Defending Public Education: Organizing for the Fall and Beyond
by Doug Singsen
The committee that organized the March 4th protests against budget cuts and tuition hikes has put together a planning and strategy meeting on Sunday, August 1 to kick off the fall organizing against cuts and hikes. March 4th was a success in New York and nationally, but we are still far from where we need to be in […]
Intelligent Action: an Interview With Adolph Reed
by 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 […]
Health Care Reform Redux
by Geoff Johnson
Like many present-day lawmakers in the United States, the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi gave at least some thought to the question of how to pay for health care. One section of the famous Code of Hammurabi detailed what the fall 2009 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly cheekily referred to as a “fee schedule” for doctors in […]
Burma’s Neverending War
by 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 […]
Tea Party Politics: Flirting with Fascism
by Justin Rogers-Cooper
The rapid national organization of the Tea Party has become one of the most extraordinary developments in American politics since the election of Barack Obama. Depending on one’s perspective, it is either a diverse movement or a confused one. In truth it is both, but only because it is a cover for more than one movement. What we […]
GC Creates New Department of Herstory (Satire)
by Advocate Staff
Her committee said it couldn’t be done. There was no way history graduate student Kram Ebeihcs would be able to write her proposed thesis, “The Penis Dialogue: Personal Reflections on Phallic Imagery in Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues,” within the Graduate Center’s conservative History Department, which is better known for its biographical work on reactionary idols like […]
Book Review: Radical Imaginings
by Abe Walker
Imaginal Machines by Stevphen Shukaitis. Autonomedia (2009).
At every level, Imaginal Machines is a subversive text. Against the rising tide of complacency, Stephven Shukaitis sketches out new possibilities for political engagement that are at once seditious and savvy.
Book Review: This New Yet Still Approachable America
by Tim Krause
A New Literary History of America by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Belknap Press (2009).
A book as long and as rich as A New Literary History of America cannot have justice done to its many individual essays in the space of a single review. Nevertheless, highlights from the volume fairly leap out every twenty or thirty pages or so, begging especial mention
Book Review: Pictures of an Institution
by Lavelle Porter
The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand. W. W. Norton and Company (2010).
The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected by Jonathan R. Cole. Public Affairs (2010).
In The Marketplace of Ideas, Menand narrows his emphasis to a set of particular issues, but in the process provides a useful overview of American higher education. The book is organized into three essays examining three particular issues in higher education: 1) the history of the general education curriculum, 2) the logic of academic disciplines and the allure of “interdisciplinarity” as a buzzword in academia, and 3) the politics of professors and the academic labor market.
Book Review: “Beyond the Intensities of the Fountain”
by Alison Powell
A Village Life: Poems by Louise Glück. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2009).
One way to approach a book of poems is to imagine not how the poet speaks, but from what stage. Wordsworth talks out of the woods, on a long walk. Allen Ginsberg shouts to his reader from a crowded bar.
