News for Educational Workers

Student Loans

As of May 27, 2008, according to the National Loan Debt Clock, a project of Student Public Interest Research Groups, U. S. students are $535 trillion dollars in debt for student loans (In These Times, July 2008). These debts can often put the life of a student after graduation on hold, translating into as much as a $1000 a month in payments, and permit the student loan companies to garnish wages and benefits. Alan Collinge, who has struggled with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, has appeared on "60 Minutes" and in the pages of numerous newspapers, criticizing loan companies like Sallie Mae, the nation's largest student lender. To help himself and others learn more about student loans and their rights in dealing with lenders, Collinge created the website StudentLoanJustice.org and then, in 2007, founded a political action committee named after the site with the goal of having "the bankruptcy law changed to put limits on how and for how long lenders can pursue debtors" (The New York Times, August 24, 2008).

The Pentagon and Education

The Pentagon is wooing academics beyond the usual weapons and technology assistance to apply social science and humanities knowledge to combating security threats in the country's so-called war on terrorism. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has proposed the Minerva Consortium, an initiative named after the Roman goddess of warriors. Gates hopes his proposal will have the same force and effect as that had by academic cooperation with the government during the Cold War (The New York Times, June 18, 2008; www.insidehighered.com, April 16, 2008).

Many scholars, however, are highly skeptical of the role the government expects them to play. Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist at George Mason University, is cofounder of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists (NCA) which, along with the 11,000-member American Anthropological Association, is monitoring the possible effects of the Minerva Consortium both on warfare and on academia. The embedding of scholars with combat troops in Afghanistan has already resulted in the death of one graduate student in political science ("Anthropologists at War," In These Times, July 2008). See the MIT Faculty Newsletter (May/ June 2008) for a list of concerns the NCA has with the Minerva Consortia Project.

Israel, Palestine, Zionism, and Education

"The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave" (The New York Times, May 30, 2008).

The Nation describes two recent cases of right-wing Jews, in emulation of David Horowitz's violation of Norman Finkelstein's tenure proceedings, interfering with the tenure process at American universities. At Columbia's Barnard College, anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj was accused of "substandard" scholarship "corrupted by an alleged hatred of Israel" (May 5, 2008). At University of California, Irvine, Daniel Schroeter, chair in Jewish history, simply resigned after "being condemned for failing to support the right-wing Jews' campaign" (July 7, 2008).

Norman Finkelstein, the Jewish son of Holocaust survivors and a scholar who has written critical books on Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories, was denied tenure and then resigned from DePaul University. In May of 2008, Finkelstein, when landing at the Tel Aviv airport on his way to the Occupied Territories, was arrested and then deported from Israel, and was told he was banned from Israel for ten years. For background on the Finkelstein case, see Academic Freedom and Intellectual Activism in the post-9/11 University, Works and Days, 26 (Spring/Fall 2008).

The American mathematician David Mumford has donated his share of the 2008 Wolf Foundation Prize in Mathematics to Bir Zeit University and to Gisha, an Israeli organization that advocates for Palestinian freedom of movement (www.haaretz.com, May 26, 2008). Gisha recently reported that the leaders of six Israeli universities have denounced the "military policy that prevents Palestinians from studying in Israel as a gross violation of academic freedom."

High Schools

Milwaukee, a national leader in the movement towards teacher-led schools, will have fourteen such public school programs next year...