Bard versus the unions

It's interesting how cyberspace and the real world interact.

Some months ago somebody by the name of Brooks Bitterman, an organizer from the Restaurant Workers Union, made an appeal to PEN-L, a mailing list I used to belong to, on behalf of striking waiters and bartenders at Smith & Wollensky, an upscale steakhouse in NY. Brooks was looking for Bard College graduates who might help find ways to put pressure on Leon Levy, the owner of the restaurant, who is a member of the Bard College Board of Directors. Levy is also the founder of the Jerome Levy Institute at Bard College, a left-leaning economics think tank. Doug Henwood, who is on PEN-L, became interested in the strike and wrote a piece about it in LBO. He commented on the hypocrisy of a left-leaning think-tank's founder kicking workers in the teeth.

I am a graduate of Bard College and volunteered my services. Brooks got in touch with me and asked me if I could get a copy of the Bard Alumnus directory. The union wanted to circulate a petition among alumni asking Levy to settle with the union on terms already worked out by federal arbitrators, which Levy subsequently reneged on. He wanted the petition to be accompanied by a letter signed by a Bard graduate. I told him that I would get the directory and sign the letter.

When Brooks showed up at my office at Columbia to pick up the directory, I told him that he looked familiar. He said that he should since he took my class on "Navigating the Internet" at the Brecht Forum a few months earlier! He said the Internet has really helped the union reach out to the rest of the union movement and the broader progressive movement.

On Tuesday evening I will be giving my class "pro bono" to Local 1180 of the Communications Workers Union in NY. Somebody who had taken my class at the Brecht Forum has been organizing the event. I told her to spread the word to NY unions that I would be happy to do the class whenever asked.

Just yesterday I received a letter from the president of the Board of Governors of the Bard Alumni Association taking great umbrage at the petition. This person asserts, "Many of our trustees, overseers, advisory board members, donors, alumni/ae, faculty, administrators, parents of students and students, have business relationships -- some of which may be deemed by you or others as 'controversial' -- unrelated to their relationship with the College. It would hardly be appropriate for us to inject ourselves into those relationships. Such is the case with the alleged relationship between Leon Levy and Smith & Wollensky."

I have been hearing this sort of thing for nearly 30 years. It doesn't matter if some college or university is encroaching on the black community's real estate, it doesn't matter if the CIA is recruiting on campus, it doesn't matter if members of the Board of Trustees have unsavory if not deadly commercial interests. I reject this notion.

The liberal arts college does not hover in space above society and its class conflicts. It is an institution that propagates the ruling ideas of the capitalist class. Terry Eagleton pointed out in his "Criticism and Ideology" that the modern literature curriculum was introduced into the British universities at the urging of Matthew Arnold. Arnold thought that since religion was losing its ability to train the masses into remaining obedient to class rule (my words, not his), something else must suffice. That something else was the classics of English literature such as those of Shakespeare and Jane Austen. The classics would teach the unruly eighteen year old about the "continuity" and "greatness" of English civilization and make better, ie. more obedient, citizens out of them.

Bard College, despite Walter Winchell's assertion in the 1950's that it was the "little Red whorehouse on the Hudson", shares these goals. I would like to see Bard continue as an institution. It is a good school with some excellent teachers. However, if I have to make a choice between Bard's survival as an institution and the survival of the American working people, in this instance taking the form of struggling waiters and bartenders, I'll take my stand with the latter.