Bill O’Reilly’s penis envy?

The New York Civil Liberties Union has filed court papers challenging the Nassau County Police Department’s refusal to disclose public records concerning allegations that the department launched an internal affairs investigation at the behest of Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly of a detective whom the TV personality believed was romantically involved with his wife.

Click here for more info.

I am so glad that NYCLU lead with TV Personality instead of TV Journalist.

However, these aren’t normal times (the NYCLU has recently filed a lawsuit against the NYPD for its stop-n-harass SWAT tactics of hundreds of thousands of People of Color in NYC annually) and I didn’t get a response and I’m feeling, sniff, a bit sensitive.

So (not personal, just business):

To: louis.mader@hunter.cuny.edu
Tuesday, November 3 10:35:59 EST 2009
Louis Mader
Director
Department of Public Safety
[Hunter College]

Hi,

I am using cameras and videos in and around campus for most of the academic year. And too frequently I’m keep getting stopped and challenged by security guards. So, I’m proposing that I provide your department with a picture of me so that the guards will know.

When I am planning something, and know sufficiently in advanced, I don’t mind alerting the guards before I shoot. But there are occasions when it’s spontaneous like yesterday when two guards challenged me in two different spots. I thought one was good but the other (I’m not
complaining) created a scene.

Best,
Gregg Morris
Assistant Professor
Department of Film and Media Studies

In the future, I will be taking pictures of annoying/harassing campus security and publishing them conspicuously for all to see.

 

April 15, 2009 NYCLU Press Release — The New York Civil Liberties Union today filed a federal lawsuit against the NYPD on behalf of a Queens man who was ejected from the old Yankee Stadium last August after trying to use the restroom during “God Bless America.”

The lawsuit maintains that Bradford Campeau-Laurion, a 30-year-old lifelong baseball fan and resident of Astoria, was the victim of religious and political discrimination on Aug. 26, 2008 when police officers forcibly restrained and ejected him from Yankee Stadium after he tried to walk past an officer during the playing of “God Bless America.”

The Spin: New York Yankees + NYPD + Nature Calls + God = 281 articles, according to Google, as of 6:47 p.m. April 15.

A News Sampling:

NEW YORK (Reuters) — A man ejected from Yankee Stadium during the playing of a patriotic song has sued the baseball team and New York City, saying his civil rights were violated when police barred him from going to the bathroom.

New York Daily News — A baseball fan is suing the NYPD for kicking him out of the old Yankee Stadium last summer because he tried to use the restroom during the playing of “God Bless America,” lawyers said.

Comcast.net Sports — A man ejected from Yankee Stadium during the playing of a patriotic song has sued the baseball team and New York City, saying his civil rights were violated when police barred him from going to the bathroom.

WSJ – Law BLOG — Imagine you’re a Yankee fan. (I know it’s hard, but try.) Imagine you’ve headed to Yankee Stadium after a long work day, eager to enjoy a night with your friends, Derek Jeter and A-Rod, as they take on their nemesis, the Boston Red Sox.

Now imagine downing a tall cup of beer and trying to leave your seat to use the stadium’s bathroom during the 7th-inning stretch, as the sounds of “God Bless America” echo throughout the ballpark.

Unfortunately for you, the Yankees have a policy of restricting spectator movement during the playing of that song, and you run into two NYPD cops on “paid detail” at the game who prevent you from reaching your desired destination. When you try to explain that you are “not concerned” about the song, the cops forcibly remove you from the stadium. (On the upside, you didn’t have to witness the Yankees fail to score any more runs and lose, 7 to 3.)

NEW YORK (AP) — A baseball fan says he was ejected from Yankee Stadium for leaving his seat to use the bathroom while “God Bless America” play

New York Times BLOG: City Room — Updated, 3:50 p.m. | The New York Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday filed a federal lawsuit against the Police Department on behalf of a Queens man who was ejected from the old Yankee Stadium last August after trying to use the bathroom during the playing of “God Bless America.”

Sporting News BLOG – You may be a “Star-Spangled Banner” person, but I’ve always been an “America, the Beautiful” guy, especially if Ray Charles is doing it. It’s easy to sing, you only have to do one full verse to get a decent anthem out of it, and most importantly, you can sing it without having to wonder whether anyone’s giggling at you trying to hit the high notes because there really aren’t any. (Not that Marvin Gaye had any problems with this, but he was Marvin Gaye, and sadly you’re not.)

