Candidate Debates at UD: A Lesson in Human Rights

Protester Ejected from UD Debate

Innocence and Optimism

Tuesday morning October 16 began with a lesson on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, what President Ronald Reagan called “a standard by which any humble person on Earth can stand in judgment of any government on Earth." Before the day was out, the lesson would be undermined by the University of Delaware-sponsored electoral debates.

I had asked my Freshman English class to select some favorite passages in the Declaration and tell why they spoke to them. I circled the room to see their work and to engage those innocent, optimistic youths in some dialogue. Among the most popular was Article 19:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Next in line was Article 21, paragraph 1:

Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.

I made some remarks that the debates to take place in the University’s Mitchel Hall that night were excluding Green, Libertarian, and Independent Party candidates and perhaps abridging their freedom of expression and participation in government. At the same time, I noted that rights were subject to limitation when necessary, as Article 29 prescribes, to secure “due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, [and] public order.”

A Train Wreck

What happened that night was a train wreck of rights in conflict, brought on by the University’s decision to limit the public discourse to those with the power of money. UD exacerbated the clash by overreacting to a Green Party and Occupy Delaware “mic check,” a brief, call-and-response demur endured with infinitely more patience at New Castle County sheriff’s sales, national rallies, and even at a speech by President Obama last November.

The stage was set for the clash by the University of Delaware Center for Political Communication (DPC), which organized the debates. Headed by Ralph Begleiter, a former correspondent for CNN, the CPC demanded that candidates meet standards set by the Pew Debate Advisory Standards Project, which suggests that forums either require candidates to raise high sums of money or have the parties go to great expense on polls to prove the popularity of their candidates. Other than the two dominant party candidates, only unaffiliated Alex Pires, a wealthy businessman, was able to buy his way into the debate. Several other debates in Delaware, including those at Widener Law School and the Jewish Federation of Delaware (after some urging), welcomed all ballot-qualified candidates, but the publicly-funded UD imposed its own form of political correctness. As I argued in my Broken Turtle Column August 10, “[f]or UD to take part in this pseudo-debate is a violation of its educational mission.” Let us note that Sen. Tom Carper and Congressman John Carney both sit on the Advisory Committee of the Center for Political Communication that protected them from alternative views.

The Palm of Information Control

When Green Party candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives Bernie August rose before the debate began to protest his exclusion with a mic check and invite the audience to an alternative debate outside of Mitchell Hall, the University let lose all the accoutrements of information control: Plainclothes cops descended on August and his supporters. Unidentified men in suits head-locked protestors out the doors. An usher in the Mitchell Hall lobby threw her hand over the camera snapping shots of someone in a suit and a uniformed UD cop ejecting a man they later charged with resisting arrest. UDaily, the University’s on-line newsletter, only mentions UD Police and says nothing about plainclothes private security, who, if they were involved, take the university into dangerous legal ground. While August says the police who held him at the Newark Police station were polite and professional, police were very slow to tell friends and family where he and the other arrestee were being held and waited until almost 1 a.m. to release them, pending trial.

UD could of course argue that the rights of the candidates to speak and of the audience to hear were disrupted by the boisterous mic check, even though the University had used its less boisterous power to silence views the audience would surely have welcomed. These views include what the Greens say about environmental issues and national single-payer health care and what the Libertarians say about the war on drugs and the anti-teacher provisions of Race to the Top. Indeed, writing in The Delaware Libertarian blog, Steve Newton reports that the same Pew Study that recommended the restrictive guidelines also noted that 53 percent of voters wanted third-party candidates included in debates. Had the Center for Political Communication given the citizens the debate they wanted, maybe they would have filled the considerable number of empty seats at Mitchel Hall and avoided a bumbling demonstration of arbitrary power.

When President Obama was similarly mic checked by Occupy Wall Street on November 22 of last year, he responded, “"I'm going to be talking about a whole range of things today, and I appreciate you guys making your point, let me go ahead and make mine, all right? And I'll listen to you, you listen to me."  The University can redeem itself by dropping all charges against the two arrestees. UDaily reported only that the protesters were removed, apparently finding the arrests too embarrassing to mention. Or they can double down on this disgrace and throw their weight around, the way they did when they intimidated investors from bidding on the old Chrysler site by threatening to seize it through eminent domain, something I learned from Left Behind, a film produced by Ralph Begleiter and his students.

In an academic environment, taboos must be broken and assumptions subjected to challenge. This debate bolstered received wisdom, gave the entrenched a free pass, and suppressed the predictable reaction.

