It’s syllabus time again and this had me thinking about one of the recent initiatives in higher education, OER or Open Educational Resources, which is an initiative to replace expensive textbooks with free alternatives. As with so many such initiatives, they’re cloaked in compassionate rhetoric (OER helps cash-strapped students) but this veneer also hides the underlying dismantling of our universities. It’s an interesting example of how the attacks on our universities (or on other institutions) often appear as their exact opposite; how your enemy approaches in the guise of a friend.
Read MoreYesterday, I read a short article in The Paris Review written by a former CUNY student (not one of mine) about her experience studying Joyce's Ulysses at CCNY. The article recounted the transformative nature of her experience against the backdrop of the chronic (and criminal) underfunding of CUNY, and was ultimately a paean to public education. But there was a tone to the article that I found a little off-putting and that I think unintentionally captures an unwelcome truth about the American class system: our criticisms often serve to reinforce it.
Read MoreI woke up to a Facebook post recounting the exorbitant healthcare bills that some of my Facebook friends have received, scrolled to a story about State Department officials who were banned from speaking about the threat posed by climate change, before then scrolling to a story about how surveillance software is being used to monitor millions of K-12 student's digital lives (including their private phones and computers), and which is being justified (rationalized) by the worry over school shootings.
The solutions to so many of these problems is simple - universal healthcare, eliminating fossil fuels in favor of renewables, and banning firearms - but our political system is so corrupt that what should be obvious isn't. Unfortunately, the obvious answer is an answer that serves the public good rather than private profit, and private profit rules. Consequently, the obvious answer has to be obfuscated, so that the citizenry doesn't unite behind it, and we instead argue amongst ourselves about the various profit-friendly "solutions" that are offered to us.
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