The anthem still gives me the requisite chills, but I can’t say the same for “God Bless America,” though, mostly because it a) uses the word “foam,” a ridiculous word to have in any song about something important, and b) it started delaying sporting events another two minutes or so after its post-9/11 renaissance as a frequently used song in stadiums, and I have zero patience for anything standing between me and the game.

Outside Governor Paterson's Office on Third Avenue, Manhattan, between 40th and 41st streets, mid town, March 25.

New York Civil Liberties Union, March 25, 2009 — Hundreds of New Yorkers rallied today in front of Governor David Paterson’s Manhattan office, urging him and the State’s legislative leaders to enact a sweeping overhaul of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, the infamous mandatory-minimum drug sentencing scheme.

Speakers – including hip hop mogul and reform advocate Russell Simmons and the Reverend Calvin Butts of Abyssinian Baptist Church – called on lawmakers to seize this historic opportunity to end the unjust and ineffective laws. Butts also is President of the the State University of New York College at Old Westbury,  and Chairman and founder of the Abyssinian Development Corporation, an engine for $500 million in housing and commercial development in Harlem.

Some speakers recalled the arrest several years ago of Paterson in front of his office in protest of the laws.

This is a QUICKIE.

QUICKIES: Images, pictures, video, audio of a news story in the works to be published in the WORD. An earlier story by Frankie Garcia. He is working on an update.

Outside Governor Paterson's Office on Third Avenue where he was arrested several years ago in a protest against the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Some protesters said that they showed up to remind what he did when he was a State Legislator.

 

Lots of news media there. Wonder how this will play on the Evening News?

Deconstructing a Snippet of the Minutes of the December, 2008, Faculty Meeting of the Department of Film and Media Studies

[What Really Goes on Behind Some Walls of the Academy]

Morris stated that he had unresolved issues with faculty. These details were written in his group emails to faculty. Roman responded that he will follow up any complaints 
made by Morris with the Ombudsman. — Shanti Thaku, the minutes of the December, 2008, faculty meeting.

At the meeting I’ve referred to as this first blip on the radar,  I revealed my contact with the New York Civil Liberties Union but didn’t reveal my contact with the National Writers Union, which had responded positively to my request for support.

NWU is very aggressive in supporting its members, and had come to my support in previous conflicts, including one with a county prosecutor in Ithaca, New York, threatening to subpoena me regarding information in my second published book, The Kids Next Door: Sons and Daughters Who Killed Their Parents (William Morrow & Co.) and a later threat of a federal subpoena from a Cleveland court regarding my third published book, Unspeakable Acts: The Ordeal of Thomas Waters-Rimmer (William Morrow & Co.).

The second book got decent reviews and made money; the third did not make money but was listed as one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year 1993.

I would have contacted the Student Press Law Center had I known then that it also repped faculty in First Amendment issues regarding student publications. Interfering with the publication of a student news medium, regardless if operated by faculty or students, is akin to a mortal sin in some circles. SPLC is a very aggressive organization regarding First Amendment rights. I was also in contact with other groups, such as PEN, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the National Association of Black Journalists and a few other Academic Freedom types.

But the NYCLU and NWU seemed poised for action. I also started work on a press conference to be held on the sidewalk in front of the Hunter North Building. But, of course, a lot of the defense stratagem was unnecessary. I’m including all this information as a primer for those who find themselves in similar situations. It helps to know resources. It is absolutely essential to know how to fight for your rights.

From Part III: “But I have to add the following: I asked this before the resolution for obstruction. Quote Marks for Effect: “So, why couldn’t we just talk about this?”

The succinct version of “this”: Shortly after I arrived on campus in 1995, I started requiring my students in my journalism writing classes to submit articles for publication in the Hunter Envoy, which at that time was publishing once or twice a year but because of the surfeit of articles coming from my classes started publishing twice a month. One of the major expectations in the hiring of me and colleague Peter Parisi was to resurrect the Envoy and reinvigorate undergraduate journalism at Hunter. 

That resurrection attracted a lot of attention from student activists who eventually took over the publication and turned into into a despicable rag and also attention from colleagues in my department who tacitly supported the student activists and who alsowere just bent on a power play to disrupt what I had been trying to do.

