Posts Tagged ‘Rikers Island’
Wednesday Links!
* Fans aren’t the irrational ones. They know how to seize pleasure from the world and hold tight even as it hurts them. If fandom is simply an obedient response to the signals of the consumer market, it is an obedience which threatens to overrun its master while saying yes.
* Another “I’m a professor” essay.
What my experience has taught me must become every instructor’s priority — that is, if we are in the profession because we want to develop engaged citizens. I have learned to teach students to notice how they are being groomed to join a “docile and contingent workforce” whenever they are not encouraged to think in ways that feel like a challenge. I couldn’t do this if I were busy cowering to avoid complaints. Besides, I want my students to be passionately engaged and to feel empowered about speaking up both inside and outside of my classroom. The real question, then, is: how can professors broach controversial topics in a way that does not lend itself to complaints that are grounded more in emotion than in intellectual inquiry? The solution is simple, but implementing it requires courage and tenacity: professors need to directly discuss power and power differentials, no matter the subject area.
* Tenure, Fairness, and Fear(lessness).
But that is not really something that makes professors special. Rather, it is good for people to make their lives less fearsome and their minds less fearful. Those of us who have some of that privilege in our working lives should hold our heads high and try to be allies to others who are working to get their share of it. There’s no shame in having security, only in keeping other people from it.
* In the wake of the UW System Board of Regents’ decision last week to “pretend to have tenure,” System leaders are coming to acknowledge more and more in their public statements the correctness of the worries they have simultaneously attempted to depict as alarmist. The very grave problem posed by section 39 of the JFC omnibus motion is finally on the public radar of UW administrators, though they continue to soft-pedal its severity.
* Can the University of Wisconsin Survive Governor Walker?
* Unless you are in highly unusual circumstances, really, do not think of adjuncting as a long-term career.
* What different colleges could do with $400 million.
* In Heated State-Budget Fights, Students Strive to Be Heard.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Cooper Union: Five Trustees, Including Daniel Libeskind, Abruptly Resign.
* The accusations against Mr. Walker, one of several new claims of academic misconduct involving Texas athletes, illustrate how the university has appeared to let academically deficient players push the limits of its policy on academic integrity as it has sought to improve its teams’ academic records.
* But the emerging field of Republican candidates for the 2016 presidential election is something else altogether. Of the dozen or so people who have declared or are thought likely to declare, every one can be described as a full-blown adult failure. These are people who, in most cases, have been granted virtually every imaginable advantage on the road to success, and managed nevertheless to foul things up along the way.
* And then there was Rand, scooping the Democrats again.
* Concerned that kindergarten has become overly academic in recent years, this suburban school district south of Baltimore is introducing a new curriculum in the fall for 5-year-olds. Chief among its features is a most old-fashioned concept: play.
* From infancy to employment, this is a life-denying, love-denying mindset, informed not by joy or contentment, but by an ambition that is both desperate and pointless, for it cannot compensate for what it displaces: childhood, family life, the joys of summer, meaningful and productive work, a sense of arrival, living in the moment.
* How Utah Became A Bizarre, Blissful Epicenter For Get-Rich-Quick Schemes.
* New government research shows that female military veterans commit suicide at nearly six times the rate of other women, a startling finding that experts say poses disturbing questions about the backgrounds and experiences of women who serve in the armed forces.
* Apple is finally fixing the reason your Mac and iPhone’s Wi-Fi sucks.
* The constant cycle of phone upgrades — in which consumers buy phones once a new model comes out every two or so years — is having serious effects on the environment, according to a new study.
* Why These Tiny Island Nations Are Planning To Sue Fossil Fuel Companies.
* music is inefficient beep bop boop
* Why Franklin Richards Is The Most Ridiculous Character In All Of Comics.
* Information wants to be free! With regard to the pornographic material Osama Bin Laden had in his possession at the time of his death, responsive records, should they exist, would be contained in the operational files. The CIA Information Act, 50 U.S.C 431, as amended, exempts CIA operational files from search, review, publication, and disclosure requirements of the FOIA. To the extent that this material exists, the CIA would be prohibited by 18 USC Section 1461 from mailing obscene matter.
* Iceland put bankers in jail rather than bailing them out — and it worked.
* And Germany’s oldest student, 102, gets PhD denied by Nazis.
Tuesday Morning Links
* From the archives: The university is no longer primarily a site of production (of a national labor force or national culture) as it was in the 1970s and 80s, but has become primarily a site of capital investment and accumulation. The historical process through which this transformation was implemented is long and complicated, and we cannot give a detailed account of it here. Instead, we want to describe the general shape of this new model and the consequences it might have for political action in a university setting. We take as paradigmatic the case of the University of Michigan, where this model has been worked out in its most developed form and from which it is spreading across the United States, as university administrators across the country look to and emulate what they glowingly call the “Michigan model.” In this new university, instruction is secondary to ensuring the free flow of capital. Bodies in classrooms are important only to the extent that money continues to flow through the system. It is a university that in a global sense has ceased to be a university—its primary purpose is no longer education but circulation. This is the new logic of the university. If we want to fight it, we have to understand it.
* Merit, Diversity and Grad Admissions.
* Big Data and Graduation Rates.
* Teaching the controversy in California, Holocaust edition.
* Another absolutely botched college investigation of a sexual assault.
* Violent Abuse of the Mentally Ill Is Routine, Widespread at Rikers Island.
* Malcolm Harris on redheads and playacting racist.
* Why it’s time we talked about the sex lives of humanitarians.
* Shouting About Diving, but Shrugging About Concussions. How to stop FIFA from being such a parasite. Could the World Cup Champion Beat the Best Club Team in the World? Stadiums and/as prisons. Another World Cup Is Possible.
* That’s… ominous. Parts of Yellowstone National Park closed after massive supervolcano beneath it melts roads.
* Buzzfeed has a longread about the behavior of a long-term predator in an elite California private school.
* Demolition unearths legacy of toxic pollution at Milwaukee plant.
* Is Milwaukee the No. 1 city for tech? Not so fast.
* The July effect is real: new doctors really do make hospitals more dangerous.
* Joss Whedon has written more Buffy the Vampire Slayer. True fact!
* Behind-The-Scenes Footage Of Buffy Stunts Is the Ultimate Time Suck.
* On the legacy of Dungeons & Dragons.
* Against natural gas as a “transition fuel.”
* If you pretend precedent is meaningful and the rule of law is an operative concept in America, and squint real hard, here’s a way Hobby Lobby could be good news for liberals.
* There is, Steve estimates, room enough on the ark for 23 people to live comfortably. And Australians are welcome. Singles, couples, families, believers. All that’s required is a $300 one way ticket from Brisbane to Luganville and a commitment that means forever.
* A bit on the nose, don’t you think? Two Fruitland Park, Fla. cops have lost their jobs after an FBI source named the two as members of the Ku Klux Klan.
* Uber and rape: Seattle Police Clear Uber Driver of Rape Charge, But Not Sexual Assault.
* When Park Middle School cheated on a high-stakes test.
* The goal of ethics is to maximize human flourishing.
* And the new Doctor Who trailer fills me with a little bit of sadness: I was really hoping the Capaldi era would be more swashbuckling than brooding. I guess I’m looking forward to Moffat moving on.
Because Neither Prisoners Nor Prison Guards Are Human
The city does not plan to evacuate Rikers Island, the mayor said. According to the city’s Department of Correction, no hypothetical evacuation plan for the roughly 12,000 inmates that the facility may house on a given day even exists. Via @studentactivism.