Category Archives: PSC-CUNY

Extremist targets two members at Brooklyn (The Clarion, PSC-CUNY)

Extremist targets two members at Brooklyn

Far right campaign seeks to limit speech

Samir Chopra talks about the defamatory posters that called some BC faculty and students “terrorist supporters.”

The message on a poster plastered to a recycling bin on the Brooklyn College campus was succinct and inflammatory: “Terrorist Supporters,” it declared in all caps. Underneath that label were names of current and former Brooklyn College students (all Muslim students of color) and chiseled illustrations of two Brooklyn College professors – Corey Robin and Samir Chopra – both known for their public scholarship and who have supported freedom of expression around Palestinian issues.

At the bottom of the poster, underneath the hashtag #StopUniversitySupportForTerrorists was the web address for the California-based David Horowitz Freedom Center, identified as an anti-Muslim hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Brooklyn College is not alone in being a target of a campaign to single out professors and students as “terrorist supporters.” This semester, posters appeared on several campuses across the country, including the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Chicago. The posters aren’t the first time that the CUNY college has been singled out. Citing increasing concerns about attempts to intimidate and harass faculty, the American Association of University Professors issued guidelines for universities to resist targeted online harassment earlier this year. Already the Trump administration has called on the University of Nevada at Las Vegas to investigate one academic who criticized Trump, and key architects of the campus culture wars have close ties to the Trump administration.

The PSC chapter at Brooklyn College was quick to condemn the poster that appeared in several spots on campus on September 27, and college staff quickly removed the posters.

“By naming and depicting professors, it seeks to curb dissent and suppress academic freedom, and it places the safety of these faculty members at risk,” wrote the college’s PSC chapter chair, James Davis, in a September 28 email to members. “Faculty members must not be subjected to orchestrated campaigns of harassment and intimidation. We urge the college administration to affirm the fundamental principle of academic freedom.”

INTIMIDATION CAMPAIGN

It’s easy to dismiss the poster as “frivolous and juvenile,” Davis told Clarion, but the effect of the poster and others like it may make faculty think “three times” before they say something controversial, because they may be on a poster next.

Chopra’s illustrated “mugshot” on a Horowitz Center poster isn’t stopping him from speaking his mind. “If you did back down, you would be doing what they would want you to do,” Chopra, a professor in the department of philosophy, told Clarion. “That feels like cooperating with them, which I don’t feel like doing.” Chopra admitted he is in a somewhat privileged position. He’s tenured, and he’s not looking to change jobs. But the posters and the concerted campaign against him and others who focus on Palestine, has its cost. In Chopra’s view, his days on the job market are “over.”

“Somebody in the dean or the provost’s office could sit down and do a Google search, and they could tell the department that wants to hire me, ‘That guy is this guy?’” Fearing retaliation from donors or the Board of Trustees, Chopra said, university administrators could decide to hire someone else – and he wouldn’t know.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TIES

All 11 names appearing on the latest Horowitz Center poster are listed on the Canary Mission website, an online “blacklist” including profiles – with names, social media handles and photos – of professors and students active on Palestinian rights, with a goal, according to a video posted on its home page, to “ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees.”

The fact that he’s named on the website, Chopra said, means that every few months, his name is tweeted out by the Mission and he’s harassed online. (Nearly a dozen CUNY professors are named on the website and many CUNY students.)

The website singles out individuals, but it ensures that its supporters are hidden. The website does not name staff members; its domain is registered so ownership is hidden. The David Horowitz Freedom Center, Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum and other right-wing pro-Israel groups that focus on campuses denied any relationship with the Canary Mission, according to a May 2015 article written by Josh Nathan-Kazis in the Forward. Charles Jacobs, who was instrumental in producing “Columbia Unbecoming,” a documentary that showed the university’s Middle East studies department as unfriendly to Jewish students, replied “no comment.” Later reporting by Nathan-Kazis revealed that the Mission’s home page temporarily directed readers to the personal Twitter profile of a director of an online Israeli advocacy group, Warren Betzalel Lapidus. Even mainstream groups, including the Israel on Campus Coalition, cited the Mission’s effectiveness in being a “strong deterrent against anti-Semitism and BDS activism” and limiting activism of some student because fear of the “repercussions of public exposure.”

