Updates

I will be in New York City for a week and then it’s Thanksgiving, so posting will be light. If you are in NYC, please join Dustin Guastella and me for a discussion of Family Trouble at the Art Bookstore in PS1 MOMA on Saturday November 23 from 4 - 6 pm.

The next Reading Group/Discussion meeting and the last one of 2024 will take place on December 29 at 8:30 am PST and we will be doing an election debrief. We need a bit of time, and we need to absorb and take in some of the liberal reactions, Trump’s moves and the demographic breakdown of the election itself. In the name of cool headed objectivity, I’m asking participants to suggest readings. Please put the links under this post so we can collect articles (by December 21). I will collate the reading list in a post and send it out with the Zoom link on December 22. You don’t have to have done all the readings, just some of them. We do this in our leisure and there will be no quiz or test. Bring your informed point of view. I hope we can have a few laughs.

The other project that I mentioned during the drunken madness of election night return watch involves gathering accounts of graduate seminar discussions that readers have been witness to during the past ten, fifteen years.

I was surprised let’s say, by the number of stories I had started to hear about a lot of yelling taking place during seminar discussions. We have been discussing for a year and half now the liberal authoritarianism peculiar to our times, and I thought these were symptoms of the breakdown of reasoned debate within the academy itself. Seminars are places where we are supposed to model scholarly and intellectual behavior, but the Humanities and Social Sciences, in order to address endless crises of legitimacy seems to be a place where dissent or disagreement lead to attempts to silence opposing or even skeptical points of view. We can leave it to the Right to protect academic freedom: what is happening in the seminar.

Please send me via Direct Message on Substack or to my gmail account associated with this account any stories you feel comfortable. I will write them up and disguise your identity and the identity of your institution. If on the other hand, you don’t mind my using your name, let me know as well. I wish I could do an empirical, social sciency study of the phenomenon which we can call “extreme behavior in graduate seminars,” EBGS, very technocratic, I know, but maybe some one will get a grant and we can work together to craft a survey. It is my contention that the Humanities and Social Sciences have become more and more cultish. DM here — I will collect and post the materials probably some time in mid-December from China, where I will be visiting my son.

I have a crazy few weeks ahead of me, so please bear with me. .

Thanks to everyone who attended the Discussion Group. It was very vun.