The Southern University Board of Supervisors voted not to renew the contract of the system’s president, which is set to expire on June 30, The Advocate, a newspaper in Baton Rouge, La., reported today.
The Board of Supervisors found the job performance of the president, Ralph Slaughter, satisfactory but nonetheless voted, 11 to 5, to terminate his contract. The board will meet in April to decide whether to place Mr. Slaughter on administrative leave until his contract expires.
Mr. Slaughter, who was named president in March 2006, filed a whistle-blower lawsuit against the board in May 2007, asserting that the board had suspended him in retaliation for reporting that a former board member had sexually harassed several female employees of the university. The board cleared the former member of harassment, and Mr. Slaughter’s lawsuit was later settled.
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27 Responses to Southern U. President’s Contract Will Not Be Renewed
eblack2 - August 9, 2011 at 12:44 pm
Please let’s not pretend that what’s going on in London is a political protest. The violence is being carried out by opportunistic thugs who are out there to smash whatever they can, and steal whatever they can get. It’s senseless looting thinly disguised as anti-police protests, and the protagonists callously took advantage of a peaceful protest following Mark Duggan’s death to cause mayhem.
The student protests earlier this year were a different matter. And indeed, the violence in their wake was caused by the same type of opportunists as today – the students protesting weren’t interested in violence, and their cause was hijacked by people who find it fun to take a brick to their neighbours’ livelihoods. This is not to deny the very real gutting of public spending being carried out by Cameron, but if this started out as an anti-government protest then that has been buried by the criminal gangs. And yes, I know that more poverty = more criminality, but they’re ruining ordinary people’s lives right now.
This is not London rising up to protest the government. The vast majority of Londoners is watching in horror as a violent minority takes over the streets.
For context, my brother works in Croydon, one of the areas worst hit this week.
For more context, see this kind of image from facebook:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2023667/London-riots-Looter-posts-photo-booty-Facebook.html
listen to these girls and their motivation:
http://boos.audioboo.fm/attachments/1441622/leana-hosea-speaks-to-croydon-looters.mp3?audio_clip_id=434411
and see the mass clean-up efforts being organised on twitter and facebook by regular folk this morning.
tenured_radical - August 9, 2011 at 1:58 pm
Well, all violence has a politics, whether those politics are recognizable to outsiders or not. Looting is not my cup of tea either, and certainly when it happened in the US in the 1960s, many neighborhoods — and entire cities, like Newark — never fully recovered. The backlash against the poor, and the social programs designed to alleviate poverty, took a massive hit too. And yet, when such a thing happens it signifies a massive failure of civil society and the state: even when people are being materialistic and vicious, they do have grievances that permit those impulses to be dominant.
eblack2 - August 9, 2011 at 3:41 pm
Very true. And while the career criminals are pretty indifferent to the political system, those who come to violent behaviour through poverty are at least partially products of failed policies. But if the question is why Americans don’t protest against their government, then this is not the best example, since most people seem to support neither the rioters nor the government, and the most common complaint has been that an attack against common folk can hardly be considered an attack against Cameron. Or would you see it as a friend suggested, an attack technically against the government, but misdirected? (And, I would add, therefore liable to backfire?) The students’ cause seemed to garner more support, but this week’s protests’ causes aren’t clear at all… have the widespread reduction in quality of life and general malaise just reached a tipping point? FWIW, I don’t think the Brits are an activist people, either.
BTW I am a long-term lurker on your blog, and always find it a great read. Cheers, Liz
physioprof - August 9, 2011 at 5:05 pm
If they do take to the streets here in the US, I wonder how they’ll handle the professional academic bourgeois like you and I who make our livings off the crumbs of the plutocracy?
tenured_radical - August 9, 2011 at 5:31 pm
I think we are doomed.
