Phew.

I just returned the copyedits for MP3: The Meaning of a Format to Duke.  That was a ton of work for my RAs and I.  I have no idea how I would have done it without them, given the intensity of the last month.   Thanks to their help I was able to do some last-minute rewriting and prettifying, and hopefully the text will be nice and shiny going into page proofs.  I also added an epigraph from Lewis Mumford (he’s perfect for all occasions, like a good white wine), which I allowed myself since none of the chapters have epigraphs.

Next up, putting The Sound Studies Reader to bed.  Oh yes, and grading.  And an end-of-term potluck for students.

New Text

“’The Recording that Never Wanted to be Heard’ and Other Stories of Sonification,” coauthored with Mitchell Akiyama, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, eds. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, 544-60. New York: Oxford University Press (2011).

Strike’s Over, Term’s Almost Over, but “it” is not over

I warned you about the quiet time. Just got back from a very nice day at Harvard, mostly in the music department but my talk was at the Mahindra Humanities Center. Met lots of cool people, had great conversations which made me think about stuff. What more can you ask for? Unrelated to any of that, I stayed in the faculty club, where my guest room was covered entirely with wallpaper featuring Victorian era people golfing. The semiosis is almost unbearable. I also visited Occupy Harvard briefly, which was an interesting phenomenon. My favorite part of their FAQ:

Q4. Are you targeting me as one of the 1%?

We are not attacking you as a person, but trying to reform a system that stifles equality of opportunity. Obviously, Harvard students work and have worked hard to get to where they are, but we are asking everyone to reconceptualize a system that leaves 1 percent of the population with a highly disproportionate share of the wealth. For example, the top 1 percent controls twice as great a share of the national income today as it did thirty years ago; we think a system whereby 1 percent of the country controls 40% of the wealth, and all the power that comes with it, is profoundly unjust, and indicative of a system that requires critical rethinking.

I spoke with one of the organizers in the afternoon who said their tack is that the most privileged people are the most responsible. Sounds good to me.

Yesterday the MUNACA staff returned to work. Full details on the settlement are here. I’m very happy for them, and for us too.

The students completed a draft of an alternative inquiry into the events of November 10th. It is very well done. We are waiting for the Jutras investigation to become public and for the administration’s response.

Darin Barney’s Thirteen Theses has been making the rounds.

The governance problems that led to the strike and riot police attacking students remain completely unsolved.

American Thanksgiving–Time to Give Thanks

For the first time ever, we’re not really celebrating US thanksgiving in a formal way. This term has had lots of travel already and we’ve been sprinting nonstop (metaphor!) so didn’t feel like taking the time off right now to go somewhere. We did celebrate Canadian thanksgiving (“it’s slightly different”) so it’s not like we’re rootless cosmopolitans without a holiday, but at the very least it will be weird to know that there is football on in the middle of my workday.

But there are many things I’m thankful for today:

Carrie, my family, my friends, my cat.
My heath (duh), my doctors, socialized medicine.
My students, my colleagues, my teachers, and the many people I know from traveling around the world for my work.
The immense privilege I have to do the job I do.
The comfort in which I live as a result of being paid to do said job.

Of course, all that’s the same as every year (well, health is perhaps more forward in my mind).

Stuff that’s special for this year:

I am thankful to my staff colleagues in MUNACA who are doing the hard (and getting harder) work of being on strike. It is not just about fair wages and working conditions for them. It is also important to remember that since profs share a pension plan with staff, they are fighting for us as well (especially since MAUT has shown itself to be unable or unwilling to advocate for faculty in any meaningful way).

I am thankful for the opportunity to meet all the cool people in MFLAG, to learn about progressive colleagues I didn’t know I had in other departments, and to have a sense that there are so many other interested in seeing real change at this university (not that we always agree on strategy or tactics, or couldn’t be more organized, but it is a group of professors. . . )

I am thankful for all the activists students on campus, who have put themselves on the line, who have paid for it by being subjected to physical violence from riot police or symbolic violence in the form of threats of frivolous discipline from university administrators (which I am shocked to see are continuing), and for all the students who turned out to denounce riot police violence on our campus, and for everyone that is keeping the thing going.

Finally, I am thankful to all those at the university who, when asked to do things to undermine the strike, have not done what they were told, and perhaps especially those in positions of authority who have chosen to do the right thing instead of what they were told to do, or who stayed to the letter of their directives and undermined their spirit.

Thank you!

The Activist Tax

This is a more personal post. And I’m sure I’m like the 100,000th person to make this point in a blog on the internet.

