from: HB
date: Jun 8, 2014, 2:33 AM
subject: A Cheer up 1995 "blast from the past"
[...] Well here I present, "1995: What Harel did before he became a useless activist 'Has-Been' "
ftp://pencil.math.missouri.edu/MAP/lolu.catalog
As you can see there was a [grand] total of 7 courses taught at Left Online University were:
U.S. FOREIGN POLICY Faculty: Noam Chomsky & Stephen R. Shalom
TIME, WORK, AND MONEY: U.S. CONSUMERISM Faculty: Juliet Schor
CONCEPTUALIZING A BETTER ECONOMY Faculty: Michael Albert
INTRO TO POLITICAL ECONOMY Faculty: Robin Hahnel
A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE U.S. Faculty: Howard Zinn
STRATEGIC RESEARCH FOR EFFECTIVE ANALYSIS Faculty: Holly Sklar & Chip Berlet
ELECTRONIC ACTIVISM ON THE INTERNET Faculty: Harel Barzilai
Below copy pasted from ftp://pencil.math.missouri.edu/MAP/lolu.catalog including my course description and "bio" at the bottom
I ended up teaching two semesters at LOLU, I can't recall if this one
below is the first or second of them. I had to focus on my ph.d.
(finished in 1997) and the entire LOLU went into partial to total
hibernation at roughly the same time period or not much later anyway.
ftp://pencil.math.missouri.edu/MAP/lolu.catalog
---------------------------------
Course Catalog from February 1995
---------------------------------<
U.S. FOREIGN POLICY Faculty: Noam Chomsky & Stephen R. Shalom
There is a mainstream consensus on U.S. foreign policy during the Cold
War which fails in one crucial respect: it is utterly false--false as
description and false as explanation. This course will provide an
alternative analysis of U.S. foreign policy since World War II, trying
to illuminate the actual record and the ways in which policy has been
rooted in the structures of U.S. society. The examination of the
historical patterns should facilitate understanding of current-day
policies and those we can expect in the future. Topics to be covered
will include U.S.-Soviet contention, Vietnam, the Cuban Missile
Crisis, the Middle East, Central America, and the end of the Cold War,
the Gulf War, Somalia, and Haiti. Readings will be provided online.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
TIME, WORK, AND MONEY: U.S. CONSUMERISM Faculty: Juliet Schor
Consumerism has found fertile ground in the United States: malls are
now the main public space, commercials saturate our culture, and kids
kill for sneakers. Savings rates have been falling and millions of
American are deeply in debt. In this course we will take a critical
look at consumerism, trying to understand where it came from, where
it's headed, and how people are resisting it.
We will explore the various contexts of consumer society: its history;
connections to work, including the "work and spend" cycle; time use
and consumerism; social processes such as "keeping up with the
Joneses"; consumption and addiction; the environmental impacts of
consumerism; the globalization of consumer culture; and
anti-consumerist movements. The course will draw on economics,
sociology, history, and other fields.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
CONCEPTUALIZING A BETTER ECONOMY Faculty: Michael Albert
People opposed to exploitation, alienation, ecological degradation and
the many other ills that characterize contemporary economic life are
often asked--OK, so what are you for? This course is devoted to
developing answers to this question. We will not present a set of
answers, fait accompli. We will instead together develop the
conceptual tools and insights prerequisite to developing answers, only
later using these to develop and evaluate some competing models for
what a better economy might be like. Along the way we will develop a
participatory economic vision and evaluate social democratic as well
as market and centrally planned post capitalist alternatives.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
INTRO TO POLITICAL ECONOMY Faculty: Robin Hahnel
What is economic activity? Economic efficiency? What types of economic
institutions exist and what are their effects? What are classes and
how do they affect societies and economies? How do individual
capitalist economies differ: U.S., Swedish, Japanese, French. What are
the defining features of non-capitalist economies (Cuba, China, the
Soviet Union, Yugoslavia)? How do markets work? How do we evaluate
them? How do they impact on the ecology, on people's lives and
development? What is going on when the U.S. government uses fiscal and
monetary policies to influence the economy? What social and economic
motives are at work in debates about health care, full employment,
welfare, etc. and in efforts to affect interest rates, employment
levels and other economic indices? How do trade and foreign investment
affect economies? These and other issues having to do with
