Tiny Houses, Narrow Visions

Examining American inequality through the problem of teacher housing

This past December, the Vail School District, in the suburbs of Tucson, Arizona, stumbled briefly into the national spotlight when it announced a plan to build tiny homes for teachers who couldn’t otherwise afford to live in the district. Starting salaries for Arizona teachers are $36,000 a year, while the median income in ...
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Tiny Houses, Narrow Visions

Milo in Berkeley

Further reflections on the renewed academic free speech debate

What light if any, I will ask here, does this claim shine on the larger discourse about academic free speech, specifically as that discussion has come to focus, for historical and strategic reasons, on UC-Berkeley. The proximal cause of Berkeley’s centrality is the shutdown of an intended speech by Milo ...
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Milo in Berkeley

The Feminist Eagles

How High School Activism Is On The Rise

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary recently announced that “feminism” was the most searched for word in 2017. Several key historical moments last year prompted this spike, including the January 21st Women’s March and the recent #MeToo campaign. Our societal reckoning with the deeply entrenched patriarchal structure and institutional racism has been a long time ...
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The Feminist Eagles

On James Baldwin and The New School

What It Means to be a Progressive University

And it is the local experts who field questions about Baldwin. The most recent request was from the university’s marketing and communications department to confirm that he had, in fact, been a student. The Baldwin estate had agreed that the university could quote him on its website but the estate ...
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The Republican Tax Bill

How to Murder Higher Education

Higher education in the US, in general, has a particular structure. Universities have considerable tuition -- often higher than $30,000 per annum. Masters students usually receive some measure of a tuition waiver, and PhD and post-doctoral candidates often receive full or significant tuition waivers along with a stipend. These tuition ...
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To a Revolutionary Degree

Power to the PhDs

The catastrophic state of early career employment in faculty roles for PhDs is nothing less than a moral issue that must be addressed with some major changes that we, as PhDs, must work to effect. These changes must prepare PhDs for work broadly conceived, rather than hewing to the current ...
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Why the House and Senate Tax Bills Spell Disaster for Graduate Students

The GOP tax bill will raise the barrier to entry for American graduate education

Even though the measure enacted by the Senate still has to be reconciled with the House-passed version, the following repercussions are expected to occur. Firstly, the bill will affect charitable giving, which allows colleges and universities to fulfill their teaching, research and public service missions. Currently, the deductions for charitable ...
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Debt Comes for Us All

Students protest against the new GOP tax bill

A graduate student walks by with a sign that reads: “TAXED OUT OF COLLEGE!” Early on Saturday morning, December 2nd 2017, the Republican Senate passed the new GOP Tax Bill, only days after students from across New York City joined together to protest it. While President Trump states that “people are going to be very, ...
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Queers, Zombies, and Institutions

A Review of Lorenzo Bernini’s Queer Apocalypses: Elements of Antisocial Theory

Edelman’s words, published in 2004, may seem an already antiquated sentiment: (many) queers can now marry and fight in American wars; the Pope has ordered Christians to atone for the marginalization of LGBT people; and queer theory is fully lodged in American academia, making its charge for revolution resound less ...
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Intellectuals—Can’t Live With Them, Can’t Live Without Them, Part I

Re-considering the democratic roles of the intellectual as revealed this week in Public Seminar

Intellectuals have the knowledge and the experience required for people themselves to govern well. I am thinking of this today as I read the news and as I think about our work here at Public Seminar, drawing on my own long investigation of the sociology of intellectuals. My work on intellectuals ...
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Can Marriage Ever Be Really Equal?

Law and Sexuality

This is essay is part of the OOPS course Law and Sexuality. Assuming the heterosexual marriage contract is a tool used by men to exploit women and marriage an institution by which the unpaid labor of women is extorted and appropriated by their husbands, do non-heterosexual marriages reproduce the same form ...
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