All IU Faculty, Staff, and Students Are “Safe,” but Some Are Safer Than Others

The discursive stylings of an authoritarian campus administration

Instead of grading papers and preparing final exams last April, I was at Dunn Meadow, a public gathering space on Indiana University (IU) Bloomington’s campus. My aim, and that of my colleagues, was to protect student protesters from the violence sanctioned by IU’s top administrators, another possible intrusion by the ...
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All IU Faculty, Staff, and Students Are “Safe,” but Some Are Safer Than Others

Academic Dialogue Against the Background of War

There are currently no conversation partners for Western academics within the Russian academy

A recent issue of Aeon featured an article entitled “The Missing Conversation,” with the subtitle “To the detriment of the public, scientists and historians don’t engage with one another. They must begin a new dialogue.” The article amounts to a conversation between the famous scientists and historians of science, professors Lorraine Daston and ...
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Academic Dialogue Against the Background of War

To Know Your Enemy’s Face

Russian studies and language programs face a decline in the US, despite stable demand for expertise in the field

Knowing your enemy as the key to victory is centuries-old wisdom. Washington seemed to embrace it during the Cold War, investing significant resources in the development of Soviet studies. In recent years, however, the situation has changed. Researchers and university professors are concerned about the deepening crisis in Russian studies ...
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To Know Your Enemy’s Face

Camille Bordas’s Latest Novel Follows Comedians on the Hunt for Material

A novelist questions the price artists pay when mining personal life for inspiration

The Material opens with a classroom of aspiring comedians workshopping their latest creations: “On Wednesdays, three of them had to perform, in turn, a four-to-six-minute routine that the whole class then proceeded to rip apart, joke by joke, beat by beat, until there wasn't anything left and the budding comedians ...
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Camille Bordas’s Latest Novel Follows Comedians on the Hunt for Material

Elite Capture and Racial Capital, from the University to Palestine

A conversation on the part-time faculty strike and freedom on campus

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and author of Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else), joined Cresa Pugh and Julie Beth Napolin at The New School in December 2023, for a conversation on racial capital in university life, the New ...
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Elite Capture and Racial Capital, from the University to Palestine

The Cyclopes in the Food Court

Or, how to get your students to go to their Gen Ed classes

As chair of liberal arts at Johns Hopkins’ Peabody Institute, every autumn orientation I tell the incoming students this tale of Cyclopean narrow-mindedness in order to plant a memorable image in their minds of what to avoid....

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The Cyclopes in the Food Court

It Was Supposed to Make Getting College Aid Simpler. It Hasn’t.

An Urban Matters Q&A with financial aid author Kim Nauer about the FAFSA’s botched rollout

Experts speaking at a recent webinar co-hosted by Immigrants Rising stated the FAFSA is “absolutely not working” for mixed-status families. “We’re talking about millions of individuals who are college-age,” noted the organization’s director of higher education....

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It Was Supposed to Make Getting College Aid Simpler. It Hasn’t.