It's Movie Time! Grace Lee Boggs, An American Revolutionary

… is back, free to watch on PBS through January, a special P.O.V 30th Anniversary treat.

❝Grace Lee Boggs, 98, is a Chinese American philosopher, writer, and activist in Detroit with a thick FBI file and a surprising vision of what an American revolution can be. Rooted for 75 years in the labor, civil rights and Black Power movements, she challenges a new generation to throw off old assumptions, think creatively and redefine revolution for our times. Winner, Audience Award, Best Documentary Feature, 2013 Los Angeles Film Festival. A co-presentation with the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM).❞

Videos—Thomas Piketty & @GC_CUNY Panel…history of #money ➜ #inequality & #education

In The Economist's July 9, 2014 video interview, Thomas Piketty explains briefly how wealth and income inequality evolved and why more meritocratic access to education could address both problems.

thomas piketty on the history of money - bookforum.com / video

for a much longer video, here's an video from the CUNY Graduate Center's April  28, 2014, panel discussion,"Capital in the 21st Century" with Thomas Piketty via CUNY TV

Upton Sinclair's The Goose Step

… (1923) is about US #highered, early corporate influence ~ and extensively cited by Frank Donoghue in The Last Professors (our post here), pointing to parallels with Veblen and current concerns over corporatization. Donoghue does not share Hammermeister's dismissive and hypercritical attitude that, unfortunately, permeates other selections in the series, notably Ortega y Gasset.

By Kai Hammermeister (associate professor of German at Ohio State University)

Editor's Note: This is the fourth in a monthly series intended to introduce new generations of faculty members and administrators to a core set of classic books about higher education and its institutions.The first three columns are here,here, and here.

There are two ways to ruin a university. The first is to submit it to the demands of industry and finance. That is the way that Upton Sinclair criticizes in his 1923 treatise, The Goose-Step: a Study of American Education. The other way is to hand it over to a revolutionary political agenda. That is the way that Sinclair advocates. 

In his book on higher education, the self-confessed "socialist writer" Sinclair travels the country and visits colleges and universities. Every time he boards the train, he relates the overlap between the local railroad magnates and the board of trustees of the largest university in the region he's visiting. His conclusion: "Our educational system is not a public service, but an instrument of special privilege; its purpose is not to further the welfare of mankind, but merely to keep America capitalist."

Rereading the University Classics, Part 4 - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Reading the University Classics, Part 2

This is either an admittedly indirect follow up or counterpoint to yesterday's October 7th actions kicking off a "global wave of action for education." I haven't decided which yet. Perhaps I'll have a clearer notion after post-7 rss feed reader skimming. Until then... history. Student actions are part of the history of the institution's history. Long preceding last century's 60s student actions, there was another set student and youth actions the century before.

Ortega y Gasset was the previous and 1st entry in this series. Did you know that Thorstein Veblen wrote about the university too?

"From the distance of more than half a century, Karl Jaspers's 1946 treatise, The Idea of the University, reads both like a farewell to the 19th-century German university and a lucid anticipation of several of today's academic problems.

Jaspers wrote his book at the end of World War II. The Nazis had suspended him from his position as professor of philosophy. One of his reasons for writing this treatise was to lay the groundwork for a thoroughly democratic restructuring of higher education in Germany. However, Jaspers also insists that the university is a genuinely transnational institution and that his elaborations concern higher education everywhere."

Read the rest of Reading the University Classics, Part 2 - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education by Kai Hammermeister

CHE Editor's Note: This is the second in a monthly series intended to introduce new generations of faculty members and administrators to a core set of classic books about higher education and its institutions.