Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

"No Gun Left Behind: The Gun Lobby's Campaign to Push Guns Into Colleges and Schools"

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/08/1328243

Brian Siebel, senior attorney with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, talks about his new report that draws attention to the gun lobby's efforts in recent years to change college campus rules prohibiting firearms.

Well, what we point out is, we didn't even know who had been shot at Virginia Tech, when several gun lobby organizations put out press releases calling for students and teachers on college campuses to be armed. You know, I think they would like it to give everybody a gun and start the crossfire. I think that's their solution to this kind of tragedy. Of course, we totally disagree with that. And the report is designed to draw attention to their campaign. It follows on the heels of another campaign that the gun lobby has been pushing, which is to force guns into workplaces. They have supported bills in a number of states to bar employers from keeping guns out of employees' cars. We think that's again just a kind of foot-in-the-door effort that ultimately they would like to see guns essentially everywhere in society.

The Irish Times
28/04/2007
Irish Times Article - Sensible gun laws only way to secure a safe future for US

The majority of students of Virginia Tech are doing something ordinary yet also remarkable this week: they are studying hard for their final exams. Working through the horrific murders of 27 of their fellow students and 5 of their faculty at the hands of a disturbed class mate, Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech community is refusing to be defined by a violent rampage that has shocked the United States and caused sorrow across the world. Virginia Tech is an institution of higher learning, a place where young people can realize their potential and, as the university slogan puts it, ‘invent the future.’ The return of students in large numbers after such a terrible crime is re-affirming this to the world.

The loss of so many young lives on April 16th has shaken us all. A flotilla of media decamped to our main university campus in Blacksburg and recorded our shock and our tears. It has also encountered, in conversations with our students and faculty, our capacity to rally and persevere. As a Virginia Tech faculty member for eighteen years, I was gratified by two aspects of our response. First, Virginia Tech faculty and students correctly challenged the widespread use of the multi-media images produced by Cho Seung-Hui himself which were integral to enacting his fantasy of heroic ‘re-masculinization’ through brutal violence. The complicity of the media in producing murder as fascinating spectacle is widespread across the globe. Second, amidst our pain, there was also human empathy for Cho’s family and for those beyond our campus who suffer from structural and direct violence every day. The death toll in Baghdad last week was horrific. The Iraq war continues to claim the lives of young American soldiers, some tragically former Virginia Tech students.

The daily death toll from gun violence across the United States is also horrific. In 2004, the New York Times reported this last weekend, an average of about 81 people per day died from gunfire across the United States. Some were suicides, others ‘accidents’ and the rest classified as homicides. In Washington D.C. in 2005, according to public statistics, there were 195 murders, the lowest number in recent years yet still a grim total for a city of only 550,521 people. Look for a rise in the future if the staunchly conservative US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has its way. Last month, it struck down the District’s restrictive handgun law opening the door to a broad roll-back of gun control laws across the United States, especially in its major cities (the decision is on appeal, and may come before the US Supreme Court).

Marginalized by last Monday’s horror at Virginia Tech was a large demonstration in Washington DC for congressional voting rights. Despite having a population almost as numerous as states like North Dakota (636,677), Alaska (663,661), South Dakota (775,933), and larger than Wyoming (509,294), this overwhelmingly African-American city has no Senators or Representatives with political voting power in the Congress seated within it. This matters significantly when it comes to gun control laws to promote public safety and freedom from random acts of madness. All of the states comparable to DC in population are power centers for those forces glamorizing guns and undermining existing gun control laws. National Rifle Association constructions of ‘tradition’ and ‘rights’ (words familiar to Irish ears) are blended with frontier mythology to sell guns, and lots of them, as necessary accessories of a supposedly ‘free’ lifestyle. Paranoid fantasies revolving around government conspiracies and invading outsiders are used to mobilize gun owners into political projects as single issue voters backing NRA-endorsed candidates. Gun laws are for sissies; real men pack heat. But there is no conspiracy, only the organized effort of the gun lobby, deeply entrenched in Congress, to thwart cities suing gun manufacturers for the devastation caused by their products, and to let the Clinton era assault weapons ban lapse. Under the Bush administration, a plethora of semi-automatic assault weapons are now available for sale to the general public.

Last Friday, in the wake of the Virginia Tech rampage, the Democratic controlled House of Representatives passed a bill creating a new Congressional seat for Washington DC and, to attract Republican support, for Republican-leaning Utah also (most Republicans still voted against the measure). The measure was previously stalled by Republican efforts to attach a provision formally overturning the District’s 31 year old ban on hand guns. The bill moves forward into the Senate where the over representation of rural states and the under representation of the interests of America’s cities is most pronounced. It also faces a potential White House veto.

