Saturday, September 26, 2015

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (41)

By the time I was working in places like Bulova or the Council on Educational Exchange [CIEE] in the 1970's, the New Left Movement of the 1960's seemed so far in the past or so far underground that I no longer saw it as politically useful or productive or relevant to discover "who ruled Bulova?" or "who ruled CIEE?" or what sociological or economic role Bulova or CIEE played in serving the special interests of the U.S. corporate elite, as I had done in relationship to Columbia University in the 1960's.

So although I worked at Bulova and CIEE in the 1970's, like most of the other fellow workers there, I never learned or discovered much about how either Bulova made most of its money or why CIEE was established by its founders.

With regard to CIEE, from all that I could see, its main mission in the 1970's was to provide a cheaper way for mostly upper-middle-class professors, college administrators and students at U.S. and Western European colleges and universities to spend their summer vacations in either Europe (if from the USA) or in the USA (if from Western Europe)--in a period when an individual regular passenger jet plane ticket on a U.S. commercial airline flight or European national airline flight was much more relatively expensive than it became in the 1980's. CIEE accomplished this by arranging, on a non-profit basis, to charter various airline planes to fly back and forth to Europe during the Summer that were filled with mostly CIEE-affiliated college students, professors and administrators--along with tourists who, on their own, had discovered that CIEE-charter flights were cheaper than the regular commercial airline flights at that time and also more reliable than the student agency-run charter flights at that time.