movement. In the early 1990s, the pro-democracy movement forced the Congolese dictator, Mobutu, to agree to a sovereign national congress that was beginning to impose limits on his power. In both cases, brief democratic openings were closed by violence, and in both cases, truly horrific wars followed. Joseph Kabila arrived in the DR Congo as a soldier in one of those wars. If he releases the political prisoners, ceases the campaign of arrests, and steps down, he could still balance out near the right side of Congolese history, even after the 2011 election and even after his recent crimes. The Congo’s friends can, and should, help.

First published at TeleSUR English April 14, 2015: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/The-Filimbi-Affair-and-Telema-20150414-0017.html

Notes

(1) “Congo’s #Telema protests – in tweets.” UK Guardian, January 21, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/21/-sp-congo-telema-protest-twitter

(2) “Church backs Congo protesters, rights group says 42 killed”. Reuters January 21, 2015. http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/21/us-congodemocratic-politics-protests-idUSKBN0KU0UI20150121

(3) https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/01/21/human-rights-watch-daily-brief-21-january-2015

(4) HRW, “DR Congo: Police Operation Kills 51 Young Men and Boys” https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/11/18/dr-congo-police-operation-kills-51-young-men-and-boys

(5) AFP, via UK Daily Mail, January 23, 2015. “DR Congo Senate backs down on electoral bill after deadly clashes” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-2923442/DR-Congo-Senate-backs-electoral-bill-violence.html

(6) Malcolm Beith for Bloomberg, February 5, 2015. “Congo’s President Kabila Will Step Down in 2016, Spokesman Says” http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-05/congo-s-president-kabila-will-step-down-in-2016-spokesman-says

(7) A basic website that includes some information about the Filimbi prisoners, demands, and ideas on how to help is telema.org: http://www.telema.org/

(8) http://www.telema.org/interview-with-ben-kabamba-filimbi/

The North American, All-Administrative University

In his 2011 book The Fall of the Faculty, Benjamin Ginsberg, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, gives an explicit institutional analysis that explains what many faculty in North America have been feeling intuitively as their institutions have changed around them. The main change in universities in recent decades, Ginsberg argues, has been the rise of administrators at the expense of the core activities of the university – research and teaching. It matters, he argues, because administrators and professors have different world views. To professors, the university is a means to certain ends, all having to do with knowledge: the creation of it, the development of it, and the sharing of it. To administrators, teaching and research are means to the institution’s ends. They are business lines, which an institution can take or leave, depending on what suits the current institutional goals (profit, or simply the expansion and growth of the administrative part of the institution). In an administrative world view, then, closing down an english department or a math department and allocating those resources to a parking lot is a perfectly rational thing to do.

The tone of Ginsberg’s book is refreshing, and I suspect very deliberately irreverent. Power in an institution depends on maintaining a mystique of insiders who attend exclusive meetings (retreats, seminars, etc.), who are aware of insider language (including particular fads and acronyms), and hierarchies of titles and authority. Ginsberg describes the administration as ‘deanlets’, and pokes fun at their principal activities, including the production of strategic plans, media relations to maintain an institution’s image, travel to seminars and workshops to meet other administrators in person (even if the topics of these workshops is the irrelevance of in-person instruction in the face of e-learning), and of course, the cultivation of relationships with wealthy donors.

The irreverent tone and the damning collection of facts, figures, and some shocking anecdotes describing the rise and effects of the all-administrative university fleshes out a core institutional analysis of how the administration came to power at the university. Ginsberg points to three key developments. First, administration used to be done by faculty who did administrative tasks for a few years before returning to their scholarly and teaching activities. Today, university administration is an alternative career track. Many scholars who go down the administrative path neither plan to nor do return to scholarship, and slowly become what they are surrounded by. Second, administration has developed independence from the faculty in two key ways: independence from faculty’s administrative work was achieved by expanding administrative staff, and independence from the university’s core mission was achieved by expanding the role of private donors. Even if public funds and student tuition still pay most of the bills, a relatively small percentage of money from private donors buys the administration, and the donors, significant control over the institution’s future.

Ginsberg concedes that faculty are far from perfect. “They can be,” he writes, “petty, foolish, venal, lazy, and quarrelsome” (pg. 201) But with administrative power comes new pathologies. Indifference to the university’s core mission means indifference to academic freedom and the possibilities for real creativity, innovation, and social progress that can result; the treatment of research and teaching as business lines comparable to other activities results in shirking, squandering, and outright fraud and corruption; an administrative philosophy emphasizes preparing students for the workplace in low-level vocational and skills-training instead of thinking of the university as a place for human development, where students can grow and challenge and change their own views and, perhaps even come to think about what in the world they could and should change for the better, with their new knowledge.

