July 5, 2016--Alison Bernstein

Alison Bernstein, my prodigious colleague and friend died last week. Below is a note I sent to her daughters--

Dear Emma & Julia

Here's a story about your mother from nearly 50 years ago.

It was 1969 or so and I was working at Staten Island Community College in the backwaters of higher education. The backwaters because in, traditional higher education terms, in status terms, it was doubly-challenged: it was a community college and located on very conservative Staten Island. In effect--nowhere and nothing special.

But, the president of SICC (SICK, students dubbed it), William Birenbaum, was an inspired and inspiring educator totally devoted to the purported mission of urban community colleges--for the disenfranchised to make access to a quality education welcoming and effective. 

On Staten Island, the local leadership saw the college as a version of a trade school where the male students should take business courses and the women study to be either nurses or secretaries--the college's two most popular programs.

Bill rounded up a crew of progressive educators to help him, as he put it, break some windows to enable new, more egalitarian ideas flourish. As you might imagine he was not a favorite of the Staten Island Italian Club who effectively ran the island. But Bill, if nothing else, was ambitious and persistent. So he hired "Flash" (a former dock worker and union organizer), a bunch of Vietnam veterans, one or two scholar-activists (Stanley Aronowitz and Colin Greer), diversity activists Joe Harris and Ernesto Loperena, me, and the very young Alison, a newly-minted Vassar graduate.

How did Bill find his unlikely way to Alison? How did she make her unlikely way to him and godforsaken Staten Island?

While at Vassar, Alison was involved in pressing the administration to place students on the board of trustees. She and her coconspirators wanted it to be 50-50, with 50 percent student members, but they settled for one seat, which Alsion of course occupied.

Alison being Alison, she immediately took the lead to establish a national organization for student trustees. In that era of social protest many colleges were adding students to their boards.

And with such an organization in place, again Alison being Alison, she organized a national conference of student trustees. To the second or third annual conference--during Alison's senior year--she invited Bill Birenbaum to be the keynote speaker.

He accepted in less than a heartbeat and showed up in Chicago, or wherever, roaring drunk. (We later learned we would find him in that condition by 4:30 every afternoon.)

Even when high, perhaps especially when inebriated, Bill was brilliant. In his speech, as he would put it, he did his thing. And after he was done--I wasn't there but heard he was at top of his game--he invited Alison and the rest of the organization's executive leadership to go out for drinks.

He carried on for hours over many glasses of Dewar's, his favorite. 

He was especially attracted to Alison (I feel certain in more ways than one.) Well past midnight, when all but Bill and Alison remained standing. Literally. To her he said something like the following--

"You say you want to participate in making a revolution. I respect that. In fact, I endorse it. But you can't do it at Vassar. That place is for rich kids. For the over-privileged, like you, who want to play at bringing about radical change. If you want to make a revolution in education there's no better place to do so than at two-year colleges. At mine. That's where the action in. So, if you're serious, it's time for you to shit or get off the pot."

"I want to, I want to," Alison said with her heart pounding in her chest.

"In that case, with you graduating soon, if you really are serious, which I doubt, I will hire you to be a secial presidential assistant and from that position you will be able to find things to do to help bring about social change."

"I'll be there," Alison said.

Bill said, "I will hold an office for you only until July 1st."

And the rest is history.

Not mentioned thus far in any of the many notes and testimonies or the president of the Ford Foundation's otherwise fine tribute, is Alsion's work with community colleges. 

After her time at SICC, when at the Fund For the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (also insufficiently mentioned), Alison began a nearly 30-year deep involvement with community colleges. First from her position at FIPSE in the Department of Education and later during her two assignments at the Ford Foundation. 

With the support and encouragement of Susan Berresford, The Urban Community College Transfer Opportunity Program, which Alison conceptualized and ran, was mold breaking. Thousands of students who didn't have a friend in philanthropy, benefitted mightily by the work that Alison pioneered, advocated, and protected. It wasn't sexy like a lot of other philanthropic work, but it made a measurable difference in the lives of many.

Back in 1969, she showed up at SICC before July 1st and got off that metaphorical pot. From then on, for decades she lived and thrived and inspired.

That was a magical time of great accomplishment.

I loved her very much.
In more ways than one.

Steven

December 29, 2014--Public Relations Jujitsu

When was the last time TV news showed the video of Eric Garner being strangled on Staten Island by police officers? A tape we saw time after harrowing time 24/7 just a week or two ago. It has disappeared from the airwaves.

What has taken its place? Live shots and video of the makeshift memorial in Brooklyn at the site where two policemen, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, were brutally assassinated nine days ago. And this weekend there was the wake and funeral of Officer Ramos that was broadcast live and then repeated on tape over and over again. Next weekend  there be another funeral for Wenjian Liu the second officer slain. It will be shown live and then during the next 24 hours replayed frequently.