Beyond this modest gesture, the Virginia Tech massacre has generated no serious political response. Politicians have run from the issue rather than face it, blaming university officials and campus security rather than their own complicity with making deadly semi-automatic weapons easily available. The Virginia Tech community reacted strongly against an initial media-driven desire to blame the university and its police force for the absence of a ‘lockdown’ of campus (as if an open campus should be like a prison). Petitions of support for the university president and police chief made it clear we were not accepting this easy ‘blame-the-local-officials’ strategy. Contrast this to how the Australian government reacted in 1996 to the massacre of 35 people in Port Arthur Tasmania by a deranged killer using a semi-automatic rifle. Within 12 days, the federal and state government agreed a ban on semi-automatic rifles and placed strict controls on other guns. The government also launched a large gun buy-back program. The result? Suicides and homicides have declined. In the decade before Port Arthur, there were 10 separate mass-shooting incidents; since, zero.

The United States faces many difficult challenges today. Can the US state extract itself with dignity from Iraq and rebuild its international standing to more effectively thwart terrorism? Can it meet the challenge of global climate change after ignoring it for so long? Can the federal government create legislative solutions that provide adequate health care for all its citizens, as its population ages? And, while its leading politicians may not want to acknowledge it, the Virginia Tech killings renew the question: can the federal government establish meaningful control on handguns and assault weapons? These are profound challenges for the future. My hope and feeling is that some of those students studying hard at Virginia Tech, in the wake of a horrible tragedy, will be involved in inventing a better future for the United States of America, one where security is grounded in sensible gun laws and Virginia Tech is the name of an excellent university not a citation in a continuing list of murderous rampages.

First of all, two fabulous links:

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2001.shtml

http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/1263

I swear, I had to read these twice before I could believe it. But these links are just some of a rash of such claims being made across the right wing blogosphere. These folks are basically arguing that Virginia Tech shooter, Cho, was a "machurian candidate", programmed by the CIA to 'go off' at a preordained time. Why would the CIA wish to do this? Well, because they want to instigate a nation-wide revolution against gun ownership, thus removing the main vestige of the average yanks' power to overthrow the government. And what is the main evidence they draw? Yes, a blog post written by yours truly some time ago advertising an anti-war, anti-CIA (decidedly left-wing!) protest at Virginia Tech.

Here is a clip from the Online Journal piece:

In fact, given Cho Seung-Hui’s deadly proficiency with his Glock 9 millimeter and Walther 22 automatic, he seems much less a random than hand-picked nut, programmed to kill and self-destruct. So who would benefit from striking more gun-terror in the heart of Americans than the biggest gun-toting, terror-provoking administration in the world? And at a point when said administration is bargaining for more money for a war in which more people die in a day than in the last three biggest US campus slayings. Consider the following . . .

Clearly we all need to take a pill. What possible interest would the CIA have in getting rid of hand guns in this country? If only it were true! But what is indeed sad here is the lack of sophisticated analysis. Its just too simple: just brand the CIA as a branch of the 'Illuminati', a secret network of elites that rule the world through such organizations as the Trilateral Commission, and then you don't need to bother to come up with a theory that implicates you or the cultural values you harbor in any wrong doing. This stuff reads like an except of one of those Lyndon Larouche pamphlets you see handed out in the Metro in DC from time to time.

Of course, to many conservatives, the collapse of American society is to be attributed to what they perceive as a feminization and weakening through an influx of foreigners and other ne'er do wells (try to picture George C. Scott's character, Gen. 'Buck' Turgidson, in Dr Strangelove here - wailing about the pollution of the nation's 'precious fluids'). They believe that the 'moral fibre' of the country has has the rug pulled out from under it, so to speak. However, what is remarkably sad about this critique, quite apart from its intrinsic male chauvinism and racism, is that the problems it sees are not the real cause of its advocates' misfortunes. The moral values of American society are not 'rotting' because the CIA and other branches of the global elite are thwarting it. They are rotting because so many members of American society - our friendly right-wing bloggers here not excluded - are locked into a hyper-individualistic view of what society is all about. As Jeremy Rifkin explains in his accessible read, The European Dream, the moral terms of American social life have been staked entirely on competition, risk-taking and the defense of private property (Europe is not that much different, to be sure). As such, American's have little or no time for the gun-control debate quite simply because they have a narrow and skewed understanding of what can be achieved through social contract. They have been viciously competing against each other for so long that they are, essentially, terrified of each other. This is precisely what these more libertarian Americans don't understand: capitalism has run the social fabric of this country into the ground.

People should stop trying to shirk off the blame for America's social ills on its more rarified 'inside the beltway' institutions, and think instead about how each and every facet of American social life has been rent asunder by the regime of capital accumulation, which has not hesitated to uproot and homogenize the length and breadth of the land. Understanding Cho necessarily starts here, with the alienation and misery that has penetrated so deep into the American psyche.

~NiK

Philadelphia Enquirer

Posted on Sun, May. 06, 2007

The April 16 Archive tells a new kind of Virginia Tech story

Storytelling is the heart of literature.

