Category: issues

New federal data suggest the increasing financial pressures may be starting to take a toll on institutions. An annual report from the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics shows that the number of colleges and universities eligible to award federal financial aid to their students fell by 5.6 percent from 2015-16 to 2016-17. That’s the fourth straight decline since a peak of 7,416 institutions in 2012-13. It is also by far the largest (the others were 0.3, 1.2 and 2.0 percent, in order).

“Broadly speaking, cultural studies is not one arm of the humanities so much as an attempt to use all of those arms at once. It emerged in England, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, when scholars from working-class backgrounds, such as Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, began thinking about the distance between canonical cultural touchstones—the music or books that were supposed to teach you how to be civil and well-mannered—and their own upbringings. These scholars believed that the rise of mass communications and popular forms were permanently changing our relationship to power and authority, and to one another. There was no longer consensus.”

A week into a federal trial over whether a law preventing Tuscon from teaching elective ethnic studies classes was racially motivated, the former head of public instruction, one of the strongest supporters of the ban, “reaffirmed things like saying that Spanish language media should be banned from the United States with a limited exception of Mexican restaurant menus.”

Don’t read this piece if you ever want to sleep again. “Today’s impersonation-bots are different from the robots imagined in science fiction: They aren’t sentient, don’t carry weapons and don’t have physical bodies. Instead, fake humans just have whatever is necessary to make them seem human enough to ‘pass.'”

“The announcement comes a day before the one-year anniversary of a failed coup against the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In the wake of the coup, around 150,000 officials have been dismissed from their posts and more than 50,000 people have been jailed.”

Uh-oh. If people can’t share passwords with their families, will they still want Hulu or Amazon? (Netflix seems safe.) “Companies say they accept some sharing as a way to promote their programming to potential customers, but they also take steps to curtail blatant freeloading.”

Both Marti Noxon and Lily Collins had experience with anorexia before making “To the Bone.” Does it go too far? “‘There’s a very, very, very fine line between giving information about eating disorders and disclosing too much and being triggering for individuals who are currently struggling,’ said Johanna Kandel, CEO of the Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness.”

A new report from the Illinois-based initiative Open the Books provides an eye-opening look into the size of that tab. The study includes virtually every grant the NEA and NEH have made since 2016, and additional details about the endowments’ activities as far back as 2009. This includes grants to 71 entities with assets over $1 billion, and one grant to a California enterprise that celebrates the work of a Japanese-American artist best known for declaring: “I consider Osama bin Laden as one of the people that I admire.”

“Stories of Pilgrims and Puritans, Founding Fathers, westward-bound settlers, and brave American soldiers dominated this consensus-driven picture of the nation’s past. The vast majority of historical markers reinforced these themes on a local level, pointing out important events or notable residents – most of them white and male – as travelers wound their way to their final destinations. … This [particular] consensus view of American history has not held up.” New historical markers – for example, one commemorating the KKK Greensboro Massacre of 1979 – now get fought over long and hard. (In that case, even the word “massacre” was contentious.) “Not surprisingly, no event has proved to be more controversial to recognize through historical markers than the American Civil War.”