contemporary economic life will be our focus.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE U.S. Faculty: Howard Zinn
This course will be based on a reading of Howard Zinn's A People's
History of the United States, and a dialogue with the author. As Zinn
writes in the introductory chapter. "...in that inevitable taking of
sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to
try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint
of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves,
of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen
by the New York Irish, of the Mexican War as seen by the deserting
soldiers of Scott's army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the
young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American War
as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by
black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers,
the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as
seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the
postwar American empire as seen by Peons in Latin America."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
STRATEGIC RESEARCH FOR EFFECTIVE ANALYSIS Faculty: Holly Sklar & Chip Berlet
This course will provide training in research, investigative
reporting, and analysis. Participants will have the opportunity to
conduct their own research projects individually or in groups. Topics
to be covered through readings and discussion will include:
methodologies for planning and carrying out research projects;
essential information sources-- print and electronic; computerized
databases and on-line research; different styles of storing and
retrieving information; finding expert sources; techniques for
conducting phone and in-person interviews; developing a cooperative
research style; logic and rational methodology; point of view and
ethical obligations.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ELECTRONIC ACTIVISM ON THE INTERNET Faculty: Harel Barzilai
In this course, students will use the Internet as a tool with which to
explore this very medium. We will explore the Internet as a
communication and information resource generally, and as a tool for
'electronic activism' in particular. Participants will learn about
email, automated email-servers, mailing lists and list-servers, the
UseNet (the world's largest bulletin board system) ftp, gopher,
telnet, the world wide web, and more. Homework exercises (optional,
of course) will allow participants to make this as 'hands-on' an
experience as they choose. Examples will be given, from anti-Gulf War
organizing, to more recent anti-Contract With America coalitions,
illustrating electronic activism in practice.
In addition to learning the 'tools of the trade' of electronic
activism, we will compare and discuss their relative advantages and
disadvantages for everything from coalition-building to electronic
leafleting. We will also explore the "online culture", especially on
the noncommercial and quasi-anarchic UseNet, including how UseNet and
the radical "GNU" project have provided, online, living proof of the
power of cooperative rather than competitive economics.
We will conclude by discussing the tremendous potentials, as well as
pitfalls, ahead of us on the 'information super-highway' -- from
privatization and commercialization, to the great potential of
democratizing the airwaves through internet 'virtual broadcasting'
radio (and eventually TV) stations beaming left/activist programs
directly into America's homes. The information highway offers seeds
for creating and sustaining a truly democratized media -- provided
activists take the initiative rather than leaving things to Corporate
America. Course graduates will be in the position to be actors in, not
merely spectators of, this unfolding drama.
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Bio:
Harel Barzilai, an electronic activist since the late 1980s, is
co-founder and co-moderator of the ACTIV-L mailing list and the UseNet
newsgroup "misc.activism.progressive" (MAP), with a global readership
of 30,000 to 60,000. His _Electronic Activism: Part I_ has been
electronically published throughout the world, including being
translated into Spanish and Dutch -- in fact, it was text-converted by
fellow LOLU faculty member, Chip Berlet. Parts I and II of _Electronic
Activism_ will form the basis for the first part of the course.
He has been a volunteer/consultant for IGC (PeaceNet/EcoNet/LaborNet);
the 1992 presidential campaign of former mayor of Irvine, Larry Agran;
The Nation; Z and LBBS; FAIR; Mark Achbar (co-producer of
_Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media_) and David
Barsamian; and others. He welcomes further inquiries, including about
the course, at "harelb@igc.org".
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