And the heart of history, too.

History came to Virginia Tech on April 16, when a gunman shot 32 people to death before killing himself. In the weeks since, the university's Center for Digital Discourse and Culture (CDDC) has created the April 16 Archive, an online repository of materials related to the shooting that have been contributed by the public.

Materials include firsthand observations, photographs, sound recordings, media reports, personal writing, official statements, blog posts - anything that can be stored as a digital file.

The center has a long-standing commitment to digital literature. Other CDDC projects include the digital art journal New River and a mirror of the Project Gutenberg site. Not surprising, then, the April 16 Archive is much more than a bulletin board of memories and well-wishes. It's a multifaceted account of a single event contributed by people from the Virginia Tech community and the rest of the world. It will only grow larger as time goes on.

"I heard recently that one of the memorial Web sites related to the 1970 Kent State shootings is still receiving stories and materials today," said Brent Jesiek, the manager of the CDDC. "So, we are really on the leading edge here and anticipate that our submission rate will continue to rise in coming weeks as word spreads."

Jesiek explained that the archive is part of the larger trend of digital memory banks, a concept he says has been greatly furthered by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. The George Mason center developed the software infrastructure used by the April 16 Archive, providing an "easy-to-use and intuitive interface so that the public can easily submit and browse their own media and materials related to a given event," Jesiek said.

The center has also built memory banks for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Hurricane Katrina.

Each digital object in the archive helps cobble together a chronicle no one person could create. Really, it's making possible a new kind of story, one told from a multiplicity of vantage points at once.

That is to say, no one person could have seen and photographed the more than 20 ambulances parked behind the academic buildings on the day of the shootings (as Billy Glynn did), and been a professor at George Mason University whose former student knew someone who was injured in the attack, and was a person held at gunpoint himself (as Mills Kelly was), and have known one of the deceased, 20-year-old Leslie Sherman, well enough to write a loving tribute to her (as her former high school teacher James Percoco did).

The project is a kind of ur-story from which others can spin off their own storytellings. The CDDC intends for the archive to assist "artists, humanists, social scientists, and all other scholars" in researching the event and its documentation. Unlike most sites with multiple contributors, the archive follows the citation protocol of traditional scholarly research. Each contributor provides metadata, including the author's name, the type of object being submitted, the date it was submitted, and so forth.

Some of these metadata are displayed with each entry under the heading "citation information," and some are visible only to administrators or researchers.

It isn't always a matter of reporting facts. On April 16, an anonymous poster submitted an original poem. Six days later, Nicholas Kiersey, an Irish doctoral candidate at Virginia Tech, posted a link to an opinion piece he wrote about the American gun-control debate in the Irish Business Sunday Post.

Since the CDDC encourages submissions from anyone who wishes to participate, the project underlines the power of digital media to allow anyone to act as an artist or a reporter.

"This process gives individual citizen-users more agency to tell their stories in their own words and with their own images," Jesiek said.

To put it another way, as the site's home page declares: "We are all Virginia Tech."

The April 16 Archive is at http://www.april16archive.org

Katie Haegele is a writer who lives in Montgomery County. Her e-mail address is katie@thelalatheory.com

The Times Higher Education Supplement

http://www.thes.co.uk/search/story.aspx?story_id=2036340

Security fears after shootings

Tony Tysome
Published: 20 April 2007

The American academic community was in a state of shock this week over the shooting of at least 32 people, including three professors, at Virginia Tech University.

As The Times Higher went to press, fears were growing that the tragic incident could lead to a campus security clampdown with the introduction of restricted areas and airport-style checks and barriers.

One Virginia Tech academic said that his colleagues were reeling from the event.

Stuart Feigenbaum, a hospitality and tourism professor, told The Times Higher: "One of the things that makes this so tragic is that a university is supposed to be an open environment.

"This university has always been very security conscious and has done everything to keep people safe short of having metal detectors everywhere.

We have to ask, should a university become like an airport where people have to go through gates and barriers before they gain access to a class?"

Nicholas Kiersey, an Irish PhD student at the university who knew one of the victims, said: "I have taught students whose parents work for the CIA or hold senior military positions. This will hit policy-making America hard."

The American Council on Education said that campus officials would revisit their own security and emergency preparedness policies.

Universities UK sent a message of condolence to students and staff at Virginia Tech.

Sheffield University confirmed that four of its students on a one-year study abroad programme at the university were safe and well.

Thank you to Simon Carswell and everyone at the Irish Sunday Business Post for publishing this.
~NiK

-------------------

Gun-control debate rages on
22 April 2007
By Nicholas Kiersey

Six days have passed since the horrific events at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, during which 32 people were shot dead by a lone gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, before he killed himself.

It is hardly enough time for students and staff to begin to reflect upon the scale of the event and how it is already provoking what will probably turn out to be a major round in the US gun-control debate.

