“We shall wish our minister an execrable new year on Sunday, January 11th,” they announced sardonically on their blog beforehand. This is the scene. The group is La Ronde Infinie des Obstinés, the Infinite Rounds of the Stubborn, which I wrote about a little bit last summer. Now it is winter. They have been meeting [...]
I’ve been working on a grant application for next year and thinking about how to simplify my field situation for the sake of the grant reviewers. I started drawing some diagrams in the process, and while procrastinating from actually writing the text of my grant request, thought I would figure out how to make computer-generated [...]
I saw the following statements posted on Sauvons l’Université. I have, of course, no personal knowledge of the facts of the situation, but it’s a culturally interesting scenario: Academics solicited for participation in a “debate” about “national identity” (nov-dec. 2009) Mail addressed to a teacher-researcher at a university in Nantes Monsieur, [...] In the framework [...]
Recently I got an interesting email from my university’s communications department with a link to a speech recently given by the university’s current president, Robert Zimmer. They said they had appreciated my prior comments on academic freedom and were curious to hear my comments on this speech. Never having been asked to comment on anything [...]
A question that has interested me since my arrival in France has been the following: how do participants in last spring’s university protests sustain their political hopes in light of the seemingly limited success of their actions last spring? I asked around last June about this and got some nebulous answers about how you just [...]
A friend of mine recently asked if I knew anything about the history of the college quad as a place of free speech and debate. I didn’t, but I’ve done a tiny bit of research in the last couple of days and the results are interesting. Among other things, I observe something of a historical [...]
Time to get back to France and to my ambition to make French academic life more visible to anglophone audiences via this blog. I have a long list of stuff I want to post soon, but this will have to do for now — Le Monde here in France just published an article with a [...]
I’ve begun a little reading group with Zach SW and Eli M. We’re trying to get a more comparative, more historical sense of what “neoliberalism” means and does in universities. We started out reading four articles: Andrés Bernasconi on the endangered Latin American university model; Robert Rhoads and Liliana Mina on a major student strike [...]
A question that people sometimes ask me about my project is: why aren’t you more interested in the “internal politics” of the departments you work on? My objection to this question, which has been strengthening for months like steeping tea, is the following: strictly internal politics aren’t actually politics. “Academic politics” as commonly discussed is [...]
Knowledge is a weapon! … The union is a force! This is the continuation of my last post about the visual culture at the University of Toulouse (Mirail). Just having seen the 14 Juillet, i.e. Bastille Day, the national holiday in celebration of the 1789 French Revolution, it’s tempting to draw some comparisons with a [...]