Imaginary City

My pal Lester Weiss' online exhibit, Imaginary City, housed at the address below,
presents his recognition of the intersection between the artifacts of the past
and the suggestions of that past in the present. Lester says it all the better
in his own statement (and his own images), but the very notion reminds me, in my own
typically appropriating-of-other-folks'-ideas manner, of the idea Suzanne brought home
from reading instruction classes at SFSU: that we exist with the dominant ideology as well
as emerging ideologies, at any given point. Let's guess that those ideologies compete.
Or coexist. (Meanwhile, I'm listening to Joni Mitchell singing "Amelia" and reading Greg Mitchell's
_The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race of Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics_.)

http://www.photomediacenter.org/Weiss/weisshome.html

What UF President-Elect Jeffrey Michels Wrote in September ...

...and why I am worried about where his leadership will take us:


"We don't need our union to "fight the district" with "aggressiveness."
We need to work with the District to acheive common goals
and to get beyond the adversarialism that has marked the
faculty-district relationship in recent years.
There's no reason why we should be at odds with the District.
The Old Guard on the Board is on its way out.
Helen Benjamin is a reasonable, smart woman with good intentions.
Let's put this combattive attitude behind us and see if we
can work with the administration to make CCCCD a place where people
feel good about their jobs."

Jeffrey Michels
English, CCC

UF President-Elect on Negotiations and What Works

Here's what Jeffrey Michels wrote last November (2005)
about the nature of negotiations. Now that we have, today,
approved our new contract with salary restoration to the 2003 level, though no
pay increase, it's instructive to consider, a year-plus later, how things look
in hindsight:


"Negotiations, Adversarialism and Mutuality.

"Irene said in today’s meeting that the faculty want
their money back and at the same time they want our
union reps to get along better with management. She
seemed to suggest that might be a tricky combination.
She said we would not go into negotiations with “our
guns drawn,” but I could see the gun in her pocket
pretty clearly.

"But colleagues, our gun, our threat of a strike, is
NOT our best weapon in winning back our money. The
best weapon is one Irene also mentioned: retention of
good faculty, ability to hire the best newcomers,
morale (which is so crucial to teachers)! We need to
go into these negotiations making it clear that we are
putting last year behind us and that we teachers are
on the same side as the Board and the managers. We
want the best school, the best quality instruction,
the best teachers and a healthy budget. Our new
Chancellor seems to understand that high morale is
crucial to a healthy school. We must build our
relationship with management on shared goals like this
one and resist all the rituals that divide us and make
us adversaries.

"A fine book on this subject is Gordon Fellman’s Rambo
and the Dalai Lama,
which explores the difficulty of shifting from an
adversary paradigm to more mutualistic communication.
Sue, Irene, I will buy a copy for
Hanukah/Christmas/Kwanza."

On July 9 of this year, in response to the District's having identified, as one of its interests (as per the process in Interest Based Bargaining), Jeffrey Michels wrote:


I wondered why rewarding performance isn't listed
as one of our interests too. I don't see that
some performanced-based bonuses need necessarily
mean no regular step increases!


This certainly raises the question of whether or not
our union president favors bonuses. Based on what, in one's performance?

Sheehan, Benjamin, two others convicted of trespassing

By SAMUEL MAULL, Associated Press

NEW YORK - Peace activist Cindy Sheehan and three other women were convicted of trespassing Monday for trying to delivery an anti- Iraq war petition to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and refusing to leave.


A Manhattan Criminal Court judge sentenced them immediately to conditional discharge, which means they could face some form of penalty if they are arrested in the next six months, and ordered them to pay $95 in court surcharges.

Sheehan and about 100 other members of a group called Global Exchange were rebuffed last March when they attempted to take a petition with some 72,000 signatures to the U.S. Mission's headquarters across a street from the United Nations.

Prosecutors said they were arrested after ignoring police orders to disperse.

The four were acquitted of disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and obstructing government administration. They had faced up to a year in jail if convicted of all counts.

Sheehan, 49, of Vacaville, Calif., lost her 24-year-old son Casey in Iraq on April 4, 2004. She has since emerged as one of the most vocal and high-profile opponents of the war, drawing international attention when she camped outside President Bush's Texas ranch to protest the war.

The women, calling their campaign "Women Say No To War," had hoped to give the petition to Peggy Kerry, the mission's liaison for non-governmental organizations and sister of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., as they had in 2005.

Kerry refused to meet with the women in the presence of Cindy Sheehan and the news media. She testified during the trial that the presentation seemed like a publicity stunt.

The women ignored police orders to leave and were reading it aloud on the sidewalk when police moved in. The women sat on the sidewalk and were carried to patrol wagons.

Sheehan's co-defendants were Melissa Beattie, 57, of New York; Susan "Medea" Benjamin, 54, of San Francisco; and Patricia Ackerman, 48, of Nyack, N.Y.

Our friend and colleague Lou Roseman

We were touched by the news from the college president's office Monday
that Social Sciences instructor Lou Roseman had died over the Thanksgiving weekend.
As Kathy Reilly reported, Lou's family has asked that donations to the
Walnut Creek Peace Center be given in lieu of flowers.

To honor Lou's life, work, and our memories of him, The RP is collecting from any and all
who would like to make a college-wide donation in his name.

The Walnut Creek Peace Center is a fitting place for a gift honoring Lou, of course.
In his DVC career he not only taught across the Social Sciences curriculum but also
started the Volunteer Center, which not only sent hundreds of students into the community
to vounteer their time and energy to the social good but also set an example for us of the activist educator
engaged in the lives of his students and the life of his community.

