Full Text of Student Petition

Before you read it... check out this beautiful song dedicated to CSF's Board of Trustees. It was written by one of the petition's organizers, James Longmire:

Here is the full text of the student petition to the CSF Board of Trustees and President, which bears 312 signatures. (We mailed personalized print copies of the petition and all the signature pages to each member of the Board):

We, the students of the College of Santa Fe, believe that we have been fraudulently or negligently misled to think that the Spring semester of 2009 was completely paid for, without expense to our quality of education (as of Fall of 2008). The entire college community was informed numerous times in a wide array of public forums, mass emails, and letters that the Spring 2009 semester was completely secured through donations from a board member and an alum. We were promised that we would suffer no loss of our quality of education. Our President, Stuart Kirk, representing the Board of Trustees, informed us of this.

We now know that such is not true, that we do not currently have sufficient funding to carry us through the completion of this semester, and that 3 million dollars of this semester’s deficit was contingent on a failed land sale to New Mexico Highlands University, which needed to pass through the uncertainties of votes in the New Mexico State Legislature.

We were uninformed of this pivotal detail when we needed to decide whether or not to attend The College of Santa Fe in the Spring of 2009, or transfer to another institution. We believe that this lapse in communication, whether intentional or truly unforeseen, was misleading, fraudulently or negligently. If the Board and the President wish to dispel notions of intentionally misleading the CSF community, we request that all official documents (Board meeting notes, minutes, etc.) generated during December of 2008 and January of 2009 be shared with us.

As students of the College of Santa Fe, we have entered in a contractual agreement with those who manage CSF (i.e. President Kirk and The Board of Trustees). We are paying a substantial tuition to attend classes, receive credit and eventually a degree from the College of Santa Fe. We have paid for and expect the quality of education that we were promised—the quality of education that existed in Fall of 2008 and prior semesters.

If the Spring 2009 semester were to terminate before the scheduled end of this semester (5/16/09), we will consider this a serious breach of contract. In addition, by attempting to account for money needed to complete this semester by drastically reducing the salaries of the faculty, and the working hours of the staff, to the point of being unlivable, we believe that our current quality of education is dramatically lessened, and we similarly see this as a serious breach of our contract. In a city where rent is high, and professors’ salaries are already low, many of our beloved faculty and staff will need to take on additional work to make ends meet. To no fault of our beloved faculty and staff, who are merely trying to survive in this impossible situation, we have already witnessed and experienced instances of this. We only expect to see more, and this will clearly result in an unavoidable loss of the quality of our education.

We reserve the right to pursue appropriate causes of legal action against President Kirk and the CSF Board of Trustees, for damages compensatory and punitive, if we, the students, find that we have not received the quality of education we have paid for, deserve, and demand. We ask that all members of the Board of Trustees assume full fiscal responsibility for the entire deficit we face this semester (i.e. find or generate the necessary finances to get us through this semester without faculty pay cuts or tightening of staff hours), given their responsibilities as the fiduciary agents, fundraisers, and managers of this institution, and given their aforementioned promises.

Sexy Luddist Urges & Afflicting Artfulness

I'm blogging again. You fuckers out there in the empty internet void better read and comment. I really am going to properly blog this time around, and I have just so many juicy things to write about...

But all in good time...

I've been afflicted by very strange urges lately. As my days are growing longer and more demanding-- as my free time is perpetually evaporating-- as my coffee consumption is becoming truly excessive and inevitable-- and as cigarettes have become just un-quittable, I cannot help but wonder if I'm being trained for the rest of my life-- for a life of endless work, and little play (America is after all the most over-worked nation in the world...).

And as I get tagged in the 99th "25 things about my life" (that no, I never ever ever really wanted to know about you) note on Fac(ad)ebook, I become increasingly inclined to want to throw my computer out a window, and drown my cellphone in a toiletbowl.

Bizarre urges, no?

As sexy as I often find such Luddist fantasies to be, they are unfortunately too impractical for the work I want to do-- for community organization-- for the promotion of art and projects I engage in, and they even become problematic for my need to be a communicative, social creature in this society.

I tried last summer to live without a cellphone, and it was disastrous, albeit liberating. If I didn't have a land-line and internet access that summer, I would have been significantly estranged from my community-- from the people and situations I participate with. My community (as such) does not immediately surround me, and I found it to be practically unreachable, without participation with various electronic mediums of communication.

People don't spontaneously visit each other anymore. Real-time interactions with friends, family, and community seldom happen without first being initiated through cellphones, email, Facebook, etc.

It's remarkable and a bit disturbing to really think about how much of our lives and interactions are mediated through technology. (But do please think about it. Ask yourself how many hours you spend in front of a computer, or a TV, or using a cellphone. Ask yourself how much information (i.e. news, weather, etc.) you get from the internet or TV. Ask yourself how much of your communications and life are mediated through technology. Soak in these questions for a little while.)

Suffice it to say, I swallowed my wanton Luddist daydreams, and procured another cellphone whence autumn came. I've been irradiating my brain gratuitously ever since. It adds to the buzz of my uber-"connected" euphoria.

