The New School originated in, and still traces its identity to, far-reaching attempts to realize such freedoms. Yet last year senior administrators at the school abruptly dismantled most of the main material structures of free inquiry. Far from being dissuaded by their institution’s history, these administrators seized on it in a brazen ideological inversion. In public addresses, they wove a narrative about how they were returning the institution to its roots and ushering in the truest realization of its founding ideals. Their slick and largely effective performance contains an important lesson about challenges faced today by those who strive to protect academic freedom.
Read MoreOn Ethnographic Barbarism
Ramia, the village in South Lebanon where I conducted fieldwork, was blown up in an act of war. On October 20, 2024, one month into a two-month war of annihilation, in a two-year (and counting) war, in a 78-year war that has not ended, Israeli soldiers detonated explosives they had wired throughout the village, forcibly and gradually emptied of human life, blowing it up completely.
Read MoreThe Liberal Arts University in the Age of AI and “Activism”
Last summer, while in Kerala, I happened to read Benjamín Labatut’s The Maniac. I was drawn to it because, two years earlier, a very dear friend had gifted me his previous book, When We Cease to Understand the World. Like that book, The Maniac is difficult to classify. It is fiction but draws so heavily on historical events that to call it fiction seems a bit of a stretch, though it would be even more of stretch to call it anything else. So let’s resort to the copout of just calling it a book.
Read More