Censored Yet Again!

Dear Kevin Moist , Associate Professor of Communications at Penn State Altoona, Sherman Dorn , Professor at University of South Florida, Bill Reader , E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, Earl Nicodemus , Associate Professor of Education:

First I commend the four of you for actually using your real names and mentioning where you “work.” Thirty-five others, likely mostly professors, regarding the Inside Higher Ed article, “Tenured Case Hinges on Collegiality” (www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/22/tenure) commented, as you likely noted, anonymously. As for Pamela Morris and Laura Winton, I could not locate their email addresses. They did not mention where they “work.” Is not such widespread anonymity a clear reflection of the fascistic tendencies of our purported institutions of higher learning?

In any case, this email seeks to inform you that Inside Higher Ed regularly censors my comments, though I never make threats and almost never use four-letter words. And I am not the only one being regularly censored. Several others have contacted me with that regard. The question remains: Should a newspaper devoted to higher education in America be into the censorship business? My censored comment regarding the article mentioned above is posted on my blog site [see below]: wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2010/01/censored-yet-again.html.

Perhaps you might—and that would indeed be astonishing—write Editor Doug Lederman (doug.lederman@insidehighered.com) to express your support for democracy and against censorship. In some aberrant manner, Lederman seems to think it amusing that censorship OUTRAGES ME. For a cartoon sketch I created on him as well as a short denunciation of Inside Higher Ed, see www.theamericandissident.org/InsideHigherEd.htm.

Will Lederman now censor all of my comments and, once and for all, render me persona non grata? That possibility in itself ties into the “collegiality” bullshit governing academe. Thank you for your attention.

Sincerely,

G. Tod Slone, PhD and Founding Editor (since 1998)
The American Dissident, a Journal of Literature, Democracy & Dissidence
A 501 c3 Nonprofit Providing a Forum for Vigorous Debate, Cornerstone of Democracy
todslone@yahoo.com
www.theamericandissident.org
1837 Main St.
Concord, MA 01742

Notes from a Gruff, Censored Professor
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some kind of central organization where professors of derailed careers, thanks to academic corruption (uh, “politics”), might actually be able to contact one another? Who knows how many of us out there exist? Where are the statistics? In Massachusetts, they’re buried in backrooms unavailable to public scrutiny, thanks to the powerful Massachusetts Teachers Association.
Rather than accept “teaching evaluations” as somehow objective, we should be focusing in on their perhaps often inherent corruption. If you’re liked, the evaluations will be good. If you’re not liked they’ll be bad. The logic is there and will remain as long as “good teaching” remains subjective.
What kind of professor does Ohio want around, obedient, group-thinking herd conformists? Likely. Because that’s the kind of professors other universities and colleges seek. Collegiality is the prime hiring concern, so why shouldn’t it be the prime tenure concern also? How many ads have I seen emphasizing collegiality and fit into the department? 100s and 100s and 100s. How many have I seen for courageous truth teller, daring to actually go against the department grain? Not one.
Inside Higher Ed should not be in the business of censorship (it’s censored at least 7 of my comments, including one made last week), nor should it be in the business of encouraging anonymity amongst grown-up professors. Nearly every comment on this article was made anonymously. Question: What is wrong with academics? Answer: They lack courage and conviction and dignity. How can one trust comments made anonymously? “A driven professor whose generosity is coupled with a sometimes strident demeanor,” note the cowards. Well, what do they possess, sheepish demeanors? And why should Ohio prefer the sheepish demeanor to the strident demeanor; after all, democracy demands the latter, not the former.
“He’s frequently the first to speak up,” note the cowards. Oh, my! How terrible! Am I dreaming here? No, I know higher ed much too well. Let those three female anonymities buck up and build some spine! Feeling threatened is by no means a reason to file a harassment complaint. If the professor in question has no criminal record, they should not feel threatened. Once upon a time, I was evicted from my public college office and building where I was teaching my courses mid-semester because one female professor had complained to the dean that she felt threatened. It disgusts me to this day that such things occur at public institutions in America.
In the public sphere, perceived “bully” and “excessively hostile and belittling” do not negate free speech and citizen rights equal treatment. College professors tend to be notoriously ignorant of the First Amendment. Those three anonymities need to educate themselves and learn to understand that democracy cannot thrive if the citizenry has no spine. Rather than whimper, let them take karate lessons or buy guns! As for the thought that the professor in question might be “mentally ill,” should we be at all surprised? “Anger” is not a sin! Nor is “happy”! Ohio sounds like a true “academic snake pit,” in the words of Nat Hentoff. How does fit in and like minded in a faculty possibly serve students?
Nelson’s comment on “gruff professor” is sadly laughable. Surely, anybody daring to criticize ones colleagues and institution will be perceived as “gruff professor.” Clearing out all “gruff professors” will clear out all criticism and make way for further deepening of corruption. Academe has truly become a frightful institution.
Thanks, “NUTS” for the comment on the disabilities act. It made me LOL… just what I needed.

