DATE LINES
Ervin, Michael & Franklin, Karen E. & Goodman, David
DATE LINES Where High School Kids Learn to Think CHICAGO Pedro Albizu Campos High School is housed in an old Walgreen's film-processing plant in Chicago's burned-out West Town neighborhood. That...
...At the time, the Chicago terrorism trial of members of the FALN Puerto Rican independence group was big news...
...Their manual suggests doing it in sixty years...
...Professor Sues MIT over Tenure CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS For nine years, David Noble worked his way up the academic ladder at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
...at Campos, 85 per cent finish school...
...Now a tenured professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Noble is suing MIT for $1.5 million, charging that the university fired him because of his left-wing political views and his public statements criticizing MIT, and thus denied his rights to free speech and academic freedom...
...They're all around...
...The Forest Service merely points to ANILCA and shrugs...
...MIT claims politics has nothing to do with it...
...The timber-supply fund "has turned out to be for the dependent Forest Service, not for the dependent industry...
...The deal has proven painfully uneconomical because the bottom fell out of the Alaska pulpwood market shortly after ANILCA became law...
...If the Forest Service stops roading as much, there's not as much need for engineers...
...Local residents, scientists, and conservationists answer that question with a resounding No...
...At that rate, they'd road 100 per cent of the unprotected roadless areas in twelve to sixteen years," says Society lobbyist Steve Richardson...
...The local economy depends more on a healthy ecosystem than on the timber industry, in any case: Most residents rely on commercial fishing, subsistence farming, outdoor recreation, and tourism for their livelihoods...
...Unless the law is changed," says planner Rai Behnert, "the agency is duty-bound to follow it...
...Which has extensive connections with the military and industry...
...The original observers had reported being impressed by the way the students felt "loved, capable, respected, and encouraged...
...In 1983, an interdepartmental tenure-review committee unanimously agreed to offer tenure to Noble...
...But, in any case, says Eggan, Campos teachers are supposed to express strong opinions—that's what education there is all about...
...But they have to believe that their opinion means something...
...But only a small percentage of that wilderness land actually contains commercially valuable trees...
...In return, the law designates five million Tongass acres as wilderness, prohibiting timber harvesting and road construction forever...
...Many either decline to comment publicly or refuse to speak at all about Noble's allegations...
...You're talking about bureaucratic inertia," says SEACC attorney Steve Kallick...
...ANILCA calls for a cutting goal of about 450 million board-feet per year regardless of market conditions or environmental considerations...
...I think their major motivation is to protect their own jobs...
...Forest Service could defile a seventeen-million-acre stretch of Alaskan wilderness, one of the last unadulterated ecosystems left...
...In Forces of Production, his most recent book, he charges that MIT stole the work of an independent engineer in the 1950s in an attempt to design the first automated machine tools for a contract with the U.S...
...Noble, however, cites this attitude as a prime example of why his colleagues denied him tenure...
...Enraged by the Tongass plan, many Alaskans have turned to activism...
...You don't have to look far to get in struggles...
...So CAPE sent a new crew of observers to reassess whether Campos should keep its exemplary-school status...
...Now they're seeking funds to meet the final mortgage payment in June...
...There is no evidence that pressure or outside influence was attempted or that the independent judgment of the tenured faculty was affected...
...In 1950, some of his followers tried to assassinate President Harry Truman...
...Which institution is the premier technical institution in the world...
...Karen E. Franklin (Karen E. Franklin is a freelance writer who has written often on environmental issues, including national forest planning...
...The school exists because the community wills it to," says Eggan...
...When repairs were needed after the FBI raid, the people of West Town raised $15,000...
...The Tongass National Forest Land Management Plan-out of compliance with Forest Service regulations by the agency's own admission-threatens to erode the world's largest strongholds of grizzly bears, bald eagles, and other wildlife of the Alaska Panhandle...
...Although the timber companies' customers have all but vanished, the Forest Service hasn't slowed down its ambitious road-building schedule or its optimistic harvest goals...
...Colleagues question his discretion...
...Wayne Strnad teaches mathematics and computer classes and has been at Campos for thirteen years...
...David Goodman (David Goodman is a freelance writer in Boston...
