Support the Nationwide Student Strike, Feb. 15, 2007

To My Academic Colleagues: In the Faculty and Student Body—I Invite You to Incite!

I am a visiting professor of German at the University of Illinois-Chicago. And I am tired of pretending that we, as academics, intellectuals, professors, teachers and instructors are not complicit by our silence and our refusal or inability to provide leadership and guidance to our students in resisting the illegal war in Iraq.

Students at UC - Santa Barbara have initiated a one day student strike against the war on February 15th. Students at Columbia University, UC - Berkeley, Sonoma State, Occidental College, Fordham University, San Francisco State, University of North Carolina - Greensboro; and Columbia College (Chicago) are planning rallies, walk-outs, and/or strikes on their campuses February 15th.

February 15th marks the 4th anniversary of when millions of people came out around the world to protest Bush's planned war on Iraq. In the wake of Bush's escalation of a war that has already caused the deaths of 655,000 Iraqis and over 3,000 US soldiers, and threats to attack Iran, this student strike is urgently needed, and must spread to other campuses quickly. Now is not the time to be waiting for Congress to make slow incremental steps towards some eventual phased withdrawal. Now is the time for millions of people to get out and demand an end to the war immediately.

(More information available here )

Today I join many colleagues and friends throughout the nation in inviting you to not only support your students, but to enthusiastically encourage them, indeed to incite them to heed Noam Chomsky’s call for a nationwide student strike:

Speaking to a packed auditorium at Columbia University February 5th, Chomsky cited Harold Pinter's Nobel lecture in which Pinter called for "organized opposition" to the Iraq war and the Bush administration, and called the student strike February 15 "a step towards such organized opposition," citing the importance and impact of the student strikes and protests in 1970 against the US war on Southeast Asia.—Noam Chomsky

(I have also invoked Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize Award Speech, many a time, see for example, “The Vast Tapestry of Lies on which We Feed...”: Harold Pinter on "Art, Truth and Politics" ).

Herr, es ist Zeit./Lord, it is time.—Rainer Maria Rilke

You are a professor, a teacher, you say. Or it is what you hope to be, some day. But what is it that you profess to teach?

What I have to teach, today: there is a time when it is better to close the books, lock the libraries, shut down the lecture halls and teach our students to take responsibility for their future, their dreams, their lives, their freedom. A responsibility too many of us in this profession have shirked for decades. Now it is time for our students to take this torch in hand. The least we can do is teach them that this is as worthwhile an endeavor as any theory, any formula, any literary masterpiece.

It is time for us—the professors, the teachers, to take the lead in inciting our students to action.

Today I join my colleague, Bruce Lincoln, Caroline E. Haskell Professor of History of Religions University of Chicago, who has taken a bold lead in this initiative:

I support the goal of forcing a recalcitrant administration to put an end to its ill-conceived adventure in Iraq and I admire the commitment of those who have taken the lead in organizing this strike. In solidarity with them, I will not teach on the 15th and am encouraging my students to take actions consistent with their consciences as regards the war.

"I circulated the statement from Columbia students to all my colleagues, told them of my intent to cancel classes and urged them to do the same. I've also announced to my classes that the strike is taking place, told them of my support for it, and called off classes.

I join Howard Zinn in not only affirming this action, but inciting others—in the student body and faculty alike—to do the same:

I would like to endorse the idea of a student strike on campuses all over the country on February 15, to rekindle the flame of protest that flared up all over the world on that date four years ago, as ten million people protested the pending invasion of Iraq by the United States. A student strike at this time would be a great boost to the movement against the war and would send a signal to Congress that it should listen to the American people and act immediately to stop this ugly war.—Howard Zinn

I invite you to incite your students to support their colleagues, friends and fellows in the Student Strike at Columbia College!