Review of a Review of Worst Instincts

Where the hell is the ACLU?
—Lenny Bruce

It is astonishing that the founding director (Marjorie Heins) of an organization named Free Expression Policy Project would so quickly truncate dialogue with someone like me who does not agree or dares actually criticize what shouldn’t be criticized! In Heins' review of Wendy Kaminer's Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity, and the ACLU (see www.fepproject.org/reviews/kaminer.html), the founding director notes that she was working in the ACLU in Massachusetts at the same time when I attempted to interest the ACLU in my case against Fitchburg State College also in Massachusetts. The ACLU essentially ignored my request for help. Was Heins perhaps friends with Vinny Mara, Franz Nowotny, Richard DeCesare, Harry Semerjian, or Shirley Wagner, dubious administrators at that college? Well, probably not, but anything in Massachusetts like that is certainly possible. The myth of the ACLU exists. "Well, there's always the ACLU," I've been told, now and then. BUT there wasn't the ACLU for me when I needed it.

The established-order mentality always demands the “right tone” or simply truncates discussion. The problem of course is that “right tone” often means readjusting (watering down) the message to the extent where it is no longer the original message which I, of course, refuse to do. Sure, I am a CITIZEN UNKNOWN, but if I were known, left or right, Heins would have likely engaged. Anyhow, I shall continue to communicate with the non-responding Heins, until she places my email address into her spam box, as every English professor at Williams College recently did because I’d sent them a criticism of one of their dear former colleagues, poet laureate Louise Gluck. Yes, vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy, but certainly not at our college, nor at our free expression projects! Heins was likely annoyed for two simple reasons: 1. the poem I’d sent her (see below) and 2. the cartoon figuring on the front page of The American Dissident website satirical of PEN New England (see www.theamericandissident.org).

Regarding Heins’ review of Worst Instincts, it is repugnant to think that “fund-raising” has become elevated to the category of “considerable talent,” as Heins thus deems it. Is it now also one of the fine arts? Certainly that “talent” has become a key problem of many universities and colleges today, which tend to select presidents who are expert fundraisers, while far too often advocates of censorship and speech codes. Evidently, the ACLU’s executive director Romero falls into that dubious category. Clearly, one must wonder just how principled and “dedicated” some of the ACLU board members really were if in fact they placed fear of ostracism above principle. Perhaps they entered the organization because of the prestige they’d get from being part of it and the money they’d eventually get elsewhere for that enhanced prestige. (Are not far too many lawyers like doctors and politicians driven to own mansions?) Heins, however, doesn’t quite put it that way: “Her opening chapter insightfully reflects on the herd instinct and the pressures for conformity that sometimes prevent even dedicated individuals like those who comprise the ACLU’s national board from standing up for principle when faced with the risk of ostracism from the group.”

Indeed, Heins seems to excuse corrupt minds (as long as on the left) by citing “the frailties of human nature.” Why shouldn’t author Kaminer have been “uncompromising in her expectations,” especially regarding persons involved in organizations like the highly acclaimed ACLU? Heins seems to excuse Romero’s shortcomings by stating his predecessor also had shortcomings. Should we excuse Obama’s shortcomings because Bush too had them? Truly that kind of reasoning seems twisted in an effort to excuse the corrupt in Heins’ very own milieu. It is indeed shameful how Heins cites herd mentality as an excuse: “Perhaps it is in the nature of executive directors to attract ‘yes men’ and women who will confound loyalty to the boss with loyalty to the organization, and will sometimes put both above loyalty to core principles.” Yet I have seen that kind of perverted reasoning used, time and again, to excuse the corrupt professors and administrators entrenched in institutions of supposed higher education!

