kevin harding

I was asked, recently, to participate in an interview at the university about the president’s ‘legacy’, given that he will be retiring in a few months. An interesting question.

As is common with me, the conversation drifted during the interview, from what the president’s legacy might be to what it should be and why education in general was so important. Standard discussion material.

We somehow turned to the university’s wordmark: “thinking of the world.”. It appears on the website, on business cards, and everywhrere. It’s supposed to imply that we are a worldly university, that we are engaged in the world, that the world is not something abstracted from us.

But it’s an unfinished thought.

To drag a haunting spectre out of the shadows, Karl Marx wrote, “hitherto, philosophers have merely interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.”

SFU certainly hasn’t taken the idea to heart. We’re merely “thinking of the world” while the point is to change it. The motto of the university lacks action. It is passive.

There are a number of links between the passive motto and the reality of the university–I’m not going to say cause and effect, or even correlation, but the university seems to have been passive lately. Passive in our reaction to creeping corporatization, passive to insidious underfunding, passive to a lot of evil.

Why? Well, our letterhead proclaims the answer.

We’re merely “thinking of the world.”

The point, however, is to change it.

The following appeared on the Stop BC Library Cuts website today, after an communiqué from the provincial government:

On August 20, 2009 the Province of British Columbia announced that the provincial dollars to support public libraries would be $13,700,000, which is about 78% of previous years. While this represents a reduction, the libraries of BC are pleased to see that the provincial government recognizes the integral role public libraries play in community development and literacy.¹

While I disagree with the ‘pleased sentiment’ (being happy with a cut in funding to important services isn’t the best approach, in my humble opinion), I think that what’s happening to the public libraries in the province should be making us in advanced education start to brace for impacts.

CBC reported today that the Finance Minister of the province is telling BC voters to get ready for a “very, very difficult budget.”  According to CBC,

“We are desperately trying to maintain the critical services in health care and education and the social services. So it’s definitely been a challenging summer,” the finance minister said Wednesday.

I would not be surprised to hear that provincial funding transfers to universities were to be impacted in much the same way that the libraries have been.  This will be an incredibly difficult budget for universities to cope with, especially since they’re already five months into a fiscal year.

In short, I think we should be bracing for the impact – and getting ready to say no.

#iranelection

If you’re on Twitter (I admit it, I have an account), or on Facebook, or if you’ve watched anything approaching television news in the past few days, you’ll likely have noted that there’s something going down in Iran — especially if you’re on Twitter, where the tag #iranelection has been a trending topic for the past week.

According to the internets, millions of people have been on the streets in Tehran and around Iran recently protesting — at first, they were protesting what they felt was an unfair and rigged election, where the results of an election in which over 40 million people voted were announced two hours after polls closed — and now they are protesting what appears to be, prima facie, extreme violence and repression on the part of a state and a ‘supreme leader‘ who has demanded that all those in the streets return home and accept the results without complaint.

While I will wholeheartedly and emphatically note that I am not an Iran expert, I will comment on the developments as I have observed them, through the media, through online sources, and through discussing the situation with members of the Iranian community at school.  There’s something big happening, and I think that we all need to pay some serious attention.

One thing that particularly strikes me is the power of the people in the streets.  The protests have been described as “amorphous and leaderless,” with some commentators using this as their indicator of an inevitable doom.  Despite these dire predictions, the protests have not waned.  Despite the orders of the Supreme Leader to accept the election results and stop protesting, millions are in the streets.  Despite the blood on the pavement, they are on the street.

Those in Iran, and many thousands and millions around the world, are watching the developments through updates from Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.  While it took some time for the mass media to catch up, they have — and while CNN is continuously waving the fax it received from the Iranian Ministry of Culture prohibiting it from broadcasting from the country — the whole world is watching the protests and the violent repression from the Iranian state.

The people in the streets are chanting as they protest.  At first, it was “where is my vote?” Now it is “No more Pinochets.”  At night it is “Allah-o-akbar” (god is great), shouted from the rooftops.  See a haunting video of this here.  As the Iranians chant and protest, there are plainclothes state militia in the street — the basij — literally hunting them down.  One particularly terrifying video is apparently that of the death of a girl named “Neda” who died in the streets of Tehran after being shot by riot police.  A not-safe-for-work and graphic video is online.

(Parenthetically, in this context, there’s no wonder why anarchists cry “smash the state,” especially the one that’s smashing you.)

iranians: “no more pinochets” continued »