The internecine brawl that had been brewing before the big department meeting over my publishing the WORD sprawled exponentially in ways that I hadn’t anticipated after that meeting: I filed complaints and there were several episodes of physical altercations and threats and foot chases and more violence, the real and the virtual. The Student Liberation Action Movement was in a state of decline and took a licking, especially when my students started publishing articles exposing its sleaze.

But the first big blip also gave me more clarity regarding the nature of my colleagues and the  and mission of the department. One interesting feature has been how this conflict has been portrayed here at Hunter/CUNY. Which brings me back to the deconstruction of Shanti Thakur’s three sentences.

In spring 2008, I asked two old-timers, Bob Stanley and Joel Zucker, about their opinions of what I was told about the administration’s concern, and they insisted that the administration’s concern was unrealistic, that there had been conflicts in the past far more serious before I arrived and that the department had never suffer harm. Zucker, F/M’s film advisor, and Stanley, a former department chair, are members of the Policy and Budget Committee.

They were blowing smoke. Of course.

So I sent the email in December, 2008, so that I could evaluate whether a discussion was possible under the meeting agenda’s “New Business.”* Everyone in the department was copied the email. This was stated clearly: That I wanted to know if others believed that the image of the department could be harmed by this ongoing conflict.

Also in that email, which included an attachment because what I wrote was more than 1000 words, I described episodes that were examples fueling this adversarial relationship with colleagues: One, a crudely defamatory and incredibly insidious effort on the part of four colleagues (three who made up the departments grade appeals committee) to help a student who had flunked my advanced reporting class to get credit that she didn’t deserve. In their decision, which was unanimously reversed on appeal by the Hunter Senate Grade Appeals Committee, I was accused of harassing her because I had flunked her and they intimated that I be investigated.

I kid you not.

One of the signers of the decision hadn’t even met with the student as required though the decision clearly inferred that he had. He simply allowed his name to be added to the decision written, of course, by colleague Larry Shore, then chair of the F/M grade appeals committee.

And the other episode involved an effort by two colleagues to give a student who was their buddy – that’s the best way I can describe the relationship – a grade that he didn’t deserve. Succinctly: I filed complaints exposing what I consider egregious behavior and I prevailed but the results, of course, fueled more animosity. Some colleagues are like the energizer bunny when it comes to cheap shots and insults and slights.  They absolutely will not stop.

Or like the BORG.

Or the Terminator.

I kid you not.

End of Part IV

 

 

postscript

Deconstructing a Snippet of the Minutes of the December, 2008, Faculty Meeting of the Department of Film and Media Studies

[What Really Goes on Behind Some Walls of the Academy]

Morris stated that he had unresolved issues with faculty. These details were written in his group emails to faculty. Roman responded that he will follow up any complaints 
made by Morris with the Ombudsman. — Shanti Thaku, the minutes of the December, 2008, faculty meeting.

Now, colleague Larry Shore, former chair of the department’s grade appeals committee which I had been describing in several venues “as one of the most corrupt” at Hunter if not CUNY, candidly responded to the question, “Recommend For New Business, Wednesday, Grade Tampering in F/M – A Big Barnacle: Is a Discussion Needed?” His comments, however, never made it into the department minutes.

Thaku only wrote that the chair had made a response without clarifying that his words had nothing to do with the big question. Maybe she believed that obstructing the context and excluding the responses of the three other colleagues, neither mentioned nor identified in the minutes, would protect them and the department from embarrassment. Maybe someone told her that including the other comments was politically unwise. Or maybe she was indulging in F/M’s formula for political correctness. The latest recruit for obstruct, obstruct, obstruct? Too many maybes, I will admit.

I was annoyed when I learned of the faux record/account, my discovery occurring after I and other colleagues had voted to approve the minutes at the beginning of the first department meeting this semester. I voted without scrutinizing every line of the multipage document. Whether deliberately or not, the three sentences had been rendered like the fine print we are regularly reminded to read. So, there, again, I was approving an obstruction, though this time it wasn’t intended: I had missed the subterfuge.

