How do we understand the politics of the university, again? Consider the following case. A few years ago there were efforts to get the University of Chicago to divest from Darfur. They failed. At the time, the president Zimmer justified the decision by referring to the Kalven Report, a 1967 document explaining that, in short, [...]
I came across a very interesting interview with one Michael Denning, a marxist cultural studies person at Yale. I’m particularly interested in his comments on graduate education; evidently he has organized a research collective co-organized with students. He says there’s a big difference between a seminar, where the teacher doesn’t write but only grades the [...]
I notice I seldom post on this blog. I think that rather than trying to make it a commentary on the current academic news, a vast and unrewarding project, I want to spend more time talking about the research literature I’ve encountered on the university. Today I just stumbled across Kate Eichhorn’s “Breach of Copy/rights: [...]
A Guardian article reports the construction of a 40,000-student university for women only in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The journalist couples the news with critiques of the discriminatory effects of gender-based segregation in the country, commenting that Human Rights Watch has recently released a report describing Saudi women as “perpetual minors.” This would seem to be [...]