Orange County Register

Our household’s copy of The Nation arrived last week with a long, helpful piece by Jon Wiener, “Warriors for Zion – in California” on the continuing campus struggle over free speech — or whatever it is — between Zionists and Muslims at UC Irvine. 

Wiener teaches history there, when he is not writing for Dissent or The Nation or hosting one of KPFK’s best weekly programs, “The Four O’Clock Report,” Wednesdays at, well, yes, 4 pm.  I happened to attend a recent 50th Israel anti-anniversary event at the flag poles at UCI where I heard my friend Jim Lafferty of the National Lawyer’s Guild give a historical analysis of Palestine and also bumped into the parents of Rachel Corrie, the young woman martyred for her effort at human rights. 

This was quite a scene, with all the provocative agit-prop arts and crafts you’d expect, security detail, a big crowd, except that you might not expect it at UCI.  The assembly came on the heels of a recent public art show by the Darfur Action Coalition and walkway lobbying and voter registration by CalPIRG, two great campus activist groups. 

Yes, it’s often easy to miss the politics at UCI when pushing through crowds of zombie-like fraternity and sorority solicitors (they somehow never invite me to join!) and the free Bible guy and the LDS proselytizers and the odious merchants of cheapo dorm-room posters (still with the Bruce Lee?) and sweatshop clothing, flip-flops, hippie jewelry.  But the variety and action by so many groups, from College Republicans to my own favorite, the Atheists, Agnostics and Rationalists at UCI (http://clubs.uci.edu/aar/) puts the lie to any easy write-off of political activism at the campus in arguably the most conservative county of any UC.
 
Which brings me to the Employee Free Choice Act, sort of.   Most grownups I’ve talked to tell me they didn’t learn how to write until after graduation.  Or think, or compose, or whatever you want to call it.  On the job, or in graduate school, they didn’t put it all together until they needed to write something:  a grant proposal, a funding request, a report, an application. 

So why teach undergrads composition at all, and further prejudice their experience by making it compulsory?  Partly, argues the Faculty Senate, to prepare them for when they need to, presumably when they have a reason to write, out of self-interest.  And partly, maybe, to show that there’s something to write about? 

Helpfully, the activists on campus — right and left, religious and atheist and reactionary and progressive — seem lately to be doing their part in the civics meets literacy paradigm.  And after a couple of years using provocative, polemical texts including Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich’s now classic “undercover” study of working-class labor and Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire and Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers maybe the connection between in-class writing and real-world discourse is just a little more obvious. 

It is to me at least.  Recent UCI research composition students had to read those texts, critique them, isolate problems they posed, and argue public policy positions toward answering them.  The Employee Free Choice Act will, of course, never become law.  It’s stuck in the U.S. Senate in a cloture debate with all Republicans against it, and probably some Dems.  Bush has threatened to veto, no surprise there.  And “No surprise there” is exactly the kind of phrase I like to hear students use when they discuss and argue, an easy expression of literacy and familiarity which they should be able to offer after taking the class.  Why the Employee Free Choice Act?  The bill offers more protections and incentives for unionization of many low-wage workers.  It is the singular and logical and reasonable proposed bill.  It is  embraced by so many beginning researchers, so elegantly obvious and correct a solution to the problems of exploitive work raised in Nickel and Dimed that, although it will never pass, it now has to be mentioned in any discussion by anybody who knows anything.  (Like if you were talking about Israel policy and had to mention the U.S. subsidizing its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.)  So that a student’s insider familiarity, and ability to use the necessary lingo of political discourse (as they do athletics or gaming or music) is a modest if important measure of some real success at breaking down walls.  For me it’s the equivalent of shoving my way, politely, through the crowd of “Greeks” standing next to their giant letters in their goofy costumes, passing out their invitations on Ring Road in my effort to get to the rally or teach-in or demonstration under the American flag, where the real world is living, talking, learning.

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