In Solidarity with William I. Robinson

I do not personally know Dr. Robinson. I am also not familiar with his scholarship. All I know is that he is a tenured professor of sociology at University California of Santa Barbara of Jewish heritage who is being threatened with termination for criticizing Israel's recent atrocities in the Gaza Strip. His crime is drawing parallels between the Israeli policy of starving the Gaza Strip with the Nazi policy of starving the Warsaw Ghetto. Two students complained to the ADL about his comparison and they in turn pressured the University Administration. The Univeristy is now forming a faculty committee to explore whether he should be disciplined before a standing committee. The ADL presumably wants Robinson to be stripped of his tenure and fired. Unfortunately, the administration of the university seems to be heading down this path. This is the most blatant violation of academic freedom in the US I have ever seen. If not even tenure can protect what I would consider a perfectly reasonable criticism of Israeli state terrorism then we Americans really should stop pretending there is any such thing as academic freedom or freedom of speech at American universities. I fully expect the usual suspects, professors who are progressive except Palestine, to either remain silent in the face of this outrage or to actively support the ADL's efforts to eliminate freedom of speech for American scholars.

Hat Tip: Mark Elf and Crew at JSF

Karachai Presentation Results

I think the presentation by my student researchers regarding their oral history project went well. Fewer people showed up than I expected. Evidently a lot of people were giving final exams early and this conflicted with the time of the presentation. This means I have a lot of snack food left over.

First Karachai Presentation Today

Today my three students researching the oral history of the Karachais deported to Kyrgyzstan will give their first formal presentation on the subject. I stopped by Ramstor this morning to buy snacks for the audience. I am very much looking forward to this event.

Noise, Noise, Noise

All day today there was extremely loud music blaring from the parking lot in front of the school as part of the celebration of the founding of Bishkek. Unfortunately, it is not a day off and I had to try and work through the awful racket. During my Politics of Genocide class I had to ask my students to shout their presentations so that they could be heard over the amplified drum music blaring outside. It was almost impossible to teach over the noise. As head of the local union here at AUCA I have inserted Bishkek Day as an additional paid holiday into the draft of our next contract. If we can get the administration to agree to it, my students and I will not be wasting our time a year from now.

Last Class of the Semester

Today I gave my last lecture of the semester. It was a brief summary of Soviet history from Brezhnev's replacement of Khrushchev as Secretary General of the CPSU until the collapse of the USSR. Tomorrow and the next day will all be devoted to student presentations. Then classes are over. Final papers are due on May eighth.

First Plagiarist of the Semester

I caught my first plagiarist of the semester. He was extremely blatant and copied numerous whole passages from the Internet without attribution. I am going to be lenient and only give him a zero for the assignment rather than fail him for the class. I knew my plagiarism free streak was too good to be true.

Only One Week of Classes Left

Next week is the last week of classes for the semester. My students in Politics of Genocide and Migration and Borders have to finish up their final oral reports. In Political History of the USSR I have one lecture and one seminar left on the Gorbachev years. After next week we have finals week. I do not give final exams, but all my students have to submit a final research paper by May eighth.

Tired

Today I taught two classes, peer reviewed a third and attended a long committee meeting.

Grading Papers

Even though I have pretty much solved the plagiarism problem and the overall quality of student writing has improved immensely, I still hate grading papers. I have a big stack of papers from Migration and Borders and Political History of the USSR to finish grading. I am not looking forward to grading almost 70 research papers come May eighth.

Return to Sadovaya

Yesterday, Orthodox Easter, my student research team and I returned to the village of Sadovaya. We went to examine the Muslim cemetery there. There are a number of Karachais buried in the cemetery along with Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Dungans and Chechens. Many of the Karachai graves had elaborate granite headstones with engraved pictures of the deceased, various symbols and writing in both Arabic and Cyrillic scripts. Quite a few of these markers belonged to individuals that had been deported to Kyrgyzstan from the Caucasus in November 1943. It was a beautiful day and the caretaker was extremely helpful. I found the small cemetery to be quite idyllic. Overall it was definitely worth seeing.

The incredible shrinking number of PhDs at AUCA

When I first started working at AUCA in August 2007 there were eight faculty in the International and Comparative Politics Department of which four of us were full time with PhDs. The next semester the total number of faculty in the department increased to nine of which five were full time with PhDs. At the start of my second year this ratio plummetted dramatically. This academic year out of ten faculty members only two of us are full time with Ph.Ds. Other departments have even fewer people with doctorates. This is one of the primary reasons why I doubt AUCA will ever get accreditation in the US. But, now I hear the Ministry of Education of the Kyrgyz Republic is making noise about revoking local accreditation due to the extremely small number of instructors with terminal degrees.

