[Alumni-chat] Legal Fund Needs - by Yazz Allen '66

[alanbenard (alanbenard at pobox.com)]

>Let us now proceed to purge the non-ideologically pure from our midst.
>
>Mark P. '71
>He started it!
>
>I guess I'll just stand here and get purged instead, eh, Mark?
>
>Folks,
>
>I can laugh at the image of me as a wizard, I can rankle at being compared to Tom Delay, and I still roll on the floor when I see the bunny with the pancake on its head.  But I'm more than a little uncomfortable with the ad hominems directed toward David.
My burning anger comes from the fact that there are loud and powerful alumni who would be very happy if people like me just dried up and blew away. I take this ceaseless complaining about -- oh, let's call it post-'73 alumni -- very personally. Speaking only for myself, that's where the urge to shine some light on one of the our harshest critics comes from. 

If it has gone too far, well then it should stop.

However. I defend my highlighting of J. David's odious plans to commercialize the campus, which he posted up himself. People need to see where these ideas are coming from -- the ideas and the presumed financial support for these ideas that give Chancellor Murdock the courage to jackhandle the trustees into destroying the college. 

Especially when -- after proposing a completely fanciful legal process by which the closure might be stopped and the university re-organized -- David's ideological friends levy the charge of murder against me. Me, some schmuck with a keyboard and a few ideas, has managed to tap into a huge, festering boil of hatred toward me, my friends, years and years of Antiochians dehumanized and ridiculed in the New York Times as toxic.

Damn right he started it first. Political purges are ugly and that is what is underway.

Art, Toni, call off your dogs, be they in the president's office or in some northern-central state. If you're serious about having a college to complain about in four years, stop stonewalling, stop attacking, stop hating. You are not going to have it all your way. 

I understand there's a letter that's been sent to the Board of Trustees. Reading it and giving it the respect it deserves would be step one toward getting the great mass of alumni to work with you. 

Or, you could just continue hating and get together in 2012 in the Livermore St. Starbucks and mourn the college. 

Alan Benard, '92