Competing Honors and Competing Rights: Drop the Charges

Recently Ralph Begleiter was honored by Common Cause of Delaware for his role in breaking the taboo against exposing the flag-draped coffins of American war dead. Almost simultaneously, Occupy Delaware was honored by Delaware Pacem in Terris as “Peacemakers Among Us” for breaking the two-party taboo against exposing the plutocratic one percent. I hope Ralph Begleiter will join me in urging the University of Delaware to drop all charges against those arrested and disclose if private security agents were involved.

           

My students demonstrate a fairly broad spectrum of views and I try to let them sort it out themselves as they contemplate competing rights. However, everything we do at the university is part of the learning environment. What will students take away concerning freedom of expression, participation in government, and Human Rights in general from this truncated debate?

PS: The Complete Mic Check

I am Bernie August and I am the Green Party candidate for the US House of Representatives. My voice, and the people's voices that I hope to represent, are being silenced with this debate. Because I am not a member of one of the entrenched parties, because I am not independently wealthy, and because I refuse to take corporate donations, I am not allowed to participate, even though I am a ballot qualified candidate.

As a result, I am protesting this partisan and farcical mockery of a debate and ask that you join me at THE REAL DEBATE to be held outside this hall and right after this message, where I and other 3rd party candidates will answer your questions. I urge you ALL, audience members and candidates on the stage, to join me so that we can have a truly free and open debate. All of our voices matter.

A Short History of Public Poetry Readings in Wilmington & Newark

Somehow I've managed to become the one who keeps the record of Delaware's literary history. There are two reasons for this, one is a rather oversized propensity for curiosity, and the other is to get some idea of the scope and composition of Delaware's literary community from the time we became "The First State" up to today. Not everyone appreciates my effort and my best indication of that is when those who attempt to refer to our literary history get it wrong. Some of it may be some fault of my own because I've not emphasized it in the right places, or failed to repeat certain features of it over and over again. Certainly, the failure by others to pay attention or to remember correctly shares that blame. Recently there was some confusion regarding the history of live poetry readings, especially in and around Wilmington and Newark.

The history of public poetry readings is a relatively short one. Before the early 1980s public poetry readings were rare and sometimes exclusive events. They may have been limited to well known poets giving a reading in an academic setting, or during a commemorative event connected to something of historic significance.

Today's public poetry readings largely grew out of the counter cultural movement of the late 1960s. Nearly every local counter cultural periodical since The Heterodoxical Voice published occasional poetry. It demonstrated to us that poetry could be appreciated by a general readership. During this period, local poets began to gather, in salon fashion, to privately read their poems to one another. This led to the next step toward staging public readings.

Yours truly reading at that 1982 reading in the Collins Room.

Phillip Bannowsky waits to read next.

There may be those who wish to differ, but I usually associate the advent of the current public poetry readings with one held sometime in the autumn of 1982 at the University of Delaware, in the Collins Room at the Perkins Student Center. The actual date is obscured because no one could have predicted the reading would launch a movement. The event was organized by former University of Delaware English Professor Gloria Hull with the intent to include academic poets as well as those from the community. On August 13, 1983, a poetry reading was held in the backyard of then Delaware Poet Laureate e. jean lanyon's home at the corner of Cleveland Avenue and North College Avenue in Newark, which was also open to the public. This reading was a kind of test run for the first fully public reading promoted by the literary group that called itself the Eschaton Writers, along with many of the same people who had been involved in the Dreamstreets project. That first real public reading was held at the Wilmington Public Library on August 31, 1983. Reading at that first event were Robert Bohm, Patricia E. Eagan, Douglas Morea, e. jean lanyon, Mafundi, and myself. On September 30, 1983, the same poets read at the Newark Public Library with the addition of poets Lew Bennett, Bob Chartowich, Jameelah and Suzanne Michelle. On October 15, 1983, two literary groups, The First State Writers and the Eschaton Writers, came together and held a joint poetry reading at O'Friel's Irish Pub in Wilmington. Reading at that event were Samuel Borton, Elizabeth Cory, Douglas Morea, Mafundi, Robert Bohm, Jameelah, Suzanne Michelle, Patricia E. Eagan, e. jean lanyon, and myself. This was a significant reading because Kevin Freel, the owner of O'Friel's invited us back for the next second Saturday, on November 12, 1983, thus launching the regular 2nd Saturday Readings, which prevail to this day.

