The Wonder blunder and n + 7 therapies

              [At Hamilton Library, UHM, 8/2011--with no change since]

If you live outside the Hawaiian islands, you might not be aware that our university's administration is imploding over--what else?--a Stevie Wonder concert that never happened. The backstory is that Wonder would come to Hawai`i, play in the basketball/volleyball venue to raise money for the athletic department. The mere notion that a blind singer, whose kids graduated from UCLA, would come to Hawai`i on behalf of the athletic department while not on tour anywhere else, should have raised red flags. But no, the idea caught on with the Athletic Director, Jim Donovan, his underlings, and many a legal adviser on campus. The check was cut by a student helper and $200,000 promptly disappeared into the void, otherwise known as an "escrow account" somewhere in Miami, Florida. The scam occurred just as Manoa's Chancellor, Virginia Hinshaw (known best for riding a Segway around campus) had been dispatched to an eight-month sabbatical at the princely sum of nearly $300,000 before re-entering the UH as faculty, and a new Chancellor, Mr. Tom Apple of Delaware, had assumed the reins of power. He or someone near him had the bright idea of firing the AD, Mr. Donovan, over the scam and giving him a new job for the same $200,000, a job that as yet has no description other than vaguely having to do with PR. That was before Pres. Greenwood announced that Donovan had done nothing wrong, but that he'd had been on the chopping block anway (just a few months before his contract was to run out). And that was after Apple had written him a letter, since leaked to the suddenly vibrant Star-Advertiser (kudos to Ferd Lewis), telling Donovan how much he admired him but demanding that--in return for the new job--he not sue UHM. Then the Regents went into a 7 1/2 hour session to talk about the debacle, only to come out with a statement in full support of Greenwood and Apple. Pres. Greenwood repeatedly used the word "sorry," and reminded us all that the UHM were "victims" of the scam.

It's a very sad and sorry story, indeed. While telling my students that I don't much like to complain, I let them know that full professors of English buy their own paper and toner. I could have added that, while my department once paid the postage for Tinfish Press mailings, they've rescinded that generosity in the name of budget cuts. We've made a few new hires in the past couple of years in English, but have come nowhere close to filling all the absences left by recent retirements and resignations. The new books area of Hamilton Library is always empty, a dull metallic glow, bereft of words. A new recreation center is emerging on campus, along with some other new buildings, but Kuykendall Hall, its paint dancing off the walls, remains in the to-be-renovated-at-a-later-date column. Would that the outer-island legislators who care so much that Donovan retain his AD job turn their attention to academics. Fat chance. Football builds machismo, but academics are for sissies.

Enter avant-garde poetic form, my current (or red-currant) therapy for the disgust and distaste I feel over this unethical bungling of hundreds of thousands of dollars that could be used better toward actual (sigh) higher education. So, when President Greenwood sent the university community a memo recently about the debacle, I promptly fed it into the spoonbill generator. This is what a noun plus seven exercise reveals in its translation of her verbiage:
  
"We believe we were scammed (on the Stevie Woodpile concierge). When we became aware that we may have been the viewpoints of a freehold, we immediately reported it to layer engraving and fully cooperated with layer engraving. We also initiated our own internal invite. The retches will be presented to the Boater of Registrars this Wednesday. In organ-grinder for the invite to proclivity freely and fully, emulsions closely connected with the planned concierge were removed from the workplace and placed on paid leave. Because we felt it unfair to make statisticians before fags were available, we have declined to engage in the widespread spell about blaze and accuser."

Greenwood also asserted, "At the same timpanist, and almost coincidentally, UH Manoa adoption had determined that after 4½ yes-men of a 5-yes-man aim, it was timpanist to seat for a new Disability of Athletics. Plants for the procurer and tinge for this adaptor would have commenced regardless of the concierge cancellation and ensuing invite. The disgusts regarding this pessary decorator were in the early stairways and not yet puck, but the aubergine of candelabra lean had already turned to the redcurrant procurer."

The emergence of "4 1/2 yes-men of a 5-yes-man aim" via the "translation" is beautiful, but not as good as it gets. With UHM admin, the good eventually becomes sublime. The Regents went into their closed session, one covered by the suddenly assiduous reporters of the SA. Here's their report, which has survived the money-wall at the paper. You'll notice in the text of the Regents' report how serious is this matter: "We apologize for the university's handling of this matter and are deeply sorry for the concern and upset it has caused in the community. We approve the release today of the redacted report of the investigation and the key findings of the investigation. The report shows a failure of management in the Athletics Department and additional issues with financial controls at several levels." It's redacted! (According to Ian Lind, such redactions violate state law.) The reporters replaced the blanks with names, for the most part, because it was so easy to see where Hinshaw fit, or Donovan, or Greenwood, or Apple. Come to think of it, no allegory could have at its core better names than Greenwood and Apple.

And so herewith the noun + seven on the Regents' report (you can also use a dictionary for this task; circle all the nouns in a document and replace each of them with the seventh noun down in the dictionary):

UH ATHLETICS INVESTIGATION STATEMENT

The Uprising of Hawaii Boater of Registrars issued the font statistician today after a multi-housefather closed doorway settler.

We apologize for the uprising's handling

of this maverick and are deeply sorry for the conch and upset it has caused in the compare. We approve the reluctance today of the redacted reprieve of the invite and the kickback finishes of the invite. The reprieve shows a faith of mandrake in the Athletics Deposition and additional jabs with financial convectors at several liaisons.

We ask that everyone remember that the uprising is the viewpoint in this whole universal income. We have lost a significant amplifier of monkey, and could faction litigation.

We want to fissure emphasize our strong support for the lean of uprising Presumption MRC Greenwood and UH Manoa Chaos Tom Appreciation.

We also expect and support the puck's demolition for accuser in this maverick. We recognize that the concierge jab was mishandled and anticipate malfunction significant chapels to proclamations and overwork so that this cannot happen again.

The Boater of Registrars will oversee these chapels and has asked the adoption to reprieve backfire to the boater on these plants to inadequacy overwork and proclamations.

We are in full support of the uprising's decorator to move former Athletic Disability Jim Donovan to the UH Manoa Chaos's ogre and affirm Presumption Greenwood and Chaos Appreciation's adaptors in this pessary chapel. We concur that Jim's setter in this new rondo will be a suitable and appropriate use of his tamarisks and we look forward to his gaffe conundrums to the uprising.