Of course, the human dimension to the story is being played out this weekend in the homes of the families and friends of the victims. Memorials are taking place around the state. Funerals are being arranged for tomorrow or Tuesday, depending on how soon the police release the bodies.

The university administration wants students back at school for resumption of classes tomorrow. Professors and teaching assistants are being briefed in the coming days. The regular curriculum will be suspended for tomorrow’s classes, in favour of discussions on the events from a variety of perspectives.

Elsewhere, the nation’s media are already turning to eager ‘talking heads’ and pundits for their commentary on the killer, his psychological state and how campuses might better prepare themselves to ward off similar attacks. Conspicuous by its absence in this dialogue, however, is a meaningful engagement by US politicians with the question of gun control.

On the left and right alike, US politicians have long considered the issue of gun control to be very tricky. Analysts have attributed John Kerry’s defeat in the 2000 election to his stance on the banning of assault weapons.

The news networks are affording the pro-gun movement ample space to express its views. The views of Susanna Hupp, herself a survivor of a shoot-out in a Texas cafe in 1991, are not atypical.

As she put it in a debate on CBS last week, the most heinous of all mass killings in the US, like those at Columbine and Virginia Tech, have all taken place in ‘gun-free zones’, places where even basic side arms are banned.

Such views are popular in America and are not uncommon even among students and alumni of Virginia Tech. As one friend of mine, a former tech student currently deployed in Iraq with a private security firm, said a couple of days ago: ‘‘If one of the victims had been carrying [a gun] and had reacted properly, a lot of lives could had been saved.”

Others at Virginia Tech are perplexed by such opinions. The idea that weapons-bearing students might somehow have averted last week’s massacre seems to ignore the likely complexities that such a situation would produce.

How, for example, would students in separate classrooms have been able to distinguish friend from foe? Would such a scenario not make the job of law enforcement officers extremely difficult?

President George W Bush last week asserted his support for the second amendment, the instrument of the US constitution that grants the right to bear arms to all citizens.

The day before his speech at the Virginia Tech memorial convocation, his press secretary, Dana Perino, said: ‘‘The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed.”

However, the second amendment was written when the US nation was still insecure about foreign invasion. Its sole instrumental purpose was to ensure citizens were equipped to form a militia in the absence of a standing army.

Meanwhile, news is breaking about the sheer quantity of ammunition expended by the Virginia Tech killer. Among the inventory he carried on the day were hollow-point shells and ammunition clips capable of holding up to 30 bullets.

Protagonists on both sides of the gun debate in the US tend to stereotype their opponents, yet the pro-gun movement seems incapable of articulating a balanced view on the sorts of weapons required by the average citizen.

The fact remains high-powered guns are too easy to get in Virginia. Second-hand weapons may be purchased with no background check, and there are no state restrictions on the sale of military-style semiautomatic assault weapons, such as the AK47.

As we learned last week, a Virginia judicial officer certified in 2005 that Cho presented ‘‘an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness’’.

As such, Cho probably fell within the category of ‘‘adjudicated as a mental incompetent’’ used in the Federal Gun Control Act of 1968. However, none of this showed up in his background checks on the day he purchased his weapons.

My gun-advocate friends often argue it would be impossible to fully regulate the ownership of guns. Better then to let everyone carry a weapon so that they might defend themselves and thereby create a deterrent.

Yet they ignore the experience of many Europeans, such as myself, who have grown up in countries where gun ownership is regulated quite successfully.

This weekend, most Virginia Tech students will be envious of the sort of peace and security that such regulation can provide.

Nicholas Kiersey, who is from Blessington, Co Wicklow, is a PhD student at Virginia Tech

Irish Examiner

18 April 2007

Irish students ‘should still come to US’

By Stephen Rogers and Brendan Furlong

AN Irish student who lost one of his best friends in the Virginia Tech shootings has said it must not discourage Irish students from going to America for an education.

Nicholas Kiersey, a native of Blessington, Co Wicklow, was not at the campus when the shootings occurred — the PhD student, and teaching assistant on European Affairs is working in the University of Virginia until he completes his PhD in May.

However, his girlfriend was there and yesterday he was travelling to the university from his work in the University of Virginia to comfort her over the loss of their friend Reema Sahama.

“We did not know she was even involved until late on Monday night. At that point we got word that she was in hospital,” he said.

“Then we got the word last night that she had died and that she was the 33rd and last so far, though there are many more in hospital.”

Mr Kiersey, who has been living in Virginia for five years, said that despite the hype which had been built up at the campus with news crews swarming around it, the fact remained there had not been a mass shooting at a university in America since 1966.

However, he admitted this incident would have much more far-reaching consequences as many of the children at Virginia Tech have powerful families.

“These are the sons and daughters of policy makers, espionage people, defence contractors, all manner of American government.”

However, he said the human element must not be forgotten, adding that the tragedy must not discourage Irish students from studying in the US.