Nevertheless I contacted Acting Chair Mick Hurbis-Cherrier: 2/11/09 5:38 PM:

> Hi,
>
> I just read through the third page of the December 10 minutes and realized
> that I somehow overlooked a passage with my name in it near the bottom.
> I want to amend my “approved” vote to “opposed.” Do I do this via email?
> With a motion at the next department meeting? How?
>
> I’m not asking that the statement be removed or clarified or cleaned up,
> whatever. I just want the record to reflect, amended, I voted no. I will
> make sure in the future that I thoroughly read the minutes.

And he responded Sat 14 Feb 18:26:29:

“Votes are tough because the procedures for relatively minor votes (approving minutes) are the same as those for significant votes (Dept. Chair). I think that in this case the proper protocol would be for you to indicate at the next faculty meeting your desire to be on the record as having changed your mind about the vote cast at the February meeting to approve the minutes of the December meeting. This change of heart will be recorded in the minutes of the March meeting.”

But I eventually realized that the sentences, in context, provide insight into the Department of Film and Media Studies. Thus, the deconstruction. Instead of the 800-pound gorilla in F/M, imagine a Mt. Vesuvius spewing fumes of unadulterated sordidness. Exaggerated? I think not. F/M seems to be always trying to sweep under a rug the consequences of its wackiness and scandals which have been massing for years and there seems to be no end to colleagues ready to join in. Like The 4 Barnacles of the Apocalypse.

More than a year ago, I was told by a member of the central administration that the College wanted to pump funds into the Department of Film and Media Studies so that it could become a showcase for film, media studies and journalism, but there was concern that the ongoing conflict could seriously impact those plans. This conflict first blipped on the radar, so to speak, several years ago at a department meeting. A former department chair and those I regard as his minion wanted to take control of the WORD. Serious First Amendment and Academic Freedom principles had to be breeched in order for the seizure to take place.

Now, there are colleagues in F/M who have been embossing their public personas with solemn assertions about Academic Freedom and Collegiality and professor empowerment and union solidarity and other caparisons. And guess who was leading the charge with the help of a goon squad of the ersatz and thankfully deceased Student Liberation Action Movement?

I know that some will be upset about the use of “goon squad” but for many years SLAM members (many of them not students) palavered and swaggered like goons, so that, well, the description is more than apropos. SLAM may have started nobly as a honest to goodness uprising of concerned student activists but it eventually mutated into an honest to goodness vile and loathing undergraduate student government engaged in all forms of odious behavior and was known to dispatch whacked members to attack students or instructors or anyone that the student-funded organization perceived as a threat. Or, easy prey.

Preferably easy prey because a lot of them huffed and puffed but were quick with a hasty retreat from targets wrongly targeted as easy prey and were ready to fight back. And there were colleagues more than willing to support them.

About three days before the department meeting that would blip on the radar, I chased out of my office a colleague who had been embossing her public persona as an empress of faculty empowerment and camaraderie (via the Professional Staff Congress, the union representing faculty and most staff at the University). She had walked into my office and stated that “we’re going to tell you” what I could and couldn’t publish in the WORD.

I was suppose to be intimidated. I was suppose to feel bad. I was suppose to keel over, prostrate on the floor, wailing my head off for mercy. Anyway, she fled my office shouting unintelligibles, fleeing as if she thought I was planning to smite her when I rose from my office chair. Another colleague came to my office as part of a ploy to soften me up for the pummeling being planned for the department meeting. Quote Marks for Effect: ”I am your friend and you are accused of abusing your power as a professor.”

Here is the succinct description: I had written a really witty op ed rejoinder about a very vulgar SLAM-er (this guy could spew four-letter expletives faster than I could form the words in my mind) who had attacked me in an editorial in the student newspaper the Envoy, left a vulgar screed on my office door and had provoked a confrontation that caused me to chase him out of the Hunter North building. He was known for his cursing binges, and I had described him as the campus’ village idiot and announced an award in his name. He complained and, according to the second colleague visiting my office, in so many words, I was to be brought up on charges of abusing my power as a professor.

At the department meeting, after what seemed 30 minutes of me refuting incredibly obtuse and bovine arguments by colleagues intent on the takeover of the WORD, so to speak, or intent on showing their support for colleagues intent on the takeover, and my pointing out, which was ignored, that there were serious Academic Freedom issues (I didn’t have the presence of mind to bring up the obvious First Amendment issues, I was arguing with sooooo many colleagues), I announced that the New York Civil Liberties Union was interested in my case and that I was ready to go to court.

