Tag: Henry Farrell

The NYT Gets It Right — and, Even More Amazing, We Have an Open Letter For You to Sign!

The New York Times is out today with a strong condemnation of the NYS anti-boycott bill: The New York bill is an ill-considered response to the American Studies Association resolution and would trample on academic freedoms and chill free speech and dissent. Academics are rightly concerned that it will impose a political test on faculty members seeking university support for research meetings and travel. According to the American Association of University Professors, which opposes the association boycott and the retaliatory legislation, there is already a backlash, including in Georgia where a Jewish group compiled a “political blacklist” of professors and graduate students who supported the boycott. Even more amazing, the Times manages to describe correctly a point of about the […]

Wow, Tyler Cowen, How Much Paper Do They Steal at GMU? And Other Responses to the Libertarians

Since my last roundup on the response to Chris Bertram’s, Alex Gourevitch’s, and my piece on workplace tyranny, there’s been a lot of action. But before I get to that, there are a couple of dispatches from the front that are just doozies. Down in Australia, a company issues guidelines for how its employees ought to keep their work stations clean: Cold soup can be freely enjoyed in communal hubs on each floor, but hot soup is only permitted on the “top deck”, an area devoted to eating and socialising on level 45 with sweeping views of the city and beyond. While gum, throat lozenges and lollies can be consumed at desks, the privilege does not extend to “chocolate, fruit, […]

Mini-Wars

So many responses to our Crooked Timber piece I can barely keep up (see my last post for an initial round-up).  And now the responses are generating their only little mini-wars. These Bleeding Hearts Let’s start with the Bleeding Hearts themselves.  Kevin Vallier has a lengthy reply, in which he concludes that the Bleeding Hearts “can have it all.” (I initially wanted to title our post “The Bleeding Hearts Can’t Have It All.” So at least we’re all the same kitschy page.) Jason Brennan has some interesting statistics on Denmark and France that I know we’ll want to come back to. Proving once again that he’s the menschiest of the menschen, Matt Zwolinski wonders “why are employers so mean?” Though […]

Graduate Student Employee Fired for Union Activism

I had intended to blog about this, but Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber beat me to it. The story goes like this: Jennifer Dibbern, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, was retaliated against for her union activism. It’s as simple as that. Henry is more cautious in telling the story than I am, but having led a campaign for graduate student unionization at Yale, and having been retaliated against for my activism—experiences I wrote about here and here—I see all the tell-tale signs of retaliation. In any event, Henry has lots of links to help you decide what went down at Michigan. And here are some more. Also check out Henry’s excellent follow-up post, in which he itemizes […]

Another prize! And other news of the blog and the book

The blog has won another award!  Cliopatra, the history blog at the History News Network, has awarded me its “Best Writer” award.  Here’s what the judges said: Corey Robin’s new blog, CoreyRobin.com, has rapidly become a *tour de force*. Robin joins battle with contemporary issues by way of a deep engagement with the history of political thought. Although he is a passionate partisan of the left, he takes conservative thinkers seriously. Several of them have returned the favor, including Andrew Sullivan, who regularly uses Robin’s provocative posts as a launching pad for his own blogging, and Bruce Bartlett, who recently debated Robin at CoreyRobin.com. All that, and Robin’s words sparkle with a crafty combination of intelligence and wit. He is […]