Tag: Seamus O’Sullivan

CNM Community Requests a Sanctuary Statement

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January 30, 2017.  By Hilary Broman

Senior Staff Reporter

Many CNM staff, faculty and students have signed a petition requesting a statement from CNM that clarifies how CNM intends to protect students, faculty and staff from threats, discrimination and harassment that they may face due to the most recent president-elect, as stated in the request.

Seamus O’Sullivan, CNM political science and sociology instructor, drafted the request, he said.

“Our primary interest is, if we see some rapid change in immigration policies, how might it affect our students,” O’Sullivan said.

O’Sullivan and other faculty and staff want to create a safe space, a sanctuary, for students who are vulnerable, he said.

“We are concerned that members of our community are at heightened risk of harassment and discrimination,” the request says.

The request for sanctuary agrees with a quote from an email that CNM President Katherine Winograd sent on November 18th, “CNM’s longstanding tradition of being a welcoming place for all” as well as its history of being “a safe haven for students of all backgrounds – including students who have been previously disenfranchised with education and their place in the world,” and then the request expresses concern for the safety of undocumented students.

“We believe a clear and emphatic statement that pledges specific supports and protections for vulnerable students is warranted,” the request states.

O’Sullivan is optimistic about the outcome of the petition, he said.

“Even though I expect opposition, I expect a lot more support than I do opposition,” he said, “Administration’s concern is the students, just like ours.”

Also, the fact that we are in New Mexico adds to O’Sullivan’s optimism, he said

Santa Fe Community College, New Mexico State University and the University of New Mexico also have similar efforts underway, O’Sullivan said.

Brandon Morgan, a History instructor at CNM, signed the petition because he believes that it is important for CNM as an institution to make a clear declaration in support of undocumented students, he said.

“In the current political and social climate, it is imperative for us to directly and publicly side with the undocumented members of our community who we have welcomed, and who have given so much to make CNM and Albuquerque a wonderful place to live,” he said.

Morgan stated that several of his students have expressed concerns about the ability to continue taking classes or working if legal protections from deportations are removed.

“These students are hard workers who contribute to our classes, and who volunteer their time for the community,” he said.

“I love living and working in the CNM community,” he said, “I believe that as a community we espouse the stated CNM values, so I have high hopes that undocumented students will not face intensified harassment and discrimination here. Let us remember that no human being is illegal.”

125 people have already signed the petition.

Although O’Sullivan did not have a specific goal for the number of signatures obtained, he plans to turn the petition in soon, he said.

 

Read the request for sanctuary and sign the petition here.

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Letter to the Editor, Issue 37, Volume 19

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The First Amendment, which guarantees free-speech rights, is fundamental to the highest ideals of American constitutional democracy and our nation’s system of higher education. However, no court, constitution, law or leader can guarantee any right once and for all, forever into the future. Even constitutionally protected rights need to be monitored, pro­tected, and every attempt to whit­tle away at them must be vigor­ously challenged.

Free speech rights at CNM are under threat. Last year, the CNM administration temporarily shut down The CNM Chronicle and suspended the staff over the publication of its “sex issue” and then reversed its decision less than 24 hours later after a deluge of public attention. More recently, new collective bargaining agree­ments for full-time and part-time faculties contained language designed to prohibit the CNM Employees Union (CNMEU) from using “College resources… for any union business of any type, a political campaign for an indi­vidual candidate, an issue or an organization.” In administration’s initial proposal to the part-time faculty negotiating team, of which I was a member, The Chronicle was identified by name as one of those “resources,” though it does not appear in the final collective bargaining agreement.

It is no secret to anyone famil­iar with the CNM that this admin­istration is obsessively concerned with protecting and polishing its public image. Nothing in the new faculty contracts directly attempts to limit an individual faculty mem­ber’s free speech right, but it is naïve to think they are not threat­ened. The contract clause I quoted is vague. Could it be interpreted to prohibit a union official from responding to an inquiry from a Chronicle reporter? Perhaps. After the new contracts were reported on in the news media, CNM offi­cials issued pronouncements in which they affirmed their support for individual free-speech rights. What is a reasonable person to believe? Is the truth more likely to be found in the actions of CNM administration or in their state­ments once their actions have been exposed to public scrutiny?

CNM faculty, staff and stu­dents are on a “slippery slope,” by which I mean an action or law, initially restricted to a specific situ­ation or group, like The Chronicle or CNMEU, which opens the door for a much broader and pos­sibly illegal application of the same restrictions. For that reason, it is in my self-interest to defend the free-speech rights of The Chronicle and CNMEU because any curtail­ments of their rights brings CNM one step closer to an attempt at restricting my individual right to free speech. Similar logic compelled the American Civil Liberties Union in 1978 to defend a neo-Nazi group’s right to stage a public political rally complete with swastikas in Skokie, Illinois, where a significant portion of the residents were survivors of the Holocaust. The ACLU’s argument, which was savagely criticized at the time by many of its own mem­bers, was that protecting the free-speech rights of a group as odious as the neo-Nazis was necessary to guarantee the free-speech rights of all Americans.