An interesting chapter, and one I did not entirely agree with, was the chapter on “Realpolitik of Race and Gender”. In it, Ginsberg argues that students from oppressed constituencies strengthen administrative control when they make alliances with administration against faculty. To Ginsberg, academic freedom includes the possibility of discussing and debating matters that may make others uncomfortable. Democratic rules of debate and discussion, as well as of academic freedom and freedom of expression, should be the guide. The administrative solution, however, is to impose such things as mandatory trainings and Student Codes of Conduct – which, having a shaky legal basis, end up being unenforceable. The fact that they are legally questionable is irrelevant, however, because university administrations only apply these codes very selectively (and, I might add, in a politicized way). My disagreement with Ginsberg in this chapter is relatively minor, but I will note it: it is only that students from oppressed constituencies are more likely to turn to (false) administrative solutions if faculty are unsupportive.

The entire discussion is about a key question: who does the university belong to? Here, we might get some help by bringing in another book, Christopher Newfield’s Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard University Press 2008). In it, Newfield discusses the threat of vast social change posed by the possibility that everyone in society might join the middle class by universal access to higher education. To Newfield, attacks on faculty privileges, on the obscurity of today’s scholarship, on the humanities and basic sciences themselves, on the attempts to use affirmative action and other tools to make the university truly inclusive – all of these were tools to stave off the prospect of a universally educated, multicultural middle class, with the capacity to shape and change the direction of the whole society. The ideas used to help roll this possibility back included: the notion of a meritocracy, in which the talented rose to the top in a society based on competition; the acceptance of inequality as a fact of life; the notion that market and business outcomes were the final arbiter of what was worth learning and thinking about. I would argue that, to the extent that faculty accept these latter ideas, we are undermining our own autonomy, our own academic freedom, and our own ability to contribute to the development of society through our scholarship and the development of our students through our teaching.

Returning to Ginsberg, who has his own ideas about what faculty have done wrong to facilitate the rise of administrative power. First, faculty have become too comfortable allowing administration to be done by others. Too busy to go to meetings? Too busy to take a part-time administrative post for a few years? Someone else is waiting to make those decisions for you. To take control again, faculty have to become more active – at all levels, but especially on boards of trustees. Faculty have to keep control of teaching away from external and administrative bodies. Second, faculty have succumbed to pressures to produce so many PhDs that the powers and freedoms academics were able to negotiate decades ago when PhD graduates were scarce have been eroded, in part because professors lack the power they had when there was no “reserve army” for universities to rely on. Administrations know that for every tenured academic in their system, there are others with PhDs who are struggling in the part-time, by-course system without any academic freedom or the hope of tenure. Ginsberg concedes that this point, and the idea of supporting the reduction or closing of many PhD programs, constitutes “especially bitter medicine”, and he has no obvious solution, only hope that through “regular two-way communication, members of the faculty and university boards might discover a formula for abating this unacceptable state of affairs.” (pg. 215)

To Ginsberg’s suggestions about what faculty need to do differently, I would add one: as a cantakerous bunch, faculty disagree with one another about many things, from curriculum to labor relations to politics in Israel/Palestine. If faculty cannot have these debates openly and according to democratic and academic norms, and instead seek to use administrative solutions on those whose politics they abhor, they are, again, undermining their own place in the institution, as well as the core mission of the university. If we use – and model – academic principles and respect free expression in debates with those we disagree with, we will be in a much better position to defend these principles against encroachment when our own interests are attacked.

Ginsberg’s arguments were built on evidence from U.S. universities, but to anyone working in a Canadian university, almost everything he describes is eerily familiar and frightening. I have been recommending his book to everyone because, as he says, “the university can be a marvelous institution”, and one “well worth protecting” (pg. 219)

First published on TeleSUR English: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/The-North-American-All-Administrative-University-20150325-0044.html

The Tuition Trap, as discussed by Christopher Newfield

I’ve been thinking about Chris Newfield’s 2008 book Unmaking the Public University a lot lately, and I wanted to reproduce one great quote from page 182, about what he calls “the tuition trap”: how by raising tuition fees, public universities undermine the case for public funding for universities, which shortfall they make up by raising tuition, undermining the case for public funding…:

“The tuition trap goes like this: The public is worried about college affordability, but its public university raises its fees. The university thus implies it does not actually depend on public funding, since it has the private resource of higher tuition at its fingertips. The university may also deepen this impression – that it can do without more public funding – by saying how good it is in spite of public funding cuts. Even worse, it may declare strong public funding a thing of the past in order to justify tuition increases or expanded fund-raising. Taxpayers then reasonably ask, if the university does not need more money, why does it keep raising fees? And since it keeps raising fees, why should we give it more public money?”

