The Legislative Assembly met yesterday to discuss two forms of condemnation of the chancellor. The details of the meeting were supposed to be confidential and known only to the Zoom participants. You'll be shocked, shocked, to know there were leaks:
From the Bruin: The UCLA Academic Senate will continue consideration of a vote to censure or a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Gene Block into its next meeting May 16 amid a lack of consensus from voting faculty...
At around 6:30 p.m. Friday, the legislative assembly adjourned its meeting with no official action in support of or against the vote of no confidence in Block, following a meeting that started around an hour late and extended over two hours past its original end time, according to three sources with knowledge of deliberations who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. Some motions failed to meet the two-thirds threshold needed, including one motion to end debate for a vote and another motion to table consideration, according to the sources. The deliberations are not open to the public...
Full story at https://dailybruin.com/2024/05/10/ucla-academic-senate-continues-debate-on-gene-blocks-censure-no-confidence-votes.
Yours truly has a sense that some of his colleagues have a kind of lost youth syndrome, recalling past episodes of campus unrest romantically, going back as far as the 1960s. So here is something to consider from the long view:
More than 2,000 miles and two time zones separate Albuquerque, New Mexico, from Columbia University in New York. But given how closely Mark Rudd has been following the drama of recent weeks at his old alma mater, it might as well have been playing out in his own backyard. This retired community college teacher has an obvious and very personal interest in the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia. In April 1968 – then a 20-year-old Jewish kid from New Jersey – he led the famous student revolt on campus that would become an iconic moment in the anti-Vietnam War protests.
A leader of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, Rudd got kicked out of school in his junior year for all his troublemaking and would later join the Weather Underground – a revolutionary group committed to "the violent overthrow of the government of the United States in solidarity with the struggles of the people of the world." He himself went underground in 1970 after three of his fellow Weathermen were killed in an explosion in a New York townhouse while preparing bombs. Wanted on federal charges, he was on the lam for the next seven years...
While the student protests during his time at Columbia were for the most part nonviolent, Rudd notes, in several incidents students crossed the line. Not only did they regularly denounce the police as "pigs" (as some do now), but in a famous incident, a student jumping out of one of the occupied buildings on campus landed on a policeman's back, paralyzing him for life.
Malcolm X, the civil rights and Black empowerment leader known for demanding freedom and equality "by any means necessary" (a slogan that has come to dominate the current anti-Israel protests as well), was, according to Rudd, "like a God" for student protesters at Columbia in the 1960s. "I fell for all that stuff. I fell for Black Power. I fell for 'by any means necessary.' I wanted to express my moral outrage, and I went overboard," he reflects. "Eventually, I went way overboard with the whole Weatherman craziness." Watching the latest student protesters from afar, Rudd, 76, fears they are repeating his mistakes...
He also used to be a member of the local chapter of the anti-Zionist movement Jewish Voice for Peace, but "sort of dropped out."
"The reason I'm not that active anymore is that I can't stand a lot of my fellow Jews," he explains. "You know, like the story about the synagogue you wouldn't be found dead in? There are a lot of people in JVP who are traumatized by Israel, but it seems to me that they don't have any perspective. Like if I tell them that New Mexico is also a settler-colonial state, and the only difference between New Mexico and Israel is 100 years, they don't see the significance of that. "In fact, many of my comrades in JVP are so traumatized by Israel that they think it's uniquely evil. But it's not. This is the world we live in and, unfortunately, mass murder, colonialism and genocide are extraordinarily common."
His one trip to Israel was in 2005, toward the end of the second intifada – an event that would further reinforce his commitment to nonviolence. "If you ask me, the second intifada was one of the stupidest things that ever happened," he says, noting how the Palestinian suicide bombings of the early 2000s caused large numbers of Israelis to question the viability of a land-for-peace deal. "And I would say the same thing about what Hamas did on October 7," he adds. "But you can't say anything like that to the kids at Columbia these days, because they're so hung up on their moral purity. And that's why they're not interested in getting any advice from people like me, especially not old people."
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