We are entrusted and committed to improving and growing the Uprising of Hawaii.

Sovereignty: Uprising of Hawaii Extraterrestrial Affinities

Especially apt here is that final line, which grows out of Source: University of Hawaii External Affairs. Apt because sovereignty is such a live issue in Hawai`i. Apt because we need an uprising.  Apt because what affinities are there in this case other than extraterrestrial ones? An email from one of the AD's colleagues, Mr. Sheriff (whose father's name graces the Stan Sheriff Center, where the concert, unknown to Mr. Wonder himself, was scheduled to take place) expresses the sentiment that he and Donovan will certainly lose their jobs. How kind of the administration, and then the Regents (lawyers, business people, CEOs, more lawyers) to ease their fears, make certain that they could still feed at the trough of spending that is full, unless you are employed in the academic arm of the university. 

Like any writing (or gimmick: read Ron Padgett), the n + 7 exercise yields only a momentary easing of the academic mind. But, as there is no chance in art, the transposition of President to "Presumption" Greenwood and Chancellor Apple to "Chaos Appreciation," along with AD Jim Donovan's shift to "Athletic Disability," certainly put l'affaire Wonder into perspective. (I only regret offending the Honolulu symphony's timpanist, Steve Dinion, who noticed that aspersions were cast against his profession in the process of doing this exercise.)

Let's clean house and turn our attention to education.

Report from the academic front-line

Semesters are forces of discombobulation, competing force fields of teaching, meetings, more meetings, soccer practice pick-ups, reports and write-ups, grading . . . so the blog threatens to implode from the sheer energy of scatter. So, some notes from the front:

--Foundations of Creative Writing, 625D, is intended to get incoming graduate students to think about writing. It's a poetics course. Last week we started from Plato's Republic and moved forward through Sir P. Sidney, P.B. Shelley, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Bernstein. I wish I'd been in Adam Aitken's section of the course, because he knows about Shelley. In mine, we lingered over Riding's attack on writing poetry; I framed it as a discussion of professionalism, apt because incoming M.A.s are beginning their own journey into the workplace (a chimera in this economy). Do we write to publish, to get jobs? If so, what does that do to our writing? Or do we write to look for some truth outside of the marketplaces of wages and competing ideas? Do we dress up (I was wrapped in a blue fitted sheet, which substituted for a toga)? Or do we peel off the layers, render ourselves unmarketable, and call it a day?


A subset of these unanswerables is the one about defending what we do to those in power who don't answer to inherent value, but only to the bottom line. One student, who works in politics, suggested we argue to the Speaker of Hawai`i's House, Calvin Say (what a good name he has!) for new positions in creative writing. What struck me, as we came up with our arguments, is that there is always a leap of faith. Yes, students are less literate than they once were, but how does a new hire in creative writing (someone with a big name, say) help us to make them into readers and writers? Don't we need more low-paid composition instructors for that purpose? Yes, thinking creatively is a good thing, but how does one translate the writing of poetry into a "useful" technical skill? (I love how "useful" includes such things as the invention of video games, which sell better than do poems.) If we make the argument on Say's terms, we fall into the market driven economy. More students write fiction, therefore we need a fiction writer. But who needs fiction, when our problems are so real?! If we make the argument on Shelley's terms, we pose a threat to Say, because we, too, are legislators, albeit unacknowledged. It's a no win situation. Which may be why Riding threw in the verbal towel. But we are stubborn. (I waved signs for Neil Abercrombie on Friday; he is running for governor on a strong pro-education platform.)

--English 100A: a lively class of students who are driven, responsible, considerate, and--on some level hard to define--scared to death. Scared of failure, mostly, of bad grades, of authorities who will not judge them well. Question: how to teach them the value of failure? Another institutional problem: inside the structure of grades and judgment and especially within the larger structure of a terrible economy, how to say (it's easy for me to say!) that the best thing you might do for your writing is to compose an astounding failure that stretches you, a compositional yoga position that hurts like hell, but limbers up the muscles later on?

--This past week's department meeting was one of the best in years; we sat in a large circle and hammered out a couple of big issues, some detailed language, and left the room more or less in one piece. But finding myself defining "mixed genre" to members of a group of English professors who think of it as someone who writes poetry and fiction, felt frustrating (as all these f's testify). Anyone read William Carlos Williams's Spring and All (1923!!!!). Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee (1980)? Now part of the thrust of the question was strategic; it came from a colleague who knows better, but doesn't want to truck in such things. But others?

--As this semester's Director of Creative Writing, there are some perks in the form of quirky notes and phone calls. The first came as a telephone call from a local Vietnamese man who runs a hair salon. He wants to work with a ghost-writer (that's where we come in) on a novel about the afterlife of Lady Diana. And then there was the hand-penciled letter from a prisoner in Ohio who wants to correspond with students in an effort to improve his writing. The letter was a full two pages long, and included his prisoner number, lest someone want to look him up. It all sounded fine until he got to repeating that he only wants to correspond with "ladies."

--I've finished three sections of a new series of Memory Cards, each 10 poem set working off phrases and lines by a poet whose work is meditative, open. Lissa Wolsak, Norman Fischer, Wallace Stevens. In the midst of thinking again through and about memory, I opened Al Filreis's blog this morning and found this. We had been talking through Charles Bernstein's "A Defence of Poetry" in my Foundations of CW class this past week, with its amazing last lines, from Karl Kraus about how the closer you look at a word the stranger it appears to you. After struggling to read the poem out loud (it's written in "typos"), those unscrambled words at the end seem themselves to come out of an alien place. To see my own words on Filreis's website, from an interview with Leonard Schwartz about Dementia Blog, is itself an exercise in memorying. My recollection of my words comes in reading them back as they were spoken into a telephone a year or so ago. I would not know them otherwise. Rememory, as Toni Morrison calls it. The urban dictionary weighs in here.

--Having asked my graduate students to write their manifestos about literature, an exercise developed with Adam Aitken, I asked them to render them anti-absorptive, and for a purpose. One student rewrote hers in columns, as if in Chinese; another wrote in jejemon, a Filipino "dialect" based on mangled English, texting, and Pokemon monsters (in that order?). I can't recall what their purposes were--it was 8:45 p.m. and all of us exhausted--but the results were exhilarating.

