The faculty members of the Labor Studies program of the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies of The City University of New York stand in solidarity with our colleague and friend, Frances Fox Piven, in the face of the outrageous personal and political attacks leveled against her by various Fox News commentators and especially Glenn Beck.
Over the past several years, Beck, on his television and radio programs and on his website, “The Blaze,” has concocted a concerted McCarthyite campaign to vilify and demonize Frances, her late husband and collaborator, Richard Cloward, and their groundbreaking academic work on poverty and poor people’s movements and politics.
These attacks should be understood not only as an outright assault on Fran Piven’s academic freedom and political rights, but also an effort by Beck and others in the Tea Party “movement” to undermine calls for an alternative and radical political response to the economic downturn.
Beck’s attacks on Fran Piven and her intellectual ideas have also prompted a wave of vile and pointed physical threats against her person from Beck’s acolytes, who have taken to writing and threatening Frances directly and personally. As we have seen in far too many recent instances, these kinds of verbal assaults have a way of spurring violent physical attacks on people and institutions.
We condemn these attacks in the strongest possible terms and call on all progressive and fair-minded people to speak out against them and to respond in the one way that Frances would most appreciate: by helping build a mass democratic movement to resist right-wing assaults and to call for fundamental political change.
Stephen Brier, Ph.D
Senior Academic Technology Officer
Professor, Ph. D. Program in Urban Education
Coordinator, Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program
Co-Director, New Media Lab
The Graduate Center, CUNY
email: sbrier@gc.cuny.edu
website: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/itp/