sign petition for secretary of education

Please sign this petition and help us convince Barack Obama to nomintate Linda Darling-Hammond to the position of Secretary of Education so we can finally improve our schools!

To: President-Elect Barack Obama
Given the dreadful direction our public schools are headed under the No Child Left Behind Act and the importance of education to the future of our country, we the undersigned respectfully request that President-Elect Barak Obama nominate Linda Darling-Hammond as the United States Secretary of Education.

Linda Darling-Hammond is Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University where she has launched the Stanford Educational Leadership Institute and the School Redesign Network. She has also served as faculty sponsor for the Stanford Teacher Education Program. She is a former president of the American Educational Research Association and member of the National Academy of Education. Her research, teaching, and policy work focus on issues of school restructuring, teacher quality and educational equity. From 1994-2001, she served as executive director of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, a blue-ribbon panel whose 1996 report, What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future, led to sweeping policy changes affecting teaching and teacher education. In 2006, this report was named one of the most influential affecting U.S. education and Darling-Hammond was named one of the nation's ten most influential people affecting educational policy over the last decade. Among Darling-Hammond's more than 300 publications are Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and be Able to Do (with John Bransford, for the National Academy of Education, winner of the Pomeroy Award from AACTE), Teaching as the Learning Profession: A Handbook of Policy and Practice (Jossey-Bass: 1999) (co-edited with Gary Sykes), which received the National Staff Development Council's Outstanding Book Award for 2000; and The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Schools that Work, recipient of the American Educational Research Association's Outstanding Book Award for 1998.

-From her Stanford University faculty page http://ed.stanford.edu/suse/faculty/displayRecord.php?suid=ldh

The signatures below will be delivered to President-Elect Obama's administration at a time before his inauguration in order to impart to him the importance of a truly progressive public education system and that Dr. Darling-Hammond is a key ingredient to achieving such a system.

Sincerely,
The Undersigned

Fwd: Save Antioch College

Dear Professor Mannur,
I am wondering whether you might be interested in signing and helping us circulate our petition in support of Antioch College. This petition is geared specifically towards academics and higher-education professionals across the nation.
Thank you!
Iveta Jusova, Ph.D.
Antioch College
http://petition.antiochians.org/
"Save Antioch College as a progressive residential liberal-arts college with a tenured faculty."
We, the undersigned higher-education professionals, urge that Antioch College be reopened as a four-year residential liberal-arts institution at the earliest possible time, so that it can continue its historic mission of educating students to--in the words of its first President Horace Mann--"win victories for humanity."
Antioch University's administration and Board of Trustees announced last year that the University would close Antioch College due to alleged financial exigency, without consulting the faculty or alerting alumni to the gravity of the~situation.~ When alumni demonstrated significant financial support for an independent Antioch College, the Board rejected three viable plans to keep the College open.~ We believe that it is time for Antioch University to step aside and cede control of Antioch College to alumni and faculty holding the needed skills, resources, and determination to restore and maintain this institution.
In line with the recent Antioch University Board of Trustees resolution inviting a new proposal from the Antioch College Alumni Association, we call on the board to facilitate transfer of the College and its assets in a manner that will allow it to reopen as soon as possible under the able stewardship of faculty and alumni who have worked tirelessly to support this institution.~
We applaud the work of "Nonstop Antioch," a coalition of alumni, community members and friends dedicated to saving the College, and the ongoing parallel efforts of the dismissed College faculty to continue the Antioch College tradition of progressive academic and civic education in Yellow Springs next year.~ The Nonstop educational enterprise is built on Antioch's core values, distinguished by high academic standards, a co-op structure of work and study, dedication to social justice, and community governance.
We urge that this tradition be preserved, along with the tradition of tenure and unionized labor, in the form of an autonomous Antioch College.

Filipino American couple, living in U.S. for 20+ years, being deported based on technicality

From a friend:

Article: http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/patriotnews/article304373.ece

This hits home because they're the parents of a good friend of mine from high school, Shappine.

They've been in the U.S. for over 20 years, serving as a doctor and grocer in an underserved rural community in Pennsylvania. The community has come out to support the family and they have a lawyer on board, but it seems that ICE isn't hearing the outpour.

I'm talking to Shappine's cousin, who is a good friend of mine as well, and I'll keep y'all updated to see if we could support this somehow.