While there may not be a direct link between the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the Canary Mission, a September 28 article, “Brooklyn College: Advocating Genocide and a Third Intifada” in the Freedom Center’s FrontPage, names students on the poster and links to their “profile” pages on the Canary Mission website. That same article’s main image is a version of the Brooklyn College poster that appeared on campus this semester.

The article then goes on to name a litany of reasons for naming the CUNY college including the Students for Justice for Palestine (SJP) chapter’s use of certain phrases including, “the third intifada” and “Al-Nakba,” (Arabic for “disaster,” to describe the 1948 establishment of the Israeli state). The article also cited the use of “the slogan: ‘From the River to the Sea’” and activists affiliated with the SJP chapter were accused of calling one faculty member a “Zionist pig” during a faculty council meeting. However, a Brooklyn College investigation later found that no member of the Brooklyn College SJP made this comment.

The Horowitz Center is run by David Horowitz, a former 1960s left-wing radical from Forest Hills and a son of communist parents who later turned and has become what the Washington Post describes as “an intellectual godfather to the far right.” A June 3 investigation in the Post explored the “shadow” universe of right-wing charities and Horowitz’s connections to Trump officials.

In the 1990’s, Horowitz hosted a Wednesday Morning Club catered to conservatives in Los Angeles. A regular guest was former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been honored at a Horowitz-organized event. Stephen Miller, now Trump’s senior policy adviser, was a protégé of Hortowitz. Miller enlisted Horowitz’s help when he was dealing with teachers and classmates at his Santa Monica high school who were “insufficiently patriotic,” and he went on to have Horowitz speak at his high school and at Duke University, where he was an undergraduate. Once Miller graduated from college, Horowitz helped him land jobs with conservative lawmakers.

Last fall, the Horowitz Freedom Center issued a list of “the top 10 schools supporting terrorists,” which included Brooklyn College. The Center, according to a website affiliated with it, “conducted a guerrilla postering campaign on the campus.” During that campaign, it decided to target a Brooklyn College master’s student Raja Abdulhaq with an illustrated poster of him with the hashtag #JewHatred.

“The main purpose [of this campaign] is not to shame people. The main objective is to stop them from doing what they’re doing,” Abdulhaq, who is studying political science and international relations, told Clarion. “There’s no way that they’ll stop and intimidate me.”

While he’s undeterred, Abdulhaq said the intimidation has had its effects. A couple of students have approached him personally and said that they’re cutting down their activism with SJP, citing their concerns about their family and job prospects after college. One recent Brooklyn College graduate – who was active in SJP, wears a hijab and has her name and photo posted on the Canary Mission website – had a study abroad poster with her picture on it defaced (her eyes were blacked out and there was an upside-down cross drawn on her forehead).

The most recent posters prompted more than 80 Brooklyn College faculty and staff to sign a letter addressed to CUNY Chancellor James Milliken, calling on him to issue a public statement explaining and condemning the poster and the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

“These posters are an insidious and utterly unacceptable attempt to intimidate and defame members of this college and the larger academic community and have an intense and chilling impact on the young people targeted and the broader student community,” stated the October 4 letter.

WEAK CUNY RESPONSE

Milliken did not publicly issue a statement, but sent an October 13 email to Brooklyn College faculty and staff calling the poster “troubling.” “I share in your strong condemnation of crude attempts to restrict protected speech through intimidation,” he wrote. He also said he stood behind Brooklyn College Michelle Anderson’s statement, which was released less than a week after the posters appeared on campus.

“[The poster] seeks to defame and silence specific individuals for their political opinions by placing them at risk for further harassment and abuse,” wrote Anderson in an October 2 email to students, staff and faculty. “We reject these tactics, especially in the context of an academic community, where robust discourse on matters of great public import is central to our educational project.”

Neither Milliken nor Anderson named the Horowitz Freedom Center in their statements, nor, as of press time, were there steps taken to restore the reputations of students and faculty who were defamed by the posters.
For concerned Brooklyn College faculty, students and staff, the administration’s response is not enough.