This carried into his even MORE public career, as Lou served on the Contra Costa County Human Relations Commission
and the Crisis and Suicide Prevention Planning Committee.

And he was a wonderful colleague, generous with his time, gracious with his conversation, warm and open
with this new part-timer in 1988, and supportive as I made my way into the full-time ranks a decade later.
He was a model of HOW one could be at Diablo Valley College.

We'll take donations of any size. Send them to James O'Keefe at DVC. Of course we'll include your name on the card.

Also, if you'd like to sign the Contra Costa Times' Guestbook for Lou, or see what others have
had to say in his honor, go to

http://legacy.com/ContraCostaTimes/GB/GuestbookEntry.aspx?&PersonID=20113963

Finally, if anyone has a digitialized photo we can post here, please email to dvcrestorationproject@yahoo.com. We'll credit the photo, naturally!

--James

Notes on the United Faculty meeting at DVC and the DVC Restoration Project's Happy Hour, 12/6/06

There were a whopping three faculty members of United
Faculty at the DVC meeting today, as VP Kathleen Costa
took us through the various changes in the contract
we are currently voting to ratify. I like the changes--good things for
making it easier for part-timers
to get step increases, get credited for work done
elsewhere and work done in the summer session--but
none of it made me sorry I voted
against this contract.

As someone wrote earlier in the week, we approved the
2005 contract on the basis of our needing to get
stronger and fight better the next time. This IS the
next time and again we're accepting the district's
pleading poor. What now--wait till the NEXT next
time?

In attendance: a former UF VP, the current FSC
president, and the failed presidential candidate for
the UF. Joining us later were two other members of
the negotiating team.

Meanwhile, observed yesterday: people tossing their Table Talks
and their ballots, unopened, into the dumpster.

Clearly DVC faculty are indifferent, burned out, and
alienated, just like our LMC sisters and brothers.
Maybe we will see an infusion of spirit and energy
from CCC as Jeffrey brings in a different perspective
and approach to union leadership. I hope so.
I'm used to faculty apathy (I don't ACCEPT it, but I'm used to it)
but this is scary.

Later that same afternoon, ten DVC employees gathered
at the Left Bank to celebrate our companionship, raise a glass to the
newly-engaged in the group, dream about study abroad and elections to
come.

The Left Bank itself was bedecked
in seasonal lights--as if a blow
against the darkness. Which
descended nonetheless.

How the United Faculty's president-elect is spending his winter break

Our friends from the CCC English Department



"I will mostly use the next
few weeks to do homework. I’ve been reading about
the history of collective bargaining in California
and starting to study our contract."

What the Zapatistas Say about the Faculty of the Contra Costa Community College District

From La Sexta (The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle):

"In the beginning there were not many of us, just a few, going this way and
that, talking with and listening to other people like ourselves. We did that
for many years, and we did it in secret, without making a stir. ... We
remained like that for about ten years, and when we had grown, we were many
thousands."

That's the story of the Zapatistas as they came together, in the years leading up to
their remarkable appearance in the streets of Cristobal on New Year's Day 1994.
And it seems apt to the situation faculty find themselves in these days of separation
and division, after the progressive voices have been driven from the forefront of our
union's discussions, marginalized by the management-friendly cries of the ascending
faction, those who spoke out against factions, in the name of their faction, swearing the loyalty
to the district and not the union, as they took over the union.

Leaving the rest of us to go this way and that.

Offspring

Everything seems up for grabs when you have any kind of public life--if you can consider talking about your kids' accomplishments on a listserve of folks you think of as your colleagues as "public life." Maybe it's all cult-of-personality
stuff. Or maybe it's just wanting people to know more of who you are, what matters to you. Devin and Grady, here at 25 & 16 this past summer on the deck of my parents' house, certainly matter.--James

Last Happy Hour of the semester, Wednesday, December 6

We're gathering again at the Left Bank on the Crescent in the (new) Downtown Pleasant Hill
Wednesday the 6th, from four o'clock on. In addition to inviting the entire DVC community,
we've formally extended the invite for the first time to our faculty colleagues from CCC & LMC.
And if you're in the neighborhood, we hope you swing by.

The Restoration Project will have an open meeting during Flex Week to chart out its spring activities, one
of which includes seeing the Sac City baseball team visit DVC in early March. Look for info in the Flex Activities
area of the DVC Staff Development page, and check back here as we provide details.

Michael Yates' "Class: a personal story"

I've linked to Michael Yates' essay in a recent issue of Monthly Review.

Yates writes a lot for MR. This piece is largely
autobiographical but especially in the end, he makes
certain points which have helped me understand
and feel more compassion
for our UF's membership.

And that compassion helps.

Mia Hamm expecting twins

By Shannon Richardson and Stephen M. Silverman

Soccer legend Mia Hamm her husband of three years, Los Angeles Dodger first baseman Nomar Garciaparra, are expecting twins, Time reports.

Hamm, 34, played on the U.S. women's national soccer team for 18 years. When she retired after the 2004 Athens Olympics, the Wichita Falls, Texas, native had won two World Cups and two Olympic gold medals.

According to Time, she and Garciaparra, 33, met at a 1998 charity event and wed in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 2003.

Because of her pregnancy, Hamm recently turned down an invitation to be inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in February, telling officials she would accept the honor in 2008 instead, the Austin-American Statesman reports.

According to the paper, a rep for Hamm said her doctor had advised her not to travel after January because she is due in early spring.

Hamm and Garciaparra live in Los Angeles. Garciaparra joined the Dodgers this year; he previously played for the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox.

http://people.aol.com/people/article/0,26334,1563617,00.html