From the Editors Archives - Page 139 of 170

Democracy

Aristotelian Reflections on President Trump’s Unauthorized Missile Strikes in Syria

The opposite of cowardice is rashness, and courage the mean between

April 8, 2017 • by Michael Weinman

Earlier in the same work, while concluding his general discussion of virtue and vice, Aristotle refers to the famous story of Odysseus facing the original “rock and a hard place” dilemma. Odysseus knows that he has no choice but to pass through the middle of the whirlpool and a ferocious ...

Aristotelian Reflections on President Trump’s Unauthorized Missile Strikes in Syria

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What Do You Mean When You Use the Term Neoliberalism?

A Question to My American Friends, Colleagues, Students and Comrades on the Academic Left

April 7, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

The term “neoliberalism” drives me crazy, specifically when used in the U.S.. It explains too much with too little, concealing crucial distinctions, as it frustrates crucial coalitions against the clear and present danger of the new authoritarianism of Trump, Le Pen, Orban, Kaczynski, et al.. Further, it’s meaningless for much ...

What Do You Mean When You Use the Term Neoliberalism?

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Great Books Socialism?

Intellectual Traditions Matter for Movement Building and Identity Formation

April 6, 2017 • by Tim Lacy

Late in 2016, Molly Worthen lauded the great books idea as an antidote to liberalism’s ills in the Age of Trump. In “Can I Go to Great Books Camp?” Worthen notes that studying the history of ideas is always connected to great books. One assumption of Worthen’s, which I endorse, ...

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Provoking Informed Discussion By Any Means Necessary

No new posts on Tuesday and Wednesday

April 4, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

We, the editors and staff of Public Seminar, are working hard all the time to cultivate an offering of posts that “provoke critical and informed discussion by any means necessary,” responding to the pressing problems of our times and address enduring problems of the human condition, as we put it ...

Provoking Informed Discussion By Any Means Necessary

Education

Hungarian Higher Education Under Attack

The Fate of CEU is the Fate of Freedom

April 3, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Central European University, one of the most important institutions of higher education in Europe, is currently being threatened by the Hungarian government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his nationalist-populist FIDESZ party. CEU, founded in 1991 during the early phases of the post-Communist transition, is officially registered and accredited in ...

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Prophets of Deceit

Post-Truth Politics and the Future of the Left

April 3, 2017 • by Nicholas Baer and Maggie Hennefeld

–Reinhart Koselleck Hindsight, much like the year we’re all now desperately looking forward to, is 20/20. –John Oliver The spectacular and traumatic failure of established news sources and polls to predict the outcome of the 2016 Presidential Election has not only heightened a pervasive sense of uncertainty and anxiety, but also given rise ...

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Secrecy and the Conspiratorial Mindset

How the secrecy we’re told protects our democracy is in fact breaking it down

March 31, 2017 • by Steve Cucharo

If there is a phrase in the entire essay that explains our current predicament as it relates to conspiratorial thinking and the advent of the “post-truth age” it might be this one. While it is common to think of the conspiratorial mindset as a cognitive deficiency, as a by-product of ...

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Misrepresentation and Misrecognition

Steve King’s American Exceptionalism and its Ties to the “Slaves were Immigrants, too” Thesis

March 30, 2017 • by Michael Weinman

I don’t want to spend much time on King’s comments themselves, but let’s note here the way that “American civilization” is equated with “Western civilization”. Let’s also note that other civilizations are inferior to this civilization, precisely because other civilizations “produce very little freedom,” while “our” superior civilization produces more. ...

Education

Confronting the Corporate University

From Cold War Federalization to Financialized Higher Education

March 29, 2017 • by Robert Meister

Thank you for inviting me. GSU has asked me to speak more biographically than I am accustomed to speaking about my experience and particularly about the relationship between my experience as a graduate student, unionizing graduate students in a private university, and how that bears on my experience as an ...

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To Write Poetry after Auschwitz is (NOT!) Barbaric

A lecture prepared for presentation at the University of Virginia

March 27, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I am very pleased to join you today and share my reflections on the importance of, not only poetry, but art more generally, as it helps us confront the social condition of collective memory in dark times. I am especially grateful for Irit Dekel’s invitation to give this presentation. First as ...

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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 ...

Education

Exile from Exile

Make the University in Exile a Sanctuary

March 24, 2017 • by Soheil Asefi

As an independent journalist in Iran, I never thought there would be a day that the paws of state would deprive me of the possibility of returning to the country where I was born and raised. After ten years of professional experience in major Iranian media outlets, I was arrested ...