Joe Biden & Kamala Harris Have Won

President-Elect Joe Biden Jr.
& Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris

This has been a nightmarish year on so many levels, from the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, to the Ahmed Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor murders, as well as many others, at the hands of police and extrajudicial forces, to the current economic crisis (the second major one in less than two decades, yet again under an inept Republican administration) and ballooning wealth and resource inequality, to the devastating effects of climate change (hurricanes and tropical storms, wildfires, etc.), and on and on, but if I can identify one possible ray of light, troubled though it may be, it would be the Joe Biden's and Kamala Harris's historical and groundbreaking defeat of Donald Trump and Mike Pence in the recent presidential election. Four years of malign incompetence, brazen criminality, incoherent domestic and external policies all keyed to and driven by the narcissistically warped vision thankfully met with a major NO MORE from US voters, and now Biden and Harris are the President-Elect and Vice President-Elect of the US, and will, attempted coups by Trump and the GOP notwithstanding, assume office on January 20, 2021.

They defeated Trump despite the Covid-19 pandemic (or, more likely, as a result of his catastrophically horrendous response to it), which meant markedly reduced in person campaigning and canvassing by Democrats; evident and relentless voter suppression across the US; threats of continued Russian interference; Trump's seeming attempts to destroy the United States Post Office by appointing as Postmaster General his supporter Louis DeJoy, who gutted branches all over the US by removing sorting machines and reducing hours; and a steady drumbeat of disinformation, misinformation, and anti-voting rhetoric from the President, his supporters, various other agents of disruption, and at times the legacy media, which amplified--rather than countering--Trump's message of a "rigged election" and "voter fraud." (We very well may look back and find that in fact he was, as usual, projecting about his own attempts to steal the election this year.)

In the end, Biden and Harris received more than 80+ million total votes, the most ever, 7 million more than Trump and Pence's 73+ million, and 306 electoral votes, the exact total Trump received in 2016, when, despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, he labeled his victory a "landslide." The Biden-Harris combo won back three states-Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania--that Barack Obama had won in 2008 and 2012, but which Clinton lost in 2016 by slender margins, while also winning two more, Arizona and Georgia, that a Democratic presidential candidate had not won since Bill Clinton in the 1990s. They make history with Harris becoming the first woman Vice President, first Black woman VP, and the first Asian American VP.  She also is the first graduate of an Historically Black College or University (HBCU) to serve as VP, and the first member of a Black sorority to hold that office as well. She will be the second VP not to be White (Charles Curtis was the first) and the second in an interracial marriage. Biden will be the oldest man elected to the presidency, and the second Roman Catholic president, and a decidedly devout one, after JFK. 

The next President and Vice President
of the United States of America

Ideologically Biden has tended to be a conservative to moderate Democrat, with a problematic legislative history, especially during his Senate tenure, of support for racist, pro-corporate policies, while Harris, at least in the US Senate, is considered one of the most liberal US Senators based on her voting record, though her records while California's and San Francisco's Attorneys General were more mixed, sometimes quite progressive and at other times conservative (pro-police). (I should note that in the Democratic Presidential primary I again voted for Bernie Sanders, but have contributed the campaigns of both Harris and Biden.) Both have expressed support for and voted for neoliberal economic and social policies in the past, and during the primary campaign, neither would consistently commit to programs that progressive and Democratic Socialist branches of the party endorsed, like Medicare for All or Single Payer health insurance, or the comprehensive Green New Deal. That does not mean, however, that they cannot be pushed towards more comprehensive, popular, paradigm-shifting policies, but their political backgrounds, especially Biden's suggest moderate rather than radical changes. But I am going into the next four years with clear eyes, and have set my expectations low. The first tests of this will be how they deal with this pandemic, which has worsened as Trump's malignant time in office winds toward its close.

Whatever they do achieve will depend in significant part on which party controls the US Senate, whose fate hangs in the balance as Georgia's two Senate seats head to runoffs, but also will hinge on the Democrats' ability to retain their control of the House, where their margins for error plummeted as Republicans regained a number of the seats they lost in the 2018 midtarms. How Biden will govern given the challenges, which mount daily, facing the country and his administration, remains to be seen, but if he can take any lessons from Trump's four years, and the eight Biden served as VP under Obama, they might include grasping the nature of the contemporary zombie Republican Party and its overriding goal of nihilistically holding power; the appeal of economically populist policies and politics and the effect of government largess for the 99% (remember 2012?) vs. the abject failure of neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy and libertarianism, especially amidst a pandemic and its aftermath; the importance of transparency, openness and regular communication with the nation; liberal interventionism in foreign policy should be a dead letter from now on; and the absolutely fundamental concept of not forgetting and ignoring your base voters, as Obama frequently seemed to and Trump never did, which, in Biden's case, comprises Black and other BIPOC voters, especially Black women, young people (Gen Z and millennials), seniors, urbanites and many suburbanites, educated middle class voters, and working-class and poor voters, even if and as he works to expand his coalition. 