The Host

Today with two other faculty members and one student I had lunch at the new Indian restaurant. It was absolutely fantastic. I can not remember when was the last time before today that I had Indian food.

Miss Kuritsa

Yesterday when I came home from work I noticed a small cardboard menu stuck in my apartment door. It was from an outfit called Miss Kuritsa which specializes in fried chicken. The menu has fried chicken with sauce, fried chicken without sauce, hamburgers and corn dogs. They also deliver to your door free of charge. The girlfriend was quite impressed by the idea of delivered food. We ordered one big order of fried chicken with sauce, two small orders of fried chicken without sauce and three corn dogs. It came to 550 som or about $13.25. It tasted pretty good and we still had a lot left over after dinner. I hope she and the boy do not eat all of the leftovers before I get home from work.

The Sun is Shining

It looks like the sun has finally returned to Bishkek.

Rain

For the last two days it has been raining almost nonstop. I feel like I am back in England. I hope the sunny weather returns to Bishkek soon.

More on Volga Germans in Turkmenistan

The descendants of the Volga Germans that settled in the Sarakhs region (Krestov) near Ashgabat in Turkmenistan managed to avoid deportation in 1941 due to already being located in a remote area of Soviet Central Asia. However, like many Russian-German communities in Central Asia they experienced severe repression later in the 1940s. In the case of the Russian-Germans living in Sarakhs raion, Ashgabat Oblast, Turkmen SSR this repression came at the end of 1948. In December of that year, the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) of the Turkmen SSR requested that 64 Russian-German families be deported from this district. In response the central Soviet government mobilized all those capable of physical labor from these families for construction work on the Chelyabinsk metallurgy complex in the Urals. The Stalin regime forcibly resettled the remaining 310 ethnic Germans from Sarakhs, those judged to be incapable of physical labor due to illness, disability or age, to Tomsk Oblast in Siberia.

Source: N.F. Bugai, L. Beria -I. Stalinu: "Soglasno vashemu ukazaniiu..."(Moscow: "AIRO XX," 1995), p. 46.

Another Turkmen Dinner

Last night my girlfriend, her son and I had dinner at the apartment of some students of mine from Turkmenistan. The food was very good and both my girlfriend and the boy had a good time. As long as they are happy I am happy.

New Teaching Techniques that Work

Last year I was a bit frustrated by my inability to motivate really good class discussions in my Political History of the USSR class. Since history is my field I felt particularly perplexed at my failure to instill a passion for the subject in my students. This year I have been much more successful in sparking interesting and insightful discussions in the class. One technique that has been especially helpful is passing out short primary source materials and asking students to comment on them. On Thursday I passed out the following two documents*:

Council of Peoples' Commissariats of the Union of SSRs Resolution No. 35 of 8 January 1945 "On the Legal Status of Special Settlers" signed by Molotov and Chadaev

Ukaz of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of 26 November 1948 "On the Criminal Penalties for Flight from Places of Obligatory and Decreed Settlement of People, Exiled to Distant Regions of the Soviet Union in the Period of the Fatherland War" signed by Shvernik and Gorkin.

I then asked the students how these acts which clearly discriminate against whole groups of people defined by their nationality could be reconciled with the 1936 Soviet constitution which prohibited both collective punishment and discrimination on the basis of race or nationality. What ensued was one of the best class discussions I have ever seen. I basically just conducted an hour long group dialogue on issues of political legitimacy, propaganda, the various motivations for people fighting in the Red Army, the political uses of memory and history, and of course national repression and Soviet state building. The best thing about teaching at AUCA has been watching the very tangible improvement in critical thinking skills exhibited by my students. I have seen remarkable academic growth in many students that have taken multiple classes from me.

*The copies of the documents I passed out were in the original Russian. I have translated the identifying information in the documents into English for purposes of this blog post.

Creating Good Labor - Management Relations

Last week the leadership of the local faculty union here at AUCA had two productive and friendly meetings with the administration. The establishment of an ongoing dialogue between the union and the administration is a very positive development. As chairman of the local union organization I feel that we have been able to successfully articulate our concerns to the administration. Considering that we did not even exist as an organization in October, this is a significant accomplishment.

Next Semester's Classes

This week we had registration for classes. I will be teaching a total of four classes next semester. Three of these are in International and Comparative Politics and one is in American Studies. The course names are listed below.

Political Violence and Terrorism in Central Asia

Conflicts in the Caucasus

Russian Politics

American Presidency