introducing professor gotcha

Music: Low: Things We Lost in the Fire (2003) There was an interesting message from a professor of debate and theatre on my professional organization's email listserve yesterday. I could not help but respond.

James Brandon, Hotel Boycott (Again)...

How nice to see that our colleagues who are in permanent revolution mode are back and setting up the barricades in what has seemingly become an annual event: to protest NCA's choice of convention hotel.

Rather than argue the finer points of the SF Hilton, let me suggest a long-term solution for our protesting friends. I suggest that like-minded individuals from a variety of national scholarly organizations should take this opportunity to pool their resources and construct a year-round academic convention hotel that will be able to accommodate meetings 52 weeks a year, and will be run according to their utopian standards. My guess is that such a convention hotel would be both not-for-profit and subsidized by taxpayers. Perhaps we could even expand upon the NCA national headquarters in DC? Although, to be fair, the proceedings should be moved to the geographic center of the US. How does Kansas sound for all future NCA's?

I envision a place where NPR is used for elevator music, copies of The Nation are freely available in the lobby, the coffee is all fair-trade, and smaller academic associations can be subsidized by the larger ones. Sort of like revenue sharing in baseball. I assume that the location will be a smoke and meat free zone, and all the energy will be created by the wind and the sun. Tens of thousands of academics will visit the center at least once a year, and the location will likely become a scholarly paradise.

With this kind of clout, the center could bring in top notch and top dollar progressive speakers for the entire year, playing the gig like it was Vegas. At the very least, I think that every academic association would be interested in keynotes by the likes of Chomsky and Nader.

To keep costs down, I propose that each person coming to the convention be responsible for their own cleaning, laundry, maintainence issues and food preparation, so then we won't have to worry about striking hotel staff.

Any objections? Then please get started on this project. Until then, I'll be staying at the Hilton in San Francisco.

Best,

Dr. James M. Brandon
Professor of Theatre and Speech
Director of Forensics
Hillsdale College
Hillsdale, MI 49242

Joshua Gunn, RESPONSE TO JAMES BRANDON

Professor Brandon's remarks yesterday about the current boycott of this year's convention hotel are snide, inaccurate, and unhelpful. In a sneering tone Brandon proposes that those supportive of the boycott (whom he wrongly characterizes as "revolutionaries") "pool their resources" and build a conference hotel that apparently reflects some sort of presumed platform: only vegetarian food, NPR in the elevator, +The Nation+ on coffee tables, Nader and Chomsky as featured speakers, and so forth.

Buried in this mockery, however, are a series of claims deserving of correction, which I list and respond to seriatim:

1. Boycotting the conference hotel is an annual event.

This is not true. There were no calls for boycotting the NCA conference hotel in 2009 in Chicago, nor were there issues with the conference hotel in 2007, 2006, or 2005 that I am aware of. Those of us concerned with the NCA conference hotel THIS year are worried about the treatment of service workers, and respectful of their request that we support their fight for a humane contract.

2. Those NCA members supporting the boycott are homogenous (e.g., NPR-listening, non-smoking, vegetarian lovers of Kansas).

I cannot speak for everyone who honors the union's request. Nevertheless, I personally enjoy meat and the occasional cigar, even though I do love Kansas, especially Lawrence and the good folks at the university there. I do not read the +Nation+, however, I am addicted to +The Splendid Table+ on NPR. I do not believe in revolution, but I do believe in collective bargaining. As everyone knows, we only need one exception to combat a stereotype.

3. Any hotel selected for a conference of our size will be inappropriate to someone, offend this or that group's sensibility, and so forth.

Although it is true that no hotel is perfect, at the same time many hotels have comfortably accommodated the NCA convention with few incidents. The union of the Hyatts in San Francisco have asked NCA members to boycott the hotel +if+ 9,000 workers and the hotels cannot come to some agreement about a currently expired contract (see http://www.unitehere2.org/).

4. There is nothing wrong with staying in the San Francisco Hyatt.

This claim contradicts the attention the NCA leadership has given to the boycott. The NCA website has a webpage dedicated to disseminating information about the boycott to the membership:

http://www.natcom.org/index.asp?bid=15066

That the NCA leadership is taking this issue seriously indicates there may, in fact, be something problematic with failing to honor the boycott. Remember that the workers are fighting for workload protection, retirement, health care costs, and the rights of non-union employees.

Of course, the financial risk of moving the convention is high and I gather would be devastating to the organization. At the same time, this does not mean individual members should not carefully consider their options. Professor Cloud's respectful and informative post on CRTNET last week details a number of alternatives:

http://lists.psu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1006&L=CRTNET&T=0&F=&S=&P=36411

Finally, let me add that it is disappointing to see fallacious, argumentative tactics deployed by a debate coach (especially from someone who claims expertise in the work of Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht!). As a coach and teacher of argumentation, I would assume Professor Brandon is familiar with the faulty reasoning of hasty generalizations and stereotyping, as well as the fallacies of division, false dilemma, and so on. This means, of course, Brandon's strategy of dismissal and scapegoating is quite deliberate; his post is intended to direct attention away from the cause of the workers to some non-existent stereotyped, homogenous group of "revolutionaries."

Honoring the boycott is not about me or anyone else who chooses to honor the boycott. Rather, the +real+ issue is about 9,000 hotel workers, their families, and their futures. To these folks, the situation at the Hyatt is not a laughing matter. Sadly, I think Professor Brandon's snarling sarcasm represents the kind of cynical resignation that the field formerly known as "speech" was created to combat.