He goes on:

“If the university is just another cog in an economic system that is about getting ahead, charging as much as you can, maximizing your returns, and buying your way to the top, why should the general public pay for it?”

Both quotes from pg. 182.

Universities could be very valuable, making huge contributions to the general development of society and accessible to all. For that to happen, public universities have to get out of the tuition trap.

York strikers show the way — now let’s build a truly public university

Protracted labour dispute raises questions of post-secondary governance and funding

The strikes at York University, the University of Toronto, and elsewhere have opened a long overdue debate about student debt, precarious labour in the academy, rising tuition, and, to a lesser extent, university governance. The York University strike offers an opportunity to argue for the continuing relevance of universities as public institutions. The importance of the public in the public university is especially true for York, which, if it embraced its role as such, could tackle a new list of issues and lead the way for other educational institutions.
Precarity, debt, and defensive struggle

York’s contract faculty are the precarious academic labourers whose difficulties have been brought into some public light by the York strike and other labour actions in North America. The contract faculty settled earlier in March. The teaching assistants and graduate assistants had to battle on until the end of the month to win their objectives.

Although the strike ended in a victory, the struggle was mainly defensive. In previous contracts, the union on strike at York, CUPE 3903, won a funding package that includes work as a TA (or, for work outside the classroom, as a GA). The total package offered to a student is usually in the range of $12,000 to $18,000 for the year. Out of this, a domestic student has to pay around $6,500 tuition. International students might get the same package, but their tuition is much higher — somewhere around the size of their whole funding package.

Students are eligible for such funding only if they have full-time status. If they work more than 10 hours per week outside of their studies and on-campus jobs as TAs or GAs, they are ineligible. So, when the administration presented the claim that TAs were getting paid $52/hour, they neglected to add that this was up to a hard limit of about $9,000 for a year. In order to get this $52/hour, students had to figure out how to live on about $30/day (or, for international students, $0/day). Of course, students could take on additional debt, the implicit solution that university administrations continuously try to impose on students.

The union did not go on strike trying to get its members out of this low-wage situation. The union went on strike because management was trying to assert its right to raise tuition while maintaining the funding package at the same rate.

This is the indexation issue that management avoided discussion of for a month, the gain won by the union in previous strikes that management tried and failed to roll back. Indexation means that if the university wants to take more from TAs and GAs in tuition, it also has to pay TAs and GAs more money so that they can pay the university. Losing indexation would have meant that, rather than helping TAs and GAs subsist, their work on campus would merely give them the slightest reduction in the massive debt they would incur while studying.

The U.S. and U.K. systems, in which students at all levels incur ever more massive debt while receiving less and less, and with fewer and worse prospects after graduation, seems to be the model. The striking workers successfully held the line against that erosion.

The academic and the administrative

The York strike also highlighted the problem of a university no longer under academic control. This issue is of more public importance than it may seem on the surface.

Unlike most workplaces that are under the uncontested control of managers, at universities the struggle for academic freedom has been linked to another struggle, that for collegial governance, the idea that academic matters should be under the control of academics (faculty and also students) and not under the control of managers.

Defending collegial governance involves constant battles over policies and procedures, careful readings and debates, and can seem arcane and obscure to the non-university public. But collegial governance, like academic freedom, is an important thing for society to have, and it deserves some public attention — and protection. Let us look at it in the context of York’s strike.

The first way that the administration has strengthened itself has been by moving money. The erosion of the university’s teaching budget has been accompanied by an expansion in the administrative share of the budget. Budgets are contentious and political, and university administrations contest the notion that they are bloated at the expense of the university’s core activities. The analyses are worth looking at: Benjamin Ginsburg describes the growth of university administration at U.S. universities in his book The Fall of the Faculty, and scientist Bjorn Brembs tackles the issue in Germany in a blog post.

