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
If you’re like me, you’re probably all-petitioned and all-statemented out. But if you are Jewish, and in academia, whether as a teacher, student, worker, staffer, or any kind of employee, I ask that you read and sign on to this statement. The statement denounces the cynical and terrible use of Jews and spurious charges of antisemitism “to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities” and “to concentrate power and exert ‘existential terror’ on our institutions and our communities–in part by threatening and slashing federal funding.” The statement has been signed by more than 2000 Jewish members of the academy, including noted Israeli scholar of the Holocaust Omer Bartov, the political theorists Wendy Brown and Seyla Benhabib, and […]
Yesterday, Berkeley political theorist Wendy Brown gave a once-in-a-lifetime talk at the Graduate Center—the kind that reminds you what it means to be a political theorist—about the way in which financialization—not just privatization or corporatization—had transformed the academy. Through a deft re-reading of Max Weber’s two vocation lectures, Brown showed how much the contemporary university’s frenzied quest for rankings and ratings has come to mirror Wall Street’s obsession with shareholder value. In the course of her talk, Brown briefly dilated on the suspicion of public goods in today’s academy. She referenced one university leader saying, with no apparent irony, that the problem with state funding is that it comes with strings attached. The unsaid implication, of course, is that private funding is somehow free of […]