Departments

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Roundup

  • SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
    6/1/2023

    Amid Anti-Woke Panic, Interdisciplinary Programs Inherently Vulnerable

    by Timothy Messer-Kruse

    Because standards of academic freedom like those of the AAUP tie that freedom to expertise within recognized professional communities of scholars, those doing interdisciplinary work and working in programs like ethnic studies have less institutional protection against charges that they are engaged in politics rather than scholarship. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    5/25/2023

    The Right to Dress However You Want

    by Kate Redburn

    New anti-transgender laws should prompt a legal response, but they also require a fundamental recognition: laws prescribing gendered dress codes infringe on everyone's freedom of expression. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    5/31/2023

    Can We Solve the Civics Education Crisis?

    by Glenn C. Altschuler and David Wippman

    Universal schooling created the potential for a unifying civic curriculum that, paradoxically, has been the subject of perpetual disagreement regarding its contents. A recent bipartisan roadmap for civics education that makes those disagreements central to the subject matter may be the only way to move forward. 

  • SOURCE: CNN
    6/1/2023

    James Comey is Deluded About Trump's Influence on Republicans

    by Julian Zelizer

    The former FBI director blamed Trump for the growing Republican hostility toward the FBI, among other government institutions. But the belief that major institutions are compromised by un-American elements has a long and deep history on the right that won't be eliminated whenever Trump happens to leave the political stage. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    5/26/2023

    Will the Debt Ceiling Deal Derail Environmental Justice?

    by Robert Bullard and Larry Shapiro

    The idea of permitting reform—easing the environmental constraints on building new energy infrastructure—has been a bargaining chip in the debt ceiling negotiations. Reforms could help bring a green energy grid online, but it could also put more polluting industry in poor and minority communities. 

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    5/30/2023

    Understanding Latino White Supremacy

    by Geraldo Cadava

    "In fact, Latino white supremacy isn’t an oxymoron, and carrying out a premeditated mass shooting in the United States is one of the more American things a Latino could do."

  • SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
    5/30/2023

    Determined to Remember: Harriet Jacobs and Slavery's Descendants

    by Koritha Mitchell

    Public history sites have the potential to spark intellectual engagement because when they make embodied connections between people and the sites they visit—even when those connections evoke the cruelty of the past. 

  • SOURCE: New Statesman
    5/31/2023

    Neoliberalism: Not Dead Yet

    by Brett Christophers

    The reassertion of state power over economies during the COVID pandemic shouldn't yet be taken as a sign of a turn away from the dominance of finance capital over the global economy and politics – market fundamentalism is only one part of the system. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    5/31/2023

    Can Activists Use Banking Regulations to Force Decarbonization?

    by Bart Elmore

    After Clinton-era reforms enabled consolidation of the banking industry, environmental groups in the early 2000s began to target the commercial banking sides of the firms that raised capital and provided credit to the fossil fuels industry. 

  • SOURCE: Contingent
    5/28/2023

    When Witches Took Flight

    by Chris Halsted

    The modern association of witches and flight in fact emerged from a relatively obscure corner of medieval church writings that gained prominence in the context of contemporary political anxieties about women's political influence. 

  • SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
    5/30/2023

    The Hypocrisy (and Futility) of English-Only "Decolonization"

    by Eric Adler

    The peril the liberal arts face today is exemplified by calls to dislodge the centrality of "dead white men" from the curriculum; universities are happy to accept this as a cheap way to pander to diversity as they gut language requirements and departments that would enable students to have a deeper engagement with world cultures.

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    5/24/2023

    Does Lincoln Hold the Key to the Debt Ceiling Crisis?

    by Roger Lowenstein

    Issuing "greenback" paper currency backed by the government's credit instead of gold was seen as a radical move in 1862, but Lincoln and Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase recognized the paramount importance of safeguarding the nation's credit and did it anyway.