Additional readings continued to be held. On November 3, 1983, the Eschaton Writers held a reading at the Concord Pike Public Library, north of Wilmington, with many of the same poets cited above. There was a short series of regular poetry readings at The Hen's Teeth Bookstore on East 7th Street in Wilmington and in October a poetry reading, held in observance of the 100th anniversary of the death of Karl Marx, was held at the Walnut Street YMCA. On December 3, 1983, a reading commemorating the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe was held at the Deer Park Tavern in Newark, thus rounding out that year of successfully launching the poetry reading movement in the area.

In October 1990, Dreamstreets launched regular readings in Newark on the 3rd Saturday and later on the 3rd Sunday. The record for these readings, which lasted until May 1994, can be found on the website dreamstreetsarchive.com. It was around the time these Dreamstreets readings ended that the "poetry slam" movement began. Before the end of the millennium, new readings emerged at the Newark Arts Alliance's Art House in Newark and at Saints Andrew and Matthew Church in Wilmington. 

There may be public poetry readings that are not known by me currently happening regularly in the area. I do know that the 2nd Saturday Readings still occur just outside the city limits in Wilmington at the Jackson Inn on Lancaster Pike. In Newark, the Mocha, Music & More event, currently held at Central Perk on Main Street, features regular poetry readings. 

The history of public poetry readings in northern New Castle County is now 30 years old, a record that should be relished by local literary artists.

Done Written

For the past several years I have tried to stop writing prose fiction. It's been more than 50 years since I began writing literature. I've been most recently commemorating that time in 1962, just after graduating from high school, that I plunked my old Underwood on the kitchen table of my parents' house and started banging out short stories. Before the end of that year I wrote about a half dozen of them and launched my literary career, such as it would turn out to be, by sending them to The New Yorker. One of those stories became my first published story in 1966 in a small college literary magazine that's not worth mentioning.

Almost a decade later, in 1973, slowed by war, getting immersed in the counter culture movement, and kicking around the country, I renewed my aspirations by writing my first novel, The Afternoon Detective Agency. Except for a chapter published in Expresso Tilt in 1984 and part of a chapter published in Dreamstreets 3, the novel remains unpublished. What ensued during the next 39 years is a matter of record. My published work can be found on every floor of the University of Delaware library. Whoopee do! The greater remaining amount is unpublished.

Today as I grapple with the certainty that I will be living in the same poverty as I'm living now for the rest of my life, I don't see any reason for continuing to waste my time trying to be a literary artist. The problem is that writing ideas keep coming. My final challenge is to keep from being tempted to write. While I might give in to this impulse, I will not share the results. No one will ever know. I'm convinced, with the exception of a few, that no one is interested, cares, or even curious about what I write.

Within the past few weeks I wrote my final two short stories, which I sent to The New Yorker so they could reject them, as a means to commemorate my original gesture 50 years ago, as well as to ascertain some measure of progress. Well, I've got my measure. I know who to blame, and it's not myself, and that's why I'm so bitter.

My final novel. Only 6 copies exist.

The first of those two recent short stories, entitled "Chasing Sugar," picks up where The Afternoon Detective Agency ends. Wences Minion finds himself chasing Sugar Heartstraps through the subways of New York City. It is a world where all the conspiracy theories have turned out to be true, from a Kenyan born Muslim who had been sent packing, to chem trails and HAARP really being used to control the weather and used for mind control respectively. Minion finds himself in a United States flagrantly run by a new breed of Nazis. He is chasing Sugar because she has his dossier containing some vital information these new Nazis, the Archon Falange and their Secrepo agents, want. As for what happens, you'll never know until some one pays me to publish it. It's not likely to happen.

The second story is entitled "Christmas at Collinswood." In this story, Mark Lucas wakes from a coma. He's in the hospital and the first person he sees is Dr. Julia Hoffman. She's just finished up her studies to be a doctor at the New York School of Medicine. It's Christmas of 1945. Lucas had returned from the service during World War II and Dr. Hoffman helps him through that first post war Christmas. Shortly afterward, Dr. Hoffman gets an internship at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. The two lose touch. Living in New York, Lucas eventually gets a job as a stagehand with the help of a new neighbor named Fred Mertz, who lives in an apartment building in Manhattan with his wife Ethel. The other neighbors are Ricky Ricardo and his wife Lucy. Lucas later moves to an apartment building in Brooklyn. His new neighbors are Ralph and Alice Kramden on the second floor, and Ed and Trixie Norton up on the third floor. Not long after, Lucas runs into Fred Mertz and his friend, comedy writer Buddy Sorrell, who hooks Lucas up with his co-employee Sally Rogers. Lucas and Sally have a brief fling and just as it sours, he learns about Dr. Julia Hoffman. She has gone to Maine to help a man named Barnabas Collins, who has a rare and ancient blood disease. It's 1966 and things come to a head during the Christmas season. What happens? You'll never know until some one pays me to publish it. Not likely.

