Amor Mundi, August 21st 2016

08-21-2016

On Violence

[caption id="attachment_18285" align="alignright" width="300"] By Fribbler - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0[/caption] Leslie Doyle remembers a visit to the late Seamus Heaney's house, in the time of the Troubles:

"I mostly remember the poems from his latest collection at the time, Field Work. Descriptions of armored tanks and patrols and bullets and the deaths of young people were silted between images of green fields and grey rocks and eating oysters beside the sea. Heaney talked to us about the Troubles, the political and sectarian strife in Northern Ireland. Lives lost. Scores settled and rekindled. At one point, something he said sounded to me like an advocacy of violence in an uncomfortable way, but I said nothing because it was his house, his country, his world that was being shaken every day. I was a visitor in all ways... Afterward, our professor said that Heaney had told him he was disappointed we hadn’t challenged him on the subject of violence. I think, even looking back, it would have been wrong to do so in his house, as if I had any right or standing to question his world. But then again, I’m certain on how I feel on violence and its use as a tactic, no matter what the circumstances. Six years before, I had been in the Tower of London the day before a bomb exploded in it, killing one person and injuring many others. Exactly forty-one years from the day I started writing this. So, what sows the gap between certainty and willingness to speak out? I knew the oppression in the North was wrong, but so were the bombings. Turning it again: two months before that Tower of London bombing, several car bombs exploded simultaneously around Dublin and a town to the north. Thirty-four people died, the most in one day of the Troubles. The Ulster Volunteer Force took responsibility for those murders seventeen years later. When I call it “oppression,” I am sugar-coating the horrors. Heaney and his family lived this."

Form more information visit: https://electricliterature.com/the-poets-house-seamus-heaney-and-the-literature-of-violence-6a6fb84574d9#.cch2jquan

Safe Spaces

Emily Durey investigates several recent attempts to create classroom and living safe spaces for people of color at institutions of higher education across the country, amidst claims that initiatives like these might amount to the reinstitution of segregation on campus:

"Moraine Valley Community College on the outskirts of Chicago recently said it would add several sections specifically for black students to a required introductory course before abruptly walking back that decision. Prior to the decision not to offer the targeted sections, Margaret Lehner, the vice president for institutional advancement, told Inside Higher Ed that the school had found the course, which is intended to help students learn to study and plot career goals, to be especially effective when students of similar backgrounds take it together. She said the school had offered courses in the past specifically for women, for veterans, and for Hispanics, and pointed out that African American students were welcome to sign up for sections that are open to everyone. “We find that these particular courses with these particular groups with our mentoring and peer support help them to be more successful than they would be if they did not have this particular experience,” she told the site. But the course is also intended to help students “develop an appreciation for diversity,” according to the class description, and critics raised concerns that in separating students, such courses would promote racial silos instead of fostering interracial dialogue. Even several people interviewed for this story who were sympathetic to the idea questioned the legality and wisdom of implementing it. “I get it, I really do,” said Tressie McMillan Cottom, an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University who has written for The Atlantic. “But it isn’t practical. I can’t imagine it standing up to criticism. The classroom has to be the space where everybody comes and is uncomfortable. College is about being safely uncomfortable.” That means no class nor section is perfect. There is going to be tension. But, she said, schools “can’t chase perfect at the expense of a democratic classroom. For McMillan Cottom, though, being safely uncomfortable in class is entirely different from being safely uncomfortable on campus. Which is why she pushes back at the notion that clubs, groups, and even housing geared toward a certain set of students, such as those of a certain race, amounts to resegregation. Where most universities were designed around the needs and lives of white students, she said, and most white students can—and do—still avoid having uncomfortable conversations about race, black students “are never at a shortage” for uncomfortable racial conversations. In other words, white students can often elect not to engage in such conversations, where black students cannot escape them. To carve out a safe space on campus where black students can get support from people who look like them and share similar backgrounds may ultimately help these students feel a sense of belonging and safety. These students are not cloistered away, McMillan Cottom pointed out. They still attend classes, eat in dining halls, and go to sporting events that are campus-wide. What white people often mean when they argue that creating such spaces is segregation, McMillan Cottom suggested, is that they also want the ability to self-segregate. The idea that black and white students come to campus with the same needs and concerns and deserve the exact same treatment is a “false equivalence,” she said. Black students are far more likely to come from high schools that lack advanced courses, to be low-income, and to be first-generation students from families unfamiliar with the college process."

At our upcoming fall conference, REAL TALK: Difficult Questions About Race, Sex and Religion, we'll be asking questions along these lines. How, can for example, colleges and universities bring racial and social justice into the heart of higher education while still ensuring that they remain a safe space for difficult and contested thinking? We hope you'll join us on October 20th and 21st, 2016 for some real talk about this question, and others, at the heart of the question of thinking in the 21st century.

Form more information visit: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/08/finding-the-line-between-safe-space-and-segregation/496289/

Corporate U

The American Association of University Professors, the organization representing college and university professors around the country, has issued a report by a joint subcommittee of the Association’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure and of the Committee on Women in the Academic Profession, “The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX.” The whole report documents the successes and problems in the implementation of Title IX, touching upon the way Title IX challenges free speech, due process, academic freedom, and the academic mission of colleges and universities. The report also sets Title IX in the context of the rising corporatization of the university.

“In interpreting Title IX, Harvard University law professor Janet Halley has suggested that a feminist model of governance could create fair and transparent adjudicative procedures, particularly in light of sensitivities surrounding topics like sex. Halley calls on “governance feminist decision-makers” to acknowledge the dangers posed by overzealous applications of Title IX, pointing out “the rights they invade: rights to privacy, to autonomy, to due process.” She urges vigilance in opposing procedural frameworks that may disadvantage an accuser or an accused on the basis of class, sexual identity, or racial difference, depending on the nature of the hostile- environment or sexual-harassment allegations. Halley’s critique contrasts faculty governance interests in due process with university administrative interests in risk-avoidance and institutional control. As Halley contends, “[i]ncreasingly, schools are being required to institutionalize prevention, to control the risk of harm, and to make regulatory action to protect the environment. Academic administrators are welcoming these incentives, which harmonize with their risk-averse, compliance-driven, and rights- indifferent worldviews and justify large expansions of the powers and size of the administration generally.” Such administrative excess frustrates meaningful recognition of the goals of Title IX by prioritizing liability risks over the realities of sexual and other inequalities on campus. This administrative overreliance also erodes faculty governance and academic freedom—the very preconditions necessary to address such inequality on campus and beyond. … A serious assessment of Title IX’s current implementation must account for how its enforcement affects and is affected by the social contexts in which it is applied and in which it operates. To start, the merits of Title IX as a principal instrument in the fight to end sex discrimination on campus must be evaluated in light of the increasing “corporatization of the university.” That phrase refers to a new organizational model of university management and governance that is entrepreneurial at its core. In part a result of reductions in state and federal support for higher education, the model also reflects a vast cultural change in thinking about the value and function of higher education, one that is oriented more toward vocational training than toward humanistic learning. The entrepreneurial model privileges administrative managerial methods and interests; evaluates and reduces or eliminates departments and disciplines according to borrowed business metrics of economic efficiency; and promotes a commercial model of higher education, in which student satisfaction as “education consumers” is paramount.”

Janet Halley will be speaking at the Arendt Center’s Fall Conference “Real Talk: Difficult Questions About Race, Sex, and Religion.” Learn more and register here.

Form more information visit: https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/TitleIXreport.pdf