Another take on this from Michael Harriot:
Spot on again. With all the hitting out of the ballpark Harriot does, I wonder if he’s had any MLB offers.
Well, it seems like he’s more into basketball lately…
I smell Hillsdale College all over that.
Hard disagree with the headine/lead. This has nothing to do with “antisemitism” as such, it has to do with encouraging diversity of opinions. Any thoughts that diverge from the party line are unacceptable, and any institution that encourages students to think for themselves must be brought to heel. The hypocrisy here is just breathtaking.
I don’t know… I feel like this every day now… what kind of stupid world are we living in…
Here’s a post-pandemic issue with education I hadn’t heard about before:
The purpose of relaunching the major, Graham wrote, was to “get high-quality conservative Aggie students into the journalism world to help direct our message.”
It’s always fucking projection with these assholes, isn’t it?
In a word, yes
Honestly, it’s like a superpower for them. A really bad and sucky one, but still…
I mean, it makes my own mutant superpower of eating ice cream without becoming a bioweapon look good!
(Certainly cross postable in other threads.)
An FBOOK post by law prof Tobias Barrington Wolff:
I have been gathering my thoughts after the appalling forced resignation of Claudine Gay from the Harvard presidency and have a few observations about some realities I think should be part of these conversations.
Universities demand much more labor of people of color, women, and particularly women of color than they do of White men like me. It is labor they are seldom rewarded for, labor that often gets dismissed out of hand when events like the systematic assault on President Gay unfold, and yet labor the University depends on and sometimes brags about when times are good and bragging is easy.
The additional labor takes the form of institutional service: committee work, administrative work, advisory work, contributions to ongoing projects, all of which are assigned to people of color and women with a self-congratulatory flourish that the committee / administration / advisory body will benefit from the participation of faculty who reflect the richness of the institution. And indeed the institutions will benefit from that richness of experience. But the idea that all this service is distinguished and an honor wears thin quickly. It is labor, it steals time from other priorities, and it can be exhausting.
The additional labor takes the form of mentoring, professional development and support for students, which people of color and women on faculties are called upon to provide in vastly disproportionate amounts. Many students see their faces, their experiences and their stories reflected in too few of their professors and wind up making huge collective demands on the handful of faculty who do offer some kind of meaningful mirror. Most faculty who take this kind of generous approach to their work with students find the experience gratifying and validating. But the fact that the work is gratifying does not make it any less demanding to show up for students in this way. It is labor, it steals time from other priorities, and it can be exhausting.
The additional labor takes the form of a gauntlet that people of color and women must navigate on a regular basis simply to have their voices recognized as intelligent and authoritative in the Academy and sometimes in their own institutions. In ways both obvious and subtle, people of color and women are regularly called on to justify their positions, their deservingness and their very presence on the faculties of universities. The experience of presenting scholarly work and having that work assessed, evaluated and disagreed with is difficult enough under the best of circumstances. We have incredible and privileged jobs, but that does not change the fact that undertaking serious scholarship is hard work both intellectually and emotionally. When you must undertake that work not with a presumption that of course you belong but rather with a demand that you justify your existence as the precursor to being taken seriously, the emotional and intellectual demands of the work magnify several-fold. It is labor, it steals time from other priorities, and it can be exhausting.
Through all of this additional labor, people of color, women, and women of color in particular are asked to be considered for and serve in major administrative roles: as Deans, Provosts, Chancellors and Presidents. It is an act of extraordinary devotion to the mission of the university to follow a path that can lead to such jobs and then actually accept such a position after all the additional labor that has been required of people of color and women to get hired as professors and occupy space as members of a university faculty.
As we figure out what comes next following the forced resignation of Claudine Gay at Harvard and Liz Magill at Penn, I suggest approaching those conversations with a respectful awareness of the amount of additional labor that universities demand of people who have traveled paths like theirs, how much universities depend on that additional labor, and how quick they can be to minimize its importance when the people who have contributed that labor come under attack.
