Monthly Archives: May 2013

Recombinant Friedman

My rephrasing of Thomas Friedman’s column today: “One of the best ways to learn about the changing labor market, if you can’t find a taxi driver to have a conversation with on your way to the airport, is to find … Continue reading

Posted in Cleaning Out the Augean Stables | 11 Comments

A Partial Archive: Swarthmore 2012-2013

First Thought Second Thought Third Thought Fourth Thought Fifth Thought Afterthought (On Microaggression) There isn’t (and may not be for some time) a single narrative account of the recent turmoil at Swarthmore College, but the timeline looks something like this: … Continue reading

Posted in Swarthmore | 8 Comments

Afterthought (On Microaggression)

One thing that I know annoyed many of the students is that they set out to get action and ended up instead having to tell personal stories in order to educate peers and administrators and professors. Here’s one more story, … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 1 Comment

Fifth Thought: How (Not) to Play the Hunger Games

I was frustrated as a student activist in the 1980s about our dependency on the narratives and grammar of activism that we inherited from the 1960s and 1970s. Sometimes it felt more like we were historical re-enactors than people living … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Politics, Swarthmore | 9 Comments

Fourth Thought: Respect Is a Two (Or More) Way Street

One of the more frustrating struggles threading through the protests has been about who is entitled to be “an ally”. What this often amounts to is well-meaning white kids begging for a gold star, an affirmation of their goodness. Sometimes … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 4 Comments

Third Thought: On Relevance

One of the best threads running through the events of the last week has been a critique by some students that classes at Swarthmore that are about race, class, gender, sexual orientation, that seem to be about oppression or marginalization, … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Defining "Liberal Arts", Swarthmore | 3 Comments

Second Thought: On the Persistence of Wrong Action

Earlier this year, the novelist Teju Cole wrote an essay for The New Yorker called “A Reader’s War”. A lot of people in my various social media feeds, on both the right and left, found its premise naive and its … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Politics, Swarthmore | 1 Comment

First Thought: On Generosity and Teaching

In the last week, I’ve heard a lot of staff and faculty talk about how hard it is going to be to teach and advise students in the near-term future, how much they now feel that they have to second-guess … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | Comments Off on First Thought: On Generosity and Teaching

The Humane Digital

As a way of tackling both the question “whither the humanities” and the thorny issue of defining “digital humanities” in relationship to that question, I’ll offer this: maybe one strategy is to talk about what can make intellectual work humane. … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Defining "Liberal Arts", Digital Humanities, Oh Not Again He's Going to Tell Us It's a Complex System | 3 Comments