Category: issues

Talent And Behavior – One Does Not Excuse The Other (It’s A Cultural Thing)

It’s not just men, often of a certain generation, who seem unsettled by this newfound determination to speak out – demonstrating cultural leadership while doing so. I’ve heard some women in theatre talking about MeToo as a “bandwagon”. These are often women who have scaled the ladder of success and found their own ways to deal with predatory male sexual behaviour. The argument is that to make a fuss about an unwanted hand on a knee or a breast casts women in the role of victims, when of course it is a women’s job not to make a fuss and to deal with these advances from men. Because boys will be boys. But that does nothing to change the culture in which such behaviours thrive.

Regulators Want To Know How Elite Colleges Choose Who Gets In. They Might Not Like The Answers

Outsiders have long been curious how admissions decisions are made. Most of the time this desire for transparency stems from a desire for fairness: Given how few acceptances elite institutions can offer, admitting any group of students almost always means excluding a much larger group that is just as qualified. So the unfortunate truth that investigators and the public may discover after peering into the black box of college admissions is that there are few, if any, procedures for deciding who gets in that would be perceived as fair.

Univ. Of Texas, Bowing To Protests, Reverses Decision To Move Fine Arts Library Off-Campus

“For the better part of a year, students, faculty, staff, librarians, museum professionals, artists, and many members of the public [in Austin] worked tirelessly to protest further removal of books and materials, after discovering that, over the summer of 2017, around 75,000 items from the Fine Arts Library had been removed to off-site facilities. The rest of the items held by the library – which predominantly occupied the fifth floor of the Doty Fine Arts Building – also appeared to be at risk of removal.”

Why Authoritarians Try To Suppress The Arts

Art creates pathways for subversion, for political understanding and solidarity among coalition builders. Art teaches us that lives other than our own have value. Like the proverbial court jester who can openly mock the king in his own court, artists who occupy marginalized social positions can use their art to challenge structures of power in ways that would otherwise be dangerous or impossible. Authoritarian leaders throughout history have intuited this fact and have acted accordingly.

Gender Pay Gap In The Arts Less Bad Than In Other Industries: Study

“A quarter of the 40 major arts and culture organisations that had to report their gender pay gap details to [the UK] Government this week paid their female staff a higher average hourly rate than their male employees last year. Overall the major arts employers still pay men more than women – there is a median hourly pay gap of 4.4%, but this is lower than the average of 12% across all 10,000 reporting employers.”

Bookstores In Germany Take On A Political Role, Including Protesting The Rise Of The Far Right

One man runs a bookshop in Berlin’s old Jewish Quarter, and he helped lead a protest against neo-Nazi marches in the quarter. “Braunsdorf, who has hosted German-Arabic reading events at his shop for refugee children and moderated debates about gentrification, the economy and politics, said he ‘can’t imagine running a bookstore just as a selling point.'”