Whose University?
by From the Editor
“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Last November, as many of you will no doubt remember, students and faculty at the University of California staged a series of protests and building takeovers in response to the UC Regents’ decision on November 19 to increase undergraduate tuition by […]
Education Uber Alles
by The Editor
“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” —Abraham Lincoln
The recent round of student protests and building take-overs at campuses across the University of California system this week have been both inspiring and heart-breaking. The devastating and unprecedented 32 percent increase in student “fees” (the UC system’s way of getting […]
Back to Basics: Resisting the Allure of Technology in the Classroom
by The Editor
I’d like to make the argument that, despite our increasingly technological lives, or perhaps because of them, the creation and conservation of technology-free spaces where people can, and are encouraged, to communicate face-to-face, free of distraction, with nothing more than their unique temperaments and their private store of knowledge and eloquence, seems more and more important to me. Our students are already attention-deprived and overloaded. The idea of forcing them back onto the Internet, especially to privately owned, for-profit websites like Facebook and YouTube, as part of their schoolwork, seems at best counterproductive, and at worst incredibly irresponsible, even unethical.
Writer’s Block
by Advocate Staff
“You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.” –Gustave Flaubert
“The imagination is man’s power over nature.” –Wallace Stevens
It happens to all of us at one time or another. The blank page, the blinking cursor, the creeping […]
Give it Back! Getting New York’s Wealthiest to Pay Their Fair Share
by Advocate Staff
From the Editor “Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.” –Thomas Jefferson
“Hey baby, nobody suffers like the poor!” –Charles Bukowski
I know it’s difficult, especially for the majority of GC students facing several years […]
Putting Away Childish Things
by Advocate Staff
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
—Corinthians 13:11 “In the epoch in which we now live, civilization is not an ideal or an aspiration, it is a video game.”
—Benjamin R. Barber
I am not one to gush, especially when it comes […]
Shut it Down
by Advocate Staff
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But […]
The Road ahead: Obama in 2008
by Advocate Staff
Despite the bitter acrimony, the racist mobs, the comic distractions, and the absurd lack of substance that has defined the 2008 presidential campaign, one of the most fascinating and unexpected developments of this election cycle is the recent and surprisingly palpable feeling among so many voters that something meaningful and potentially momentous is on the […]
Shocking Wall Street : Disaster Capitalism and the Promise of Progressive Reform
by Advocate Staff
“Buy the sky and sell the sky and lift your arms up/ to the sky/ and ask the sky and ask the sky/ don’t fall on me.” — R.E.M.
“We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
In her prescient and controversial […]
I Want to Believe
by Advocate Staff
“The worst crimes were dared by a few, willed by more and tolerated by all.”
— Tacitus (on the Roman Empire) “Evidence is worthless if you’re dead.”
— Dana Scully, The X-Files
Late last month, in an attempt perhaps to investigate the possibility of impeachment and to examine and try to understand the unprecedented national failures of […]
