Actually, Evan, i said "weapon of mass instruction." I heard they're gonna preemptively hit Koffee Too ("Strike them before they can strike us.")

In all seriousness, the Bush-Levin alliance of Neoconservative Fascism and Neoliberal Corporate Power terrifies me. It suggests, perhaps, a glimpse at the ultimate shape of Levin's "globalized university" and its relation to several different imperial projects. It also underscores for me the importance of fighting Yale and not dismissing the academic left and academic labor movement as somehow "reformist" simply because they are making demands on and fighting against structures which are seen as enclosed, elitist etc. As the Baca Ranch stuff shows, and as this latest news confirms, universities are only enclosures in the sense that they enclose upon the global commons and restrict access to the privileged. They are not enclosed in the sense that they are turned inward and blind to and disinterested in the rest of the world. Yale's money and power trace the contours of global capitalism, from Colorado, to Maine, to the Sudanese Civil War, and now to Iraq itself. Our resistance must be more global than Yale.

Michael Denning's new book, Culture in The Age of Three Worlds carries powerful suggestions about the ways we can conceive of these connections and histories of struggle, capital, and power. It is no coincidence that the book is dedicated to "the organizers of GESO," because GESO and the movement here in New Haven have articulated a vision of teaching and learning which charts the shaping of the social forces and the creation of the structures and policies which have made the Levin-Bush alliance possible, and themselves constitute part of the movement that must constitute its antithesis. GESO and the movement here are part of the Global Left that Denning charts, part of the global movement to smash the neoliberal project and instantiate a globalization form below.

And here's Lauren M. Burke, straight from the pages of the (Yale) New Haven Register

"What makes President Levin unique here, is he’s the only person on the panel who is decidedly nonpartisan," noted Minh A. Luong, assistant director of international security studies at Yale. "He’s going to be the honest broker. He’s the one person who is going to be the voice of reason and keep the commission honest."

That sentiment was not shared by the student protesters outside Levin’s office Friday.

A dozen protesters stood in the rain, chanting, "When it comes to intelligence, Levin knows jack!"

"It isn’t exactly something he knows about," said Yale junior Lauren Burke. "As far as being able to deal with things like labor negotiations, he seems to be more in line with Bush."  ¶ 1:36 PM