“[Milliken] should name the Horowitz Freedom Center as a menace to the university’s values and the safety of students and faculty, even if it means giving the Horowitz people the publicity they crave,” PSC Brooklyn College Chapter Chair James Davis told Clarion. “Otherwise, it’s a squandered opportunity to demonstrate administrative leadership.”

Resolution on the Freedom of Speech and Assembly for All Faculty, Staff and Students at the City University of New York (PSC-CUNY)

View in PDF format: resolution_on_academic_freedom
Adopted by the PSC-CUNY Delegate Assembly on October 13, 2016.

PSC

Intersecting Picket Lines: Free Speech, Palestine, and the CUNY Contract (Viewpoint Magazine)

Viewpoint Magazine

Intersecting Picket Lines: Free Speech, Palestine, and the CUNY Contract

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“Die-In/Vigil for Ferguson and Gaza,” John Jay College/CUNY, October 8, 2014

On June 20, five days after the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) teachers and staff union reached a tentative contract agreement with the City University of New York administration, the Board of Trustees (BoT) convened a public hearing on a proposed policy for “Freedom of Expression and Expressive Conduct.” This Orwellian measure could criminalize any unsanctioned meetings, speak-outs, and marches on CUNY campuses, and by the CUNY lawyer’s own admission, was tailored to counter recent Black Lives Matter and Palestine solidarity actions. At the packed hearing, three dozen students, faculty, staff, and alumni railed against the BoT, demanding that the proposed policy be scrapped.

Even though the new contract was brokered only after the PSC threatened to strike, and establishes concrete gains for various constituencies, it’s by no means a radical agreement. Some members have already vowed to pursue a no-vote. The 10.41% salary increase (compounded for 2010-2017) doesn’t surpass inflation, the three-year adjunct appointment system (instead of reappointments each semester) won’t apply to most adjuncts who teach the majority of CUNY classes, and management will be able to hire a new coterie of star faculty with exorbitant salaries (call it the Paul Krugmanization of CUNY), thus wrenching the two-tier wage disparity gap even wider.

It’s no coincidence that the CUNY administration delayed negotiations so that the PSC membership vote to ratify the contract and the BoT June 27 vote to curtail free speech would both occur when most of the CUNY community is dispersed for the summer. However, because the PSC has fought for a contract along narrow demands, in the face of increasing political crises at CUNY – over labor austerity, free speech, U.S. militarism, and Palestine solidarity – the union leadership is now scrambling to mount a broad, multi-sectional opposition to a policy that would inhibit the right to amass a picket line.

This tenuous situation demands that we rethink the strategies that guide labor organizing on college campuses. In preparation since 9/11, the CUNY administration and New York government have now fully entwined the languages of anti-racism, law and order, and fiscal responsibility to enforce a shock doctrine of structural underfunding and repression. But if a defense of free speech and anti-imperialism is fused with the struggles of organized labor, a new opening for a broad and combined struggle can emerge. If CUNY’s movements are to reverse this assault, they’ll have to force the union to move past the economism of their contract campaign and embrace struggles that speak to the lives of their members, New York, and the wider world.

City University in the World

CUNY is the largest public urban university in the United States. It employs fifty thousand teachers and campus staff in several unions, and relies on unwaged intellectual work by over half a million students, mostly working poor immigrant youth from around the world. Both the wealthy elite and social movements have long recognized CUNY’s institutional role as a social bellwether. At various points in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the university has become a primary site of economic, social, and ideological restructuring – as well as resistance – in which struggles over CUNY became epicenters for national, and even global, conflicts.

We see this dynamic, for example, in the early 1940s, when the Rapp-Coudert Committee held closed-door disciplinary hearings to fire more than fifty CUNY educators (predominantly Jewish) in the College Teachers Union who were suspected of being Communists, a few years after several dozen CUNY students and teachers had returned from fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Rapp-Coudert laid the groundwork for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to wreak havoc over a generation of radical lives.