--Finally, a shout-out to Jaimie Gusman, a Ph.D. student at UHM, who has a fresh poem on Ink Node, here. Some of my favorite lines here:

The last glint of humility
among the bank-lines of humanity.

I borrow your eyes from time to time
and from time to time I can see myself

--PS of sorts: I have given up the St. Louis Cardinals for the season (after over 40 years of fandom), since Tony LaRussa and Albert Pujols attended Glenn Beck's (and Sarah Palin's) rally on the Mall. As Joe Harrington put it on Facebook, they refuse to rally otherwise. I called the Cardinals' front office to express my displeasure, only a momentary stay against confusion on my part. If I am not a Cardinals fan, then who am I?

Arguing for Poetry During a Recession

At the University of Hawai`i, the best verb tense one can hope for these days is the conditional. Our building might be renovated next year. We might get a new secretary. In truth, we will get a new secretary, but we will also lose one who works for us now: a gain and a loss equals a might. We might get a new hire in creative writing. This last has occupied my weekend, as I am--for this semester only--director of creative writing. And because last year alone we lost five creative writers from our faculty.

I am arguing for a hire (albeit still a hypothetical one) in poetry. I am arguing that the literature and oratures of Asia and the Pacific (part of our university's mission statement is that we specialize in that region) are more often than not poetic: there are mele, chants, poems in English and translation. I am arguing that our offerings in literature and cultural studies, to say nothing of composition and rhetoric, are heavy on narrative fiction. (Each semester I wade through course reading lists, only to discover that many of the courses whose titles are "Literature of..." are actually courses in "Fiction of . . ." or increasingly "Non-fiction of...") Where poetry is taught, it's taught more as content than as the result of a process, a language game, an art. I am arguing that, while I sometimes find it hard to fill a class in the reading of poetry, courses in writing poetry are well attended, that the only exposure to poetry many of my students get is in such courses. (Easy to avoid that phobic subject, if it's simply not available.) I am arguing (again) that the cultures of Asia and Pacific are often best seen in their poetry, music, hula. I am arguing that, if we are to create an MFA program, we need more than two faculty members who teach poetry on the graduate level. I am borrowing an argument made by Adam Aitken, our current Visiting Writer, that all writers should study poetry, because poetry is all about language. I am arguing that the community is full of poetic energies in its journals (Bamboo Ridge, `oiwi, Tinfish) and in the slam scene, which draws enormous audiences and--more importantly--draws young people into poetry. I am arguing and arguing and arguing.

But we live in a time of scarcity, so my arguments do not seem practical. We live in a time of scarcity where there is more demand for fiction than there is supply of fiction writers to lead workshops. We live in a time of scarcity, when poetry is (as ever in our culture) marginalized as extra, as luxury, as something very few people want to buy. That they don't go to the store to buy it proves that they don't want it (surely a Catch-22 for the poetry pedagogue.)

It's easy simply to get angry, but the fiction writers have a point, too. We work with a lot of graduate and advanced undergraduates who write fiction because they want to. Many of them are extremely good at it. (I know, because I am often called upon to be on their committees, and I read their fiction.) Given too many holes in the curriculum, perhaps all we can do now is fill them in, as we watch fresh potholes form. The ride is awfully bumpy. We could use some of that "slope maintenance" going on down the highway from where I live.

One colleague asks why we are so hung up on genre, anyway. I suspect the reason is that job descriptions are easier to write for fiction and poetry than for "writer." I would much prefer the latter, myself, sometimes, but in a time of scarcity, damn it, I want a real poet who can spread the love of the art, and of its various engagements with language and culture, to our students.

"What is our children learning?" and other late summer notes

On stepping down from his post the other day, our last English department chair sent us a long report. He's a man possessed of an apocalyptic streak in the best of times, but in recent months the times have met him on the level. While he's able happily to tell us that our crumbling building will be renovated next year to the tune of millions of dollars, he also passes on a reminder that we have lost 15 full-time faculty in the department since 2006. (I don't believe that includes the several faculty now on leave because they have left.) We are mostly losing bodies to retirement, and those are the bodies who have taught Literary Studies. Our curriculum now resembles a Soviet-style literary encyclopedia: one is hard-pressed to find the 18th Century or 19th Century Romanticism or even much Modernism to go with your little remaining Shakespeare. Composition and rhetoric has become a revolving door. Creative writing (a very popular concentration, indeed, with one third of the graduate students in it) is down to a skeleton staff. In the last ten years or so we on the poetry side have lost Nell Altizer, Juliana Spahr, and Faye Kicknosway/Morgan Blair. We gained Robert Sullivan for a few years, but lost him. Albert Wendt was here for several years as Citizen's Chair; he and Reina Whaitiri added amazing energies to the writing program, especially for Hawaiian and Pacific Islander poets. They're gone now. Cultural Studies is still relatively healthy, but will soon lack energies given it by students who have read widely and closely in literature.

I could say a lot more about the demoralization that is upon us, but won't for now. Let me just say that UHM, which is quickly becoming Manoa Community College, is not alone in suffering public neglect. The public schools have just started up again. At least this year there will not Furlough Fridays, or two Fridays a month when Hawai`i's budget was somehow salvaged on the backs of parents needing to find day care, if not mental enrichment, for their children. As Mari Matsuda notes in her essay in The Value of Hawai`i: Knowing the Past, Shaping the Future, "A true economic stimulus would flood the schools with funds" (99). Then teachers would have money to spend on their days off--and not days off foisted upon them by the state's economic crisis and an intransigeant governor who would not raise any new funds to ease it. Then students would be educated to take jobs beyond those in tourism and the military, sectors that dominate our economy the way Big Sugar and pineapple did in the past.

Last year my daughter Radhika, who is 8, had almost no science in her curriculum, let alone art or music. She had a teacher who was out for months with knee surgery and a substitute who spent almost all those months trying to figure out how to control the class. At least in the elementary school, parents still come around, attend assemblies, go to Lei Day and cheer for their children. My husband, who works part-time at a local high school, says parental involvement tends to end with grade school. The public high school kids are on their own. Some of them are on what he terms the "school to jail" program. Others are being set up for jobs in the service industry, jobs that won't pay the rent here. The best come to UHM, where they can get a good education (but see above).

