Gagging the Victims

Accusation as the real crime in campus sexual assault

The recent Title IX Listening Sessions of July 13 2017 sponsored by U. S. Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have prompted this week’s forum at Public Seminar. As part of the process, Secretary DeVos also hosted men’s rights activists who champion the cause of individuals claiming to be falsely ...
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Gagging the Victims

Not An Advocate for Students or the Public Interest

Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education

In slightly less than half a year as Secretary of Education, thus far Betsy DeVos has promoted the interests of profit- and rent-seekers in higher education over students' interests and over the public interest. Her most consequential acts affecting higher education has included removing consumer protections for current students borrowing ...
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Not An Advocate for Students or the Public Interest

Myths on the Body

What Candice Jackson would know about sexual consent if she read the research

The recent  Title IX Listening Sessions of July 13 2017 sponsored by U. S. Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has prompted this week's forum at Public Seminar. As part of the process, Secretary DeVos also hosted men's rights activists who champion the cause of individuals claiming to be falsely ...
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Myths on the Body

Why Do Schoolhouses Matter?

The Rise of Public Education in America

In our imagined past, we idealize the little red schoolhouse, a symbol of ourselves as a community, as a public. We dreamily recall the public schoolhouse as a place where children of the village congregated; learned their reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic; and became Americans together. Certainly, as Jonathan Zimmerman argues ...
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Why Do Schoolhouses Matter?

Our Dark Times

Setting the Intellectual and Political Context for the Investigation of Media, The New Authoritarianism and Its Alternatives

This seminar has a long history, predating the Democracy and Diversity Institute, and born as an oppositionist activity in the good old bad days of previously existing socialism. Adam Michnik first imagined it, after he received an honorary doctorate from The New School in a clandestine award ceremony in 1984 in ...
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Our Dark Times

An Interview with Justin Leroy

Racial finance and the question of moral progress

On Wednesday, March 29th, Justin Leroy, an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis, delivered a presentation entitled “Race, Finance, and the Afterlife of Slavery,” as part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the seventy-eighth installment of the longest-running survey of American art. Leroy’s talk, which drew from an article ...
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An Interview with Justin Leroy

The New Public Sphere

Invisible Actors, Intangible Codes

A well-informed public is one of the key elements for the functioning of a democracy. However we must acknowledge the paradoxical nature of the present public that is global in size but limited to conversing through a computer screen. These days it seems a well-informed public is a public that ...
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The New Public Sphere

Fame, Truth, and Justice

A Review of Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro

“…The general reaction to famous people who hold difficult opinions is that they can’t really mean it. It’s considered, generally, to be merely an astute way of attracting public attention, a way of making oneself interesting...”- James Baldwin, No Name in The Street James Baldwin was more than a writer and ...
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Fame, Truth, and Justice

Dividuals and Democratic Data

Are we more than just data points?

ENFJ. Those are the results from the Myers-Briggs personality test I took online. The option to share my results flashed on the screen and, with a click, just my 638 closest Facebook friends were able to see and like my results. At least that is what I thought. Big Data has ...
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Dividuals and Democratic Data