TA4EVA - August 9, 2011 at 5:32 pm
dunno if i buy the notion that the riots in london right now are somehow pure apolitical thuggery, as eblack2 suggests.
i mean, check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biJgILxGK0o&feature=player_embedded
tenured_radical - August 9, 2011 at 5:46 pm
And for a spicy response to today’s post (that I *think* is implying that I have insufficient class rage for a Radical), see Gavin Mueller at Unfashionably Late.
nelson626 - August 9, 2011 at 5:50 pm
I would be more concerned about who’s going to save your soul at the Judgement Seat of Christ, all-the-while you’re blaspheming Him in your article. Not wise.
tenured_radical - August 9, 2011 at 5:52 pm
I’ll keep that in mind, Nelson.
physioprof - August 9, 2011 at 7:01 pm
That dude needs to lay off the fucken “quotation marks”.
tenured_radical - August 9, 2011 at 9:08 pm
“No $hit.”
Chicago South Side - August 9, 2011 at 10:44 pm
Similar article from yesterday: http://neighborhoods.redeyechicago.com/hyde-park/2011/08/08/i-dont-predict-a-riot/
Karl Gottschalk - August 10, 2011 at 8:40 am
” Our failure to respond as a people to the current crisis stands in
stark contrast to the capacity of other citizens around the globe to
take to the streets and demand change.”
Isn’t that what the Tea Party did — take to the streets and demand change? I believe you reported on one of their first demonstrations. And the recent debt limit kerluffle reflects the change the tea party demanded.
tenured_radical - August 10, 2011 at 8:55 am
Thanks for that link.
Dana Cruikshank - August 10, 2011 at 8:55 am
The best commentary on these riots I’ve read so far are from a 24-year-old in London. Definitely worth a read – http://pennyred.blogspot.com/
tenured_radical - August 10, 2011 at 9:00 am
Yes, actually I thought of that, and minus the urban rioting, Tea Party folks have been quite confrontational. And yet Tea Party protests, while they have had a tangible result in pushing the Republican Party to the right, as have other conservative voting blocks that make themselves visible (I’m thinking the Moral Majority coalition, STOP ERA, and the Pitchfork Brigades — the last two of which I think are historical antecedents to the Tea Party) have not presented an alternative social vision and the means to accomplish it as, say, the civil rights movement did. Also, check out the above link: part of what is interesting about Tea Party people is that they are overwhelmingly older people, not students or younger voters.
northernbarbarian - August 10, 2011 at 9:33 am
So here I am, a middle aged, bourgeois professor, feeling like I am fiddling as my country burns. The question is, what CAN we do? The Tea Party tried, in its hapless way, and got hijacked. They may yet attack back, but that scares me more. Violence will make things worse. I write to my congressman and get mush in return. I don’t have enough money to buy my own congressman. I am too busy keeping up with teaching and scholarship to be the active, informed citizen that I know I should be. What are the options for articulating an alternate vision?
notPICNIC - August 10, 2011 at 10:03 am
to get a sense of how the student / teacher movements are developing globally
i have curated quite some material in a blogpost embeddable collaborative tool :
America: http://pear.ly/N0Aj SOSMarch: http://pear.ly/WCq1
United Kingdom: http://pear.ly/DqkX
The Netherlands: http://pear.ly/Dpcb
International: http://pear.ly/W7lL
i hope that this tool might inspire others to start to work together in ways yet unimagined, greetings
more info on the tool via http://pear.ly/uXl5
mizpat74 - August 10, 2011 at 10:55 am
I appreciate the comments made on this article. Indeed, most Americans have lost their activist spirit.
Guest - August 10, 2011 at 5:03 pm
I maintain a cautious skepticism about the Tea Party though I feel obliged to support them in the face of unfair hysteria (they are definitely not racist as a group, for instance) and I must credit them as an amazing model of mobilization. I wrote a piece for the American Thinker which might be coming out tomorrow (we shall see) in which I tried to figure out how to be for the Tea Party without being of it. I have worked with Tea Party folks on conservative activism and they are, I can say, a true grassroots movement depending on which group you are in. They are also quite postmodern insofar as there is no definitive agenda and the group encompasses many disparate groups asking for totally different things. What is amazing is how they have been able to harness all that energy and avoid becoming violent, while still staying within the guidelines of the Constitution.
I think the reason you see them not having an alternative social vision is that they are truly postmodern; there is no definitive social vision they seek and in fact they are rebelling most strongly against the utopian projects which purvey such social change projects, because many of them have reached the conclusion that the effects of utopian social transformation are simply destructive as they have experienced them. I am not sure what you call “old,” since some a lot of them are suburban people in their 30s. I agree that you won’t find many college students there. But it isn’t all retired people either.
