Category: “Austerity”? You mean class war, don’t you?
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As a card-carrying Deleuzean, I'm supposed to be scornful of the concept of "ideology."* But it does have its uses, and here's a great example of ideology qua naturalizing the social. Fatal traffic accidents occurred in New York, Michigan, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. Authorities said a woman suffering from Alzheimer's disease froze to death after…
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There was a story in today's NYT about a number of colleges that are lowering tuition, sometimes drastically. The argument is that they can do this without loss of revenue, since so few pay full tuition anyway. Thus, they are lowering tuition and cutting financial aid and making a splash vis a vis the current concern…
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This Slate article* about the recent Johns Hopkins plan** is symptomatic of a seriously — and unfortunately widespread — mistaken approach to the political economy of higher education, namely, a short-term and ahistorical focus on the TT section of the entire labor system, mislabeled as "the job market." Abstracting for the moment from the details of the…
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A few days ago, while trying to open the interwebs thingy to allow me to start entering my grades, I was prevented from doing so by a pop-up menu that referenced LSU's Policy Statement 67. The text included unsubstantiated and highly dubious claims such as that most workplace problems are the result of drugs and alcohol…
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While reading this recent KCNA article about the execution of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un's uncle, I was really struck by just how transparently stupid the thing is from beginning to end. It never really tells you what the uncle did that was so bad, but just accuses him of broad classes of sin: The…
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Nice article in today's NY Times here about MOOCs not doing all that Thomas Friedman (cf. his entirely predictably earlier puff piece) had quite hoped. If the links don't work, just reset your browser history and they will open up. Here's a nice bit: But the pilot classes, of about 100 people each, failed. Despite access…
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Nice discussion of Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste here. The first half of the book theorizes neo-liberalism from a Foucaultian perspective and the second half excoriates the economics profession, e.g. According to Mirowski, there was a moment after the 2008 crash when the economics profession could have performed some rigorous self-criticism…
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My six year old Thomas is reading Star Wars books designed for six year olds. He's actually very good at it, but he does consistently misread the word "universe" as "university." Since it occurs quite a lot in these books, he's constantly telling me things like the following: My name is Qui-Gon Jinn. I am…
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