For a wee bit of context, I've been reading Wendell Berry and Murray Bookchin lately. I've been working on a brand new permaculture garden at a community center I'm working/studying at. I've been having inner dialogues about the seeming constitutional opposition of new media art and folk art. This dialogue is related to the larger globalization/industrialization/homogenization/mechanization vs. locality/naturality/diversity/humanity dialogue I've been steeping in for what seems like a while now.

If you're one of my 725 Facebook friends (jesus fucking christ), you know that I'm fighting a mild addiction to Facebook/the Internet/Cigarettes.

Fuck.

It's a great word, isn't it?

With this fantastic context, this past Monday I wandered haphazardly into one of the wildest, mind-fucking lectures I've ever had the pleasure to be blown away by. I found myself sitting in CSF's Tipton Hall, listening to Godfrey Reggio speak in a lecture organized by the Santa Fe Art Institute. (I used to serve Godfrey Reggio coffee at Cloud Cliff Bakery practically every day I worked there as a barista. He was always one of the warmest, friendliest people I encountered there, and I didn't know who he was or what he did for a ridiculous length of time.)

SFAI's lecture series this year is entitled "Memory: Shadow & Light-- Art as individual/collective memory" Reggio's lecture was entitled: "Memories of Massman/Memories of Amnesia."

Reggio opened Monday's lecture with a historical parable of sorts: The indigenous peoples of Florida did not see the ships of Spanish conquistadors approaching their native lands from the ocean, even though the image was tremendous, and the conquistadors certainly arrived. The sight of the ships was so far outside of the daily realities and assumptions of the indigenous, that the Spanish remained invisible, until they were on land. Similar stories of colonizers being invisible to indigenous people have been documented in numerous places across the earth.

Reggio subsequently made the point that "the things that are the least seen are the most present," because we don't pay attention to them. In his view, certain profound aspects of our world, culture and daily lives are invisible to us because we take them for granted as ordinary and normal, when they really are quite extraordinary.

According to Reggio we are simultaneously living in two worlds: the world of "the blue planet" (i.e. the planet you see from outer space) and the world of planet earth-- the globalized world vs. the local-- the unified world vs. the diverse-- the mechanized vs. the organic-- the perfect vs. the fragile-- the cyborg vs. the human.

(As an aside, I spent a significant portion of Reggio's lecture wishing I could see him enter a battle of intellect with Donna Haraway.)

Reggio went on to state that "our language no longer describes the world in which we live-- it describes a world that's no longer here." To him, "language predicates who we are."

He talked about the dying of languages-- something I'm very aware of-- something that upsets me deeply, as an advocate for diverse folk cultures and art.

In 1900 there were 30,000 languages and dialects, according to Reggio. Currently there are less than 4,000. Languages are dying perpetually at the hands of globalization, along with the unique perspectives and cultures that are attached to them.

We have more people these days, and less languages. More WalMarts and less community. (That analogy is mine...)

In Reggio's perspective it is "our behavior that determines the content of our mind," and we become our environment. He believes that we are living in the environment of technology, without our language. To him, technology is autonomous and sacramental. He says that technology produces what it signifies, and it is in this sense sacramental. (Reggio was, after all, a Christian Brother for something like 14 years.) As such, "it's truth becomes the truth."

The interesting beauty of Reggio's lecture is that it was filled with oblique, Zen-like references to a really terrifying idea that vaguely resides in the back of many minds. Reggio's oblique references helped to illustrate what he was trying to communicate in ways that explicitly articulating his view never could have accomplished. In this sense, it was absolutely artful. His delivery allowed space for people's own ideas, experiences and perspectives to interpret the meaning of it all.

He also used bits of his own art to illustrate the nature of what exactly it was he was lecturing about. This is one short film he used-- "Evidence," an 8 minute film shot in Italia in 1995:



Know what it is? It's children watching television. I just about wanted to cry, when I was watching it.

If our behavior determines our minds, and we spend multiple hours a day sitting in place staring at screens of all sorts, what does that make us?

Today, we actually live with something called Nature Deficit Disorder. This relevant San Francisco Chronicle article from 2007 has some pretty affecting statistics in it. It mentions a Kaiser Family Foundation study which found that children ages 8-18 spend an average of 6.5 hours a day with electronic media, and another study that found that 8 year olds were able to identify 25% more Pokemon characters than actual wildlife species.

Ask yourself: what do we do when our world faces substantial environmental challenges the likes of which we've never seen (and I will certainly indulge the wide library of current scientific, environmentally apocalyptic statistics and articles I have in later posts), and the generation that would solve these problems would rather go to the mall, eat McDonald's, and play with their iPhones than go for a walk in the "boring" woods? What do we do with that reality?

Community gardens are certainly a start.

But perhaps art and experiences and education can do something worthwhile as well.

Towards the end of his lecture, Reggio quoted Nietzsche: "We have art so that we might not perish from the truth." He also said that "art is a feeling you are trying to inflict on a person," but its beauty and power lies in that "it has no meaning."

In this sense, again, I will say that Godfrey Reggio's lecture was certainly more artful than any other I've ever attended. I know I was afflicted.