York’s faculty union, YUFA, did some interesting analysis of York’s financial statements. While not discussing academic and administrative budgets in detail, it does deal with how to think about the financial statements of a public institution. YUFA also produced a report that described the growth of managerialism.

The growth of the university’s administration at the expense of its academic mission is not solely a matter of money, as Ginsburg’s Fall of the Faculty documents. The growth of “student life” programs under the control of the administrative apparatus has seen students offered more programs in things like time management and study skills, while academic programs in languages, literature, or history are starved of resources. York University has a Senate that is the ultimate authority on academic matters, but the Senate does not have the power to decide what is and is not an academic matter — that is the prerogative of the administration.

Before the current strike, the York community was presented with apocalyptic budget projections (which have since been challenged by YUFA and CUPE) as well as warnings about low enrolments.

York’s administration imposed a process called the Academic and Administrative Prioritization and Review, or AAPR — another management tool that was imposed on other Canadian universities, such as Guelph and the University of Saskatchewan, to destructive effect. Several faculty councils at York repudiated the AAPR and rejected its use in academic planning. Like the strike, the AAPR ended up opening an overdue debate on administrative attacks on the academic mission of the university (see Michael Ornstein’s presentation for a fine example of applying academic criteria to a managerial exercise and Craig Heron’s essay on the consultant Robert Dickeson, whose methodology is used in AAPRs across North America).

Amazingly, in a context of enrolment and budget fears, the York administration walked into negotiations with CUPE 3903 seeking concessions that the union could not accept, and took over a month to make any movement towards an acceptable offer.

As an alternative to bargaining, the administration used a reading of the university’s policy on remediation — intended to provide guidance on how to restart the university after a disruption is over — to start remediating during the strike. The “remediation” ended up making students more uncertain, increasing physical pressure and fear of violence on the picket lines as thousands of drivers tried to cross daily to attend classes that may or may not have been proceeding.

For an administration worried about enrolment, it is difficult to imagine how this could have been anything other than a nightmare scenario — unless low enrolments themselves might provide another tool that administrators could use to discipline the academics?

York, a public university

Like every public institution, universities are changing. They are becoming more hierarchical, more corporate, less accessible, and less free. Defending their role, even expanding it, may not be possible from within their walls alone. But should the non-university-going public care?

Universities cost society massive amounts of resources, and everyone within them, from the administration to the student body, has some relative privilege compared to the many people who never get the chance to go. Scholars’ reputations for obscurity and detachment from the real world doesn’t make it easy for these same scholars to ask the public for resources or for help defending the institution. But public indifference to what is happening at universities only serves the administrators who are eroding them.

And truly public universities could be extremely socially beneficial. Take York again, and consider some 2006 figures that will not have changed much in the decade since. Located in North Toronto, York’s students come from families with a median household income of $55,881, compared to an average of $74,093 for all Ontario university families. The median household income for York students in 2006 was actually lower than the median household income for Ontario in 2005, which, at $72,734, was only slightly lower than the average for Ontario university-going families. Ryerson students came from slightly more affluent families ($56,733) and University of Toronto from slightly more affluent than that ($58,895). The contrast with universities such as Western and Queen’s, with median family incomes above $100,000, is striking.

More than 50 per cent of York’s students commute for more than 40 minutes, and 57 per cent of York’s first-year students rely on public transit to get to school, compared to 32 per cent of Ontario students. Of first-year York students, 60 per cent are female, compared to 55 per cent for Ontario. Of senior-year York students, 72 per cent work for pay off campus, compared to 46 per cent for Ontario; 43 per cent are from a visible minority compared to 29 per cent for Ontario. Where 70 per cent of Ontario students had a parent with post-secondary education, 65 per cent of York students could say the same.

For many decades in North America, universities were designed to train and prepare the ruling class and the professionals who serviced them. But starting after WWII, public universities started to open up and transform into places that potentially everyone could go. York’s demographics present a picture of that kind of public university, a place whose student body looks like the population and not like the rulers.

It may not be coincidental that at the most public of universities, there is a strong emphasis on humanities and social sciences — 53 per cent of first-year students compared to 38 per cent in Ontario, 51 per cent of senior-year students compared to 42 per cent in Ontario. I love science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and I think this type of education is both vitally important and under attack, especially under the Harper government. But social sciences and humanities — philosophy, literature, history, political science, geography, sociology, linguistics, economics — are fields that help students understand power and understand the world they live in. They are fields that give students a chance of shaping the future.