Heins states: “Kaminer raises profound and difficult questions about organizational integrity, politics, and personal loyalty.” YET we’re not talking about any old business or for that matter academic organization here. We’re talking about the ACLU, an organization that many regard as the top of the top of integrity! Thanks to Kaminer, we now know that to be a myth.

The following questions raised by Heins are excellent ones that should each be answered with a capital YES, but Heins does not do so: “Were the compromises with civil liberties principles and basic honesty as dire as Kaminer and Meyers thought? On balance, was it worthwhile to ‘go public,’ at whatever cost to the organization’s image or fundraising? Were they right to conclude that the ACLU had been so hopelessly corrupted that only an open airing of their concerns would save it?”

Instead, in good bourgeois fashion, Heins questions Kaminer’s TONE. “[…] the reaction of some ACLU people to Kaminer’s and Meyer’s muckraking was, in her telling, gratuitously insulting […].” Of course, they were insulted! Truth is always extremely INSULTING to the fraudulent. Let them be insulted! Maybe it will do some good, though I highly doubt it.

Oddly, Heins doesn’t see it that way. Yet, if not for the “muckraking,” board members wouldn’t have been forced to show their true disgraceful colors: “[…] and at least one institutional response contributed mightily to the public embarrassment. A proposal to limit board members’ communications with the media, as detailed by the New York Times in the spring of 2006 was one of the politically dumber proposals to be considered by a group whose primary cause is freedom of speech.”

At least Heins does agree that ACLU members should heed Kaminer’s criticism, as opposed to engaging in facile “ad hominem attacks, as they sometimes did during the course of the battles she recounts.” It is still mind-boggling to me that so many so-called educated people actually do resort to ad hominem attacks. Worst Instincts is indeed an excellent, if not unique, account of left-wing corruption written by someone on the left. Far too often the left proves entirely incapable of dealing with criticism and reacts to it with ad hominem rhetoric, silence, or denial, as in a vast right-wing conspiracy for the angelic Clintons. Think also of ACORN. What the left needs are many more soldiers like Kaminer, standing first and foremost for truth, not for the liberal party line and precious career. They would only serve to strengthen the left… by helping to get rid of its stifling, viscous, putrid muck.


An Unknown Citizen’s Futile Efforts

The American Civil Liberties Union
responded, but then
SILENCE
The American Association of University
Professors never responded,
SILENCE
PEN America responded, then
SILENCE
PEN New England never responded,
“defending freedom of expression
everywhere,” except, of course, here,
SILENCE
The American Library Association’s
Office of Intellectual Freedom
never responded,
SILENCE
The Free Expression Policy Project
responded, but then
SILENCE
The National Coalition Against Censorship
responded, but then
SILENCE
Foundation of Individual Rights in Education*
responded, but then
SILENCE
…………………………………………….
*At first, this poem did not include FIRE because I really love FIRE. Thus, I found myself self-censoring. So, I finally decided to add FIRE. After all, why can’t I criticize FIRE and still be its friend?

Local Journalists as Paladins of the Chamber of Commerce

"The wall of sep­aration between American news and the business interests is being systemati­cally dismantled at institutional levels of journalism. The practice of selecting news in order to make advertising more effective is becoming so common that it has achieved the status of scientific precision and publishing wisdom."
—Ben Bagdikian, former dean of the School of Journalism at the University of California in Berkeley
One must wonder how journalism got so corrupted in America today—so fixated on famous airhead personalities and diversionary fait divers. Mass Communications programs in the nation’s universities and colleges likely play an important role. After all, what can one expect from Mass Comm professors who don’t even have the courage to report corruption in their own respective institutions? Spinelessness seems to have become a defining trait of the professorial herd. I’ve witnessed it over and again. If not courageous truth seeking and truth telling, therefore, what might professors be instilling in their journalism students, many of whom end up at the helm of local community newspapers? For one thing, journalism students seem to have been learning that bending over backwards in order to avoid offending the thin skinned is far more important than truth telling. Democracy, however, demands citizens with tough skin.

Over the past couple of decades, on a number of occasions, in vain, I brought First Amendment issues to the attention of local journalists. Their response has more often than not been simple indifference and silence. Nearly 15 years ago, for example, I was evicted from my office without due process at Fitchburg State College, a public institution. Eventually, the college paid me a settlement. However, neither local nor the student newspapers would publish a story about the incident. For the college, it was as if it hadn’t happen. Just the same, I founded The American Dissident as direct result of the intrinsic corruption witnessed first hand at Fitchburg State College.