Sorry, I just can't afford to give it away anymore.

My Vietnam War novel. Only 6 copies exist.

As I declared at the beginning of this article, writing ideas keep coming to me. For a while I'll used this Brokenturtle blogspot to provide quick synopses of fiction ideas that occur to me but which I will never write. I'll give that much. It only takes an hour to whack out these blog articles, but I'll also write these synopses to get it out of my system, to purge the poison of wasted creativity from my life.

By the way, a few articles ago, I suggested that I might be deleting the file on Valdemar's Corpse, my non-fiction book about Delaware's past literary artists. The verdict is still out. The book is still hanging by a couple of threads. One of those is a query to a publisher for which I'm still awaiting a response. There is another publisher who wants to publish it, but there are issues, mostly having to do with printing costs. There are those who are rooting for Valdemar's Corpse never seeing the light of print. Perhaps they'll get their wish and like the corpse of Valdemar in Poe's story, after the link has been broken, my book will rapidly decompose never to be heard, or in my case, read forever. 

A Personal Invitation from Phillip Bannowsky

Dear friends in arts, factories, and politics,

About twenty-five years ago, when I was a rank-and-file activist in the UAW and humping the assembly line at Chrysler, I discovered a rare young poet, Jim Daniels, who seemed to understand the dreams and difficulties of us autoworkers. Now he is coming to Delaware, and I hope all my friends and union brothers and sisters will come out to see him when he reads at 5 p.m. October 11th at UD’s Gore Hall in Room 116. Also, he will be joining my old friend and long serving former Delaware Poet Laureate, e. jean lanyon at the 30^th Anniversary Celebration of 2^nd Saturday Poets, 5 p.m., October 13^th, at the Jackson Inn, 101 N. DuPont Road in Wilmington. Both events are open to the public. UD is free; 2^nd Saturday requests a $5 donation, and the Jackson Inn, as a tavern, serves only over 21.

Jim Damiels

Daniels seemed to be living my dream. While I dropped out of UD in 1965 and hired on at Chrysler in 69, Daniels escaped early on from Ford to work at Carnegie Mellon University, where he has taught creative writing since 1981. Now he has written, edited, and produced over thirty works of poetry, fiction, and film, and he has won numerous awards. By the way, he wrote a generous blurb for the back cover of my Autoplant: a Poetic Monologue. He has read in countless union halls, universities, libraries, bars, and bookstores since 1978. One of his poems, “Factory Love,” from Places/Everyone, is decaled on the roof of race car driver Alex Gabau’s sports car: “Machine, I come to you 800 times a day/like a crazy monkey lover.”

I stayed at Chrysler, (except for 1992-95 on leave to teach in Ecuador) until I retired in 2001, and now I teach at the University of Delaware. I am proud to say I have had a role in bringing my old favorite to Newark and Wilmington. A big thanks is due for funding to UD’s English Department, the Faculty Senate, and the Delaware Humanities Forum. But it is not only pride that a feel, but a sort of vindication.

You see, my present employer, the University of Delaware, purchased the Chrysler Newark Assembly Plant (N.A.P.) site to use for its new Science, Technology and Advanced Research (STAR) Campus and for Bloom Energy. Ironically, UD had featured prominently in my Autoplant as the dream “gymnasium” from which I wandered in the late 60s across South College Avenue to Chrysler’s assembly line.

What had been hometown to so many Chrysler workers is now history. Now, history can either be a corpse treated to an academic post mortem or a living memory recounted in the poet’s imagination. Chrysler N.A.P wasn’t just so much private property; it was the site of our human drama and the embodiment of our creativity and sweat.

Photo by Harry Rohrer: Chrysler N.A.P Body-In-White

That’s how worklife appears in Jim Daniel’s poetic world: human and sweaty. Sometimes it highlights the inherent dignity in a bottom job. In “Short-order Cook,” for example, from Places/Everyone, when the narrator gets an order for “thirty cheeseburgers and thirty fries,” he deftly if frantically crowds thirty patties onto the grill, flips them, ads the cheese, builds them on buns, cooks two buckets of fries, wraps them all, bags the order, wipes his sweat, smiles at the counter girls, eats a handful of ice, and proceeds to

do a little dance and walk back to the grill.

