mortiz055

Comments from the 150th Anniversary Symposium of the University of California Academic Senate, Oakland, California, October 27, 2018,  by Dylan Rodríguez, Chair of the UC Riverside Academic Senate, Professor, Department of Media and Cultural Studies [Photo: Gen. David Barrows, Armistice Day, 1926, courtesy of FoundSF .] Let us reconsider the full historical context of the University of California’s founding moment and the context in which it coined its motto, “Fiat Lux.”  A brief reflection on the UC’s political, geographic, and historical conditions of possibility may offer some vital complexity and depth to recent college- and university-based discourses on free speech and academic freedom, while raising deeper questions about the notions of “speech” and “freedom” in-and-of-themselves. The founding of the University of California represents a particular confrontation between Western Euroamerican modernity and the high point of Manifest Destiny—a nation-building cultural, po...

We've gotten dosed this past week with some prime time smugness about how we don't need to do anything much to help higher education.  First was one of my favorite data journalists, David Leonhardt, rejecting loan forgiveness in the New York Times. He wrote,  "The fatal flaw of universal student-debt cancellation is that it’s not, in fact, progressive. It mostly benefits the upper middle class. 'Education debt,' as Sandy Baum and Victoria Lee of the Urban Institute have written , 'is disproportionately concentrated among the well-off.' The highest-earning quarter of the population holds about half of all student debt, according to Baum and Lee. Which means that universal student debt cancellation would be a giant welfare program for the bourgeoisie." Actually by American standards student debt isn't very concentrated.   And Leonhardt misses some major problems with "manageable" student debt that forgiveness would fix. I drafted the ...

Below you will find the announcement of  the creation of a new network that has formed to defend the critical functions and independence of higher education in a moment of crisis. We in the United States are facing a dangerous threat to our institutions of higher learning from a political climate dominated by anti-intellectualism and willful ignorance. For more than forty years, the academic community has been the target of a sustained campaign of demonization and defunding that is designed to undercut its legitimacy as a source of expertise and a haven for dissent. The structure of this anti-education movement is deep, wide, and coordinated and the attack is being intensified under the current administration. Almost every area of academic life is now at risk: whether the threats come from the insistence of outside groups pressuring universities to host speakers who seek to affront marginalized members of the university community and others; or the federal government’s attempts to ...

By Robert Cohen  (New York University) The release of the California College Republican’s Platform has attracted  press attention because of its extreme right wing positions demonizing  the university as “ degenerate and murderous ” -- denouncing university support of transgender rights, undocumented students, Mexican and Muslim student organizations, and funding of birth control, and abortion.  But what the media coverage of the platform missed was the brazen dishonesty of these college Republicans’ discussion of free speech on campus. Indeed, the charge  of attempted censorship that the platform makes against  the UC Berkeley administration, with regard to the campus appearance of conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, is not merely misleading and false; it is by far the biggest lie I have ever encountered from student activists in the more than 30 years  I have spent studying, publishing books and articles, and teaching courses on Amer...