New Orleans Then

“The campaign on Dryades was calculated to start just before Easter because that’s when people bought lots of clothes,” Elie said. Black students from Xavier, Southern University of New Orleans and Dillard, along with a few white students from Tulane and University of New Orleans, joined picketers on Dryades. In mid-1960, former Xavier student-body head … More New Orleans Then

Bruce Cockburn

This is The trouble with normal, a 1981 song lyric I did not know. I notice that Cockburn had the same insight I did, then. Strikes across the frontier and strikes for higher wage Planet lurches to the right as ideologies engage Suddenly it’s repression, moratorium on rights What did they think the politics of panic … More Bruce Cockburn

A line

This is my line in the sand: I can read online for work if I must — even long documents –, and I can read short news articles, but I am not interested in reading books or magazines online for pleasure. Axé.

Foucault, encore

Our present age of austerity requires of us resilience as a psychological characteristic. University counseling centers now have resilience training, and psychology professors receive major grants to study resilience. But “resilience” studies are not science. We have here, then, one of the examples of commercial activity replacing research in the entrepreneurial university. Foucault appears to … More Foucault, encore

Des mots

When I was a child, I would read fairy tales in which most characters were either royalty or peasants. I did not know the word peasant and misread it as “pheasant.” So I would visualize these tales, in which many characters were pheasants that spoke and lived like people. I imagined the pheasants’ wives and … More Des mots

We should say this here

The UK’s universities can justifiably claim an outstanding international reputation, generating multiple direct and indirect benefits for society, and underpinning our core professions through training and education. Yet these attributes are being undermined and degraded from within and without, with innovation, creativity, originality and critical thought, as well as notions of social justice, being threatened … More We should say this here