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What we are Reading: Black Americans
By Roger BerkowitzNikole Hannah-Jones is well aware that she is “part of the first generation of black Americans in the history of the United States to be born into a society in which black people had full rights of citizenship.” She writes that while “Black people suffered under slavery for 250 years; we have been legally “free” for just 50.” And she believes that “in that briefest of spans, despite continuing to face rampant discrimination...
08-19-2019
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The New Aristocrats
By Roger BerkowitzMatthew Stewart in The Atlantic rehearses the truth that the top one percent of Americans are villains and the bottom 99 percent are the good guys. The reality, he argues, is more complicated. Stewart divides us instead into three classes. There is the top 0.1 percent who are masters of the universe and the bottom 90 percent who are losing out in a race to the bottom. In between is the top 9.9 percent who Stewart calls “the new aristocrats.” While it is easy to claim to be part of the 99%, many who do so are part of this new aristocracy who Stewart argues are “accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy.”
05-26-2019
Leadership and Academic Freedom
Roger Berkowitz writes about the Wall Street Journal's coverage of strong leadership and engaged debate at Bard College.05-26-2019
Taking White Interests Seriously?
By Roger BerkowitzIsaac Chotiner of The New Yorker interviews Eric Kauffman about his new book Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. Kauffman’s book looks analyzes a double insight...
05-26-2019
A Eulogy for Jacques Taminiaux
By Kazue KoishikawaJacques Taminiaux, professor emeritus in philosophy at the University of Louvain and Boston College, passed away on May 7th, 2019 at the age of 90 years. As those familiar with continental philosophy know, he left a tremendous legacy in the field of phenomenology from Husserl and Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Arendt, and more.
05-22-2019
Not All Populisms Are the Same
By Samantha HillWriting for the Boston Review, Jason Frank argues that we should reassess the popular use of the term populism to describe a wide range of emergent illiberal political regimes from Orban’s Hungary to Trump’s United States.
05-19-2019
Friends of Academia
By Roger BerkowitzRandall Kennedy writes that all “friends of academia” must sound the alarm in response to Harvard University’s decision to remove Ronald Sullivan and his wife Stephanie Robinson as Faculty Dean’s of the undergraduate college’s Winthrop House.
05-19-2019
Diversity Index
By Samantha HillThomas Chatterton Williams responds to the SATs new adversity index which will factor in social conditions like neighborhood and crime rates. Chatterton Williams argues that this index is a Band-Aid solution that will not address the structural inequalities that students face. He writes...
05-19-2019
A Disjunctive or Disruptive President?
By Roger BerkowitzJack Balkin of Yale Law School recently described Donald Trump as a disjunctive president. Using a model developed by Stephen Skowroneck, Balkin argues that Trump represents the “last gasp of the vanishing Reagan era that began in 1980.” He writes...
05-19-2019
Arendt’s Eichmann: Murderer, Idealist, Clown
By Jerome KohnAdolf Eichmann was a Nazi Higher SS officer and member of the Gestapo during the Second World War. When the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem was adopted as German policy at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, it became Eichmann’s job to organize the destruction of millions of Jews.
05-16-2019