In his 2008 book Unmaking the Public University, English professor Chris Newfield of the University of California, Santa Barbara, argues that the attack on the social sciences and humanities — the devaluing of cultural knowledge — was a part of the assault on public universities and part of the assault on the North American middle class.

The idea of a public university open to everyone, where the cultural knowledge to shape and change society is taught and developed, is a dangerous idea for those who fear the public.

Who is subsidizing, and who is subsidized?

Newfield’s book is full of insights, many of which are highly relevant to Canadian universities and especially to York. One in particular relates to university budgets. Part of a professor’s job, especially in the natural sciences, is to seek external research funding. The grants that professors win in competitions bring prestige to their universities and make it possible to do research. Many believe that these grants help subsidize other parts of the university, but Newfield points out that the grants never cover the full costs of the research, and the university has to provide some matching funds for every grant.

Where do these matching funds come from? From the teaching budget from where most of the students are: the social sciences and the humanities. So, here again, what most people believe is the reverse of reality: it turns out that teaching in the social sciences and humanities subsidizes research in the natural sciences, not the other way around.

In the background of the York strike is the provincial funding formula, which has continued to erode the public part of university budgets. Universities in Ontario responded by following what was done in the United States: they have sought to squeeze more tuition out of students and more funds from private donors.

York’s administration has also sought to expand its science, technology, engineering and mathematics profile and reduce, in relative terms, its social sciences and humanities profile. The fact that the social sciences and humanities faculty and students are among the most “unruly,” the most likely to insist on collegial governance, and highly active in unions, may not be lost on the administration.
Unfortunately university administrations are all alike, and there are no models for creatively managing public institutions.

But none of these strategies will work to the competitive advantage of York, many of whose students will either receive a public education or no education at all. This puts York in an interesting position, as it makes the public option the most strategic one for the institution to survive and thrive. Unfortunately university administrations are all alike, and there are no models for creatively managing public institutions. There are only corporate models of total top-down control, privilege, and power at the top, and obedience and fear at the bottom.

York’s social sciences and humanities programs, which attract huge numbers of students and probably subsidize the rest of the university, will never be shut down. But an administrative vision would see these programs carefully controlled, delivered by insecure teachers with no union protections or academic freedom, and students who pay huge amounts to shut up and study like their instructors, who gratefully accept a tiny share of the budget for the chance to shut up and teach.

It doesn’t have to be this way, especially at York. We could try, instead, to be who we are, instead of trying to be something we are not.

What if York were to lead other universities in the aggressive pursuit of the public option? Embracing its progressive traditions, embracing its diverse and in many cases oppressed student body, and working on a whole new list of problems. What would it take to achieve free tuition? How could we speed up and open up the peer review process? How could we run the university on free software and free information? How could we ensure that everyone who works at the university has a good job at a living wage and the freedom to contribute creatively to the community and to say what they think? How could we have a totally seamless relationship with the non-university public, in which the university becomes a source of knowledge and not a place where knowledge is locked up to be accessed only by those who pay to be within its walls? These are the more interesting problems that we could work on at places such as York.

The alternative is to become another all-administrative university with cowed, indebted students taught by cowed, temporary faculty. York’s TAs, GAs, and contract faculty have shown the way, but the struggle for a truly public university will be a long one.

First published in Ricochet: https://ricochet.media/en/373/york-strikers-show-the-way-now-lets-build-a-truly-public-university

Cease Fire, Resume Genocide: An Interview with Dr. Jacob Smith*

Dr. Jacob Smith (name changed) is a North American physician who has visited Gaza several times, working at several hospitals there in both clinical and training roles. I spoke with him about the medical system in Gaza and the state of Gaza under the current, post August-2014 intensified siege.

Justin Podur: Describe your work in Gaza’s medical system.

Jacob Smith: I was initially asked several years ago by the Ministry of Health in Gaza to participate in a needs assessment for one of the subspecialties. At the time I knew very little about Gaza, wasn’t involved in politics, and knew very little even about the history of the region. As a physician what I saw was a tremendously poor humanitarian situation that was in large part man-made. Most times humanitarian crises result from earthquakes, tornadoes, natural disasters. This disaster is entirely man-made. The health system is the area I’m exposed to most. But it’s one small nidus of a multifactorial problem. The health system needs work, but so does the water system, so does rebuilding people’s homes, there are huge needs in every area. Politically, the most important thing would be getting the borders open so people can export and import – these are simple things that people in a Western society simply take for granted. The blockade prevents medical supplies, medications, training of doctors. The actualization of an independent, sovereign people requires that they can interact with other people. To be able to be empowered to overcome poverty and other challenges, is really not something that they can do under blockade.