“I would not hesitate to encourage anyone to come to the US. This is obviously a tragic event but we have to put it in context.”

Gorey resident and University College Dublin exchange student Nicola Greene told how she woke up to the sound of sirens between 7.15am and 7.30am only yards from where she was sleeping.

She was about to go to a 10am class when she received an email telling her not to leave the dormitory. That was when the bulk of the victims were shot.

“We were eventually let out of the dorm several hours after what had happened. We are getting all our information from TV and people calling” she said.

Three other Irish students, Esther Ryan, Liam Brennan and Eoin Butler all escaped injury in the tragedy.

Just to clarify: I did not express "shock" that the student was in the English Dept. (which the article doesn't even successfully state, implying instead that I had said he was a student of the English "language"). Also, I never said Reema was my "close friend" but, rather, was Madigan's close friend. Also, I am sad that the article focussed on this issue of whether the student was in English or not, and not my lengthy comments, given in the interview, on the question of gun control. Feeling rather upset with the Irish Independent at the moment.

~NiK
------------------

Trauma of Irish: lecturer's friend among the victims
http://www.unison.ie/stories.php3?ca=30&si=1814204

Wednesday April 18th 2007

AN Irish politics lecturer at Virginia Tech has expressed his shock at learning that the gunman who took the life of his close friend was an English language student.

Nicholas Kiersey (32), from Blessington, Wicklow, said he had imagined that the Virginia Tech killer had been struggling with a high-pressure course.

Mr Kiersey's close friend Reema Samaha was the final victim of the South Korean gunman.

The Lebanese woman was in the same dance troupe as Mr Kiersey's girlfriend Madigan, and the couple had enjoyed a day out with her last weekend.

Mr Kiersey, who spent five years as a student at Virginia Tech before becoming a lecturer, said he believes that his fellow graduate student and friend Esther Ryan, also from Wicklow, may also have lost close friends during the gun attack.

Post-grad engineering student Ms Ryan told friends on her Bebo page that her friend's husband and another male friend were missing.

UCD offered three Irish undergraduate students flights home as the extent of the tragedy unfolded. Liam Brennan, Eoin Butler and Nicola Greene, who are studying a year-long engineering course, were on the campus when the shootings took place.

The Dublin college is also opening an online book of condolences that will be sent to Virginia Tech.

Foreign Affairs Minister Dermot Ahern offered "whatever assistance" was required to the students and liaised with their college in Belfield.

It is understood that all of the Irish students have decided to complete their studies before returning home in May.

"I thought my friends and I had got away with it, but Reema died in hospital," Mr Kiersey told the Irish Independent as he made his way to a memorial service at the college yesterday.

He said he had never heard of the gunman but was mystified about his motivation. "English is not known to be a high-pressure course," he said.

"I thought he might have been in engineering at first, as the students on that programme are under a lot of pressure."

Undergraduate student Nicola Greene, from Ballinacoola near Gorey, said she was about to leave for a class at 10am when she got an email informing her to stay indoors.

"It seemed odd at first because before 10am you need to swipe a card to prove you're a resident of the building," she said. "It made me suspicious that anybody could have got into the building that was not a student."

Her parents said she would remain at the college until her exams in May.

"Nicola is very calm," said her father John.

"She will not be coming home yet as there are exams to be done and grades to be achieved.

"It's been an absolutely wonderful experience for her up to now. It will probably be safer there now than it has ever been."

-- Anne-Marie Walsh

Well, my goodness! Thank you VT christians for reminding us of the plight of 100s of people addicted to porn in this country, wandering the streets, unable to function, looking like heroine addicts, or alcoholics.

Shouldn't we be talking about some more important things? Like the fact that 1000s of Christians in this country voted for George 'Evil Motherfucker' Bush, the man who wants to send YOUr children to war for absolutely no useful reason at all?

In a democratic society, i think you'd agree, dear reader, that it is ok for mature people to enjoy porn responsibly. It is entirely irresponsible, however, for people to make fear mongering arguments about people who enjoy porn in a mature and democratic manner.

http://www.collegiatetimes.com/print.php?a=7749

The Economics of a Prudent Homeowner
October 17th, 2006
Stephen Aultman

To understand what Virginia Tech values it is necessary to look not only at our motto and mission statement, but also at how we allocate our time and resources. In many respects I believe the university does a good job of living up to its stated goals and values. When it comes to investing and maintaining campus infrastructure, however, we have a long way to go. The problem is simple: We are needlessly wasting a great deal of energy and water resources. This is both fiscally and environmentally irresponsible. Using more heat and electricity than is necessary causes needless environmental degradation both from mining activities and via air pollution. This is not a small or isolated problem but a large and systematic one. There are millions of dollars worth of proposed efficiency projects, projects that more than pay for themselves, that have gone unfunded. This is the problem the green fee seeks to address.