...In West Town, the public-school dropout rate is 75 per cent...
...Many teachers and students are indifferent to the question of Puerto Rican independence from the United States...
...I have never seen a school which accomplishes its stated goals in such an exemplary fashion," wrote observer Sandra Hurst...
...The procedures followed in this tenure review," asserts MIT president Paul Gray, "were, in every respect, in conformity with those commonly employed with MIT...
...I'm certain there are many academic-freedom cases which involve internal departmental decisions to keep out dissident or radical faculty," he says, "but I think it's extremely difficult to prove...
...Students who couldn't hack it in public school do better at Campos: In test scores, they advance an average of 1.4 years in a school year, and the 1982-83 students averaged a one-year advancement of 2.6 grade levels in their math scores...
...In 1985, the Council for American Private Education (CAPE) and the U.S...
...Shortly thereafter, the local CBS-TV affiliate ran a three-day news series on how Campos was, as the anchor put it, teaching students to "respect the activities of terrorists...
...Most of the teachers are volunteers who schedule classes around their days off from their regular jobs...
...His persistent criticism of MIT itself has been a major issue in Noble's case...
...We have definite points of view and we think that's what education should be...
...But this approach causes problems...
...Between 1980 and 1985, the agency built roads on 25 per cent of the available roadless area of the Tongass, according to Wilderness Society data...
...The award was temporarily withdrawn...
...After all, the bill's supporters aren't asking for radical change...
...This case is one of the first in which a scholar has challenged the secretive tenure-review process and demanded a public hearing...
...In response, the Forest Service lowered the price of timber by 99 per cent to help out the industry...
...Wildlife biologist Jay Nelson left a post in Alaska with the U.S...
...Their bill would end ANILCA's no-questions-asked fund and overstated harvest goals, replacing them with annual appropriations and harvests based on economics...
...Of today's thirty-five students and the 400-plus who have graduated over the years, most came to Campos as public-school dropouts...
...His last article for The Progressive was "South Africa: Whites Who Won't Fight," in September 1985...
...We've gotten screwed," says Jim Clark, attorney for the Alaska Loggers Association...
...In 1983, the Campos school and the Puerto Rican Cultural Center which operated it were raided by fifty Federal agents wearing black jumpsuits and baseball hats marked FBI...
...But five hours before the June graduation ceremony, at which school officials planned a celebration of the award, the Education Department notified them it had been rescinded again...
...Students are taught," says Eggan, "that they are an important part of a community in struggle and that they have skills that can help that community...
...But the roads have not made logging easier or cheaper...
...Liberal MIT economist Michael Piore said in a court deposition that Noble's work focusing on MIT is "like studying your mother or your father...
...An assistant professor and author of two books and many articles in such publications as democracy and The Nation, Noble earned a reputation as a sharp-tongued but brilliant historian of technology...
...That represents a big step up for the alternative Puerto Rican school...
...Students are not just taught X, Y, and Z, but the importance behind X, Y, and Z. It teaches them to think...
...He says his former colleagues described him as a "vulgar Marxist" and an "advocacy historian" and accused him of being an "anti-technologist, a Luddite...
...We'd like to get people to understand that this [self-censorship] process is going on and that some kind of struggle against it has to take place...
...Air Force...
...It's an outstanding school in many ways," says Strnad...
...One way the school gets dropouts to care, says director of programs Ferd Eggan, is by appealing to what he calls "the strong sense of nationalism" among Puerto Ricans, who live in West Town but are emotionally bound to their home island...
...It's mostly just rock and ice and steep areas," confirms Gary Morrison, Alaska coordinator for the Forest Service...
...Noble has also been a vocal critic of MIT's lucrative relationship with the Whitehead Institute, a private biotechnology research center that employs MIT facilities and faculty but retains commercial rights to scientific discoveries made there...
...What we hope to get is a very thorough discussion of the kind of censorship that is now being exercised by administrators and self-censorship that's being exercised by faculty," says Leonard Min-sky, director of the National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest, which is providing some financial backing for Noble's lawsuit...
...A sad but common story, it would have led most academics to begin packing up their sagging bookshelves...