JP: Give us some examples of how the siege plays out in the medical system.

JS: I’ll give you an example of what happened in the last offensive. Some specialized treatments like cancer treatment, kidney dialysis, and blood transfusions are only available in Shifa hospital in Gaza City. These treatments are regular, life-saving, and necessary to prolong people’s lives. In the last offensive, people from Northern Gaza were unable to get to Gaza City for these treatments because the road network was destroyed. Those people simply died. Just like that. Another very simple example: when I was there a few years ago, I met a young man in his early twenties who had been exposed to white phosphorus. As a complication of that, he ended up being in the intensive care unit quite a long time. I saw him several years after his exposure, which was probably during Cast Lead in 2008/9. He has chronic illness, he’s unable to find work. During his time in intensive care, the hospital lost power, so he’s lucky to even be alive, but he is a casualty of white phosphorus. In the most recent Israeli offensive a lot of the equipment just stopped because of power cuts. If you’re on a respirator and the power dies, you die. And during the most recent offensive, people who were the sickest – in the intensive care unit – intermittently, the power went down, and you had to hope the generators kicked in. Otherwise the person died. It was that simple. During the offensive, the one time when critical supplies need to come in, this is the time that none of the supplies were available. People were ingenious, trying to find solutions, but there are limits to that. Many people died from things that were easily preventable.

JP: I think it would be worth our time for you to tell us a bit about Palestinian ingenuity. It’s a part of the story people rarely get to hear about.

JS: Just to give you an example, when I visited the dialysis unit, one thing they have is old equipment that is essentially breaking down, broken down to the point where anywhere else, it would be thrown out. But because of the needs, the major hospital in Gaza has designed a system where there are now five shifts – for perspective, you should know no North American facility runs more than three shifts – they run five shifts and they have modified the regime to assure that every patient’s needs are met. They’ve modified the scheduling system to ensure there are nurses available 24 hours a day. I’ve never heard of that happening anywhere else. Another well-publicized example. When the power runs out, many of the Palestinian people will use cooking oil in their cars, which works effectively. The hospitals do the same when they run out of diesel. They use cooking oil to fuel the generators. There are countless examples of running out of electricity supply in the hospital, and setting up someone’s car battery so that the intensive care unit, OR, and the ER can continue to operate. Now there’s a big push, and one of the most empowering programs now is to empower each of the hospitals with solar power similar to as has been done in a couple of hospitals in Haiti. You’ll find countless examples. The level of knowledge of medical students, in terms of book knowledge, was higher than my North American students. But the Palestinian students don’t have the opportunities to go on exchange, develop experience and training outside of Gaza. They have everything they can get in Gaza – they are brilliant students – but they are stuck under the blockade.

JP: And as inventive as the Palestinians are, the occupation is also endlessly inventive in attacks and deprivations. How do they raise the costs for internationals to try to help in Gaza?

JS: So long as the blockade continues, Gaza is in a situation where they really need international help. So long as they are blocked, they need foreign aid, they need NGOs, they need money, reconstruction of hospitals, homes, UN buildings, everything. And yet at the one time that they need the world more than ever before, the world is grossly absent. And it is not simply that the world doesn’t want to be there. Israel (and, it must be said, Egypt) has made it almost impossible to get in and out of Gaza. If you’re an NGO and you’re trying to determine the most productive use of your time and money, you’ll go to a place that’s easier to get in and out. It is hard to get in, hard to get out, it’s intentional delays to deprive people of the ability to do good work. If you apply to go through Israel, they’ll delay or refuse your COGAT permission. Many have been refused without explanation and aren’t allowed back – for no reason. Mads Gilbert is an example.

I know of doctors who have been rejected multiple times, spent thousands in legal fees, took their case to the Supreme Court of Israel, and were finally granted permission through the Supreme Court of Israel. Even after getting permission from Supreme Court, the border officials make entry and exit especially difficult and humiliating.