I realize that what I am about to say is nothing compared to what my colleagues in MUNACA are dealing with. They are marching in circles for four hours a day at the rate of $70 per day. That’s brutal and boring and economically crushing. And certainly what I am about to say does not compare to being a peaceful protester and getting pepper-sprayed in the face.

But it is really hard to be a professor and actually stand up for what you think is right. It is like a job on top of a job, except neither job ever stops.

I was speaking with someone yesterday who wondered why more progressive faculty don’t take a stand. Is it that we are bought off with our research grants and well-stocked labs (okay, I don’t have a lab but I take the point)? Perhaps for some. And there are plenty of others who are simply depoliticized or who aren’t comfortable speaking up in public. But one of the biggest disincentives to activism is the added stress and exhaustion it brings in times of crisis. There is an activist tax and every activist pays it.

If you are good at your job as a professor you are a very busy person with a lot of people depending on you. Every day I spend on some matter related to what’s happening on campus and locally is a day when papers don’t get marked (sorry again for the delay on that date assignment, COMS 492!), letters don’t get sent (so I do that instead of taking time off on a Sunday), readers’ reports for other people’s books don’t get written, emails don’t get answered and meetings with people who need to see me don’t get had. I have commitments to travel, presentation and hosting that I made months in advance and can’t simply abandon. Then, there’s my own research. Humanists (or any scholar who is able to work alone) will tell you that the institution always tells you your work comes last, despite the fact that it is the thing most valued. But because of publication deadlines, I don’t have that luxury right now.

All of this is actually wonderful and intense and part of the job. But the activist part of the job never stops either. Every day is a new emergency, a new project, or a new meeting. And so those of us who want to actually do something about the terrible things happening on campus have to move back and forth, and ideally, we should “selfishly” take some time off besides (this is the part I’m not so good at–apathy is good for relaxation).

A few years ago I started using the phrase “every day is a special occasion” to describe the embarrassment of riches (and too many nights out) that comes with too many invited speakers and conferences in too short a time. One could say the same thing about the current state of political emergency in my campus environment.

I have never been so angry at my own university, even when my undergraduate school threatened to cut the department where I was studying.

But this is clearly going to be a long haul, and so like some other crises I’ve faced, the challenge is to find a “new normal,” whether temporary or not. There is a cliché that people who do service well are “rewarded” with more work. We could also talk about an activist tax for faculty and students: those who stand up and do the work are rewarded with more of it and stretched thinner. This is why organizing and organization are important, so that we can depend on one another, but don’t individually have to “pay” as much for the time we put in for the cause.

As for me, I am close to my limit, and will be stepping back for a couple weeks–at least that’s the plan.

A few days late, but another speech from the November 14th rally

This one from my friend Michelle Hartman

–*–

My name is Michelle Hartman, I teach in the Institute of Islamic Studies and I am a member of MFLAG.

The last time I spoke out on an amplified system to you all, at another student organized teach-in, I linked the treatment of the striking workers from MUNACA to systemic problems of sexism and racism at McGill University. And I read a poem. And I am going to read that poem again today when I finish my remarks.

Today we are standing here to deplore and condemn another terrible series of events on our campus, intrinsically linked to these same issues. The intervention of McGill security guards to harass and physically harm student demonstrators and those who occupied the James Building, the escalation of this by the police and the entry of riot police onto our campus to further beat, pepper-spray, and harm students, profs, passersby and others must be roundly condemned by us all and we must–as others have said–stand together to resist this, condemn it and to push back.

This is not a coincidence and this is not isolated. This is not about a few student radicals or some cops who got out of control when faced with a certain “difficult” situation.

This is a logical outcome of what has been building on our campus and a reflection of other struggles across our city, province and the world.

We feel so surprised because it is easy here at McGill to isolate ourselves from the reality of police and state violence that exists in Montreal, particularly at protests, demonstrations and in communities of colour.

But we have seen repression from the beginning of this semester on our campus by the workers from MUNACA who are on strike for fair and just wages and benefits and a proper pay scale. They have been faced with a series of injunctions limiting their ability to picket and express their demands. They have been faced with stalled negotations. They have been mischaracterized and demonized as though they were violent thugs. As has been pointed out this is a workforce that is 80% women, many of whom are heads of households, many of whom are people of colour, they are the most diverse organized body of people on campus. They have been treated with scorn and contempt in a university where research and reports exposing institutional racism have been ignored. They have been followed, video taped and intimidated by the increased security on campus.

