November 13, 2011, 4:55 pm
By Claire Potter
We return to guest blogger, historian and former Zenith provost Judith C. Brown. Her full biography and Part I of this series can be viewed here. Brown ended the first section of her essay by reflecting: “in the early 19th century, it was in the relative ‘backwater’ of the German universities as well as in the newer universities of Europe, where imagination and flexibility with regard to change were able to flourish, that we see the beginnings of the modern research university.” She then asked: “Are we in that kind of turning point in American higher education?” The answer is yes.
American higher education is at a major turning point. We are in the midst of enormous social, political, economic, and technological changes that are part of big long-term shifts in the economic and political position of the U.S. in the world, shifts that began several decades ago. While the U.S….
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September 10, 2011, 10:46 am
By Claire Potter
Commemorations of the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, and of those murdered on a third plane brought down in western Pennsylvania, began long ago and will culminate tomorrow. Here at Tenured Radical we have promised you no commemoration. Other media have a grander scope than we do, and ours will be trivial by comparison, even though memories of that day occasionally cause us to tear up unexpectedly. We also believe that life can sometimes become so saturated with commemoration that as citizens we become besieged by memory and unable to recall what it is, exactly, we experienced.
September 11 2001 is perhaps as fine an example of the role of simultaneity in generating nationalism as Benedict Anderson, or any American Studies scholar teaching Anderson, could invent. As I drove up to Northampton yesterday, where la famille Radical is spending the weekend, I was listening to an…
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September 6, 2011, 5:19 pm
By Claire Potter
Today’s guest blogger is my Zenith colleague, feminist philosopher, animal studies scholar and fellow tenured radical Lori Gruen. I asked her to comment on the renewed interest, both virtual and real, in the relationship between humans and chimpanzees.
Two summer movies featuring “chimpanzees” (no actual chimpanzees were used in the production of either film) have really got folks talking about our primate cousins. People seem to be both fascinated and frightened by the idea that scientists might create intelligence in other apes. What’s interesting is that other apes are already intelligent without our manipulations — we just don’t know how to appreciate it because we’re too focused on our own cleverness. Project Nim, a documentary by James Marsh, director of the acclaimed Man on a Wire, reveals the quirks inherent in cognition research with chimpanzees as well as …
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February 26, 2010, 3:41 pm
By Claire Potter
Are you one of the sickos who cheered when Joseph Stack flew his plane into the federal building in Austin last week? Of course not. According to the Washington Post on February 22 2009, although most of us were horrified by this cruel and violent act, “his suicide mission has clearly tapped a vein of rage among anti-tax, anti-government extremists.”
The way they see it, ‘he did the ultimate flipping of the bird to the man,’ said JJ MacNab, a Maryland-based insurance analyst who is writing a book about tax protesters. ‘He stuck it to the man, and they love that.’
It is not surprising Stack would be portrayed as a hero on fringe Web sites such as stormfront.org, a forum for white supremacists. But admirers also are expressing their appreciation on mainstream sites such as Facebook, where a fan page supporting some of the things he said in his six-page manifesto had more than 2,000…
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