It is one thing to clean house when it comes to Trump's lawlessness, recklessness and incompetence, but replicating the worst aspects of the Obama years will imperil not only Biden's tenure and doom Democrats but the nation and the globe. I cannot predict how the next four years will turn out, but it will be refreshing to have Trump out of the White House, whatever damage he attempts as a private citizen, and, as when Obama was president, we will have to press Biden and Harris, as FDR said, to do what is needed; in fact, echoing FDR, we will need to make him (them) do it.

The Threats to Wisconsin's University System

Bascom Hall, University of Wisconsin

At the end of March I blogged briefly about acclaimed linguist and sociopolitical critic Noam Chomsky's Jacobin essay, "The Death of American Universities" (whose link somehow became mangled and led to a junk site--my apologies). As part of my preface, I noted that much of what Chomsky argues in this short transcribed talk, delivered in February to members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, would be familiar to anyone working--and paying even passing attention to the changes--in academe today, though the effects are perhaps more evident in public institutions, which are more economically vulnerable because of their reliance on shrinking state and federal support, and smaller institutions lacking the massive endowments of the elite research universities and liberal arts colleges.

Even at the wealthiest institutions, however, a neoliberal ethos has increasingly become preponderant. Nearly all US universities today are increasingly viewed and run as quasi-businesses, with all that that conceptual shift entails. Tuition costs and fees grow ever more exorbitant; students are labeled and treated like consumers; the administrative bureaucracy waxes, paying itself at near corporate levels; fiscal austerity and competition for funding have become the baseline for most aspects of the university except the sports programs and high-end infrastructure renovation; the ranks of contingent faculty swell and tenured positions dwindle; donors are given outsized say (cf. the University of Illinois and the Stephen Salaita case); market-based policies become standard; and a fixation on promoting what elites in society believe will translate into direct benefit for corporations, or what is popular--and preferably what falls at the nexus of the two (computer science? biomedical engineering? financial engineering and sciences?)--gains emphasis at the expense of all else, with concomitant corporate-style jargon, acronyms and programs proliferating like kudzu.

I could give numerous examples of how this has played out at institutions across the country, including my current one, where, as I noted three years ago when I arrived here, the three-university system, and particularly the universities in Newark and Camden, found themselves in a fight for their lives. The story of that particular battle is a complex one, but let me just note that it was student, staff, faculty, administrative, union, and alumni pushback that not only saved the university, but perhaps made those who were seeking yet again to transform it for the worse to step back, at least temporarily, and rethink their actions. We have subsequently been engaged, at our university, on the conceptualization and development of a strategic plan that has been a model of shared consultation and conversation. When I was in Montana this past spring, several professors at that state's university whom I met there, and who were not directly linked to the conference I attended, bemoaned the constantly shrinking budgets and the onslaught of attrition. They spoke with admiration of what had occurred in New Jersey.

Just last week, the  University of North Carolina's Board of Governors' educational planning committee announced the elimination, discontinuation, consolidation, and demotion of whole departments across the entire university system, including one at flagship campus University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a policy the full board later voted up. Over fifty percent of the cuts were slated for four campuses: East Carolina University, UNC-Greensboro, North Carolina State University, and UNC-Charlotte. Among the eliminated programs were African Studies, women's and gender studies, various K-12 educational programs, and so on.  The Board of Governors based their decision, as one put it quite bluntly, on neoliberal principles: "We’re capitalists, and we have to look at what the demand is, and we have to respond to the demand."  This followed the recent move by Tom Fennebresque, NC Board of Governors president, who, along with the rest of his colleagues, had previously ousted UNC's highly regarded president, Tom Ross.

Yet as far as I know, the most extreme assault thus far on public universities and the American university system, which is also an attack on academic freedom, appears to be taking place in Wisconsin, where that state's Republican-dominated legislature's Joint Committee on finance voted this week not only for over $250 million in budget cuts but also to remove guarantees of shared-governance involving faculty and students, and to strike faculty tenure, from state law. The legislation clearly states this:

Tenure: Approve the Governor's recommendation to delete the definition of a "tenure appointment" and language establishing the conditions under which the Board of Regents may grant a tenure appointment to a faculty member. Delete current law specifying that a person who has been granted tenure may be dismissed only for just cause and only after due notice and hearing. In addition, delete the definition of "probationary appointment" and provisions limiting the length of such an appointment to seven years.

That is the chilling language taken directly from "University of Wisconsin: Omnibus Motion," linked above, which Wisconsin State Senator and Majority Caucus Chair Sheila Harsdorf and Representative Michael Schraa introduced for a vote. Both are Republicans.