Pressure, responsibility, success,

thirty cheeseburgers, thirty fries.

Other times the dignity comes harder. Digger is an autoworker whose troubles Daniels writes about in dozens of poems published across three decades. In “Digger Thinks About Numbers,” also from Places, our hero contemplates his contribution to the tally of cars built in Detroit on a big sign above the freeway. The poet speaks to Digger, noting how he wishes the sign said,

“Digger made 160,000 parts so far this year.”

You want your neighbor to come over

and congratulate you. But

he ties brake cables—he’d want a sign too.

Diego Rivera, 1927, Detroit Institute of Arts.

Daniels’ heroes aren’t just working out their place in the work place, but in their homes and in the spiritual order as well. Niagara Falls is a longer poem about a man on vacation with his family at the famous site. His mind drifts back to the hardscrabble existence of his parents, his Catholic upbringing, the prayers he learned and forgot, the perverted priest and the one who smoked pot, a shrunken head at Ripley’s Museum, Elvis, St. Francis of Assisi, feeding bread to an insatiable multitude of carp, and a recurring motif about a restaurant called Mama Something’s, where he got a bad case of heartburn. The poem ends by evoking that glimpse of grace that may be the best we can pray for:

We are carp swimming up river, Mama,

all of us, even you. I hold the steering wheel

in one hand. The other rests

on my wife’s knee. My wallet against my ass

tells me little about who I am.

It is the prayer book this world insists on.

The sound of the tires hisses in my ears

like rushing water.

If I was a saint, I might

scoop out my dashboard full of change

and toss it to the wind.

But I am counting it out

to pay my toll.

One of the most tragic poems is “Abandoned, Detroit,” from In Line for the Exterminator. The narrator and his dad take a ride to see if the house they and his great-grandfather lived in was still standing. They

                                                detour down

Benitau, slowing to look for the crumbling heap

of recognizable memory, then blowing through

stop signs back to the freeway.

He reminisces about the Great Flood of Detroit, with

                                                everybody

pitching in to clean up the sewage in each other’s basement,

nobody talking about whose shit it was.

And Daniels leaves us with a final image of Motor City grief:

Ragged Flakes of lead paint, yellow and brown,

seeping into the hallowed ground where our dead

were laid out, then carried across the street

to the church that is also no more. My heart’s

a wrecking ball, okay? I’m swinging away

at my holy places of abandonment.

I’m thinking about bricks as seeds.

I’m dreaming the dull sad eye

of the streetlight.

Jim Daniels shares many of our values of working class dignity, art for the people, and human rights. I hope to see you at the University, October 11 or at 2^nd Saturday’s on October 13.

Jim Daniels Amazon Page is at http://www.amazon.com/Jim-Daniels/e/B001HMMC8S/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1348867102&sr=1-2-ent

This program is partially funded by a grant from the Delaware Humanities Forum, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A Restoration of Two Important Films

Eric Von Stroheim

This Labor Day morning I awoke, turned on the television to catch the latest news over breakfast, and when I got tired of the news being interrupted by commercials, I turned to Turner Classic Movies. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself in the middle of a classic silent film Greed, directed and produced by the famous director Eric Von Stroheim. I have to admit that Von Stroheim as a director and actor is a favorite, and I've been curious about his film Greed for a long time.

Von Stroheim had a reputation for shooting long films. He was a perfectionist for realistic detail and he strove to tell a more complete story on film than the Hollywood moguls thought appropriate. In spite of his brilliant filmmaking, his career as a filmmaker ended with the silent film era, but he went on to become a superb actor during the sound era. Two favorite examples are his roles in Jean Renoir's 1937 film La Grande Illusion and  Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard from 1950, which included footage from Von Stroheim's 1929 film Queen Kelly. Both Sunset Boulevard and Queen Kelly starred Gloria Swanson.

Serge Eisenstein

I couldn't help but to notice a comparison of the fate of Von Stroheim's Greed to another film by his contemporary Serge Eisenstein. That film was Que Viva Mexico! Von Stroheim's Greed was based on the Frank Norris naturalist novel McTeague. Eisenstein had made the trip to Hollywood from his home in the Soviet Union to make a film during those times of warmer feelings between our two countries generated by Roosevelt's New Deal. Initially Eisenstein planned to make a film version of the social realist novel by Theodore Dreiser, his 1925 An American Tragedy. Somewhat like Von Stroheim, Eisenstein ran into the Hollywood buzz saw of subterfuge, intrigue and sensibilities reminiscent of Fitzgerald's final novel The Last Tycoon. This whole set of circumstances drove Eisenstein to Mexico to embark upon the making of the film Que Viva Mexico! which he was unable to complete.

