Category: issues

“Insecurity, endemic to a profession heavily reliant on short-term labor, is usually omitted from discussions regarding safe spaces. But the instructor’s role in the construction of safe spaces is unquestioned: They hold the balance of power in the classroom, even if they know themselves to be nearly powerless in other areas of life. As a result, they need to concede a great deal of that power if a space is indeed to remain safe for their students.”

“It seems to me that prestige only accrues to those at the very top—not top 20, more like top five—and when we’re talking prestige, we’re almost exclusively talking about private institutions. Unfortunately, the only way to survive in a culture that continues to turn away from education as a public good is to “compete,” and the only way we know how to compete is for “prestige.” But what is the cost on public institutions of chasing prestige?”

“In particular, it is the humanities that teach us how not to be racists, by showing us how to open ourselves up to what is different. Whether a given humanist is a modernist, postmodernist, New Critic, Marxist, or an adherent of any of dozens of other approaches, what she does in the classroom is always the same: She takes some cultural product that seems at first strange and off-putting — a poem by some ancient Greek or Persian poet, a novel by some African or Chinese author, a statue from an indigenous culture whose true name we don’t even know — and, if she is a good teacher, makes it familiar enough to be interesting.”

“Its backers have praised [the Canadian Museum for Human Rights], which attracts nearly 350,000 visitors a year, for starting important conversations about injustice. But to others, despite a raft of powerful exhibits on the oppression of indigenous peoples in Canada, the museum could do more to address the nation’s uncomfortable truths about its past and present dealings with the descendants of the land’s original inhabitants.”

“On May 9, after a question-and-answer session following a public lecture by US diplomat Dennis Ross at the Plaza branch of the Kansas City (Mo.) Public Library, city police arrested and detained an attendee and the library’s director of programming and marketing. … In late September, the library decided to make the incident known to the media, because the city had pressed forward with the case.”

“Central to the story of deconstruction, but often neglected, are the various American contexts that cultivated and disseminated deconstructive undertakings. Even though the image—to some, the bogeyman—of the European theorist persists, the truth is that deconstructive literary theory was largely an indigenous creation. This change of perspective throws new light on the scapegoating of French Theory for the decline of the humanities.”

“A statement from the NAC said that the creation fund, which the Ottawa performance centre hopes to increase to at least $25-million, is intended “to provide a source of venture capital [to] artists and arts organizations” across Canada.”