Category: Samir Chopra
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By: Samir Chopra In 1997, as a graduate teaching fellow, I began teaching two introductory classes in philosophy at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Many of my students were training for careers in criminology and law enforcement. Some hoped to join the FBI, yet others, the New York…
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By: Samir Chopra Jason Osder's searing Let the Fire Burn–a documentary about the tragic standoff between the radical black liberation group MOVE and the Philadelphia city administration in 1985–is ostensibly a documentary about an America of thirty years ago, but it is also about the America of today. Last night, as my wife and I waited for the 'verdict' in Ferguson,…
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By: Samir Chopra Last night, along with many Brooklyn College students, faculty (and some external visitors) I attended ‘Silencing Dissent: A Conversation with Steven Salaita, Katherine Franke and Corey Robin‘, organized by the Students for Justice in Palestine. (My previous posts on this event can be found here and here.) As Robin has noted over…
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By: Samir Chopra Last week, I made note here of the philosophy department at Brooklyn College co-sponsoring ‘Silencing Dissent: A Conversation with Steven Salaita, Katherine Franke and Corey Robin‘, an event organized by the Students for Justice in Palestine and scheduled for Thursday, November 20th. As you will notice, on the link for the event above, there is a disclaimer, in fine print, which…
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academic freedom, BDS, Brooklyn College, constitutional rights, Corey Robin, First Amendment, free speech, Israel, Katherine Franke, Palestine, Steven Salaita, University of Illinois.
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By: Samir Chopra A couple of years ago, after reading Neil Gross' excellent biography of Richard Rorty, I sent him a short note of appreciation, telling him how much I enjoyed his book. Gross wrote back; he was clearly pleasantly surprised to have received my email. I mention this correspondence because it is an instance of an act that I…
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By: Samir Chopra This is a story about rankings. Not of philosophy departments but of law schools. It is only tangentially relevant to the current, ongoing debate in the discipline about the Philosophical Gourmet Report. Still, some might find it of interest. So, without further ado, here goes.
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By: Samir Chopra Jose Saramago's Blindness is a very funny and a very sad book. It is a very sad book because it is about a cataclysmic event–an outbreak of blindness in an unspecified place and time–and the breakdown of social and moral order that follows; it is very funny because this apocalypse of sorts provides an…
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By: Samir Chopra In writing about Brittany Maynard, the twenty-nine year old cancer patient who has scheduled herself for a physician-assisted suicide on November 1, Ross Douthat asks: Why, in a society where individualism seems to be carrying the day, is the right that Maynard intends to exercise still confined to just a handful of states? Why…
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By: Samir Chopra A couple of decades ago, I strolled through Washington Square Park on a warm summer night, idly observing the usual hustle and bustle of students, tourists, drunks, buskers, hustlers, stand-up comedians, and sadly, folks selling oregano instead of good-to-honest weed. As I did so, I noticed a young man, holding up flyers…
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