Over 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 More[Disclaimer: this post is a brief, quickly-composed and so incomplete response to a number of tangentially-related events and essays from the last several days. I have a lot more to say about all of them, including how they are not merely tangentially-related, but not now.] If you haven’t already, you should read yesterday’s Stone article in the…
Read MoreOne of my colleagues, Jeff Gross (Asst Professor of American Literature and Culture), posted a really excellent essay entitled “Rethinking Grades” earlier today, which I want to recommend that everyone (especially educators in Tennessee) read post haste. There, he raises a number of questions about how we think about the phenomenon, widespread in higher education today,…
Read MoreHere’s the thing everyone needs to understand before s/he starts picking a fight: you can only back people into a corner so far before they come out swinging. UChicago law professor Brian Leiter has decided to pick a fight with me in a comment thread on his blog here. There, in a moderated thread allegedly addressing “issues…
Read MoreYesterday afternoon, I saw the new film Fifty Shades of Grey, based on the erotic romance novel of the same name by E.L. James. I hadn’t read the books beforehand, which I expect I would have found insufferable if the general consensus about the quality of their prose is even half-true. (Judging from the stilted,…
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 MoreDespite much well-earned Sturm und Drang in the last few years surrounding the so-called crisis in the humanities, the regrettably pernicious corporatization of higher education, the imminent death of American universities, the (at turns, but more often in conjunction) sexist, racist, homophobic, classist and just garden-variety asshole-ish paucity of civility/collegiality in academia— especially in the discipline of Philosophy— I sometimes fear we…
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 MoreI’m starting a new series on this blog today, which I’ve named How It Will Go (hereafter, HIWG). In each installment, I will anticipate how teaching a particular figure or text will go in my class, based on patterns that I’ve seen previously. If something unusual or noteworthy happens, I’ll report back on it, but I…
Read MoreThis is the third installment of my series How It Will Go, 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: Plato, “The Story of Gyges’ Ring,” (from The Republic) Context in which I teach this figure/text: I begin…
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