When I was a boy I had a next door neighbor who had shelves in his office lined with stamp albums. He gave me and my brother a starter album and a few stamps each and we were on our merry way. From time to time I find a stamp in the mail that I like and I archive it with a bit of nostalgia for this childhood hobby.
Students in Brown’s Museum Collecting and Collections class know this nostalgia. Professor Steven Lubar’s class curated the University stamp collection for an exhibition of postage stamps until May 13, 2016 at the John Hay Library.
“Their research uncovers the breadth of the collections and highlights the numerous ways in which postage stamps and postal history hold relevance to social history, political and cultural studies,” says a preview of the show.
Said another way: You can learn so much about a person based on the stamp they use. I always get a little kick when Ray Rickman drops an envelope in the mail for me because he quite often decorates it with the visage of an important figure in American black history. It was Ray who gave me a Martin Luther King, Jr. stamp that I treasure and put beside my Rosa Parks ikons.
From stamps, you can learn if a person prefers Elvis or Jimi Hendrix. Try gleaning that from their email address! There are Soviet stamps that carried images of Palestinians, Nelson Mandela, and Che Guevara! Stamps provide these small opportunities to understand the effort a government makes to tap into a populist current within the culture and utilize it so to encourage investment in infrastructure (which the postal service is, by the way).
The insight into the statecraft of a given year a stamp is issued and the psychology of a given sender (especially if they are one of those diabolical masterminds who only buys stamps featuring finches, a true sign of megalomania) is fascinating. Did you know that the person who is constantly sending you mail using Disney characters might in fact be a certifiable serial killer? I’m not sure either but anyone perverted enough to buy those stamps must be a little Huey, Dewy, and Louie upstairs! When you begin seeing correspondents sending you stamps featuring the Olympic emblem and various sports, you can easily build a computerized database of people that know where you live who got beat up by the jocks in high school and might go postal in a relatively short time!
Considering the major disappointment that came to baseball card collectors when the steroids report showed there had not been a valid World Series in my lifetime, I am very proud I stayed with philately instead of that philistinism. I know for sure I will never hear about the Postmaster General using the juice!
Students and staff of Brown University gathered Tuesday on the campus green to protest the outsourcing of nine mail room jobs over the summer and the potential loss of two “mail driver” jobs this year.
Over the summer Brown laid off nine workers and contracted with RICOH, a Japanese corporation, for its mail room services. Brown said the move would save money and increase efficiency, but according to the protesters:
“Important packages have been lost, students have not received medication in a timely fashion, departmental mail has been lost, and lines for picking up packages can be extremely long.”
Perhaps more important than lost and late mail is the impact such moves have on workers and our community.
It is extremely difficult to find a good job that pays decent money and provides anything in the way of benefits. Now, thanks to outsourcing, its even more difficult. Outsourcing allows a company to lay off a bunch of employees and pay a lump sum to an outside vender who supplies low paid workers, usually temps who work by the hour and receive no benefits. This saves the company money and transforms good jobs that people can use to raise families and improve their lives into low wage poverty traps.
The rally was called because an analyst from RICOH was coming in to “assess the mail room drivers, positions that previously were not outsourced to RICOH.” Though Brown administrators Beppie Huidekoper and Beth Gentry claim there are no plans to outsource these jobs, protesters are skeptical. The same RICOH analyst came to Brown last year to assess the mail room, and now those jobs are gone.
The protesters are asking “that President [Christina] Paxson, Beppie Huidekoper, and Beth Gentry publicly commit not to outsource these jobs to RICOH, maintaining them as Brown employees. We ask that they disinvite the RICOH analyst.”
As workers, students and the community suffers, Brown pockets the profits. If Brown University can’t offer decent, well paying jobs to our community, why are they exempt from paying taxes?
A group of students attending Brown University are publicly calling on the Brown Corporation to increase its monetary contributions to the City of Providence. Tomorrow morning at 10 a.m., students will speak in front of the University’s historic Van Wickle Gates, announcing the beginning of their campaign to convince Brown to reconsider its current fiscal relationship with the Providence community.
“We’re doing this because Brown’s part of this community, too,” said Becca Rast, a sophomore. “As such, we need to step up and do our part to help make Providence the city we all want it to be.”
Brown and the City of Providence have been in negotiations for over a year about increasing the University’s payment in lieu of taxes, but recently talks fell apart when the Brown Corporation refused to pass part of an agreement in which the University would pay an additional four million dollars per year to the City, of which half would be earmarked for the Providence public schools and half for taxes on land in the newly-opened I-95 corridor. Following this breakdown, Mayor Angel Taveras recently announced that the City may run out of funds before the year is out.
“To me, it’d be different if Brown were the only entity being asked to pay more,” said Saski Brechenmacher, class of 2012. “But in the last year, Providence students and families have lost their schools, taxpayers have had their taxes raised yet again, and union members have given up benefits. As students, we are not willing to sit back and watch our university refuse to share in the sacrifices being made by so many other Providence stakeholders.”
“We love our school. That’s why we want it to do the right thing,” said Zack Mezera, a junior at Brown. “And it’s why we are calling on the Corporation to agree to contribute at least the $4 million amount that President Simmons endorsed earlier this year, as well as to begin an open and transparent review process of Brown’s fiscal relationship to the city, with participation and feedback from the student body and the Providence community about what a truly engaging and productive city-university connection should look like.”
Students made clear that they understand the many ways Brown contributes to Providence already, and say they do not think this is about the city becoming dependent on the University. “We’re not here today to in any way imply that Brown is the cause of Providence’s fiscal crisis or the answer to it,” said senior Tara Kane. “What we are saying is that Brown has a responsibility to step up and be part of the answer. Because that’s what good neighbors do.”
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