Co-Executive Editor, Public Seminar and Professor of History, The New School for Social Research

Education

Scandals in Higher Education

Race, Class and the Struggle Over Diminishing Resources

August 3, 2017 • by Claire Potter

As those of us who are college and university teachers gear up for the fall semester, our profession is briefly back in the news with a high focus on the heartbreak of college admissions. Let's start with genuine heartbreak. Last Saturday, we learned that UC Irvine had rescinded acceptances for almost 500 ...

Feature

When Women Fight for Health Care

Before Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, There Was Midge Costanza

July 31, 2017 • by Claire Potter

We are all still breathless from last week's near-repeal of Obamacare. As two Republican Senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, stood between the American public and a bill that would cut Medicare, defund Planned Parenthood, and throw the insurance industry into turmoil, keeping the consequences of ...

Politics

Academic Statement for the Release of Xiyue Wang

A Petition

July 31, 2017 • by Claire Potter

The Iranian judiciary recently announced that Xiyue Wang, a doctoral candidate in history at Princeton University, had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for "espionage." This petition generated by a group of historians to provide an opportunity for scholars to show their support for Mr. Wang's release, and was ...

Academic Statement for the Release of Xiyue Wang

Feature

When Women Sued the New York Times

Gender Equity and Journalism in 1972

July 22, 2017 • by Claire Potter

Forty-five years ago this week, a dozen women representing the Women's Caucus at The New York Times began a civil rights revolution in journalism. Their July 19, 1972 confrontation with publisher Arthur Ochs "Punch" Sulzberger and his board was, by 1974, a class action employment discrimination lawsuit, Boylan v. New York Times. ...

Feature

When White Houses Go Dark

Watergate and the Lessons of History

June 17, 2017 • by Claire Potter

Forty-five years ago today, all the President's men were nervously awaiting the fallout from a break-in at an office at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. where the Democratic National Committee had established its 1972 campaign headquarters. Naughty, naughty. The White House's shadow arm was a jolly crew nicknamed "the Plumbers." Among ...

Feature

Who Knew Running Yahoo Was So Hard?

Marissa Mayer Takes One for the Team

June 5, 2017 • by Claire Potter

As we begin to think about writing the history of the Age of Trump, my advice is to follow the money. For example, answer this question: how do CEOs make a fortune by killing businesses and putting working and middle class people on the unemployment line? If your answer is "Sending ...

Event

What Happened at Hypatia?

Peer Review, Academic Kinship, and Social Media

May 12, 2017 • by Meryl Altman, Timothy Burke and Claire Potter

In response, over 500 feminists -- a mix of senior, untenured and independent scholars, as well as graduate and a few undergraduate students, signed a letter demanding that Hypatia retract Tuvel’s article. They argue that it “falls short of scholarly standards in various areas,” uses incorrect vocabulary, “deadnames” Jenner (refers ...

Feature

Fly the Angry Skies

Airline Travel and the Militarization of Everyday Spaces

April 14, 2017 • by Claire Potter

Yes, he was threatening me with detention and a strip search. What had I done? I hadn't lost my temper. Not yet, at any rate. I hadn't even sighed or rolled my eyes. I had, however, explained that I was late for my flight and needed to be searched and released ...

Feature

Why Don’t You Stay (Just a Little Bit Longer)?

A Few Thoughts About Women in History

March 26, 2017 • by Claire Potter

But I have a few other words to say first. It is, perhaps, very difficult for much younger women to know how very tight we who went to graduate school in the 1980s were -- and remain -- with our foremothers. Part of this had to do with entrenched sexism: by ...

Politics

Progressive Media is Losing

But It Doesn’t Have To

March 21, 2017 • by Claire Potter

In "Progressives Need to Build Their Own Media," Hertsgaard details a game plan to counter the effects, not just of Fox News, but of the cluster of television, radio and websites that surround Fox like planets rotating around the sun. Conservative media have won the political narrative, he argues, and ...

Literature

Will Trump Defund Culture?

History Says No

March 20, 2017 • by Claire Potter

It doesn't surprise me that the first Trump budget proposes to eliminate all federal cultural and public broadcast funding. It's the same script we have been seeing for almost forty years. First, the amounts of federal money devoted to arts and culture are infinitesimal, particularly when you compare them to ...

Feature

Were Donald Trump’s 2005 Taxes News?

A Report from Clickbait Nation

March 19, 2017 • by Claire Potter

It seems that those who chose to watch Maddow may have felt the same way. As it turned out, Rachel had two 1040 summary pages from Trump's 2005 return, via journalist David Cay Johnston of DCreport.org, who had received them anonymously (morning speculation is that they were deliberately leaked by the ...