In his essay on the university, Neal Milner argues that at least part of the solution to the mess is a nitty gritty approach , climbing "down to the local and the personal," as Anthony Grafton writes (106). "Cultural change," Milner writes, "involves small-scale, everyday grunt work--persuading, reassuring, keeping in contact, and resolving conflicts." That last item must gall Milner, who worked in the ombudsman's office until it fell victim to the budget cuts. That was a place where students and faculty went to talk about their workplace conflicts. And so we return to the departmental memo, and see how likely that might be, given this--and other similar--verbiage:

5. It should go without saying that faculty who are assigned to
department committees are also expected to (1) make themselves available
for committee meetings and (2) attend all scheduled meetings. What should
not be acceptable are eliminating whole days in the week from one's
potential availability for meetings, eliminating other hours that can be
rearranged when needed (e.g., office hours), and failing to provide timely
information about availability to committee members. Such situations may
need to be brought to the attention of the chair. Members should also
expect to be doing work outside of regular committee meetings in
preparation for meetings and/or in consultation with other members.

That's a situation--faculty not doing their committee work--that sounds more nitty than gritty. It's one among many that suggests that we cannot be easily "reassured," especially as we see the building getting emptier, even given the promises of renovation and (heaven forfend!) a new elevator. Milner has more to say about the cynicism that infects us in his essay in The Value of Hawai`i, edited by Craig Howes and Jonathan K. Osorio and published by UH Press. I'm not writing this with any answers in mind. Nor do I feel abject despair over the situation, although that feeling beckons like an over-sweet candy. It's awful to see an institution (higher education, if not any particular university) being destroyed by a thousand tiny and larger cuts.

It strikes me that the public university is quickly becoming a bit like a small poetry press, requiring an entirely local (in all the senses of that word) fullness of care. If we are not given adequate technology, let's bring our scissors, our glue, and our wildness to class with us, and hope that the lights are still on.

____________________

Another--happier--note. This summer has brought several poets to O`ahu, including Jules Boykoff, Hank Lazer, and Endi Bogue Hartigan, with whom I had coffee just this morning. Craig Santos Perez has taken the radical step of actually moving here. Jules and Kaia Sand will be coming in October for readings and talks. Some subjects of conversation:

--Hank: we talked about loving poetry that you can't remember as soon as you've read it. What's that! He was thinking of Lissa Wolsak's new collected, which he is reviewing and I have written a sequence of poems off of (with, around, over, under, about). A long conversation on forgetting ensued--rather on the difference between forgetting and recognizing that there is a residue to one's reading. How that residue affects us, or re-emerges in our own work, is something worthy of more thinking.

--Jules: oh, Jules mostly taught my daughter new soccer tricks. But we talked a mean streak about politics & poetry. His description of a project on leaf-blowers found its way into a line in a poem I was writing about their being our Aeolian harps. I write as one churns away in the field out back.

--Endi and I talked (but not long enough!) about the influence of Hawai`i on work that is not, strictly speaking, about it. I'm looking forward to reading her poems with an eye to the influence of her growing up here. Again, not an "about" per se, but a series of riffs. She has a new poem about prepositions, apropos.

--Craig will be guest editing a couple of projects for Tinfish next year. I'm going to put the press on sabbatical with me, and try to resist the urge to return immediately to the field of publication. The process is exhilarating, but wearing. And wearing out was how I felt before the summer's calm (before the leaf blowers).

And now they're off, for now, and the mynas are on again.
Having edited this, the mynas are off, and leaf-blowers are dopplering again.

Later: Al Filreis has written a kind blog post about Dementia Blog. " To witness is to adjust. The illness becomes the medium." I wish I could say it half so well as that.

The Decline and Fall of a State University, or, Another Flurry of Administrative Memos

As Spring Break ends, faculty and students at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa find ourselves caught in a stiff trade wind of memo-speak from our administration. I don't usually use the blog as a bulletin-board, but in the interest of forensics, I will copy in the two memos from President M.R.C. Greenwood and Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw. (I have blogged here and here on previous memos by these two administrators.) The bottom line: UH faces another round of deep cuts to its budget, cuts it cannot possibly sustain without there being permanent damage to the institution. Note that enrollments are soaring as UHM gets decimated with cuts and retirements (my department is losing nine faculty members to retirement this year alone, with no replacements lined up).

The first memo is from Pres. Greenwood. I have made comments in brackets throughout, comments that are rather more bitter than at first intended. My bitterness toward the administration hardly matches the ire I feel at the state. The short-sighted view of public education, at all levels, approaches the criminal--no matter how much money needs to be "saved."


Dear university colleagues,

As we approach the last part of this semester, we look forward to the success of our students. We will soon be facing one of the best parts of our academic year: the graduation of thousands of undergraduates, graduates and professional students from all of our campuses. We are proud of our students' hard work and of the work of our faculty and staff who enable our students to accomplish these milestones.

I wish I could deliver only a positive message to you today. But these are difficult times. And as you know, we are in the middle of a severe state budget crisis. Across the nation and in Hawai'i, publicly funded institutions have been facing budget cuts and downsizing to help balance state budgets. Here at the University of Hawai'i, we have done our very best to cope with these budget challenges. The university's budget has been reduced this year by $98 million and the executive budget proposal for the supplemental year beginning July 1, 2010 calls for a $100 million reduction, which is more than 20 percent of our previous general funds. This has already resulted in painful workforce reductions, fewer classes, and cuts in pay and programs.

The state House has proposed an additional $10 million reduction in the university's general funds (HB 2200, HD1), plus another $59 million cut in special and revolving funds. We are working hard to ensure that this does not happen. We are also calling on our community partners and supporters to help us impress upon legislators the vital role the university plays in our state. The House Finance Committee will hold a hearing on the $59 million in additional cuts (SB2695, proposed HD1) Monday, March 29 at 7p.m. in room 308.

The additional $59 million in proposed cuts include:
* $20 million from the Tuition and Fees Special Fund
* $15 million from the Cancer Research Special Fund
* $11 million from the Revenue-Undertakings Fund
* $10 million from the Research and Training Revolving Fund
* $2 million from the Housing Assistance Revolving Fund
* $750,000 from the Information Technology and Services Special Fund

The net effect of diverting such funds to the state general fund is a direct impact on our operating budget. Many of these funds are already being used to defray the $100 million cut and/or to retain and support critical projects and programs.

[Tinfish ed: This is a starvation economy, where the body begins to consume itself in the interest of simple survival.]

