The Fat Lady Hasn’t Sung
I’ve written a lot about the CSC over the past week, and have gotten a fair deal of feedback on my work. Of particular interest is that some students at the University of Dayton have started dropping by. I do wish that my host hadn’t broken referrer tracking at the moment - I’d love to see how everyone is finding this place.
Because of this traffic, I feel that I need to briefly address a few issues which are of interest to the community there. Thus, I’m going to start off with an appetizer (Editorial Flambé), move onwards to a cold dish (Aged Story garnished with juicy Exposé) and as a segue into the main course of this post (Roast Analysis of Organizational Structure.) Bon appetit!
Flyer News
The recent Flyer News editorial “on behalf of the CSC” is not actually on behalf of the CSC at all, although it was written by a student worker there. Nick Cardillino has disavowed any knowledge of the editorial prior to its publication. This is good, as it saves me the trouble of fisking it. I have no objection to debate - if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen - but I do take issue with those who radically misinterpret and directly misquote me.
Play for Peace
Back in May 2003, I wrote a few somewhat-intemperate entries about the Week of Student Action Against the War that was being hosed by the CSC. One of the events that week was a “Play for Peace” concert which was to feature the student bands Breakaway and The Melting Room. As the anti-war connections of the concert became public, Breakaway pulled out of the event, saying that they were “falsely informed” and that they “support our troops in Iraq.” At the time, I made a snarky comment that The Melting Room should enjoy their new solo appearance.
Last week, that old post got a comment from a representative of The Melting Room. As always, authentication of this sort of thing is difficult. However, the commenter did leave a valid UD e-mail address in the comments system - if someone faked this, the forger worked at it a bit. I’m going to take the liberty of quoting his full comment here:
The Melting Room was promised that the show was in no way related to any anti-war movement. The band was promised that the proceeds from the show would go to an unrelated charity.
That is, to say the least, a very interesting statement. Were either of the bands that were scheduled for the “Play for Peace” concert informed of the nature of the event they were playing at? For reference, the charity that was scheduled to receive donations from the weekend was not involved in work “unrelated” to the war. In fact, the Flyer News reported that donations at the concert would be given to Voices in the Wilderness. Voices in the Wilderness was last spotted breaking into live ordnance storage in England to protest Coalition operations in Fallujah. The kind folks at VitW also recently heckled Marines during MOUT training with this thought-provoking statement of their desire for peace:
Dubya’s lies should make him choke
He must still be snortin’ coke
Saddam’s secret poison gas
Must be something Rumsfeld passed
This is the CSC’s definition of an unrelated charity? This is the CSC’s definition of a concert which isn’t connected to the anti-war movement? What could create such a total disconnect between the story both bands received and the reality of the situation?
Nick and Me
The answer to this question is party revealed by my meeting with Nick Cardillino, director of the CSC, last week. We had a long and productive discussion about the issues I had raised in my editorial, and I thank him for his time and willingness to discuss the issues.
On the one hand, the discussion resolved a few of my previous concerns. In my editorial to the Flyer News, I raised the question of whether or not CSC funds had been used to sponsor the protest at Ft. Benning. Mr. Cardillino assured me that the funding for this protest came solely from the students involved, and that the organization of this protest was not carried out by any members of the CSC staff while they were “on the clock.” This is a good thing, and I’m glad to have that question answered.
On the other hand, this answer raises some equally troubling questions about the structure of the CSC. Based on my discussion with Mr. Cardillino, it appears that the CSC employs a highly cellular structure. Students come up with the idea for an event, and Nick Cardillino briefly screens the idea for the event. With his approval, the organization can draw on the CSC for resources to support the event in question.
This sort of structure has the advantage of being highly flexible, and it allows the CSC to address a wide variety of issues. Unfortunately, this structure offloads the responsibility for researching an event to those students who are promoting it. To borrow a few concepts from computer security, there is very little data validation before the CSC executes the requests provided by students. Mr. Cardillino mentioned at one point that he trusted the students at the CSC to provide him with accurate information. From a security standpoint, a trusted entity is something that can break your security anytime it wants to.
This appears to be the underlying reason that the CSC showed up at an International ANSWER protest in October 2003: The student who organized the protest didn’t do the enough background research on ANSWER to find that it was a WWP front, and what research she did was not presented honestly to the campus. (How exactly does an anti-war and anti-administration protest get advertised as a protest against the use of depleted uranium?) At the time, there were no checks in place to verify this information before the CSC acted on it. My e-mails to the CSC after the fact were the first clue Nick Cardillino had that there was something rotten in the state of ANSWER.
I would speculate that much the same process occurred when bands were recruited for the “Play for Peace” concert. Acting without extensive supervision, a few students decided to set up the concert, and to recruit local student bands to play. Perhaps the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing, or perhaps the truth was stretched a bit to ensure that the bands would play the concert. One way or another, the unsupervised actions of a few students turned into an embarrassment for the entire CSC.
This does not hold the CSC blameless for these events: This is their structure. They devised it, and they have chosen to operate using it. In some cases, such as the WHINSEC protest, this cellular structure has been used to the CSC’s direct advantage. Technically, the students protesting at WHINSEC weren’t protesting on behalf of the CSC, but were functioning as private citizens. However, they were all involved with the CSC, one of them was a staffer at the CSC, they were wearing t-shirts printed by Pax Christi (a major CSC client group), and the two arrested have played up their affiliation with UD and the CSC.
I’ve seen this approach before when working with Boy Scout troops - generally, it’s how adolescent males think they can get around organizational bans on playing laser tag and paintball. In Scout troops, the role of the adult leadership is to put the kybosh on any such doublespeak. What is the leadership of the CSC doing about this situation? Alternately, is the leadership of the CSC perfectly content to use this sort of end-run around University policy? If they wouldn’t let a UD student booked for an alcohol violation temporarily renounce his status as a UD student to avoid fines, why are they willing to tolerate this sort of “maybe I am, maybe I’m not” sophistry from their volunteers and staff?
Until the CSC is both willing and able to exert strong central control over the activities carried out in their name, embarrassments of the sort that I have documented previously are inevitable. The CSC needs to begin aggressively protecting what is left of its reputation if it wishes to remain in existence on this campus. I find it interesting that the e-mails I received in support of my editorial in the Flyer News came from students and from faculty, on the right and on the left. Before it was taken down, the Flyer News’s opinion poll only showed about a quarter of students supporting the WHINSEC protest, with a quarter calling for further research into protest actions and half saying that the university should never be involved in illegal activities.
The CSC does do good work on this campus: They’re involved with numerous service groups such as Habitat for Humanity, and they do some valuable social justice activism. If that wasn’t the case, I’d be happy to watch the CSC marginalize itself further. As it is, however, it would be a shame to lose the good work that the CSC does because it can’t be bothered to police the political activities carried out in its name. The CSC has a stark choice to make: Either they can commit to major internal reform, or they can let the poor judgment of some of their students further marginalize them to the point of irrelevancy.
Don’t touch that dial, folks. It may get quiet for a while, but the fat lady hasn’t sung.
It ain’t over ’til it’s over. — Yogi Berra