Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich met Friday with federal prosecutors to discuss the Bridge scandal.
A very, very good point about the public role of academics and the role of college and university instruction from TPM Reader JS (in response to this earlier post)…
One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about your blog is your historian’s perspective – I’m one too! But I think this discussion of academics’ supposed lack of engagement with broader national debates overlooks something critical: the classroom as a public space for engagement in the national conversation.
Republicans now considering shutting down state governments over Obamacare.
TPM Reader JG responds to my post on leaving academic life …
Reading your blog on academic life was so touching and resonant. It really encapsulates so much of what I went through in graduate school and I imagine so many other people have gone through.
This trial could make Mississippi the first Abortion-free state in the country.
That and other fun on tap in next year’s (possible) McConnell-led Senate.
Whatever happens in November, the cultural politics of the country are clearly moving away from the right. It appears to be endangering a spasm of legislative hysteria in a number of deep red states. First, we had this rash of new laws painting religious people who don’t like gays as a minority in need of special protection. Now Kansas is considering forcing cities to notify residents of the dangers of the fluoride in the drinking water.
There’s been a rollicking debate in the generally non-rollicking and pretty small world of academics, political types and journalists about why academics are so obscure and boring and why they won’t get in the game and start contributing and carrying their weight in our country’s public debates. That was the framing at least of the Times piece by Nick Kristof which (though iffy in itself) kicked off the conversation off. Here’s one response, for instance, from Daniel Drezner, a very publicly outspoken academic, who was in the curious position of having the publisher of his main outlet, Foreign Policy, not only agree with Kristof’s thesis but further crap on academics who try to write for a popular audience as “opaque, abstract, incremental, [and] dull” and goes on to say he’s going to stop publishing them anymore.
As a general matter, I think Drezner and a bunch of other generally youngish academics are right in their pushback when they say that contrary to Kristof’s claims, academics are actually a lot more involved in public debates today than they have been in a while. And a lot of that is because of the Internet and the paths to contact with the larger public has made possible. Think about Juan Cole. A vast contribution to the public conversation about the Middle East, entirely because of the Internet. There’s really little precedent in recent decades for anything like him in his area of study. And there are many other academics who have made public names for themselves via online writing, though in many cases writing themselves out of the academy in the process of doing so. If they manage both, it’s most likely they have tenure, which likely puts them well into their thirties or beyond.
As I thought about this though, I couldn’t help but see it through the particular prism of the decisions I made in my own life which cut pretty hard to the core of this discussion.
I was supposed to be a history professor. And a good bit of my decision to leave grew out of my growing sense of the deeply conventional, channeled nature of the profession, one in which I found paradoxically little outlet for creativity or novelty.
Obamacare as a key GOTV tool in 2014? If Dems have their way, it could play a role in at least one hotly contested Senate race. Dylan Scott explains.
The Tea Party primary challenger in the Kansas Senate race, a radiologist, posted on Facebook x-rays of what were apparently his own deceased patients (in other cases he appears to have obtained them through his hospital privileges), mocking and making light of the wounds that ended their lives. Beyond the sociopathy that gets you to do something like that, I have to imagine HIPAA (which sometimes complicates even rather trivial communication by medical professionals) makes this a big big no-no.