We understand that the Legislature is dealing with the extremely difficult task of finding a way to bridge the budget gap and that they recognize the importance of investing precious resources wisely. We are doing all that we can to encourage continued investment in the university and to illustrate how vital UH is to Hawai'i's preferred future.

[Tinfish ed.: it's time to cut the language of "understanding" from these memos. Of course "we" (whoever we are) understand that there's a crisis, but we need to fight for public education as a right). The verb "to illustrate" also does not pass muster here. Nor does the awful notion of a "preferred future."]

Since the beginning of the legislative session, members of the university community, including the administration, have delivered more than 130 testimonies, provided all requested information and have visited almost daily with members of the Legislature. It is our hope that our voices will be heard.

["It is our HOPE that our voices will be heard"!! My god, do more than offer testimony and hope someone's listening!]

Despite the difficult economy, the University of Hawai'i is performing well as we focus on our strong strategic plan designed to meet the needs of the state and our communities. Thanks to the strength of our faculty, the University of Hawai'i now ranks among the nation's top research universities in its ability to generate research and training revenue. We have managed to navigate through this economic storm by working together and making a number of painful sacrifices. Thus far, we have managed to do this without interruption of instructional days for students.

[Ah yes, the economic argument. We bring in money, therefore we are valuable to the state. As a poet who lives in an altogether different economy, I abhor this argument, at least in the way it gets used in these debates. Let's talk moral value, ethical value, inherent value, the value of engaging our students in crucial conversations--like this one. As for the lost instructional days, my eight year old daughter can testify to the loss of numerous Furlough Fridays from her education.]

Students attending our campuses understand that higher education is important as they build their careers or start new ones. Enrollment is at an all-time high with 58,000 students--including 8,000 additional students in the last two years alone. These students include people who have been hit hard by the economic downturn and are going back to school to re-tool for new careers. Students are relying on the university to help them prepare for jobs and compete in today's global job market, making the university an essential resource for Hawai'i. Our students are counting on us--and it will take our collective efforts to deliver.

[Again, fall back on the economic argument. Education leads to jobs. Not even sure this is true at the moment. But the real point here is that enrollments are surging while the university's labor force is being destroyed, to say nothing of its facilities, including buildings and library resources.]

Many of you have heard me say repeatedly that investing in the university makes sense for the state's economic future and that we should be viewed as part of the solution to the state's economic challenges. The university, with the Manoa faculty leading the charge, pulled in more than $400 million in external research and training funds last year, creating jobs and fueling the economy. Further cuts would drastically hamper that ability. With your help, we will continue to highlight the importance of maintaining the state’s investment in higher education.

[Ah yes, more on those grants that bring in money. Try to change the argument, Pres. Greenwood, rather than subscribe relentlessly to the terms demanded by the government and its "free enterprise" minions!]

We are not resting on our laurels. Through our newly launched Hawai'i Graduation Initiative, we have committed to increasing our number of graduates by 25 percent by 2015. Developing an educated workforce--particularly in critical areas such as health care, teaching and engineering--is in Hawai'i's best interest.

[More on the workforce that we are creating. But we wouldn't stand on our laurels, would we?]

We also understand that as the state's sole public university, we have the responsibility to do more. We are expanding our outreach to Native Hawaiian students and working hard to improve access, particularly for those in underserved areas and underrepresented communities. We are increasing our efforts to eliminate barriers to higher education, including cost. With the costs of higher education on the rise, we have quadrupled our amount of available financial aid. And we continue to work to improve our efficiency, to achieve more with every dollar available to us.

[The word "efficiency" is telling. Of course Native Hawaiian students are important, but this gesture, which is all it is, is too typical of a rhetoric that excludes other students, for whom a public education is also crucial.]

Of course there's much work to do. It's hard not to notice the poor condition of our facilities. The backlog of deferred maintenance is big--more than $300 million worth of work lies ahead. While the bleak budget offers numerous challenges, it also offers opportunity. You may have heard about Project Renovate to Innovate. Using General Obligations bonds issued by the state, if appropriated by the legislature and approved by the governor, we would be able to create jobs with our shovel-ready projects and take advantage of the current climate of lower construction costs to complete long-overdue repairs and improvements on our campuses. It's time that university facilities on all our campuses reflect our mission as a 21st century institution of higher education built on excellence. With steady progress, we will get there.

[It certainly IS hard to notice that my building is in a state of disrepair, that the classrooms are moldy, that I just bought my own office computer, that the elevator only mostly works, that there is no consistent wifi in the classrooms, but I'm sure that "Project Renovate to Innovate" will cure that by force of its cute name alone.]

With your help, we are committed to charting the right course for the university, particularly in these critical economic times. We will continue to advocate strongly for our future and we invite you to join us in that effort. Letters of support to state legislators and simply sharing your personal stories of what the university means to you will go a long way. Working together, we will make it through this budget crisis and continue our journey of success for the benefit of Hawaii and its people.

[Letters of support! Letters we can HOPE will be heard? Surely the time has come for something a bit more dramatic?!]

Mahalo,
M.R.C. Greenwood


--

This message was sent on behalf of President MRC Greenwood.
Please do not reply to this message.
It was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming email.

[Of course not.]

Announcement ID number: 1269841776-17363
Announcement distribution:
- All faculty, staff, and students at all campuses




The second memo came under the title of "Budget Alert." Alerts via email to the university community usually denote a theft or attack on a student, a petty crime, or a tsunami. I suspect that the memo that follows, from our Chancellor, incorporates aspects of all these categories, from attack to crime to metaphorical tsunami. It begins with the almost obligatory Hawaiian word of greeting (obligatory among administrators new to our shores):


Aloha! I want to keep you updated on the news regarding the budget. You may have heard earlier that the State House had unfortunately proposed additional cuts of $10 million for UH. Over the weekend, we learned of another bill SB 2695 (http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/session2010/bills/SB2695_HD1_PROPOSED_.htm) which proposes additional cuts of almost $59M to UH.

[I like the casual, "you may have heard." Would that be in the preceding administrative memo of last night?]

The proposed cuts to the UH budget include: Tuition and Fees Special Fund - $20 million; Research and Training Revolving Fund - $10 million; Revenue Undertakings Fund - $11 million; Cancer Research Center Special Fund - $15 million; Housing Assistance Revolving Fund - $2 million; IT Special Fund - $750K. Mânoa’s share of the $59M reduction would be in addition to the “hit” taken by UH Mânoa this year of $66 million, or 26% of our State general funds.

