BY GEFEN BAR-ON SANTOR Guest blogger Gefen Bar-On Santor teaches English at the University of Ottawa. I often feel in competition with the Internet as I search for materials to make my lectures more stimulating—a word many students use to describe what they want. No matter how engaging I try to become, there is still…
BY MARTIN KICH Ellroy, James. L.A. Confidential. New York: Mysterious, 1990. A strong case can be made that in the last quarter of the 20th century, James Ellroy has stylistically influenced the American mystery-detective novel more than any other novelist of the period. After writing seven other crimes novels in six years, Ellroy focused his…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week shortly before I left for Washington, D.C. to attend meetings of the AAUP Foundation Board and the AAUP Executive Committee, I learned that California State University (CSU) Chancellor Timothy White would be addressing a breakfast there hosted by the California State Society, “a social networking organization” serving Californians in the…
BY HANK REICHMAN On February 29, California State University (CSU) Chancellor Tim White visited the CSU East Bay campus and addressed a public meeting of faculty, staff and students. White was greeted by some 40 student and faculty demonstrators who later joined others in the audience. As readers of this blog know, the CSU faculty…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last year George Yancy, a professor of philosophy at Emory University, conducted a series of 19 interviews with philosophers and public intellectuals on the issue of race, published in the New York Times feature “The Stone,” which seeks to bring the insights of philosophy (as in “the philosopher’s stone”) to bear on issues…
This very nuanced reflection on race and its impact on faculty-student assumptions, communication, and effectiveness is sub-titled “How Ferguson, John Roberts, and an Anonymous Student Helped Me Understand Diversity in the Classroom.” The author of the essay is Margaret Williamson, an Associate Professor Emerita of Classics and Associate Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth…
The New York Times covered the Historians Against the War resolution to protect academic freedom in Gaza and the West Bank that have been under Israeli control since the 1967 war. It stated in part: More than a half-dozen American scholarly groups have passed resolutions condemning Israel, including the American Anthropological Association, which endorsed a boycott…
Cecil Canton, my colleague on the CBC Executive Committee, has passed along this “Weekly Commentary” from Jesse Jackson, Sr., about the erosion of voting rights in Alabama. Very ironically but very predictably, once the Supreme Court ruled that the states subject to federal monitoring under the Voting Rights Act had moved beyond the need for…
This from the Washington Post: “Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker suspended his presidential campaign today, effectively ending a once-promising GOP presidential bid that collapsed over the summer. “Walker, who tumbled from top-tier status amid tepid debate performances and other missteps, had pulled back from other early-voting states in favor of a heavy focus on Iowa, where…
Close to my house in Tambaong, Togo–where I was a Peace Corps Volunteer 25 years ago–was the remains of a large fish pond, a development project of the past. Nobody I knew could even identify the Non-Governmental Organization that had built it–nor could anyone remember having eaten fish from it. West Africa is littered with…