Tag
Education
-
“Totto-chan,” the Myth of Hans Asperger, and Disability Pride amidst Fascism
In the lead up to World War II, one headmaster educated children with a variety of abilities—and doing all he could to protect his students from Japan’s authoritarian government.
-
Stop Hyping Academic Freedom
Universities may be among the oldest of our institutions, but they have changed significantly during the millennium or so since they were established. Roughly speaking, the history of the European university proceeds through four phases. First, the medieval ecclesiastical-juridical phase in which, first in Italy and gradually across Europe, universities were granted and then claimed…
-
Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking
At Loyola University New Orleans I teach a seminar on David Foster Wallace—a class I designed at the urging of several students. One day late in the semester we were tackling Wallace’s very short story “Incarnations of Burned Children.” Four students in the class immediately and enthusiastically declared that they had read and discussed this…
-
A Riot Grrrl Zine in the Modern Age
A personal explanation: I grew up in a small town, and when I say that, I actually mean miniscule—exponentially smaller that most would assume when one describes the phenomenon of a small, rural town. 1200 people small, to be exact, and located smack dab in the heart of Texas. Land of exceedingly right-wing conservatives and…
-
Showdown at the University of Texas
In June 2014 there was a showdown in Texas. The University of Texas Board of Regents and its chancellor, who runs the system, had been trying to fire the president of the university system’s flagship campus in Austin for more than five years. They were tired of waiting. President Bill Powers was popular because he…
-
The Politics of For-Profit Higher Education
Back in June, David Brat, an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College, defeated then House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary for Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District. It was a remarkable achievement for Brat, a political unknown. He rode to victory on a surge of local pro–Tea Party sentiment, arguing that Cantor was an establishment…
-
Race and Campus Rape: Equal Under the Law?
It took me five years to muster the strength to report my rape. It was still within the (five-year) limitation period, and I told my story to a Philadelphia prosecutor armed only with the evidence of my memory. I had been a 17-year-old freshman in college at the time of my assault and been dating…
-
“We” Includes Me
In my world, which is populated by people obsessed with race, statistics about black men and boys are ubiquitous. Study after study lays out how few graduate from high school, how many wind up in prison, how few are employed, how many are killed by the police. I can find a number for nearly any…
-
Stop Defending the Humanities
Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them. I say this after having read widely across the rapidly accumulating literature in defense of the humanities, to which this book loosely belongs. Strictly speaking, The Humanities and Public Life is a record of a seminar on…
-
Changes
The first thing that happens, when a literary historian starts using computers to think about literature, is that the object of study changes. Not just the tool; the object itself. “The objects studied by contemporary historians” have this peculiarity, Krzysztof Pomian observed some time ago, that “no one has ever seen them, and no one…
-
Toads and Bitches
“At last, something beautiful you can truly own,” says Don Draper, pitching to Jaguar executives in the fifth season of Mad Men. This idea of owning a woman is tempered here by metaphor: the car only stands in for the woman. Male ownership of her remains, albeit tenuously, a fantasy. Not so in the case…
-
A World Where We Are All Autistic
On a memorable spring evening in 2002, the philosopher Peter Singer welcomed disability rights advocate Harriet McBryde Johnson to speak at Princeton University. The event was controversial, given that Singer had publicly claimed that parents should be allowed to euthanize children with severe disabilities, and that Johnson was herself severely disabled. Born with muscular dystrophy…
-
Back to Kindergarten! A Modest Proposal for a College of the Future
A visit to that marvelous Century of the Child design show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York last summer set me to musing all over again. Marvelous, I say, albeit a bit of a missed opportunity. And musing, as it happens, not so much about children past as about colleges future. Regarding…
-
The Euphoria of Influence: Jeffrey Eugenides’s “The Marriage Plot”
In The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides asks what would happen if nineteenth-century literature married twentieth-century theory, and the result is many brilliant novels in one: a romance, a coming-of-age story, a travelogue, an account of madness, and a tale of religious quest. Its protagonists are Brown University students, Class of 1982, which also makes The…
