BY MARTIN KICH
The Atlantic has released its annual compilation of the top 25 news photos. (Over three days, they are following up with three sets of 25 other photos highlighting news stories from throughout the year.)
Five of the 25 photos have a connection to education-related stories.
They include a photo of Christine Blasey-Ford being sworn in before her testimony at the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Professor Blasey-Ford’s academic credentials gave her a credibility that a less accomplished witness might not have had, but the stereotype of the liberal academic got a great deal of traction in the Far-Right media. An under-reported part of the story has been the ways in which her testimony has severely disrupted not only her professional life but also her personal life. The threats against her life and her family have not received anything close to the media attention that the menacing Antifa demonstration at Tucker Carlson’s home has received.
In another photo, Randall Margraves, the father of three daughters who were abused by Larry Nassar, lunges at Nassar during victim statements before Nassar’s sentencing in Charlotte, Michigan, on February 2, 2018. Although the story will not remain in the headlines for anywhere near as long as Nassar’s victims will have to live with the effects of his crimes, the indictment of former Michigan State President Lou Anna K. Simon means that the story will remain in the headlines at least into 2019.
Three of the photos feature the remarkable student activism following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The most powerful of those photos, I think, is by Carolyn Kaster for the Associated Press. It shows the students leading a mass protest outside of the White House.
The complete set of The Atlantic’s “Top 25 News photos of 2018” is available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/12/top-25-news-photos-of-2018/577216/.
There were links to academia indeed. The modern university has become in many ways a primary communication hub and ideological distribution center in society. That communication unfortunately includes much special interest agitation, and with it an arguable grave danger to academic rational inquiry. In that regard readers may wish to read a broadsheet opinion I wrote for the University of Chicago community (link below) concerning the Law School’s involvement in private lobbying during the Kavanaugh hearing, and inter alia the actual unintended diminution or discrediting of the witness testimony, and by extension, of her credential signaling. These are among the concerns voiced by University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom in his unexpected best selling “Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished The Souls of Today’s Students.” The forward by Saul Bellow raises the smart observation concerning the struggle for independent consciousness, and its challenge from external interests, or as Bellow puts it, “the university acting as society’s conceptual warehouse of often harmful influences.” Thank you and regards. https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2018/10/9/booth-alum-says-law-school-signatories-mistakenly/