CUNY again became a fulcrum upon which the U.S. state and capital, reeling from the 1975 defeat in Vietnam and the resulting economic crisis, extorted concessions from the working class via the reduction of social programs like free college education. After Black, Puerto Rican, and Asian students-led campus strikes in the late sixties and early seventies transformed CUNY with ethnic and gender studies and Open Admissions, President Gerald Ford insisted that New York City impose tuition at CUNY and lay off contingent faculty en masse in order to escape from a manufactured fiscal crisis whichFord’s cabinet reframed as irresponsible self-indulgence: like “a wayward daughter hooked on heroin… You don’t give her $100 a day to support her habit. You make her go cold turkey to break her habit.”

Campus War Zone

More recently, the post-9/11 relationship between CUNY and U.S. imperialism has developed to the point that the university is now a prominent target for both military recruitment and counterinsurgency. Since the mid-2000s, as the United States became mired in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, recruiters’ presence intensified at CUNY colleges, especially after the 2008 economic crisis. In November 2011, days after the Occupy Wall Street eviction, the CUNY administration imposed a five-year annual tuition increase by approving a police assault on peaceful protestors, and then evacuating an entire campus building to hold the vote. During this same year, CUNY reviewed a policy paper calling for the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) to be re-embedded at CUNY in order to diversify its officers.

Then in fall 2013, former military general David Petraeus began teaching a CUNY class called “The Coming North American Decades,” and ROTC set up shop in three other CUNY campuses with little to no regard for campus governance procedures. Although Medgar Evers College successfully removed ROTC, it remains at City College and York College. Meanwhile, student activists were surveilled, arrested, and suspended as campus organizing spaces were seized. As journalist Peter Rugh put it, “America’s most diverse university was turned into a war zone.”

During this post-9/11 period I’ve briefly sketched out, the political situation at CUNY also dramatically shifted in terms of solidarity with Palestine and opposition to the surveillance of Muslim students, two issues which began to coalesce on CUNY campuses as the movement against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan waned.

In 2005, Palestinian civil society issued a global call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complied with international law and universal principles of human rights. Critiques across CUNY and New York City of the Israeli military’s unchecked aggression on Gaza heightened during Israel’s winter 2008, November 2012, and summer 2014 carpet bombing campaigns. All funded by $8.5 million U.S. government dollars a day, these three conflicts altogether killed 3,900 Palestinians and 90 Israelis, left many more wounded, and demolished social infrastructure (such as hospitals, schools, electricity and water supplies) along similarly asymmetrical figures in an effort at total destruction of daily life in Gaza.

This carnage could have potentially felt distant, were it not for Zionist organizations, college administrators, and government officials’ more local attempts of repression on CUNY campuses. If student revolts once aspired to “bring the war home,” more recently this pro-Israel coalition has done so differently in its attempts to fire and suppress CUNY faculty and studentswho dared to critically teach, learn, write, and organize for Palestine. Instead of being silenced, Palestinians and their anti-imperialist accomplices at CUNY (in groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and CUNY for Palestine) – many of them women, LGBTQ, and gender-nonconforming folk – began to more insistently share stories of what people in Gaza and the West Bank endured under the U.S.-backed Israeli military.

CUNY faculty and graduate students also helped lead a wave of several national academic associations and unions passing BDS resolutions against the Israeli government and academic institutions. The CUNY Graduate Center’s own student government passed an academic boycott in April 2016 after a two-year campaign. These boycott resolutions were implicit strikes against occupation, understood as clearly drawn picket lines for academic labor.

Surveillance and Selective Anti-racism

Links between wars against Arabs and Muslims abroad and at home also deepened when, in the fall of 2011, journalists exposed that the NYPD had conducted surveillance of Muslim student groups at eight CUNY schools from 2003 to 2006. Another NYPD spying operation would begin in March 2011 at Brooklyn College. An informant embedded herself in Muslim friendships circles, in Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and in a “Unity Coalition,” which organized SJP, the Black Student Union, Puerto Rican Alliance, Dominican Student Movement, and other left student groups. This resulted in fall 2015 revelations of the entrapment of two young women in a fabricated ISIS terrorist plot.

