Bob Cahn has written up a piece on the Job Crisis. It ends with a “threat” that if the APS Council does not propose a satisfactory plan of action by the Washington meeting (end of April) then there should be “No Business as Usual”. Just what action that implies is purposefully ambiguous; and it will depend on the...
Tag - organizing report
Although several contacts on the campus have been helping to distribute Science for the People, we have not had any formally organized SESPA group here previously. However, some of us in the various science departments are working on a couple of little projects, not enough to form a complete organization around, but...
We solicited reports from local SESPA groups and groups like SESPA, however, the mails have been slow and our request may not have reached some people because of summer vacation. Therefore, we would like to invite our contacts to send us any news of activities for the next issue—deadline Sept. 10, 1971. Despite the...
It would seem that confrontation, restructuring, or issues by themselves are not enough to change peoples' attitudes. One key factor is to what degree the people are involved in any of these tactics. We should be particularly aware of the concrete conditions within which we act and of the mood, attitudes, and...
Students and staff at the University of California's Lawrence Radiation Lab at Berkeley continue to press for the right to hold organized meetings at noon hour in the Lab auditorium. This seemingly innocuous demand has resulted in a seventeen-month controversy involving Director of the Laboratory, Dr. Edwin McMillan...
Since the American Physical Society (APS) meeting a number of developments have occurred in the campaign to force Polaroid Corporation to withdraw from South Africa. On February 9, 1971 Polaroid responded to the boycott called by the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement (PWRM) by sending a memo to all its employees...
Our major purpose was both critical and assertive -- critical of the technical and scientific obfuscation of the essentially political nature of the use, content, financial support and motivation of science in America and assertive of the need of a positive program of "people's science." (see "People's Science, page...
SCIENCE AGAINST THE PEOPLE is a crime that in today's world has reached a scale unprecedented in history. For never before has the confluence of technological capability and the need to dominate affected so many people in so many parts of the world. You are guilty, Glenn T. Seaborg. of a conscious, major, self-serving...
The first major event at the AAA$ was the Special Lecture to be delivered by. Dr. Philip Handler, President of the National Academy of Sciences, on the "Obligations of the Scientific Community." The forty-some page text released in advance made it amply clear that we were going to be treated to one of those consensus...
On a Wednesday morning at 7:30, I began a lecture to about a hundred Vietnamese students and professors in a bare room with a scratchy blackboard. My translator and I moved about a large wooden platform at the head of the room as we spoke. A microphone had been placed on the lectern, but neither of us used it. On our...