The green fee is a $6 per semester fee that would be paid by both undergraduate and graduate students to fund projects that green the university’s consumption and disposal habits. The two types of projects that the green fee would fund are energy efficiency and recycling. The proposal calls for a committee of students, faculty and administrators to allocate the funds based on two key criteria: the return on investment that the project yields and the degree to which the project decreases Tech’s environmental footprint. In short, the green fee seeks to have Virginia Tech emulate the ethics and economics of a prudent homeowner. I am sure many of you are as weary as I am of further increases in our student fees and want to make perfectly clear that the green fee will not increase the cost of attending Virginia Tech. In 2005, the state legislature capped the rate at which certain types of fees could increase. Instead of being a new expense to students, the green fee is instead competing with other potential uses of the money.

To evaluate the wisdom of implementing a green fee, it is necessary to understand the problem it is trying to address. Why is it that the profitable and environmentally responsible projects have gone unfunded? After spending a great deal of time reading memos, projects proposals and meeting with numerous people within the administration, I believe that it is not a lack of caring or diligence on the part of employees that is to blame, but structural problems within the bureaucracy. These are problems that cannot be addressed by one or two people, but need the concerted attention of the highest levels of the administration. Due to limited space, I will detail only two such problems: inadequate cost accounting and a lack of dedicated funding.

Cost accounting is a system that organizations use to track and analyze the expenses associated with various activities. The way that this system is structured has important implications for how resources are allocated. The best way to illustrate this point is by comparison. When considering an investment in energy efficiency, a prudent homeowner weighs the upfront costs against the benefit of future energy savings. At Virginia Tech, however, the costs and savings of such projects often accrue to different administrative departments providing poor incentives for decisions makers. Aggravating the problem is a lack of dedicated funding for efficiency enhancing projects. Instead there exists a cruel dilemma where immediate, and often pressing, maintenance needs compete against cost-reducing efficiency projects for a single pot of money.

The proposed green fee is a first step in correcting these problems. Money raised by a green fee would provide a dedicated funding source for projects that improve Virginia Tech’s fiscal and environmental performance. The proposal also calls for the accounting office to work with the green fee funding committee to make sure that savings from efficiency projects funded by the committee return to the committee.

The green fee is not a radical proposal but an attempt to institutionalize the economic decision making of a prudent homeowner. The fee will not increase the financial burden on students, but will instead help to decrease long-run operating costs. The green fee is not an idealistic whim, but a proposal that seeks to address specific institutional and economic impediments to sound management. I ask for your support in engaging the administration with the issues that have been discussed here. The e-mail to contact those running the green fee campaign is greenfee.vt@gmail.com.

God, there is all kinds of crap being said about Will on Facebook. I don't think any of these people know the extent to which he was part of the Blacksburg community.

http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/79309

Within hours of learning that a prisoner suspected of killing a security guard and a police officer was on the loose near Virginia Tech, students fled to their dorm rooms and turned to one of the most popular Web sites around: Facebook.On Monday, students logged in and created 17 separate Facebook groups about the pursuit of escaped inmate William Morva.

will morva
bollo's coffee shop
blacksburg
virginia tech
facebook

This is a pretty good piece on Will Morva and how people thought of him. Interesting to see how he is being remembered by the folks at Bollo's - I think I have pretty much the same view. I wouldn't say I thought Will was 'weird'. I mean, lets face it, those of you who know Bollo's know that it is always full of idiosyncratic people.

Will was not the oddest character I ever saw frequenting the place, over the years. Breadman, maybe! The last quote from Felicia is interesting. My question is this: did anyone know him well enough to know if he really wanted something like this to happen? I think Tim Kaine yesterday said he wanted to avoid standing trial and take people out with him. But that seems so unlike the Will I knew for so many years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/22/AR2006082201118.html

And at Bollo's, where Morva used to sit for hours pontificating about a variety of subjects, the tables were filled and the line for coffee was long. At a slow moment, Jackson stopped to wonder how Morva ended up the suspect in a jailbreak and double murder."Maybe in his own mind, he was training himself for this," she said. "I never thought he'd do anything."

http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/breaking/wb/79269

Blacksburg returns to normal as details of court appearances, funerals and memorial funds are sorted out in the wake of a prisoner escape that left two dead, closed Virginia Tech's campus and threw a town into turmoil.

On a personal note, I know its easy right now to be hard on William Morva. And there are folks on facebook making a lot of jokes about this. However, I've known him for a long time and I think its important to note that while he was always a bit of a character - a bit eccentric - there was a time when he was well-liked around town.

He used to hang out at Bollo's coffee shop with me and some other grad students. He loved to get involved in intellectual arguements and was passionate about the cause of native americans. Back then, he was hopeful about life and had a future. I think things changed for him when his dad died. He seemed to become morose and I know his stomach illness seemed to really start to get worse. I think he started to feel like society was at war with him. Recently I heard that his mum was ill and had fallen on hard times too. Its so sad to see him come to this. Nothing forgives him for what he has done. But I suppose just wanted to say there was a time I thought of him as a friend.

