Breaking News: Victory for UPR Student Strikers
Advocate Staff
After more than forty grueling days of strikes and campus occupations, students at the University of Puerto Rico have finally reached a tentative settlement with the University that meets all of their core demands.
On April 21, students took over all eleven campuses of the University of Puerto Rico system, effectively shutting down the university for the past two months. The strikes and occupations were called by students in protest against a series of proposed measures by the University that would have raised tuition by fifty percent, massively cut merit based scholarships, and further privatized the university.
Time for CUNY to Divest from Israel
The Editor
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.“
–Nelson Mandela
Israel’s unwarranted and outrageous attack upon the flotilla of ships carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is another sad reminder that the leaders of Israel are determined to indefinitely continue and defend the punishing and illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip and the continued isolation of the West Bank, which has caused and continues to cause immense suffering and loss of life for the Palestinian people. Deaf to the cries and condemnations of the international community, Israel has pursued …
Populism Yea! Yea!
Frank Episale
Since 2002, Les Frères Corbusier has been building a reputation as a company able to marry the anarchic energy and scattershot intellectualism of groups like Radiohole and the International WOW Company with a more accessible, populist aesthetic. Their mission statement describes the company’s work as “aggressively visceral theater combining historical revisionism, multimedia excess, found texts, sophomoric humor, and rigorous academic research,” asserting that they seek to “speak directly to the mainstream audience continually ignored …
The Battle For Haiti: Which Side Are You On?
Carl Lindskoog
On March 31, speaking before the International Donors’ Conference for Haiti, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed the United States’ commitment to “help Haiti and to help the leaders of Haiti lead a recovery effort worthy of their highest hopes.” At the conclusion of the conference participants from the international community had pledged $5.3 billion to Haiti over the next two years and more than $9 billion for the next three years and beyond. It seemed that the international community had come to a rarely-achieved consensus and …
Intelligent Action: an Interview With Adolph Reed
Douglas Medina
GC Advocate readers, particularly those steeped in cultural studies, literary theory, political science, and sociology literature are probably very familiar with “star” academics like Cornell West, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and William Julius Wilson, all hailing from our most venerable of higher education institutions that purportedly form the core foundations of the Ivory Tower in America. What they may not be familiar with are the ideological and historical foundations that are …
The Ph.D. Wager
Louis Bury
Life is a gamble, at terrible odds — if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it.
—Tom Stoppard,
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
Over the past year or two, while writing (or, at times, putting off writing) my dissertation, I became, almost inadvertently, a part-time professional poker player. That is, I began to play online poker as a viable source of income and not just as a hobby or means of procrastination. After years of performing qualitative intellectual labor, often wondering what could be said to constitute the boundaries of my …
The University On Screen: The Top 10 Academic Films
Lavelle Porter
The campus novel has been around in American literature for quite some time. Some critics have pointed to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s first novel Fanshawe, published in 1828, as the first piece of American fiction that deals with campus life. More recently, British writer David Lodge has made a career out of penning academic novels with thinly veiled depictions of well known British and American universities, as well as fictional versions of actual professors. (One recurring character in his novels, Morris Zapp, is clearly based on literary critic Stanley …
Harlem on Hold: The Fading of an Ecosystem
Liza Rosas Bustos
The Randolph Houses in Harlem are disappearing. For half a dozen years now, I have walked past them on my way to Frederick Douglass Academy II, where I work as a Spanish teacher. Neighbors sitting on the stoops of their brownstones across 114th Street used to cheer my daily commute. I would walk into my workplace showered by greetings from students, school personnel, and neighbors. Now the street is quiet.
A few months ago, after the …
Burma’s Neverending War
Michael Busch
Nearly fifty years after Burma’s last democratically-elected government was overthrown by a military-led coup, the Southeast Asian country has suffered some of the world’s most egregious human rights abuses. For activists, Burma has become synonymous with institutionalized rape, torture, forced labor, and ethnic cleansing. In the popular imagination, however, the enormity of Burma’s crisis remains obscured by indifference and the overshadowing presence of disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Darfur.
In 2006, Mother Jones
…
Flash Back September 2007: Who Are The Board of Trustees…And Why You Should Care
Advocate Staff
Who are the CUNY Board of Trustees and what is their role in the governance of the university?
The Board of Trustees of the City University of New York is made up of exactly seventeen members. Of these seventeen, ten of the members are appointed by the governor, with only perfunctory advisement form the state senate and five are appointed directly by the Mayor with similar advisement from the senate. The remaining two non-appointed members of the board include the head of the University Student Senate and …
Lessons in Terror at John Jay
Abe Walker
Marc Sageman and Charles B. Strozier at an October Center on Terrorism Seminar
In the normally-restrained world of academic discourse, the 2007 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association stands out as a break with the dominant culture of self-abrogation and humility. During the course of
…
The GC Advocate Guide to the 2009 NYC Mayoral Elections
Advocate Staff
Let’s face it. The pickings in this year’s mayoral race are pretty slim. Bloomberg has outspent every other candidate in the field by a good $60 million, and the Democrats have hardly put their best foot forward by nominating the lackluster underdog Bill Thompson. Meanwhile, the Greens have chosen a celebrity candidate who may or not actually want to be mayor, while most of the other voices in the fray are either slightly wacko, inexperienced, or completely invisible to most voters.
