September 1, 2015  

We Need Walls, Just Not around New Classrooms or Other Spaces That People Actually Use

ACADEME BLOG

Sinking into insignificance in the presidential polling, Scott Walker’s has now suggested that building a wall along our border with Canada may be necessary to preserve our national security.

Putting aside what this emphasis on walling out the world indicates about the current state of our national psyche—or at least the Far Right psyche—the proposals for these walls along our borders expose the incoherence of the values ostensibly being preserved. Unlike Donald Trump who seems blithely unconcerned about the cost of constructing a wall along the much shorter border with Mexico, Walker claims to be a very determined fiscal conservative and yet has proposed what would surely be the second most expensive public works project in U.S. history—with only the interstate highway system surpassing it in cost.

But this is what happens when your presidential campaign is floundering: you ignore principles that are momentarily inconvenient in order to get some…

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About martinkich

I am a Professor of English at Wright State University's Lake Campus, where I have been a faculty member for more than 30 years. I have served four terms as the president of the WSU chapter of AAUP, one term as the president of the Ohio Conference of AAUP, and three terms as an at-large member of the executive committee of AAUP's Collective Bargaining Congress. I was elected to the Ohio Conference Board ahead of the statewide effort in 2011 to repeal by referendum Ohio's Senate Bill 5, which would have eliminated collective-bargaining rights for all public employees in the state. As co-chair of the Ohio Conference's Communication Committee, I began to do much more overtly political writing during that campaign. It was a tremendous learning experience, though often quite overwhelming. At the beginning of 2018, our chapter at Wright State went of strike for three weeks. The second longest strike by a public university faculty in U.S. history, it was necessitated by an effort to gut our contract. Everyone who stood firm to preserve our contract paid a substantial financial as well as emotional price to do so, but the sense of solidarity--not just with our Wright State colleagues, but with our students, the faculty at other Ohio institutions, the members of other unions, and many community supporters who joined our picket lines and helped in countless other ways--was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I have sustained my activism over several decades, and at the risk of stating the obvious, I have very much enjoyed the work, I have been grateful for what we have sometimes managed to accomplish, and I continue to cherish the great friendships that I have made. Receiving AAUP's Sternberg and Tacey awards for those efforts has been a great honor, but also has seemed a little redundant. Beyond my blogging, I have been a fairly productive writer of articles and reviews for academic journals and more general periodicals. I have written one book and co-authored another, and I have co-edited a collection of essays. I am currently working on two book manuscripts.

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