This post was taken From an SEIU UWFF site during the Sawant Campaign and annotated as shown here.
The AAUP listserv is beginning to sound more than a bit like a Republican Presidential debate.
While one side brings up the issues of politicization of the UW by SEIU, the other in a not so naive way, proclaims that is is shocked at claims that the SEIU and SEIU/UW have been associated with causes, including the Sawant campaign in Seattle, BDS, and, yes, the International Socialist Organization.
Michael Goldberg, UWFF member
The clandestine effort by rabid extreme far-left activists to gain control of the UW under the guise of a unionization campaign has been exposed by two courageous faculty crusaders, it was reported yesterday. One of the crusaders, Prof. Karl Kaiyala, proclaimed, “[The] SEIU leadership is dominated by far-left activists. I am quite confident that they would work day and night to impose their far-left ideas on all of us. And keep in mind that the largely self-selected cadre of far-left activist leaders in a UW-SEIU union would have almost unlimited time, energy and money with which to prosecute their agenda, whereas the vast majority of the working stiff faculty at the UW needs to devote a lot of time to teaching, grading, writing proposals, doing science and all that other stuff we do.” Prof. Sarah Stroup, on the lookout for potentially malignant phantasmagoria, declared, “Forcing those who may want to vote for a union to also (potentially) vote for a BDS resolution is a kind of emotional blackmail, and I don’t think it’s remotely Ok. Selling bread and butter and switching it to social activism after the deal is sealed is tacky… It’s good for current or potential SEIU/UWFF supporters to know what they are potentially signing up for.”
One Faculty Forward member, who did not want to be identified because he did not want to be involved in lengthy discussions about misrepresentations and outright falsehoods that are repeated endlessly despite factual evidence to the contrary, noted, “It might be more productive to stick to the valid arguments for and against a union and not engage in name-calling and fear-mongering.” Members of the UW Faculty Forward organizing committee were not available for comment because they were too busy teaching, grading, writing proposals and doing science as well as the unimportant academic work at the UW that did not involve science. However, Vlademir Illych, an unaffiliated faculty member in the non-existent Department of Trotskyite Polemics, who does not take corporeal form but does admit to haunting the imaginations of certain receptive faculty members, affirmed the charges, stating, “History has now confronted us with an immediate task which is the most revolutionary of all the immediate tasks confronting the proletariat of any country—organizing a union at UW in order to precipitate the struggle for a socialist state!”
Michael Goldberg
UWB/IA&S