SHAKE WELL BEFORE USING

Not All Is Well That Ends Well : BY DANIEL A. SEGAL On April 15 of this year, Pitzer College’s Title IX Coordinator informed me that a student had filed a complaint against me alleging both “harassment on the grounds of sex/gender…

  The Pomona College class of 2025, photo-captured on the steps of Carnegie Hall on August 28th, 2021, image promptly shared on official Pomona social media accounts.  ASSESSING risk is hard, and we can reasonably hope that setting up and photo-capturing the moment above did not result in any transmission of the COVID virus.  Precautions were in fact taken: the students were assembled while wearing masks and were told to remove them just for the photo—and then to re-mask afterward.  And admirably, Pomona requires that students be vaccinated.  Put simply then: the amount of heightened COVID risk for the sake of capturing this photo, while greater than zero, was probably moderate, not extreme.   Yet this relatively happy assessment almost certainly misses this mark on the low side, since the consequences of taking and circulating the photo are not limited to the event itself, meaning to the staging and taking of the photo.  We must also conside...

Ashraf Ghani—the now deposed president of Afghanistan—holds a PhD in anthropology (Columbia '83).  In addition, prior to moving to the World Bank in 1991, he was a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins.   There is evidence—from his academic publications in the 1980s and from what folks who “knew-him-when” say—that Ghani once thought and taught valuable anthropology grounded in both the lived experience of ordinary persons and democratic social theory.  And here it ’ s worth recalling that the Hopkins department of his time was rightly recognized as distinctly on the left and opposed to US neo-imperialism, having been founded and led by Sidney Mintz .  I myself found no such evidence of a democratic and anthropological consciousness the  one time I interacted with him, which was during his years at the World Bank.  The occasion was an annual meeting of the Society for Cultural Anthropology; Ghani was the keynote speaker, and I was serving, at the t...

This 2021 fall term, McMaster University and Tel Aviv University are jointly offering an online course, "The Beginning of Science: Ancient Egyptian and Babylonian Conceptions of Space and Time."  As is true of many courses at North American universities in 2021, the syllabus starts with a land acknowledgment.  And taken  on its own, that land acknowledgment  is serious and admirable.   It reads: "We recognize and acknowledge that McMaster University meets and learns on the traditional territories of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee nations, and within the lands protected by the 'Dish With One Spoon' wampum, an agreement amongst all allied Nations to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes." What is missing—and once one sees this, one cannot un-see it—is a comparable land acknowledgment for Tel Aviv University.  Something like this would be in order:  "Tel Aviv University meets and learns on Palestinian land, which has been s...

"Without exception, cultural treasures...have an origin [we] cannot contemplate without horror....There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."                                                        -- Walter Benjamin, "Thesis VII," On the Concept of History. In recent months and years, names that should never have been affixed to public buildings have been coming down, especially on our college campuses. In 2017, Yale University, for instance, removed the name of white supremacist John Calhoun (Yale 1804), from one of its residential colleges, renaming the college after Grace Murray Hopper (who earned a PhD in maths from Yale in 1934).  It's good to have removed Calhoun's name, but let's agree that it should not have taken a century-plus to know that white supremacism and ...

After a decade hiatus, SHAKE WELL BEFORE USING begins again in August 2021.   Expect posts on the Palestinian solidarity movement, academic freedom, the struggle to end capitalism before it ends us & more.   For now, please remember this:  Bad at Zoom. Good at Life!  

It would be all too easy to identify "the scandal" that made news yesterday -- I am thinking of CMC's false reporting of its students' SAT scores -- as a CMC problem.  And without question, it is a CMC problem.     But it is a mistake to think this is only a CMC problem.  The truth is every college and university that participates in the rankings is implicated, since our participation lends credibility to the rankings.  And the rankings are, without question, garbage. The best response is thus not to castigate CMC (who, after all, needs to be told that false reporting is unethical behavior?); the best response is to encourage our own institutions to stop filling out the survey that is distributed by 'useless news & world distort.'  Once a critical mass of colleges and universities opt-out, this crass commercial project will implode. Put simply: when it comes to college rankings, ...