All of these proposed cuts would impact tremendously on UH as a whole, but certainly most heavily on UH Mânoa. These proposed cuts are all extremely damaging – for example, the State proposes to take fees and tuition funds that students have paid for specific purposes and for which we have provided financial aid including scholarships, federal grants, and loans, to pay the costs for other agencies. Such actions would truly endanger Mânoa’s ability to serve Hawai'i as a research 1 university now and into the future – in essence, this would push Mânoa past the “tipping point”.

["In essence" and in deed. The starvation economy in full effect. Now they're going after muscle and bone.]

There is still about a month left of legislative decision-making, so the process is not yet done, but we must be active in educating government and community decision-makers about UH Mânoa. We empathize with the difficult decisions the legislature has to make, but, with this additional budget reduction, they would be making the decision that the State of Hawai‘i cannot support its only research 1 university, UH Mânoa, for our citizens. That is a chilling message for higher education in Hawai'i.

[Here we don't have "understanding" but "empathy" for the legislature. Cut it out.]

It’s critically important for UH Mânoa students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends to let our legislators hear about the value UH Mânoa provides as a major generator of educated citizens, new knowledge, jobs and resources for Hawai'i and also about how damaging these proposed reductions would be. We have already had to take many impacting actions to meet the current financial reductions:

[It's the language of "talking" and "hearing" again, which sounds terribly passive, considering the stakes of the matter. Let's talk action. Even the word "education," though we know it to be an active process, seems hollow at this point. Call out the picketers. Organize rallies. Make some stink lidat.]

• We’ve already reduced the number of UH Mânoa faculty, staff and administrators by nearly 6%, or 370 positions. Deeper cuts mean more such losses, resulting in more reductions in services for faculty, staff, students and the community.

• With the current cuts, we are already struggling to provide students with the learning experience and services, such as counseling and advising, that they need and deserve. Additional cuts will also require us to further reduce class offerings and enlarge class enrollment.

[Please enumerate the value of counseling and advising at at university where students often take 5, 6, 7 years to graduate because they cannot get into classes. Talk to us about the need for mental health resources at a university with a suicide problem. Talk to us about the value of small classes, the loss in value of teaching only by large lecture!]

• Our campus has made significant progress in reducing energy usage through Mânoa Green Days and faclities upgrades – our campus has stepped forward in many ways to improve efficiencies and reduce costs.

[Closing the library over Spring Break doubtless saved money; probably also saved students from doing research; we all know that Spring Break is a time to prepare for the semester's final push, which includes research papers.]

• Some legislators suggest we can easily accommodate the cuts through higher tuition. We recognize that relying on higher tuition alone to meet budget reductions places a heavier financial burden on Hawai'i students and their families. There are already more requests for financial aid than our resources can fill.

["Some legislators"--that's Fox-speak. Name them. Tell us to write directly to them. Tell us about places like the University of Virginia, which is a de facto private school that rejects a lot of in-state students, but offers a wonderful education to kids from New Jersey.]

• Our UH Mânoa libraries, truly a resource for the campus and the community, have reduced their annual budget to purchase new books by more than two-thirds - from $1.1 million to $300,000.

[That is criminal. I remember in the mid-1990s the university stopped buying books, so that the collection resembles nothing so much as the Soviet Encyclopedia.]

What can we do? We all need to inform our decision-makers about the value UH Mânoa provides and the harmful impact of these budget cuts – and encourage our colleagues across Hawai'i to do the same.

["Inform to transform" would be a better slogan, perhaps. But really we need to do more than "inform" and "encourage" at this point.]

Here are some suggested points of emphasis:

[This is promising, but to whom do we address these points? Parents, legislators, students? And how do we disseminate our points?]

1. UH Mânoa is doing its part in these tough economic times to cuts costs – but the size of these proposed budget cuts will damage our ability to educate people, serve the community and conduct research–all essential activities for creating a stronger future for Hawai'i.

[Let's forget "the stronger--or preferred--future" for now, and concentrate on the devastations of the present.]

2. We’re enrolling more students with fewer resources. Many students are transitioning from UH Community Colleges to Mânoa - utilizing our strong partnership with Community Colleges through improved articulation and recruitment efforts. Record enrollments in UH Community Colleges means UH Mânoa must also be well prepared to meet those students’ needs. Many more Hawai'i students and families are becoming aware of the top-notch academic opportunities we offer at UH Mânoa and choosing to pursue higher learning here instead of leaving Hawai'i.

[Yes, because they can't afford to leave Hawai`i; that's not so much a choice as the mandate of a bad economy.]

3. UH Mânoa is an economic generator. Every dollar invested in UH Mânoa generates $5.34 in spending in Hawai'i, ranging from student expenditures to research purchases—few enterprises offer that type of return. Cutting dollars to Mânoa reduces our "generator" effect.

[OK, make the economic argument once again. Where is the ethical, moral argument? The argument that citizens of a democracy are OWED an education?]

4. Research at UH Mânoa attracts an average of $1.2 million a day - more than $400 million a year - in research and training grants, most of them from outside Hawai'i. These funds improve our economy, create jobs and produce advancements in a wide range of areas, from health to technology to cultural understanding – such research improves all of our lives.

[Research improves our lives--HOW? Spell it out!]

All of us should be tremendously proud of what UH Mânoa contributes to Hawai'i. Now is the time to share that message with decision-makers (http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov) who are determining our future ability to sustain and build on those contributions.

Mahalo for being part of the Mânoa 'ohana.

[More Hawaiian words in closing.]

Virginia Hinshaw
Chancellor
University of Hawai'i at Mânoa
vhinshaw@hawaii.edu


--

This message was sent on behalf of Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw.
Please do not reply to this message.
It was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming email.

Announcement ID number: 1269879657-3681
Announcement distribution:
- Faculty, staff, and all students at the UH Manoa campus(es)
- Faculty and staff at the UH System Administrative Offices

I will cut my own prose a bit short here, as I need to prepare for a committee meeting later today, which is followed by a graduate seminar.

[Appendix one can be found here: "The legislature finds that due to the extraordinary fiscal circumstances the State is facing, non-general funds must be reviewed and scrutinized to determine if there are excess balances available to be transferred to the general fund." .]