Although their candidate Jimmy McMillan has no …
Intellectual Leadership: Plato’s Dream, Popper’s Nightmare
Charles Pasternak
Author of Quest: The Essence of Humanity (John Wiley, 2003;
paperback 2004)
Mens cuiusque is est quisque
(What a man’s mind is, that is what he is)
Good leadership, the world over, is in short supply. Terrorism or its threat lurks everywhere; the problems in the Middle East grow by the hour; central African chiefs continue to practice genocide instead of agriculture; meanwhile, in Brussels, overpaid bureaucrats dream up yet more ludicrous directives that will render the European economy as uncompetitive as that of Burkina Faso. It is clear we need …
Defending the UN
Andrew Bast
Like beauty, the value of the United Nations lies in the eye of the beholder. Case in point, David Rothkopf’s recent screed on Foreign Policy.com (“You Can’t Spell Unproductive Without the Letters U and N”) against the world’s largest multilateral organization, the latest in a long line of vitriolic — and largely misinformed — attacks on the institution.
Only a few years ago, John Bolton, at the time the US ambassador to the UN, …
ARTS
Omegaville
Tim Krause
Welt am Draht (World on a Wire), Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Few, if any, film careers come close to the star-crossed wonder and terror that was the life and work of German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who burst onto the scene in the late 1960s and who blazed, a baleful, maleficent, darkly beautiful comet across the [...]
Girls’ Rooms and Boys’ Rooms
Alec Magnet
Back When I taught comp, my last observation fell on a day for which I turned out to have assigned really boring reading. I don’t know
how many of you use the McQuades’ Seeing and Writing, but it has a little portfolio of bathroom signs from around the world that caught my eye as I was franticly scanning the pages on the subway up to campus trying to find something more interesting to talk about than what I had already assigned. After thinking about it I decided to ditch my lesson plan and instead have the class talk and write about these signs. Thankfully, it turns out that there’s a mountain of things to talk about with bathroom signs.
Populism Yea! Yea!
Frank Episale
Since 2002, Les Frères Corbusier has been building a reputation as a company able to marry the anarchic energy and scattershot intellectualism of groups like Radiohole and the International WOW Company with a more accessible, populist aesthetic. Their mission statement describes the company’s work as “aggressively visceral theater combining historical revisionism, multimedia excess, found texts, sophomoric humor, and [...]
Comings Together/Comings Apart
Sara Jane Stoner
Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present, at the Museum of Modern Art We’re just past the halfway point of the run of Marina Abramović’s retrospective at MOMA, “The Artist is Present,” and chances are good you’ve already seen it, or maybe seen one of the blogs that has materialized in response. Abramović, born in Yugoslavia in [...]
COLUMNS
The Battle For Haiti: Which Side Are You On?
Carl Lindskoog
On March 31, speaking before the International Donors’ Conference for Haiti, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed the United States’ commitment to “help Haiti and to help the leaders of Haiti lead a recovery effort worthy of their highest hopes.” At the conclusion of the conference participants from the international community had pledged $5.3 billion to [...]
Intelligent Action: an Interview With Adolph Reed
Douglas Medina
GC Advocate readers, particularly those steeped in cultural studies, literary theory, political science, and sociology literature are probably very familiar with “star” academics like Cornell West, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and William Julius Wilson, all hailing from our most venerable of higher education institutions that purportedly form the core foundations of the Ivory Tower in [...]
Time for CUNY to Divest from Israel
The Editor
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.“ –Nelson Mandela Israel’s unwarranted and outrageous attack upon the flotilla of ships carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is another sad reminder that the leaders of Israel are determined to indefinitely continue and defend the punishing and illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip and the continued isolation [...]
We are all Workers
Renee McGarry
When Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona signed SB1070 (“Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Act”) into law on Friday, April 23rd, I felt like many of us had the morning after Obama won the presidential election: I went to sleep in one United States and woke up in a different one. Of course, with Obama’s election — for many [...]
The Ph.D. Wager
Louis Bury
Life is a gamble, at terrible odds — if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it. —Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead Over the past year or two, while writing (or, at times, putting off writing) my dissertation, I became, almost inadvertently, a part-time professional poker player. That is, I began to play online poker as a viable source of income and not [...]
The University On Screen: The Top 10 Academic Films
Lavelle Porter
The campus novel has been around in American literature for quite some time. Some critics have pointed to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s first novel Fanshawe, published in 1828, as the first piece of American fiction that deals with campus life. More recently, British writer David Lodge has made a career out of penning academic novels with thinly veiled [...]