CUNY professor Jeanne Theoharis warned in the Intercept,

[T]hese tactics are not renegade actions. They are consistent with the NYPD’s and the FBI’s approach to Muslim communities after 9/11. They reveal how an “investigation” becomes a perch from which to spy on a community for years, how politically active and religiously conservative students become targets, and how efforts to form coalitions between students of color become suspect.

I draw this chronology to situate why, in the last year, CUNY has suddenly become an epicenter of struggle around educational austerity, “expressive conduct”-policing, and BDS. This history helps to explain why in fall 2015, as the PSC organized civil disobedience and rallies, and mobilized for a strike vote, Cuomo and NY legislators suddenly proposed a half-billion dollar state funding cut to CUNY’s budget, harkening back to our 1975 emergency status.

Based on a letter by the Zionist Organization of America that cited a skewed series of “anti-Semitic” events at CUNY (defined only with regard to Jewish students, not to Arab students who are also Semitic), the NY Senate announced in March 2016 that they would “deny additional funding for CUNY senior schools until it is satisfied that the administration has developed a plan to guarantee the safety of students of all faiths.” Even though state funding was ultimately restored to CUNY, the irony, of course, was that this massive gash in the budget would have also hurt Jewish students, faculty, and staff.

Nevertheless, a self-described CUNY task force on anti-Semitism called pro-BDS Professor Sarah Schulman and SJP student leaders into closed-door disciplinary meetings reminiscent of the Rapp-Coudert Committee and the rise of McCarthyism to underscore a “Palestine Exception to Free Speech.” In the last few weeks, Governor Andrew Cuomo introduced a bill to specifically attack individuals, student groups, and institutions that advocate BDS. The CUNY Board of Trustees also seized the momentum to introduce the policy on “Freedom of Expression and Expressive Conduct.”

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PSC civil disobedience outside CUNY Central administrators’ offices, November 4, 2015 (Photo credit: Erik McGregor)

Intersecting Picket Lines

The government and administration have fused these crises into a new political economy at CUNY – we can use this shift to meaningfully connect our struggles, not keep them isolated in retreat. The PSC repeatedly vocalizes its defense of CUNY’s mission to provide quality education to working-class people of all colors and backgrounds. However, the union has maintained a limited contract focus that is already hampered by enduring adjunct inequalities, while not taking a public stand on these anti-BDS bills, McCarthyist hearings, student surveillance, and the policy on “Freedom of Expression and Expressive Conduct.” In so doing, the union has one arm tied behind its back, right when it could further expand upon a recent landslide 92% strike authorization and subsequent contract offer.

This moment is haunted by the old racist song repurposed by Paul Gilroy to examine race and class under neoliberalism, that “There Ain’t no Black in the Union, Jack.” In other words, labor movements are always at risk of eliding concurrent struggles that affect its most marginalized workers and support bases. These issues are not being officially recognized by the PSC as part of our picket line, even if they have become a central means by which many of us organize as laborers, and have pivoted the directions of our university’s institutional life.

More widely, a class re-composition is taking place to gather various kinds of workers – athletes, artists, dockworkers, educators, healthcare workers, journalists, retail workers, scientists, students, and beyond – under the “one big union” of BDS to coordinating rank-and-file cross-industry actions that link apartheid and imperialism abroad with austerity and policing at home. Because CUNY students and workers have had to vigorously defend our right to speak on Palestine and on the surveillance of Muslims, we’ve radicalized the contours of a new free speech movement that is concerned with different “trigger warnings” of Israeli apartheid and Homeland Security on our campuses.

Our movements can learn to both “oppose and propose.” We can demand a fair CUNY contract while taking a stand against political repression. We can oppose ROTC military science programs, while expanding resources for valuable spaces like the CUNY Graduate Center’s Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center (MEMEAC) that are at risk of being underfunded to death. We can protest when rape-apologist IDF soldiers are invited to speak on campuses, as we host the annual Palestinian students’ Right 2 Educationtour nationwide. We can refuse to cooperate our academic labor with Israeli universities, and form new partnerships with Palestinian universities, asRabab Abdulhadi at San Francisco State University has initiated with An-Najah and Birzeit.

