Career At Sonoma State University
In 1982 Walls returned to California to take a job at Sonoma State University (SSU) as director of sponsored programs and general manager of the SSU Academic Foundation. In 1984 he became the dean of the school of extended education. During his tenure as dean, SSU introduced a BA degree completion program with a distance learning component, MA degrees in liberal studies and computer and engineering science, and an expanded group of MA degrees in psychology, including organizational development and depth psychology. He received an academic appointment in sociology, and taught classes on the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and gender and social movements.
Walls authored The Activist's Almanac: The Concerned Citizen's Guide to the Leading Advocacy Organizations in America, interviewing over a hundred leaders of national social movement organizations. After a favorable review of The Activist's Almanac in The Workbook (a quarterly aimed at activists in the Southwest), editor Kathy Cone invited several articles by Walls. These appeared in The Workbook between 1994 and 2000, when the magazine was discontinued by its sponsor. Walls's survey article on community organizing has been updated twice and remains a popular on-line resource.
Since 2000 Walls has engaged in a dispute with Project Censored over what he sees as a denial of war crimes committed by Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo, specifically concerning atrocities at Trnopolje camp and Omarska camp near Prijedor in Bosnia, and the Račak massacre in Kosovo. Walls's article in New Politics drew a supportive letter from sociologist Bogdan Denitch and rejoinders from Peter Phillips, Diana Johnstone, and Edward S. Herman & David Peterson, with replies to each by Walls. He has also been critical of Project Censored's occasional inability to distinguish between sound and unsound science, as in the case of NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and its promotion of 9/11 conspiracy theories.
Read more about this topic: David Walls (academic)
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