School Days Mixtape
It’s only a few more weeks until I go to school. I’ve started burning mix CDs for the road trip to Amherst. For a bit of fun, I’ve compiled some of the better school-themed songs. “Fuck School” by the Replacements. The Mats picked up the speed and dumbed down the jokes on their 1982 e.p. “Stink.” Whereas a song like “Goddamn Job” has a certain pathos, “Fuck School” is impotent, class-dropping anger. “School” by Nirvana. From the heavy metal guitar feedback to the lyrical refrain “No recess!” this is early Nirvana at their most obvious. Eh. Everybody’s gotta start somewhere. “College Man” by Bill Justis. Justis is best known for the instrumental hit, “Raunchy,” the twangy guitar and sax ramble that was pure sex on the airwaves in the 1950’s (Bit of trivia: George Harrison had to prove that he could master this song in order to join the Beatles). […]
Ravenswood
I was very excited to receive in the mail this week all of the books and syllabi for my first courses at the U-Mass Labor Studies program. I’m taking Labor Law, with Harris Freeman, and Labor Research, with Tom Juravich. I decided to start lightly with “Ravenswood: The Steelworkers’ Victory and the Revival of American Labor,” which Juravich co-wrote with Kate Bronfenbrenner, and which is included in the syllabus for the Labor Research course mostly, I assume, to add color to the discussion. Ravenswood was an early 90’s lock-out at an aluminum processing plant of which I had never previously heard. Juravich and Bronfenbrenner argue that this little-remembered labor struggle presaged the revitalization of the labor movement experienced later in the decade, and represented the first time that American unions successfully combined a labor action with a corporate campaign, boycotts and international solidarity; a recipe for what they differentiate from […]
Hear You Been To College?
I’ve been hiding a secret. I applied to grad school. When I graduated from Queens College, I was pretty sure that I was done with school. I felt like the higher up you go in higher education, the less actual education there is and the more image-conscious bullshit there is (Yeah, I’m looking at you, Ward Churchill). Besides you can only “study” the labor movement for so long before you become an armchair academic critic. It’s much more of an education to go to work for a union. Get in there and get your hands dirty. You’ll do some amazing work, but you won’t stay ideologically pure, and you’ll be better off for it. I’ve counseled lots of people to stay away from grad school. Hell, I’ve counseled people to drop out of college if the right gig came along. “Why stay in college? Why go to night school? Gonna […]
Shit In, Shit Out
Harvard President Lawrence Summers is sunk. He’s catching a lot of hell from his faculty and students over some stupid remarks that he made, by way of explaining Harvard’s gender imbalance in the sciences, that suggested that women aren’t as good as men at math and science. The controversy hasn’t let up, and as Summer’s character has been debated in the national press have come repeated complaints of his bullying and autocratic style, and constant reminders of how he chased Cornell West away to Princeton. It’s over for Summers. I’ve seen this movie before. In my Junior year at Queens College, we brought down our president. Allen Lee Sessoms was appointed in 1995. He was Queens College’s first black president, one of the minority administrators appointed by Giuliani and Pataki in order to dismantle the hallmarks of the CUNY system and kick out thousands of minority students. Sessoms wanted to […]