Letter in Support of Tony Kushner
by Alex Vitale on Friday, May 6, 2011 at 3:31pm
May 6, 2011
Dear Governor Cuomo and Mayor Bloomberg,
As a member of the faculty at Brooklyn College I am deeply upset
about the CUNY Board of Trustees’ actions this week denying an honorary
degree to Tony Kushner, someone whose work I have admired for many
years. This incident provides strong evidence that the current Board of
Trustees is deeply out of touch with both their responsibilities as
Board members and the fundamental mission of a public university. My
reading of this event is that the Board, in failing to stand up to
Wiesenfeld’s political hackery, grandstanding, and slander, is
disinterested in the life of the mind, intellectual honesty, or
academic merit.
It should go without saying that I feel that Wiesenfeld is unfit
to serve on the board of this great institution and should be removed
immediately, he is utterly lacking in academic accomplishment, has shown
little interest in the role of CUNY as an institution of social
integration and opportunity, and appears to be on the board because of
political opportunism. He is the epitome of what is wrong with the
current system of appointing Board members that rewards the politically
connected rather than searching for great intellectual leaders.
But while Wiesenfeld’s sin of commission is abhorrent, I find the
lack of resistance to it by the rest of the Board a no less insidious
sin of omission. In failing to quash Wiesenfeld’s extremism, the rest of
the board revealed their own lack of intellectual and ethical merit. The
Board stood idly by while the fundamental tenets of intellectual freedom
were torn asunder by McCarthyistic bloviating. Political opportunists
revel in moments like this when their rhetorical bomb throwing is
rewarded with actual power—always ready to push their agenda when
enabled by those who refuse to stand in their way because of decorum,
ignorance, or political expediency.
This event, however, has merely revealed a rot that has been long
festering. The CUNY Board has utterly failed to defend the core mission
of this University. They have allowed political leaders in Albany and
City Hall to continually chip away at the resources needed to create
opportunity for hundreds of thousands of the City’s young people.
Instead of responding with a vigorous defense of the University’s
mission they have chimed in with their own plans for privatization,
tuition increases, and Potemkin villages of privilege for the few at the
expense of the many.
I am further galled by the total lack of respect for the faculty
evinced in this travesty. By what intellectual and ethical basis do they
have the right to question the decisions of the faculty in such a
matter? A group made up of union busting lawyers, political operatives,
and investment bankers, seems in no position to make such judgments.
This latest incident seems consistent with the Board’s willingness to
usurp the role of faculty by taking over decisions concerning
curriculum, creating a new community college without basic governance
structures, and constantly obstructing the right of the faculty and
professional staff union (PSC-CUNY) to bargain over the basic conditions
of our worklife.
I call on you to direct the Board to apologize to Tony Kushner and
just as importantly the faculty of John Jay College. I also urge you to
take this opportunity to make major changes in the composition of the
Board. CUNY needs intellectual leaders, with a vision about how to
provide excellence in education to those who have faced great challenges
in getting here, a vision of what a great public university should be,
sitting at the center of the intellectual and cultural life of the city.
We don’t need corporate executives, political insiders, and financiers
to accomplish this. We need great artists and great thinkers with
imagination and the desire for innovation, who will work with the
communities of the City to produce the best possible City University of
New York. To that end you should immediately replace Jeffrey Wiesenfeld
with Tony Kushner on the Board. His is the kind of intellectual,
artistic, and ethical leadership we need.
Sincerely,
Alex S. Vitale
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology
Brooklyn College
CUNY Graduate Center class of 2001.
CC Matthew Goldstein
Board of Trustees
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