The Yale Medical School and Yale New Haven Hospital announced yesterday that they will no longer prescribe gender-affirming medications for patients under 19. Interestingly enough, much less wealthy and smaller healthcare institutions continue to provide medication and care to trans youth. In conjunction with Columbia’s decision to suspend or expel or revoke the degrees of over 70 pro-Palestine students, it’s hard not to think of Yale’s decision in light of the canonical literatures on sacrifice. In all these cases, these institutions are undoubtedly thinking that they have to sacrifice the smaller, more marginal, and more vulnerable, for the sake of preserving the larger, the more advanced, the whole. 70 pro-Palestine students in return for hundreds of millions of government research […]
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Categories
Economies, Education, Palestine and Israel, Political Theory, Repression, The Left, The Right, The State
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Tags Aeschylus, Arendt, Columbia, Maistre, Wendy Brown, Yale
According to Gothamist, Columbia has disciplined more than 70 students for activism around Palestine. More than 2/3 of those students have been suspended or expelled. In return, Columbia is trying to negotiate about one billion dollars in research grants that Trump has frozen. That’s roughly $14.3 million per every punished student. I guess that’s a good deal for Columbia, huh? Not so good for education and freedom, though.
My friend Alex Gourevitch alerted me to Columbia’s statement on combatting discrimination, harassment, and antisemitism, which I had somehow missed. Alex points out how it’s essentially DEI from the right—new sensitivity trainings, for what the university calls antisemitism; new diversity hiring initiatives, for pro-Israel scholars; new administrators, to oversee the hiring—with a lot more coercion. On that question of coercion, have a read of the statement and simply count how often words like “sanction” (as in punish) and “suspension” and “expulsion” appear. It’s hard not to read this as new constitutional order for universities, in which the onerous apparatus of crime and punishment that this country has veered to over the decades is simply dropped onto the university campus. Is […]
About thirty years ago, I had a conversation with one of America’s great labor leaders, who told me that people at elite universities always misunderstand the power structure of their institutions. When you’re at a university, you imagine the place as a pyramid, with the students at the bottom, faculty in the middle, deans and provosts and such in the upper section, and the president at the top. You imagine, in other words, the power structure of the university to reside entirely on and within the campus. The real power structure of an elite university, he told me, is an upside-down pyramid. The president—the only person within the pyramid representing the campus—is at the bottom of the pyramid, the board […]
In a pathbreaking ruling, the National Labor Relations Board announced yesterday that graduate student workers at private universities are employees with the right to organize unions. For three decades, private universities have bitterly resisted this claim. Unions, these universities have argued, would impose a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all approach on the ineffably individual and heterogenous nature of graduate education. Unions might be appropriate for a factory, where all the work’s the same, but they would destroy the diversity of the academy, ironing out those delicate and delightful idiosyncrasies that make each university what it is. As virtually every elite university now facing an organizing drive of its graduate students is making clear (h/t David Marcus for discovering and pointing me to these specific links). Here, for example, is Columbia: Here’s […]
I find this statement in a New York Times oped, coming from Suzanne Nossel, the head of PEN America, to be absolutely stunning: SOME of the most potent threats to free speech these days come not from our government or corporations, but from our citizenry. Anyone who can write a sentence like this simply doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Which is fine, but not fine when the person is the head of an organization dedicated to freedom of expression. By “our citizenry,” Nossel is referring to the recent round of free speech wars on college campuses. Now when these issues of free speech arise on campus, you usually see an explosion of conversation about it: on the campus itself, and […]