Becoming Un-Disciplined

What it takes to make a university community where Black faculty and students–and all of us—can thrive

Part of what I find amazing about being a professor at this moment is watching the change that’s coming, not always from institutions, but from young people and their demands on institutions. Their demands for a different type of faculty in terms of demographics. Their demands for different types of ...
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Becoming Un-Disciplined

Something Like Freedom 

What teaching Black literature requires of us

feminist thought, Black is queer and quare, Black is past-present-future, Black ain’t marginal, Black is belonging, Black is bringing the outside in, and Black is making space for what and who among us has been displaced....

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Something Like Freedom 

The Experiment

An excerpt from Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality

Steven Armstrong was the first to show up in Classroom No. 1O on the morning of Friday, April 5, 1968. “Hey, Mrs. Elliott,” Steven said as he slung his books on his desk. “They shot that King last night! Why’d they shoot that King?” Steven was an alert, savvy kid. The son of ...
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The Experiment

Is Emma Camp Correct That College Students Silence Themselves?

Perhaps she is, perhaps she isn’t. But the core issue may not be free speech, or even education, but more enduring American fears about the dangers of conformism

Free speech undergirds democracy. I am uncompromising on this point and dislike being distracted by concocted hysteria about free speech. All the same, a guest essay in the New York Times by Emma Camp engaged me. Camp, a senior at the University of Virginia, argues that students and faculty on ...
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Is Emma Camp Correct That College Students Silence Themselves?

The Problem Is Not Harvard, the Problem Is Graduate School

Sexual harassment is a normal feature of the current power arrangement. What will you do about it?

This is because the system is built to protect, enable, and encourage harassers. Graduate students, whose cheap labor is used by the university to buttress the outrageous salaries of star faculty and senior administrators, are often broke, disempowered, terrified, and exhausted, even prior to being sexually harassed....

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The Problem Is Not Harvard, the Problem Is Graduate School

In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower

In this excerpt, Davarian L. Baldwin introduces his new book, The Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities

I never thought a university would foretell the future of our cities. But there I was, on a December afternoon in 2003, stepping out into the brisk South Side air after hours holed away in the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library. I immediately heard chants of protest and saw people ...
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In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower

Sincerely, A Very Famous Man

Or, why academics should dispense with letters of recommendation entirely

The letter of recommendation also shows us, in microcosm, how elite institutions—universities, foundations, humanities centers, think tanks—gate-keep for each other....

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Sincerely, A Very Famous Man

A Pencil For Your Land

Ngũgĩ and Achebe on colonial public school

_____ Oppressed people who retaliate are up against the privileged and powerful. Fighting back often places them outside the system. But what happens when the suppressors’ tools are turned on themselves? Can a colonial education—the underhand offer of ‘a pencil for land’—be turned into an emancipatory counter movement? ‘Colonial mimicry’ describes a ...
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A Pencil For Your Land

Remembering Michael E. Gellert

Not just a benefactor but a friend, this émigré from Central European knew that the act of listening was the future of democracy

_____ One of the great honors of my life was to be named the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology in May of 1999. At the time, I was very pleased because it recognized the value of my scholarship, teaching and service to the New School and the broader public. But ...
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Remembering Michael E. Gellert

A Sanctuary from Double Betrayal

What The New School could do for its students from China

_____ The New School has one of the most international student bodies of American universities, including students from many Asian countries. Asian international students are celebrated among the graduates and alumnae/i, especially of Parsons School of Design, but while studying here they often find curricula that marginalize their traditions and ignore ...
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A Sanctuary from Double Betrayal

The Education Trap

Schools and the remaking of inequality in Boston

————— Despite its centrality in public life and scholarly debate, education, surprisingly, has not been a chief focus of political or economic histories of the modern United States. The role of schools, however, has been fundamental to American historical development in several key ways. Politically, education was a key driver of ...
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<em>The Education Trap</em>