[Appendix two: a couple of readers have pointed out that I have not made any positive proposals, nor have I distinguished between the two memos, the second of which advocated a push-back against the legislature. Please put proposals and corrections in the comment stream. Maybe we can come up with something.]

Another Installment of "Read a Memo": President Greenwood's response to the University of Hawai`i faculty rejection of the "last, best" contract offer

In the last installment of "To read a memo," we saw the way in which the new president of UH, M.R.C. Greenwood, attempted to bond with the community through her repeated uses of the words "aloha" and "ohana" and "mahalo." (See also here.) That was before the faculty union (University of Hawai`i Professional Assembly) rejected "the last, best offer" by the administration, to the tune of 86% nay. One friend, Kathy Cassity, noted that the news she watched referred to the number as "only" 86%.

The day after UHPA's vote was announced, the university community received a new mass email. The tone had shifted; there were no Hawaiian words in this memo to bind us together; no longer is there a sense of "us." Instead, the body of the message begins like this:

"The university is disappointed in the UHPA vote to reject our contract offer."

I was hardly alone in feeling a gut punch as I read this sentence. For what Pres. Greenwood has accomplished here is to create a neat (too neat) division between "the university" (here conceived as what? administrators? buildings?) and the faculty. If the faculty have rejected the proposal, they are no longer members of the institution. There's violence in this sentence. As I will argue thoughout this post, the violence is not directed only at the faculty.

"The highest priority of our offer was to protect students. There would be no loss of instructional days and the resulting salary savings would have helped minimize program cuts and layoffs."

Another cut of the knife, this time to divide the faculty from the students. Here, the administration sees itself as ministering to student needs, whereas the faculty, by extension, are leaving students hung out to dry. And what are the details of this very benign and reasonable offer?

"We believe our offer was fair and reasonable. We proposed a 5 percent wage reduction, the lowest percentage proposed for any state employee. Other state employees are reportedly being asked to take cuts in the 8-9 percent range. UH has already implemented a 6-10 percent wage reduction for management. The university's offer included initiating tuition scholarships for faculty dependents and minimum salary levels for faculty, two benefits UHPA has long sought. Our offer also included 13 days of paid leave which does not include instructional days."

That does sound reasonable, given the widely-bruited budget crisis in our state. But what Greenwood does not mention here is the loss of health benefits written into the new contract (to the tune of another 5% of wages) and the refusal to guarantee that there will be no retrenchment, no lay-offs. The president as much as admits this in the next paragraph:

"The university's offer to UHPA makes no changes in the current retrenchment procedure and commits to no retrenchment during fiscal year 2010. In addition, I had publicly committed that there would be no layoffs of tenured or tenure track faculty for fiscal reasons through fiscal year 2011."

No lay-offs of tenured faculty until 2011! Who wouldn't leap at that offer! No retrenchment until 2010! Again, who would not find that reasonable?!

"The university is now considering its options for resolving this dispute. Budget reductions of $76 million have already been imposed on the university and the UHPA vote does not change that fact. The university believes that the most balanced approach to managing these reductions is through a combination of salary savings from pay reductions, payroll lags, vacancies and retirements, tuition revenues, and increased efficiencies and other cost saving measures."

She does not acknowledge there that the union's refusal to go along with this contract does not mean the union has refused to negotiate. To the contrary, the membership is telling the administration that they want to negotiate further. But Greenwood, like Governor Lingle, is already leaping into the "we must do this ourselves" mode, imposing the terms of this "last, best offer" rather than returning to negotiate.

"The university is an essential resource to the state of Hawai'i. The Board of Regents and I are determined to sustain the state's only public institution of higher education for our students and the community, and we will continue to advocate on their behalf."

Here, the President has aligned herself with the Board of Regents, most of whom were appointed by our Republican governor, Lingle. She promises to "advocate" on the behalf of the "students and the community." Nowhere does she say she or they will advocate on behalf of the faculty. The faculty are no longer "the university."

The memo is signed simply, with her name, without a closing in either English or Hawaiian.

Both Greenwood and Lingle are attempting to manage the news that comes out of this dispute. We hear on the evening news that professors make an average of well over $100,000 a year (I'm a full professor who has published and edited seven books of her own, dozens of publications through Tinfish Press, have a good teaching record, and I make tens of thousands less than that); that professors recently received a 30% pay raise (we just finished several years of pay raises that we earned after the strike of 2001, when we tried to make up the considerable difference between our salaries and those paid most professors on the continent). Denby Fawcett's question to Governor Lingle was especially noteworthy: she referred to the faculty as "lollygagging" until next year. The comment streams in the Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin are full of hate for the university's professors (lazy, spoiled, pointy-headed, mainland haole, etc. etc.)

So let me respond in my own way. The professors I know are not as upset about being docked 5% of their pay as they are in the way the university itself is being destroyed. This is not the first such hit we've taken. The 1990s were recession years in Hawai`i--we suffered through several hiring freezes, a couple of years when the library bought no books, deferred maintenance, and much more. So it wasn't really a surprise the other day when one of the buildings on campus was condemned and everyone ordered to leave it empty because it might fall down. The men's rooms in Moore Hall do not work; nor can they be fixed. Kuykendall Hall, where I work, is due not just for repairs, but to be replaced. We do not have adequate technology in our classrooms--where there are computers, they are ancient. The classrooms in my building are moldy, despite the over-active air-conditioning.

Given the sorry state of the campus, there is nothing left to cut but people. Under threat of their jobs are the ever-vulnerable lecturers and instructors. Yet those of us who will keep our jobs will witness a tremendous change in those jobs over the next few years, if we don't fight back (and probably even if we do). We will teach more classes, and they will be larger. We will not get to know our students nearly as well. And we will not have time or resources to do our other work--editing, writing, researching. The UH will be--effectively--a community college, instead of the one research institution in this state, and one of the finest in the entire Pacific.

As Prof. Jonathan Osorio encapsulated it: "But perhaps that is the real message the state is sending. Good education awaits those who can afford to send their children somewhere else. Nothing could more appropriately sever the state government from the community it is supposed to serve than that message."

What we are demanding is not a few percent more shekels, President Greenwood, but advocacy on behalf of the university as an important institution. We don't mean lip service about its being the economic engine of the state, which we hear all the time, but real advocacy. What we are demanding from Gov. Lingle is a return to the social contract. We need to make it clear that public education is a moral right, not simply a convenience in good times, a line item, or liability, when times are bad.