When I was leaving Israel via Ben Gurion, the authorities insisted I write my facebook, home address, work address, phone numbers. I had my luggage dumped on the floor, every item in my bag was swabbed, I had to go through the X-ray twice, I was strip searched, and had my private parts patted down. This is routine for anyone entering and exiting Gaza for medical relief work. You are intentionally made to feel like a criminal, like you’re doing something wrong by going to Gaza, that the mere act of being present there makes you a criminal. As you go through it, even if you know that’s happening, human nature dictates that you’ll start to think, well, there are a lot of places that need humanitarian work, you’ll be inclined to go somewhere else next time, which means you’ll have done exactly what the Israelis wanted you to do. As a physican, most physicians will feel they have better things to do with their time. And that’s a part of why development has happened at a snail’s pace.

And consider me, as a white North American physician, I’m not used to this treatment, but part of the sadness is, if I was Palestinian, this would happen all the time, I wouldn’t be telling this story, and much worse would happen to me – I’d be detained, or jailed, or tortured, and no one would know.

JP: You mentioned Egypt. It’s not just Israel making it difficult for people to get in. It’s also the Sisi dictatorship in Egypt.

JS: I visited Gaza when Morsi was president of Egypt. At that time, the Rafah border crossing was mostly open. There was also a tunnel system that served as a lifeline of medical supplies into Gaza. It was easier for people to go in and out via Rafah for specialized medical care. That said, it was still not accessible to everyone. It was accessible to people who had the means – in a territory where there is more than 50% unemployment, that was still a major barrier. But now, in the Sisi era, it’s simply impossible to get out. Several years ago, during one of my visits, you could see NGO people everywhere: UN, MSF, Red Crescent from Turkey. They were everywhere, there were projects, there were people. Now they are almost invisible.

Much of the money that was pledged, the overwhelming majority, has never got in. Reconstruction efforts are essentially nonexistent. The hospitals that were most visible from the international perspective – in Gaza City – were rebuilt first. Not because they were strategic for human health, but because they were the most likely to please Israel, to help Israel’s international reputation. The pediatric hospital, which was bombed in August 2014, was rebuilt first.

So far, the reconstruction effort is going at a rate that will take 100 years to repair the damage just from the most recent conflict, never mind the conflicts before that. The most basic necessities are in short supply. The majority of the water is undrinkable because of damage to water treatment plants and lack of sewage treatment. Electricity outages range anywhere from 12 to 20 hours a day. Because of the displacement of over 100,000 people, many of these people are living in congested housing. We’re seeing a very high rate of people living in close proximity. People are literally dying of diarrhea, children have died of hypothermia because they can’t get heat in their homes.

Each of the things that I’m describing, we’re talking about an area where the average person in Gaza lives on less than $1500 per year. If you move less than a mile away in Israel, that figure is over $35,000 per year. The reason this exists is entirely man-made. The people within Gaza are motivated, determined to be independent and have their own health care system that they develop and that they optimize. The reason this is not happening is solely because of the occupation and a blockade that forbids supplies, and rather than the very rapid genocidal campaign of the war, after the ceasefire none of the conditions have been respected.

My dream is that Gaza would have an independent health care system that would be run by Gaza that wouldn’t be dependent on foreign aid, not dependent allowing supplies in through the occupier. That’s completely possible. The desire, the expertise, the determination, are all there on the Palestinian side. But on the Israeli and Egyptian sides, there is opposition. And internationally, those who want to help haven’t been strong enough to overcome this opposition. One of the most frustrating things for me, is, to see the potential. I have to perceive things as, what’s the potential if we overcome those barriers. That has to be the way that we think. What’s the ideal situation? A health system designed by, for, and managed by physicians and leaders in Gaza. They are more than capable of doing it if the world allowed them.

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Cease-Fire-Resume-Genocide-An-interview-with-Dr.-Jacob-Smith-20150311-0031.html. If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

Online Privacy Is Worth The Extra Work

This past week, Laura Poitras’s documentary, Citizen Four, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. When he provided the documents that revealed the details of universal spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA), the subject of the documentary, Edward Snowden, wrote an accompanying manifesto. His “sole motive”, he wrote, was “to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them. The U.S. government, in conspiracy with client states, chiefest among them the Five Eyes – the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – have inflicted upon the world a system of secret, pervasive surveillance from which there is no refuge.” (1)

Snowden, who made careful plans to try to avoid capture before he could get the materials out, nonetheless assumed that he was going to be spending the rest of his life in prison. Even though his greatest wish was for the public to know about the surveillance programs, he was pessimistic about the possibility that the programs would be reformed through the existing political system. His manifesto concluded with the repurposing of a quote from Thomas Jefferson about the U.S. Constitution: “Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of cryptography.”

