Section
Higher Education
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Shoptalk: Overheard at ASA 2025 or MLA 2026?
This edition of Shoptalk asks: Can you guess which of the following was overheard at ASA 2025 and which was overheard at MLA 2026?
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Reckoning With Our Collective Failure
We were collectively failing in our mission to help students become informed, engaged citizens.
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Liberation, Education
In April 2024, Sofia Rivera captured stark close-ups of scenes from the Columbia University campus, from barricaded buildings to clipped versions of the campus’s famous statues, obscured in favor of the images of protest surrounding them.
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The Fire This Time
I come to you with the same tears of rage, the same feelings of intense internal pain, and the same traumas that you all carry daily.
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Lyrics of the Student Intifada
There is an elegy that echoes from the universities of Gaza to the universities of the world.
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Like Trees By Water
lock-armed and mealy mouthed atop us / the blockade begins to sing / and cross-legged / fetal below / we join
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We Keep Us Safe
At every step, the strength found in solidarity was instrumental in sustaining the movement.
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A Tale of Two Graduations
In their different ways, the People’s Graduations restored my belief in the university—not as an imprimatur of excellence or a factory of social mobility, but as a community of scholars devoted to freedom and truth.
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From Palestine to NYC: Globalizing the Intifada
On the central platform’s mast, a fluttering Palestinian flag challenges the legitimacy of the official American one positioned a few meters above.
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Because Grief Is Collective, Healing Is Too
I watched news incessantly, like it was going to save me. I stopped sleeping at night.
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When the Singing Turned to Screams
The city had to wash the blood of students off the ground, and both it and Emerson are pretending nothing happened.
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On Being Disruptive
To say that the protests were not disruptive helps us look for the real reasons as to why the police were called. There are many.
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The Campus Transformed: A Protest Archive
There is no better time to revisit the accounts and reflections from the spring uprisings, in the words of participants and onlookers themselves.
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To Fix the University, Return to Moo U
Every time Sean Carswell teaches Jane Smiley’s “Moo” in his research writing class at California State University, a catastrophe at the fictional Moo University mirrors a crisis within CSU.
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Protest Pedagogy
The encampments could be understood as masterful examples of project-based learning in civic engagement.
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“Things Happen, As They Do in War”: From Chaucer’s Siege of Troy to the Siege of Gaza
“Troilus and Criseyde” is not often regarded as war poetry. But in 2024, it’s impossible not to see the truth at the poem’s core: it’s a work about a city under siege.
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“The Joke’s Ultimately on Me”: “Diabetic of Enlightenment” on Academic Twitter
When it comes to academia, we live in a moment of heightened contradictions. And yet, graduate students and junior professors are frequently told we mustn’t rock the boat even as it sinks farther and farther into the neoliberal abyss. The weight of this disconnect was bound to break eventually. Twitter, now regrettably known as X,…