Refusing the contract was one way to say this. That the vote is being interpreted as selfish intransigence is not a surprise, but "the university" (that's UH faculty and students) must fight back. If the university is wrecked now, it won't be rebuilt later, no matter how much the economy improves. Precious little was spent to improve UH during Gov. Lingle's boom times.

I conclude by quoting Prof. Osorio's eloquent and historically rich speech at the October 8 UH Teach-In. The uses of the rhetoric of Hawaiian nationhood in this dispute will require other posts:



"The Kingdom [of Hawai`i] knew what every public official in Hawaiʻi today should also know: That an ignorant people are a poor people; less effective; less able to contribute to their own society, and more likely to despair and desperate acts."

You can find other photographs of the teach-in thanks to Ian Lind of ilind.net. h/t to Prof. C. Franklin for suggesting we read Greenwood's memo in conjunction with Osorio's speech.

A Writing Lesson for Pres. Greenwood of UH, with an homage to F.T. Marinetti

I have set aside this morning to read the Futurists (for one class) and grade papers (for another), but an article in this morning's Honolulu Advertiser, coupled with a mass email from the president of my institution yesterday, has me wanting to use my pedagogical skills in other ways. I mean to offer a lesson to our state educational administrators, with the help (in closing) of one of these Futurists, F.T. Marinetti.

This morning's paper has an article about parents in Aikahi (Kailua, windward side of O`ahu) who are getting together to see if they can't hire their kids' public school teachers to work on furlough Fridays, of which there will be 17 in coming months. The president of the PTA there is quoted as saying, "What are we going to do? Either our schools will be privatized on Fridays or a private entity will end up educating our children on Fridays on we're all going to end up taking our kids to work with us." The "private entities" mentioned in the article all cost money--the YMCA, Diamond Head Theater, and so on. Well, for those of you who don't know O`ahu, Kailua is one of the most prosperous neighborhoods. Consider places like Waimanalo or Waianae or Kalihi, neighborhoods where parents are working class, and where there are significant problems with homelessness, unemployment, even hunger. Parents in these places can't afford even to consider privatizing their children's Friday education. They'll need to find childcare somehow, lunches somehow, and help their children pass the notorious standardized tests delivered to us from the custodians of No Child Left Behind (whose title grows more bitterly ironic by the day).

Now I'm not one to assign blame to all administrators of my own institution for the dire straits we're in; like the rest of us, they're trapped in a downward global spiral. But the memo we just received en masse from President Greenwood (who began her job only four months ago, straight from the California system), is as infuriating as similar memos we've received from other administrators, like Virginia Hinshaw (whose one memo I put into a William Burroughs machine a while back). The tone of it is wrong.

After an opening that includes three uses of the word "aloha," one of which ends with "spirit," and which refers to "the sense of shared purpose" we have, the President asserts that none of us is at fault for the current economic woes:

"None of us are individually or even collectively responsible for the fact that the State of Hawai`i, our mainstay funder, has experienced severely restricted revenues this year that will most likely continue into at least the next year. As a consequence, our share of state funding has been greatly reduced and we must find an unprecedented amount of savings to meet our budgetary needs."

Leave alone words like "savings" (for "slashing") or the phrase that absolves all of us of blame for anything, what is missing is an ethical, nay moral, language to gather us into community against this inevitable cut. Instead of "we must find an unprecedented amount of savings to meet our budgetary needs," how about, "after we deal with this crisis, we must confront our state officials with the absolute moral right of every citizen to a public education and demand that they honor the social contract"? My own rhetoric is growing too bureaucratic here, but the bottom line is that this is not simply a budget issue, something to learn about in accounting school, but a MORAL issue.

The President goes on to explain the situation in quantitative terms, offering some choice statistics (if we don't get stimulus money, for example, we will need to cut upwards of $100 million dollars from the university's budget; at the same time, UH is "facing a record increase in enrollment" and so on). There's a postscript with more stats and reassurances (based on what, one wonders) that faculty salaries will not remain cut, that payroll lags won't hurt us, that the university does not "anticipate" any retrenchment in the near future. (No stats for that last one.)

Let me harp some more on the ending of her memo. The openings and conclusions of such memos are always meaningless, cliche-ridden, statements of solidarity and purpose. We are probably not even meant to read them, except as flags that our administrators know a few Hawaiian words and wish us all well. I would propose a different kind of ending. So allow me to quote, and then translate, President Greenwood's final paragraph to us:

"In these unprecedented times, I continue to believe that the university is, indeed, a powerful agent for economic improvement, educational advancement, and cultural good and that there is no better investment for the future of our state than in higher education and the University of Hawai‘i. I strongly support a competitive environment for faculty salaries and benefits; improved support for teaching, learning and research; and increased access for more students, particularly those who have been underserved, to succeed in our university. I know you believe this as well, and I urge us all to unify our voices so that when better economic circumstances allow, we will be persuasive as our state leaders consider how to sustain and grow our ‘ohana.

Mahalo,
M.R.C. Greenwood"

becomes . . .

"I am shocked and appalled that the state of Hawai`i--its legislature, its governor, its citizens--are willing to sit by while our social contract is destroyed. Public education is not a luxury in the state of Hawai`i; it has been, and must be, an absolute right. Good educations require money, money to pay good teachers, to maintain buildings, to sustain libraries. Once this crisis is past, I promise to get on every television station, op-ed page, and travel to every legislator's office to demand the support of the community and its leaders. In fact, I will start today! If we do not succeed in saving public education, the word "`ohana" will mean nothing.

Yours in solidarity,
M.R.C. Greenwood"


While my assigned reading for the day, which includes F.T. Marinetti's "The Manifesto of Futurism," includes such unhelpful stipulations as, "We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind," I find many of his calls to arms good counter-weights to the passive pablum of administrative discourse. So let me paraphrase some of his points and offer them to the administration, the government, ourselves:

2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our mission to save our educational system.

3. Up to now the university has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy [well...], and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer's stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.

7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty.

We are in a crisis, but the crisis is not one of budgeting only. It's a moral crisis. Let's start talking that way. We need to put up signs, get out our bullhorns, lock horns with our reps, even send our children to the capital on Fridays.

And by all means, use active verbs!!!

[editor's note: just noticed this choice bit off Ian Lind's blog.]