With the fight against raising teachers’ salaries in full swing, Dr. Luvelle Brown and ICSD’s Central Administration decided to innovate their tactics. After a long couple of weeks spent deep in study with members of the local Workers World Party chapter, Dr. Brown emerged with changed rhetoric. In his first public comment, he declared that ICSD did not recognize the autonomy of the so-called “Republic of China” (also known as Formosa). Brown also denounced what he called “wreckers,” or those in ICSD who hold Trotskyist and other Revisionist viewpoints.
In the most recent negotiation session with the Ithaca Teachers Association (ITA), whose negotiation team Brown refers to as “the Four Olds,” Brown and other Board members attacked the association in strong terms. Brown decried the ITA’s leadership for focusing on their wages and benefits while “living in the imperial core itself.” One anonymous, very cool Board member (one might say he is a rad stranger) claimed ICSD’s teachers were quite decadent to request better working conditions when considering the exploitation and extraction faced by underdeveloped nations in the Global South. When the negotiating team asked for Brown’s counter-proposal, he presented them with what he termed the “Protracted People’s Budget,” which included provisions to tie increased salary to sufficient self-criticism in yearly teacher evaluations, withholding of pay for participating in “bourgeois electoral politics” like marches and rallies, and half of the district’s budget earmarked to be sent to the Venezuelan government to “fight gusanos.”
The ITA has yet to release an official response to these developments. However, our sources indicate that at least one member of their negotiating team accused the Board of being “social imperialists” who were more concerned with “woke cred” than adhering to the science of dialectical materialism. One ITA representative criticized Brown’s support for China’s invasion of Vietnam, maintaining that it was not only an overreach but supported US interests in the region. That representative questioned whether Brown had gotten around to reading Enver Hoxha yet.