And then in both officers' cases there is breaking-news and continuing reports about how Bowdoin College will cover all costs for Officer Ramos' sophomore son's tuition and how, with "America's Mayor," Rudy Giuliani in the lead, the Tunnel Foundation is raising $800,000 to pay off the mortgages of the two slain officers' homes.

In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with any of this. The two officers deserve the attention, support, and honors.

But again, what has faded from view? No longer mentioned is what happened in Ferguson, Staten Island, or Cleveland. And what has taken the place of coverage of these outrages? Stories about the shooting that occurred in Brooklyn.

Coincidence, this shift in focus? Yes and no.

No, because of the very real murders in Brooklyn. Yes, because shifting attention from the citizen victims in Ferguson, Staten Island, and Cleveland to the victims on the streets of Brooklyn, allows those disposed to side with the police in regard to the underlying reasons for what happened to Ramos and Liu, to switch their concerns to the "real" problem--from misplaced sympathy for the out-of-control criminals (who happen to be African American) who were killed by police (who happen to be white) to the vulnerability and courage of those officers in the face of these lawlessness perpetrators.

That is the transposition of what has happened.

This represents a brilliant example of public-relations jujitsu. Substituting one reality for another. In regard to this fraught situation, we are seeing a shift of attention from a systemic problem (the uneven application of justice in America) to something horrific but specific--the assassination of the two police officers, which in the process is becoming universalized: the two murdered officers now represent all police.

Demonstrations in the streets in support of equal treatment under the law have been replaced by images of the solemnity of tens of thousands of police officers gathering in a demonstration of their own at the funerals of the two slain officers.

This is a complicated situation with heat and demagoguery on all sides, but let us remember how and where it began--in Ferguson, Mo, Staten Island, NY, and Cleveland, Ohio. It did not begin in Brooklyn.

December 12, 2013--Meow Lion, Meow

What's happening up at Columbia University, my old college? The Lions, instead of roaring, as our fight song says, are meowing. At the Law School.

It is rare that I agree with anything in Rupert Murdoch's tabloid rag, the New York Post. Actually, I never agree with him or the editorial positions of his newspapers or Fox news outlets. But this one time I do wholeheartedly concur with Tuesday's front page that bellowed--"Poor Babies! Cop Rulings 'Traumatize' Columbia Kids."

The story that followed claimed that the acting dean of the Law School announced that any students so upset by the grand jury rulings in Ferguson, MO and on Staten Island could arrange to delay taking their end-of-semester exams.

Of course skeptical that this could possibly be true (the Post relishes having or creating opportunities to bash liberal elites), I turned to the New York Times where, to my dismay, I found, buried on page A-26, virtually the same report with the more temperate headline--"Columbia Law Lets Students Delay Exams After Garner and Brown Decisions."

Between you and me, I prefer the Post's "Poor Babies!" That does a better job of getting to the essence of the matter.

The acting dean, Robert E. Scott, in an email to students actually did use the T-word: he wrote that following existing policies for "trauma during exam period" students who felt their performance on final exams would suffer because of the grand jury decisions not to indict white police officers who killed alleged African-American perpetrators, could defer taking the exams.

Refusing to say how many sought delays, a Law School spokesperson said a "small number" had.

To me, even one student seeking such a deferment is one too many.

Yes, the decisions not to indicate are upsetting, deeply upsetting, but unless the "small number" of students who are delaying their finals are members of Eric Garner's or Michael Brown's immediate families (I doubt it), it is hard to imagine being so traumatized that they can't study or concentrate.

This is particularly pathetic behavior for law students who presumably are being prepared to deal with just these kinds of circumstances. Actually, even worse circumstances. Say, like what happened exactly two years ago at Sandy Hook Elementary School where 20 five- and six-year-olds were slaughtered.

I could sputter on about this--how we are over-pampering our young people, even those in top-ten law schools; how no one these days wants to take responsibility for anything; how we have lost moral fiber and what my father used to call "intestinal fortitude"; how for too many it's all about getting and spending; how the world has become Oprah-ized; how . . .

But I will resist and allow the Post front page to have the final word.

December 8, 2014--A Conversation About Race

Every time there is an outrageous example of how the justice system in America works differently for white people and people of color, political leaders, the press and clergy say that we have to have a serious, dispassionate national conversation about race so that we can at long last overcome our still fraught racial history.

This call was raised after the OJ Simpson trial when it was obvious that whites and blacks experience the justice system almost as polar opposites--the vast majority of caucasians saw him to be guilty of homicide while blacks in overwhelming numbers cheered the jury verdict.