...Noble backs his charges with statements made in court depositions by members of his tenure-review committee...
...MIT, of course...
...The legislation also guarantees an annual "Tongass timber-supply fund" of at least $40 million, which exempts the operation from going back to Congress every year with a harvest plan and appropriation request—a privilege enjoyed by no other national forest...
...But that decision was reversed later that year, when members of his own department voted to deny tenure...
...Eggan fears the fallout...
...Noble continues to teach and confesses that even in his new job at Drexel, he has gotten into political squabbles...
...Michael Ervin (Michael Ervin is a free-lance writer in Chicago...
...The commonly accepted restriction that you don't make your own institution the subject of your study becomes very big indeed in this instance—you can't study the heart of the monster," Noble says...
...The Forest Service's Road to Nowhere JUNEAU, ALASKA A deal between two multinational timber monopolies and the U.S...
...We don't call ourselves liberals because we don't believe the liberal education idea that all opinions are equal," Eggan says...
...When the boiler broke, they found the money to fix it...
...Commercial fisher Joe Sebastian and Joan Kautzer of Point Baker, a remote village of about seventy-five people now surrounded by intensive logging operations, recently journeyed to Washington to gather co-sponsors for the Tongass Timber Reform Act, introduced in both houses of Congress early this year...
...But David Noble called foul...
...Loss of community support is a severe threat...
...Pedro Albizu Campos started out in a church basement in 1972, with a student body of eight Puerto Ri-cans kicked out of the public high school for leading a student strike over the lack of bilingual education...
...The students don't have to have the same opinion...
...But whether it makes sense to prepare that amount of timber, that's questionable...
...he asks...
...In the spring of 1986, CAPE reinstated Campos's exemplary status...
...I don't know how not to get in tangles if you have any level of integrity," he says...
...Roads to nowhere lace the forest, accomplishing little...
...Another observer, R. Bruce McPherson, called charges of terrorist indoctrination "absurd" and said not restoring exemplary status would be "fraudulent and dumb...
...They've been building roads where there's the worst timber so the money hasn't done us any good...
...Noble's scholarly specialty is the study of technical education and the development of science and technology in society...
...The second set of observers concurred and unanimously reaffirmed Campos's selection...
...The FBI was trying to determine the accuracy of rumors that the school and center were actively involved in support for the FALN, and the agents seized evidence and arrested some people, but have taken no furthar action...
...Seen as vital to the local economy, the timber contracts are supported by a 1980 law, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) that seems to fly in the face of the more ecology-minded National Forest Management Act of 1976...
...Campos, they reported, offered a strong alternative to the "drugs, gangs, and violence that nearly all other youth in their community participate in...
...Influenced by two fifty-year timber contracts the Forest Service holds with the Alaska Pulp Company and the Ketchikan Pulp Company, the plan authorized the agency to prepare the ancient trees for sale at a rate far outpacing demand and to build unnecessary roads into the raw back-country...
...So for me to focus on MIT makes perfect sense...
...All we want," says Koehler, "is for the Tongass to be treated the same as any other national forest...
...We just want to see it managed for true multiple use...
...So far the plan has cost taxpayers more than $50 million a year and returned virtually nothing...
...The Forest Service's own literature says current policy doesn't make sense," says Richardson of the Wilderness Society, "and the bill has an excellent chance of being passed...
...The MIT faculty is sharply divided on the merits of Noble's case...
...The combination of the long-term contracts, the untouchable pork-barrel timber-supply fund, and the rock-bottom prices the pulp mills are paying for timber has resulted in an incredible ripoff of public tax dollars and forest resources," says SEACC's Koehler...
...Department of Education selected Campos as one of the exemplary private schools of the year...
...Fish and Wildlife Service to lobby for the bill in SEACC's new Washington office...
...The contracts are a very big tail wagging the dog," says Bart Koehler, executive director of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council (SEA-CC), a coalition of area community groups named by Congress in 1980 to monitor Tongass management...
...The school is named, for example, for Pedro Albizu Campos, a forty-year leader of the Puerto Rican independence movement...
...MIT Professor Noam Chomsky points out that there are inherent problems in tenure disputes...
Vol. 51 • June 1987 • No. 6