CNMEU and The Chronicle may be the only organizations associated with CNM that admin­istration cannot completely con­trol. At the moment, I am less concerned about the union than I am for The Chronicle because I believe the newspaper has already been targeted for elimination. My suspicion is fueled not by any state­ment made by an administrator, but by what has already been done: three months after The Chronicle was shut down last March CNM launched The Suncat Times, which is described on the college’s website as a “student newsletter” distributed by email.

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” has been attributed to the abolitionist Wendell Phillips, sometimes to Thomas Jefferson, though a similar statement was made as early as 1790 by the Irish political figure John Philpot Curran. The statement is as sound today as it was in the 18th and 19th centuries and I hope it will heeded by liberals and conservatives, liber­tarians and socialists, people who support unions and people who oppose them, as well as friends of The Chronicle and people at CNM who never read an issue.

Seamus O’Sullivan, Ph.D.

Part-time faculty, politi­cal science and sociology

Letter To The Editor; In Response to Volume 19, Issue 10 "Surprise! You've Graduated"

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Dear CNM Chronicle,
If you hang around long enough at Central New Mexico Community College, the school’s carefully polished public image will wear thin and expose a core of half-truths and bombast.
The latest revelation surfaced earlier last week when the CNM Chronicle, the independent student newspaper, reported that a biology student, Emily Sarvis, was awarded two degrees and certificate that she knew nothing about. In fact, she only found out about her degrees and certificate when she was asked to complete a post-graduation survey.
Sarvis, by the way, is president of the CNM Executive Council of Students. I’m sure she has heard the same admonition I have as part-time faculty member: Students have to apply to graduate. It’s not automatic.
Sarvis, a biology major, told the Chronicle she did not apply to graduate and wanted to take additional courses in her major before she transferred to the University of New Mexico. However, she is now being denied financial aid to complete her degree because school records indicate she already graduated, according to newspaper.
This does not appear to be an isolated incident. Another CNM student, James Roach, who claims he lacks one math course to complete his degree, found out that he too graduated in May, reported the Albuquerque Journal last Friday.
Hold on because this gets stranger. It seems that the program that granted Sarvis her degrees and certificate is same one that “helped CNM more than double its graduation rates in the past two years, which also helped the school win a prestigious award this year for improving student services,” according to the Journal.
Many long-time CNM students are unaware they have enough credit hours to earn an associate degree and consequently never apply to graduate, so “the program uses software to find students with enough credit hours and automatically gives them degrees,” according to the Journal. A CNM administrator explained this was a “pilot project” that will improve over time, presumably to include students and inform them that the application to graduate may not be necessary.
What makes this revelation potentially more disturbing is that CNM is a lead partner in a collaborative effort called Mission: Graduate, which claims it will produce 60,000 additional two-year, four-year and graduate degrees above and beyond the norm by 2020. By boosting the skills and credentials of the local workforce, the reasoning goes, employers will be more likely expand or relocate their operations to the Albuquerque area. This initiative, which is scheduled to start in August, has the support or the active involvement of Presbyterian Healthcare Services, the United Way, the University of New Mexico, the City of Albuquerque, Albuquerque Public Schools, Rio Rancho Public Schools, Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, Intel, Public Service Company of New Mexico, and the Journal.
There was, to my knowledge, no involvement by teaching faculty from any of the partnering institutions in the development of Mission: Graduate. That would be typical of the top-down changes in public education that are driven by the private-sector and masqueraded as reform. Perhaps no faculty members will be required to achieve 60,000 new degrees under this vision, maybe that lofty goal can be reached without any more students, classrooms, or courses. Maybe the results, or most of them, will be churned out by fine-tuned software that cranks out degrees for students without their knowledge or involvement. Now that’s reform.

Not amused,
Seamus O’Sullivan, Ph.D.
Part-time faculty

Letters to the Editor: In response to Volume 18 Issue 26 Sex Issue

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Editor’s note:

 The point of any news article, other than to inform, is to create civil discourse. Issue 26 of the CNM Chronicle has done this more so than any other edition of the paper in its 18 years of publishing. This and the following four pages have been dedicated completely to the responses we have received, both negative and positive.

It is important to note, however, the not all discourse remained civil. On the Central New Mexico Community College Facebook page, some of the conversation became nasty. This was never the intention of the paper.

Many people who commented negatively about the paper did not wish to have their comments published because of the cruelty of some newspaper supporters.

These commenters said that CNM had been in the right to shut down the paper and to confiscate copies; that the staff of the Chronicle should be fired; that the paper had been offensive, especially to those who were religious and that the paper exercised extremely poor judgment in creating an issue focused on sex. One commenter wanted to let us know that the sexual position Chit-Chat was creepy and completely inappropriate.

While we could not convince those people to allow us publication of their comments, we wanted to ensure their voices were heard.

  Continue reading “Letters to the Editor: In response to Volume 18 Issue 26 Sex Issue” →