Friday, October 21, 2011

Reading Room: An unsettled moment in #highered

Found the Omnivore piece below languishing in drafts, hopefully not too late. Scott McLemee's Occupy piece may seem a tad outdated and even superseded by now. However, with the International Student Movement's November 7-20 Global Weeks of Action just around the corner, the piece is still timely, a reminder of the global.

What a fall calendar: Campus Equity Week 2011 next week (and still resources and exhortations to post!); then Campaign for the Future of Higher Education the 1st weekend in November with ISM actions starting the very next week and peaking November 17 on International Students Day... all against the backdrop of ongoing Occupations. Is it just me or could movements use "action planners" to coordinate schedules? What about cooperative actions?

And the rest? Hate, humanities, culture wars, information overload, protests... all relevant. Mind the ellipses: you know the drill. Here four means at least one link. Catch the missing ones online

.... Is the time right for a field of hate studies? A single interdisciplinary field would bring new insights and understanding to this very human reality, say proponents, but others aren’t sure it’s necessary. From Transformations of the Public Sphere, Stephen Walt on International Affairs and the public sphere.... Oh, the humanities! Joshua F. Leach on how the liberal arts can save themselves. A review of The Public Value of the Humanities.

Conservative think that modern colleges are bastions on unfettered communism, but critics are wrong in thinking that classic western culture has been run out of town.... A review of Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair.... Education is in the streets: A global wave of student protests has spread over the past two years — Scott McLemee looks into a new book from the barricades.