Princeton students have voted overwhelmingly not to turn the university’s choice of hummus into a referendum on Middle East politics. According to The Star-Ledger, undergraduates rejected a proposal, 1,014 to 699, that would have urged the Ivy League university to stock its food court and convenience stores with another brand of the chickpea dip besides Sabra. A pro-Palestinian student group on the campus has asserted that a corporate owner of the Sabra brand that is based in Israel has supported an Israeli military unit with pocket money and care packages. The president of the Princeton Committee for Palestine, Yoel Bitran, a senior majoring in sociology, said he would not be disappointed if the referendum failed because it had already prompted discussion.
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5 Responses to Princeton Students Reject Dip Into Geopolitics of Hummus
tpul2014 - December 4, 2010 at 6:47 am
Everyone knows the best hummus is made in Lebanon.
22251986 - December 6, 2010 at 10:41 am
It is very easy and inexpensive to make hummus. Why doesn’t the university drop the involvement entirely and support a national hummus company instead?
kyushumntsphil - November 23, 2011 at 5:59 pm
Nigel Thrift stops just when I thought he was getting going.
In his last para, he refers to internationalization of ed as possible “extension of U.S. values.” Yes? Does he mean the “values” by which we can presume students around the world will overwhelmingly flock to biz ed departments, as American students do?
Does he mean foreign-based universities will dish out more funds for elaborate gyms, work-out facilities, and rock-climbing walls as American colleges increasingly do? Does he mean students abroad will read much less, and spend much more time texting, as American students do? Or that full-time faculty will disappear more and more from classrooms in favor of underpaid, exploited adjuncts, grad students, and other part-timers? That admin everywhere will grow in the self-bonusing fatuities whereby American universities allow their bloat? And that the corporate cult of departmentalism will increasingly consign yet more to silos where those in them prove “expertise” not by growing connections outside, but by reduced literacy to orthodoxies inside?
This Nigel Thrift piece raises all these Qs, but goes nowhere near answering any of them.
He does, mercifully, mention, again in last para, something about ed being “two-way.” Yes? Great — then let’s have some conversation about how U.S. access to foreign cultures may free Americans from the corporate priorities and corporate habits by which American ed has lately been strangling itself, as the larger culture has by American finance, consumerism, and a sprawl culture targeting all the world.
Guest - December 1, 2011 at 6:07 pm
Money before students, my dear friend, money before students. Nigel was once an academic but he grew up… and now he is rich!
lenard - December 6, 2011 at 6:02 pm
With the increase in fees as shown by the regions, higher education in the US is driven by higher fees. This is very evident in California, where a college education was quite a bargain. With higher prices, more adults are less motivated to attend school.