BY AARON BARLOW One of the greatest examples of a reaction to totalitarianism is comedian Charlie Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator (1940). This very funny—when it is not tragic—movie ends with a speech resonating even in today’s political milieu. Here’s a bit from it: The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we…
BY AARON BARLOW Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Tobacco. These are real collusions and they have had impact on all of our lives. But Big Academia? Jack Kerwick, one of David Horowitz’s followers at FrontPageMag, certainly seems to think so. He sees it, from the best I can glean from his confused piece,…
BY AARON BARLOW David Brooks writes in today’s The New York Times of “the fact that we’ve regressed from a sophisticated moral ethos to a primitive one.” This has always been a favorite conservative trope, that we should yearn for the beliefs and coherences of yesteryear. Yet it has no truth behind it, as any…
BY AARON BARLOW It’s been a bad year. Not just for higher education. And not just at it winds down. The coming 2018 does not bode well for American colleges and universities. For one thing, the Janus case against agency fees (when unions can assess non-members for fees as a result of gains and benefits…
BY AARON BARLOW In the November 2017 issue of Australian Humanities Review, in an article entitled “The Roz Ward Case: Relections on Social Media, University Management and Free Speech,” Binoy Kampmark, a a Senior Lecturer in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, writes of the situation of…
BY AARON BARLOW Fifty-plus years ago, the political right began a campaign to undermine the institutions of the American political and societal system. They were out of power and had found themselves far outside of the mainstream of both political parties; lacking responsibilities within any extant institutions, they had no commitment to those landmarks of…
BY AARON BARLOW The act of teaching is political. Yet Americans like to pretend that its schools are removed from the public sphere, that they focus on knowledge and skills, nothing more. Rightwing firebrand (though his spark has dimmed against the bright flames of newer agitators like Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos) David Horowitz has…
BY AARON BARLOW Hank Reichman, on this blog the other day, quoted Donald Moynihan, a professor at the University of Wisconsin: “More people now believe that students oppose free speech, based on a flawed survey and resulting headlines. No correction will fix that.” He was referring to a “survey” conducted by a Brookings Institution Senior…
BY AARON BARLOW “’Tis but thy name that is my enemy.” That line, and Juliet’s following thoughts, come to mind each time I listen to talk of interdisciplinary courses and programs. So bound are we by names and the divisions they create that we no longer seem able to see how ridiculous and small-minded we…
BY AARON BARLOW In early 2016, I shared on this blog a statement by a tenured professor recently fired by the University of California at Riverside. One of the comments, by a former colleague of the ex-professor, accused me of posting his statement solely as “clickbait.” I chuckled, but the accusation rankled: the Academe blog…