This same security has intimidated, threatened and now physically harmed student demonstrators and protesters. The increased security on campus is not protecting students–they shut one of my students foot in a door when she was trying to enter a senate meeting that at least 50 students and about a dozen profs were also prevented from entering by locked doors.
Specific students and profs have been profiled, targeted, brought up on bogus charges for disciplinary hearings–we have been refused entry not only into senate but also to other university buildings.

So it is not a mistake that when students linked their protest against the unfair treatment of workers on campus to the struggles of other students across the province and organized to participate in the massive demonstration last week against tuition rises that we saw the university and city clamp down on them. McGill students came together and worked together with students from Concordia, Université de Montréal and UQAM as well as schools and universities across the province in a massive demonstration.

You all are fighting back together and this is the moment to fight back. Students are linking their struggles to those of other students. We are working to link McGill to the city and beyond and this is exactly what we should be doing. We came together to support MUNACA, we have come together in the past to support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel (BDS).

I am so happy to speak today at such a big gathering of students and others. It is you all who have researched what is going on, made decisions, come together and organized. You have reached out to profs, many of whom have been working with you and more and more are joining. This is the time to come together and work together.

To say no to tuition rises so that education can be accessible to everyone, to support our striking colleagues for fair working conditions, to demand the rights of all of us to freedom of speech and assembly.

Today and right now we must also stand up and say NO to increased security; NO to police on our campuses. We must demand these security forces leave our campus.

Last Thursday night, we saw the response to the threat we posed–and our actions are a threat–to the corporate interests of the university.

This is not just a struggle in the university; this is much larger. We must link our actions to larger struggles.

I want to finish today by saying that conflict is not always bad. Emotion is not bad. Anger is not bad.

I have heard it reported that the principal, Heather Munroe Blum said that it is “too soon” to discuss these events because we are all too emotional right now.

I reject this–our emotions and our anger drive our willingness to engage in this as a conflict can be used for us to come together and get the work that needs to get done, done.

And now I will read the poem:
(And encourage everyone to google June Jordan, particularly her famous poem “Poem about Police Violence”.)

I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies

Dedicated to the Poet Agostinho Neto,
President of The People’s Republic of Angola: 1976

1
I will no longer lightly walk behind
a one of you who fear me:
Be afraid.
I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits
and facial tics
I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore
and this is dedicated in particular
to those who hear my footsteps
or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery
cart
then turn around
see me
and hurry on
away from this impressive terror I must be:
I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon
surrounded by my comrades singing
terrible revenge in merciless
accelerating
rhythms
But
I have watched a blind man studying his face.
I have set the table in the evening and sat down
to eat the news.
Regularly
I have gone to sleep.
There is no one to forgive me.
The dead do not give a damn.
I live like a lover
who drops her dime into the phone
just as the subway shakes into the station
wasting her message
canceling the question of her call:

fulminating or forgetful but late
and always after the fact that could save or
condemn me

I must become the action of my fate.

2
How many of my brothers and my sisters
will they kill
before I teach myself
retaliation?
Shall we pick a number?
South Africa for instance:
do we agree that more than ten thousand
in less than a year but that less than
five thousand slaughtered in more than six
months will
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

I must become a menace to my enemies.

3
And if I
if I ever let you slide
who should be extirpated from my universe
who should be cauterized from earth
completely
(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the
terrorist degree)
then let my body fail my soul
in its bedeviled lecheries

And if I
if I ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.

I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies.

What happens now

Sorry for the quiet here. Overwhelming week between stuff happening on campus and this thing called my job (which included some awesome out of town guests and the American Anthropological Association conference this week into this weekend).

—

I wish I had something more profound than “ugh, this again” to say about police violence spreading to other campuses, but I’ll let others speak about it. Cathy Davidson is calling this a “Gettysburg Address Moment for Higher Education” and I take her point that “students are not the enemies of administrators unless we invite them to be.” But I also think this moment is about more than dialogue between administrators and everyone else.

Last week, the McGill senate broadcast its proceedings, which is notable only because security had kept people out of previous senate meetings even though there were seats for observers and some of those seats were open. But despite all the high minded and collegial talk, there is still conflict. This is why, at minute 19, you can witness the entire back row get up and turn their backs to Dean Jutras of the Law School, who by all accounts is a decent and fair person. But the issue isn’t whether people like Jutras or if he’s fair. It’s what he is and is not empowered to do.

Jutras reports directly to the principal, who has dictated the terms of investigation into the events of November 10th, and who has therefore dictated some very narrow possibilities for its outcome.

This is not meaningful civil dialogue. This is the practice of uncivil governance in the guise of civil dialogue.