What We're Readings

The Humanities Must Argue for Themselves

Len Gutkin interviews Bard College President Leon Botstein about liberal arts, political repression and the humanities. Here, Botstein responds to the crisis of the humanities.
 

College Hierarchies

Mitchell L. Stevens argues that despite the “enduring faith that a college education creates opportunity for rising up social ranks,” empirical evidence suggests that at least some college degrees may actually reinforce social and economic stratification. 

VIDEO: Crisis in Education 

As part of the Richard Saltoun’s Gallery’s reading group around its Exhibit “On Hannah Arendt,” Roger Berkowitz hosted a conversation with Griselda Pollock on Arendt’s essay “The Crisis in Education”

Against Bad Ideas

Glenn Loury writes the inaugural essay in the newly launched Journal of Free Black Thought:

A Failure of Leadership

Nikole Hannah-Jones has published a letter explaining her decision to first fight to get tenure as the Knight Chair Professor at the University of North Carolina and then her decision to decline the offer and take a new chair at Howard University. 

The Imagination Police

Barbara J. Zitwer writes about the importance of imagination, something she argues is threatened by an “imagination police” rules against cultural appropriation. 

Laughter as a Kind of Common Sense

In The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt revisits Plato’s Thracian servant girl, suggesting that her laughter is the laughter of innocence. There is no hint, here, that the Thracian girl’s response involves the hostility of ridicule. Of course, Arendt’s project can be thought in terms of a kind of identification with the Thracian girl’s worldly perspective, and writers such as Jacques Taminiaux have explored this association and its important implications...

The Deformed Appetites of Whiteness

If you want to understand why there is controversy around critical race theory, take a look at this abstract from a paper by Donald Moss that was published in the Journal of the American Pscyhoanalytic Association. 

The Strongmen

Ariel Dorfman reviews Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s The Strongmen  that offers a synoptic account of the dictators, fascists, and strongmen that emerged on the world stage in the 1920s and continue till today. Ben-Ghiat divides these Strongmen into three periods and seeks to discover their common thread.