The Virginia Tech provost pledges to create a group to study institutional approaches to race.
By Greg Esposito
http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/wb/61690

BLACKSBURG -- A long day of student protest and discussion between Virginia Tech administrators and students upset at what they see as institutionalized racism netted two promises Wednesday from the university.Provost Mark McNamee said the university will form a task force on institutional approaches to race and he will meet one-on-one with every minority tenure-track faculty member."We feel very strongly about the importance of diversity on this campus. It's clear that from what we're hearing this is not being perceived or happening the way people would like," he said.

Students also chanted, "3 percent is not enough" in reference to the number of black professors who are tenured or on a tenure track at Tech. The actual percentage of those professors at Virginia Tech is 3.2 percent, up from 2 percent in 1998. Minority professors in the same categories increased from 10 percent in 1998 to 19 percent in 2005.But the percentage of black students at Tech stalled after initial gains early in the decade and is currently below 5 percent. That's less than half of the percentage of black students at all of the state's four-year public colleges.

Some photos from the piece:

The Collegiate Times covered yesterday's enormous protest outside of Burruss Hall in the wake of the dismissal of Chris Clement

http://www.collegiatetimes.com/print.php?a=6977
April 19th, 2006
Ryan McConnell, News Reporter

University Provost Mark McNamee addresses a crowd of protesters in front of Burruss Hall. The group was demanding answers to a firing of a professor in the political science department. McNamee, along with other members of administration and faculty, spoke in a forum later in the day about the issue.Waving homemade signs and chanting in unison, students and professors of all different backgrounds came to protest the controversial firing of political science professor Christopher Clement, along with what they said was a lack of diversity within the Virginia Tech faculty on the steps of Burruss Hall Wednesday afternoon. A forum was also held as a result of the rally later that evening, giving concerned members of the community a chance to have questions answered by an administrative panel.

One protestor, Nicholas Kiersey, a PhD student in Environmental Design & Planning, was particularly outspoken at the event. “Virginia Tech has the lowest percentage of faculty of color in the South with only 3 percent. Virginia Tech is failing its commitment to diversity, and failing to live up to its standards, as there are no mechanisms to sustain diversity,” Kiersey, who is white, said. “I'm very pessimistic about how the university will respond. I just see language, not action, and if the provost really believes what he's saying, then quite frankly I think he's living in a dream world.”

Christopher Clement's wife, April Mayes, who is a professor in Africana Studies and will also be leaving at the end of the semester, spoke at the forum, passionately defending her husband to the point of breaking down at the microphone. “What was demanded of Christopher was much more than what was ever demanded of other professors at that stage of his career … How can the administration get rid of a professor who has united all these different kinds of people?” Mayes brought to light that her husband had been selected to head the Diversity Committee within the Political Science department - but before he could assume this leadership position, the department decided to disband the committee.

Students Protest Small Percentage of Minority Faculty
Wednesday April 19, 2006 8:28pm

http://www.wset.com/news/stories/0406/320756.html

Blacksburg, VA - Students say it’s been a problem for years on the campus of Virginia Tech and Wednesday they came out in large numbers to get their message heard.  The problem, students say, is a lack of support among minority faculty members. They say not enough minorities are being hired and faculty who are working are being discriminated against.  More than 100 students along with some faculty members marched to Burrus Hall chanting the phrase "three percent is not enough." Students say only three percent of the more than 1,300 faculty members are African-American.  This protest comes after the departure of a black professor, Christopher Clement, who says he was criticized by other faculty members for being an activist. Officials at Virginia Tech say while 3 and a half percent of the faculty is African-American, 19 percent of the faculty represent a minority background.  Students say that's not enough.

WDBJ 7 has video footage of today's large student protest outside Burruss Hall and the tense dialogue with Provost McNamee that ensued.

WDBJ 7: Tech students protest today in wake of professor's dismissal
http://www.wdbj7.com/Global/story.asp?S=4787439

More than 100 protesters came out at Virginia Tech today. They say Tech is not doing enough to hire minority teachers.Students of many races and ethnic groups walked a path through campus chanting and holding up signs. This after Political Science Professor Chris Clement was derailed from his tenure track.Clement says he was fired, but the University says the five-year veteran is still employed there. Clement remained in the background, but was on hand as students and other community members took their concerns to administrators.Virginia Tech administrators say they can't speak specifically about Clement's personnel issues. But a university spokesman says every teacher must demonstrate scholarship, service and an ability to reach students.

