Category Archives: Politics

Of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax–and Commencement Speakers

I found myself really annoyed in the last week when I came across the many cases of faculty approvingly endorsing the fate of commencement speakers like Robert Birgeneau and Christine Lagarde, and scolding William Bowen for scolding students for their … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Politics | 16 Comments

Sovereignty Is Bunk

During the run-up to the Iraq War, I remember a few hot conversations among opponents of the war about whether there was such a thing as a “sovereignty left”, e.g., a tendency towards seeing the achievement and maintenance of inviolable … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | 12 Comments

Frame(d)

High Anxiety In modernity, dread only takes a holiday once in a while. Right now Mr. Dread is hard at work all around the world, and he’s not just sticking to the big geopolitical dramas or some single-issue fear. He’s … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Generalist's Work, Oh Not Again He's Going to Tell Us It's a Complex System, Politics, Swarthmore | 8 Comments

Who’s the Boss?

In the current wave of online ill-will between contingent and tenure-track faculty (which of course most faculty in either group will never see, know about or care about), one of the common sentiments that produces some modest degree of agreement … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Politics, Swarthmore | 20 Comments

Unplanned Obsolescence

Solidarity and sympathy in online culture and social media are fleeting things: you are only as good as your last response rather than a lifetime of responses, and only as welcome as you are permitted to be within a particular … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Oh Not Again He's Going to Tell Us It's a Complex System, Politics | 10 Comments

Yesterday, All Our MOOC Troubles Seemed So Far Away

Everybody remember the expectation that a smart, professorial President would hire an equally smart, skilled staff who would prove that a well-run government can be quickly responsive to the needs of the society, efficient in the execution of its duties, … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Politics | 5 Comments

Be Nelson Mandela

It is 1981 and I am writing my first long research paper ever in my high school government class on why the U.S. government and U.S. institutions need to commit more aggressively to fighting apartheid. I am citing a report … Continue reading

Posted in Africa, Politics | 34 Comments

In Loco Parentis?

I used to believe much more in procedural reform as a way to deal with questions of fairness, equity and justice. That every institution and community should have its established rules and processes, and if you signed on, you accepted … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Politics, Swarthmore | 14 Comments

Look! Over There! What On Earth Can That Be?

When I was working on my dissertation, I read through the lengthy transcript of a Southern Rhodesian Commission of Inquiry that had been charged with investigating the poor living conditions in some of the rural reserves that Africans had been … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Politics | 5 Comments

Smarter Than You: The Ideology of the Incentive (Parking Lot Edition)

I’ve already made my feelings about most uses of “incentives” by technocratic planners fairly plain, and besides, I’m just really at best a handmaiden on this point for my colleagues Ken Sharpe and Barry Schwartz, who make the argument more … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Oh Not Again He's Going to Tell Us It's a Complex System, Politics, Swarthmore | 15 Comments