Support the student strike at Columbia College!
February 15 Coalition Against the War, Columbia College is holding a press conference on Wednesday, February 14, at noon at 623 S. Wabash. Spread the word, especially to anyone you know in the media. Contact 312-217-6700 or february15colum@yahoo.com
SUPPORT THE STRIKE on Thursday, February 15, all day. Lobby of 623 S. Wabash.

I have cancelled my classes on Thursday, February 15, and encourage you to do the same. I have encouraged my students to participate actively in the strike.

Interestingly enough, archival documents recently surfaced in my department, reminding us of Professor Alfred Wallace, a professor of German who joined the University of Illinois at Chicago German department in 1966, was inducted into the Selective Service in March, 1968, and refused the call—risking his job and imprisonment. Here is a photograph of Alfred Wallace, standing before the building in which my department is still housed.




Here is a copy of his statement, transcribed from a pamphlet distributed by the SDS, the Committee to End the War, and others of Good will:

The Romans martyred the Christians.
The medieval church burned heretics.
The Puritans destroyed witches.
The Nazis tried to “solve the Jewish Problem.”
The USSR crushed Hungary.
And now the United States wages war against the people of Vietnam.

All the above were sanctioned by law.

Human society is good and ought to be maintained.
A framework of just laws is necessary in maintaining the social fabric, thus respect for such laws is good. But when a state attempts to force men to do evil, the law which authorizes such coercion is void. If our country is to survive, then the responsibility lies on us all to resist the war and the draft. If in so doing we must break a law which is an instrument of oppression, then let it be so.

Our country was founded almost two hundred years ago by men who, having failed in earnest attempts to secure justice and liberty, disobeyed oppressive and unjust laws. Some years later the abolitionists broke the laws of the states and of the Nation by helping black slaves, legally the property of white men, to escape from their masters. Neither then nor now can any law, combination of laws, or “national interest” justify treating people as things. The Abolitionists broke a law, but they were not guilty; they reaffirmed the worth of human beings.

“Patriotism,” “freedom,” and “manhood” increasingly lose meaning as they become terms in the process of psychological blackmail. Thus a “patriot” is a man who follows orders without question; a “real man” kills “gooks,” and “freedom”—well that’s what “we” are fighting for and what “they” are fighting against.

If one demands that the ends can never justify the means, then freedom and the Selective Service cannot both exist, first because state ownership of people is antipathetic to freedom and second because the existence of a ready supply of draftable men encourages policy makers to indulge in reckless military adventures against peoples and nations which will not accept American domination.

Human beings are caught in time; we cannot remove ourselves from the world around us, deferring judgment until History brings in all the facts. Any such attempt is a tacit endorsement of the existing situation, thus every action (and every inaction) is a choice.

Because I must make a choice, I choose not to make war against the Vietnamese people and not to support conscription. Therefore I refuse to comply with the Selective Service order that I report for induction into the armed forces on March 20, 1968. A man has only a few realistic options when faced with induction: acceptance, flight and exile, or imprisonment. I do not wish to go to jail, but that is the consequence of my actions, and I accept it.

I appeal to my colleagues, to the university community, to my friends: please consider carefully what you have chosen to do and what you can choose to do. --Alfred Wallace (emph. LMF)

In this spirit, I appeal today to my colleagues, to the university community, to my friends: please consider carefully what you can choose to do.

Defiantly yours,

The Professors
A poem by Georg Heym, translated from the German by Anthony Hasler

They sit by fours behind the table’s green,
entrenched beneath the canopy’s high edges.
they squat baldheaded in each folio’s pages
as ancient inkfish squat on carrion.

Sometimes their hands appear, befouled with ink
that’s smeared them black. Often their lips
fly open noiselessly. And each tongue droops
over the pandects like a long red trunk.

Sometimes they seem to blur far off and float
like shadows in the whitewash of the wall,
their voices sounding faded and remote.

And then their mouths grow monstrous. A white storm
of slaver. Hush. And on the margin crawls
the paragraph, a long green worm.
Cited from Georg Heym, Poems: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Anthony Hasler (Evanston: NWUP, 2004), 77.