For a week or two after the verdict a version of that national conversation occurred; but here we are again, nearly 20 years later, with two grand juries--one in Ferguson MO, another on Staten Island--failing to indicate two white police officers who killed unarmed black men. Again there are street demonstrations, 24/7 media coverage, and renewed calls for that discourse about race.

But before we can even get started talking across the racial divide, people are criticizing New York City mayor Bill de Blasio (who has a biracial son and daughter) and Barack Obama (who is obviously African American) either, as in the case of the former, for "throwing the police under the bus" (as ludicrously claimed by the president of the NYC patrolman's union) or, as in Obama's case, for not speaking out passionately or personally enough.

The Washington Post over the weekend wrote explicitly about this--"N.Y. Mayor Bill de Blasio Spoke Bluntly On Race, Policing in Ways Harder for Obama."

Yes, the mayor spoke bluntly--actually he was more compassionate than blunt--praising the vast majority of police officers who protect citizens black and white while calling for the need to retrain them in the appropriate use of force and then "spoke from the heart" as a father of a dark-skinned son who sports a huge Afro while Obama spoke more professorially, less as a black man and father of two daughters.

Obama may have tempered his remarks out of concern that they might interfere with his Department of Justice's investigations of both cases, exploring whether or not the victims' civil rights were violated though they will be difficult to press since the DJ would have to prove intent. He may have wanted to avoid the legal storm that arose after Trayvon Martin was killed when he, with emotion and truth, said Trayvon "could have been me."

Yes, any President needs to tread carefully when talking about on-going criminal investigations, but surely there must be ways, there must be appropriate words for our first African-Ameircan president to speak publicly about race in less than his usual dispassionate way. For him, if you will, to testify about what it is like, what it feels like to be a black man in America and the father of teenage children who must worry when his children are out and about, even with Secret Service protection. And how he must have residual fears about his own safety when in public. Fears exacerbated by the fact of his skin color.

I understand that during his first term, for political reasons alone, he did not want to come off sounding like a "black president." He was and is the president of all the people, even those who disagree with and even despise him. Further, considering the underlying racism so pervasive in America, he did not want to give bigoted whites the excuse to have their views confirmed that he is the proverbial boogie man (epithet intended)--a militant Angry Black Man.

But now, with the last midterm elections over (and lost) what continues to hold him back from truly speaking his mind and leading the long-overdo conversation? He has nothing significant to lose. Now more than ever we need his perspective and passion.

December 4, 2014--Chokehold On Staten Island

I need to learn more, but Staten Island, where I worked for 10 years, is more like Ferguson, MO than Manhattan. Though a brief ferry ride away it is as mired as Ferguson in anger and racism.

And now with a Staten Island grand jury concluding not to indite the police officer who in July killed unarmed, African-American Eric Garner with a chokehold, I expect this forsaken borough of New York City to erupt in protest. Hopefully, not violently, but there is a limit to what people of color can tolerate in 2014.

This was all caught on vivid videotape and should have been an easy one. Indict officer Daniel Pantaleo and then let a public jury decide to convict or not.

But, more white police officers live on SI than in any other part of New York City and so this was not unexpected.

Again, as in Ferguson, rather than a traditional grand jury review, which usually lasts for a few hours or perhaps a day or two, this one went on for months and one knows all to well what that means--a version of a trial occurred out of sight. And of course there was no indictment.

*   *   *

After I wrote this, we met friends for dinner at the Yale Club, across from Grand Central Station. We had not seen them for awhile and had a wonderful time. They are always up on the news but there was so much to catch up about that we didn't talk much about Staten Island or Ferguson.

But at about 10:30, after dinner, when we were saying goodbye at the station, we were swept into a flash-demonstartion--a few hundred young black, brown, and white people who were darting about, herded by an equal number of police, all already organized by Twitter and Facebook postings to protest the lack of an indictment on Staten Island.

We joined them as they dashed into Grand Central. For me it was evocative of others times and other causes. 

"Hands up. Don't shot. Hands up don't shoot," they, we, chanted in reference to what allegedly happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson. "No justice, no peace. No justice, no peace" from earlier days.

And, "Fuck the police. Fuck the police" from today.

One struggling middle-aged commuter, who remembered similar epithets shouted decades ago in anger at the police, the "Pigs," during the Vietnam War said, "That didn't work then and it's is not fair now. At worst, it was only one policeman in Missouri and a few here. So . . ."

Someone who heard that responded civilly, "Don't you understand the frustration, the anger? You expect everyone to be courteous?"

"Maybe you're right," the commuter said as he ran for his train to Stanford. Maybe you're right. Back then I thought we were." 

He disappeared in the crowd.