Ruminations on Simon's Rock

posted to www.marxmail.org on May 12, 2004

Simon's Rock College is a subsidiary of Bard College, my alma mater. Both institutions carefully cultivate an image of political progressiveness and cultural daring. But beneath this veneer, there is more than a bit of rot. While I have been posting about Leon Botstein (the President of Bard) and his various faculty members' dubious interventions into hotly contested topics such as anti-Semitism on the American campus and "human rights" wars in the Balkans and elsewhere, there are a couple of items that have come to my attention lately that prompt me to say a few words about Simon's Rock.

Simon's Rock is a four year school that incorporates the final two years of high school and the first two years of college. Simon's Rock shares Bard's idyllic surroundings (the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley respectively) and a hothouse bohemian environment that is difficult for some students to adjust to.

This was clearly the case for Wayne Lo, the son of a Chinese restaurant owner from Montana who cracked up in 1992. With an assault rifle purchased at a local store, Lo went on a rampage on Dec. 14 that year. When he was done, a security guard and several students lie wounded, while a professor and an 18-year-old student named Galen Gibson were dead.

Recently I finished reading "Gone Boy: a walkabout" by Gregory Gibson, (Galen's father) on the advice of Marxmail and PEN-L subscriber Ahmet Tonak, who has been teaching economics at Simon's Rock for a number of years. He knew that with my frequent public critiques of Leon Botstein, I would find the chapter describing Gibson's meeting with Botstein a real eye-opener. Since Gibson turned out to be such an astute commentator on Leon's Pecksniffian pretensions, I decided to read the entire book and would strongly recommend it now as a kind of elevated version of Michael Moore's "Bowling for Colombine".

Like Moore, Gibson interviews a myriad of people who had some connection to his son's murder, from the disgusting administration officials at Simon's Rock who were doing everything they could to minimize PR and legal damage to the school (they will remind you of the spinmeisters on torture in Iraq) to the dead youth's classmates and his murderer's parents. Throughout it all, Gregory Gibson is a captivating figure, haunted by his son's death and the irrationality of gun ownership in the USA. The main brunt of his anger is directed against Simon's Rock which failed to take action against Wayne Lo when bullets sent to him were first discovered in the mailroom and before anybody was shot. Although they gave the excuse that he had a right to privacy, it would appear that ineptitude was the main problem. Throughout his conversation with Botstein and Simon's Rock Dean Bernie Rodgers, Gibson is struck by the school's unwillingness to be accountable for its neglect.

Throughout the book, Gibson--a used book dealer--proves himself as a skilled writer. If fiction has become more and more the venue of banal postmodernist observations, the hungry reader will inevitably turn to works such as these that turn personal experiences into art. Visit http://www.goneboy.com/ for information and reviews.

Over the years I have called attention to Bard's anti-labor practices on the Internet. Back in the early 1990s, I ran into a labor organizer from Smith and Wollensky on PEN-L, whose waiters were being stonewalled by the Levy brothers that owned the restaurant. These are the same Levys who set up the think-tank at Bard that people such as Anwar Shaikh (Ahmet's erstwhile writing partner) and James Galbraith have connections to. When the labor organizer asked if anybody had an alumnus directory from Bard that could be used for a mass mailing, I happily supplied him with one. I was even happier to get an angry letter from Bard about the misuse of school assets.

To his credit, Ahmet is even more of a gadfly than me. Over the past year or so, he has been on the frontlines defending construction workers at Simon's Rock who are getting the short end of the stick from the administration. Here's an excerpt from an indymedia article about the struggle:

"Students at Simon's Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Have erected tents outside of Dean Bernard Rodgers’ Window in response to the college’s inaction over a labor dispute over workers who were not paid by a subcontractor who was working on the new Daniels Arts Center that is scheduled to open this May...Ahmet Tonak, a professor of Economics at the College, found out about unfair treatment of a framing crew at the construction site of the new DAC in May 2003, from local union carpenters. The company being accused of improper business practices is MetroNational Inc., a New Mexico-based subcontractor of Mullaney Construction Inc. Mullaney has been the contractor for many recent construction projects on the Simon’s Rock Campus, and has worked with MetroNational before. MetroNational has a history of poor business practices and has recently been sued in New Hampshire."

full: http://wmass.indymedia.org/newswire/display/2775/index.php

Visit http://www.simons-rock.edu/~eatonak/labor/ for ongoing reports on this critical struggle.