Betsy DeVos Archives - Public Seminar

Activism

Worse Than Betsy DeVos? Outside Money Swamps 2020 School Board Elections

A national campaign to privatize public schools continues regardless of who is president

December 15, 2020 • by Jeff Bryant

When a Biden victory in the 2020 presidential election became certain, supporters of public education gleefully took to social media to say good riddance to U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. DeVos came into office with an agenda to further the privatization of public education by expanding charter schools and ...

Worse Than Betsy DeVos? Outside Money Swamps 2020 School Board Elections

Theory & Practice

Sentencing the Present: Part Five

Critical conversations in a time of crisis

June 4, 2020 • by Benjamin Bernard, Jonathon Catlin, Benjamin P. Davis, Jodi Dean, Shannon Hoff, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Zein Murib, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Rocío Zambrana

This is the final seminar of the "Sentencing the Present" series. For previous seminars, see part one, part two, part three and part four. A sentence is protean: It can describe, question, or cry out. A sentence is critical: In passing judgment, it names wrongs, makes decisions, and declares publicly. In ...

Education

BREAKING: DeVos Appointee Says Foreign Spies Are in the Classroom

Programs that refuse to report on international students at government request may face cuts

October 29, 2018 • by Maria Bucur

On Saturday, October 27th, Diane Auer Jones, Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education at the Department of Education, gave a public address at the conference International Education at the Crossroads, organized in Bloomington by Indiana University. An audience of around 100, many of us migrants and persons of color, and most ...

BREAKING: DeVos Appointee Says Foreign Spies Are in the Classroom

Education

Finding Value in Schoolhouses as Public Things

A Reply to Johann Neem

August 7, 2017 • by Michael Weinman

I am fully persuaded by Neem’s diagnosis of the current crisis in American public education, and hope we all take his lesson to heart. In this reply, I hope to augment and perhaps slightly shift the prognosis that his (and Honig’s) focus logically entails: that if we want to save ...

Finding Value in Schoolhouses as Public Things

Education

Don’t Roll Back Title IX Enforcement

The Past and Future of Campus Sexual Assault Policy

July 28, 2017 • by Haylee Millikan

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 ...

Education

Gagging the Victims

Accusation as the real crime in campus sexual assault

July 26, 2017 • by Katie Gentile

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 ...

Education

Not An Advocate for Students or the Public Interest

Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education

July 25, 2017 • by Sherman Dorn

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 ...

Not An Advocate for Students or the Public Interest

Education

Myths on the Body

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

July 24, 2017 • by Ali Shames-Dawson

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 ...

Education

Why Do Schoolhouses Matter?

The Rise of Public Education in America

July 20, 2017 • by Johann Neem

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 ...

Education

Reading Black Reconstruction Today

April 19, 2017 • by Aaron Neber

My first encounter with W.E.B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction in the America came over the same weekend that the US Department of Education, newly under the leadership of Betsy DeVos, tweeted: "Education must not simply teach - it must teach life. -- W.E.B. DeBois". The Education Department's blithe attempt to participate ...

Feature

(Not) Coming to Terms with the Past

Race, Injustice and Social Policy in “Postracial” America

March 15, 2017 • by Michael Weinman

A week later, on March 6th, Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), waded into similarly troubled waters when he claimed -- in an address to HUD employees -- “That’s what America is about. A land of dreams and opportunity. There were other immigrants who came here in ...

Multi Media

No to DeVos Rally

February 17, 2017 • by Jo Freeman

Roughly 500 people gathered in a park near the Senate on February 6 to ask for "one more vote" against confirming Betsy DeVos to be the next Secretary of Education. At the time of the rally, all 48 Democrats and 2 Republicans had vowed to vote against her confirmation. The Senate ...