Here is an online petition from their local newspaper: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/servanofamily/

Peace,
Charles

p.s. - this article from Philly brings tears to my eyes and for y'all who have parents that worked hard in a small (and often environmentally abusive) business, it'll hit you, too. sheng kai dong is a young 'prodigy' who's dad is being deported, causing a horrible mess for the rest of the family. check it out at http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/11/15/the-prodigy

Defend the University

It seems as if all those with academic positions would want to 
consider signing this petition.  One can do this by e-mailing:  
defend.university@gmail.com.


---

 Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the University



Many concerned individuals, on campuses and beyond, have been 
monitoring and
condemning the recent attacks on academic freedom, including the ever 
more aggressive
incursion of partisan politics into universities' hiring and tenure 
practices.
Today a diverse group of academics and others are joining together to 
collectively mark
our resistance to the current abrogation of academic freedoms.  To 
begin we are asking
people to sign up so that their name may be added to the petition on 
our web page here,
and to the petition as it will appear in the  press.
   If you would like to join us, or for more information, please 
contact us at defend.university@gmail.com.



 Our Petition
    In recent years, universities across the country have been 
targeted by outside groups seeking to influence what is taught and 
who can teach. To achieve their political agendas, these groups have 
defamed scholars, pressured administrators, and tried to bypass or 
subvert established procedures of academic governance. As a 
consequence, faculty have been denied jobs or tenure, and scholars 
have been denied public platforms from which to share their 
viewpoints. This violates an important principle of scholarship, the 
free exchange of ideas, subjecting them to ideological and political 
tests. These attacks threaten academic freedom and the core mission 
of institutions of higher education in a democratic society.

    Unfortunately and ironically, many of the most vociferous 
campaigns targeting universities and their faculty have been launched 
by groups portraying themselves as defenders of Israel. These groups 
have targeted scholars who have expressed perspectives on Israeli 
policies and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with which they 
disagree. To silence those they consider their political enemies, 
they have used a range of tactics such as:

*unfounded insinuations and allegations, in the media and on 
websites, of anti-Semitism or
sympathy for terrorism or "un-Americanism;"
*efforts to broaden definitions of anti-Semitism to include 
scholarship and teaching that is critical of U.S. foreign policy in 
the Middle East and of Israel;
*pressures on university administrations by threatening to withhold 
donations if faculty they have targeted are hired or awarded tenure;
*campaigns to deny scholars the opportunity to present their views to 
the wider public;
*the promotion of efforts to restrict federal funding for area 
studies programs and the teaching of critical languages on political 
grounds;
*lawsuits in the name of the "right" of individual students not to 
hear ideas that may challenge or contradict their beliefs;
*and demands in the name of "balance" and "diversity" that those with 
whom they disagree be prevented from speaking unless paired with 
someone whose viewpoint they approve of.

    The suppression of free speech undermines academic freedom and 
subverts the norms of academic life.  It poses a serious threat to 
institutions of higher education in the United States.  The 
university should be a place where different interpretations can be 
explored and competing ideas exchanged. Academic freedom means not 
only the right to pursue a variety of interpretations, but the 
maintenance of standards of truth and acceptability by one's peers.  
It is university faculty, not outside political groups with partisan 
political agenda, who are best able to judge the quality of their 
peers' research and teaching. This is not just a question of academic 
autonomy, but of the future of  a democratic society. This is a time 
in which we need more thoughtful reflection about the world, not less.

    A study by a Harvard sociologist last summer found that "a 
greater percentage of social scientists today feels their academic 
freedom has been threatened than was the case during the McCarthy 
era."  It is time to defend the norms of scholarship and the best 
traditions of the academy.

We, the undersigned, therefore pledge:

    *to speak out against those who attack our colleagues and our 
universities in order to achieve their political goals;
*to urge university administrators and trustees to defend academic 
freedom and the norms of academic life, even if it means incurring 
the displeasure of non-scholarly groups, the media among them;
    *to vigorously promote our views in the media and through the 
Internet, and to explain the importance of academic freedom to a 
sustainable and vibrant democracy;
    *to mobilize our students to defend the values and integrity of 
their institutions.

The future of higher education in America, its role in our country's 
democracy, and its contribution to world affairs is at stake.  Join 
us in defending academic freedom!
Joan Scott, Edmund Burke, Jeremy Adelman, Steven Caton, Jonathan 
Cole, Organizing Committee.