mortiz055

In 2017, universities will be tempted to follow a dual strategy: resist the Trump administration's discriminatory agenda while adopting its underlying business model.  In this case, they would oppose intensified hate crimes on campuses, exclusion of Dream Act students, explicit racial scapegoating, and government intimidation, balanced by periodic administrative crackdowns on faculty speech. At the same time, they would move the university further towards the status of a business, synchronizing with our businessman-president and his nominated Secretary of Education , the privatizer-in-chief. This hybrid policy is made more likely by the fact that it is what universities have been doing for decades. They long ago learned to follow Clintonism's fusion of social liberalism and fiscal conservatism, of public causes with public austerity.  Donald J. Trump's election brought a quarter-century of Clintonism to an end when Trump convinced enough people that both halves of the dou...

Since the election there has been much discussion of higher education's self-inflicted wounds. Mark Lilla and Nicholas Kristof , have trotted out the usual cherry-picked examples of alleged intolerance on (mostly elite) campuses as signs that universities exist at a distance from the real world.  Both have ignored the realities of life for most students and faculty , a point that shouldn't surprise us I suppose.  After all they are both locked into the New York media bubble whose gaze seems to extend all the way from Cambridge to Washington D.C.  These screeds would simply be unhelpful and annoying if they didn't serve to distract attention from more fundamental problems facing higher education today. For it is time for faculty and others committed to the future of universities and colleges to think more clearly about what needs to be changed in our own self-organization as we move forward. One of the most glaring, if also most often ignored in public debate, is the wor...

As you have probably seen, George Ciccariello-Maher, a political scientist at Drexel University has come under fire for tweeting "all I want for Christmas is white genocide ," following his tweet and his condemnation at Breitbart .  There have been calls for his firing and he has received death threats .  Depressingly, Drexel University issued a statement calling Ciccariello-Maher's statement "inflammatory" and declaring them "utterly reprehensible" and "deeply disturbing" and insisting that they "do not in any way reflect the values of the University." I don't want to enter into a discussion or defense of Ciccariello-Maher's academic freedom here. Both Hank Reichman and Corey Robin have done so over the weekend and a petition has been set up to express support for Professor Ciccariello-Maher .  Instead I want to focus a little more closely on Drexel's response. Professor Ciccariello-Maher has insisted that his tweet...