Like our unions (and universities), BDS is a means, not an end. Moreover, the protection of free speech is not to be decorously enshrined by any top-down policy, but directionally honed and pushed beyond what the bosses and lawmakers deem permissible. Only through these intersecting picket lines can we address all the aspects of a contract campaign within a larger struggle to transform CUNY. In the words of Tidal Magazine, an anti-colonial movement journal,

Boycott is a necessary yet limited tactic. Each “win” is but a small part of a coordinated exertion and intensification of pressure. The value of Boycott lies as much in the economic damage it could do to the target as it does in the conversations, bonds, and spaces that are formed in the process of organizing. These are the foundations of any future liberation, beyond Boycott and beyond BDS itself.

City University of New York students, faculty, and staff, like the U.S. labor movement, are stuck between two forms of class composition: one that is bound by parochial bread-and-butter demands, and one in which our actions can reverberate around the world as they transform our working and learning conditions here. Which side are we on? Improvements over wages, benefits, and job security are real advances against the university and state elite, but they cannot be divorced from these interrelated conflicts that have catapulted CUNY into a local/global battleground.

We must collectively ask why the PSC and many other campus unions – as their leadership and membership are currently configured – have not been adequate forces for making such political demands. But perhaps struggles at CUNY can experiment with strategies to escape this impasse, finding ways to link the union to other struggles, to wider communities, to build associational power. In these broader coalitions, and relying on deep community ties, PSC members can urge the union to refuse to ratify a contract until management desists from its efforts at austerity, curtailment of civil liberties, and endorsement of U.S. and Israeli occupations, which are all integral facets of our workplaces. During the past year, we mobilized for a strike which garnered wide support across the university and New York City. We can use this momentum to strike at the heart of empire, and in the process, help redirect the course of social movement unionism.

***

On June 23, half an hour after this article was published, Politico announced a statement by CUNY that “A proposed policy will be considered by the Board of Trustees at a later time, following additional consultation and discussion.” Meanwhile, The Nation reported that Governor Cuomo continues to pursue a BDS Blacklist, in a clear violation of the First Amendment. Later in the evening, the Professional Staff Congress Delegate Assembly voted 111-11 to approve the contract as it stands for ratification by the union membership.

is an archivist, doctoral student, educator, and organizer at the City University of New York, a collective member of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and a co-founding participant in the Free University of New York City. Conor researches twentieth and twenty first-century literatures of social movements and urban freedom schools, and will be a 2016-2017 Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

CUNY Professors Decry Their Union’s Anti-Israel, Anti-American Activities (Jewish Press)

Jewish Press

CUNY Professors Decry Their Union’s Anti-Israel, Anti-American Activities

By:Elliot Resnick, Jewish Press Staff Reporter Wednesday, December 19, 2007

“Not in our name!” some City University of New York (CUNY) professors are proclaiming.

The Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the union that represents 20,000 faculty members and other professional staff at CUNY, supports and promotes various far-left and anti-Israel causes, these professors claim.

For example, a mere 16 days after September 11, 2001, PSC President Barbara Bowen was one of thirteen principal officers to sign a statement denouncing “George Bush’s war” in Afghanistan.

This statement, issued by New York City Labor Against the War (NYCLAW), claims the United States has already “inflicted widespread suffering on innocent people in such places as Iraq, Sudan, Israel, the Occupied Territories…” and warns that war “will play into the hands of religious fanatics from Osama bin Laden to Jerry Falwell.”

The statement proposes that “an independent international tribunal [should] impartially investigate, apprehend and try those responsible for the September 11 attack.”

Justifying its occasional venture into the political realm, the PSC told The Jewish Press that it cannot “defend the interests of our members without participating in the life of the city, state and nation that defines the social and political context in which we work and teach.”

However, KC Johnson, professor of history at Brooklyn College, said this is only an excuse. Referring to PSC leadership as the “far left fringe,” Johnson said “they’re far more interested in international affairs than they are in the working conditions of most people at CUNY.”

Bronx Community College professor of history David Gordon agreed: “They pay far too much attention to radical causes that are dear to the far left but much less attention to the economic needs of the membership.”