A decade ago, I was accosted by police on three different occasions over the period of a year at Walden Pond State Reservation, each relative to the exercise of free-speech rights on public property (for details, examine www.theamericandissident.org/WaldenPondStateReservation.htm). Not one newspaper contacted proved interested in the stories. On one of those occasions the police incarcerated me for a day. The judge, of course, threw that case out three months later.

More recently, I brought to the deaf ears of local journalists anomalies also pertinent to the First Amendment regarding the Concord Cultural Council and Watertown Free Public Library. As for the latter, it issued a no-trespass order (see previous blog), though no crimes had been committed, that is, with the exception of lack of display of deference and curtsy. Although I informed the local editor of the Watertown Tab & Press that the librarian had lied in the text of the order stating I’d made threats and had caused a general disturbance, he was not sufficiently interested to investigate. But where and who were the witnesses and what threats had been made? Also, no hearing whatsoever was offered by the library for me to attempt to defend myself. My right to exercise free speech at that public library had simply been terminated on the whim and prevarication of an uptight reference librarian. But the journalist was not at all interested in investigating the breach of a citizen’s right to free speech in a public space. Why not? Didn’t attacks on citizen rights constitute a good enough subject for journalists nowadays? Well, he did publish a brief letter to the editor of mine, though corrupted its title to “Man, forbidden to enter the Watertown Free Public library, has his say.” Yes, I had my say, but I didn’t have my hearing!

As for the Concord Cultural Council, it decided this year to disregard any project proposals that might be of a “political nature,” a policy likely provoked by my overt questioning and challenging of the Council over the past several years. But what is “political nature”? It remains conveniently undefined, of course. My proposal was rejected this year for that reason. Why, a thinking citizen ought to wonder, didn’t the Council enact instead a policy to disregard projects of an “entertainment nature”? After all, entertainment is generally a superfluous form of culture, one that when too pervasive can indeed be detrimental to the health of democracy for it diverts citizen attention away from important issues, including war and corrupt politicians and other local leaders. Political engagement is, however, necessary for democracy’s very survival. Nothing at all in the minutes of the Council, which I examined, indicated that a discussion on the issue had even been engaged. I brought the matter to the deaf ears of The Concord Journal.

Finally, a thinking citizen, would have to wonder why there has not been a continued journalistic effort at revealing the extent of the damage effected by the millions of dollars used by the American Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s number one lobby in Washington, to purchase politicians in a very successful effort to stifle business regulation, which ended up wreaking havoc on the nation’s financial system and in the lives of everyday citizens regarding their retirement accounts.

Below are two letters I wrote this past week. Chris Helms (Watertown Tab & Press) did not respond to my questions, though did permit me to post a very short account of the event in question. Patrick Ball (The Concord Journal) has yet to respond, though it’s been about three weeks now.

Chris Helms: Please do let me know if you decide to run that letter of mine. Actually, I was really hoping, however, you'd investigate and write a story on the incident. After all, the First Amendment is clearly in question. My right to exercise free speech has been denied in a public space. As a journalist, why don't you care about that?

Were there witnesses besides the two librarians? If in fact I upset patrons, did any patrons complain? Why is there no recourse to contest the no-trespass order? Why doesn't Leone Cole respond to my emails with that regard? Why is she uninterested in my side of the event? Why did Francoeur lie? Why did she say I made threats and upset patrons, when nothing of the kind occurred?
Sincerely,
G. Tod Slone

Patrick Ball: No response at all from you regarding my cultural-council complaint! Perhaps you ought to investigate. I’ve been investigating. The issues are clear. This year the Council enacted a new provision for excluding culture: “political nature.” Why? Or why didn’t it enact a new provision excluding culture of an “entertainment nature”? Why has it been according grants year after year to the very same organizations? Why does it reject my requests year after year? Well, at least now we know why: “political nature.” Why are the Council’s minutes devoid of debate on that issue? I examined them yesterday in Town Hall. Why should politicians (selectmen) select Council members… in order to exclude those like me who challenge politicians and their masters, the business leaders of the Chamber of Commerce?

Here’s another interesting story you could do. It would be a fascinating one: “Local Journalists, Paladins of the Local Chamber of Commerce?” Think about that!

Sincerely,
G. Tod Slone