In other words, maybe if the public found out, they would find the idea of being surveilled by unaccountable powers unappealing, or maybe they would not. If they rejected universal surveillance, they might demand that the program end. But maybe the political system was in fact so closed, undemocratic, and unresponsive that it could not change in response to such a demand. But even then, the public had options: the public could change their behaviour in order to make universal surveillance more difficult. How? What are these “chains of cryptography” to which Snowden referred?

In a lecture at the 31c3 conference late last year (2), Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras showed the systems that the NSA have so far been unable to crack. Taken together, and used carefully, these systems offer the continued possibility of privacy, a fundamental right, a right which enables people to form their personalities, their philosophies, and their politics, a right which has been taken away by spy agencies for their own grandiose plans.

What are these systems? They include public key (GPG) encryption for email, onion routing (Tor) for web browsing, and Off-The-Record (OTR) protocols for online chatting. Importantly, all of these tools are free software/software libre (3), which means that their source code is published and can be studied, so that bugs and problems can be identified and fixed by the community of users and developers. Security experts like Bruce Schneier (4) have long emphasized that no user should trust any product that promises online privacy or security that is not free software. Unless the source code is published, there could easily be “backdoors” built in – and, as Snowden’s documents have shown, they often are. Richard Stallman of the GNU free software project made the argument connecting free software to online privacy and security at his own lecture at 31c3 (5).

The above tools – GPG, Tor, and OTR – may be cracked one day by the NSA, or declared illegal by oppressive governments (including that of the US). The important point is that they are tools that were created by the free software community and offered to the public as ways to try to achieve the right to privacy. Unlike corporations, the writers of free software don’t try to control users in order to profit from them. But nor do they have the resources to create vast call centres to do customer service, and indeed all free software comes with a warning that it has no warranty or guarantee. Although the difficulties are often exaggerated, the free software versions of many programs can be difficult to use. What this means is that the price of freedom, or of privacy, online, is not measured in dollars or even in suffering, but in convenience and patience.

Greenwald recounts in his book, No Place to Hide, that Snowden tried to contact him many times before finally reaching him through Laura Poitras. Greenwald didn’t want to go through the inconvenience of learning GPG, and Snowden wouldn’t write him any specifics without it. Even now, most people, including journalists and activists, don’t take the extra time to learn these tools, or to learn about the free software movement. Until Snowden, this included even Greenwald, the very reporter who ended up breaking the story. The ‘crypto party’ movement has arisen to make it possible for people to get together and help each other learn the tools (6). If only a tiny group of people attempt to exercise their rights to online privacy, it will be easier for governments to isolate them. On the other hand, if people assume they have the right to privacy and join the free software movement, it is better for everyone. By exercising your right to freedom, you are making it easier for others to exercise theirs. If you are already using a computer anyway, isn’t it worth some inconvenience?

NOTE: If you are having difficulty getting to a crypto party, but are willing to put in some time and effort to learning the tools for online anonymity that we do have, some of the principles of online privacy and security, and some of the principles of free software, please consider joining the Z School course (7) on the topic, which will begin in April 2015.

First published at TeleSUR English March 2/15: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Online-Privacy-Is-Worth-The-Extra-Work-20150302-0021.html

Notes:

(1) The manifesto is quoted in its entirety in Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide.

(2) See the talk, “Reconstructing Narratives”, here: http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6258_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412282030_-_reconstructing_narratives_-_jacob_-_laura_poitras.html

(3) Free software, or software libre, is software that gives its users the freedoms to view, share, modify, and use the code as they wish, and it is regulated by very carefully constructed licenses, especially the GNU Public License or GPL.

(4) See Scheneir’s blog: https://www.schneier.com/

(5) See the talk, “Freedom in your computer and in the net”: http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6123_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412291130_-_freedom_in_your_computer_and_in_the_net_-_richard_stallman.html#video

(6) In my city, for example, there’s Toronto Crypto: http://torontocrypto.org/. Find out if there’s one in your city.

(7) The course opens in April 2015. Details will be posted on: https://zcomm.org/znet/

My Radical Teacher article – A summer in Islamabad, and a student view

Radical Teacher’s 101st issue is about Teaching Across Borders. In it, you can find my article about my experience teaching in Pakistan in 2008, which I’ve also written about in this blog.

Since then, I saw a new article by Aamna Shafqat, a student at IIU-I, and found the student perspective fascinating. If you want to read a bit about teaching and learning in Pakistan, I’d recommend both!