In spite of the fate of both Que Viva Mexico! and Greed, bowdlerized and shorter versions of each film were released. These versions distorted the messages that filmmakers Eisenstein and Von Stroheim intended, even though the superior quality of their filmmaking craft enabled the moguls to use the truncated films to recoup their investments.

About a decade ago a restored version of Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico! was released. This was accomplished because footage intended for the finished film but relegated to the "cutting room floor" had been recovered. Along with notes  and story boards kept by Eisenstein's associates Grigori Alexandrov  and Eduard Tissé, a completed, though not finished film, was released.  Eisenstein had intended to portray the cultural identity of Mexico through its history up to and including its revolution of 1910 – 1920. Only surviving story boards depicted this latter portion of the film.

In Von Stroheim's Greed, the nearly restored four hour version that was broadcast on Turner Classic Movies had also been pieced together from various elements to demonstrate the filmmaker's original intent.  Much of the lost footage was replaced by movie stills. The inclusion of those stills was enough to incorporate the subplots that Von Stroheim intended, which also provided contrasting themes to a story of the destructive capacity of greed and the power it inflicts on the downward spiral of the personal lives of McTeague and his wife Trina.

Both Eisenstein and Von Stroheim were pioneers of early 20th century filmmaking. Both had to adjust to the caprices of their patrons, in spite of which both remained innovators, great stylists of cinema, and uncompromising champions of progressive causes. Both Que Viva Mexico! and Greed are well worthy of viewing. 

UD to Limit Election Debate?

Andrew Groff for US Senate
(Green Party &
Endorsed by Libertarian Party)

Does anyone else in the UD community object to the lack of fair academic and democratic principles underlying the exclusion of minority parties and independent candidates from the October 17 and 18 UD-sponsored congressional and gubernatorial debates? Others are weighing in.

It is one thing for corporate media to be complicit in the deals cooked up by the major parties to exclude minority parties from debates; it is another for a university seeking “prominence” to truncate the discourse. Demonstrating a commitment to principles lacking at UD, the League of Women Voters withdrew their support for the Presidential debates after the two big parties took them over in 1988.

According to the press release published in UDaly, organizers of the debate, Director  of UD’s “nonpartisan” Center for Political Communication Ralph Begleiter and Delaware First Media President Micheline B. Boudreau, justify their exclusionary policy based on “nationally recognized debate inclusion criteria established by the Debate Advisory Standards Project.” Recognized by whom? by a political class that has discredited itself to many Americans?

Alex Pires for US Senate
(Independent)

They also rely on precedent, because they got away with this before in 2008 (and 2010), except that they had to suffer the embarrassment of Green Candidate Michael Berg hopping onto the stage with a campaign sticker over his mouth. The video went viral on YouTube.  

Among the criteria for inclusion: “3 campaign contributions per 1,000 residents . . . of $50 or more. “ Alternatively, candidates could poll 10 percent or more or have previously held political office. 50 bucks is a lot of money for folks unemployed or living on poverty wages. They may be disenchanted by the political class but know nothing about the alternatives, thanks to UD, and will be unlikely to cite minority candidates when polled.

Bernard August for US House
(Green Party)

Without irony, Micheline Boudreaus boasts that “[p]roviding avenues for civil discourse is a core component of our mission at DFM and WDDE. These debates also offer a premier learning experience to our student interns who assist in the production of the event.” Narrowing the discourse is hardly a “premier learning experience,” unless you are trying to indoctrinate students in received wisdom. For UD to take part in this pseudo-debate is a violation of its educational mission.

Scott Gesty for US House
Libertarian Party

So, how do the faculty, who are supposed to be guiding lights of the university curriculum, feel about this? Does their fear of left or right spoilers trump their obligations to an open discourse? I say the UD should insist that candidates who want to use their facilities must abide by the spirit of free inquiry and take on all comers. They include Andrew Groff (Green Party and endorsed by Libertarians) and Alex Pires (independent) for US Senate and Scott Gesty (Libertarian) and Bernie August (Green) for US House.

Your thoughts?