“Taxes, after all, are dues that we pay for the privileges of membership in an organized society.” —Franklin D. Roosevelt Increasing taxes, even upon the extremely wealthy, is not (and has never been) a very popular position in postwar America. According to a 2009 Harris poll...
Faculty Equality Now In a recent article, the New York Daily News reported that, although the great majority of CUNY’s more than 450,000 students are of black, Latino, or Asian origins, a predominant amount (about two-thirds) of the faculty members who teach those...
“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...
“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...
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.
“White riot –I wanna riot White riot—a riot of my own” —The Clash “Government…bullshit Black and white… fight” —The Subhumans At first the talk was all about the prospects of a “post-racial” America. Obama’s success among white voters (he received a...
