A few weeks ago, the College of Charleston's Board of Trustees caved to political pressure from South Carolina Republicans, and installed our famously racially divisive Lt. Gov. Glenn McConnell as president of CofC. The backlash has been swift and severe. Last week saw rallies, sit ins, Votes of No Confidence in the board from the Student Gov. Association as well as the Faculty Senate. Today we are still fighting tooth and nail to stop this hostile takeover. We ask for your help!
First a little background-
Decent overviews:
For the grownups-
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/...
and here's a fun one for the young at heart:
http://www.hercampus.com/...
here's a link to my previous diary for a first person perspective from a few organizers:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Finally, I wanted to include the opening statement of a faculty member last night as he introduced the Vote of No Confidence in the Board of Trustees:
-This is my first year in the faculty senate, and I have to admit that I was skeptical about
what the faculty senate can actually do when I started. After serving this year, though,
I’ve become convinced that our work is extremely important. While we may rarely
exercise the power of deeds, we definitely wield the power of the word: we can speak up,
we can publically critique and question, we can go on the record, we can bear witness.
And as far as this resolution is concerned, we have a responsibility to speak up.
We have a responsibility to speak up for our students, who are the focus, the center of our
mission at the College, who pay for more than half of the operating budget of the college
through their tuition (compared to only 8.16% from the state), but who have been utterly
disregarded by the Board of Trustees in their appointment of a new president.
We have a responsibility to speak up for our LGTBQ staff, students, colleagues, and their
allies, whom the board has appalled and alienated with their refusal to challenge the
homophobic rhetoric coming from the state legislature as well as with their delayed
statement on academic freedom.
We have a responsibility to every constituency on our campus, especially but not limited
to people of color, who are outraged, hurt, and/or ashamed that the Board is attempting to
install, against the will of the faculty and students, a candidate with such divisive
affiliations, hobbies, and political baggage.
We have a responsibility to our foundation, whose fundraising work the Board has
sabotaged with their unilateral presidential decision.
We have a responsibility to speak up for our colleagues, who overwhelmingly agreed that
the Board’s ultimate choice was not a qualified, acceptable candidate, only to have their
overwhelming opinion disregarded by the board.
We have a responsibility to those constituencies on campus, such as staff, instructors,
adjuncts, and untenured faculty, who are devastated by the Board’s actions but feel that
they cannot speak out.
And finally, we have a responsibility to our own profession as educators and scholars,
whose very ethos is to question, to identify problems, even if we don’t have a clear
answer or solutions, to point out and discuss the very things that others would rather
repress.
If we don’t go on the record to state no confidence in the board, we will be complicit in
their actions and we will undermine our own mission. It is my hope that tonight we will
stand together to show them that we refuse to be silenced.-
Kossacks with a minute to spare can find our petition here:
http://www.change.org/...
Thank you for all that you do,
Matt