Among other groups the PSC supports directly or by proxy, Johnson said, is Labor for Palestine, whichNYCLAW co-founded with the pro-Palestinian group Al-Awda. In a letter to fellow trade unionists and workers, Labor for Palestine calls attention to Israel’s “brutal military occupation of Palestine,” and its “murder and collective punishment” of Palestinians.

The letter concludes by asking all labor bodies to “demand an end to U.S. military and economic support for Israeli Apartheid,” which it estimates at five billion dollars annually.

The PSC averred that it “has no affiliation with Labor for Palestine.”

However, while English professor emerita at Bronx Community College Nahma Sandrow said, this is “technically true,” she pointed to the PSC’s association with NYCLAW co-convener Michael Letwin, who is “explicitly against Israel,” and who also helped draft Labor for Palestine’s founding document in 2004.

Letwin was president of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys in New York City for 13 years until he lost re-election in 2002, in part because of his opposition to the war in Afghanistan. In a Socialist Actionarticle in 2002 concerning AFL-CIO’s ownership of millions of dollars-worth of Israeli bonds, Letwin was quoted as saying, “It’s bad enough that our tax dollars are going to fund Israel, but our union dues – that’s intolerable.”

Letwin co-chaired an anti-war meeting with PSC president Barbara Bowen in 2004 and received a “Friend of CUNY” award from the PSC on behalf of NYCLAW that same year.

PSC President Barbara Bowen

“These people are exploiting being in a position of power in a labor union to make a political statement against Israel. They have enormous power here and it’s scary,” Sandrow said.

Further indication of PSC’s anti-Israel sentiment lies in the signature of PSC International Committee chairman Renate Bridenthal on “An Open Letter/Petition from American Jews to Our Government.” The petition declares: “Our country has an extraordinary leverage on Israeli policy, if only our government would dare to use it…. [W]e call on our government to make continued aid conditional on Israeli acceptance of an internationally agreed two-state settlement.”

More locally, the PSC recently praised New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s plan to grant illegal immigrants driver licenses. The PSC’s Solidarity Committee had fought for the change, which, according to the PSC, “makes the city safer for all of us.”

Professor of mathematics at Queens College Michael Maller remembers a time when the PSC was less political. The PSC used to be led, he said, by “liberal Democrats akin to Mario Cuomo.” However, “they were getting older and losing energy.” Then, in 2000, Barbara Bowen led a group called the New Caucus, which won control of PSC’s executive council. “And now we’re being led by an alliance of leftists and deconstructionists.”

Following The Money

Many professors and students at CUNY are unaware of the PSC’s ideological positions and activism, according to Brooklyn College’s Professor Johnson. “[PSC president Barbara] Bowen is careful that people do not know,” he said.

For example, said Johnson, very few people know that the PSC distributes union money to political causes. Individual sums are sometimes small but nevertheless shed light on whom the PSC feels worthy of its money.

For example, in late 2001 the University of South Florida moved to dismiss Professor Sami Al-Arian amid allegations that he supported Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The PSC’s Delegate Assembly reacted by proclaiming a “threat to academic freedom and the First Amendment.”

It adopted a resolution on April 25, 2002 to donate $100 to faculty at the University of South Florida defending Al-Arian. In a plea agreement in April 2006, Al-Arian admitted to aiding Palestinian Islamic Jihad and agreed to be deported.

“The PSC did not contribute any funds to Al Arian,” the PSC wrote to The Jewish Press. “[W]e did contribute $100.00 to support the academic freedom campaign of a faculty union in Florida.”

The PSC does admit donating $5,000 to Lori Berenson, an American woman accused of aiding a Marxist terrorist organization in Peru. However, it claims the contribution was humanitarian and made to Lori’s parents, not to her. (Her father was a professor at Baruch College and a member of the PSC.)

Professor David Seidemann, who teaches geology at Brooklyn College, decries PSC’s political expenditures. “I don’t think any union leader should be using union money for any political agenda,” he said. “Just do what serves everybody’s interests and forget the politics. That’s my philosophy.”