I do not, in principle, hate academic faculty or departmental meetings. In fact, as someone who (many of my friends have rightly dubbed) a “certifiably pathological proceduralist“– no kidding, I would voluntarily stand out on the corner and pass out Roberts Rules of Order like evangelists pass out Bible tracts– I genuinely (ahem, naively) look…
Read MoreThe disappearance of citizens displays a perversely cruel and absolute sovereignty. —Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (2002) I should begin by noting that I started writing what follows last week, after the publication of the New York Times story on the “1.5 Million Missing Black Men in America” but before the popular uprising in Baltimore that began Monday as…
Read MoreYesterday, my good friend, fellow music-lover and ridiculously super-smart guy, Steven Thomas (Asst Professor of English and Director of Film and Media Minor, Wagner College), published on his blog a response to and critique of my post from a couple of days ago on the Thicke/Pharrell/Gaye lawsuit (“On Blurred Lines, Pop Music, Pirates/Thieves and Memphis’ Mustang Sally”). His…
Read MoreOver the last couple of years, the practice of including “trigger warnings” on course syllabi or articulating them aloud in classes that include potentially disturbing, offensive or triggering content has become the institutional norm, if not also a requirement (as it is more or less becoming at many institutions). What detractors remain don’t really question the fundamental advisability…
Read MoreThis is the second installment in my How It Will Go series, documenting the regularity of students’ responses to certain figures/texts and, in the occasional rare instance that it happens, noting whatever variations I witness. Today’s episode: W.E.B. Du Bois on “The Conservation of Races” Context in which I teach this figure/text: I usually teach…
Read MoreThe printing press, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane: each in their own way radically shrunk the world, diminished the power of mere distance to maintain our strangeness to one another. Yet, arguably, no human innovation has served as a greater tool for transcending Nature’s most seemingly impregnable boundaries, space and time, than the World…
Read MoreA pen (or keyboard) has, for millennia, been both the preferred and most essential tool of a philosopher, but I consider my camera to be a very close second as a 21stC philosopher. Since completing the American Values Project in 2012, I’ve come to understand my camera as another weapon in the struggle against ignorance and,…
Read MoreThis has been a strange month for academic Philosophy, for professional philosophers and, as a more or less direct consequence, for this blog. A little less than four weeks ago, on September 24, I began collecting various posts, essays and articles related to what I then anticipated was going to be, at the very least,…
Read MoreIt’s been a busy (in fact, record-breakingly busy) month here on RMWMTMBM, so I wanted to take a momentary break from the Leiter/PGR/SeptemberStatement brouhaha–about which this blog has more or less unfortunately become something akin to professional Philosophy’s version of TMZ— and instead remark upon an initiative as important to our discipline as, and not wholly…
Read MoreHow we ought to understand the terms “civility” and “collegiality” and to what extent they can be enforced as professional norms are dominating discussions in academic journalism and the academic blogosphere right now. (So much so, in fact, that it’s practically impossible for me to select among the literally hundreds of recent articles/posts and provide…
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