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the proposed legislation passed the committee on a party-line vote, despite warnings from Democratic legislators that it would harm the university system, widely acknowledged and ranked as one of the nation's best, and it will likely pass both GOP-majority houses of Wisconsin's legislature. After that Republican governor Scott Walker, who had previously gutted public and private sector unions, and survived a recall election, intends to sign the bill into law, whereupon he plans to launch his run for the presidency on the Republican ticket. The tenure-stripping measure was but one of several on which the legislature and Walker, who had initiated a push to restructure the system into a more top-down format, agreed, though there was disagreement on others involving the independence of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tuition increases, and the depth of the cuts.

In response, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the University of Wisconsin's Board of Regents voted unanimously today to temporarily add tenure protections to their board policy should this almost broadly accepted standard will be struck from state law. This appears to be a reaction to the regent's acknowledged inability to convince the legislature to change its mind, though several members of the board have urged the legislature to remove the "non-fiscal," or non-budgetary changes from the law, thus far to no avail. Not only does the stripping of shared governance and tenure endanger academic freedom, but it transforms the future Wisconsin professoriate into an contingent precariate, subject to much easier dismissal, based on political views, statements and actions, under the rubric of elimination and discontinuation of programs, as is occurring in the North Carolina system. Should a new professor like the distinguished historian William Cronon espouse views critical of or contrary to the wishes and beliefs of Wisconsin's leaders (broadly understood), she very well could now be fired. As might any or large numbers of his colleagues.

To put it another way, the professoriate will be subject to the same precarious status as employees at most US businesses, with no guarantee of tenure to ensure stability while pursuing research of any kind, let alone controversial research, whether in the natural sciences (think of the geologists at the University of Oklahoma who have shown a causal link between fracking and earthquakes) or the social sciences (economists studying inequality, say) or the humanities (teaching socially critical works of literature), or engineering (biomedical engineers working with human embryos). But then this destabilization and quasi-privatization is the neoliberal goal, and this silencing of anything that might be viewed as socially or politically controversial is the conservative goal, isn't it?

Though the US Constitution seems to protect prior tenure contracts, the realities of the new law will eventually devastate Wisconsin's faculty, its system, and its educational profile. But then that is the same goal Republicans (and many "school reform" Democrats) have effectively pursued against public elementary and secondary education all over the US, and the effects could be just as far-reaching, since the destruction of the public sphere and commons, with all that they entails, have serious consequences. The people behind such policies act as if because they can neither accept nor transform faculties' independence and liberal tendencies, whether in knowledge, politics or any other sphere, by persuasion, then coercion might work, with dismissal a final step. We have been here before, at various points in history, and the outcome rarely is positive or pleasant. What I hope most people understand is that this is only the beginning, and if voters don't challenge such policies at the polls by publicly denouncing what is happening and voting out legislators advancing agenda like these all over the country, we will rue the day we watched this destruction unfold and sat by, doing nothing, thinking, well, that's just Wisconsin, but in my state....

However, lest we assume there was ever an idyllic or platonic idea of American university life, Chomsky, in the talk to which I linked above, brings us back to earth. As he suggests, great democratization of our universities, with students, staff, faculty, and administration all having a voice in how things are run, is the direction things shifted in the 1960s, to create the examples of shared governance we now think of, at least at many institutions, as the baseline. But let me offer Chomsky's words directly, remind us, as he does, that these ideas come out of Millian classical liberalism, which shows how far contemporary conservatism has moved from its economic and social roots:

First of all, we should put aside any idea that there was once a “golden age.” Things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from perfect. The traditional universities were, for example, extremely hierarchical, with very little democratic participation in decision-making. One part of the activism of the 1960s was to try to democratize the universities, to bring in, say, student representatives to faculty committees, to bring in staff to participate. 

These efforts were carried forward under student initiatives, with some degree of success. Most universities now have some degree of student participation in faculty decisions. And I think those are the kinds of things we should be moving towards: a democratic institution, in which the people involved in the institution, whoever they may be (faculty, students, staff), participate in determining the nature of the institution and how it runs; and the same should go for a factory.

Exactly. 

Occupy: Images Worth 99% of 300 Million's Words

"A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound." - Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, 1862

Tuesday, Police assault on Zuccotti Park


Yesterday, Police attack on peaceful students at the University of California, Davis


UC Campus Police pepper-spraying peaceful students

UC Campus Police Pepper-spraying peaceful students

Today, Newt Gingrich: "Go get a job right after you take a bath."


Why are people protesting? Why can't they "get a job," Newtie?

Jesse LaGreca, on This Week, with Christiane Amanpour


In case they still don't get it, some facts: