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....

Read More
The Problem Is Not Harvard, the Problem Is Graduate School

Why the Harper’s Letter Got It Wrong

The most serious threats to protest and open debate come not from the left or the right but from the state and powerful political institutions

So I took a new job in a new city and began again. I have been thinking about my decision to speak up, and its costs, in light of The Letter. You know the one: the open letter in Harper’s magazine that praises the “needed reckoning” of the past few months ...
Read More
Why the Harper’s Letter Got It Wrong

Hungary’s Attack on Gender Studies

A threatening online message and institutional inaction exposes the official illiberalism

Abby L. Ferber, in her 2017 presidential address at the meeting of Sociologists for Women in Society, analyzed the threats and harassment educators face in institutions of higher education in the United States -- quoted Malcom X: “If you’re not ready to die for it, put the word ‘freedom’ out ...
Read More
Hungary’s Attack on Gender Studies