I recall the former chair’s reaction. Some of his minion were still trying to argue (they probably believed I was bluffing or were too ignorant of the ace I had just pulled from my sleeve), and he looked as if he had been bushwhacked but his response was as sober as one could imagine of a leader of a major misadventure.

[I hadn’t wanted a confrontation with him or the department at this point but no one, and I mean no one, was going to trample on my rights without a fight.]

As he was strongly signaling that he was no longer interested in the fight, a colleague, a member of the Policy and Budget Committee,  motioned to table the matter, providing a face saving solution. And it was unanimously passed, in essence, that the matter would never be brought up again (as I was told after the meeting but didn’t believe the source of the comment). And there also was unanimous agreement that the details of that meeting, including the comment by a whacked colleague that I was in the gutter, were not to be included or reflected in the minutes of the meeting because of the embarrassment it might cause the department and, of course, the whacked colleague.

And also included in the spirit  of that resolution was that the specifics and details of future brawls not be reflected in the minutes – for the same reasoning. That is, the image of the department was to be protected. And there I was, participating in another major obfuscation. I concurred; I thought the big fight was over. Nevertheless, I secured the original notes of the then department stenographer, Christine Noschese.

I have to add the following: After the resolution for obstruction was passed, I asked the following question. Quote Marks for Effect: “So, why couldn’t we have just talked about this?”

But, of course, no one responded.

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End of Part III

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Postscript

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Okay, I admit that this is tongue in cheek because I know everyone reads the Times and don’t need me to post a notice that would infer that they are not up on all the news fit to print. But based on my many talks and consultations about Academic Freedom and First Amendment rights with reps from the Professional Staff Congress, the AAUP, the New York Civil Liberties Union, PEN, Committee to Protect Journalists, National Writers Union, which has supported me through two subpeonas and a job action, and others (there are always others), I can understand colleagues’ confusion.

I had originally planned to post this information on the Hunter College Listserv, Hunter-L, but paused because I wanted to see if any colleagues in or out of my Department of Film and Media studies would start the thread.  AF is a big topic at Hunter, a big topic inspired especially by one of my colleagues, Stuart Ewen, a former department chair. However, after waiting and waiting and with nothing happening, I decided to publish here. 

So, I’m suggesting Fish’s column as a contribution to the ongoing discussion and sometimes slugfest because too many colleagues, I believe, in and out of my department, regard Academic Freedom as a special gratuity for the brahman in an Academic caste system. In my effort to help colleagues, and myself too, of course, I’m also reviewing, Challenging Racism in Higher Education: Promoting Justice – by Mark Chesler; Faculty of Color: Teaching in Predominantly White Colleges and Universities by Christin A. Stanley; and Faculty Incivility: The Rise of the Academic Bully Culture and What to Do About It by Darla J. Twale.

And, yes, I believe Academic Freedom slugfests involve the kind of flaws that degrade students’ learning opportunities. That I know from first-hand experience.

 

The 4 Barnacles of the Apocalypse? The the nom de plume for four colleagues accused of violating tenets and canons of Academic Freedom and Academic Collegiality. Many instructors log anecdotes about students who didn’t want to study and didn’t want to come to class but wanted A’s, nevertheless. Well, the 4 Barnacles are the colleagues who encouraged that kind of lethargy.

Senior Editor-Producer Jonathan Mena’s CNN iReport on the November 23 New York Youth Rally at City Hall, Demanding Hearings and Passage of Student Safety Act.

Also, info at the WORD.

I’m in St. Petersburg, Florida, right now for a workshop of several days at the Poynter Institute, having left yesterday as CNN was contacting Jonathan Mena & Jacqueline Fernandez about their reporting on the protest at the gates of Hofstra University, Long Island, the site of the last presidential debate. Fernandez got roughed up as did several protesters. The New York Civil Liberties Union has issued a statement along with the Nassau County Civil Liberties Union demanding an investigation of the use of horses by the NCPD. CNN eventually published M&F’s broadcast on its iReports.

Mena said that CNN might interview them later. Mena, Fernandez and Kisha Allison – the WORD trio at the Democratic National Convention – have been on a roll unlike any Hunter journalism students in recent memory. And what they do is infectious. I can’t wait to see what other student journalists are or will be doing.

Sometime tonight, after this first workshop, I plan to start catching up.