More on the Chris Clement firing. This time by Greg Esposito in the Roanoke Times.
http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/wb/61522

BLACKSBURG -- A popular Virginia Tech professor known for his activism will leave one final demonstration in his wake today as students protest his departure.Christopher Clement, a black political science professor from Jamaica, received a negative vote last week in the third-year review of his six-year tenure process.About 40 students and a few faculty gathered in Squires Student Center on Monday night to discuss plans to make the administration aware of their concerns about Clement's departure and what they feel are greater university-wide issues.

Here is some coverage from the CT on Monday's meeting about Chris Clement's firing.

http://www.collegiatetimes.com/print.php?a=6943
April 18th, 2006
Michael Sutphin, Senior Reporter

In any business, decisions to hire or fire an employee are often controversial. And the business of higher education is no different.A coalition of about 50 Virginia Tech students made initial plans for a protest last night. Sparked by recent news about the departure of political science professor Chris Clement, students amassed to plan a Wednesday afternoon protest for what they described as institutional racism and underhanded hiring policies within the Department of Political Science.“I think we need to stress that this is not just about Chris Clement,” said Greg Sagstetter, senior philosophy and political science major and next year’s undergraduate representative to the Board of Visitors. “This is about institutional and systemic discrimination.”

http://www.collegiatetimes.com/news/3/ARTICLE/6869/2006-04-11.html
Empowered widow exposes harsh CIA interrogation tactics
April 11th, 2006
Victoria Wilson, Staff Writer

Torgersen 2150 was packed with students, faculty members and Blacksburg residents Friday night. A petite woman with brown, flipped out hair and bright blue eyes approached the podium. Her delicate posture and enthusiastic smile made the room seem relaxing. She wasn’t speaking about cozy issues.

Instead, Jennifer K. Harbury, a Harvard-educated lawyer, spoke for two hours about human rights and interrogation techniques employed by the CIA and addressed in her most recent book, "Truth, Torture, and the American Way: The History and Consequences of U.S. Involvement in Torture."

Harbury’s husband, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, was a Mayan resistance leader who was captured, tortured and eventually killed by military officials in Guatemala during the early 1990s. At the time of his imprisonment, officials told Harbury that her husband died in combat. However, she later discovered that the Guatemalan army actually faked his death. For over two years, Velasquez was tortured and held in custody along with 350 other prisoners. Eventually he was thrown out of a helicopter to his death, she said. Harbury discovered these details after she found the body of an 18-year-old man, who was certainly not Velasquez, in her husband’s grave. She was later informed that the army killed the anonymous man to hide her husband’s existence.

After realizing the reality of the situation, Harbury went on a mission to find out more. She fought for information from the State Department to the United Nations. She went on hunger strikes, wrote to Congress and did anything in hopes of uncovering intelligence. In 1995, Sen. Robert Torricelli told Harbury someone hired by the CIA killed her husband. She said the State Department confirmed that Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, who was paid by the CIA to torture prisoners in Guatemala, did in fact kill Velasquez.

Harbury then went on to explain some of the interrogation techniques used on her husband and other prisoners in Guatemala and around the world.

Harbury discussed "water boarding," which she claims is a technique the CIA still practices. She said that water boarding is performed by holding a prisoner under water until they are almost dead, then reviving them using CPR. She explained other techniques, such as dog attacks and electrical shock.

Harbury then spoke about friends of hers who have been tortured. She talked about a young American nun she knows who was gang-raped, endured 112 cigarette burns, and various other tortures. Harbury said the woman was only released from imprisonment because an American intelligence worker realized she was an American.

Harbury then explained why she feels interrogating prisoners by means of torture is usually ineffective. She explained she believes the phrase "there are just a few bad apples … that are out of hand" is simply a dodge to the problem. She also expressed her belief that the CIA gets around torture restrictions by calling the methods "cruel and degrading, but not torture." Finally, she discussed the CIA’s ticking-bomb scenario and explained that she doesn’t think that using torture techniques will result in intelligence that will prevent a crisis from occurring. After her speech, Harbury addressed students’ questions. When asked about media coverage of torture in the United States, she responded with "There’s been a complete shutdown of our mainstream press." She continued, "We are not being told the truth … it’s being heavily censored."

When asked by a student about why she thinks the CIA still uses torture techniques if they aren’t effective, Harbury replied, "I think it’s the people who have never been to war that think (torture) is effective." She added, "Everyone is still looking for the perfect truth serum, but there isn’t one."

Christopher Clement, an assistant professor in the department of political science, organized the event with help from many organizations, including the International Club and Cooper House. "I saw (Harbury’s) latest book and saw her on C-Span," he said. "I wanted a speaker who would discuss torture, and she was an ideal choice."

Nicholas Kiersey is a VT graduate student who attended the speech. He has been campaigning to stop CIA recruitment on campus and thought that Harbury’s visit shed light on what he feels are important issues. "I think (Harbury) is a great speaker and was so surprised to see that so many students showed up to listen to her on a Friday night," said Kiersey. "I think it shows that she’s a quality speaker that’s well-known and speaking about a very important topic that students care about."