New York

It Was Just Blather

In the Critical Theory Archives at UC-Irvine, deep in a file of the Stanley Fish Papers, is a statement on Duke University letterhead by Fish when he was Executive Director of Duke University Press. The statement isn’t dated, but we can assign it to the year 1996, appearing as it does in response to the […]

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An Academic(?) Conference to Combat the Right

Last Friday, a 6-hour conference at the City University of New York (CUNY) graduate center examined “rightist efforts, from fiscally or socially conservative movements to hate groups.” It apparently raised no eyebrows, though if the meeting had set out to examine “leftist efforts, from fiscally and socially liberal movements to the Unabomber and animal rights […]

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More On The New School Occupation

The flap over the New School occupation last Friday continues apace this week, with a letter from New School President Bob Kerrey to the New York Times, pointing out omissions in their reporting. Your account of what happened at the New School on Friday glossed over some very critical information that puts the whole event […]

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The Situation at the New School

This is the text of an open letter about the student occupation and police intervention last weekend at the New School in New York City. It was sent to members of the New School community by James Miller, professor of political science and liberal studies at the school. Miller is a former member of Students […]

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How To Finesse A Student Occupation

What kind of mark does NYU deserve for its handling of its student occupation? Let’s give the university a “B-plus” or even an “A” for a performance marred only by a poor end game—immediately reinstating the suspended perpetrators of the sandbox revolution, thus letting them claim that they had won. (“We did it”, said the […]

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If You Haven’t Laughed Today

Take a look at some hilarious footage of the end of the NYU building occupation, courtesy of Gawker. You won’t regret the nine minutes spent watching this. “I don’t think they want water bottles. They probably drink corporate water.” -Protester

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NYU Is Safe Again

New York University students, or at least a few dozen of them, have just set several records for student occupations of a campus building: fewest occupiers, shortest occupation (3 days) , least support among the student body and longest list of demands. Surely the strange litany of demands had much to so with the adventure’s […]

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Talk For Credit

If your plans for next semester were ucertain, here’s a surefire plan: NYU’s new one-credit “Intergroup Dialogues” which are “designed to foster communication among racial groups at NYU.” The sessions are to be gerrymandered, of course, according to the Washington Square News: To ensure balance, a 14-student section addressing racial issues would have seven white […]

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Peter Salins In The New York Times

Peter Salins’s October 15 essay here , “Does the SAT Predict College Success?,” attracted attention from many quarters, including the New York Times. Today the Times’s op-ed page published a fresh version of the Salins piece, which reported that at the State University of New York (SUNY), the colleges that decided to require higher SAT […]

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Campus Factoids and Nuggets of Information

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s almanac, out in the journal’s August 29th issue, drenches readers in campus statistics. Women account for 57.3 % of students enrolled at American colleges and universities (10,184,100, compared with 7,574,800 for men). Slightly more than 59 percent of women graduate. The figure for men is 53 percent. Freshman males are […]

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NYU’s Middle East Problem

This past winter, Andy Ram and Jonathan Erlich, a men’s doubles team who captured the 2008 Australian Open championship, announced plans to enter the ATP tournament in Dubai. Normally, tennis players’ schedules aren’t big news. But Ram and Erlich are citizens of Israel, and the government of the United Arab Emirates prohibits holders of Israeli […]

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CUNY Schemes Around Civil Rights Law

At a recent Manhattan Institute forum, Ward Connerly, the fierce opponent of race and sex preferences by government (who’s leading a state-by-state referendum drive to abolish affirmative action) admitted how the Bush Administration has disgraced itself by endorsing racial and gender-conscious policies and practices. Connerly did not give examples, but one glaring illustration is President […]

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Racial Quotas Bar Minorites In Brooklyn?

After decades of watching the sons and daughters of black doctors and lawyers get preferencial tretment in college admissions over those of white coal miners and mill workers, and corporate titans kowtow to the Al Sharptons of the world, those appalled by America’s ever-expanding regime of racial quotas will be forgiven for thinking things could […]

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Libel, Satire, Or Terrorism at CUNY?

Sharad Karkhanis, professor emeritus at Kingsborough Community College, is a vitriolic critic of the faculty union at the City University of New York. He’s accused Susan O’Malley, another professor at Kingsborough, of seeking to “recruit terrorists” to teach at CUNY. O’Malley has responded with a two million dollar libel suit, reports the New York Post: […]

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