My main reasons for wishing to remain outside the Tea Party are their stances on immigration, taxes, and history. As I wrote in the piece for American Thinker, I cannot ask them to dilute their immigration message because it would be like undoing their whole movement. But I simply cannot embrace a black-and-white legalistic pro-deportation view of immigration. I also think the Bush taxes are a mistake and should be retired for *all* income brackets, not just the rich–that’s a deal breaker for the Tea Party. Lastly, I do not think the eighteenth century is in any way relevant to our current struggle against Democrat hegemony–I find the 1850s a much better mirror because that was the birth of the Republican Party and its foe was the paternalism and dependency of the slave plantation.
But not only the London riots, also the Breivik massacre, both convince me that the Tea Party represents a necessary part of the political landscape. Without it, many people would not feel as though they had a voice at all and there would be no intellectual anchor to their alienation at all. Though imperfect, the Tea Party’s discourse is scholarly and historicist–people at events talk about the Federalist Papers and know who James Madison was. The fact that they channeled all their energy into legislative power without collapsing into violence is a testament to the power of intellectualism and discourse. So I am for the Tea Party but not of it.
brett14 - August 10, 2011 at 5:52 pm
sorry, i might not be picking up the irony here, but you’re joking right?
tenured_radical - August 10, 2011 at 6:13 pm
Send me the link to your piece when it comes out — I’d like to see the whole thing.
Brandon Paul Weaver - August 11, 2011 at 4:06 am
preach it sister!
busterphd - August 11, 2011 at 10:19 pm
Enjoyed the article but I have two small nitpicks.
1. While you bring up the prison-industrial complex as a form of state violence toward the end of the post, it seems to me that you really underplay the role of massive incarceration in America’s political quiescence. With an incarceration rate of almost five times that of the UK, certainly the imprisonment of “surplus population” plays a major role in repressing dissent in the US.
2. It is not clear to me that American political apathy can be convincingly connected to the “triumph” of the vision of Deming, Rustin, et al. There may be an embrace of woefully misconstrued, coopted image of MLK, but I don’t think that people are re-reading back issues of Liberation and WIN magazine and then sitting on their rumps, letting PayPal direct money to the ACLU. If they were reading up on old American pacifists, they’d would see the main point of the non-violent praxis was not avoiding conflict, but direct action causing creative conflicts. On the streets. To end war and foment a new society. I don’t think most Americans ever embraced this politics as “what the United States really was.”
Anyway, minor points aside, I appreciate the larger points, esp. re: student apathy and Waiting for Superman. Dear God, that movie made me want to hurl my TV across the room.
emilylee518 - August 13, 2011 at 6:27 am
hope stop!
Davide Cellamare - August 17, 2011 at 12:53 pm
That riots in UK are a political protest is not entirely true. A few days ago two criminologists put forward 10 arguments (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14483149) to explain riots in England. A first glance at their analysis left me baffled. Not in the sense that those 10 arguments were false, indeed they make sense. Still, even 10 explenations of why a mob decides to set cars and shops alight do not seem to be exhaustive. And the fact that we need 10 or more hypoteses makes the phenomenon appear rather complex to interpret anyway.
Nevertheless, it’s true that what is going on in Britain makes us reflect on the ‘extraordinary passivity’ of students, not only in the States but – as I can observe – in Europe as well.
tenured_radical - August 18, 2011 at 9:14 am
I’ll go take a look at that link — thanks. I think my late mentor Charles Tilly would have a lot to say about this, and would make comparisons to Captain Swing and machine breaking. So would Christopher Hill. The perspective would be the illegibility of these actions to the “legitimate” political class, the ways they make perfect sense to a disenfranchised mob, and the inability of language to brideg the gap in political expression. I mean, to what extent does it make sense — or even address the issue — for Cameron and other MP’s to go on about “a breakdown in culture”?? To say that these behaviors are “un-English” — which is essentially what that means — is a way of occluding the rejection of class hegemony that the riots actually do express. And the rioters– who are being denied good jobs, education, and affordable urban lives through austerity programs — do not have to express themselves in the language or behavior of their social betters to actually have politics. There is a much longer “English” history here to consider when talking about the politics of an event like this.